Omar El Akkad's new book "One Day, Everyone Will have Always Been Against This" breaks Western liberalism down to its termite-ridden studs. Straightaway, Akkad introduces his thesis, as well as explaining why so many people have been radicalized by the gauze falling away from their eyes. Or perhaps it's just the contradictions of both capitalism and western liberalism that have never been so glaringly obvious before.
Akkad describes this widespread radicalization as an abrupt "severance" from acceptance of the lies of neoliberalism and neocolonialism. And as an account of the end — actually the West's own abnegation — of its so-called "rules based order." And just as the "rule-based order" is only valued when it serves Western purposes and then is so easily discarded when it's not, Liberalism itself works that way.
This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.
To maintain belief in what is commonly called the rules-based order requires a tolerance for disappointment. It's not enough to subscribe to the idea that there exist certain inflexible principles derived from what in the parlance of America's founding documents might be called self-evident truths, and that the basic price of admission to civilized society is to do whatever is necessary to uphold these principles. One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of political opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election campaign, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something greater. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power.
History is a debris field of such moments. They arrive in the form of British and French soldiers to the part of the world I'm from. They come to the Salvadorans and Chileans and Iranians and Vietnamese and Cambodians in the form of toppled governments and coups over oil revenue and villages that had to be burned to the ground to save them from some otherwise terrible fate. They arrived at the turn of the twentieth century to Hawaii (the U.S. apologized for the overthrow of the Hawaiian government-almost a hundred years later). They come to the Indigenous population eradicated to make way for What would become the most powerful nation on earth, and to the Black population forced in chains to build it, severed from home such that, as James Baldwin said, every subsequent generation's search for lineage arrives, inevitably, not at a nation or a community, but a bill of sale. And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.
Now, for a new generation, the same moment arrives. To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust or anger, but a severance. The empire may claim fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies any measure of violence in return, but this severance is of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such horror. What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.
Here, then, is an account of an ending.
Akkad writes about Western complicity with the genocide in Gaza and the complicity of a liberal press that sugar-coats the reality of empire, preferring to write in the passive voice about its crimes, operating in the service of a liberalism that wraps itself in hollow gestures and performative sentiment, lying to itself about the evil that it actually wreaks, while simultaneously lying to itself about its own inherent (and largely non-existent) virtue.
Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language — a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration. And this language might protect the empires most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.
As an Egyptian-Canadian-American, Akkad is fluent in two languages and two cultures. As a young reporter covering the war in Afghanistan, Akkad quickly discovered the limit of truth-telling permitted to journalists – a limit imposed by Western empire:
It may as well be the case that there exist two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against victims of empire and victims of empire. Victims of empire, those who belong, those for whom we weep, are murdered, subjected to horror, their killers butchers and terrorists and savages. The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be. Victims of empire aren't murdered, their killers aren't butchers, their killers aren't anything at all. Victims of empire don't die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.
To watch the descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language's purpose — to watch the unmaking of meaning. When The Guardian runs a headline that reads, "Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect's Home," it is not simply a case of hiding behind passive language so as to say as little as possible, and in so doing risk as little criticism as possible. Anyone who works with or has even the slightest respect for language will rage at or poke fun at these tortured, spineless headlines, but they serve a very real purpose. It is a direct line of consequence from buildings that mysteriously collapse and lives that mysteriously end to the well-meaning liberal who, weaned on such framing, can shrug their shoulders and say, Yes, it's all so very sad, but you know, it's all so very complicated.
The slippery ethics of the Liberal confuse and disgust Akkad:
I start to see this more often, as the body count climbs — this malleability of opinion. At a residency on the coast of Oregon, i read the prologue to this book; a couple of days later, one of the other writers decides to strike up a conversation.
"I'm not a Zionist," she says. "But you know, I'm not anti-Zionist either. It's all just so complicated."
I have no idea what to say. I feel like an audience at a dress rehearsal.
There's a convenience to having modular opinions; it's why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner talbes you lengthen to accomodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing.
Akkad signs a petition to drop charges against anti-genocide protesters at an awards ceremony for the Giller Prize, a Canadian literary event supported by a bank with half a billion dollars of investments in Israel:
The letter sets off a small firestorm of newspaper articles and rival open letters. I suppose it makes sense: people were made momentarily uncomfortable at a black-tie gala — someone has to pay.
Watching footage of the demonstration later, what fascinates me isn't the smattering of boos from the audience as the protesters take to the stage, it isn't even the protest itself — it's all the people in that room, so many of them either involved in or so vocally supportive of literature, who keep their heads down, say nothing, wait for it all to just be done. A room full of storytellers, and so many of them suddenly finding common cause in silence.
I am reminded of this in the Democratic Party response to Trump's non-stop bald-faced lies in his "State of the Union" speech. Only one courageous congressman stood up and shouted out in protest (just as only one courageous congresswoman opposed the rush to war after 911). The rest of the combined houses of Congress passively remained in their seats as America's first openly fascist president declared war on every value Americans have traditionally revered. A group of Democratic women donned pink pants suits, a few Democrats held paddles – paddles! really? — expressing some unmemorable version of "tsk tsk."
This calorie-free performance was typical of American Liberalism. This was one more example of Liberalism's amoral incapacity to take a side and fight for it. This is the manifest poverty of Liberalism. And this is precisely what Akkad's book is all about.
Both X (formerly Twitter) and all the Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) are owned by fawning Trump-loving oligarchs. These online platforms steal your personal information, resell it, and permit hate speech they approve while censoring political opinions they don’t like.
Even if you’ve been on these platforms a long time, it’s now time to leave. Immediately.
Pulling the Plug
One of the first things Elon Musk did after buying Twitter was to re-host far right groups and outright fascists. Some people gave him the benefit of the doubt. But when Musk was anointed Trump’s “efficiency” czar and then hosted Alice Weidel of the German neo-nazi Alternative für Deutschland Party on X, people realized that the grandson of a fascist and the son of a fascistic eugenics enthusiast is himself a fascist. And they are looking for instructions for deleting their accounts on X – advice like this and this.
Ach nein! Was meinst Du denn? Weder von uns ist ein Nazi!
And ever since Mark Zuckerberg made his supplicant’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, plunked down an easy $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and discontinued moderation of fascist hate speech on his now Führer-friendly platforms, people have been looking for instructions for leaving Meta too – instructions like this and this.
In general, it’s not a bad idea to stop helping these fascist-ready oligarchs make more money off you and gain an even greater foothold in government. You may not have as much power as they, but you DO have the power to get off their platforms.
Where else would I go?
If you worry that you won’t be able to find your friends online any longer, you might be pleasantly surprised to find some have already migrated to the far less toxic Mastodon and BlueSky Social networks, or found much more secure messaging in Signal as a replacement for WhatsApp.
But don’t stop with account deletion
Like the end of any toxic relationship, the breakup isn’t complete until you change the locks and block the calls and text messages.
Deleting accounts on X and Meta only ends your contributions to these toxic platforms. To completely pull the plug and cut the cord, you need to stop viewing content on them altogether and block their trackers and bots from continuing to access your devices through cookies, fingerprinting, and other forms of digital surveillance.
You can do this on a desktop (or laptop) by creating a hosts file that prevents your computer’s networking system from resolving the IP address of any X or Meta server. SwitchHosts is a host configuration program that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux and can be downloaded here. Once installed, you point SwitchHosts to collections of addresses of social networking servers you want to block. Several can be found here and here and here. You either download the lists and paste them into SwitchHosts or configure SwitchHosts to read and refresh the online lists automatically.
On both mobile devices and desktops you can accomplish the same objective by using a DNS server that will not resolve IP addresses for social networks you want to block. One such service is NextDNS.
Once you have created your own custom blocking profile with NextDNS, you then configure your mobile and desktop devices to use the profile. Your device will now resolve every IP address except for those of the services to be blocked.
The result is that, as far as your computer or mobile device is concerned, Twitter and Meta no longer exist.
The last year has been one hell of an eye-opener. One party is openly fascist; the other is the habitual party of war and corporatism, now tripping over itself to play ball with an incoming swarm of fascists.
For all the siloed activist groups fighting America’s many ills, there is still no major political party that faithfully represents working people, with principles that oppose (among other things) the American foreign policy and imperialism that have driven the genocide in Gaza.
And for all the letter-writing, stand-outs, polite calls to Congressmen and Senators, online petitions, Zoom meetings, teach-ins, and donations to “lesser evil” politicians, there is very little to show for it. By now most of us must know, at least at some level, that we are working at cross-purposes by supporting two parties of billionaires while fighting them on every injustice they create — thanks to the mandates we stupidly hand them at the polls, year after year, election after election.
We are well beyond reform of a system that, for my entire adult life, has waged war and regime change on the rest of the world and shows no sign of letting up. We are well beyond reforming a system that shows no interest in improving the lives of average people. And we are well beyond trusting any existing political party to fix it — especially the one that sells itself as the Lesser Evil. They’ve had their chance. Thousands of chances, actually.
The Democratic Party — the party of segregationists in the Sixties, of Viet Nam into the Seventies, Big Business in the Eighties, and Clintonism and wars in the Middle East from the Nineties until now — was never actually liberal, although many Americans (myself included) once held out hope that it could be.
In recent memory we’ve seen the Manchins, Sinemas, Kennedys, Fettermans and Gabbards abandon it outright or unabashedly prostrate themselves before the fascists. In recent weeks we have seen the supposedly “liberal” media make a beeline to Mar-a-Lago to suck up to the new Führer, and we’ve watched “liberal” tech bros suddenly go full MAGA. That one-time “liberals” can so easily flip an ideological switch is a sign of the inherent poverty and unreliability of liberalism.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. If you read history, capitulations by liberals occur at almost every time of economic or political crisis. But it’s not really a capitulation when they’re simply revealing what they actually stand for.
Predatory liberalism — not just the American variety, but in virtually every Western nation — is fundamentally illiberal — or it would not perpetually wage war on non-Western nations and the global South, both militarily and economically. If liberalism were not fundamentally lacking it might show some appetite for fighting fascism rather than continually making nice with it.
As Trump and his scavenging oligarchs begin to pick at and chow down on what is left of American democracy, it’s clearer to me than ever that the root cause of all this insanity is Capitalism. And the loss of the 2024 election was in many ways the rejection of the half-hearted, dual-faced liberalism of an important segment of the American middle class that still embraces it.
Middle class liberals — centrist Democrats for the most part, union bosses, professional and academic gatekeepers, corporate America’s upper layer of management, the MBAs, tax lawyers, financial advisors, well-remunerated technologists, inventors, developers, entrepreneurs, health executives, and opinion-shapers — for all their lawn signs and donations, they’re not really willing to risk privilege, status or employment by fighting the hand that feeds them.
As a politically ambiguous class they’re confused about which side they’re on. And for all their half-hearted activism, that side has never been squarely or decisively the side of justice for the poor and oppressed. Both Gaza and liberalism’s new accommodation with fascism bear this out. The reluctance to abandon the Democratic Party is another symptom.
In 1931, after being terrorized by Harlan County mining company thugs who invaded her house looking for her union organizer husband, Florence Reece wrote “Which Side Are You On?”
Regardless of where we are in this society, or where we came from, this is the central question facing America right now. And it’s a serious question that has to be answered honestly after considering what such a commitment really means.
From left to right: Olaf Scholz; Justin Trudeau; Emmanuel Macron; Giorgia Meloni; Joe Biden; Fumio Kishida; and Rishi Sunak
If there’s one picture that best illustrates the collapse of confidence in neoliberalism it’s last Summer’s photo op of the presidents and prime ministers who make up the G7. This is an informal group of major economic powers who promote neoliberal and neocolonial economic policies and, despite the IMF’s formal ties to the UN, have their big fat fingers on the levers of the International Monetary Fund.
With the notable exception of neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, this entire crop of investment bankers, hedge fund operators, and professional politicians pictured last Summer is either gone or on the way out — their positions soon to be occupied by conservative liberals (if ever there was an oxymoron), harsher conservatives, outright fascists, or fascist-friendly replacements. In many cases those departing came from parties claiming to be “liberal.”
Though faces may change and the parties may change, the basic government policies curiously remain the same. This is as true in Britain, Germany, Japan, or Canada as it is in the United States. You can vote for a “liberal” or a “conservative” but in either case you’ll get austerity, militarism, and neoliberalism. Just with different frostings in different packet sizes.
Here, then, is the G7 Class of 2024.
Kanzler Olaf Scholz of the German Social Democratic Party may have once been a left-leaning labor lawyer, but he soon drank the neoliberal and NATO kool-aid. Scholz suffered a no-confidence vote in December and is likely to be replaced by Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union, which has signaled its willingness to work with the the openly fascist AfD Party.
FORMER Canadian Prime Minister of the Liberal Party, a birthright PM (his father Pierre was also a Canadian PM), quickly entered politics after college. Since 1968 Canadians have had 30 years of prime ministers named Trudeau. Trudeau resigned a few days ago, offering the Liberals a chance to tap a back bench filled with bankers and economic tinkerers. But polls favor the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre, a fiscal and libertarian conservative, Friedmanite, and crypto bro.
French President Emmanuel Macron, an investment banker, created right-of-center En Marche and Renaissance parties that have imposed austerity programs and pursued militaristic policies. Macron’s party trailed Marie LePen’s fascist party by 17 points in the June 2024 European Parliament elections and then suffered major losses in the July French election. Neither Macron’s Renaissance, the left-ish New Popular Front, nor LePen’s National Rally, has enough votes to control Parliament outright. LePen is expected to run again in 2027, but the power of the National Rally party, particularly on economic issues, is growing. Macron, who is still vulnerable to no-confidence votes, is essentially a lame duck who has promised to leave major issues to referenda on which National Rally will push even harsher policies.
Who says Italian fascism is dead? Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the fascist Brothers of Italy cut her teeth as a student activist and served as a youth minister under far-right Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi. She claims to have a journalism degree but in fact Meloni studied “hospitality” at a technical college. Still relatively young (at 47) the telegenic career politician is a zealous pan-European fascist rated positively by 57% of Italian voters. The ruling class loves her as well: Forbes magazine rates Meloni the “third most powerful woman in the world.” Don’t expect her to leave office for quite some time.
FORMER U.S. President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party needs no introduction. Soft on segregation and a self-described Zionist, Biden worked for two seconds as a lawyer and makes a big deal of his working class roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But long ago Biden ditched the working class when he began buying up houses he could scarcely afford. Among Biden’s many accomplishments are: greasing Clarence Thomas’s way to the Supreme Court by sliming Anita Hill, opposing school busing, writing broken windows policing legislation, authorizing massive expenditures for the military, pursuing a reckless foreign policy, and partnering in conducting a genocide. Biden’s participation in Israel’s war on Gaza very likely cost him the election.
FORMER Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of the Liberal Democratic Party is a former investment banker who introduced a “new capitalism” initiative that some tried to call a New Deal. But his economic reforms were undercut by austerity measures, increased military spending, and inflation. Like Biden, Kishida was a negotiator who cut backroom deals with far right nationalists to remain in power. In many ways Kishida was more popular outside Japan than inside. He survived an assassination attempt in 2023 (following Shinzo Abe’s in 2022). Last October Kishida was replaced by Shigeru Ishiba, also from the LDP. Like his predecessor, Ishiba is a conservative and a militarist.
FORMER British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party is a hedge fund magnate (just shy of a billionaire) who presided over a highly unpopular government which collapsed in July 2024. Sunak was replaced in the next election by the Labor Party’s Keir Starmer, a former federal prosecutor. Like Bill Clinton, Starmer has pushed his own party even farther to the right than it had been drifting. The new Liberal PM changes nothing for most Britons.
Alex Gibney is a co-producer of The Bibi Files, a new documentary directed by Alexis Bloom and available on jolt.film. In early 2023 Gibney received anonymous footage of police interrogations of Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, his wife Sara, son Yair, and high profile associates, including billionaires Arnon Milchan, [the late] Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, personal assistants, house and security staff, and hundreds of other witnesses to the Netanyahus’ crimes. The investigation, launched in 2016, is focused on the Netanyahu’s extortion of millions of dollars worth of luxury “gifts” in exchange for political access.
Top left: “democracy” demo in Tel Aviv. Top Right: Netanyahu quoting Don Corleone. Bottom left: fighting with police interviewers. Bottom right: Legacy.
Highlighting the kind of “access” being sold, Former Finance Minister Yair Lapid recalled that Milchan was seeking the continuation of an Israeli tax exemption and Netanyahu dutifully brought up the subject with Lapid. Netanyahu also personally intervened with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to have Milchan’s U.S. visa reinstated. It must be nice to be so fabulously wealthy that heads of state volunteer for personal concierge service.
Gibney has encountered numerous hurdles trying to get the film before audiences. For starters, The Bibi Files is banned in Israel. In addition, no major streaming service wants anything to do with it and the BBC has rejected it as well.
The physical files the film is based on fell into Gibney’s hands long before the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal response. Among those interviewed for the film was former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who himself went to jail for corruption. Given how routine official corruption seems to be in Israel, the story was spiced up with the thesis that Israel’s long, cruel war in Gaza is simply Netanyahu trying to stay out of jail. And that Netanyahu’s political partners, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, represent a marriage of convenience with fringe extremist elements. Without the corruption investigation, so the film’s thesis goes, there’s no need for a coalition with Kahanists. Without the Kahanists, there wouldn’t have been a protracted war in Gaza. The problem all boils down to a freak constellation of circumstances.
Well, I’m not buying it.
Top left: “Kahane chai (lives). Top right: with Ben Gvir. Bottom left: Smotrich promising annexation. Bottom right: Smotrich denying existence of Palestinians.
The simplistic, ahistorical narrative is tailor-made for Liberal Zionists who would prefer to ignore the fact that the goal of Zionism has always been to cleanse the land of Palestinians (or to use a scriptural term expropriated by religious fanatics, to “redeem the land”). Every Israeli prime minister, from Ben Gurion forward, has followed the plan. One of Netanyahu’s “liberal” predecessors, Golda Meir, famously pronounced that “there is no Palestinian people.” Sentiments like Meir’s have been heard in the Knesset since Israel’s founding.
Netanyahu’s father Benzion was a secretary to Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, author of “The Iron Wall,” a polemic that argues that Jews must treat Palestinians as mercilessly as American settlers treated Native Americans. When we meet Netanyahu’s ultra-right son Yair, the filmmakers insist he is pushing his father to the right. But darling Yairi, sitting out the war in a heavily guarded Miami condo, is simply a chip off the old block of both his father and grandfather. And Netanyahu himself is simply the latest iteration of Prime Minister to do his part to “redeem the land” from its indigenous inhabitants.
The film would have you believe that one crafty Israeli has wrapped the entire American foreign policy establishment around his little finger.
As the film winds to its end, we see Netanyahu speaking before a Joint Session of [U.S.] Congress – his 4th or 5th such appearance. The film’s point is not that he’s a habitual partner in crime with the U.S., but that Netanyahu is an especially cunning operator with a phenomenal memory who has consistently wound U.S. presidents, Congress, and Secretaries of State around his little finger.
I’m not buying this either.
The filmmakers don’t bother to point out that, without U.S. weapons, funding and diplomatic cover, Israel could never have waged its war — any of them — in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere. The film also misses the opportunity to remind viewers of the famous words of current President Joe Biden: “if there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent it.”
The truth is: Israel is America’s proxy, its Middle Eastern attack dog.
The 2019 film King Bibi covers much of the same bibliographic ground as The Bibi Files, but makes a convincing case that Netanyahu is a product of the American far right. After he first returned to Israel from Boston, where the well-spoken MIT man was slumming as a marketing executive for a furniture company, Netanyahu was still regarded in Israel as an “American.”
But Netanyahu had a knack for marketing “fighting terrorism” to the Americans, and above all marketing himself to Israelis. With considerable encouragement, two campaigns run by Americans, American speech and elocution classes, and a stint as ambassador in Washington, Republicans came to like the young Israeli who sounded almost like them. Netanyahu soon became as indispensable to the American foreign policy and military establishment as the little nation he would go on to lead.
I am getting a little sick of all the liberal salutes and fond farewells to Joe Biden, painting him as a fundamentally decent man and a compassionate father.
The Democratic Party rewarded Biden’s long Senate career of racism, militarism, and bipartisan fuckery by greasing his way to an undeserved presidency. Americans will remember Biden as the man who lied so much about both his health and the health of the economy that they chose a fascist to replace him. The rest of the world will remember Joe Biden as a mass murderer, war criminal, and an accomplice in genocide.
some of Trump’s “good people on both sides” (Charlottesville)
Our first Fascist president
Americans have finally come to the realization that Donald Trump really is a fascist. We got the first inklings when an ex-wife revealed that he kept Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand. But it’s never been a secret. Trump actually sounds like Hitler and acts like Mussolini. Even his own supporters don’t bother denying it since they themselves have been rubbing elbows with European fascists for years at CPAC conferences along with their spray-tanned Führer.
At least two of Trump’s new appointments, Pete Hegseth and Sebastian Gorka, seem to be fascists (Gorka even belongs to a pro-Nazi Hungarian order). Steve Bannon, Trump’s old campaign manager, has been trying to organize a fascist “Internationale” for years. Trump’s new Rasputin, Elon Musk, was raised in a fascist family that abandoned Canada for South Africa. It also came as no surprise to anyone when, barely a year into his first term, the German magazine Stern pictured Trump giving the Roman salute – better known as the Hitlergruß. Germans know a fascist when they see one.
Germans know a fascist when they see one
Fascist movement don’t just pop up out of nowhere. For sure, they have their autocrats, führers, caudillos, jefes, and strongmen; and of course they have a disaffected citizenry; but most importantly they represent they robber barons whose stream of barely-if-at-all-taxed riches will be affected by an annoying hoi polloi mobilizing to serve their own interests.
It is no coincidence that MAGA 1.0 really took off after the 2008 market crash and that MAGA 2.0 came back like a bad case of herpes right after the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement exploded.
As soon as anyone could say “Cheeto Hitler”, America’s rulers began banning books and cracking down on dissidents. Biden’s war on Gaza (yes, almost all the weapons came from the US) had a sobering effect on both citizens and rulers: it radicalized many of us and created a mass movement that questioned American empire, colonialism, and human rights violations — which proved to be one step too far for both the fascists and those claiming not to be.
For all of this, the unanswered, million dollar question remains: why did a large segment of the working class get 100% behind the fascists, while a similar-sized segment continues to fight them?
Sociologists, psychologists, and even political scientists have failed to adequately explain the phenomenon. Liberals are embarrassed to talk about class conflict or study what Marxists call the bourgeoisie. But we’ve had fascists at the door before, and the Marxists may just have the best analysis. So bear with me as I take you through how fascism has been studied — by liberals and Marxists alike — in the aftermath of National Socialism.
The Books
While Americans were busy trying to figure out whether Trump was or wasn’t a fascist, a huge number of books hit the market, each trying to define what fascism really is. But the emphasis in virtually all them is on the personal characteristics of fascist leaders or attempting to define the characteristics of fascist movements. None really deals with the class dynamics that push America’s ruling class to create and direct fascist movements.
Popular books making the rounds after Trump’s first election include: Timothy Snyder’s 2017 On Tyranny; Jason Stanley’s 2018 How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; Levitsky & Ziblatt’s 2018 How Democracies Die; Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s 2020 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present; and Masha Gessen’s 2020 Surviving Autocracy (to name just a few).
Liberals also dusted off their copies of Robert Paxton’s 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism and Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And we kept making trips to the bookstore. One new arrival this year was Ann Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World.
All of these books are useful up to a point. But for each the focus is on diagnosis and classification. None deal with how people like Trump or his MAGA movement — or the German AfD, the French Front National, Spanish Vox, Portuguese Chega!, Dutch PVV, or Hungary’s Fidesz Party — actually come to power or how reactionary interests conjure these movements out of peoples’ anger, almost like alchemy.
Fascism is as American as apple pie
Fascism has knocked on the door many times in America’s relatively short history. After the Civil War fascists rolled back Reconstruction in what W.E.B. Dubois considered a counter-revolution, establishing a terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, which at one point had 4 million members. Eugenists and nativists created the “American Party,” better known as the Know Nothings. An offshoot of the KKK called the Black Legion actually attempted a coup. The Bund, a German-American group, famously held a massive rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 — just as Hitler was constructing his 6th concentration camp — urging Americans to “take back their country” from the mongrel races, especially the Jews. George Lincoln Rockwell launched America’s first Nazi Party.
After the McCarthy period, which attempted to break a growing labor movement, more fascist groups emerged, such as the Traditional Workers Party, Stormfront, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters. Many of them are now well entrenched in the police and military.
These were little more than a lunatic fringe until the Tea Party movement brought them into the political mainstream, welding them together with the Religious Right. The Tea Party “movement” — neither a legitimate movement nor even an organic upwelling of working-class sentiment — spun off hundreds of astroturf groups to do the ruling class’s dirty work. For instance, it was former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey who created Freedomworks and who wrote the Tea Party Manifesto.
When we actually look closely, America’s illiberal movements are usually orchestrated by moneyed interests. The John Birch Society, for example, was created by Massachusetts candy magnate James Welch. Today, like Welch, the Koch brothers, Miriam Adelson, the Hunts, Leonard Leo, and the Bezoses and Musks of this world don’t just dabble in politics; they expect something for all the money they lavish on autocracy and repressive politics.
Trump just appointed 14 billionaires to his executive team. One of them seems to think he’s a co-president. All will use their cabinet appointments to enlarge already obscene wealth and to shape society to their advantage. Add to this the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and hundreds more autocratic democracy-killers, all funded by right-wing billionaires. This, my friends, is what Capitalism has been doing to democracy since time immemorial.
an early “dictator-buffoon” hybrid
Fascists defining fascism
One of the best descriptions of fascism was written by a fascist, Benito Mussolini. His Doctrine of Fascism (1932) rejects liberal social democracy, socialism and syndicalism (Mussolini was previously involved in both), as well as the classical liberal notion of the individual. Instead, for Mussolini, everything must serve the state — in Italy’s case, a nation eager to recreate the glory of Rome. It was Mussolini who gave fascism its name, from fasces, a Roman image depicting rods bound together with an axe, symbolizing the power of the state over an individual.
For Mussolini the state was supreme. Individuals were only important in terms of their function within the state. Only the state conferred morality and identity: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Like contemporary fascists, Mussolini rejected internationalism (which he correctly associated with socialism). Contempt for liberal democracy meant that single-party rule and authoritarianism were ideals, not defects. Contempt for the individual and worker’s organizations meant corporatism, by which the state would direct the economy (a complex maneuver since fascists certainly weren’t about to privatize corporations).
Fascist militarism is intrinsic because force and brutality, both by the military and the autocrat himself, are necessary to maintain an authoritarian state. Finally, fascism promises to create a “new man” unencumbered by conventional morality, weakness, hesitation, or qualms. As a replaceable human widget completely dedicated to the nation-state and dependent upon it for meaning, the new man abandons the materialism inherent in both capitalism and socialism.
Adolf Hitler’s conception of fascism, developed in two volumes of his autobiographical rant, Mein Kampf (my battle), covered much of the same ground as Mussolini’s but obsessed over the racial purity of the German nation-state. Hitler’s theories of Aryan supremacy and Jewish degeneracy led to the Nuremberg Laws (based on American Jim Crow), a host of antisemitic laws that purged Jews from the Civil Service and elsewhere, and embraced a weaponized form of Social Darwinism. Many forget that the first victims of Nazi extermination were average Germans with birth defects and mental health problems.
For Hitler Jews were a one-stop explanation for every ill in Weimar Germany; the removal of Jews would therefore address all these problems. Jews were Communists. Jews were Capitalists. Jews were internationalists. Jews were insular. Jews were diabolically clever. Jews were mental defectives. While expulsion and genocide had already begun, the “final solution” for Jews (complete annihilation) was finally formalized at the Wannsee conference in 1942. Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum (room to expand) was also a reaction to the limits placed on German nationalists by the victors of the first world war.
Psychological explanations of fascism
Although she was otherwise an astute political observer, Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, tied fascism’s appeal to lonely, atomized individuals. Her explanation resonates with modern readers for several reasons. It offers a mechanism by which the COVID epidemic could have contributed to the MAGA movement. Declining marriage and birth rates, alienation through social media and the breakdown of social institutions and consensus also fit tidily into Arendt’s essentially psychological theory.
Arendt wrote that, through propaganda and pseudo-science, alienated individuals can be easily manipulated into participating in the destruction of institutions they no longer believe hold any advantage for them, particularly when lies and propaganda are deployed. This includes the violation of laws and the rejection of social norms. Scapegoating and racial and ethnic intolerance are features of fascism and Arendt discussed in great depth the staggering number of refugees created in the wake of World War I — not so different from today’s global refugee crisis created by American wars in the Middle East as well as global warming.
Arendt is best known for her phrase “the banality of evil,” found in another of her books, Eichmann in Jerusalem. In it she maintains that Eichmann, in organizing a genocide, did so without really thinking, barely conscious he was committing crimes against humanity. Having abandoned his own humanity (as Mussolini and Hitler demanded of citizens of a fascist state) Eichmann also abandoned personal morality. This was a thesis that few believed and many, particularly other Jews, found offensive. In 2014 German philosopher Bettina Stangneth repudiated Arendt in Eichmann before Jerusalem. Stangneth’s thesis, developed from archival material unavailable to Arendt, was that Eichmann was every bit the monster everyone believed him to be, and was an ambitious, vain, calculating monster at that. But once again, all this was a debate about the psychology of a single fascist.
storming the Capitol, January 6, 2017
The Frankfurt School
From 1923 the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany) was known for social theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and others collectively known as “The Frankfurt School” despite widely-differing analyses.
Their work — much of it written in exile — drew from disparate intellectual currents of the early 19th Century: psychoanalysis; Marxism; and Critical Theory, a method of analysis that looks at power structures. As fascism manifested in real time, the Frankfurt School had much to say about authoritarianism, mass culture, propaganda, ideology, and power.
While haphazardly integrating Marxist class analysis into its work, the Frankfurt School focused mainly on psychology and sociology. Theodor Adorno examined the authoritarian personality. Walter Benjamin viewed fascism as an aestheticized politic glorifying war and violence and as theatre or religious spectacle in which myth and propaganda mimic religious ritual. Wilhelm Reich theorized that fascism appealed to the sexually repressed who more easily submit to authoritarian control. Reich believed that fascism could not be fought merely politically but had to address human and mass psychology that made it so attractive.
Contemporary diagnosticians
Contemporary analyses echo many of the theories first developed by the Frankfurt School.
Jason Stanley describes the tools and strategies that autocrats use to cement their power: “us versus them”; the mythic past; “alternate facts” and propaganda; attacks on intellectuals and universities; appealing to “law and order” while demonizing minority groups as criminals; promoting a “traditional” hierarchical society (appealing to the religious right and to racists); attacking democratic norm; pushing the Overton window of unacceptable or criminal acts; and advocating or initiating political violence.
Timothy Snyder finds fascism to be essentially opportunistic, feeding on fear and unrest. He points out that fascists are given to apocalyptic rhetoric — “on the brink”; “American carnage”; “complete destruction of society by our enemies” — as well as associating the Leader with God.
Robert O. Paxton offers an excellent summary of fascism’s features (again, not its etiology) in one paragraph:
“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Paxton enumerates five stages of fascism’s development: (1) the creation of movements, when a movement steps in to respond to a social crisis; (2) rooting or embedding of fascism within the political system (going mainstream); (3) seizing power; (4) wielding power; (5) radicalization or decline, where either the regime amasses even greater power or is finally repudiated by the people (or hung from a hook like Mussolini, or committing suicide in a bunker like Hitler).
Paxton observes that fascism seeks out elites who will control the economy or the military. Trump’s appointments and Project 2025 would seem to confirm this idea.
But is it fascism that seeks out elites, or elites that create fascism?
Since liberal analysis neglects class analysis and discounts internationalism, liberals often excoriate obvious enemies while letting their “friends” off the hook. Read Robert O. Paxton’s definition of fascism again and tell me how he has not just described to a “T” the Israeli state and its ultra-nationalist ideology, Zionism.
fascism ultimately depends on violence
The Marxists
While the liberal analysis of fascism offers insights into its characteristics and its repertoire of dirty tricks, Marxists can actually explain it.
The smoke had barely cleared following the Russian Revolution when fascism arrived to roll back social and economic gains of the revolution. Fascists openly declared war on socialism and socialists, leaving no doubt that their reaction was not a corrective to some vague social disquietude — as almost every modern commentator paints it — but a violent reaction to the growing demands and power of the working class.
While there are certain methods and strategies that fascist movements share, not all are alike. Each is typically shaped to fit the particulars of the nationalism being promoted. While liberals may argue about characteristics of fascism that differ among movements, Marxists have done a far better job of describing the mechanics of how fascists take power and mobilize part of the working class.
Here are a few who made contributions to understanding fascism using a class analysis:
Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist, eventually jailed by the fascists, who wrote his famous prison notebooks behind bars. One of Gramsci’s observations was that fascism doesn’t always have to overpower or destroy its enemies; sometimes it simply operates by manufacturing mass consent. Gramsci examined how propaganda is used to accomplish this. He noted that one of fascism’s most important objectives — one that the wealthiest strata of society benefit from enormously — is the destruction of working-class organizations like unions and worker’s advocacy groups, replacing them with corporatist structures under state control.
In 1921 Gramsci wrote The Two Fascisms, describing how the fasci di combattiemento was created after the first world war, how disaffected veterans and farmers had been drawn into one form of fascism — weak and under-represented in Parliament — while urban shopkeepers and small businessmen were drawn into a second form with significantly more power in the legislature, and led by Benito Mussolini. Gramsci wrote that the two fascisms related somewhat differently to liberal and social-democratic parties. The urban fascists were only too happy to reach agreement with the social democrats (who were only too happy to give in to the fascists’ demands) while the rural fascists remained intransigent in the face of all the back-slapping and deal-making. Gramsci also gives us a clear sense that, by understanding precisely how fascism works and what its weaknesses are, we can better fight it.
ready to play ball with fascism
Zetkin
Clara Zetkin was an another early theoretician of fascism. In 1923 she wrote The Struggle Against Fascism setting out a Marxist theory of fascism. Her words sound modern even a century later — though to properly-conditioned Americans certain words (bourgeois, proletariat) will evoke a conditioned response.
“[W]e view fascism as an expression of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy and as a symptom of the bourgeois state’s dissolution. We can combat fascism only if we grasp that it rouses and sweeps along broad social masses who have lost the earlier security of their existence and with it, often, their belief in social order. Fascism is rooted, indeed, in the dissolution of the capitalist economy and the bourgeois state. There were already symptoms of the proletarianization of bourgeois layers in prewar capitalism. The war shattered the capitalist economy down to its foundations. This is evident not only in the appalling impoverishment of the proletariat, but also in the proletarianization of very broad petty-bourgeois and middle-bourgeois masses, the calamitous conditions among small peasants, and the bleak distress of the “intelligentsia.” […] At present all these layers are experiencing the collapse of the hopes they had placed in the war. Their conditions have become significantly worse. What weighs on them above all is the lack of security for their basic existence, which they still had before the war.”
By crushing government institutions that sustain liberal democracy, as well as by imposing austerity programs, fascists accelerate the immiseration and fragility of the working class. It is no coincidence that Donald Trump has tasked Elon Musk with precisely the job of destroying the civil service. As Zetkin explains:
“As a result there are countless thousands seeking new possibilities for survival, food security, and social standing. Their number is swelled by lower and mid-level government employees, the public servants. They are joined, even in the victor states, by former officers, noncoms, and the like, who now have neither employment nor profession. Social forces of this type offer fascism a contingent of distinguished figures who lend it in these countries a pronounced monarchist hue. But we cannot fully grasp the nature of fascism by viewing its evolution solely as a result of such economic pressures alone, which have been considerably enhanced by the financial crisis of the governments and their vanishing authority.”
Zetkin provides a detailed analysis of Italian and German fascism, its strengths and vulnerabilities, and lays out a strategy to fight it. One of those strategies is the United Front:
“But proletarian struggle and self-defense against fascism requires a proletarian united front. Fascism does not ask if the worker in the factory has a soul painted in the white and blue colors of Bavaria; or is inspired by the black, red, and gold colors of the bourgeois republic; or by the red banner with a hammer and sickle. It does not ask whether the worker wants to restore the Wittelsbach dynasty [of Bavaria], is an enthusiastic fan of Ebert, or would prefer to see our friend Brandler as president of the German Soviet Republic. All that matters to fascism is that they encounter a class-conscious proletarian, and then they club him to the ground. That is why workers must come together for struggle without distinctions of party or trade-union affiliation.”
Trotsky
Although Leon Trotsky served as foreign minister, defense minister, and economic minister under Lenin’s Bolshevik government and was considered to be the “second in command,” he was later regarded as an enemy of the state after Lenin died and Stalin came to power. Stalin forced Trotsky into exile in 1929 and between 1936-1938 Stalin initiated a campaign of purging political enemies called the Great Terror, which claimed 1.2 million lives. In 1940 Stalin finally assassinated Trotsky, who had sought asylum in Mexico. During Trotsky’s 12-year exile in various countries, the former foreign minister studied political developments and wrote voluminously. This was precisely the timespan during which European fascism emerged. And Trotsky had a lot to say about it.
In 1944 Trotsky wrote Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it. Fascism always arises during periods of deep crisis in capitalist countries because the ruling class uses discontent to create fascist movements, whose objective in turn is to crush revolutionary movements and protect capitalist interests.
Trotsky argues that what Marxists call the petit bourgeoisie (middle classes, small business owners, and skilled professionals) is affected like anyone else by economic collapse. However, they do not necessarily see their interests overlapping with what Marxists call the proletariat (instead let’s use marginal, gig, and blue collar workers). It is usually the petit bourgeoisie that first succumbs to the siren call of fascism.
From Capitalism’s perspective, the capitalist class (the 1%, let’s say) rolls out fascism as a last resort after all other methods of maintaining control have failed. Suddenly we get censorship, political persecution, enemy lists, as well as the suppression of labor unions, demonization of socialists and others who challenge the corporate-friendly state, its foreign policy, or its military/police. Sound familiar?
In order to accomplish its goals, fascism relies on all the tricks and techniques described previously. But then comes the violence. Mass fascist movements begin to target and scapegoat minorities, encourage violence and paramilitary thuggery. Trotsky predicted “Stand back and stand by” 80 years before Trump ever uttered the phrase. Eventually, shutting down unions and criminalizing leftist political groups is undertaken.
While liberals see fascism’s emergence as a consequence of the weakness or absence of revolutionary struggle (or even mass movements), Trotsky viewed fascism as the dialectical consequence of the rise of revolutionary struggle. Fascism, for Trotsky, is what you get when increasing demands for social change scare the hell out of the ruling class. Trotsky was very clear that working people can expect no help from social-democratic parties (i.e. Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, lets say) who often end up brokering deals with the fascists all too quickly once they take their seats in government.
The wildcard in all of this is that segments of a disaffected working class and a frightened petit bourgeoisie can go either way — right or left. Social democratic party half measures to relieve social and economic pressures rarely do anything more than shift the social democrats to the right in their efforts to compete in elections or convince voters they’re not radicals. This is why the Democrats lost the last election. By the time the social democrats have ceded most of their power to the fascists, there may no longer be elections.
For the last year Palestinians have been living in an extra-hellish hellscape, harried from place to place by Israeli military and systematic bombing that has killed between 45,000 to nearly 200,000 people, depending on which figures you trust.
Early on, the American political establishment and an empire-friendly media settled on the dishonest narrative that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” after which the US threw tens of billions of dollars at Israel, arming and funding it to the teeth with brutal weapons that alarmed even politicians who voted for the transfers.
Anyone who opposed either Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians or the US breaking its own laws to fund human rights abuses became a dissident — to use a word we once reserved primarily for the Soviet Union. We turned on our own dissidents as a host of new legislation appeared, criminalizing protest of what has now been rightly judged to be a genocide.
Dissidents in putative “Western democracies” suffered arrest, censorship, loss of income, public humiliation, charges of “antisemitism,” doxxing, and show trials. These occurred under “liberal” governments as well as authoritarian ones. In the US, McCarthyite hearings were conducted to purge college presidents and shut down student groups. Current legislation proposes to shut down non-profits and human rights groups that oppose Israeli genocide.
Bipartisan consensus gives the middle finger to international law and international bodies like the UN and the ICC. The Imperial State has unabashedly shown us its long, bloody fangs. And, amazingly, they look just like those in dozens of repressive regimes across the globe. Gaza has offered Americans a dismal peek into the realities of every one of their national institutions. For anyone paying attention.
All of this is to be expected. Imperialism and Capitalism are ultimately incompatible with democracy, so guess which one takes the hit? The Capitalist gods have created a government in their own image. On January 20th it will be: out with Democratic Party billionaire donors (who prefer to quietly wield their influence) and in with triumphal Republican billionaires who will screw up your life as much as the Democratic billionaires, but will troll you as they do it.
Corrupt, malevolent regimes never fail to produce dissidents — just as unbearable repression produces resistance movements, including some you may not like. No one can be a disinterested spectator forever. Sooner or later someone comes to take your house, your orchards, your land, your life, your job, or your voice. Eventually you have no choice but to take a side.
“Beit Lahiya is gone, Beit Hanoun is gone. Operations are underway in Jabalya, essentially clearing the area of Arabs.”
If there was ever any question of what the war in Gaza was really about, we now have confirmation from former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, acknowledging — in the Jerusalem Post of all places — that Israel’s disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance was a fantastic opportunity for Zionists to start a new round of annexation and ethnic cleansing. Just as in Israel’s first round of ethnic cleansing in 1948, “Nakba 2.0” was accomplished through terror, slaughter, and the forced transfer of civilians. But this is what Zionism is, even the “friendly” version Joe Biden espouses: I win, you disappear.
Both American political parties signed on to support and commit war crimes and human rights abuses, bringing dissidents into the streets all over the globe. The blunt and clumsy instrument used to defend Israel is “antisemitism.” We are asked to swallow a crude and nonsensical explanation — that “antisemitism” has spontaneously spiked by orders of magnitude for no good reason. The fact is: people don’t hate Jews any more or less than they did a year ago. But there is considerably more reason to hate the Israeli state. And incidentally, that includes a lot of Israelis too. But criticism of Zionism is not antisemitism, as much as Democrats are now willing to create laws to criminalize the former as the latter.
It’s a long relay effort involving both parties. Democrats may have (again) brought us to this point but Republicans are about to (again) take the baton and run with it. But it wasn’t just the Democratic Party that left us in such a tough spot; it was the party’s liberals who placed all their eggs in the “lesser-evil” basket, hoping they could save a few domestic rights at the cost of sacrificing, quite literally, the lives of others out of sight thousands of miles away. They ended up saving neither.
As long as pesky dissidents were only the allegedly “antisemitic” Left or a bunch of disobedient college students, Liberals were content to throw them under the bus too. Enough Democratic politicians broke ranks to vote for repressive laws, condemn dissidents, or conduct McCarthyite hearings with MAGA Republican colleagues, that we can fairly say that both parties have brought America to ruin.
If you’ve ever read Martin Niemöller’s quote beginning with “First they came for the Communists,” you know that by the time the fascists came for pacifist Lutherans like Niemöller, there was no one left to defend them because all their predecessors were dead. Niemöller’s point was the importance of both moral integrity and solidarity.
Moral integrity and Solidarity: a little something to think about as Trump takes power and the Democrats conduct one more political post-mortem.
I recently saw the trailer for “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin.” It reminded me of another film with similar historical accuracy, 2012’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”
As you might imagine, this is a film that has nothing to do with the actual, historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
As soon as it was released concerns arose that “Bonhoeffer” was primarily a vehicle for Christian Nationalism. The Bonhoeffer Society itself has condemned it. Even the cast of the movie has had misgivings:
The film was produced by Utah-based Christian Nationalist media company Angel Studios and was adapted from a “biography” (in quotes for good reason) by Eric Metaxas, a right-wing talk show host and rabid supporter of the Orange Führer himself.
If you wouldn’t vote for the fascist on the left, why are you using the fascist on the right’s social network?
Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it from an already toxic platform into a white supremacist’s dream. Musk implemented schemes to gouge his customers, blocked third party developers from the Twitter API that had contributed to the platform’s success over the years, and invited back virtually every banned hate group you can think of. After renaming Twitter “X” it has now become indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Trump Social, and it’s not that many goosesteps away from Stormfront. In joining the Trump administration, Musk intends to use his new position for personal gain despite the many conflicts of interest it poses. Just like Trump.
That other Trump-flirting social media mogul, Mark Zuckerberg, is not quite the Bond villain Musk is, but his four social media platforms operating under the grandiose title Meta (above it all) — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Threads — represent a social media monopoly dedicated to hoovering up as much of your personal data as they can get. Meta censors content and de-platforms users for the most obscure of reasons. Many users who posted criticisms of the Gaza genocide, for example, found themselves banned on several of Meta’s sites. Despite best efforts to keep your account private, Facebook will often “relax” your privacy settings without permission. If you use forwarding emails or phone numbers to preserve your privacy, Facebook will treat you like a criminal. Facebook’s registration process may even require you to hand over a photo of your driver’s license. In short, Meta is designed for one thing — to suck up as much of your personal data as it can for resale. You are the product Mark Zuckerberg is selling.
There are other options out there, though none are so popular as to make it possible for your long-lost high-school friends to find you. But if you want to share your views — or your cat pictures — you can try BlueSky, Mastodon, or Substack. Among others. That is, if you’ve had enough of censorship, violations of your privacy, and neo-Nazis.
Getting out
To delete your Twitter/X account, click the three-dot menu icon and on X’s left sidebar and choose Settings and privacy. From there choose Deactivate Your Account. To delete your Meta accounts, go here and delete Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads accounts through Meta’s Accounts Center.
Blocking the bastards
Deleting Meta and Twitter is one thing. Removing them permanently from your life is another. Both Meta and Twitter use cross-domain trackers to keep an eye on you even if you aren’t a user. There are browser extensions and tracker blockers you can install to try to prevent this, but they may not always work with all internet apps,
One way to stop all access to and from Twitter and Facebook is by blocking them at the domain name server level. On every desktop system there is a hosts file that can accomplish this by telling DNS to ignore certain websites, resulting in a refusal to resolve a domain name (like “www.facebook.com”) to its IP (internet) address.
One tool, available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, is Switchhosts, which makes it easy to safely edit the hosts file. You create a profile similar to this one and simply enable it in Switchhosts. No more Facebook or Twitter! Attempts by any of your internet apps to forward personal data will not be completed because they won’t be able to find the IP addresses of Facebook’s or Twitter’s trackers.
If you want to accomplish the same on your mobile devices, you can use a custom domain server that will do the blocking for you. One popular and currently free solution is NextDNS. You create an account, choose the social media networks you want to block, and NextDNS creates a profile for you. You then load the profile onto your mobile device, where it overrides your network settings and points to a custom DNS profile on NextDNS that is all yours.
Any time your browser or any other app tries to connect to the social media networks you want blocked, it’s as if the site simply doesn’t exist.
Which, in the best of all worlds, would be totally fine with me.
I have spent the last three quarters of a century in and out of the United States and lived though tumultuous chapters of our national history that have often been measured in wars of choice and countless instances of undermining other people’s democracies. Now things have come full circle; it is our own democracy that we’ve decided to torch.
If authoritarianism — or let’s just call it by its proper name, fascism — seems like a new choice, Americans have always had a rather low opinion of actual democracy. This is why we purge voter rolls and disenfranchise ex-felons. This is why we give cops carte blanche to murder civilians without consequence. This is why the majority of our national treasure is spent on destruction instead of lifting up the people who pay the freight. This is why the building blocks of our democracy, like the electoral college and the Senate, were designed to be inherently undemocratic. This is why we have a Supreme Court that gives lie to what you learned in social studies — that it is held in check by two other branches of government. Clearly it no longer is.
Americans could care less about democracy. We worship at the altar of raw power and we sneer at equality, justice, civic virtue and social cohesiveness. We are not all in this together. It’s every man for himself, and that’s just the way the capitalists like it.
There is so much in Trump’s win that boggles the mind, from his obvious dementia — if not outright insanity — to his incessant lying, the multiple felonies, the sleaze and corruption, and the fascist toadies and evangelicals who have sidled up to him. But the greatest insanity is the expectation that a corrupt billionaire and a coterie of other corrupt billionaires will somehow make things right for the common man — instead of simply lining their own pockets. What moron would believe such nonsense?
It turns out that the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are not morons. While they may not have been voting in their own long-term self-interest, and many no doubt disapproved of Trump’s countless moral, intellectual, and mental failings, they were not voting for a man but for a Führer who will dictate and decree the kind of country they have always wanted — dominant Christian and White-controlled. If there are any doubts about this, Trump’s cabinet appointments make it abundantly clear.
Emergent fascism is scary enough, but what was equally shocking about this election was how fluidly the Democratic Party moved from years of denying that its incumbent president was cognitively impaired to fielding a new one — all without the inconvenience of a primary. How easily the party machine raised billions from mega donors while continuing to gaslight voters about the benefits (it turns out, mainly to Wall Street) of Bidenomics. How easily, barely raising any alarms, the Democratic Party moved significantly to the right on immigration, war, military spending, foreign policy, and even social issues. How coldly the party provided “ironclad” and excessive support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. And refused to change course, even with a new candidate.
Democrats of every stripe behaved badly in this election, from Blue Dog Democrats to Democratic Socialists. From Congressman Bill Keating, who cheer-led the Gaza war while profiting from his Boeing investments — to good old Bernie Sanders and [former?] Democratic Socialist spitfire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who both shepherded progressives, herding them into line to stick with an administration that was illegally funding the genocide of Palestinians even as they both supported performative legislation to stop it.
The Democratic Party is finished. Or it should be. Like a trojan virus in an operating system, unless thoroughly rooted out, the Democratic leadership will continue to advance the neoliberal policies and losing strategies that have had it on the ropes for decades and are its hallmark. Like a trojan or root virus, the most reliable solution is to start all over again, installing a new OS on the bare metal.
The Left has always argued for a new party of working people. Now liberal Democrats are slowly discovering they need one too.
The Israeli-American Council (IAC) is yet another node in a vast network of pro-Israel and Israel-linked organizations known as the Israel Lobby. As opposed to American Jewish groups which might embrace Zionism, the IAC is openly operated, and in apparent violation of FARA laws, by Israelis on US soil.
The IAC was created in 2007 by Israel’s Consul General, Ehud Danoch, and it immediately began recruiting dual (Israeli-American) nationals, primarily with backgrounds in American business. In 2013 the IAC obtained additional financial support from casino mogul and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, as well as Hollywood producer/investor and Biden donor Haim Saban. In 2014 a third billionaire and convinced Zionist, Adam Milstein, was appointed its chairman.
To say the IAC’s politics are far-right is an understatement. On September 19, 2024 the IAC convened its three-day National Summit at the Washington DC Hilton, and it had all of the features of a MAGA Republican CPAC Hungary conference — militarists, authoritarians, enemies of civil liberties, propagandists, Christian Zionists, and even a wannabe dictator — two if we count Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at the event.
Kim Jong Un was unavailable
The DC Summit featured three days of workshops, among which the following were offered:
“Taking Antisemitism to Court” featured speakers from the Brandeis Center, the Lawfare Project, the National Jewish Advocacy Center, and IAC Action, which coordinates its efforts with right-wing Republicans.
“The IHRA Definition: A Tool for Fighting Antisemitism” hosted MAGA Republican legislators from Georgia, South Carolina, and Arkansas sharing tips with two Israelis from IAC for Action.
The “Civic Engagement” workshop was a hodge-podge of miscreants that included: Elise Stefanik, who represents Israel more reliably than her own Congressional district; Trump defender Alan Dershowitz; Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi of Falls Church, Virginia, son of Iran’s brutal Shah, who now supplements his CIA stipend by hitting the conference circuit; Shabbos Kestenbaum, who sued Harvard for not doing enough to shut down free speech; Christian Zionist actress Patricia Heaton; and several other nobodies from stage, screen, and television.
At “Head of the Snake: The Global Terror Network and Iran’s Leadership Role” Israeli defense analyst Yoav Limor moderated a discussion with: Elliot Abrams, war criminal, convicted felon, Gulf War cheerleader, and now one of Biden’s national security advisors; Victoria Coates, another warmongering American neocon and former National Security Advisor under Trump; and two Israeli terrorism “experts” — Boaz Ganor and Anat Berko.
“Tragic Awakening Documentary Film & Conversation” was a film screening by its director, Rabbi Raphael Stone, founder of the Clarion Project, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group because of its Islamophobic focus.
“The US-Israel Alliance Now and Tomorrow” was moderated by Israeli broadcast journalist Yuna Leibzon and included: Ofir Akunis, Likudnik and Israeli Consul General of New York; former Middle East envoy and “Israel’s Lawyer” Dennis Ross; former NSC advisor Victoria Coates; and Michael Oren, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.S.
And, finally, for those who needed to hear justifications for the carpet bombing of civilians, there was “Ethics in Combat and the Law of Armed Combat” featuring: Alon Ben David, who specializes in “International communications” at Bar-Ilan University; Colonel Richard Kemp of the Gatestone Institute, a far-right Islamophobic advocacy group founded by Nina Rosenwald and funded by billionaire megadonor Rebekah Mercer, whose more recognizable members include John Bolton, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, R. James Woolsey, Dutch fascist Geert Wilders, and Amir Taheri, who has repeatedly been accused of fabricating stories about Iran.
A partial list of participants
Alan Dershowitz defender of torture, apologist for Trump, all-round disappointing excuse for a human
Alon Ben David Senior fellow at the Center for International Communications at Bar-Ilan University, writes for a variety of military magazines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alon_Ben_David
Anne Bayefsky Fox News opinion writer; Director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust; the neoconservative Hudson Institute; UN Watch, which slams the United Nations; the Israel-based Ariel Center for Policy Research, a Likud Party-affiliated organization; and writes for right-wing publicans including the Weekly Standard. https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/anne-bayefsky/
Colonel Richard Kemp Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a far-right, Islamophobic advocacy group founded by Nina Rosenwald and funded by billionaire megadonor Rebekah Mercer, whose easily recognizable members include John Bolton, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, R. James Woolsey, Dutch fascist Geert Wilders, and Amir Taheri, who has repeatedly been accused of fabricating stories about Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute
Daniel Edelson Israeli journalist covering the US “antisemitism” beat, particularly universities that offer courses analyzing settler-colonialism https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hjmpfse0c
Dr. Charles Asher Small founding director and president of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which has been embroiled in controversy after publishing falsified studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Small
Dr. Mark Goldfeder private counsel to Donald Trump, and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which is unrestrained in its accusations of “antisemitism” and “blood libel” and which sued the Associated Press, Americans for Justice in Palestine, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and UNRWA USA, for allegedly providing “material support for terrorism.” https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-jewish-advocacy-center-njac/
Elise Stefankik MAGA Republican crusader who represents the 21st Congressional District of New York but who best represents non-voters 6000 miles away.
Grace Rubin after launching a pro-Israel club at Wesleyan, she snagged a job as AIPAC intern, then interned with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was a US House of Representatives legislative correspondent, and is now Senior Manager for Activism Research and Training with the Israeli-American Council. https://www.iac360.org/iac-summit-speakers/grace-rubin/
Jake Bennett director of State Legislative Affairs for IAC for Action, on AIPAC’s Arizona council, the Jewish Federation, and previously regional director of the Arizona ADL, https://www.iac360.org/iac-summit-speakers/jake-bennett/
James Maslow another obscure performer whose profile increased after expressing support for Israel after October 7th
Prof. Boaz Ganor founder and executive director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, and member of Israels National Committee for Homeland Security Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaz_Ganor
Rabbi Raphael Shore Canadian rabbi, founder of the Clarion Project which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group, and film producer of numerous Islamophobic propaganda films like the 2008 film Obsession, which featured interviews with many individuals who appeared at the IAC summit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Shore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion_Project
Roz Rothstein CEO of StandWithUs, which is supported by Adam Milstein, a common name in such organizations. StandWithUs is at the far right end of the spectrum of Zionist groups and conducts training in deplying pro-Israel propaganda, much of it disinformation. It is as brutal toward Jewish progressives as it is to others. https://www.standwithus.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StandWithUs
Victoria Coates foreign policy advisor to Donald Rumsfeld, Rick Perry and Donald Trump, who appointed her to run the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, a propaganda outlet. She also served on the National Security Council under Trump and now works for the Heritage Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Coates
Yuna Leibzon Chief US correspondent for Israel Channel 12 news and occasional lecturer at Ariel University, built on an illegal settlement in the West Bank https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuna-leibzon
We are in the midst of another McCarthy era. Universities and public schools are under attack by organized witch hunts. Slanderous accusations of antisemitism are ending careers. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act is being weaponized by Zionist “lawfare” organizations. Protests against Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza (not to mention the West Bank and over half a dozen Middle East countries) are twisted as endorsements of terror. Conversely, condemnations of Israeli terror are twisted as antisemitism.
It is rare that we encounter a single story involving Israel and its strong-arm tactics with so many moving parts. It is even rarer that we encounter one in our own backyard. The following story illustrates just how the state of Israel and unregistered agents and lobbyists, coordinating with American Zionist organizations and MAGA Republicans, can marshal the resources of federal investigators, police agencies and prosecutors, to threaten an Ivy League university and take down its president, throw a school district into chaos, and manipulate politicians — all to suppress protests of Israel’s war crimes and to ruin its critics.
The Inciting Incident
In the early days of Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up a “die-in” at the Harvard Business School’s campus in Allson. Yoav Segev, a Jewish Harvard Business School student, was attempting to surveil the “die-in.” As Segev stepped awkwardly over the bodies of prostrate protesters attempting to film their faces, he raised suspicions he was trying to dox them. Corinne Shanahan, a Harvard Law School student, felt Segev was filming “in bad faith, either to intimidate or dox” the protesters.
Shouting “exit!” and “shame!” student safety monitors told Segev to stop and, after he refused to leave, half a dozen students blocked his camera with scarves and banners. This included Divinity School student Elom Tetty-Tamaklo, a safety monitor, and also Harvard Law Review editor Ibrahim Bharmal. In what now appears to have been clearly a set-up, Segev claimed he had been “assaulted” and two of the camera-blockers were soon arrested by an undercover Harvard campus police officer working on a federal task force. As an editorial in the Harvard Law Record points out, both Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal were trying to protect protesters from Segev. Somehow the safety of this segment of Harvard students has been forgotten.
It was Segev’s father Ilan who emailed the Harvard University police (HUPD) with the complaint. The elder Segev knew just whom to contact using intelligence from an unnamed source, and he provided HUPD with the identities of two students, informing HUPD that the son wanted to press charges. Out of more than half a dozen students the two Segevs could have accused of “assault,” the two chosen were both men of color. A letter of support from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine asks “why Tettey-Tamaklo, who is Ghanaian, was singled out from the other protesters as a threat?” While racism was certainly one possibility, another become apparent when we learn that Tettey-Tamaklo was a co-founder of the campus group Harvard Graduate Students 4 Palestine. He was targeted because he was the leader of the pro-Palestinian group.
While Segev is only 26, he owns a tony condominium in Boston’s South End purchased for just over $1 million and now valued at $1.24 mil. His parents, as we will see, are extremely well-connected. Tetty-Tamaklo, on the other hand, was a proctor from a poor country who lived in student housing, receiving meals as part of his aid package. Ibrahim Bharmal had been a member of the Harvard Law Review — that is, until Harvard’s Chabad rabbi Hirshy Zarchi, Harvard megadonors Bill Ackman, Jonathan Neman, and David Duel, 94 Jewish alumni, and the Brandeis Center, a Zionist “lawfare” group, all showed up with pitchforks demanding the two students’ heads on spikes.
The lynch mob
Both Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal face charges of Assault and Battery and Violations of Civil Rights. Although the cases against them are weak and have not yet been dismissed by Suffolk County DA Kevin Hayden, neither Tetty-Tamaklo nor Bharmal have court dates, much less convictions. Rejecting any presumption of innocence, Harvard punished the two without hearings anyway. Zionist attack groups further “punished” the two with character assassination. Someone set up a libelous webpage using Tettey-Tamaklo’s identity, and both are being doxxed by Canary Mission, a particularly repulsive Zionist attack group funded by deep pocketed donors, including the late Sheldon Adelson and Adam Milstein. Harvard quickly bowed to the well-orchestrated attack campaign, evicting Tetty-Tamaklo from his university housing. And after megadonor Bill Ackman demanded to know, “How does this man remain Editor of the Harvard Law Review?” Ibrahim Bharmal’s bio was yanked from the Harvard Law website. But still the Defenders of Israel weren’t done with their enemies.
The mob takes down a president
With the university scrambling to appease its attackers, donors like Bill Ackerman, long critical of both the Harvard Trustees and its President, as well as Zionist and MAGA organizations, demanded President Claudine Gay’s head — and those of the Trustees. On December 5th, 2023 Virginia Foxx (R-NC) launched her McCarthyite Congressional hearings at which a grandstanding Elise Stefanik (R-NY) outdid herself defending Israel while haranguing Gay and assaulting free speech and freedom of association. It was a shameful display of deference to a repressive, foreign regime.
Unfortunately, Gay’s spineless defense of student Constitutional rights and academic freedom at Harvard was nearly as shameful. Even Gay’s apologies and assurances were not enough to assuage the MAGA and Zionist zealots. After a month of “deeply personal and sustained attacks [that have] played out in […] the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls” the beleaguered university president had had enough. On January 2nd Gay stepped down.
An extremely weak case
Those who have seen footage of the Segev incident are hard-pressed to recognize anything resembling an assault. Adrian Walker writes in the Globe, “As someone who has covered crime in Suffolk County for decades, I’ll just say this: I can’t remember a weaker assault case. Not only does this case not clear the bar for prosecution, it doesn’t even approach it. Assault by scarf? Please stop it.” Thomas Nolan, a former Boston Police lieutenant, commented: “I didn’t see anything in the video that I would characterize as an assault and battery … or anything remotely approaching a civil rights violation.”
Barbara J. Dougan, legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Massachusetts, found the politically-motivated prosecution of the two troubling: “As a lawyer who has represented the victims of hate crimes for 25 years, I view the way this incident is being handled as highly unusual. In my experience, police departments are unwilling, despite the victim’s wishes, to bring charges for incidents that don’t clearly rise to the level of a crime. […] I trust that Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden will take a good, hard look at the facts of this case when deciding whether to prosecute.”
More on the Segevs
But the story gets more interesting. Not merely another Jewish student at a school that is 25% Jewish, Segev junior is a student member of Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE), part of a pro-Israel “lawfare” group, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB). LDB has filed dozens of legal complaints of alleged “antisemitism” against universities and school districts all over the U.S. based on purported violations of Title VI protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sniffing for antisemitism is exactly what LDB does. It is reasonable to assume Segev was operating as an operative of LDB the day of his confrontation with protesters.
LDB was created by Kenneth L. Marcus, Donald Trump’s former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. Not related to a similarly-named university, LDB has been at its game a long time and was party to the lawsuit which ultimately dismantled affirmative action admissions. Besides opposing affirmative action and launching a tsunami of Title VI lawsuits, LDF and JAFE also work to pressure universities to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
LDB’s interests overlap considerably with those of MAGA Republicans who, like Zionists, are fierce foes of DEI and affirmative action and reject any suggestion that the U.S. is or ever was a settler-colonial state. The nation’s 30 million Christian Zionists also see Israel as a model for a Christian Nationalist renewal in the U.S. Zionist and MAGA interests also converge in opposing anti-colonialist Middle Eastern studies programs and the faculty who teach courses on, critique, or even discuss settler colonialism with their students. Christian Zionists promote the IHRA definition, which will eventually result in arrests and punishment if fully weaponized. Maybe they’re just thinking ahead to the day when criticizing Christian Nationalism will result in similar repression.
Within MAGA World the accusations of “antisemitism” have been increasingly adopted and weaponized by grandstanders like Elise Stefanik, who libeled Segev’s “assailants,” and Mitt Romney, Harvard class of 1974, who signed a letter painting a melodramatic picture of “Jewish students [who] have locked themselves in dorm rooms across your campuses afraid for their own safety.” The fact that a Jewish student like Segev could feel safe enough — if not entitled — to wade through a field of protesters knowing he wouldn’tactually be harmed undercuts such rightwing talking points.
All of the chaos created by reckless and slanderous accusations is ultimately to the advantage of the Israeli government, which makes young Segev’s family background all the more interesting.
Segev’s father Ilan is a former Israeli diplomat who transitioned to American investment manager at Morgan-Stanley, where he manages portfolios sizable enough to attract the occasional lawsuit. Segev senior is founding Co-Chair of and donor to the Israeli-American Council of Boston, a member of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN), whose leadership overlaps somewhat with the ICA’s. Segev donates to a variety of Boston-area institutions, including: the Jewish Community Day School, where he is a Director; the [former] Kehilla Schecter Academy, where he was also a Director; the Landmark School, a secular school for autistic children; and Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where he is on the Board of Overseers. Segev held diplomatic posts in Qatar and served as Israel’s Vice Consul in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2001 Segev visited Wake Forest University to deliver the Foreign Ministry’s message that Palestinians are entirely responsible for their own occupation, their loss of territory, and the many racist laws they are subject to.
Segev’s mother Shiri (Shira) is also a former diplomat with the Israeli Foreign Ministry and is now a financial compliance officer at Omniguide. She serves on the Boston Jewish Community Day School’s Board; like her husband is also a member of the Israeli-American Council; a trustee of the Gann Academy, a Jewish day school; Educating for Excellence, a pro-Israel education group; the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, where she is a director. Owing to their wealth and connections, the Segevs have a lot of friends in very high places.
IAC and ICAN
The Israeli-American Council (IAC) to which both parents belong is yet another node in a vast network of pro-Israel and Israel-linked organizations known as the Israel Lobby. As opposed to American Jewish groups which might embrace Zionism, the IAC is openly operated, and in apparent violation of FARA laws, by Israelis on US soil.
The IAC was created in 2007 by Israel’s Consul General, Ehud Danoch, and it immediately began recruiting dual (Israeli-American) nationals, primarily with backgrounds in American business. In 2013 the IAC obtained additional financial support from casino mogul and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, as well as Hollywood producer/investor and Biden donor Haim Saban. In 2014 a third billionaire and dedicated Zionist, Adam Milstein, was appointed its chairman.
To say the IAC’s politics are far-right is an understatement. On September 19, 2024 the IAC convened its three-day National Summit at the Washington DC Hilton, and it had all of the features of a MAGA Republican CPAC Hungary conference — militarists, authoritarians, enemies of civil liberties, propagandists, Christian Zionists, and even a wannabe dictator — two if we count Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at the event. For a closer look at the conference, click here.
There are now between 200,000 and as many as one million people with Israeli citizenship living in the U.S. In the Boston are there are some 30,000. As an organization for Israeli expats, IAC shares much of its membership, some of its leadership, and — owing to its ongoing connections to the Foreign Ministry and IDF — it shares Israeli government objectives with other Israeli-American groups such as the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) and its sister group, the Israel-American Civic Education Institute (both headed by lobbyist Dillon Hosier). All three target American educational institutions and cultivate friends within MAGA World. For example, ICAN Massachusetts recently endorsed Steven Howitt, arguably the most right-wing representative on Beacon Hill.
ICAN and ICA have gone all out in attacking the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which supports a ceasefire and voted to develop materials that can be used for teaching the Israel-Palestine conflict. Joined at the hip in unsavory ways, MAGA World and the pro-Israel media both went into simultaneous attack mode.
Fox News commentator Kassy Akiva (Dillon) of the Daily Wire published an attack on Ricardo Rosa, who had been tasked with developing the MTA curriculum, and this was followed up by a press release from Steven Howitt, issued in the name of the Massachusetts House and Senate Republican Caucus. The Times of Israel and Canary Mission then attacked the MTA. Parents Defending Education and JNS, the Jewish News Syndicate, piled on, accusing the MTA of rank antisemitism, putting targets on both Rosa and Newton City Councilor BIll Humphrey, whose only crime was failing to fall in line by condemning the MTA. The Jewish News Service, the MAGA Patriot Post, and other far-right sites followed suit. It was quite the team effort by Israelis, the Israel lobby, and the American far right. Rosa showed me the death threats recorded on his phone.
One important objective of the Israeli-American Council — and the Israeli Foreign Ministry that created it — is shaping perceptions of Israel and Zionism within American educational institutions. In June 2016 the IAC hosted a meeting at its Newton headquarters, chaired by Ilan Segev, to which Mayor Setti Warren was invited. The Forward describes Newton, a city 30% Jewish, as “one of the most Jewish cities in the United States.” Ignoring how ludicrous such allegations are, Segev charged Newton’s schools with “sweeping antisemitism under the rug,” while Charles Jacobs, a notorious Islamophobe who led opposition to the construction of the Islamic Center of New England (since built), claimed the Newton schools were using maps of Palestine created by the PLO. For both Israel and its MAGA friends, talking points don’t have to be true. it’s all about manufacturing outrage.
Thomas Karns
Returning to the thread of the “assault” at Harvard we now meet Thomas F. Karns Jr., the campus cop who arrested Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal. Karns is a former Boca Raton police officer and Gulf War veteran. In 2019 he was briefly suspended for calling a Black colleague a “f—t n—r.” His LinkedIn page lists extensive training in computer forensics and provides references from at least one federal prosecutor. Karns set up Veritas ex Machina Consulting LLC in Marblehead MA in 2015. His organizational filing states the purpose was “digital forensic consulting and computer incident handling.” Karns’s LLC was dissolved by court order in 2019.
In 2008, in a strange echo of the 2023 incident, Karns arrested two Massachusetts residents during campus protests against Israel’s Cast Lead operation in Gaza. Karns was then wearing a track suit, not a police uniform, filming protesters. He later admitted he was “conducting plain clothes surveillance on a demonstration.” Karns illegally arrested the two for simply documenting his surveillance of pro-Palestinian protesters, not for committing an actual crime. In 2020 Karns was again seen monitoring Black Lives Matter protesters after George Floyd’s murder; his suspension for racist behavior the previous year seemed relevant to the Harvard Crimson.
A 2012 paper by the Massachusetts ACLU documented the practice of policing dissent in New England. The Boston Police Department routinely collaborates in federal task forces, violating the Constitutional rights and civil liberties of those it spies upon, just like the [private] Harvard University police. Although Harvard denied that Karns was operating as part of a federal task force, Massachusetts ACLU Legal Director John Reinstein pushed back: “They claim they don’t have a political surveillance ‘unit,’ but they do have a guy who goes out and takes pictures of people in peaceful demonstrations…” According to an article by Mike Damiano in the Globe, Karns testified in sworn testimony in another case that he was there as part of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Brigitte Karns
Brigitte Karns (Thomas Karns’s wife) is a Marblehead teacher and a fitness instructor at the JCC North Shore. She owns a registered “educational enrichment” company. It turns out that Karns is also deeply involved in pro-Israel advocacy — just like the Segevs, with both the Israeli-American Council and the Israeli-American Civic Action Network. When criticism of Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza surfaced at Karn’s school, she was so outraged that her first impulse was to shut down opposing views: “As you know, my parents are Holocaust survivors and most of my family lives in Israel and what you’re saying is incorrect. You need to stop.”
Karn’s wrath seemed focused on three fellow teachers, members of her school’s DEI committee. Karns’s simmering gripes surfaced at a June 10, 2024 webinar organized by a “who’s who” of far right Zionist organizations: ICAN, Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism (a front for ICAN), CAMERA Educational Institute, Christians and Jews United for Israel (CUFI), StandWithUs K-12 Educator Network, the “anti-woke” Combat Antisemitism Movement – and of course the Consulate General of Israel to New England.
On June 20, 2024, at a meeting again sponsored by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) Brigitte Karns went after her fellow Marblehead teachers, specifically targeting Candice Sliney: “Marblehead has been knowingly supporting a hostile work environment of some of the Jewish teachers and students. The Marblehead Education Association is using intimidation tactics to silence Jews and then the administration is perpetuating antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology by remaining silent.”
Sliney — who is a member of the Marblehead Task Force Against Discrimination, which partners with the ADL to train students and teachers to fight antisemitism and discrimination — was astounded by Karn’s allegations: “Every single accusation was a lie. She has attacked my character, endangered my family and put my career at risk, with zero evidence.” Sliney urged the School Committee to hire an independent investigator. Voices from the community fortunately came to Sliney’s defense.
But Karns wasn’t finished with her colleagues. She went on testify to the psychic trauma of having to listen to fellow teachers condemn Israel’s war on Gaza: “This anti-Zionist interaction has left me feeling unwelcome and isolated at work. The encounter pierced deeply, shaking my trust in the place I work and with whom I work with. The silence from the administration and the union amplified my feelings of isolation. It’s like a double blow, being marginalized by a colleague and then having administration ignore my feelings and concerns.”
It’s really a shame that our fantasies of forcing everyone we interact with to adopt our own views and refrain from uttering contradictory ones can’t be realized, but at some point we need to pop out of it and accept reality.
Following Karns’s allegations, the Marblehead Current reported that the Marblehead Schools had been forced to conduct an “antisemitism” probe — at taxpayer expense. Schools superintendent John Robidoux signed an agreement specifying that “the district shall pay Kurker Paget at a rate of $360 per hour for the services of any partner of the firm and $160 per hour for the services of the firm’s paralegals, billed in six-minute increments. MPS will incur fees for the time Kurker Paget staff spend traveling in connection with the investigation.”
The Current also reported that the Marblehead schools did receive a number of letters accusing the schools of doing little to protect Jewish students. But most were identical, generated by a computerized form, and began with, “I am emailing you to show my support for the Jewish teachers that have experienced antisemitic/anti-Israel incidents in the Marblehead schools…”
Assessing the damage
To date, a handful of zealots, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israel lobby, and its MAGA fellow-travelers, all working together, have managed to take down a university president, ruined the lives of two human rights advocates and at least one teacher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hearings and needless studies, subverted free speech in universities and public schools, marshaled the powers of Congress, the FBI, the police, and the courts against Americans and those protected under our laws — and they’ve done it all without a single shred of oversight or regulation.
New York Mayor Eric Adams is politically finished as a consequence of acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Turkey. Robert Menendez’s career is over after acting as Egypt’s. Paul Manafort went to prison after acting as an agent for Ukraine. All of these men violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act in one way or another. And all of them were Americans. Yet somehow none of this applies to the Segevs and the “Israeli-American” and pro-Israel organizations running amok over the American political landscape.
In 2018 M.J. Rosenberg — who worked for AIPAC himself at one point — argued that AIPAC and lobby groups like it ought to be required to register under FARA laws. Rosenberg described the mind-bending loophole that allows such groups to function as agents for Israel (and apparently only Israel). If a similar loophole had been in place in the Fifties allowing Americans to act as agents for the Soviet Union, perhaps Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (no relation) could have avoided the electric chair.
The conclusion Rosenberg drew in 2018 is as relevant as ever today:
“No, AIPAC is not a ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. It’s the Netanyahu lobby and our laws should treat it as such […] As for the thousands of Americans gathered in Washington this weekend, they need to know one thing: They are not supporting the dream of a secure, democratic Israel at peace with its neighbors and the world. They are, unwittingly, supporting a right-wing political agenda that is placing Israel in ever-deeper peril and, frankly, jeopardizing its very existence.”
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith ButlerColumbia University Press, ISBN 9780231146111
In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Judith Butler makes the case that Judaism and Zionism represent vastly different world views. Butler’s readers are more likely to be liberal and progressive secular Jews, but no doubt readers also include both political and religious Zionists. Because Butler does not address the Zionists directly, as Shaul Magid does in The Necessity of Exile, they may be scandalized by the critical studies approach drawing on a variety of Jewish scholars, postwar philosophers, German-Jewish thinkers, and Palestinian writers. Nevertheless, Butler addresses Jewish ethics as well as Zionism’s use of state violence and its newfound messianism.
After Israel’s 2008 Operation Cast Lead, Butler sought to debunk the claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, proposing that Judaism is in fact opposed to injustice, state violence, expulsion, dispossession; and that in all its traditions — secular, socialist and religious — Judaism is dedicated to social justice and social equality. And if that case could be made, “it would be a painful irony indeed if the Jewish struggle for social justice were itself cast as anti-Jewish.”
Thus Butler sets out to show “that there are bona fide Jewish but imperative Jewish traditions that oppose state violence and modes of colonial expulsion and containment [,…] affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak.”
To do this Butler needs to show that resistance to Zionism is itself a Jewish value, that Zionism’s illiberal exceptionalist lens must be replaced by a democratic universalist, and Jewish, lens. And, to overcome the objection that Zionism’s violence is only reactive and not intrinsic, it must also be demonstrated that a critique of state violence, which Israel uses to repress Palestinians, is not only inherent in Jewish values but that Zionism is not inherent in Judaism or in Jewishness. It’s a tall order.
Butler’s main task, like Magid’s, is to rescue Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism and to rescue Judaism from the grip of a Zionist framing:
“It continues to surprise me that many people believe that to claim one’s Jewishness is to claim Zionism or believe that every person who attends a synagogue is necessarily Zionist. Equally concerning is the number of people who think they must now disavow Jewishness because they cannot accept the policies of the State of Israel. If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgment of those of Jewish descent or formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish values or, indeed, the Jewish people. Although it is surely possible to derive certain principles of equality, justice, and cohabitation from Jewish resources, broadly construed, how can one do this without thereby making those very values Jewish and so effacing or devaluing other modes of valuation that belong to other religious and cultural traditions and practices?”
In deriving first principles from an ethical or religious tradition, Butler asks if Jewish sources can be reinterpreted anew and if non-Jewish sources can ever be used to illustrate Jewish values.
One would think that these arguments would depend on firmly establishing that even Jewish sources regard Zionism’s qualities as alien to Judaism. And they do. But Jewish values such as cohabitation with the “other,” equality, and justice can be applied universally. Jewish experiences, such as dispersion and exile, may have particularist but also universal meanings. Certainly both Jews and Palestinians have experienced both. Butler acknowledges that universal concepts may not always hold precisely the same meaning for all parties. Even Jews are famously heterogenous. Everyone, Butler argues, perhaps Jews especially, must contend with the notion of the “other,” with alterity.
Ultimately, Butler elects “to depart from a[n entirely] Jewish-centered framework for thinking about the problem of Zionism and to locate Jewishness in the moment of its encounter with the non-Jewish, in the dispersing of the self that follows from that encounter.” These encounters are far-ranging, and if one does not have a solid background (which I don’t) in critical theory they will find themselves treading water instead of swimming happily along. Nevertheless, Butler’s book offers some useful framings to consider Zionism’s hijacking of Judaism.
Butler begins their meditations with an insight from Edward Said, who noted that Moses the Egyptian, Judaism’s founder, is recognizable as both a Jew and an Arab. The moment we begin to grapple with these opposing identities, we are engaging, in Butler’s terms, with alterity. Said makes the point that the only thing that really distinguishes Moses as a Jew is receiving the tablets at Sinai. The two peoples he embodies have much more in common — chiefly, their refugee status, both in scripture and in the modern historical record.
Outwardly it’s difficult to distinguish Mizrachi Jews from Arabs. It’s hardly a surprise that Jews (including many Ashkenazim) and Arabs share much of the same DNA. Now, many centuries after Sinai, having joined a world of nation-states, the real difference between contemporary Israeli Jews and Palestinians boils down to who has the power to deploy violence against the other to maintain its claim of exclusive ownership of a contested piece of land.
While critical studies certainly have their challenges, they are also remarkably capable of identifying central issues. In Zionism’s case it is institutional violence toward the “other.”
The weaponization of “alterity” and its counterpoint in the [non-militarized] idea of “cohabitation” are thus flip sides of a major theme of Butler’s book, whose first two chapters largely focus on Emmanual Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Rashi’s discussions of how Jews relate to non-Jews, and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence.
Butler demonstrates that Judaism itself, Jewish scholars like Levinas, and sages like Rashi have long grappled with the ethics of the “other.” Contrary to Judaism, Zionism cannot see — in fact, refuses to recognize — the humanity of the “other,” valuing only survival, relying on state violence and operating by the law of the jungle.
Although Butler themself does not quote Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, this foundational document expresses Zionism’s almost sociopathic “survival-over-morality” in terms that ought to make any religious scholar shudder:
“We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.”
Zionism’s fundamental absence of morality was echoed recently in a statement by Israel’s Kahanist National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir:
“My right, my wife’s right, my children’s right to travel on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than Arabs’ freedom of movement. Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality, that’s the truth.”
I had thought I was up to the challenge of reading Parting Ways because I had previously read several of the works of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, which Butler uses as departure points. I thought I might be able to keep up. And even though I had also read the Kafka mentioned and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I had never read Benjamin’s famously obscure meditation on violence, which also treats divine violence and wades into messianism. Despite a better than average chance of understanding Butler’s many eclectic references, some of the chapters were still a very tough slog.
It pains me when Zionists claim that their beloved Apartheid state and the twisted, amoral ideology that undergirds it are central to Judaism. There may once have been a Kingdom of Israel (actually two, which only lasted 125 years) but that Israel is clearly not the same as today’s ethno-state, despite the fantasies of Kahanists, hilltop setters and Christian Zionists.
So I don’t mean to slam Butler’s overall thesis at all, because I agree with it. But this slim volume makes something relatively straightforward unnecessarily complex. I also found the book physically painful to read because the font size is 8 or 9 points. There are far more approachable dissections of why Judaism and Zionism are not only completely separate but stand absolutely in opposition to one another.
We could start with the Talmud, for one. There is nothing in the Talmud’s 63 tractates that describes the contemporary state of Israel now run by fascists, Kahanists, and religious lunatics. Look at the Talmud’s laws of war to see how Israel has violated virtually every stricture. Or look to the pre-state Zionists for their objections to contemporary Zionism, discussed in Chapter 6 of Parting Ways.
Even before Israel’s founding, many of the early Zionists like Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Judah Magnes quickly distanced themselves from the ethnic cleansing and fascism that had become inevitabilities of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism embraced at the 1942 Biltmore Zionist Conference. Their argument was that stealing from and murdering Arabs would create an unsustainable, racist state and violate every tenet of Jewish ethics.
And, really. How could Zionists have proceeded to steal an entire land from its indigenous people in spite of such easily-foreseen consequences? Because Zionism has no morality, no concern for the “other,” no respect for universal values. Even after there was no longer a Nazi threat to Jewish life, Zionism continued on its trajectory of genocide and dispossession of Palestinians.
Today finding Jews critical of Zionism is not very difficult. There are hundreds of Jewish organizations, even some within Judaism itself, that are critical of Zionism. If you’re looking for a contemporary, theoretical critique, check out the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which numbers a respectable share of Jewish intellectuals. Visit https://criticalzionismstudies.org/ and their podcast.
In the final analysis, recognizing the differences between Judaism and Zionism requires no esoteric meditation. Zionism, with its attendant, even logically consequential, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression, is diametrically opposed to Judaism’s Tzedek, tzedek tirdof! (Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue!). And Zionism most surely contradicts Hillel’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary.”
After years of illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the only thing left of the “Two State Solution” is as a prop for liberal politicians and liberal Zionists to point at while doing nothing to advance any now clearly impossible partition plan.
The charitable or gullible may view these liberals as idealistic dreamers, but realists will recognize them for what they are — purveyors of an obvious, damnable lie. In truth, Israel and its colonial enablers will permit only an exclusively Jewish state — and this has always meant the inevitable mass-murder or expulsion of a people who will never renounce their claims on their own land.
Even when the opportunity has presented itself to create or move forward the idea of a Palestinian state – even a rump state or a disconnected set of cantons or reservations — the United States has rejected or vetoed the idea, pointing to its other gaslighting prop — the equally dead and pickled Oslo Accords — as the “only game in town,” as George Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell used to call it.
Oslo may be long-dead but it is still the straw man that US presidents and their Western allies recite while demanding that Palestinians negotiate directly with Israel — as if such were negotiations between states on equal footing. But since Israel has physically destroyed literally every Palestinian government (and that includes assassinating its leaders and negotiators), only the toothless, highly unpopular Palestinian Authority remains, and it has absolutely no mandate to negotiate with anyone.
Meanwhile, no American president has ever made any effort to hold Israel to account for its illegal settlements, actively worked for two states, or even presented a vision for one. That’s because for decades it has been impossible (not to mention embarrassing) to look at a map of the West Bank and explain to anyone with a straight face how a Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together from the tiny crumbs still left on the table. So when I hear liberal stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren mumbling “two states” I want to demand that she show me her detailed plan. Or shut the hell up.
As reasonable as a demand that the thief return the property he stole, or the home invader vacate the home he invaded, or that damages (criminal or civil) must be paid to a victim, no Western nation with its own sordid history of slaughter and displacement of indigenous people will will ever impose this sort of justice on a fellow settler-colonial state. When you think about it, this is nothing more than professional courtesy between rogue states.
But now, after 75 years of injustice and now an exceptionally well-documented genocide, the world is screaming for a solution to be found. Israel’s solution is to double down on every technique that created its Apartheid state in the first place — massacres and ethnic cleansing. The Zionist state remains committed to “thinning” the Palestinian population — as if it were a herd of animals, stealing even more land, and devising ever more creative schemes to push Palestinians into the Sinai, Jordan, or Egypt. But a previously inattentive world has been paying attention, and now Israel’s many crimes have justifiably made it a pariah.
AND YET American politicians are still on board with Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and continued annexation. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have suggested that Israel “bounce the rubble,” drop atomic bombs, or “finish the job” — echoing genocidal calls openly and increasingly advanced by members of Israel’s Knesset and its public. The Democratic president, a self-described “Zionist,” generously funds the ongoing genocide, has placed boots on the ground and boats in the Gulf. His National Security Advisor and Secretary of State shamelessly lie about the scale and scope of Israel’s war crimes.
Democratic Party politicians avert their eyes from the victims of Israel’s genocide, and couldn’t bring themselves to allow a Muslim congresswoman to address their national convention (while allowing two Israelis the platform). They vote with Republicans to criminalize protests, vote for new laws to muzzle speech critical of Zionism or opposition to Israeli policies — all while continuing to hide behind Oslo and the fictive Two State Solution. And while the Democratic majority is too well bred to openly cheer for genocide like their Republican brethren, they still do everything they can to sustain the “lethal” slaughter.
Zionists interpret the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call to exterminate all the Jews. I doubt they actually believe this propagandistic “interpretation” any more than I do because Israel’s ruling party actually uses a similar formulation in its own platform. What is true, however, is that throughout all the territory it controls Israel — and no other people — maintains an actual One State ethnocracy by extreme violence. Again, literally from the river to the sea. This single state includes 5.5 million Palestinian subjects in areas occupied by Israel and Israel’s 9.1 million citizens, totaling 14.6 million souls.
Of this total population 7.2 million – a slight minority – are Jewish. But Israel’s One State Jewish minority is even smaller because up to a million Israelis don’t actually live in Israel and many of the Russian olim were admitted under an amended 1970 Law of Return which permitted non-Jews to immigrate (specifically to offset Arab demographics). So when you also factor in the Palestinian diaspora — between 6 million and 7 million people displaced by the 1948 Nakba — Jews represent only a third of the total number of people who have claims to Palestine.
This, together with the racist, repressive, even neofascist, nature of the Israeli state, perfectly justifies classifying Israel as an Apartheid state. As a state for only a fraction of its “subjects,” Israel maintains the status quo only through violence and terror, and it can’t even do this on its own.
As its colonial era Mandate expired, Britain turned over its military and colonial infrastructure to the Jewish Company, not the majority Palestinian population it had occupied. Since its founding, Israel has depended on hundreds of billions of dollars of American subsidies to its military, defense, tech, and energy programs. Billions of dollars in funding came from North American Zionist organizations, notably the private Jewish Federations and large donors. Like a failing tech startup, the Zionist state only exists by pumping more and more money into it. In the long run it is unsustainable.
France made Israel the nuclear power it is today. Russia armed it in its early years. Americans can’t have national healthcare, but between 15-20% of Israel’s defense budget is paid for by American taxpayers. In any other financial arena where expenses are properly scrutinized, from business to government to non-profits, throwing wads of cash at a recurring disaster is the very definition of insanity.
By at least 1990, with hope for a Palestinian state all but dead, it was obvious that a different version of the One State solution — not exclusively Jewish — would be necessary to end the madness of Zionism’s ruthless control over all of Palestine. Though different, several of these plans end exclusive Zionist control over Palestine by giving Palestinians a long-denied voice and exactly the same rights as Jews — security, respect for personal property, freedom of movement, a political voice, and the right of refugees to return to their communities.
a “unitary state” that denies the non-dominant nationality any rights, redress, or power
a system that grants the non-dominant group [some] individual rights but no collective political rights or power
a classical liberal democracy in which no nationality has special or collective political rights and where the relationship of citizen to state is not mediated by ethnic or religious membership
a “parity-based” bi-national framework in which each nationality becomes a collective political unit and is accorded equal status and power regardless of size
a “consociational” bi-national arrangement which recognizes ethno-national rights within “cantons” (preserving one aspect of the “two state” solution) while permitting freedom of movement and property ownership for both nationalities within all of Palestine
Although it’s a bit dated, Hermann’s taxonomy provided both a useful outline and an analysis of how Israel has systematically opposed both one- and two-state solutions. Note that Option #1 is the current reality, and the only reality acceptable to Israel and its Western enablers. Note also that various options that would address injustices toward Palestinians have been systematically rejected by elements of the Israeli Left, Right, and Center.
Early Jewish Bi-nationalism
As Hermann writes, Zionism ignored and discounted both Arab existence and resistance to displacement:
“For many devoted Zionists, it came as a severe blow to realise that implementing the dream of the Zionist movement – the ingathering of the Jews in the land of their forefathers and the building of a national home for the Jewish people – bluntly interfered with the life of the Arab community in the same land. Although warnings in this regard were expressed as early as 1907–08 (Epstein 1907/1908), awareness of the hostility that massive Jewish immigration created among the Arabs was minimal.”
But there were plenty of Jews who recognized the flaw in Zionism:
A small minority, however, rejected these strategies as early as the 1920s, denouncing them as immoral for disrespecting the national rights of the Palestinians and for putting the Jews and Arabs on a collision course. Instead, this minority position advocated a bi-national arrangement. Thus, in 1925 the Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) group was formed with the aim of promoting Jewish–Arab understanding and co-operation.
The members of Brit Shalom, some of them prominent figures in the political or academic establishment, believed that the domination of one people by another would lead to severe friction and, eventually, war. At least in its early days, Brit Shalom’s bi-nationalism could be described as optimistic: it was meant to forestall the conflict before it ripened. Switzerland and Finland were the examples of successful bi-nationalism that encouraged Brit Shalom. In practical terms, the group advocated creating a legislative council based on Jewish–Arab parity, which would run the affairs of a bi-national state in which the two peoples would enjoy equal rights irrespective of their relative size at any given time.
The “Disturbances”
The wave of violent Arab riots against the Jews in 1929, known as the ‘disturbances’, were a severe blow to the group [my note: and should have been to the Zionists as well] since they suggested that time was running out faster than they expected. Brit Shalom warned that these ‘occurrences’ were not a sporadic, transitory phenomenon but the beginning of a national liberation struggle that would only get fiercer if not properly handled. Nevertheless, as noted, the chances for bi-nationalism to be adopted when other, more ‘natural’ options have not yet been tried, and failed, are slim.
Indeed, Brit Shalom was harshly attacked by the mainstream and accused of defeatism. The fact that they spoke their minds while the murdered Jews were not yet buried infuriated their rivals even further, and the Zionist establishment denounced them as either pathologically naive or traitors. It is important to note that the bi-national advocacy of Brit Shalom and its successors in the pre-state days was not echoed on the Arab side. Given their numerical superiority, the Palestinians rejected a parity-based regime.
Detroit Jewish Chronicle, October 3, 1941 calling Magnes a “Quisling”
The “Ihud” (Union)
Apart from Brit Shalom, however, the group most identified with it is Ihud (Union), which was led by Martin Buber and Judah Magnes and was active from the early 1940s till the establishment of the state, though it continued its activities until the mid-1960s. Ihud was established in 1942, almost a decade after Brit Shalom had expired.
By that time the conflict was already an undeniable and very violent reality. Moreover, Ihud operated against the background of World War II and the catastrophe of European Jewry. Its members believed that bi-nationalism offered the only way of saving both the Jewish community in Palestine and the survivors of the Holocaust. They did not deny the Jewish people’s special attachment to the Land of Israel but maintained that together with the Arabs living in Palestine they must develop the country without one side imposing its will on the other.
In their submission to the Anglo-American Commission (1946), Magnes and Buber, who represented Ihud, argued, in stark contrast to the position presented by the Zionist establishment, that since both Jews and Arabs had a national claim to Palestine, it could neither be an Arab state nor a Jewish one. They also rejected the partition option, saying it was impractical and a ‘moral defeat for everyone concerned’. Instead, they recommended that a bi-national state be formed in which Jews and Arabs would share power. According to this parity-based model, Jews and Arabs would have equal representation in a democratically elected legislative council, and the head of state would be appointed by the United Nations Organisation, with each community exercising autonomy in cultural matters.
Zionism’s conflict with Jewish values apparent
Indeed, the bi-nationalism of Brit Shalom and Ihud had a strongly moralistic aspect. They saw it as a natural derivation of the Jewish tradition of antimilitarism – the victory of the spirit over the flesh. At the same time, they promoted bi-nationalism as the only practical solution that might be acceptable to both sides.
A brief appearance by Israeli Bi-nationalists
The tiny camp of today’s (2005) Israeli bi-nationalists can be divided into two subgroups. First there are those, mostly belonging to the radical, non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist Left, who favor this model per se. Second are those who would prefer a different scenario but have concluded that the existing geopolitical and demographic realities dictate bi-nationalism.
The bi-national idea was already raised by a few Israelis in the 1970s, and again, strongly but by very few, soon after the launching of the Oslo process. Political activists of the radical Left, such as Michael Warschawski of the Alternative Information Centre and others, warned against the pitfalls of the Oslo paradigm, claiming that the Palestinian state to be established in this framework could not be viable but would only be a Bantustan-type entity.
For this they mainly blamed the expansionist Zionist ideology and the Israeli government, while also criticising the Palestinian Authority’s impotence and inability to defend its people’s interests: ‘If Arafat had not accepted the conditions laid out at Oslo, this miserable agreement might have remained a mere position paper (Ben Efrat 1997; see also Pape 1999, Warschawski 2001). These activists called for the adoption of the PLO’s ‘secular-democratic state’ model, which they referred to as bi-national in essence. However, theirs was a cry in the wilderness; it was heard, if at all, only within small circles of the Left and was mainly understood in the context of the internal rivalries between the Zionist and non-Zionist components of the peace camp.
Until very recently, however, bi-nationalism was not a significant (albeit highly contested) option in the Israeli repertoire of possible solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian strife. Thus, when in the summer of 2003 the weekly supplement of the Haaretz daily published a lengthy interview with two public figures, Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi, in which both expressed their support for a bi-national, Israeli–Palestinian state, many within and outside Israel were taken by surprise. In this pathbreaking interview Hanegbi, a well- known figure of the radical Left, admitted to his initial support for the Oslo process (Shavit 2003).
Yet as time passed and the process seemed to be leading nowhere, he came to view Oslo as a mistake – a diversion of everyone’s attention to Israel’s rhetoric rather than its deeds, namely, the ongoing settlement expansion. Therefore, dwelling on sweet memories of his childhood in Mandatory Jerusalem amid Jewish–Arab harmony and coexistence, Hanegbi asserted that Israel was unable to free itself from its expansionist mentality since ‘it is tied, hands and feet, to its core ideology of dispossession and original mode of action’. His conclusion was that: ‘Only binational cooperation can save us. Only this can transform us from foreigners in our land to locals, to natives’.
More on the debate
Benvenisti, the second interviewee in this scandal-stirring article, is also a nonconformist but comes from the heart of the Israeli establishment. Having warned prophetically for years that the ever-growing settlement project was becoming irreversible, his shift to bi-nationalism reflects much frustration and pain: Israelis, like the Afrikaners in South Africa, should realise that the present discriminatory regime ought to be dismantled, since it has failed to impose its hegemony over the dominated collective, and replaced it with a regime of individual and collective equality. Like Hanegbi, Benvenisti also admits to making a mistake in the past – in his case, defining the Israeli– Palestinian struggle as a national one when the correct definition, he now acknowledges, is that of a struggle between natives and settlers/colonisers, resulting from the atavistic hatred of those who feel dispossessed by foreigners.
Separation, then, is no longer an option, and the entire Land of Israel should be regarded as a single geopolitical entity (Shavit 2003). Although in this interview Benvenisti did not describe the details of the bi-national arrangement he suggested, he mentioned some combination of a horizontal sharing of powers on a parity basis and a vertical (territorial) one, a federalist structure that would include the entire land west of the Jordan River and be divided into several ethnic cantons.
In an article published a few months later, however, Benvenisti advocated the consociational model, ‘which recognizes the collective ethnonational rights and enables cooperation in the government at the national level while guaranteeing well-defined political rights for minorities’ (Benvenisti 2003). He views such an arrangement as based on a cantonal division under a federal umbrella. Such an arrangement, he states, also enables maintaining ‘soft’ borders and constructive ambiguity, which facilitates handling symbolic issues such as Jerusalem and even the refugees and the settlers (ibid.). He also states his pessimistic bottom line: ‘I am not happy with what I have just suggested. . . . We are not going to have peace here. Even if there is some binational arrangement, it can only manage the conflict. At its outskirts, however, violence will always prevail’ (Shavit: 10–14, 2003).
The publication of the interview with Benvenisti and Hanegbi by a major Israeli newspaper brought strong aftershocks, including many letters to the editor and opinion columns in the printed and electronic press. Paradoxically, for reasons to be explained below, the most negative reactions came not from the Right but from the Centre and moderate Left, both supporting one or another version of the two-state solution. For example, Yosef Gorni, a mainstream Zionist historian, fiercely attacked Benvenisti, who is also a historian along with his other professional activities:
As Benvenisti knows very well, this approach [bi-nationalism] is a complete non sequitur. . . . This is essentially because of the national spirit and history of the Jews and the Arabs. Both peoples find it very difficult to have minorities in their midst. . . . Furthermore, this idea also has a deplorable moral aspect, as it is unthinkable to legitimate such collective discrimination, by which all other peoples of the region, besides the Jews, will be entitled to a national state of their own. (Gorni 2003)
Another mainstream critic (Shacham 2003) fiercely attacks Hanegbi: ‘better not to bamboozle us with some bi-national phrasing when what one actually means is a regular state, with a majority and a minority, with the majority defining the rights of the minority’ (ibid.). His criticism of Benvenisti is no gentler: ‘The use of the phrase ”bi-national paradigm”, which sounds so intelligent, cannot compensate for the total lack of thinking on how such a state can be established and function’ (ibid.). Shlomo Avineri, a prominent political scientist and former director-general of the Foreign Ministry, states categorically: ‘A binational state? There is no such thing. Simply put: nowhere in the world has a conflict between two national movements been resolved by squeezing two national movements, holding each other’s throats, into the boiling pot of a binational state’ (Avineri 2003). Clearly alluding to Benve- nisti, he continues:
What happened to them [i.e. the advocates of bi-nationalism who were not part of the radical Left but came from the mainstream] was that they simply collapsed in the face of the Palestinians’ determination and resistance and their readiness to sacrifice themselves, reaching the conclusion that Zionism can never win and hence should be given up altogether.
Interestingly enough, there is also some opposition to the Hanegbi and Benvenisti-style bi-nationalism on the radical Left, the traditional (albeit tiny) support base in Israel for the PLO-style, secular-democratic bi-national state. These voices maintain that dividing the entire country into cantons a la Benvenisti has a misleading ring of plausibility. Israel boasts a First World economy, while the Palestinian-populated areas belong to the Second or even Third World. In such a situation, where the Jewish cantons are ‘haves’ and the Arab ones ‘have-nots’, the chances of real equality under the new federal or other framework are practically nil. Yet the question is idle, the argument goes, because there is no apparatus for realising this concept anyway; there is nothing to motivate Israel, which has brought Arafat to his knees and divided the Palestinian national movement, to enter into such an adventure (e.g. Ben Efrat 1997).
As noted, the Right’s criticism of the ‘new school’ bi-nationalists was surprisingly mild, apparently because any plan that implies retaining the Land of Israel as a single unit is appealing – with some amendments – to supporters of that principle. Thus, in November 2003 the Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) Council released its own ‘bi-national’ plan as the solution for the conflict. It divides the entire historic Land of Israel into ten cantons, each of which would have cultural autonomy, with their boundaries delineated according to the ethno-national composition of the population in the specific region. These cantons would come under a federal umbrella.
However, according to this plan’s principle of division, only two of the cantons would be Palestinian, thereby guaranteeing a Jewish majority in parliament (Eid 2003). The right-wing activist and journalist Israel Harel proposed another bi- national model: ‘We should take the Arabs on both sides of the Green Line as one body and the Jews on both sides as one body, and give the Arabs Jordanian citizenship and the Jews Israeli citizenship’ (Harel, in Susser 2003). There are, however, moderate right-wingers who fear that if such positions are embraced, the bi-national reality may impose itself on the land and destroy the settler community from within.
Thus Yair Sheleg, a journalist living in a settlement yet writing in Haaretz (which is left-of-center on Israeli–Palestinian relations), urged his fellow settlers to agree to the two-state solution before it was too late. With their powerful opposition to evacuating even the smallest, most isolated outpost, Sheleg argues, the settlers have created a balance of deterrence with the government. Sheleg urges the settlers to stop pressuring the government and concludes: ‘In specific moments of their life, individuals often agree to undergo painful operations, including amputating this or another organ of their body so as to save their life. The same level of responsibility such individuals take regarding their private life could be expected from those who aspire to be in the leadership position regarding the good of the nation.
Glimmers of One State
In 2004, frustrated with an Oslo process that was going nowhere, with Israel still occupying Gaza and beginning to wall off Jerusalem, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alta) – who would shortly be succeeded by Hamas’s Ismail Haniyah – threatened that if there was no real progress in negotiations Palestinians would call for one binational state.
The United States, smack in the middle of a Middle East war of its own making, placed its heavy thumb on the scales, acting as the biased peace broker it has always been. Elliott Abrams, soon to become a convicted felon and an accused war criminal, was part of the American delegation tasked with making sure Israel would prevail. US Secretary Colin Powell “categorically” rejected a one state solution and demanded that Palestinians “wrest authority” from President Yasir Arafat. For its part, Israel rejected any sort of a Palestinian state.
And prevail Israel did. The 2006 elections which swept Fatah from power and ushered in Hamas were a consequence of Israeli intransigence and American connivance. The US and Israel had no idea at the time that anointing (and later funding) Hamas would eventually blow up in their faces so spectacularly.
Thus, rather than “Palestinians never failing to miss an opportunity” for peace, peace in Palestine has been systematically subverted by Israel and the colonial powers (notably the US) that created it. These parties have worked tirelessly, always behind the scenes, to scuttle any sort of just solution or compromise that would allow two peoples to live in peace on the land one party stole.
My last post addressed two letters in the New Bedford Guide concerning Zionism. One clearly defended it, while another by my friend Betty Ussach only sounded like it. I have known Betty for many years, worked with her on social justice issues, and, while I may not have been the only person to misread her intentions, I should have given her much more credit for what should have been read as a principled objection to Israel’s violence in Gaza, not the opposite. Another letter she published in the New York Daily News leaves no doubt as to where she stands. Betty, again, I’m really sorry.
While I am apologizing, the New Bedford Guide did eventually publish my response. As uncomfortable as the issue may be for some to confront, covering vital public discussions that have otherwise been banished from the local papers is an important function of the press. Anyone who, even belatedly or reluctantly, publishes unpopular views on the war in Gaza or Zionism is doing an important public service. I hope the NB Guide will keep it up because the other local news outlets aren’t.
While to some people Gaza may be somebody else’s war — a topic made radioactive because of cynical accusations of “antisemitism” or something having nothing to do with our national priorities — without American bombs, naval fleets, intelligence sharing, missile defense systems, vetoes at the UN, and cumulatively hundreds of billions of dollars of military aid to Israel, neither Israel’s Apartheid system nor their genocidal war on Palestinians would be possible. And everybody knows it — most of all the vast Israel lobby.
At some “Walter Cronkite moment” in the future, with almost every international body condemning the war and Israel’s Apartheid system, Americans are going to finally realize that pumping billions after billions to prop up a nationalist supremacist state is simply throwing bad money after bad.
It’s been said that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. This is certainly the case with the New Bedford Guide, which falsely claims “in fairness and objectivity, we share opinions from our readers whether we agree or disagree with their opinion.” Not even remotely true. NB Guide refused to print either an August comment on one pro-Zionist letter or the following rebuttal to two of them.
September 17, 2024
Two recent contributors to the New Bedford Guide have made separate arguments that opposing Zionism is antisemitic. Both may be passionate but are wrong.
On August 22nd Abrah Zion expressed her opposition to posters at Wings Court featuring quotes from well-known Jewish critics of Zionism. One poster depicted Albert Einstein and a quote from his December 4th, 1948 letter to the New York Times decrying widespread massacres and the ethnic cleansing of Arabs, as well as the presence of fascist elements in Israel’s first government. Mrs. Zion found the posters “antisemitic” and went so far as to make the strange claim that they somehow threatened her children, further asking that Mayor Mitchell censor the posters critical of Zionism by having them removed.
On September 16th Betty Ussach published a letter, again equating opposing Zionism with antisemitism. I have several quibbles with her arguments. First, Israel’s genocidal response to Hamas’s incursion on October 7th was not “Netanyahu’s war” alone. It took its place in a series of disproportionate Israeli responses to Palestinian resistance over the 75 years Israel has imposed British-era martial law on the Territories. She writes that opposing Zionism now seems to be an “acceptable” way for antisemites to express their hatred of Jews, and that conditioning aid to Israel will only unleash worldwide attacks on Israel, implying that the US should give Israel carte blanche to continue to slaughter Palestinians.
The only thing wrong with this argument is that MORE Israeli aggression and the strong possibility of drawing the US into Israel’s conflicts — exemplified by post-October 7th bombing attacks on the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran — is the result of NOT conditioning aid. And her insinuation that opposing Zionism is tantamount to yelling “Jews will not replace us” simply refuses to acknowledge any of the many valid criticisms of Zionism and the violence required to sustain it that were raised by Arabs and Jews alike long before the founding of the Israeli state.
As the Einstein letter indicates, Israel was founded on terror and expropriation of Palestinian territory. Fascist elements in the first Israeli state whom Einstein mentioned have now been joined by new ones. Just listen to Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir from the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party. Listen to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who represents radical religious settlers. Both want Palestinians completely dead or gone. Listen to Likud Knesset member Revital Gotliv, who advocates nuking Gaza. Last week the English language podcast “Two Nice Jewish Boys” told listeners that if there was a button that could wipe out all Palestinians, they’d press it in a heartbeat. Moreover, they suggested, this is a widespread Israeli sentiment.
I certainly hope not, but I also hope that this is not what my American tax dollars are subsidizing since the US pays for between 15% and 20% of the Israeli military.
The ideology which founded Israel, sustains it, and makes possible the continued expropriation of Palestinian land and even personal property has a name — Zionism. For many of us — Jews included — Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. Another Jew on the Wings Court posters was Hajo Meyer, a survivor of Auschwitz. This is his quote from the poster:
“Because Zionism was created by Mr. [Theodor] Herzl and others at the end of the 19th Century, and in that era it was commonplace to be colonialist, to be racist, to be super-nationalist, to adore the nation-state — so the idea of France for the French, Germany for the Germanics, and then some state for the Jews. They were very bad ideas and they all formed the basis for Zionism. […] Zionism and Judaism are contrary to each other. Because Judaism is universal and humane, and Zionism is exactly the opposite. It is very narrow, very nationalistic, racist, colonialist, and all this. There is no ‘National Judaism.’ There is Zionism and there is Judaism, and they are completely different.”
Just as Americans are right to fear Christian Nationalism and its ugly manifestations, we are equally right to reject “Jewish” Nationalism (in quotes because I agree with Hajo Meyer). Nationalisms and supremacist states of every stripe are repellent, and it is no more antisemitic to oppose Israel’s supremacist state than the “Christian” version MAGA America has lined up for us.
Recently an episode of the podcast “Two Nice Jewish Boys” fantasized about slaughtering 6 million Palestinians. The video was taken down — but nothing ever disappears completely from the Internet.
Podcasters represent the Zionist mainstream
Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein have the longest-running English language podcast in Israel. The two, who met in film school, have been producing Two Nice Jewish Boys since 2016. They have a YouTube channel, they’re on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, SoundCloud, Podbean and others, and their podcast is syndicated on the Jerusalem Post. The duo also produce a second podcast, The Melting Podcast, which promotes moving to Israel. They pen dozens of Zionist-themed news articles every year for Jewish publications. These two guys are an entire cottage industry.
While anti-Israel opinions are quickly censored and de-platformed, none of the internet platforms these two sociopaths use have knocked them off the air yet — even though I’m pretty sure that calling for genocide is a violation of Apple’s, Google’s, and Overcast’s Acceptable Use policies.
So mainstream are these two, so in tune with Zionist attitudes within Israel and with Zionist policies defended from criticism outside the state, that the co-hosts have nothing to fear. Meningher and Weinstein not only have the rapt attention of Israeli society and Jewish English-language listeners worldwide, they have been interviewing mainstream Israeli and Zionist cultural figures for the better part of a decade. They appear on Israel’s most influential news outlets, are featured on virtually every important English language Jewish publication outside of Israel, and have extremely high level government and Zionist connections.
For instance, here they are interviewing Deborah Lipstadt, now America’s Antisemitism Czar with the U.S. State Department.
America’s antisemitism czar with two sociopaths
These two “nice Jewish boys” are as mainstream as you can get, so Weinstein’s assertion that genocide is a mainstream sentiment among most Jewish Israelis is particularly troubling — and, unfortunately, backed up by plenty of evidence.
Meningher is the producer of the podcast and has written hundreds of articles for: Arutz Sheva, which is identified with the Israeli settler movement; Israel National News, the English-language version of Arutz; Channel 7 News; and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, a Zionist publication originally distributed by the Jewish Federation. Meningher’s website is currently down for “maintenance” but an archived portfolio highlights his skills in video production, setting up chatbots, and running political campaigns — including the five that he worked on for Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Meningher working on Netanyahu’s campaigns
Eytan Weinstein was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. His father Gilbert is an associate professor of math and physics at Ariel University, built illegally on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank. Weinstein junior has written for: Arutz Shevah and Israel National News; Channel 7 News; the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles; the Algemeiner Journal, originally a Yiddish publication whose board includes Martin Peretz (neocon, Islamophobe, and owner of The New Republic), Abe Foxman (former ADL President), and Malcolm Hoenlein (executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, founding executive director of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, and head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York).
The Times of Israel’s founder attacks liberal news outlets
When South Africa filed charges of genocide with the International Court of Justice, one of the submissions to the Court was a list of 500+ instances in which prominent Israelis had called for genocide on Palestinians. It seems that every other day an Israeli politician calls for Palestinians — dehumanized as “animals,” “Nazis,” or “Amalek” — to be nuked, slaughtered, expelled, burned, tortured, or executed. “Death to Arabs,” “Muhammad is Dead,” and “Burn Your Village” are widely shouted at soccer games, graffitied on Arab homes, and shouted at nationalist rallies.
In an interview on Israeli channel 13 last December, former Knesset MK Danny Neumann said, “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be terminated, all of them must be killed. […] We will flatten Gaza, turn them to dust, and the army will cleanse the area. Then we will start building new areas for us, above all …”
And Israel’s war on Gaza has matched this genocidal fixation on a Final Solution for Palestinians. With few targets left to bomb in Gaza, the West Bank is now being destroyed, its land annexed at a furious pace, while pogroms have become a daily occurrence. For Palestinians every night is Kristallnacht.
Israel has now almost completely demolished Gaza and slaughtered nearly 41,000 people (or more) with 2000 pound ordnance and bunker busters. Despite this, according to a Tel Aviv University poll, 58% of Israelis say that the IDF has deployed “too little firepower” on Palestinian civilians. Israeli politicians are less and less inhibited about calling for Palestinian erasure. And there is now absolutely zero appetite for protecting the civil rights of, or listening to, the Palestinian citizens of Israel who are treated as a fifth column.
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last April, 70% of Jewish Israelis (versus 18% of Arab Israelis) want social media content sympathetic to Palestinian civilians to be censored. There is widespread censorship in Israel. Loyalty oaths, arrests, intimidation and purges in Israeli universities have become routine. As Russia, criticizing the war on Gaza has severe consequences.
In 2016 Israel passed legislation that assumes that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are all hostile to the state. Of course, Zionism almost by definition is antithetical to universal human rights. An analysis of the bill showed virtually every anti-occupation or human rights group, including B’Tselem, ACRI, Ir Amim, Gisha, Breaking the Silence, or Zochrot, would be severely limited by the law. Only two days ago, Likud Party Member of the Knesset Revitaly Gotliv asked prosecutors to arrest B’Tselem’s executive director Yuli Novak for “assistance to the enemy in war,” a charge that carries the death penalty.
In August 2014 the Times of Israel published an article titled “When Genocide is Permissible” by Yochanan Gordon, sales manager for an Orthodox newspaper owned by his father that serves five New York boroughs. Gordon’s post was eventually taken down but was saved elsewhere. Gordon wrote that President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry approved of Israel’s right to defend itself, that Prime Minister Netanyahu had stated that the 2014 invasion of Gaza was “protective,” and that any government has a right to ensure the safety of its people; so therefore:
“If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?”
Gordon’s post was retracted after complaints. But after issuing an initial and insincere apology in which he said he had been misunderstood, Gordon then doubled down on his argument for genocide in a Tweet:
“The existence of Israel and the Jewish people is at stake. How do you suggest we neutralize the threat?”
Just as with Gordon’s post, the “Two Nice Jewish Boys” podcast has been disavowed by a few fellow Zionists, to the tune of “these are not our Zionist values.”
But it’s clear that Zionism has run out of ideas. For Israel, there are really only two options: either share Palestine with the Palestinians — an option Zionists reject outright — or carry out extermination, pogroms, and genocide.
You only need to watch the news to see which option Israel really believes in.
In the early 70’s I was working in Germany, living in a low-rent district near the train station in a small city in Baden-Württemberg. I occasionally watched the evening news with my elderly landlady, who had grown up in the same building she now rented out. After a news segment touching on Germany’s Nazi past I asked her what she and her parents had known of the trains that took Jews to their deaths from the train station just a few blocks away: “Gar nichts!” (absolutely nothing) was her emphatic and earnest-sounding response.
Of course this was a lie — millions of people had been arrested, stripped of their possessions, spirited away on a vast transportation network constructed expressly for an extermination project, gassed and turned into powder all over Europe. Sports facilities in some cities were not available to the public because they had been commandeered as staging areas for concentration camp transport.
The Nazis began their Reinigung (cleansing) in 1939 by first “euthanizing” disabled and mentally-ill family members of even non-Jews. The photo above of a work party from Dachau was taken by a German civilian who simply snapped it from his balcony in 1945.
For years atrocities went on under everyone’s eyes. Who could not have known?
The Holocaust, just like today’s Gaza genocide, was no secret to either the Nazis or the Allied powers. Every Western power simply ignored the Holocaust, denied it, cast doubt on its scope and scale, or lied about the desperate plight of Jews when asked to help save their fellow human beings. For these Western powers, Jews were apparently not fully human.
In 1943, shortly before Yom Kippur, 400 rabbis marched on Washington to plead with Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rescue European Jews from the ovens. FDR, a Democrat like any today, myopically focused on domestic issues, told the rabbis to go take a hike. FDR also made no effort to destroy German rail infrastructure critical to the transport of so many to mass slaughter, even when advised it would save lives. Fortunately for FDR, social media hadn’t yet been invented to document his sins of omission and commission.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, addressed to Lord Rothschild and conveyed to the British Zionist Federation, which “gave” Palestine for Jewish settlement, was not offered out of love but in order to facilitate British Jews leaving the country, and also to raise money for the war effort. British antisemitism also determined the response to the desperate plight of European Jews. As Louise London documents in “Whitehall and the Jews: 1933-1948,” the British government had no use for refugees, especially more Jews. Britain simply let them die, like FDR.
This is more or less where we are today with Palestinians — the world’s new Jews. But this time, rather than simply ignoring mass atrocities and loss of life, Western colonial powers are actually contributing to the genocide through arms sales, diplomatic cover, boots on the ground, and boats in the Gulf — and then lying about it, denying the root cause of the conflict, disputing the severity of human suffering, defending the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, and recycling propaganda points provided by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and a galaxy of domestic lobbying groups that serve only Israel’s interests.
The biggest lie of all is that this is a war Israel is waging to protect itself. Like a parody of the Manchurian Candidate (“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life”), politician after politician gets up before the cameras, repeating virtually the same words, “Israel has a right to defend itself and has the ironclad support of the United States,” when referring to a slow-motion genocide.
This is a genocide that began — not as a response to October 7th, 2023 — but with the massacres, terror, and mass-expulsions of Palestinians by Yishuv (pre-Israel) terrorist groups in 1947 that created the state of Israel. American support for this has led to decades of loss, dispossession, and exile for Palestinians. Now, led by Israel’s most far-right government of all time, including nationalists literally calling for genocide, Americans are still siding with the original perpetrator and waving away the latest genocide.
Think of all the genocides we have managed to ignore in our lifetime. Some of the blame is personal. Sticking one’s head in the sand when faced with horrific barbarity — especially from our so-called “friends” — and having no real political power to stop it, seems to be a reaction typical of the human societies and governments we have inherited.
Local newspapers play their part in keeping us unaware or distracted by mindless fluff. This is what the New Bedford Standard Times has written about Gaza: virtually nothing. The New Bedford Light, originally conceived to shed light on important topics (and I would include Gaza), has refused for the better part of a year to report on local efforts to stop the slaughter in Gaza. These publications apparently regard genocide as not “newsworthy” — or their timidity betrays political bias or a fear of alienating sponsors and advertisers.
When the media is not deep-sixing articles on Gaza, mass-producing fluff, or blatantly censoring its reporters, it pulls on its fatigues and boots and ten-huts, proudly serving in the propaganda wars that obscure the history of Israel’s colonization of Palestine or de-contextualize the conflict. Too many news sources, notably the New York Times, demonstrate lazy journalism, outright bias, violations of professional ethics, or simply toss journalistic standards in the dumpster.
In politics, consider also how institutionalized the denial of the Gaza genocide has become throughout government, Republican and Democrat alike. Even with widespread knowledge of the scope of destruction — and Gaza is the best-documented genocide in world history — Western “democracies” still do exactly what my old German landlady did: deny, deflect, and lie.
And if you’re a nationalist propagandist or lobbyist or a politician receiving money from any of them — Christian Nationalist or Zionist, it makes no difference — you follow the Narcissist’s playbook — deny, attack, and make yourself the victim. And there seems to be a willing market for their disinformation.
In the case of Gaza, there is no information deficit, nor is there a deficit of empathy and humanity. Despite the moral darkness of this politically-unchallenged genocide and the sheer madness of a nation which exploits the phrase “never again” while actually doing it again, I still believe in the inherent decency of humankind and refuse to accept that a majority of us values life so cheaply as our politicians.
And polls confirm my woolly-headed, idealistic views — a majority of Americans want a ceasefire and disapprove of Israel’s crimes against humanity and the Zionist nation’s genocidal destruction of Gaza. Americans are, truly, decent people. But they are also mute and spineless, too fond of their vast military, too attached to the creature comforts an advanced Capitalist economy provides, too credulous when fed heaping, stinking propaganda.
As a consequence we have a foreign policy and a hyper-aggressive militarism no one ever wanted and no one ever voted for, almost always imposed on the world’s most oppressed people. This is what Americans call “democracy” without a trace of irony.
In my own lifetime our nation has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people — slaughtered in the name of anti-communism, or the war on terror, or the war on drugs, or for “peacekeeping” missions, or in the “defense” of authoritarian, repressive regimes, and — now — as a willing participant in a genocide. Americans not only have blood on our hands; we are dipping them into a bucket of blood every day we remain complicit in the elimination of Gaza.
Zionism — White Christian Nationalism’s kissing cousin — has beenthe*problem in Palestine for 82 years, and it is increasingly difficult or career-ending to say this out loud in public. Nowadays anyone — Jews included — who criticizes Zionism is accused of antisemitism. This is patently absurd, especially since anti-Zionism has a long history within Judaism itself. The* American Council for Judaismis a group of anti-Zionists within Reform Judaism who have been extremely vocal for 82 years that Zionism is not Judaism, and for Judaism to make a central place for Zionism in American Jewish life is a terrible mistake. For more on the history of Jews opposing Zionism, see my November 2023piece. The following post is reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Allan C. Brownfeld. You can subscribe to the ACJNA’s newsletterhere.
For More and More Jewish Americans, Zionism Looks Like a Dangerous Wrong Turn
Allan C. Brownfeld — Issues Spring – Summer 2024
In recent months increasing attention has been focused upon developments in the Middle East. The October 7 terrorist assault on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s response, which has already cost the lives of more than 34,000* Palestinians, including thousands of women and children, has focused attention upon the way in which Zionism has come to dominate American Jewish life.
More and more Jewish Americans are coming to the conclusion that Zionism was a dangerous wrong turn for American Judaism, as the American Council for Judaism has argued from the beginning. In the Council’s view, Judaism is a religion of universal values, not a nationality. American Jews are American by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim. Zionism, on the other hand, argues that, somehow, Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews, and Jews living elsewhere are in “exile.” Zionism has come to dominate American Jewish life, with Israeli flags on synagogue pulpits and Jewish schools promoting the idea that emigration to Israel is the highest ideal for Jewish young people.
Much of American Judaism seems to place the state of Israel in the position of a virtual object of worship, a form of pagan idolatry much like the worship of the golden calf in the Bible. This is not Judaism, which is a religion of universal values dedicated to the long Jewish moral and ethical tradition which declares that men and women of every racial and ethnic background are created in the image of God.
Jewish Americans Are Not In “Exile”
Jewish Americans are not, as Zionism proclaims, in “exile,” but are very much at home, and always have been. In 1841, in the dedication of America’s first Reform synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski told the congregation, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”
Zionism, many forget, was a minority view in Jewish life until the rise of Nazism in Europe. Even then, many Jewish voices warned against substituting nationalism for the humane and universal Jewish prophetic tradition. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.”
The prominent Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spoke out in 1942 against “the aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international maneuvers.” From Jerusalem, where he was teaching at the Hebrew University, Buber, speaking at the time hostilities broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, cried with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion; it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”
A Rupture in American Jewish Life
In an article titled “The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life” (New York Times, March 22, 2024), Peter Beinart, an editor of Jewish Currents, notes that, “For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.”
Beinart points out that, “The American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law…their numbers are larger than many recognize, especially among millennials and Generation Z…The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish life for decades to come.”
American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon—a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.” In the years to come, Peter Beinart believes, “For an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which Palestinians and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather than Jewish supremacy…For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on contradictions. Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now, here and there are converging. In the years to come we will have to choose.”
No Liberal Rights for Palestinians
Many are in the process of choosing now. Noah Feldman, the Harvard Law School professor and First Amendment scholar, and author of the book “To Be a Jew Today,” declares: “Today, many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.” Shaul Magid, a professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, says, “In my view, the Zionist narrative, even in its more liberal forms, cultivates an exclusivity and proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism.” Oren Kroc-Zeldin, director of Jewish Studies at the University of San Francisco, says that “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” He says he rejects “a monolithic Pro-Israel identity.”
Within Reform Judaism, there have been calls for a move away from Zionism. A letter signed by more than 1200 alumni and current members of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) addressed to the organization on Dec. 16,2023 declares, “We grieve for the 1,200 killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7th attack and the more than 18,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military—almost half of whom have been children —since then. Israel has cut off water, electricity, fuel and supplies to Gaza. We are deeply concerned that tax dollars have been so easily provided to support Israel’s military assault on Gaza, while we struggle for the basic needs of our communities.”
The letter declares that “The URJ teaches practicing Pikuach Nefeshz, ‘saving a life,’ and Tikkun Olam, ‘repairing the world.’ An immediate cease-fire is in line with these Jewish values.”
“Atrocities committed In Our Name“
At the same time, a letter was released from descendants of progressive rabbis and leaders to express “our horror at URJ’s failure to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. We are alarmed that the leadership of our community has not demanded an end to Israel’s devastating violence against Palestinians in addition to the safe and immediate return of the hostages…A decades-long campaign to dehumanize Palestinians has hardened the American Jewish community’s hearts. Atrocities are being committed in our name. We do not consider the killing of thousands of innocent civilians to be a justifiable consequence of ensuring our community’s protection.”
The letter concludes: “The URJ continues to actively alienate alumni with its uncompromising Zionist rhetoric…We will reconsider our and the next generation’s membership and support for the URJ unless there is a public and dramatic shift in the way the movement addresses Israel.”
Among the original signers of the letter are Zippy Janas, a descendant of Rabbi Julius Rappaport, Chana Powell, daughter of current URJ rabbi Talia Yudkin Toffany, and Zachariah Sippy, son of Rabbi David Wirtschaffer.
Reform Jews for Justice
At the same time, an organization called Reform Jews for Justice has been established (https://reformjewsforjustice.com). It declares that “As Reform Jews we stand together for Justice in solidarity with Palestine. We unite in our values to call for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. …We have come together to call on our movement to engage in Solidarity with Palestine. We envision a Reform Jewish movement that…rejects the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism…The URJ leaders have unabashedly demonstrated shameful tactics of ethno-nationalism and tribal political priorities over simple ethics and the illegitimate and dangerous conflation of Zionism and Judaism. We have been alienated from the movement that raised us to ask, ‘If I am only for myself, what am I?’—through binary language suggesting that our affiliation is conditional on Zionism. We will not stand by.”
In recent years, there has been a growing effort to redefine “antisemitism” to include not simply bigotry toward Jews and Judaism, but also criticism of Israel and Zionism. In May 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Ignoring the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, he has been strenuously promoting this false and ahistoric notion ever since. Some Israelis admit that falsely equating anti- Zionism with antisemitism is a tactic to silence criticism of Israel. Shulamit Aloni, a former Israeli Minister of Education, and winner of the Israel Prize, described how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are antisemitic.”
The tactic of equating criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism has come under widespread criticism. Writing in Slate (April 29, 2024), Emily Tamkin headlined her article, “The ADL has abandoned some of the people it exists to protect: For those with the wrong opinions, the group is now a threat to Jewish Safety.”
Muddying The Waters About Antisemitism
Tamkin writes: “Over the past six months, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, has stressed repeatedly that he is concerned about rising antisemitism. Unfortunately, he has also made clear that he cares about antisemitism only as he defines it and as it affects people who agree with him on the definition…The ADL… is insisting on conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and it has made its conflation central to the ADL’s work. This has not only muddied the waters of its own antisemitism research, it has also undermined the safety, security, and pluralism of American Jews.”
One example is the fact that ADL evidently mapped protests for a cease-fire led by the Jewish groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow as “antisemitic incidents” on its calculation of how much antisemitism has risen. This makes it more difficult to assess the year-over-year change in antisemitic incidents. Tamkin notes that, “Of course, an increase will seem more dramatic if you are now counting incidents, you weren’t before—but it also arguably undermines the rest of the ADL’s reporting of antisemitism.”
When it comes to Jonathan Greenblatt, a story in Jewish Currents from 2021 revealed that former ADL employees felt that Greenblatt was choosing defense of Israel over protecting civil liberties, one of the group’s- stated missions. In March 2023, Jewish Currents published a report on internal dissent at ADL over Greenblatt publishing a report comparing pro-Palestinian groups to the extreme right. Greenblatt has compared pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University to the explicitly neo-Nazi march in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He likened the group Jewish Voice for Peace to the terrorist group Hezbollah and called it an “on campus proxy for Iran.”
Younger Jews Disconnected from Israel
In Emily Tamkin’s view, “I wonder how likening a Jewish student group to a terrorist organization helps stop the defamation of the Jewish people, or scores justice and fair treatment to all…Younger American Jews are increasingly critical of and feel disconnected from Israel. The Pew 2020 study on American Jews found 51% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 were not emotionally connected at all to Israel…Young American Jews were “less likely to view antisemitism as ‘a very serious problem.’…Greenblatt is failing to stand up for the rights of all American Jews. He is using his position to make clear that some Jews are more worthy of protection and political representation than others. He’ll have powerful allies, including non-Jews who have made common cause with open antisemites.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely described student protestors on behalf of Palestinian rights as “antisemitic mobs” and likened the demonstrations to “what happened in German universities in the 1930s.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (IND-VT), who is Jewish and lost members of his family in the Holocaust, pushed back against Netanyahu’s characterization of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. He declared to Netanyahu: “It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population.”
Sanders continued: “Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable things to many millions of people. But please do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the illegal and immoral policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in Israeli courts.”
Protesting Against Slaughter Is Not Antisemitism
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and now professor of public philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, writing in The Guardian (April 3, 2024) makes the point that, “Protesting against this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus —taking a stand against a perceived wrong, thereby provoking discussion and debate.”
In the view of Robert Reich, who is Jewish, “Education is all about provocation. Without being provoked—stirred, unsettled, goaded—even young minds can remain stuck in old tracks…The Israel-Hamas war is horrifying. The atrocities committed by both sides illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity, show the vile consequences of hate. Or it presents an opportunity for students to re- examine their preconceptions and learn from one another…Peaceful demonstrations should be encouraged, not shut down…To tar all offensive speech ‘hate speech’ and ban it removes a central pillar of education…”
Jewish critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians are receiving increasing attention. The Forward (May 6, 2024) carried a feature article with the headline, “This 100-year-old Jewish activist is speaking up again—this time about Gaza.” It reports that, “Jules Rabin stood at the busiest intersection of Montpelier, Vermont in early April with snow still on the sidewalks, protesting the war in Gaza. Accompanied by about 75 friends and family members —holding a sign that asked, ‘How could the Nazi genocide of Jews 1933-45 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians today?’ He was celebrating his 100th birthday.”
“A Piecemeal Holocaust”
Jules Rabin, a World War 11 veteran, graduate of Harvard, former Goddard College professor and a pioneer in Vermont’s bread-making renaissance who, with his wife, ran a bakery for more than 40 years, appeared on a podcast on the nonprofit Vermont Digger. He referred to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza as a “piecemeal Holocaust.” He told podcast host David Goodman that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza “resembles what the Germans did to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and everywhere else in Europe.” In Rabin’s view, the Jewish claim for restitution after World War 11 should have resulted in the Germans awarding Prussia or Bavaria to the Jewish people. Concerning the latest news from Gaza and the West Bank, Rabin says, “One can’t look the other way when something dreadful is going on.”
In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would enshrine a contentious definition of antisemitism into U.S. law. The Antisemitic Awareness Act (AAA) passed the House by a wide margin. It mandates government civil rights offices to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This definition has drawn widespread criticism because most of its examples of antisemitism involve criticism of the state of Israel, such as calling it a “racist endeavor.”
If this bill is passed by the Senate, which will consider it at a later date, it would mean that this definition would apply when officials adjudicate Title V1 complaints alleging campus antisemitism. Opponents say it chills legitimate criticism of Israel. The bill passed by a vote of 320-91. Opponents of the IHRA definition include Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the House’s longest serving Jewish member. He declared that “Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination. By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title V1’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (May 2, 2024) reported that, “Americans for Peace Now, a dovish pro-Israel group worried that the bill, should it become law, would be used as ‘a cudgel against the millions of Americans, including many Jewish Americans, who object to the Netanyahu government’s decisions and actions.”
Jewish Critics of AAA Legislation
Even some members of the Jewish establishment are critical of the AAA legislation. Alan Solow, who serves on the board of the Nexus leadership Project and is a former Chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wrote this in The Forward (May 3, 2024): “Distinctions…are vital for developing strategies to fight this prejudice. If those with whom we disagree about Israel—sometimes vehemently—are labeled antisemitic without regard to nuance or context —they will not join us in coalition against anti- Jewish bigotry…A viable strategy against this scourge…must recognize this….It cannot ignore…the diversity that exists in this country, a diversity reflected in an intense debate about Israel within the Jewish community, on college campuses as beyond…If the Senate passes the AAA, it will alienate our political allies, including stalwart supporters of Jewish causes and Israel, and narrow the coalition we need to confront the spread of antisemitism.”
An editorial, “Not in Our Name” appeared in the Jewish journal Tablet (May 3,2024). It declared, “There is no exception for hate speech in the Constitution —it is not, according to the Constitution of the United States of America, illegal to say that the State of Israel ‘has no right to exist’…No governmental authority has the standing to penalize you for (making such a statement) …That includes Congress. The fact that a word or idea is annoying or upsetting to you —or us! —does not make it illegal.”
Tablet declares that “This includes the phrase ‘From the River to the sea,’ which the House of Representatives voted to condemn last month. This is wrong. No citizen of America, Jewish or not, should support the condemnation of speech by those whose conditional authority is entrusted to them by the people. You are American citizens. However noxious your beliefs, as long as they stay beliefs, they should be done the business of government.”
Danger Of “Weaponizing Antisemitism”
The staff attorney for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Chris Godshall-Bennett, who is Jewish, provided this assessment: “In weaponizing antisemitism by equating it with criticism of Israel, this bill evades the fundamental principles of free expression and academic freedom. As a Jewish person, who stands hand-in-hand with my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and who works daily against anti-Arab hate, I found this weaponization of my identity particularly disgusting. Criticism of Zionism and of the Israeli government is not antisemitism and conflating this only serves to provide cover for Israel’s ongoing human rights abuses in violation of international law…”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) strongly condemned the House of Representatives for passing this legislation (H.R. 6090) which, it declared, threatens to censor political speech critical of Israel on college campuses under the guise of addressing antisemitism. Christopher Zanders, director of ACLU’s Democracy and Technology Policy Division declared that “The House’s approval of this misguided and harmful bill is a direct attack on the First Amendment. Addressing rising antisemitism is critically important, but criticizing America’s free speech rights is not the way to solve the problem. This bill would throw the full weight of the federal government behind an effort to stifle criticism of Israel and risks politicizing the enforcement of federal civil rights statutes precisely when their robust protections are most needed. The Senate must block this bill that undermines the First Amendment protections before it is too late.”
As a recent ACLU letter to Congress made clear, a federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment by federally funded entities, and the Antisemitism Awareness Act is not needed to protect Jewish students from discrimination. Additionally, as the Supreme Court ruled more than fifty years ago in the landmark decision of Healy v. James, “This Court leaves no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large. Quite to the contrary, the vigilant protection of Constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of America’s schools.”
“Netanyahu Making Israel Radioactive”
Many of Israel’s longtime supporters are expressing dismay over recent events. In a column, “Netanyahu is making Israel Radioactive” (New York Times, March 12, 2024), columnist Thomas Friedman writes: “Israel today is in grave danger, with enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, Israel should be enjoying the sympathy of much of the world. But it is not. Because of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition have been conducting the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, Israel is becoming radioactive…”.
Friedman argues that “I fear it is about to get worse…No fair-minded person could deny Israel the right of self-defense after the Hamas attack…But no fair-minded person can look at the Israeli campaign…that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza…and not conclude that something has gone terribly wrong there. The dead include thousands of children, and the survivors many orphans… This is a stain on the Jewish state…Netanyahu has sent the IDF into Gaza without a coherent plan for governing it after any Hamas dismantling or cease-fire…Israel has a prime minister who apparently would rather see Gaza devolve into Somalia, ruled by warlords…than partner with the Palestinian Authority or any legitimate broad-based non-Hamas Palestinian governing body because his far-right Cabinet allies also dream of Israel controlling all of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, including Gaza, and will oust him from power if he does.”
In an important and much discussed article entitled “We Need an Exodus from Zionism” (The Guardian April 24, 2024), Naomi Klein, a Guardian columnist and director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, writes: “I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the Mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. It is about false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.”
Worshipping A False Idol
In Klein’s view, “Too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again… Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it onto a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate. It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of Justice and emancipation from slavery —the story of Passover itself—and turned them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, road maps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
The whole concept of a “promised land” has, Klein declares, become “a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land — a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe —-and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnic state… Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba…Zionism has brought us to our current moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said it clearly: it has always been leading here….It is a false idol that has led far too many of our people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core Commandments: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet…We seek to elevate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid.”
More and more One-time advocates of Zionism have moved away from this position. One of these is Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. In his book, “The No-State Solution, A Jewish Manifesto” (Yale University Press), he writes, “I was a Zionist in my youth. In those years, I thought of myself as a left-wing Zionist. I was very active in Habonim (a Socialist Zionist youth movement). I think I ultimately caught the leftism and socialism more than the Zionism. And when it became clear to me that I had to make a choice, I finally realized I had to let the Zionism go. That choice came when Yitzhak Rabin stated that the Israeli Army should break the legs of Palestinian kids who threw stones at soldiers. I asked at that time, what is this cruel idea of breaking the arms and legs of little boys? And somebody explained to me that this was necessary in order to maintain the state. I said, if that’s necessary…then the state is clearly a wrong thing…I remember the first time I wanted to say I was an anti-Zionist…. I couldn’t say the words. That’s how hard it was for me.”
For Dr. Boyarin, “…the dilemma is how to maintain a truly, vital, authentic, rich, lively and compelling Jewish cultural life without falling into the kinds of nationalism and ethnocentrism that we find all over the world today.”
Zionism Was a Minority View
Zionism, many now forget, has, before the Holocaust, always been a minority view among Jews. It seems likely that it is on its way to becoming a minority view once again. Only during the period of the Holocaust, when Jews were endangered by Nazism, did the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine gain support. The fact that Palestine was already fully populated was largely ignored. Deena Dallasheh, a historian of Palestine and Israel who has taught at Columbia University and Rice University, told the New York Times ((Feb. 4, 2024) that, “The Holocaust was a horrible massacre committed by Europeans. But I don’t think the Palestinians figure that they will have to pay for it. Yet the world sees this as an acceptable equation. Orientalist and colonial ideology were very much at the heart of thinking, that while we Europeans and the U.S. were part of this massive human tragedy, we are going to fix it at the expense of someone else. And the someone else is not important because they are Arabs. They’re Palestinians and thus constructed as not important.”
Most Jews historically believed that their Jewish identity rests on their religious faith, not any national identification. Jews in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, Italy and other countries never viewed themselves living in “exile,” as Zionist philosophy holds. Instead, they believe that their religion and nationality are separate and distinct. The God they believe in is a universal God, not tied to a particular geographic site in the Middle East.
An early leader of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, pointed out in the 19th century that the underlying essence of Judaism was ethical monotheism. The Jewish people were a religious community destined to carry on the mission to “serve as a light to the nations,” to bear witness to God and His moral law. The dispersion of the Jews was not a punishment for their sins, but part of God’s plan whereby they were to disseminate the universal message of ethical monotheism.
Not A Nation but A Religious Community
In 1885, Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh adopted a platform which declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.” In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state and declaring that, “America is our Zion.” In 1904, The American Israelite declared, “There is not one solitary native Jewish-American who is an advocate of Zionism.”
To the question of whether Jews constitute “a people,” Yeshayahua Leibowitz, the Orthodox Jewish thinker and long-time Hebrew University professor, provides this assessment: “The historical Jewish people was defined neither as a race , nor a people of this country or that, nor as a people which speaks the same language, but as the people of Torah Judaism and its commandments…The words spoken by Rabbi Saadia Gaon (882-942) more than a thousand years ago: ‘Our nation exists only within the Torah’ have not only a normative but also an empirical meaning. They testified to a historical reality whose power could be felt up until the 19th century. It was then that the fracture which has not ceased to widen with time, first occurred: the fissure between Jewishness and Judaism.”
An early leader of the American Council for Judaism, Rabbi Irving Reichart of San Francisco, made his first significant declaration of opposition to Zionism in a January 1936 sermon: “If my reading of Jewish history is correct, Israel took upon itself the yoke of the law not in Palestine, but in the wilderness at Mt. Sinai and by far the greater part of its deathless and distinguished contribution to world culture was produced not in Palestine but in Babylon and the lands of the Dispersion. Jewish states may rise and fall, as they have risen and fallen in the past, but the people of Israel will continue to minister at the altar of the Most High God in all the lands in which they dwell…There is too dangerous a parallel between the insistence of some Zionist spokesmen upon nationality and race and blood, and similar pronouncements by Fascist leaders in Europe.”
Zionism: A Dangerous Wrong Turn
In America at the present time, Zionism looks to more and more Jewish Americans like a dangerous wrong turn. Those who resisted Zionism from the beginning appear to have been prophetic in their warnings and misgivings. Let us hope that prophetic, universal Judaism will be restored.
Anyone who opposes Israel’s genocidal wars is smeared as a Hamas sympathizer. I got my first taste of this myself in 2009 when I visited then-Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s office in Washington, DC to lobby against US support for Israel’s “Cast Lead” operation, which was a smaller version of today’s genocidal war on Gaza. I was asked, and I quote, “What, do you support Hamas?”
I concluded at the time that the Senator, who had just replaced Joe Biden as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, was an evil bastard incapable of understanding that opposing war crimes and disproportionate force was not at all the same as supporting terror — which by the way he seemed to define extremely narrowly since Israel wasn’t included.
When Kerry eventually became Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, the evil bastard hypothesis was confirmed, though I then understood that Kerry’s understanding of terrorism would never include his own government’s drones, assassinations, black sites, black ops, wars of choice, regime change, or support for proxy regimes that also used terror and repression. Kerry, like most American politicians, is a disappointing creature of empire not unlike his many simulacra at the DNC convention this week.
With thanks to Mehdi Hasan, who was hounded from MSNBC for his outspoken views on Palestine, here’s a list of a few others who have gotten the same treatment. It turns out you don’t have to argue for human rights or against genocide to get on this not-at-all exclusive list; you simply have to have a momentary lapse of conscience or exhibit involuntary shock at how depraved imperialism and capitalism are.
The October 7th attack on Israel may have been Israel’s 9/11 but it was also a defining moment in American politics. As Israel unleashed its genocidal response, which has now destroyed almost all of Gaza, left 2.3 million homeless and snuffed out at least 40,000 lives, Americans had a choice to make. Instead of locating their moral center and preventing a barbarous human rights abuse, America sided with an ongoing, historical injustice and — as usual — against the rule of law.
But the culture of impunity that shields Israel is the same that shields our own politicians from accountability and justifies almost every injustice in this country. Our culture of impunity exists because we have always worshipped at the altar of raw power instead of true democracy.
The particular intensity of the cruelty and the barbarity of hounding 2.3 million people from one place to another, then bombing them, using crude AI models to target 100 civilians for every suspected Hamas commander, and the use of massive American munitions — all made a lie of Israel’s claims of “surgical” strikes against terrorists.
Israel’s genocidal violence, accompanied by numerous Israeli public and political expressions of genocidal intent, finally got to some Americans. Many for the first time — including a large proportion of young American Jews — began to examine the sickness and inconsistency of our foreign policy and to connect these with the sickness of our domestic institutions that rhyme so well with it.
The disproportionate Israeli Blitzkrieg on Gaza was a waterboarder’s bucket of ice-water to the face that reminded us of empire’s cruelty — not just Israel’s but our own. A handful of “terrorists” had managed to kill and kidnap hundreds of Israelis — and that led to Israel’s slaughter of dozens or possibly hundreds more of their own citizens, as the Israeli media itself has reported. The documented number of Palestinian dead is now over 40,000 as I write this, but the British medical journal Lancet estimates the number could be as high as 186,000 — 8% of the entire Gaza population.
For decades Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and pogroms against Palestinians have proceeded with the collusion of settlers, politicians, the Israeli public, the Israeli military, and the US foreign policy establishment. The barbarity of Israel’s war on Gaza is nothing new.
With revelations that prisoners of war and even civilians face summary execution (which also occurred during the 1948 Nakba) as well as torture, murder and rape in detention, Israel’s claims ring hollow that it has the “most moral army in the world.” Thousands of social media posts by IDF soldiers have documented Israel’s many war crimes, from looting to heinous crimes against humanity. I sincerely hope these are being collected as evidence in a future war crimes trial.
We are told that Israel “has a right to defend itself” and that any response to “terrorism” is justified. But what of the terror of 1948 that created Israel? And if we are discussing terrorism we should not forget that no one does terrorism as well as a state with an air force, nuclear weapons, and unlimited munitions from a friendly imperialist benefactor. If Hamas is a terrorist organization after killing 1,000 people and destroying a few kibbutzim and military posts, then what is a nation that slaughtered forty times that number, terrorized and destroyed an entire enclave?
There’s no other word for it. Israel is a terrorist state.
After international institutions like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice condemned Israel’s war crimes, and the ICJ ruled that charges of genocide leveled by South Africa at Israel were credible, the United States and its Western imperial partners showed their contempt for the so-called “rules-based order” — the thin veneer of “civilization” they hide behind when not providing arms and diplomatic for friendly repressive regimes. It is nauseating to see a Biden, a Macron, or a von der Leyen supporting Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or the Philippines as if they did not deserve the status of international pariahs. It turns out that the “rules-based order” involves absolutely no respect for international law but simply follows the law of the jungle.
Joining Republicans in mocking the rule of law as something only for suckers, rubes and peons, Democrats screamed a loud Fuck You! to international conventions on cluster munitions and domestic laws, including the Leahy Law and the Magnitsky Act, which forbid military aid to human rights abusers. Democrats, who frequently accede to demands to dismantle or defund social programs, went on a veritable bomb-buying spree, shelling out billions for [internationally prohibited] cluster munitions for Ukraine, jets and munitions for Taiwan, and 2000-pound neighborhood-leveling bombs with which Israel has inflicted so much carnage and damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Both American political parties went on to reject the ICJ’s determination of genocide by Israel, defund the United Nations refugee program, reiterate their objections to the International Criminal Court’s mandate to indict war criminals, and to promise that, if Netanyahu and Gallant were ever indicted, the U.S. would continue to thumb its nose at international law.
For Democrats, there ought to be no whining about the lawless Supreme Court and its disregard for our domestic “rule based order.” In that institution, operating with complete impunity, habitual corruption among Justices goes unpunished — not including the Court’s own unaccountable departures from established jurisprudence and legal precedence. How can Democrats object to any of this while thumbing their nose at the ICJ?
Democrats who object to the MAGA president’s attempts to overturn inconvenient election results should not announce plans to impose unelected puppet regimes on post-war Gaza or Venezuela. Democrats who bristle at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and land theft are curiously mute on Israel’s identical crimes. The same Democrats who call for Russia’s complete withdrawal from the Donbass should not speak of a “Two State Solution” that fails at a minimum to require a complete withdrawal from the West Bank by settlers coddled by Israel and the US and funded by American Zionist institutions.
The American lame-duck president, a self-described Christian “Zionist” who cannot enunciate his own foreign policy to the American public and instead leaves that to his military-security establishment, has given Israel everything it wants, which includes the deployment of U.S. naval fleets as well as beefed-up military bases in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. There is no question that — regardless of the nature of Israel’s belligerency — the U.S. will never hesitate to put American troops in harm’s way to defend the Zionist state.
The Israeli Prime Minister, all but indicted in both Jerusalem and at the Hague, was invited to address Congress by leaders of both political parties and he used that opportunity to gaslight Congress and the American public, insulting both the American people and the institutions of the host nation that underwrites his genocidal war.
Americans listen to our elected officials using words like “ironclad,” “unbreakable,” and “no daylight” to describe the US-Israeli relationship. We hear again and again that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, that its military is the most moral, its enemies nothing but virulent jihadist antisemites bent on its total destruction. Like the fabled “beheaded babies,” such talking points begin life in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, bounce about among an armada of Israel lobbyists and Zionist organizations who serve only Israel, and end up glued to the lips of American politicians. Billions in junkets and PAC money ensure American politicians’ subservience to a foreign state.
Despite the relentless propaganda thrown at us by Israeli and domestic propagandists, Americans can see with their own eyes the carnage that Israel is inflicting with our complicity. The cognitive dissonance between the propaganda and what we see and read with our own eyes is so great that some weak minds simply deny the reality. Israeli propagandists do their part by conjuring up “crisis actors,” a term they pilfered from their MAGA bedfellows to discredit what is seen and real as “just an act.” If not slammed as “fake news” then accurate descriptions of Zionism’s dark reality are termed “antisemitic.” The White House, the State Department, and the national security establishment invariably follow Israel’s lead, disputing Palestinian casualty figures, denying documented atrocities, sanitizing Israel’s crimes, recycling Israeli Foreign Ministry talking points.
Despite all this, Americans have begun to tally the costs of our reflexive, uncritical support for a murderous rogue state. American taxpayers — denied national healthcare like Israel or even Mexico — nevertheless have to foot the bill for 15% of Israel’s military budget, more if you factor in the many buy-at-cost military programs, or the numerous joint technology, security, and energy ventures.
Uncritical American support for Israel’s murderous regime also threatens our own democracy. Israel’s defenders have thrown tens of millions of dollars at the Democratic primaries and recently unseated the second of two members of Congress they had targeted for opposing genocide.
Thousands of people have lost their jobs in purges of critics of Israel. Laws in 36 states — New Hampshire just joined them — create a legal definition of “antisemitism” that has nothing to do with “the baseless hatred of Jews” (the traditional definition) and everything to do with punishing any or all criticism of Israel. American universities, once safe places for debate and critical studies, are now in ideological lockdown, experiencing a new form of McCarthyism — as Zionist attack groups working with MAGA Republicans take down their real targets: DEI programs and the faculty members who challenge settler colonialism — including Israel’s.
The near-assassination of Donald Trump brought forth a torrent of repudiations of political violence — of the “this is not who we are” sort of argument. But this is exactly who we are.
Less than a week before a white supremacist managed to clip Donald Trump’s ear, North Carolina governor and Christian nationalist Mark Robinson told a church assembly that secular America were all Nazis and that “some folks need killing… it’s a matter of necessity.” Church pastor Cameron McGill agreed with Robinson, who suggested that the “guys in green” or the “boys in blue” were up to the job.
Not surprisingly, Americans were quick to applaud Israel’s targeted assassination of Ismael Haniya. Besides the hundreds if not thousands of our own political assassinations carried out by American presidents (remember Obama’s “Terror” Tuesday?), many more have been carried out by agents of foreign governments in our employ — just as Israel paid off two disaffected Iranian IGRC agents to plant a bomb in Haniya’s residence. The Guantanamo detention center remains open; the US tortured prisoners to death there and at Abu Ghraib and at other “black sites” — all artificially and yet unimaginably outside the reach of the Constitution. And all this occurred despite numerous U.S. laws and directives prohibiting assassination. In America the rule of law means nothing.
But Governor Robinson was simply speaking of reality when he suggested having the police carry out assassinations. This is exactly what they do in thousands of documented cases each year. We already give the police — who act like and are often armed precisely like military occupation forces in non-white and working-class neighborhoods — carte blanche to kill people. In practice “qualified” immunity amounts to complete blanket immunity, as Justice Sotomayor observed.
Likewise, the American judicial system — which convicts 95% of those it processes by inflating charges in order to coerce plea deals — carries out assassinations every time it applies the death penalty. Even knowing that we are murdering a not insignificant number of demonstrably innocent people, those who had an inadequate defense, or those who lack the mental capacity to understand their crime, makes no difference to the terror state. We go so far as to use untested drugs and mystery cocktails to stop a human heart, keeping their provenance secret, preventing the public and the press from observing or documenting these gruesome rituals — which now include the reintroduction of the firing squad and the gas chamber.
Rounding out the injustice and impunity at work in both our foreign policy and domestic government is the Presidency. The rogue Supreme Court recently ruled that whatever the President does — whether a blatant crime for personal benefit or an official act of state — is protected. The President is a goddamned emperor.
It is not the anarchists or the communists that scare me. It’s the fascist thugs and the neoliberal machinators making up the law as they go along. In this climate of official corruption, hypocrisy, lawlessness, and impunity, how is the average citizen supposed to respect the rule of law — when virtually every branch of government revels in its unchecked corruption?
If the nation’s moneyed and “connected” murderers, bribe-takers, scofflaws, insurrectionists, and war criminals can get away with anything — then open the doors to all the prisons and let them all out.
No one’s a more murderous criminal than the politician who signs a bomb bound for Gaza or the one who votes for it.
As the Democratic National Convention convenes in Chicago, a handful of “Uncommitted” delegates hopes to influence the party to stop funding genocide. With all respect to the moral certainty of this tiny group, they are tilting at windmills and have already been told to shut the hell up. The party’s 2024 platform planks on Israel remain unchanged from 2020. More importantly, Kamala Harris’s choice of Middle East advisor offers the greatest clue about her policies; the advisor may talk a good game, but in the end he joins all his predecessors as little more than a creature of empire and occupation.
Harris’s advisor, Philip H. Gordon, previously served under Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton and is a member of the National Security Council and the Council for Foreign Relations. Although tapped as Harris’s Middle East advisor, Gordon’s expertise is mainly on Europe and Eurasia. He has been around a while and published articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, the Atlantic, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Le Monde, and others.
Compared to much of the American foreign policy establishment, Gordon at first glance appears to be a moderate. He has argued, for example, against US involvement in regime change schemes, for the preservation of the US-Iran nuclear deal, and has questioned the usefulness of crippling sanctions on nations the US opposes. Gordon’s less belligerent tone immediately placed him in the GOP’s crosshairs. MAGA whackadoodle Elise Stafanik actually accused Gordon of being in bed with Iranian foreign agents.
Because Israel is constantly pushing the US toward outright war on Iran, Iran-watchers have naturally been curious about Gordon’s background. Last week the Iranian expat website Iran International produced an interesting and extraordinarily detailed roundup of Gordon’s career and connections (for example — who knew? — Gordon and Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken used to play on the same indoor soccer team at the Washington DC Edlavitch Jewish Community Center). Similarly, Jewish Insider also ran a profile of Gordon, as did Politico and The Nation.
Bottom line: Gordon is simply Pepsi to someone else’s Coke or Dr. Pepper. In terms of foreign policy there is little to suggest that a Harris presidency will look any different from any that have preceded it. Gordon was a booster of NATO’s disastrous involvement in the US war in Afghanistan. And given that both Gordon and Harris support continued US support for the war in Ukraine and continued US support for arming Israel, defense contractors have nothing to worry about under a Harris presidency.
Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship
For readers of this substack, Gordon’s monograph Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship, written together with Robert D. Blackwill, the Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, may provide the best idea of his orientation toward Israel and Palestine. Gordon and Blackwill argue that the US and Israel ought to exhibit as little divergence (“daylight”) in policy as possible, particularly where Iran is concerned. In the preface written by CFR President Richard N. Haass:
“Here they note the widening gap between many in Israel and the United States over the desirability and feasibility of pursuing a two-state solution to this long-standing conflict. They then go on to suggest a more conditional American approach that would tie elements of U.S. policy to a range of Israeli actions on the ground, including settlement policy and what Israel is prepared to do to improve the daily lives of Palestinians and prospects for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state.”
Gordon and Blackwell acknowledge the dirty little secret of Israel’s reliance on the United States:
“Israel prides itself on being able to “defend itself by itself,” but the reality is that it continues to rely heavily on the United States for both military and diplomatic support. The United States has provided Israel some $100 billion in defense assistance since the 1979 Camp David peace treaty and regularly expends an enormous amount of political capital at the United Nations and in a wide range of other international organizations to shield Israel from criticism or sanction. Israel can choose to shrug off concerns about growing differences with Washington if it wants, but a decline in support from the United States would only embolden Israel’s enemies and imperil its legitimacy and security.”
but also Israel’s strategic importance to the United States:
“Despite the arguments of some of Israel’s critics, the United States profits substantially from the relationship as well. Israel is the United States’ closest strategic partner in the world’s most unstable region and shares valuable intelligence with Washington on terrorism, nonproliferation, and regional politics. The United States also derives important military benefits from the partnership, in areas such as military technology, intelligence, joint training and exercises, and cybersecurity. And, despite its relatively small population, Israel is the largest regional investor in the United States, the third largest destination for U.S. exports in the Middle East, an important research and development partner for the U.S. high-tech sector, and a source of innovative ideas on confronting twenty-first-century challenges such as renewable energy and water and food security.”
The thesis of their monograph is that certain tweaks need to be made to the US-Israel relationship:
“The future of the U.S.-Israel relationship is at risk. The two countries continue to share many interests and deep cultural bonds, but the relationship is threatened by diverging strategic perspectives on a region undergoing fundamental change and by long-term demographic, political, and social trends that are undermining the pillars on which the relationship once stood. No one is well served by pretending that these risks do not exist. For strategic, historical, and moral reasons, both governments should do all they can to reframe and revive the U.S.-Israel strategic partnership. The upcoming transition to a new U.S. administration provides an opportunity to put recent disagreements aside and to show the political will needed to reverse the negative policy trends described. This report offers several realistic and necessary steps the leaders on both sides should take as they contemplate their stewardship of this important relationship in the years to come. Although some of these steps would entail painful compromise and political risk, those leaders should understand that preserving this special relationship is worth the effort.”
These tweaks included:
Seek to reframe the relationship at a summit in early 2017 at Camp David focused on developing a new strategic vision for a changing Middle East, committing the United States to remain engaged in the region, seriously addressing the Palestinian problem, and institutionalizing an intensive bilateral strategic dialogue.
Enhance Israel’s sense of security and confidence in the United States by committing to expanded missile defense, anti-tunnel, and cybersecurity cooperation under the terms of the September 2016 longterm defense assistance Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
Move beyond the debate about the merits of the Iran nuclear agreement and work together to implement and rigorously enforce it, with a commitment to imposing penalties on Iran for noncompliance and a joint plan for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons after the deal’s main restrictions expire.
Develop detailed common understandings about how to more effectively contain Iranian hegemonic regional designs and take action designed to do so.
Agree on a set of specific, meaningful measures that Israel will take unilaterally to improve Palestinian daily life and preserve prospects for a two-state solution, linking continued U.S. willingness to refrain from or oppose international action on Israeli settlements or the peace process to Israel’s implementation of such positive, concrete steps.
Expand economic cooperation focused on bilateral trade, investment, energy, innovation, and Israel’s integration into the region.
Unfortunately, the monograph’s proposals were simply so much boilerplate. US “engagement” in the region from administrations Gordon served in had already consisted of destabilizing Iraq, Syria, and Libya, undermining the Arab Spring, and arming Saudi Arabia to the hilt. Naturally, all joint security initiatives with Israel were pursued. Ignoring Gordon’s tepid suggestions, the Biden Administration made no effort to re-establish the Iran nuclear agreement and dismissed Gordon’s concerns about increasing sanctions. “Meaningful measures” to improve Palestinian life were never implemented by either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Israel’s “integration into the region” was pursued by both Trump and Biden under the rubric of the Abraham Accords. And now the United States has doubled-down on the complete destruction of Gaza and its people.
There has been virtually no difference between Democratic and Republican policies vis-a-vis Israel or Palestine. Democrats who imagine a Harris administration will abandon a road long traveled are simply deluding themselves.
Israel National News, Editors. “VP Harris’ Security Advisor: ‘Some in Israel Reject a Ceasefire Deal, We Simply Disagree.'” Israel National News, 25 June 2024, www.israelnationalnews.com/news/392050.
For some time the title of this blog has been Civilization and its Discontents, the English title of a monograph published by Sigmund Freud in 1930, shortly before Nazism finally took power. In times like that — remarkably similar to times like this — people naturally question why they live in societies, particularly those breaking down, and what their relationship to those societies should be.
The German title of the monograph is Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, where Unbehagen conveys uneasiness instead of simply discontent. In 1930 the world was changing — not in a good way — and there was a sense of dark, imminent social and political changes, much like birds know a storm is brewing.
As with much of Freud’s other work, Unbehagen dealt with id, ego, sex, religion and morality. Freud pointed out that societies offer their own pleasures while demanding of their members normative behavior (prohibiting even victimless, non-criminal behavior) that denies primal instincts that could undermine the presuppositions of social institutions. Today’s MAGA fundamentalists, with their insistence on hetero-normative sex and a hypocritical moral code from which their own leaders are always excused, have nothing on Weimar prudery or any of the world societies Freud examined.
Freud identifies “three sources from which our suffering comes: (1) the superior power of nature, (2) the feebleness of our own bodies and (3) the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society.” There is not much to be done about the first two, but the third (family, state, and society) is the subject of his monograph.
For Freud, religion was just one of a number of palliatives to reduce human suffering — something “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” If societies stifled human desire, religion was even more pernicious:
“Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.”
Besides religion, other mechanisms of “displacements of libido” (sublimation, for example) distract humans suffering from deprivation and want. The ego, Freud says, can elevate human consciousness to spheres of imagination (art, science) or fantasy (religion, psychosis, narcissism) — but according to Freud’s “pleasure principle” a person’s underlying primal needs must always be met directly. Those needs — and the aforementioned tensions between individual, family, society, and the state — form the basis of our unease or discontent:
“[…] what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. […] How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange altitude of hostility to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned by certain specific historical events. […] There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. […] But […] this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier. […] What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”
On June 23rd an Israeli company set up a real estate bazaar in an ultra-Orthodox kollel and synagogue in Los Angeles. The company sells real estate both in “Israel ’48′” and in the West Bank. Protesters protested, counter protesters hurled eggs, LAPD showed up in riot gear, there were fistfights, and it just got even uglier.
CNN commentator Van Jones called the protest a “pogrom” against Jews, likening the keffiyah that Palestinian protesters wore to a “Confederate flag” — though he had no problem with an actual, foreign flag Jewish counter-protesters draped themselves in. Newsweek called the protest a “synagogue attack” — as if protesting an illegal real estate sale was tantamount to Kristallnacht.
While the protest was organized by a Palestinian student group, many of the protesters were Jewish — who saw the sale of illegal property as a violation of both the 1965 Civil Rights and 1968 Fair Housing acts. From both a Palestinian and a progressive Jewish perspective, the illegal land sales were outrageous and criminal. For the Jews among the protesters it was also unforgivable that these violations of US law and Jewish ethics were taking place in a synagogue.
But casting the Gaza-related protests as “antisemitism” has become a highly successful strategy pro-Israel groups use to distract from central issues like land theft and genocide. So much so that American media have become largely incapable of distinguishing Judaism from Zionism. Likewise, the Israel lobby’s push to create repressive laws based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews and Judaism with Israel, further threatens any distinction.
* * *
But Judaism is a religion that existed for centuries after the ancient Hebrew state (also called Israel) collapsed after only 125 years, in part due to civil war. Long after this collapse, Jewish culture still thrived in multiple cultural forms and languages. Rabbinic Judaism developed. The crown jewel of Jewish scholarship, the Talmud, was written over centuries in present-day Iraq. While early Zionists like Ahad Ha’am hoped that Zionism might enrich and strengthen Jewish culture, contemporary Zionists have managed to reduce Judaism down to Zionist land grabs and conquest — its ethical values further dishonored by the state of Israel’s repression, war crimes, and genocide and the insistence of Zionists that this is all that Judaism is.
But right from the beginning, Zionism has shamelessly placed Judaism at the service of its political agenda. In Der Judenstaat (the “Jewish State“) Theodor Herzl described (see original German in the graphic) the rather heavy-handed approach by which the Jewish Company would issue instructions to Jews:
Our Clergy
Every group will have its Rabbi, traveling with his congregation. Local groups will afterwards form voluntarily about their Rabbi, and each locality will have its spiritual leader. Our Rabbis, on whom we especially call, will devote their energies to the service of our idea, and will inspire their congregations by preaching it from the pulpit. They will not need to address special meetings for the purpose; an appeal such as this may be uttered in the synagogue. And thus it must be done. For we feel our historic sanity only through the faith of our fathers as we have long ago absorbed the languages of different nations to an ineradicable degree.
The Rabbis will receive communications regularly from both Society and Company, and will announce and explain these to their congregations. Israel will pray for us and for itself.
It is worth reading Herzl’s foundational work describing the Zionist project. Among other things he made clear how little he thought of Palestine’s indigenous people, that he recognized that in a “pure” Jewish state it would be necessary to ethnically cleanse the inhabitants by “spiriting them away” across the border. Anticipating the cognitive dissonance of today’s liberal Zionist when trying to see Israel’s Apartheid state as both “democratic and Jewish,” Herzl’s Jewish state was to be structured as either a “democratic monarchy” or an “aristocratic republic,” neither of which would tolerate popular unrest.
Herzl’s state was to be a bulwark against the Asian hordes, which would then endear it to the Western powers. The Zionist project, Herzl wrote, would depend on colonial support and patronage. And not only was Zionism to be — explicitly — a settler colonial enterprise, it was to be a settler colonial enterprise that both served and profited from European colonial nations. Today’s Zionists become apoplectic when DEI scholars and scholars of colonialism point this out, but these very words were all in the draft of the Jewish state that Herzl described in Der Judenstaat.
Herzl, who eventually helped organize the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish National Fund, also helped create the Jewish Colonial Bank. In 1898 Herzl described the purpose of the bank in Die Welt: “The task of the Colonial Bank is to eliminate philanthropy. The settler on the land who increases its value by his labor merits more than a gift. He is entitled to credit. The prospective bank could therefore begin by extending the needed credits to the colonists; later it would expand into the instrument for the bringing in of Jews and would supply credits for transportation, agriculture, commerce and construction.”
Of the Jewish Company, which was central to the Zionist project in Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote: “The Jewish Company is partly modelled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has other than purely colonial tasks.”
Acknowledging the similarity of Jewish colonial settlement to that of the American West, Herzl wrote: “In America the occupation of newly opened territory is set about in naive fashion. The settlers assemble on the frontier, and at the appointed time make a simultaneous and violent rush for their portions. We shall not proceed thus to the new land of the Jews. The lots in provinces and towns will be sold by auction…”
Which brings us to Los Angeles of 2024. The auction of stolen property at Adas Torah has been a principal feature of Zionism for over a century.
Despite attempts by early Zionist organizations like Brit Shalom and the Ihud to advocate for a binational state that would avoid ethnic cleansing, land theft and the inevitable resentment of the dispossessed, Herzl’s 19th Century dream of an undemocratic, racist Jewish state was ultimately realized.
From the moment of its founding, Israel has been an ugly, illiberal, nationalist anachronism in a world that has since adopted more democratic aspirations. As Herzl wrote, “if you will it, it’s not a dream.” And, strangely enough, Herzl was right: the ethno-nationalist state he dreamed of has become an absolute nightmare.
Long before Joe Biden confirmed his cognitive decline and unfitness for the Presidency, his center-right politics, his sale of cluster munitions to the Ukraine, his foreign policy, his coddling of Israel, his turnabout on immigration, inaction on abortion and disinterest in Supreme Court enlargement — all made him an unacceptable choice for a second term. After Gaza, the “uncommitted” movement to punish him in the primaries evolved into a concerted effort to push the Democratic Party to choose another candidate. Thus was born the Abandon Biden campaign.
Ironically, Biden himself has done the most to make the case that Democrats need a different challenger to what, after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, may well be an Imperial Presidency.
AbandonBiden24 is a campaign that Muslim and Arab Americans launched in December 2023 in Dearborn, Michigan, to send a strong message to Joe Biden about his complicity in the Gaza genocide.
With AIPAC and a galaxy of Israel lobby and propaganda organizations applying pressure to American politicians, it has been both refreshing and somewhat of a novelty to see American Muslims flexing their political muscles, particularly in a broad community process. I have seen both AbandonBiden24’s Town Hall with alternative presidential candidates and its followup Great Conversation with activists around the country and offer a few observations.
AbandonBiden24 wants to show both parties that Muslim Americans can’t be taken for granted. Republicans lost significant Muslim support after 9/11 and by 2020 a substantial majority of Muslims supported Biden. However, Biden’s blanket (“ironclad”) support for Israel and his blank checks and reckless munitions shipments — all to maintain Israel’s brutal Apartheid system — have soured Muslim voters who resent being put in the position of having to choose between a war criminal or a fascist. They want to punish Biden and want America to know that if the President loses in November it will be precisely because of angry, ignored Muslim voters:
The Abandon Biden strategy is for people of conscience to punish Biden at the ballot box and then take the “blame”–or claim the credit–for his electoral defeat. Punishing a president for his genocide would send a clear signal to the political landscape that genocide is not politically viable. It would create a political earthquake, soliciting a reckoning in the political parties.
Muslims face exactly the same dilemma as white liberals but, seen from the perspective of people who have lost relatives to American bombs, to many Trump is clearly the lesser evil. We saw this view reflected in the Great Conversation. What seemed to be a majority of the Detroit focus group not only regarded Trump as the lesser evil, but advocated voting for him instead of a third-party candidate to ensure the greatest likelihood of defeating the genocidaire-in-chief.
While there is some Muslim support for Trump in Texas and elsewhere, we’ll have to leave it to the pollsters to determine how great it is. It’s clear the GOP is recruiting. One member of the Detroit focus group was obviously in the bag for Trump, and acknowledged being approached by the Trump campaign. And he sounded exactly like he’d ingested every ounce of Kool-Aid they’d poured for him.
For the most part, however, most AbandonBiden24 campaign members appeared to be as distrustful of Republicans as they are of Republicans. When asked about the campaign’s direction, Jaylani Hussain, director of Minnesota’s CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) chapter, replied, “We don’t have two options. We have many options,” but added for clarification, “We’re not supporting Trump.”
What’s not clear is if the Town Hall invitations to third-party candidates indicated real interest in permanently breaking with both parties, or if it was simply a shorter-term strategy to court some of those “many options.”
Toward the end of the Great Conversation, three members of AbandonBiden24 discussed where the campaign might be heading.
Mohammad Ziny is a progressive, leans toward progressive politics, but fears burning bridges with “good” Democrats like Jamal Bowman. He believes the movement should call for a vote for explicitly pro-ceasefire candidates like Cornel West or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Personally, he would endorse Stein. However, the greatest attraction to the Greens is its “infrastructure” – the fact that it has ballot access in 26 states (compared to Cornel West’s 13). Whether American Muslims would find a permanent home in a predominantly white eco-centric party is a question only they and the Greens can answer.
Kareem Rosshandler from Georgia advocates a “courting all, committing to none” strategy. He advocates keeping options open with both parties, but recognizes that the movement’s complicated relationship to the GOP could frighten liberals. He believes that America has never had the chance to talk about a “Muslim vote” before, and this is a first opportunity. But, as such, how America sees the Muslim vote will be reflected in whether Biden wins or loses. If Biden loses, the movement will have made its point that the Muslim vote counts. If Biden wins, Muslims will be reviled like third parties as election “spoilers.”
Moderator Sadia Tarranum from Minnesota agreed with Ziny on the strategic usefulness of working with the Green Party. But she also agreed with Rosshandler on the need to keep all options open.
The AbandonBiden24 campaign was born of a single goal – to punish Joe Biden for his complicity in slaughtering Palestinians. It first flexed its political muscles in the Democratic primaries, and that muscle has managed to deny between 8% and 20% of the Democratic vote to Biden in over a dozen states. The campaign has become a hostage to its own success and clearly has a mandate to continue – but as what?
* * *
For AbandonBiden24 to succeed as a movement to put Muslims on the electoral chess board, it surely needs a win, as Kareem Rosshandler rightly points out. But more importantly, it needs to know where it is ultimately headed. And with whom.
Is there anyone who watched last night’s Presidential debate who really thinks Joe Biden can survive?
It’s not just Biden’s chances of winning an election I’m talking about. I’m referring to his extremely fragile physical and mental state. Voters have every reason to question whether the walking corpse we saw on CNN’s debate stage last night can see the end of a second term or function any better than what we saw last night. The man is not well, and it’s shocking that the DNC allowed Biden to take the stage in Atlanta — especially after images surfaced of him “frozen” at a Juneteenth celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.
The man most of us saw last night shuffled onto stage and squinted into the cameras, appearing slack-jawed and confused. Speaking in a barely perceptible whisper, Biden often lost the thread of what he was saying, misquoted facts and figures, or mumbled incomprehensible jibberish. Almost as troubling, a clueless and self-unaware Biden insisted his poor performance was due to a head cold, adding “I think we did well.”
In comparison, a practiced Donald Trump spoke in the convincing manner of the sleazy, racist real estate salesman he is. And to those who judge debate performance primarily on appearances, Trump’s incessant lying miraculously did not diminish a pretense of presidential command and competence.
But Biden’s abysmal performance finally grabbed the attention of the liberal pundocracy, long in denial and now terrified. A surprising number of one-time Biden cheerleaders are now calling for candidate Biden to step down, including panicking donors. By and large, however, a timid and unimaginative Democratic establishment is doubling down on support for their guy.
Among the liberal columnists now calling for Biden to voluntarily drop out of the race are: New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman, Frank Bruni, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Nicholas Kristof; Current Affairs’s executive editor Nathan Robinson; Harold Myerson of the American Prospect; The Slate’s David Faris; and Mehdi Hassan, who jumped from MSNBC to the Zeteo platform. Sacramento Bee opinion writer Robin Epley warned readers that “for the Democrats, only a fresh injection of visible vitality and something more than a minimally-acceptable level of intelligence will save Americans from a second Trump administration.” Presciently, last month Alex Shepherd wrote in the New Republic (“Democrats have a Joe Biden Problem”), warning Democrats to replace Biden on the basis of his consistently awful polling.
But such warnings are nothing new.
A year go The Atlantic acknowledged that “Democrats would like a new presidential candidate. The problem is that the current president is plugging along fine.” But this morning things were not so fine. Franklin Foer’s article in the Atlantic is titled “Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys.” Another by Jerusalem Demsas counsels the same: “Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option.” In February 2023 Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the New York Times, “Biden’s a Great President. He Should Not Run Again,” warned against precisely what debate viewers saw last night.
Despite last night’s fiasco, the Democratic establishment is still not ready to throw in the towel on Biden.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an obvious dog in the fight, conceded that Biden had a “slow start” but warned that the election should be decided on the basis of “substance.” California governor Gavin Newsom, a rumored replacement for Biden who was in Atlanta for the debate as a Biden surrogate, dismissed Biden’s replacement: “With all due respect, the more times we start having these conversations, going down these rabbit holes, it’s unhelpful to our democracy, the fate and future of this country, the world. They need us right now to step up and that’s exactly what I intend to do.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, another whispered replacement, tried to cast the debate in the best light for Biden: “Tonight, voters were presented with a clear choice — a president working hard every day to improve the lives of all Americans or a convicted felon, a selfish blowhard looking out only for himself. The contrast between these two men was clear before the debate — it is even clearer now.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called rumors of Biden dropping out “bizarre” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) dismissed the idea as well. “I’ve heard no credible plan B, and I’m not counting on a plan B.” Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro pooh-poohed replacing Biden, calling only for Democrats to “stop worring and start working.”
But much of the media cheering section is still with Biden.
MSNBC, the Fox News for centrist Democrats, denied that Biden was unfit and said only that Biden had had a bad night, counseling optimism: “Biden still has months to right the ship.” But no one can fault MSNBC for inconsistency: a year ago the network ran a segment denying problems with Biden’s candidacy, letting 2016 runner-up Hillary Clinton tell listeners why he was a great a candidate as she was. The Slate’s Jill Filipovic still supports Biden — but by the thinnest of threads: “That Biden bungled even his party’s strongest issue should be a moment of reckoning –not just for his supporters, of which I am one, but for the man himself.” Robert Reich wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, only leaving panicking readers with a panicky lecture on how Trump is exactly like Hitler. Heather Cox Richardson also wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, but dissected each of Trump’s lies. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and Israel hawk Bret Stephens is still betting on Biden but sounds like he’d prefer Republican Elise Stefanik to the Vice President.
And this is only the “morning after.”
We’re going to have to wait a few days or weeks to see if Democrats are capable of moving past their shock and denial to a rational — actually the only possible — response to last night’s disaster. In any rational universe the DNC would replace Biden.
Despite the fact that it’s never been done before so late in the game, a new candidate could soften the rift between centrists and progressives, allay concerns over Biden’s age, address his terrible polling and also his choice of VP, offer a stronger challenge to the many third party candidates in the race, and (providing the replacement is not another zealous Christian Zionist) pacify somewhat the 10-15% of Democrats who voted “undecided” in the primaries because of Biden’s collaboration in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
But this is a party that doesn’t care, never learns, and never takes responsibility. Blaming voters for Biden’s almost certain defeat in 2024 will be the the DNC’s response to their own irresponsibility. It’s going to be a repeat of 2016 unless the party grownups wake the hell up.
On Sunday, June 23, 2024 an Israeli real estate firm called My Home in Israel (“housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel”) staged a real estate event inside a synagogue, Congregation Adas Torah, in Los Angeles together with another Israeli company called International Marketing & Promotions (“We sell things to Jews. We sell Israel to the world.”). This unseemly event not only dragged a synagogue into the muck but broke U.S. civil rights and international human rights laws in the process. Yet protests against the event were quickly spun as quite literally a “pogrom” against Jews — and by some of America’s most recognizable “liberal” Democrats.
The protest was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement and was joined by a number of pro-Palestinian groups on the Left, including CODEPink. As an article in the Forward reported, “Hundreds of counter-protesters — toting their own flags and megaphones — were present when it began at 12 p.m. […] The scene recalled a fracas at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA the night of April 30 which began when a pro-Israel mob arriving after the conclusion of Passover lobbed fireworks, poles and other items at the encampment and tried to tear down its makeshift walls.”
The vehemence of the counter-protest betrays an ugly truth about Zionism. It has always used land theft and land sales to accomplish the displacement of Palestinians. Such property is illegal; international law recognizes the West Bank as Palestinian and settlements as illegal. Real estate sales like Adas Torah’s are no different from selling stereos off the back of a truck under some overpass.
The usual shrill accusations of antisemitism have been turned up a notch and the propagandists’ keyboards are on fire — because these real estate sales, more than anything else we see right out in the open, demonstrate exactly how Zionism works and its absolute depravity.
In March a similar event took place at Keter Torah synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey. This followed almost identical events — all at synagogues — in Montreal and Toronto and was to be followed in Lawrence and Flatbush. According to New York Magazine, “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is an annual exhibition produced by Gideon Katz, a self-described ‘expert in marketing Israeli real estate to the global Jewish community.’ […] At most of the events was a company called My Home in Israel, brought along to showcase available properties in both Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies: multiple units in a building near Givat HaMatos in East Jerusalem, townhouses in near Ariel University in the heart of the West Bank, and a five-bedroom villa with a pool in the luxury enclave of Efrat south of Bethlehem.”
Rich Segal, a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey and himself Jewish, testified at a public hearing in March that he believes restrictive sales of Palestinian land to Jews-only buyers (American Muslims can’t buy any of the houses) violate both domestic and international law, including the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. “We don’t allow real estate events to be for whites only, or for Jews only. Now, as Jews, we don’t get to fly under the radar and break the law and hide it in the synagogue. Segal went on to say that such sales also violate international law because, at the Teaneck sale, homes from three different [illegal] West Bank settlements were being offered.
At these events much of the violence has come from counter-protesters. In Toronto, Ilan-Reuben Abramov, a supporter of the Israeli real estate event, attacked protesters with a nail gun. In Los Angeles pro-Palestinian protesters were punched, shoved, pelted with raw eggs, and soaked with bear and pepper spray. Well-organized counter-protesters and members of nearby synagogues, many with Israeli flags, were there expressly to confront the pro-Palestinian protesters.
Predictably, a Jewish Chronicle headline screamed “Keffiyeh-clad mob launches bloody assault on Los Angeles synagogue.” CNN commentator Van Jones actually called the protest a “pogrom.” And Democratic Party leaders at all levels — President Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — all endorsed stomping on the First Amendment by barring protests in front of houses of worship. Bass promised to meet with the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Rabbi Noah Farkas, and “other law enforcement and faith leaders” to prevent a repeat of the protests.
President Biden, who after October 7th claimed to have seen videos of nonexistent beheaded babies on kibbutzim in the Negev, sputtered that the protests were “antisemitic and un-American.” But what of those American and international laws being broken by the Israeli real estate organizers? Isn’t violating the 1965 federal Civil Rights Act un-American? The Fair Housing Act? Apparently not to the great enabler of a genocide — who as Senator undermined civil rights provisions, lobbying his colleagues as a Delaware Dixiecrat against school busing, calling it a “liberal train wreck.”
Because pro-Israel spin has transmuted the protest into an attack on Jewish worshippers, it is necessary to point out that the protest took place on a Sunday — not the Jewish sabbath. It was also not, as echoed throughout the mainstream media, a random racist attack on a synagogue but a protest at an offensive and illegal sale.
Religious institutions, including synagogues, often open their facilities to community groups and for public meetings or voting. Churches hold medical screening clinics. Synagogues hold on-site blood drives. A New Bedford synagogue rents out part of its facility to a girls school. These are all commendable public uses of religious property, but none has anything to do with Judaism. And neither did the Zionist real estate event in a meeting room at Adas Torah.
In 2009 Stoughton (MA) synagogue Ahavath Torah hosted a series of far right speakers, including Dutch fascist Geerd Wilders. When it repeated the stunt in 2016 over a hundred clergy, including rabbis from other congregations, protested. And quite justifiably.
So, again, it is unfortunate to have to point out the obvious — but like any organization, houses of worship are capable of staging questionable (even illegal) events, and the public has every right to protest them.
Adas Torah Congregation is situated in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles in an area known as the “kosher corridor.” According to an Aish magazine profile, “In a 20-minute stroll down Pico […] I encounter 30 shuls, kollels and outreach programs: Persian, Modern Orthodox, kiruv, yeshivish, Chabad, Carlebach, Yemenite, Chassidic, Israeli. There are boutique shuls for musicians and artists; one for Moroccans and another French-Moroccan. Plus 30 kosher restaurants!”
With all these opportunities to conduct a so-called “pogrom” why was only Adas Torah chosen for protest? The answer is staring you right in the face – because of the illegal sale of Palestinian land and the violation of domestic and international laws shamefully taking place inside the building.
“In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.” — Phil Ochs, intro to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (1966)
* * *
The New Republic recently ran a series of articles about Liberalism, one of which was authored by Jamie Raskin. The article is accompanied by a photo of “liberals” protesting Trump immigration policies (“no ban, no wall”) — but this was not a picture of liberals illustrating liberal immigration values but of progressives protesting Trumpian policies the party of liberals has now chosen to follow.
This is just one example of an easily-observed phenomenon: that liberals often voice approval for progressive policies while doing the complete opposite. Don’t believe me? Read the Democratic Party Platform, national or Massachusetts versions. It doesn’t matter. Both are filled with voter candy that Democratic legislators then turn around and vote against.
Right out of the gate Raskin admits that “American liberals exist for the most part implicitly — in our work, our arguments, and our values, and not so much in terms of explicit, much less exclusive, political self-identification.” What Raskin acknowledges here is that liberals have certain sentiments but absolutely no coherent political positions — which is much the same thing comedian Lewis Black was getting at when he observed that “Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.”
Liberals want to have it both ways. They want to be progressives and conservatives, both at the same time. Let’s hear more of what else Raskin has to say:
“We are indeed emphatically liberals because we defend individual liberty, but we are equally progressives because we champion progress for everyone; and these days, we are the closest thing America has to conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public integrity, judicial independence — everything in society and nature that the party of nihilists and authoritarians wants to destroy.”
I concede that some liberals are inclined to many of these things, but few are inclined to defend, say, the “individual liberty” of Palestinians — or to even criticize their leaders for colluding in a genocide. And the political party that represents liberals has done little to defend any of it. Wasn’t it Biden, for example, who ushered Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court? Has the Constitution ever been any more than an aspirational document for people who can be satisfied with mere verbiage? Doesn’t this same Wonder Document enshrine gravely undemocratic institutions (the electoral college, the Senate) into law? Have Democrats really defended these institutions that Raskin enumerates with anything nearing the same zeal that the GOP shows in trying to destroy them?
But Raskin was right about the conservatism. While Republicans have become a party of radicals who “violate norms” and would tear our institutions apart if they could, liberal Democrats have become the champions of these decrepit, dysfunctional institutions, including our relatively unchanging American foreign policy. While MAGA Republicans question everything from NATO to provoking Russia and China while focusing on domestic issues, liberal Democrats (according to a Pew Research Center study) are only too happy to expand NATO right up to Russia’s door and spend taxpayer money freely at the arms bazaar.
Tellingly, nowhere in Raskin’s essay does he mention foreign policy, the great Achilles heel of Liberalism — because liberal values exist only in an extremely limited geographical bubble. Move outside the borders of the United States and liberals become the most ardent defenders of empire, war, conquest, and colonialism.
Raskin goes on to assign progressive fights to the liberal scorecard. While the ACLU and the NAACP are no bastions of Bolshevism, to be sure, both struggle with “liberal” Democratic Party policies and inaction. Yet they appear on his “liberal wins” column. But liberals can’t undermine the Ilhan Omars and Rashida Tlaibs in their own party while simultaneously taking credit for their progressive activism.
Quoting John Dewey, Raskin writes that the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; among the ills that sicken our democracy are gerrymandering (still used by Democrats, as I can personally attest since my own Congressional district is still gerrymandered) and voter suppression (Democrats are currently using an entire catalog of dirty tricks to keep third parties off the ballot in numerous states). The real problem with our democracy is that the rules of the game in the Constitution are flawed and undemocratic. And liberals aren’t interested in changing them.
Raskin goes on to slam autocrats like Putin and Orban who shut down papers and use state powers to crush political opposition. Fair enough. But the hypocrisy of his observation — at a time when Democrats have colluded with Republicans in shutting down protests over Gaza and punishing academics and college presidents for permitting critiques of Zionism and colonialism on their campuses — is sickening.
And speaking of Zionism, liberals are apparently great defenders of this 19th Century relic of ethnonationalism that is so popular with the Orbans and Bolsonaros. Our liberal President, on innumerable occasions, has called himself a Zionist. The party of the liberals unhesitatingly gives Israel whatever it needs to keep its supremacist state in place. This in turn undermines liberal claims to defend liberty and fight authoritarianism. The Israeli government that American liberals enthusiastically support is the most far-right in history and includes outright fascists who every week advocate genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no individual freedom when an entire people is being carpet-bombed and ethnically cleansed. And there is no individual freedom when the liberal state uses its power to crush dissent over unpopular wars and foreign policy. This is as true today as it was in 1968 when liberals were slaughtering VietNamese and beating protesters.
* * *
Presidential candidate Cornel West weighed in on liberalism last year and, like Raskin, has a complicated relationship with it. On the one hand, he easily sees its weaknesses, but he also has a classical liberal orientation toward it:
“The sunny side of liberalism is its defense of these indispensable rights and liberties. The dark side of liberalism is its blindness to the threats of oppressive economic power, its blindness to militarism and imperialism abroad. But it’s very important that we never view liberalism in monolithic, homogenous terms. I hope we’re able to have a kind of dialectical understanding, so we can tease out what we see as valuable in these various liberalisms, and at the same time keep track of faults and foibles.”
Like Raskin, West identifies human dignity as Liberalism’s most important feature. But instead of massive structural change, including change initiated by conflict and the system’s inherent contradictions, West ultimately believes that civics and morality will straighten it all out:
“In Democracy Matters, I wrote a chapter on the deep democratic tradition. The backdrop of this tradition is the dignity of ordinary people. Each one of them has an equal status in the eyes of something more powerful. They have to undergo education, they have to undergo spiritual formation, they have to develop a sense of civic virtue, but it’s their voice. That’s a democratic voice, with a liberal dimension. We started this dialogue saying what? Without liberalism as a prerequisite in terms of rights and liberties, fascism is the alternative; that’s it. Let’s just be honest about it. But then the question becomes: Are we sensitive enough, and do we have the patience to tease out the resources in our own tradition that can serve as a launching pad for alternatives?”
* * *
Writing in the same issue of TNR as Raskin, Sam Adler-Bell observes that:
“Either liberalism is a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving justice and fairness, or else liberalism is an active impediment to these aims, an “ideology,” in Marx’s sense, whose chimerical aspirations naturalize and perpetuate the status quo.” […]
“I often find myself flitting between these two propositions in my writings and commitments. To be frank, I hope the former is true: that universal rights and dignity not only are compatible with but require a scheme of material redistribution to be realized. But in my darker moments, I fear the latter is more true: that individual liberty will always be, first and foremost, the handmaiden of property, that exceptions to liberalism’s universal pretensions can always be found when they imperil the privileges of the propertied class.” […]
“The timidity of liberals, our obsession with getting things right, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.”
There’s that conservatism again. And — completely in conflict with justice, fairness, rights, and dignity — the liberal penchant for warmongering and repression has repeatedly surfaced even in relatively enlightened times.
Adler-Bell points out that it was Truman who signed Executive Order 9835, kicking off the [second] McCarthyite era. Likewise LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to repress the American Left, the Black freedom movement, the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement. And —
“As I write, liberals, including President Joe Biden, are wringing their hands — when they’re not ringing the police–over protests by young people who have taken all-too-seriously certain universal propositions: that Palestinian lives are as inviolable as Israeli ones, as worthy of dignity and protection, and as deserving of the right to self-determination.”
And Adler-Bell sure puts his finger on the patient’s pulse when he writes:
“American liberalism, Irving Howe once wrote, cannot escape its “heritage of Protestant self-scrutiny, self-reliance, and self-salvation. Consequently, American liberalism has a strand of deep if implicit hostility to politics per se — a powerful kind of moral absolutism, a celebration of conscience above community, which forms both its glory and its curse.” This strikes me as remarkably true of today’s Democratic Party. Its loudest boosters take for granted that an aura of moral righteousness attends the party’s actions, and that it is every person’s solemn duty of conscience to walk, soberly and somehow alone, beneath its banner. Liberal politics divorces itself from interest, need, and passion; “from the soil of shared, material life,” as Howe put it. In Biden’s message, one hears a stultifying admixture of high moral panic with utter political banality and sloth. Our existential crisis demands prudent equanimity; we are called to frenzied urgency–but not like that.”
This explains, in part, how even a Protestant “radical” like Cornel West can share many of these values.
* * *
Next up to defend liberalism in the New Republic is Robert Kagan. Those who remember this Machiavellian liar and warmonger who pushed the US to invade Iraq also know that neoconservatives like Kagan and Elliot Abrams hold an esteemed place at the Democratic Party’s actual (not professed) foreign policy table. As a well-known neoconservative Zionist apologist who advocates for American domination of the “White Man’s Burden” variety, and for Jewish supremacy in Palestine, Kagan writes that he is appalled that the Supreme Court would defend white Christian supremacy. To some ears this nonsense is not as glaringly inconsistent as it sounds to mine.
* * *
Finally, rounding out the discussion in the New Republic, Jefferson Cowie wonders if Liberalism has any meaning at all:
“First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.” […]
“We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.”
This 1955 view of Liberalism brings us directly to the 1950’s America both Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden represent. Whether by beefing up NATO or imposing tariffs, or kicking out the immigrants (which both geezers now appear to be in favor of), it’s the bad old America that was. Not the America of the future.
Cowie rattles off several competing views of liberalism, but each falls back on the old, comfortable “more democracy” argument. In naming many of American democracy’s most glaring defects, even Cowie shrinks from pointing out the obvious — that only radical medicine can treat this habitually sick patient. In the end it is liberalism’s “respect for the individual” that each of Liberalism’s advocates presented here falls back upon.
That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. This is what Robert Paul Wolff was getting at when he wrote his brilliant 1968 autopsy report, The Poverty of Liberalism.
The solution, as old math books used to say, “is left as an exercise to the reader.”
The Two State Solution is a fundamentally dishonest proposition. When Western colonial powers first conceived carving up the Middle East, starting with the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1919 League of Nations mandate system — and by way of dozens of partition schemes to take one people’s land and give it to another — the whole notion of partitioning Palestine became nothing less than an organized system of land theft persisting until the present day.
Naturally, Palestinians have reacted with understandable anger at the imposition of a Jewish state literally built on the rubble of their homes and communities — some 500 cities and towns — and the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians accomplished through massacre and state terror. Today Israel continues to extend Jewish domination on the rubble of newly bulldozed and cratered Palestinian homes and cities. And state terror continues to be an important arrow in its quiver of control and repression techniques.
Operating out of desperation, with much of the Western world arrayed against them, Palestinians have at varying times acquiesced to partition schemes — just as one might have no choice but to allow an armed home invader to move into his house while he flees to the basement. These are essentially the terms that American “peace” brokers from various, mainly Democratic, administrations have dictated to the Palestinians. Americans who live in communities that long ago overran Native American lands — I’ll wager this is most of White America — somehow find this arrangement completely normal and reasonable.
So, while incapable of condemning the home invader, the fictive Two State Solution has become the default position of Centrist Democrats who promote this “solution” at every opportunity while offering neither description nor outline of how such an impossibility could ever be conjured into existence. Lately, these Two-Staters’ biggest problem is that One State is official Zionist policy and the entity our politicians are working in behalf of — Israel, not the US — won’t consider any sort of Palestinian state — even the “basement” option. And, of course, Palestinians are none too eager to accept a third-rate rump state on a fraction of their homeland while leaving the heavily-armed home invader still in charge.
As much as a Two State solution has become a deservedly lampooned article of faith among American Liberals and liberal Zionists, it is no longer even a remote possibility. 10% of Israel’s population — 15% of them Americans, many of them non-Jewish Russians — now occupy the West Bank. The scale of Israeli settlement is so vast, especially with Israeli laws that “legalize” ongoing pretextual land grabs and encourage Judaization of even Arab communities within Israel proper, that there is no longer enough contiguous land in the West Bank — forget about the isolated Gazan enclave — from which any sort of Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together. To speak of Two States, then, is to promote a damnable blatant lie.
A few years ago I read about an 11-foot python that swallowed a baby deer. It was a meal that cost both the deer and the python their lives. Israel has exactly the same problem as the snake — in a land where Zionism has long struggled to attain and maintain a Jewish majority, Palestinians have always been an indigestible mass that a Zionist ethno-state can never control, repress, or eliminate without massive assistance from the same colonial powers that created it. Zionism, which now openly expresses itself in the most vile, racist, separatist jingoism and violence, will never be able to contend with Palestinians in their midst or make peace with the Arab neighbors who sympathize with them. And it’s just a matter of time — repeated attempts to eat the deer will eventually kill the snake.
Historically, Zionism is an aberration and an anachronism, as historian Tony Judt and innumerable Jewish writers have observed in recent years. While earlier proto-Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes may have envisioned a bi-national homeland, by the 1942 Biltmore Conference it was clear that Zionism now meant an exclusionary Jewish state. In 1945 the last European concentration camps were liberated but that did not alter the trajectory of Revisionist Zionism’s plan — initiated in the late Thirties — to completely rid Palestine of Arabs. As Israel’s New Historians have shown, the massacres, atrocities, and mass expulsions of Arabs of the Nakba had been long planned.
Ethnic cleansing was arguably built into Zionism by its best-known advocate, Theodor Herzl, who wrote in Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State) that the indigenous people would be “spirited across” the border. Though the Nakba had been planned for almost a decade, Plan Dalet was finally implemented on March 10th, 1948 — months before the fabled “massing Arab armies” supposedly instigated the 1948 war. Any discussion of the present conflict should begin not with October 7th but with March 10th, 1948, the day that the Nakba was launched from David Ben Gurion’s offices in Tel Aviv. It has been 76 years since then, and the snake is still trying to eat the deer.
* * *
Today we live in a vastly different world than our mothers and grandfathers did in 1948. Colonialism has fallen into disrepute, South Africa’s Apartheid regime has collapsed. America’s foreign adventures in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been recognized by a significant percentage of voters as bloody disasters that not only killed millions but tore our own country apart. Here in the US we are making uneven progress with our long-festering race problems, but a significant part of America remains committed to racial justice (even as a significant number is not). All this is to say that the climate for accepting a racist ethno-state like Israel’s has changed. What was normal at the end of Jim Crow America in 1948 is now seen as obviously racist. Yet, fighting to keep JIm Crow alive in Israel, Zionists are pulling out all the stops to demonize young protesters, pass laws that criminalize criticism of Israel, and assure that Israel-friendly candidates have a leg up in the Democratic primaries.
Peter Beinart, who one could consider a “recovering Zionist,” offers one of the best explanations of why young people today, including Jewish students, are turning their backs on Zionism. One of the reasons is “intersectionality.” This generation of students has been involved in racial justice and police accountability struggles following George Floyd’s murder, gun control, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ justice, and in climate and environmental justice campaigns. Some of these issues intersect with justice for Palestinians, but mainly their activism represents the fact that young people are simply paying more attention to the greater world we live in.
And this goes for Jews too. As the list of Israeli human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, and charges of genocide grows, many Jews have become soured on Zionism, particularly the Revisionist strain that became official policy after 1942. Following the 1967 war, especially, Zionism began hijacking Judaism and threatens to destroy the religion by compromising Judaism’s values as it insists that there is no difference between an ethno-nationalist movement and a religion. This, of course, is exactly what is happening to Christianity in the United States and Eastern Europe. And in fact many Zionists are politically in bed with the autocratic Far Right and Christian Nationalists. Consider Israel’s cozy relationships with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Spain’s Vox party, and Christian Zionists like John Hagee, to cite just a few examples. Zionism is literally Christian Nationalism’s kissing cousin. Jews who fear our domestic turn to the right also fear Israel’s now shamelessly open expression of the same.
It’s fair to say that Europe-facing Israel would love to be part of an illiberal autocratic ethno-nationalist global Far Right, even as it courts the economically powerful neoliberal Western nations (US, Germany, France, Great Britain). While these nations admittedly have emerging autocratic, illiberal, and ethnocratic tendencies of their own, they also have significant numbers of people pushing back against these tendencies. This is what makes the unprecedented opposition to American and European policy on Gaza so remarkable — it is not antisemitsm, as the Zionists would have it, but a growing awareness of how our domestic turn to the right is connected with the illiberalism at Israel’s core.
Ultimately both MAGA revanchism and Israel’s attempts to preserve its antique ethno-nationalism are doomed to fail. In 2003 historian Tony Judt wrote in “Israel: the Alternative” that
“In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today’s”clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.”
* * *
All this has led to the idea of a single, secular bi-national state for both Palestinians and those who made their homes out of Palestinian homes.
In 2010 Merav Michali asked Tony Judt what his idea of a bi-national state looked like:
“I don’t know. What I do know is that since I wrote that in 2003, everyone from Moshe Arens through Barak to Olmert has admitted that Israel is on the way to a single state with a potential Arab majority in Bantustans unless something happens fast. That’s all that I said in my essay.
But ok, since it looks as though Israel is determined to give itself this future, what will it look like? [It will look like] Hell. But what could it look like? Well, there could be a federal state of two autonomous communities – on the Swiss or Belgian model (don’t tell me the latter doesn’t work – it works very well but is opposed by Flemings led by people very much like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman). This could have crossover privileges and rights for both communities, but each would be autonomous. I think this would work better than a mixed single-state, and it would allow each community to set certain sorts of religious and other regulations according to its taste.”
Why “Hell?”
Because it would start from a very bad place. It would begin with Jews running the place in the name of a Jewish state, defined by Orthodox Rabbis and controlled by an army whose officer core is increasingly permeated by religious and settler communities. No Arab would feel remotely safe, much less equal or a citizen in such a “single state”. The Arabs’ lack of property, rights, status and prospects would either make them a sullen and potentially violent underclass or else the best of them would try to leave. This is no good basis for integration, though it is of course what some of Israel’s present leaders privately desire. And then there would be Gaza…
… Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also recognize that Israel is on its way to a single state. […] In such a state, Jews would soon be a minority. Doesn’t that frighten you?
Not as much as it seems to frighten others. Why is it ok for a Jewish minority to dominate an Arab majority, its leaders to call for expulsions of majority members, etc., but not ok for a democracy to have a majority and minority both protected under law? At least Israel could then call itself a democracy with a clear conscience.
What you are really asking is whether I think the Palestinians would immediately set out to rape, pillage and murder the Jews? I don’t see why they would want to — there is no historical record suggesting that this is what Palestinians do for fun, whereas we have all too much evidence that Israelis persecute Palestinians for no good reason. If I were an Arab, I would be more afraid of living in a state with Jews just now.
Can you see or understand why Israelis are afraid?
Yes, but only in the sense that someone who has been brought up to fear and hate his neighbors will have good reason to be frightened at the thought of living in the same house with them. Israelis have created a generation of young Palestinians who hate them and will never forgive them and that does make a real problem for any future agreement, single- or two-state.
But Israel should be much, much more afraid of the Israel it’s creating for itself: a semi-democratic, demagogic, far-right warrior state dominated by racist Russians and crazed rabbis. In this perspective, an internationally policed and guaranteed federal state of Israel, with the same rights and resources for Jews and Arabs, looks a lot less frightening to me.
Can you see why American Jews are fearful as well of that?
No. This is the fear of the paranoid hysteric – like the man at the dinner table in the story I wrote in the New York Review who had never been to Israel but thought I should stop criticizing it because “We Jews might need it sometime.” American Jews — most of whom know nothing of Jewish history, Jewish languages or Jewish religion — feel “Jewish” by identifying unthinkingly with Auschwitz as the source of their special victim status and “Israel” as their insurance policy and macho other. I find this contemptible — they are quite happy to see Arabs killed in their name, so long as other Jews do it. That’s not fear, that is something between surrogate nationalism and moral indifference.
Judt was certainly not the first or last to speak of a one-state land-sharing solution, but he certainly roiled the waters when he suggested it. Zionists accused him of antisemitism and of denying the Jewish people both their “historic home” and “Jewish self-determination.” Aside from the fact that all the religious states we are familiar with are nightmares (Saudi Arabia comes to mind), Germany of early 1945 was the last European nation with laws privileging or demonizing specific ethnic groups. That Israel would essentially preserve Nuremberg-style laws in a Jewish state has always seemed aberrant. Especially to many Jews.
In the last two decades there have been dozens of proposals, all with slightly different wrinkles, offering plans to end the ongoing nightmare in Palestine. Contrary to the shrill voices of Zionists telling the rest of us what we mean when we say “from the river to the sea…” Palestine will be free someday. For everyone. There will be something closer to a democracy, and it will offer the world a hopeful example.
An overview of One State proposals — good and bad — will be the subject of my next essay.
This is the last of three book reviews on the One State Solution I started a few weeks ago. I previously reviewed Ian S. Lustick’sParadigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, and Omri Boehm’sHaifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. From time to time I will add additional One State reviews.
Jonathan Kuttab has dedicated much of his life to human rights, first as one of the founders of Al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group established in 1979, and also as a co-founder of Nonviolence International in 1989. Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian lawyer who has practiced in Israel, Palestine, and the US and was the head of a legal team that negotiated the 1994 Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. In 1980 Kuttab co-authored a study of Israeli military laws governing the West Bank that had been modified from British Mandate and Jordanian law to apply more draconian control over Palestinians and to “legalize” land theft.
Kuttab, then, is as qualifed as anyone to present a non-violent program for a One State solution in his book “Beyond the Two-State Solution,” available in English, Hebrew, and Arabic print editions and also in electronic format.
Despite his conciliatory tone, Kuttab doesn’t pull any punches. Zionism is a land grab and, following each war and Oslo, Israel always grabbed as much land as it could — finally rendering impossible a Two State solution. Kuttab analyzes the many failed brokered peace agreements and tries to isolate the unresolved sticking points.
Kuttab acknowledges Israel’s extreme preoccupation with security, the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian right of return, and a difficult-to-imagine reversal of illegal settlements. After looking at all the proposals that bowed to Zionist domination, he eliminates Two States as a workable solution because “the language of the Two State Solution leaves the battling ideologies intact, and only requires a geographic division and spatial limitation on the exercise of each ideology. Chauvinism, racism, discrimination, and inherent problems are all swept under the rug. No real critique of Zionism or Palestinian Nationalism is required, if we accept the language of the Two State Solution.” Kuttab’s rejection of Palestinian nationalism may grate on those who want to discard one nationalism for another.
Kuttab begins by enumerating the “minimum requirements” for Jewish Israelis when entering into a bi-national state: (1) the Jewish Right of Return; (2) Security; (3) a Jewish rhythm of life; (4) Hebrew; (5) the right to live anywhere in Palestine. For Palestinians the list is virtually identical: (1) the right of return for refugees; (2) Democracy; (3) respect for and protection of Arab Identity; (4) Arabic; (5) the right to move about and live anywhere in Palestine. Kuttab sees no pragmatic impediment to a bi-national state and sets about describing how one could be realized, how national and meta-national laws and even a bi-national Supreme Court could protect both peoples with binding judgments instead of hollow actions in toothless international courts.
Kuttab throws out any number of concrete suggestions for structuring a new bi-national state, but these are only useful to illustrate the point that any serious party could come up with plenty of workable ideas. For this reason it’s not worth dissecting Kuttab’s specifics because specifics must be proposed by both parties and negotiated only after both come to terms with the reality that a bi-national state is the only possible option.
Kuttab writes that “Jewish fears need to be addressed forthrightly” (but of course Palestinians have their own well-justified fears). Kuttab demonstrates enormous (disproportionate?) sensitivity to the fears of Jewish Israelis who, even with the most powerful and only nuclear military in the Middle East, habitually reject Palestinian rights because they are perceived to limit Jewish security. So Kuttab suggests writing Jewish supremacy into the new state’s legal system with a Lebanese-style requirement that the head of the new bi-national military always be Jewish, while the head of the national police always be an Arab. As much as I respect what Kuttab is attempting here, it is an odd and lopsided provision that cannot fail to be a show-stopper.
in remaining chapters Kuttab addresses other objections and challenges to his proposals. One is that a bi-national state has never succeeded before. But is that true? Kuttab writes that Lebanon and Yugoslavia may have foundered because of ethnic strife, but Switzerland and Canada are examples of successes of confederation models.
Even if a successful model did not exist, Kuttab writes that the Holy Land is a special case that deserves special effort, and that a resolution of this particular conflict could play an outsized role in resolving other regional and global conflicts.
Kuttab asks rhetorically why Zionists — having “won” — would ever agree to anything limiting their power or supremacy. The quick answer is that Israel’s victory has never been a stable “win” and, in any case, is not sustainable without bottomless aid and diplomatic cover from Western colonial enablers who will eventually tire of subsidizing human rights abuses. And in the long run the injustices perpetrated on Palestinians cannot be ignored forever.
Another objection Kuttab addresses is the argument that the degree of enmity is so great that it can never be surmounted. If this were true then contemporary national alliances of the 21st Century would be impossible — consider Britain and France, the US and Germany, the US and Japan, Germany and Israel. Many of these former bitter enemies became friends within a generation following the end of conflict.
A final argument for pursuing a single state — and against doing nothing — is that, under Zionism, there is no place for minorities. The logic of Zionism requires that minorities (Muslim, Arab, Bedouin, Christian) can never be allowed to become a majority, and which requires that they must either be repressed or eliminated. But this is logic of the 18th and 19th centuries. A multicultural democracy is manifestly superior to endless occupation, war, racist law, and the perversion of democracy.
Kuttab never says so explicitly, but ultimately Israelis will recognize that Zionism is incompatible with democracy. As fantastical as such a prediction sounds in the middle of Israel’s most genocidal war to-date, Israelis will eventually admit that Zionism did its job of saving millions of Jews but it is now time to abandon it, just as Palestinians will have to abandon their own nationalist aspirations — that is, if a bi-national state is ever to take root.
Kuttab’s final chapter is a discussion of what one might call the “attitude adjustments” necessary to make a bi-national state possible. Kuttab, as a proponent of non-violence, rejects armed resistance for both pragmatic and moral reasons (to give you a sense of where he comes from, he’s on the board of a Christian Bible college). Before the two peoples can ever start to build a shared state, settlement will have to stop. Israeli’s aren’t going away, and not all settlers are extremists, Kuttab writes. Likewise, Hamas isn’t going away and (contrary to the propaganda) many of their members are moderates. In any case, Hamas will have to be part of any One State solution.
Palestinians have rights and agency. Thus, truly democratic elections in Palestine — not a US-Israeli-appointed regime – would have to precede any sort of political realignment in order to obtain Palestinian agreement. Collective punishment has to stop immediately. Gratuitous repression and domination for domination’s sake would have to end. “Administrative detentions” and many other Israeli excesses and daily insults would have to cease before Palestinians could enter into a new state with Israelis. Terror attacks (from both sides) and Israeli military incursions would need to stop immediately.
Jonathan Kuttab joins many other One-Staters who have reached the same conclusion — that Two States are now an impossibility and, even if feasible, would only defer and compound the conflict. As unimaginable as One State is now, it is the best and only hope for two peoples sharing one land.
Shortly after the 2016 election, Democrats started telling voters — particularly racial and sexual minorities – that they were idiots for dabbling in “identity politics.” By this they meant that the values these voters held were too controversial, and too “divisive.” Instead, Democrats rolled out an election strategy based on economics, launching it from the one Virginia county where HIllary Clinton had won a majority of votes. Fast forward to 2024 and the Dems are again flogging “Bidenomics, Bidenomics, Bidenomics” – as if it were the only issue over which American voters ought to worry their pretty pointy little heads.
Even though Biden’s numbers have long been stuck at levels absolutely guaranteed to sink his campaign, a vast gaslighting project has emerged to explain why voters aren’t buying the whole economics shtik and to tell voters that they’re idiots for not buying it.
Everybody from James Carville to Robert Reich has offered a contribution to the oevre. The Washington Post thinks that, while personal finances are generally OK, voters are actually more worried about the national economy. Bloomberg takes the completely opposite view. Zachary D. Carter’s recent article in Slate offers the online lede, “I think I can explain Joe Biden’s Bad Approval Ratings” and then proceeds to roll out his own incoherent theory of “new beginnings.”
In other words, Democrats have completely written off what Richard Hofstadter called “interest politics” – or what today we would call the concerns of “value voters” – in his groundbreaking book on the American Far Right, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
So, having read Hofstadter and in contrast to Zachary Carter, I think I can actually explain why Biden’s approval ratings are in the toilet. And it has nothing to do with the economy.
Though he studied American politics in the first part of the 20th Century, in Part I of “The Paranoid Style” Hofstadter offers us a solid clue about much of what is happening today. In fact, Hofstadter’s formulation below explains voter disinterest in Bidenomics, the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, the phenomenon of people “voting against their own interests,” and also explains why the moral furor over Gaza has taken Democrats by surprise and will likely tank Biden’s Presidency:
The wealth of the country and the absence of sharp class-consciousness have released much political energy for expression on issues not directly connected with economic conflict; and our unusually complex ethnic and religious mixture has introduced a number of complicating factors of great emotional urgency.
Significantly, the periods in which status politics has been most strikingly apparent have been the relatively prosperous 1920’s and the 1960’s. In periods of prosperity, when economic conflicts are blunted or subordinated, the other issues become particularly acute. We have noticed that whereas in depressions or during great bursts of economic reform people vote for what they think are their economic interests, in times of prosperity they feel free to vote their prejudices. In good times, with their most severe economic difficulties behind them, many people feel that they can afford the luxury of addressing themselves to larger moral questions, and they are easily convinced that the kind of politics that results is much superior to the crass materialism of interest politics. They have fewer inhibitions about pressing hard for their moral concerns, no matter how demanding and ill-formulated, as an object of public policy, than they have in pressing for their interests, no matter how reasonable and realistically conceived.
In the following essay, I will try to show that Barry Goldwater was one campaigner who saw with considerable clarity the distinction between interest politics and status politics, and went out of his way in his campaign to condemn the immorality of the first and to call for an intensification of the second.
Today, Americans from both political extremes feel America is morally on the wrong track and the two ethically-compromised antediluvian candidates for President are no answer to their concerns. The only question is: given this focus, which candidate will have the edge in November?
Well, that’s easy. Trump, with his coterie of “prophets” and preachers and a side-line as a bonafide Bible-thumping Bible salesman – as transparently fraudulent as this vaudeville act is – still comes closest to what Hofstader recognized in Barry Goldwater and the successful Far Right revolution he launched sixty years ago.
Biden, though he hasn’t been convicted of any felonies or bribed a porn star lately, has a crackhead son and has enthusiastically coupled his fate to that of an accused war criminal (who like Biden can’t survive politically) in carrying out a well-documented genocide.
Bidenomics isn’t going to save Joe any more than it can save America.
This is the second review of three books on the One State Solution.
My previous review was of Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In this post I will look at Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and in the final installment I will look at Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution.
Why One State? It’s time to say kaddish for the dead and move on. “Two States” was an idea that had its genesis over a century ago and might have had its day for the briefest moment in time, but it was almost universally declared dead by 1983. To continue promoting two states is dishonest and as creepy as pretending to talk to the dead.
It is also high time that American “Liberals” and “liberal” American Zionists stopped supporting a violent ethnocratic supremacist state. We don’t want one here and we shouldn’t be paying for the one in Israel. Americans pretend that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” but it’s no such thing. It’s an Apartheid state with a brutal occupation over millions of stateless people, and over five dozen laws that discriminate against its own non-Jewish citizens. With the massive amount of money American taxpayers shell out to preserve the Zionist state, why on earth are we not calling for a genuine democracy?
Moreover, the notion that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation is hogwash. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? A state for practitioners of Santeria? Rastafari? If liberals really believe in such a “right” then why are they not pushing just as hard for theocratic states all over the Western hemisphere?
It should go without saying: a repressive state does not have a right to exist as a repressive state. It cannot claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms constitute hate-speech or antisemitism. If there are calls to dismantle Israel’s Zionist state, for all the shrill Cassandras, this in no way implies the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself must cease doing business as usual. Portugal, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to name a few examples of former dictatorships or repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. The ADL and a myriad of Zionist attack organizations can infer whatever delusional meanings they like from it, but this is is what I mean when I utter that unambiguous phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic
While Ian Lustick proposes recognizing the reality of Israeli domination “from the river to the sea” and building a single secular democracy (however slowly) out of a repressive ethnostate, Omri Boehm’s vision is of redefining Zionism to promote a confederation that allows two peoples to share one land. Boehm’s vision is similar to an early (pre-state) thread of Zionism that advocated a Jewish homeland but not necessarily a state.
Boehm begins by recounting the angry reception that Tony Judt’s essay in the New York Review of Books (“Israel: The Alternative”) received from Zionists in 2003 when he proposed that Israel abandon Zionism and embrace liberal democracy. Zionists huffed that Judt had crossed a line from legitimate criticism of Israel to “illegitimate criticism of Israel’s existence.”
But then Thomas Friedman — hardly a kefiyah-sporting radical — declared in a February 2016 New York Times column that “they all killed the Two State Solution. Let the one-state era begin.” But he wasn’t finished. Friedman went on, “It’s over folks, so please stop sending the New York Times your proposals for a two-state solution […] The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.” And Friedman was not wrong. Even an unlikely Henry Kissinger threw shade on the Two State solution shortly before his death.
Haifa Republic recounts the history of the Yishuv — pre-Israel — and the varieties of Zionism that existed before Revisionist Zionism prevailed and from then on Zionism meant (1) a state not just a homeland; (2) exclusive control over all of Palestine; and (3) ethnic cleansing (“transfer”) to ensure a Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion implemented these goals and told the 20th Zionist Congress in 1937:
“In many parts of the land Jewish settlement would not be possible without transferring the Arab peasants. […] We’re lucky that the Arab people has immense and empty territories. The growing Jewish power in the land will increase more and more our ability to execute the transfer in large numbers.”
Boehm agrees with Lustick that a one-state reality now defines Israel:
The future is here: one-state politics now defines Israel’s reality, and the consequences are monumental — to Israelis, to Palestinians, and to world Jewry. But we’re still lacking a language for liberal Zionist thinking in a post-two-state, post-ethnic era.
But he believes that the beginnings of Zionism might hold the key to refashioning a new, shared democratic state:
The basic vocabulary of this language existed in the past — in Zionism’s beginnings. Whereas Zionist politics today is synonymous with the view that Jews have the right to their own sovereign state in Eretz Israel, the movement’s founding fathers held a more nuanced view. Intense ideological disagreements divided Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion, but they could all agree on the distinction, all too often forgotten, between national self-determination and national sovereignty: up until very late in Zionist history, they all viewed the project as committed to the former but not the latter. In fact, they were for the most part committed to the latter’s denial.) That is, they believed that the Jews had the right to exercise political self-rule, administrate autonomously their own lives, and revive Jewish culture and education. But they did not believe that this should have been done in a sovereign Jewish state: the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty. Jabotinsky, for example, who is commonly regarded today as a raving right-wing Jewish nationalist, explicitly agreed with Brit Shalom, Martin Buber’s Zionist faction, that “the future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a binational state.” Even Hannah Arendt, who is often considered an anti-Zionist, could subscribe to this concept of Zionism. Until late in his career, Ben-Gurion actually did subscribe to it. When Wieseltier or Dershowitz condemn binationalism as a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, they overlook the distinction between self-determination and sovereignty: both as a crucial political distinction and as one that, historically, stood at the heart of Zionism’s origins. Israel’s political survival as a democracy depends on the recovery of this distinction.
Boehm wants to redefine Zionism — if such a thing is now possible. Redefinition seems like a face-saving device to soften the blow to liberal Zionists of abandoning the ideology. So Boehm doesn’t require them to abandon it; he just calls it something different. This seems like the perfect solution for people given to self-delusion. Maybe it could even work.
The Holocaust and the Nakba are thus the main pillars of Zionist thinking as we have come to know it– of the axiom that Zionism is essentially about Jewish sovereignty, and that Jewish demographic superiority, therefore, must be preserved at all costs. It’s time to see that this alleged Zionist axiom is not a Zionist axiom at all, and that adhering to it is leading to the destruction of Israel and expulsions of Palestinians.
It is time to restore a binational Zionism – with a strong notion of equal citizenship in a one-state solution. One way we can do this is by developing an art of forgetting, a politics of remembering to forget the Holocaust and the Nakba in order to undo rather than perpetuate them as the pillars of future politics. Ernest Renan advanced the idea of such an art of forgetting in his great lecture of 1882, “What Is a Nation?” Renan’s account of modern citizenship can help us rethink Israel’s future relation to its past. What is true of the Holocaust is true of the Nakba: for the sake of a future binational politics, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the country would have to be, in a similar sense, forgotten. But it can be forgotten only if we commemorate it first–and do justice to the past by committing ourselves as citizens to the Palestinians right of national self-determination. This includes a meaningful commitment to the right of return.
Perhaps realizing he’s out on a limb, Boehm addresses his skeptics:
How practical a binational political program would be, one may however wonder. Thoroughly practical. None other than Menachem Begin, Israel’s first right-wing prime minister and a vehement opponent of territorial compromise, offers a viable model with the “autonomy plan” he devised in the late 1970s. Begin’s program could just as well be called the “one-state plan.” It included not only the institution of a Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, but also an option for all Palestinians to become full Israeli citizens, as well as complete freedom of movement and economic rights in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and a department within the Palestinian Autonomy’s Council for the Rehabilitation of Refugees. The Knesset voted on this proposal and passed it by a large majority in December 1977.
That Begin had some such plan is familiar to some, but its details, coming so close to a binational constellation, have received little attention. Historians, deferring to the two-state orthodoxy, tend to see the plan as Begin’s plot to prevent Palestinian statehood, not as a program that originates in Jabotinsky’s binational thinking and could test and open up the ethnic political boundaries and taboos of contemporary Israel.
It is worth pointing out that the Likud and Netanyahu are political descendants of Jabotinsky and Begin. Netanyahu’s father Benzion was even Jabotinsky’s secretary. Philosophically, then, resurrecting and adapting Begin’s plan is something the current (37th) government of Israel could conceivably do. Boehm calls this “new Zionist” proposal the “Haifa Republic” in honor of a city that has played a key role in the history of Jews and Palestinians:
It is time to explore a program reconstructed from Begin’s proposal — I call it the Haifa Republic — recognizing the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination, even sovereignty, in their own states, separated along the ’67 border, and yet regulating their separate sovereignty by a joint constitution ensuring basic human rights, freedom of movement, and economic liberties throughout the territory. Such a plan could allow many settlers to remain in their homes. And it would enable Palestinians to exercise rights commonly associated with the right of return-the aspiration to return to the territories from which they were expelled in 1948. Plans of this sort have been raised in the past, and are still promoted, but they are too often regarded as Post-Zionist. The attempt here is to rehabilitate such politics as a Zionist program, consistent with the core aspirations of Zionism’s founding fathers.
In essence the Haifa Republic is a Zionist two-state fiction that permits settlers to remain in the West Bank and opens up present-day Israel to currently-expelled Palestinians. It is also somewhat of an ideological fiction because the nature of Zionism has been redefined.
The final chapter of Boehm’s small book fleshes out a few details of the “Republic.” The Palestinian state Begin proposed was to be demilitarized, overseen by an elected Palestinian council, and included a provision for vetting the return of some “reasonable number” of Palestinian exiles. But it unequivocally asserted the Jewish right to “Samaria” and “Judea” (the West Bank).
The Haifa Republic is based on Begin’s idea, but instead of making Palestinians citizens of Israel (as in Lustick and Begin’s plans) Boehm would conjure Palestinian nationhood without a physical nation. In the Haifa Republic Palestinians would have their own military which co-operated with the IDF in a mutual defense treaty. Complete freedom of movement and the ability to buy and own land anywhere in Palestine would be extended to all within the borders. Arabic and Hebrew would both be official languages. East and West Jerusalem would be capitals of each nation, respectively, and a legal entity structurally similar to the EU would apply to both nations. There would be a shared supreme court that adjudicated disputes without international involvement.
The big question is how to get from today’s one state reality to Boehm’s.
According to defenders of Israel’s Apartheid state — which today maintains a brutal supremacist regime across all of Palestine — the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” supposedly implies the genocide of the Jewish people. The ADL, which cites the Hamas and PFLP charters, calls it an “antisemitic slogan” that “means the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.” — Or so they say.
Hamas, of course, is not the only group to have used this phrase. Israel’s Likud party used a similar phrase (“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”) in its platform. Perhaps it’s just simple projection, but Zionism has actually denied the Palestinian right to self-determination, especially through the removal of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The perpetuation of a system of Jewish supremacy maintained by a genocidal occupation is both unsustainable and unimaginable.
The purpose of this and two essays to follow is to review three books that propose — instead of a Zionist supremacist state– a shared democratic, secular state in Palestine.
It is fair to say that the so-called Two State Solution (TSS) may have once had its day, but that day is long gone following massive settlement by now more than 700,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank. Until or unless they are withdrawn there will never be any land for a contiguous Palestinian state. In terms of a Palestinian “rump” state, the conditions imposed on Palestinians in each of the American “peace” negotiations would have been unacceptable to Israel if imposed on Jews; thus each foundered because Palestinians too would reasonably not accept colonialism, even a “Lite” version that denied them a genuine state with full self-determination.
This leaves a One State Solution, or some variant, as the most reasonable solution — a single land for two peoples. Each of the solutions in these three books have a slightly different wrinkle, as we will see.
Today’s review is Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In following posts I will review Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Each of the authors has proposed a solution “from the river to the sea” that is more than a maligned slogan — a solution in which everyone in Palestine is free.
But before we get into the books, the Hamas Charter frequently cited by Israel-defenders actually reads like a mirror of Zionist policies. You could almost do a global search and replace of “Judaism” with “Islam” or “Jewish” with “Palestinian.” Or replace “the Jewish people” with the “Ummah” — and you get the idea. Palestine is still contested land and its original inhabitants have rightly never given up their claim.
Here is the context in the Hamas charter in which the contentious phrase is used:
“20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”
This doesn’t sound like genocide to me. Elsewhere the charter makes it even clearer:
“16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
While it is presumptuous of the ADL and other Zionist attack organizations to tell us what our own words mean, their interpretations are quite a stretch. The authors of each of the three books I review could well be smeared as “antisemites” by Zionists for their proposals of secular democracies that do away with Jewish supremacy, but each of these proposals must be read to see how Jewish — and Palestinian — life and culture can not only survive but flourish in a shared state. This is anything but antisemitic.
And what of a Zionist state? Is dismantling a racist, Apartheid regime such a tragedy? The question answers itself.
To me the premise that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation seems strange. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? The state for practitioners of Santeria? Writing as a secular American, the whole notion of Christian Nationalism offends me, and the reality of today’s Christian nationalists (and their kissing cousins, the Zionists and Saudi Wahabbists) ought to be a cautionary tale about the dangers and excesses of theocratic states. So, yes, for Zionists to claim that Israel is the home of all the world’s Jews, including me, is both offensive and insane.
Furthermore, a repressive state does not have a right to claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms of it constitutes hate-speech or antisemitism. If people call for dismantling Israel’s repressive state — as it is — this does not mean the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself cannot conduct business as usual under its toxic ideology. Portugual, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to list only a few examples of former dictatorships and repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. This is what I mean when I say:
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Paradigm Lost
Ian Lustick is a former intelligence analyst with the State Department, and currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies, a member of the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Lustick grew up Jewish in upstate New York. His dissertation was on Arabs in the Jewish state, and he has written extensively about the Israeli settler movement. He has clearly thought deeply about how two peoples might live in this one land.
Lustick’s One State Solution is essentially the democratization and transformation of Israel into a nation for all of its people from the river to the sea. He builds his case, beginning with an uncomfortable truth: “A Palestinian state could have been established and could have coexisted peacefully alongside Israel, but the opportunity to establish it was historically perishable and is no longer available.” The question then becomes: what kind of Single State does Lustick envision?
Lustick recounts the history of Zionism, from the Yeshuv to early Israel, through 1948, 1967, Oslo, the PLO, and Arab League peace initiatives. A Palestinian state was no longer an option by the 1980’s because it was official policy of almost every government that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River could never exist. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” was the operational philosophy that decreed that Palestinians must experience unrelenting, uncompromising force until their nationalist aspirations have been extinguished. While it guided successive Israeli governments and parties like the Likud, it has never succeeded. A variety of Palestinian liberation movements have fought Israel tooth and nail since its founding. The unintended consequences of the “Iron Wall” were, according to Lustick, that “Zionism’s strategic logic unintentionally institutionalized a political incapacity to discern or exploit Arab willingness to compromise.” Zionist state builders like David Ben-Gurion convinced themselves that the Arabs would eventually give up. But they never did.
Another self-inflicted Israeli delusion is what Lustick calls “Holocaustia.” This is the abuse of the Holocaust by turning it into a justification for the demonization and nazification of Palestinians and the Arab world. In 2006 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed American Zionists in Los Angeles, telling them “it’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2016 Israeli president Reuven Rivlin told a group of soldiers, “Today, seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, we stand before you and we swear an oath, and promise: All of us, each and every one of us, has a number tattooed on his arm.” While the Holocaust was certainly a defining traumatic event for many Israeli and Jewish families, in Israel it became weaponized as the justification for Zionism. Without an imagined second Holocaust just on the horizon, and without a new Nazi to fear — or as of October 7th the biblical enemy Amalek — Zionism is little more than a 19th century nationalist ideology in search of a contemporary raison d’etre.
Outside Israel, AIPAC and dozens of “lobbying” groups that fly high above FARA registration requirements hold American foreign policy captive and provide Israel with all the armaments and diplomatic cover it needs to continue operating its 76 year-old occupation. Lustick presents little new information here, but this mention is necessary because the United States is the only — as of yet unrealized — hope for applying leverage on Israel. Owing to the shared colonial (and genocidal) history of both the US and Israel, any solution would have distinct American fingerprints on it. Lustick believes that there is hope yet that Americans may yet decide to “save Israel from itself” and show some tough love leading to a breakthrough. This is going to require a paradigm shift.
Lustick regards the Two State Solution (TSS) as a dead paradigm, albeit one that politicians and liberal Zionists cling to desperately. Amusingly, Lustick compares the TSS to the old theory of phlogiston, a non-existent element related to combustion. Only after trial after trial after experiment after experiment was phlogiston debunked. Similarly, there is now enough proof of the impossibility of the TSS so that policy makers ought to stop talking about it.
In fact, over one hundred years of schemes and negotiations have demonstrated that, given Israel’s refusal to permit a Palestinian state, the idea of two states is a dead letter. Lustick systematically shows how each of the assumptions underlying Two States were undermined by different facts or contrasting assumptions. For example, Israelis wanted “two states” to mean no territorial concessions, but for Jordan to provide land for a Palestinian homeland. It wasn’t until the Oslo process that both sides saw TSS as a real possibility. Right after Oslo Israel slowed down settlements and there was discussion of land swaps. But by 1983 it was clear that annexation of “Judea” and “Samaria” had progressed too far to ever support two states. The window had been closed. Hope had become fantasy.
Lustick has tried to formulate a solution given his understanding of the facts on the ground. And the facts are that there is already a One State Reality (OSR) “from river to the sea.” Sorely lacking, however, are evenly-applied freedoms within that space. Lustick writes:
Though there is no “solution” in sight, there is a reality. There is today one state, the State of Israel, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is an apparatus of power, recognized by the international community, whose policies and actions decisively affect the lives of everyone in the area. It collects taxes from West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and determines who enters and leaves those areas, who enjoys rights to property, and who can live, build, or even visit where. In its current form, the state is no group’s pretty picture. It was achieved by no one’s carefully implemented plan. It is not a solution but an outcome — a one-state reality (OSR).
Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are citizens of no other recognized state. As measured by the State of Israel’s impact on the intimate details of their lives and indeed on whether they live at all, they are as much its inhabitants as black slaves were of the United States and as Africans in the Bantustans were of apartheid South Africa. The five-decade occupation of the West Bank and the twelve-year blockade of Gaza, combined with the exposure to state violence that these populations regularly endure, do not mark their exclusion from the Israeli state. Rather, they simply register the fact that Israel rules different populations in different regions in different ways. Though the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip came within the ambit of the Israeli polity fifty-two rather than seventy-one years ago, the palpable fact is that they live within it.
Officially, the Israeli government views lands west of the Jordan River but across the Green Line – the 1949 armistice line that separates Israel from territories occupied in 1967 — as “disputed,” which implies that from their perspective they are part of the country, Thus, when Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports the number of Israelis in the country, it counts every Israeli living west of the Jordan River, not just those living in the part of the country surrounded by the Green Line.
Most official Israeli maps feature no divisions between the sea and the river other than administrative boundaries of districts and regions. Textbooks show lines surrounding the Gaza Strip and around Area A clusters and a slightly different shading for Area B clusters. But the only lines indicating a border between Israel and another sovereign country are those along its borders with Arab states — and these separate both Gaza and the West Bank from the Arab states. A map accessed in December 2018 on Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs website was titled “Israel within Boundaries and Ceasefire Lines.” The map labels the Gaza Strip as “under Palestinian jurisdiction” and the Oslo demarcated areas of “A” and “B” in the West Bank as characterized by Palestinian responsibility for “civil affairs.” The country’s international boundary includes both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank within the state. All mail that enters or leaves the West Bank or the Gaza Strip does so via Israel. The undeclared OSR is also revealed in the ordinary language of public communications: images of the country used by Israeli ministries, weather maps, maps of annual average temperature and rainfall, maps of the topography of the “State of Israel,” road maps, and iconic depictions of the country’s borders used for tourism and other purposes.
In 2009 I visited Palestine and Israel. I spoke to Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American I met in Ramallah, who expressed the view that the Palestinian demand for a separate nation, if frustrated, would lead to a Civil Rights movement in which Palestinians demanded equal treatment within the Israeli state. In this scenario, would American decision-makers take Palestinian demands for equal rights and civil liberties seriously, or pretend that two states are still possible, deciding that Palestinians need another 75 years of martial law and repression? Most of today’s Congress would opt for the latter, I’m sure of it.
To democratize Israel would require abolishing Zionism’s discriminatory laws and injustices. Zionism itself would finally have to be discarded. The “Basic Law: Israel as a Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which assigns rights of citizenship only to Jews, would have to be repealed in an expanded democracy. As it is, the law discriminates against 20% of Israeli citizens of Bedouin, Druze, Christian, and Muslim heritage for whom Israel resembles the Jim Crow South.
Finally, Israelis and Americans have to come to terms with the fact that Israel cannot be — and never really has been — a “democratic AND Jewish” state. Just as a “democratic and Christian” state is a similar impossibility in the US, American liberals and liberal Zionists will have to be among the first to recognize and reject this incongruity. In a land where Jews are actually a slight numerical minority, Zionism has no moral right to crush the hopes and lives of the majority. But for many Israelis and Jews who cannot see where Judaism ends and Zionism begins, this is going to be enormously challenging.
Khalidi enumerates six “Declarations of War” by Western colonialists on Palestine, the last four of which he lays at the feet of the United States. The six include the time periods (1) 1917-1939; (2) 1947-1948; (3) 1967; (4) 1982; (5) 1987-1995; and (6) 2000-2014. From the Balfour Declaration to the League of Nations mandate system, to the carving up of Palestine in the most egregiously racist fashion, to colonial complicity in militarizing Israel, defending it in the UN, and pretending to be simultaneous ally and unbiased arbiter in so-called “peace” talks, the deck has been stacked since the beginning against Palestinians in favor of a European-flavored colonial outpost in the Middle East.
Khalidi’s accounts are invaluable, particularly since he personally was involved in some of the so-called “peace” negotiations and his family has a long intimate connection to Jerusalem and Palestine. But I’m going to skip over a discussion because, for me, Khalidi’s concluding chapter is the most important and thought-provoking. For the review you may have expected, Kaleem Hawa’s piece in the Nation is one of the best. And Khalidi himself spoke about the book at a gathering at Politics & Prose.
While the Goliath that is now Israel seems almost invincible, and justice for Palestinians so elusive, Israel nevertheless has a fatal vulnerability. The first is that Zionism, the ideology underlying everything the state does, has a bitter aftertaste in the 21st Century. Much of the world today regards Israel as an international pariah, a rogue state. As the historian Tony Judt observed, Zionism “arrived too late,” and it “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.” It is not lost on the Global South that represents the majority of the world’s nations that Israel’s only supporters are past and present colonial powers.
Israel’s second vulnerability is that, no matter how much hasbara (spin, propaganda) it generates, or how many Western Zionist lobby organizations are enlisted to do Israel’s bidding, Zionism itself can not withstand much scrutiny. There are simply too many founding documents, too many incriminating statements by politicians, too many political and military actions taken, too much history, too many racist, separatist, supremacist, discriminatory laws built into the state to deny or repudiate Israel’s malign ideology. Zionism, at its root, is scarcely different from the racist, undemocratic, repressive Christian nationalism that is Zionism’s greatest advocate in the United States.
Khalidi explains some of Zionism’s more blatant internal contradictions:
Of course, the five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all, while the half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights. This systemic ethnic discrimination was always a central facet of Zionism, which by definition aimed to create a Jewish society and polity with exclusive national rights in a land with an Arab majority. Even as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence proclaimed “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” dozens of crucial laws based on inequality of rights were implemented in the ensuing years. These severely restricted or totally banned Arab access to land and to residency in all-Jewish communities, formalized the seizure of the private and collective (Waqf) property of non-Jews, prevented most indigenous Palestinians who were made into refugees from returning to their homes while giving citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants, and limited access to many other benefits.
The problem of Zionism is a central moral question — one that a younger generation of American Jews certainly recognizes:
This core problem is even more stark today, with a total Arab population in Palestine and Israel from the Jordan River to the sea that is equal to or perhaps slightly larger than the Jewish population. That inequality is the central moral question posed by Zionism, and that it goes to the root of the legitimacy of the entire enterprise is a view that is shared by some distinguished Israelis. Imagining scholars looking back one hundred years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked, “When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty towards the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?”
Finally, the illusion of “liberal Zionism” has finally been shattered, as a slew of recent books by Jewish writers now acknowledges. Israel can either be a Jewish state that discriminates against and dominates non-Jews, or it can be democratic. But not both. Khalidi writes:
For decades Zionists insisted, often referring to the state’s declaration of independence, that Israel could be and was both “Jewish and democratic. As the contradictions inherent in this formulation grew ever more apparent, some Israeli leaders admitted (indeed, even declared it with pride) that if they were forced to choose, the Jewish aspect would take precedence. In July 2018, the Knesset codified that choice in constitutional law, adopting the”Basic Law on the Jewish Nation-State, which institutionalized statutory inequality among Israeli citizens by arrogating the right of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people…
It is clear, once you begin turning over rocks, that Zionism is based on a zero-sum calculation that only one people can exist in Palestine, that one ethnicity must dominate. Thus Zionism’s survival ultimately depends upon “completing the job” of ethnically cleansing Palestine begun in 1947. Israelis constantly talk about “transfer” of Palestinians and “death to the Arabs.” Even within “1948” (Israel proper) North American Jews unwittingly support Judaization programs in the Galilee and elsewhere, with the intent to create Jewish majorities in traditionally Arab cities. This is the Trail of Tears alternative to sharing land stolen from Palestinians: displacement, ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.
While early “drafts” of Zionism contemplated nation-sharing schemes, ever since the 1942 Biltmore declaration Zionism has meant only domination and expulsion for Palestinians. To speak of any other type would not refer to the Zionism that eventually prevailed but to some other species of Western liberalism generally reviled in Israel. To speak of a non-Zionist Israel for all people “from the river to the sea” provokes only shrill denunciations and accusations of antisemitism. This is because Israel under Zionism cannot survive multiculturalism, democracy, and equality any more than the Confederate States of America could have.
Khalidi’s last chapter considers what the future might hold. He writes:
Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.
That said, either two (real, not rump) states or a single confederated state are the best alternatives to Zionist domination of Palestinians from the river to the sea.
We can rule out the Algerian or Haitian scenario, where colonizers were expelled or overthrown. Israel is the only nuclear country in the Middle East thanks to France and the United States. It has one of the most powerful militaries in the world, again thanks to Western colonial powers. If Israel were to cease operating as a Jewish supremacist fantasyland for hilltop settlers, no doubt some Israelis would return to the US or Europe (before October 7th as many as 15% were contemplating leaving). Israelis who remained (most with nowhere else to go) would have to reconcile with a new reality, as white South Africans discovered upon the collapse of the old Apartheid system.
This leaves the third option – “finishing the job,” as American after American after American after American – and Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli and 500 more examples – have described their violent fantasies of a “Final Solution” for Palestinians. Following October 7th Israel seems to have doubled down on genocidal talk. As Khalidi predicted (the book was published in 2020), international attention would be drawn to any Israeli attempts at ethnic cleansing on a grand scale:
There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighboring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2017 that a record sixty-eight million persons and refugees were displaced the world over. Against this horrific regional and global background, which elicits scarce concern internationally, there might seem to be little to restrain Israel from such an action. But the ferocious fight that Palestinians would wage against their removal, the intense international attention to the conflict, and the growing currency of the Palestinian narrative all mitigate against such a prospect.
Given the attention, it would necessarily damage the “ironclad” relationship between Israel and its Western sponsors:
Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past. Even if undertaken under cover of a major regional war, such a move would have the potential to cause fatal damage to the West’s support for Israel, on which it relies.
Nonetheless, there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than a any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israeli taking such a step.
Given Israel’s attempts to herd Gazans into the Sinai and opening up West Bank areas barred since 2005 to settlements, Khalidi’s 2020 crystal ball might have been a bit off. Nevertheless, Gaza 2023 did focus world attention on Palestine and Zionism, and a growing number of people now see much more clearly what has been going on for the last 75 years — including many in the Jewish community.
If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many).
The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.” This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.
From the West’s perspective, the Abraham Accords, begun by Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden, offer a shortcut to solving of the Palestinian problem once and for all. As usual, these schemes rely on the collaboration of autocratic regimes instead of stable democracies. But Khalidi warns against such a short-sighted approach:
GIVEN AN ARAB world that is in a state of disarray greater than at any time since the end of World War I and a Palestinian national movement that appears to be without a compass, it might seem that this is an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians, and declare victory. It is not likely to be quite so simple. There is the not inconsiderable matter of the Arab public, which can be fooled some of the time but not all of the time, and that emerges with Palestinian flags flying whenever democratic currents rise against autocracy, as in Cairo in 2011 and in Algiers in the spring of 2019. Israel’s regional hegemony depends in very large measure on the maintenance in power of undemocratic Arab regimes that will suppress such sentiment. However distant it may seem today, real democracy in the Arab world would be a grave threat to Israel’s regional dominance and freedom of action.
Just as important, there is also the popular resistance that the Palestinians can be expected to continue to mount, whatever the shabby deal to which their discredited leaders may mistakenly assent. Though Israel is the nuclear regional hegemon, its domination is not uncontested in the Middle East, nor is the legitimacy of the undemocratic Arab regimes which are increasingly becoming its clients. Finally, the United States, for all its power, has played a secondary role — sometimes no role at all — in the crises in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the region. It will not necessarily maintain the near monopoly over the Palestine question, and indeed over the entire Middle East, that it has enjoyed for so long.
Configurations of global power have been changing: based on their growing energy needs, China and India will have more to say about the Middle East in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous one. Being closer to the Middle East, Europe and Russia have been more affected than the United States by the instability there and can be expected to play larger roles. The United States will most likely not continue to have the free hand that Britain once did. Perhaps such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.
Finally, the war in Gaza has unleashed a struggle in the United States. Besides widespread protests against US complicity in Gaza, collusion with Israeli and autocratic Arab regimes, the Democratic president’s “ironclad” support for Zionism, and the massive military expenditures “we” are so willing to spring for instead of relief for our own citizens, it has become obvious to many that America is not a gleaming city on the hill — but instead an ugly empire with an insatiable appetite for war and the subjugation of weaker nations.
As Khalidi points out, controlling the narrative is essential to the survival of Zionism and the imperial aspirations of the Western colonial powers that support it. It takes considerable political repression, large doses of propaganda, and the abolition of civil liberties to keep a system like this running for the benefit of war profiteers and other stakeholders in Empire.
The bipartisan preoccupation with ensuring Zionism’s survival threatens to destroy the last shreds of our democracy. We Americans seem to be slow learners, so it may take several more decades of foreign adventures and supporting repressive regimes and toxic ideologies before we finally awake to the damage we’re doing to our own democracy.
Following anti-war unrest not seen since the Sixties, both major parties have decided that repression and clamping down on free speech, rather than reconsidering an off-the-rails foreign policy, is the solution to America’s problems. With thousands of cases of censorship, repression, and punishment for anti-Israel views, we have truly entered a new era of McCarthyism and thought control.
Since the Gaza war began we have witnessed unprecedented police violence against campus protesters, as well as outrageous accusations of “antisemitism” by mainstream media and politicians of both parties. Like candidate Hubert Humphrey before him, candidate Joe Biden has doubled down on American militarism and, like Humphrey, it’s going to cost him the presidency. With tens of billions for war on three fronts, active conflict in 16 different countries, “counterterrorism” operations in 78, and now with U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza, Biden risks pushing the U.S. to the brink of World War III while undermining domestic initiatives he claims to support.
Likewise, Biden seems unconcerned that his “ironclad” support for Israel, even in the face of a credible genocide case at The Hague, has irrevocably alienated his own voters. With the exception of a handful of Democrats, both major parties are equally committed to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and refuse to either call for a ceasefire or try to prevent Israel’s impending slaughter in Rafah. What we are now seeing is the unmasked, unapologetic face of bipartisan American imperium.
This week Democrats joined MAGA Republicans in not only suppressing free speech and ratcheting up support for World War III but in legislating the meaning of words.
We have been long accustomed to MAGA America insisting on their own definitions of “life,” “marriage,” “freedom of religion,” and “privacy.” Resisting any common or commonsense understanding of these terms, and now undermined by an overwhelmingly Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, we have entered an Orwellian world where words have only the meanings that authoritarians assign to them.
This week Democrats are joining the authoritarians. Bipartisan bill H.R.6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA), attempts to redefine “antisemitism” as not the generally-accepted concept of “hatred of Jews” but as “criticism of Israel.” The alteration is based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has a long history but in short was concocted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. A number of Democrats have joined the bill’s MAGA sponsors in altering the meaning of a commonly understood word being changed for blatantly political purpose.
Accompanying this bill, H.R.7921, the Countering Antisemitism Act, would establish an Antisemitism Czar to clamp down on criticism of Zionism.
Sponsored by Senator Jackie Rosen and Congresswoman Kathy Manning, among others, the bill is the result of lobbying by virtually every Zionist organization in America: Agudath Israel of America; American Israel Public Affairs Committee; American Jewish Committee; American Jewish Congress; Anti-Defamation League; B’nai B’rith International; Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Hadassah; Hillel International; Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy; Israeli-American Civic Action Network; JCC Association of North America; Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Jewish Federations of North America; Jewish on Campus; National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry; National Council of Jewish Women; Nexus Leadership Project; Secure Community Network; The Rabbinical Assembly; Union for Reform Judaism; Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America; United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism; and the World Jewish Congress.
Now, in addition to the Israel Lobby applying pressure from outside government, they will effectively be part of it and playing a repressive role — for the benefit of a foreign power.
No doubt many more Democrats than merely the bills’ sponsors, and among them Massachusetts representatives like Seth Moulton, a cosponsor of CAA, will support both pieces of legislation.
Wartime has an uncanny facility for showing citizens the true face of their own democracy.
In coming days Americans will be treated to further proof that voting for Democrats is no less evil than voting for their ideological friends on the other side of an aisle that, increasingly, separates the two parties by only a name.
Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza and its people, as well as the Israeli government’s open expressions of genocidal intent, have pricked the consciences of millions and launched a case at The Hague. While there have been many comparisons between today’s ceasefire protests and those against the war in Viet Nam, the explosion of disgust at the Gaza genocide and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians bears greater resemblance to antebellum Abolitionist outrage at the “peculiar” American institution of slavery.
The Abolitionist movement rode a long wave of 17th and 18th century Enlightenment values, and by the 18th and 19th centuries slavery was on the way out over much of the world. Successful slave revolts, the British campaign to end the slave trade throughout its empire, a similar ban by the Ottoman empire, abolition of slavery in the Northern US, Britain, Latin America, the emancipation of serfdom in the Russian empire, and France’s abolition of slavery throughout its colonies – the moral arc of the universe was straining but the South was almost alone in resisting the bend toward justice. Just as Israel is today.
What survived slavery was scarcely better. While it was no longer acceptable for individuals to exploit a hundred or a thousand lives as personal property, rules were different for empires. Virtually every empire that had abolished slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries colonized and exploited entire populations, typically of a different race. And in order to extract wealth and exert control over these subjugated people, settlers were needed to colonize, administer, and defend the ill-gotten gains.
One of Hannah Arendt’s critiques of Zionism is that it turned its back on Enlightenment values. But writing as a Jew who had just barely escaped Nazi terror no thanks to Western democracies, she was also rightly skeptical of Western liberal traditions. In the Arendt Center’s newsletter Roger Berkowitz writes,
“The weakness of the enlightenment is baked deeply into the liberal tradition. Montesquieu follows Aristotle in insisting that limited and liberal government depend upon the virtue of citizens. Liberals such as John Stuart Mill and John Locke insisted that only some countries had citizens who were evolved enough and civilized enough to enjoy the freedoms of liberal democracy. There is, as Uday Mehta has so powerfully argued, an Imperial project at the foundation of liberalism, one that insists that all peoples be assimilated into the values and virtues of liberal civilization before they can be allowed to enjoy the benefits of liberal government. Until that time, backwards peoples need to be governed by liberal colonialists. Much of the critique of enlightenment and liberal government is a result of this imperial drive in liberalism to insist that only those who think like liberals are capable of freedom.”
This is clearly reflected in the Charter of the League of Nations and also in the Charter of the British Mandate in Palestine, whose laws of military occupation Israel still uses in the West Bank.
Israel’s colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is scarcely different from the American settler-colonial project, Australia’s, or that of the British in India. China and Russia both have ongoing settler-colonial projects – and American politicians just spent tens of billions to slow down the competition. The United States too has its colonies. An estimated 15% of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlers are American citizens. Most of us live on land stolen by earlier generations of settler-colonists, some of whom were our ancestors.
We may not have colonized Africa but we literally kidnapped and enslaved the ancestors of 13% of our own population and yet have made no attempt to redress wrongs to them. We fork over up to $40 billion each year to maintain the supremacy of Israel’s 6.8 million Jewish citizens but for our own 10 million Native Americans the budget for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is $3 billion.
Israel’s bad luck is that their settler-colonial project began in the 20th Century, when – just as in the case of slavery – the evils of the “peculiar institution” of settler-colonialism were well-understood and beginning to be regarded as morally reprehensible.
* * *
I recently reread Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 and was struck by the many similarities between Zionism and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
Baptized in Blood distinguishes between the CSA’s government and the culture it represented. Wilson recognized two “civic religions” of the United States, one dedicated more or less to Enlightenment values, another to darker aspects of European nationalism, myth, and racial supremacy.
Zionism’s self-defense and propaganda efforts have much in common with the South’s vehement defenses of its “morality,” customs, and values from Northern criticism. The South rejected Enlightenment values that the North had embraced more or less at the same time early Zionists were rejecting them.
Both Zionism and the Confederacy promote a narrative of persecution and threat to a “way of life.” Their way of life, of course, means sovereignty for a chosen people who, whether at the Biltmore Hotel or at Fort Sumpter, secede from one nation to create a separate nation that privileges their ethnicity. Both the South and Israel cultivated the good will of foreign empires. Judah Benjamin, who held positions with the Confederacy as Attorney General, War Secretary, and then Secretary of State, unsuccessfully negotiated support for the CSA from both France and Britain. Similarly, the newly-established World Zionist Organization negotiated with both the British and Ottoman empires for support for its own nationalist project.
Just as both Southern religion and what Wilson calls its “civic religion” parted ways from Northern Christianity, Zionism makes a mockery of Jewish values. Early Zionists were regarded as heretics by almost every branch of Judaism, particularly Orthodoxy. Today the largest ultra-orthodox sect, the Satmars, continues to oppose Zionism. Abolitionists and a fleet of Northern clergy similarly regarded Southern Christianity as an aberration.
Civic and cultural values have also diverged because of Zionism, especially now that Israel’s 37th government includes outright fascists. It is no secret that for many years American Jews have held democratic values not shared by a majority of their Israeli cousins. A significant number of younger Jews in North America and Europe who grew up in “democracies” that claim liberal values have embraced those liberal values and reject what is, in the end, nothing but ethnic nationalism. And such was the case with a divided antebellum United States where Abolitionists were every bit as zealous as kaffiya-wearing ceasefire demonstrators.
The conscription of religious leaders into propaganda efforts was central to Southern religion and culture just as it is to Zionism today. Theodor Herzl wrote that the Zionist project depended upon the conscription of rabbis into its service (“The Rabbis will receive communications regularly from both Society and Company, and will announce and explain these to their congregations”). Ultimately the centrality of ethnic cleansing to create a Jewish majority in Israel and the centrality of the institution of slavery for the Confederacy corrupted both religions enlisted to defend them.
The South may have lost the War, but its true believers embarked upon a campaign to justify and legitimate their vision of their dying culture. In contrast, Israel won its many wars and successfully established a state (both with significant American support), yet nevertheless must justify its ongoing crimes against a subjugated and repressed Palestinian people – as well as its continuing embrace of 19th century settler-colonialism.
As is the case with Judaism, the tragedy of the Shoah (Holocaust) has been ruthlessly exploited by Zionism. Both Ian Lustick and Avraham Burg have written about how Israel’s first Prime Ministers retroactively and tautologically seized upon the Holocaust as the ultimate raison d’être for Zionism, as an excuse for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (and worse), and as a shield from criticism for crimes of the state they created. In the United States Israel employs a constellation of propaganda and lobbying groups in its service, many operating in contravention to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The South similarly spawned an entire cottage industry devoted to Confederate propaganda, much of it written by Christian ministers. In 1860 an anthology of pro-slavery propaganda, most essays by clergymen, was published under the title Cotton is King.
Zionism as “civic Judaism” and the Lost Cause as “civic religion” were both built on victimization, martyrology, and myth. Dixie and Zion are both mythic lands of the imagination. Where the South dreamed of an eventual resurrection of Dixie, the Zionists had been dreaming of Zion’s resurrection for a hundred years. Both Confederates and Zionists believed in a special destiny for their people, born of and sanctified in bloodshed and sacrifice. Both were obsessed with monuments, memory, and military heroics. The CSA had their “knights”; Israel has its elite fighting units. Both embrace ethnic supremacy.
The birth of Zionism and Southern Christianity and their corresponding civic religions owe profound debts to Romanticism and German nationalism. Fritz Stern and Wolfgang Schivelbusch have studied the Southern debt to German nationalism, while Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl belonged to a German nationalist fraternity and even advocated conversion to Christianity for a time. Herzl’s 1902 novel AltNeuLand (Old-New Land) is the story of a German-Jewish lawyer who retires to a tropical island for 20 years then visits Palestine only to discover a German-speaking, pan-European New Society that Zionists have created.
Again, the South may have lost the War but the North all too willingly embraced Southern myth, heroics, and military veneration. Since Reconstruction it’s been a struggle to rid American military bases of the many Confederate generals’ names, even as white supremacy remains as malign as ever. I would argue that our contemporary American civic religion – militarism – shares this with Israel’s, both reinforcing one another.
Whether it is turning our backs on Reconstruction, continuing to propagate neo-Confederate myth and culture through a hijacked Evangelical MAGA Christianity, or providing 75 years of bipartisan support to a racist Jewish ethnocracy, America has firmly turned its back on its supposed Enlightenment values, as a skeptical Arendt was well aware. Today – and especially since Gaza 2023 – Democrats have torn up or ignored international agreements, laws, and institutions as readily as their MAGA brethren. So much for the supposed “rule based order.” So much for the Enlightenment.
Today’s young “genocide abolitionists” represent the best in our civilizational aspirations despite being smeared as “antisemites.” There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of firings, cancelled talks, banned meetings, arrests, assaults, doxxing, and language policing of ceasefire supporters. Laws are being enacted to shut down protests, ban a social media outlet that does not censor criticisms of Israel, redefine “antisemitism,” and criminalize criticism of Zionism.
How much democracy are we willing to give up for American and Israeli imperium?
Last week New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell spent 4 days in Israel on a junket funded by the American Jewish Committee’s “Project Interchange,” a program “dedicated to connecting global leaders to Israel.” As such, it had nothing to do with Jewish life in the U.S. It was all about cultivating pro-Israel support from foreign leaders for Israel’s benefit.
The “delegation” of the US Conference of Mayors which Mitchell headed was in fact the AJC’s fourth all-expenses paid tour of Israel for mayors. The group toured Sderot, one of the towns raided by Hamas, and participants spoke with families of hostages. There were no meetings with victims of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing in either Gaza or the West Bank.
Yet according to Mitchell, “The current conflict is widening the political fault lines in our country, and I believe that it is important for mayors, as the leaders of their cities, to take opportunities like this to deepen their understanding of a situation that, as everyone can agree, is complicated and difficult.”
If only that were true. If only an understanding of a complex issue could be obtained by allowing a highly biased party in the conflict to completely shape your views. What’s next for the mayor? Trips to Riyadh and Kiev to obtain insights into what? School funding? Improving municipal services? For most of these mayors their participation in an AJC-funded junket had nothing to do with their day jobs and everything to do with performances meant to burnish their political resumes and broaden contacts with potential donors.
Aside from the fact that the junket took the better part of a week out of Mitchell’s schedule, the AJC is hardly an even-handed educational outfit. It is one of a constellation of Zionist lobbying organizations that exist solely to build support and sympathy for Israel, even as that nation 5,500 miles away conducts a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
One of the AJC’s chiefly pro-Israel propaganda efforts is the criminalization of any criticism of Israel. The AJC astroturf group Mayors Against Antisemitism promotes the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes roughly 15 features, of which 11 relate to criticism of Israel and Zionism. This is the basis on which the AJC also opposes the non-violent Palestinian BDS movement. In opposition to official US policy but completely in line with Israeli policy, the AJC also opposes a Palestinian state.
The AJC also follows the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s lead in labelling South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at The Hague “meritless” and “a travesty.” The AJC’s antisemitism glossary regards as antisemitic the recognition of Zionism as settler colonialism. It takes some extreme mental and moral gymnastics to willfully deny a historical reality like colonialism.
Partly because of DEI’s critiques of settler colonialism, The AJC has joined other Zionist and Christian Nationalist groups in opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Last December former ADL national director Abe Foxman and former AJC CEO David Harris both called for an end of DEI programs. The ongoing McCarthyite Congressional hearings on supposed “antisemitism” in the Ivy Leagues headed by MAGA Republican Virginia Foxx serves both Christian and Jewish ethno-nationalist interests at the expense of American First Amendment rights.
But academics, progressives, and intellectuals have long been a thorn in the side of Zionist groups like the AJC and the ADL. The AJC’s own history reflects this. In the Fifties the AJC was involved (again) in McCarthyite witch-hunts of supposed Communists, in the Seventies it actively opposed affirmative action (in fact celebrating the Baake decision), and in a 2007 pamphlet authored by Alvin H. Rosenfeld with a forward by AJC President David Harris, attacked a number of liberal and anti-Zionist Jews, naming names in a now-familar pattern of smearing critics of Israel.
The AJC is a far-right defender of ethno-nationalist supremacy, occupation and war crimes. Mitchell and other politicians who participate in its programs ought to be called to account. What could they have possibly learned from a tour guide like the AJC? What were their actual reasons for attending? And did any of this have even the remotest thing to do with running their cities?
Jon Mitchell owes his constituents an explanation.
I just finished reading Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile. This is the work of a rabbi who spent much of his life in Israel. It is a Jewish book for Jews grieving — not October 7th, not the growing and very real antisemitism of Trump’s America — but the realization, deep down, that something they have long loved is a cruel and bitter fantasy, its ugliness and evil an indigestible truth that insults every liberal value they believe in.
Magid writes:
As I write this in 2022, I do not think it’s provocative to state that liberal Zionism is in crisis. It is, after all, abundantly clear today that the present iteration of liberal Zionism, as a humanistic project of Jewish self-determination based on liberal democratic values, is in a defensive posture. The problem is that the social and political realities of the Israeli state today cannot be defined as “liberal” by any stretch of the imagination. This includes the country’s continued — perhaps permanent — occupation/ annexation of millions of stateless Palestinians and their land, as well as its own narrative self-fashioning — illustrated in part by the 2018 Nation-State Law, which arguably codifies Jewish domination, even supremacy, into the state itself. (The law states that national self-determination is “exclusive to the Jewish people” in the State of Israel, where non-Jews comprise over 20% of the population.) Many in the contemporary Zionist camp celebrate this ethnocentric turn. Most liberal Zionists do not. And yet most liberal Zionists remain steadfast in their defense of the State of Israel. Therein lies the crisis.
Magid writes that this extends to diaspora Jews, particularly American Jews raised with not necessarily the reality of democracy and equality, but with a deep belief in those ideas.
Last year these uneasy American Zionists watched as their Israeli cousins massed in the hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv and elsewhere to save Israel’s — not really a democracy — from fascists, racists, religious fanatics and genocidal monsters. Of course, absent from Israel’s so-called “democracy movement” was any pursuit of democracy for Palestinians on either side of the Green Line.
In parallel with the shifting values of liberal Jews, Magid notes how liberal America (at least parts of it) has also begun to jettison our own colonial-setter ideology:
John O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny theory was an engine that drove the American settler-colonial project during the western expansion, but was then replaced with Teddy Roosevelt’s “melting pot,” Horace Kallen’s “cultural pluralism,” John Kennedy’s “nation of immigrants,” as well as later forms of multiculturalism. In retrospect, Manifest Destiny was, and remains, a racist and discriminatory ideology. Yes, white supremacists still hold Manifest Destiny as one of their ideological foundations, but such illiberal ideas are justifiably under attack in the continued culture wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance ofthe far-right white nationalists in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed [liberal Zionist],” the Manifest Destiny of the Israeli context, now rules the State of Israel.
Facing up to one’s own country’s settler-colonial history is not so easy. When Representative Lydia Velazquez introduced a resolution calling for annulment of the Monroe Doctrine, it received only six co-sponsors — all people of color — and GovTrack estimated it had a 0% chance of adoption. So if America is one step ahead of Israel in facing up to its racist, genocidal history, that step can only be measured in millimeters.
But Zionism’s main problem is that it appeared too late in world history. Ethnonationalism fell into disrepute after World War II for obvious reasons. Not simply an anachronism, Zionism like its ugly siblings Christian nationalism and Hindutva, is fundamentally racist, exclusionary, and undemocratic. A nation built on the supremacy of one ethnicity is bad enough, but when you throw in god and messianism, it quickly becomes both a moral and political disaster.
For those deeply invested in Zionism and its accompanying settler-colonialism, all criticisms are strongly deflected as nothing but antisemitism. Much in common with antisemites themselves, attempts to distinguish Zionism from Judaism are likewise rejected by Zionists, who claim that a Zionist state is the home of all Jewish people, and that (as antisemites could only dream) all Jewish people ought to leave their homelands and move to Israel.
The Zionist conflation of nationalism and religion only reinforces the antisemitic view that all Jews are racist ethnonationalists, and this is largely responsible for the predictable spikes in antisemitic expression whenever Israel’s aggression towards Palestinians becomes most severe. Similarly, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is designed to conflate Judaism and Zionism, a multi-tool to be used as both cudgel and legalism to muzzle Israel’s critics.
Unfortunately there is some truth to the conflation, as Judaism itself has been all-too-willingly put to work in the service of Zionism. It was once verboten to speak of an Israel that had not been divinely reconstituted. Orthodox Jews originally reviled Zionism and even today the Satmar, perhaps the largest sect of Haredim, still reject it. There is also a long history of anti-Zionism among liberal Jews, who before 1948 issued countless — prescient — warnings of the disaster that Ben Gurion’s expansionist vision would unleash on both Jews and Palestinians.
But after the 1967 war, many Jews began to think that all that winning must have been divinely ordained. Today there are few congregations that don’t host Zionist Federation events or have youth or congregational programs centered around Israel, lending weight to the view that antisemites hold that there is little distinction between Judaism and Zionism.
Rabbi (Rav) Abraham Isaac Kook predated the formation of the state of Israel, but he broke with Jewish Orthodoxy (literally) by claiming that creating a Zionist state was the first step of a messianic redemption of not only Jews but of the entire human race. After 1967 Kook’s son Zvi Yehuda Kook took it up a notch and created the Gush Emunim movement, upon which Israel’s violent settler movement is founded.
All this blending of Zionism and Judaism was bound to create a philosophical and theological muddle. Zionism was supposed to redeem Jews (particularity) and even the whole world (universality). But wasn’t that the purpose of Judaism?
As a rabbi, Magid dives into the question, looking at the historicity of some of these ideas within Judaism. He examines how the particular and the universal have always been in tension with one another in Judaism:
The universal, certainly as a kind of (perhaps messianic) ideal, was actually never quite endemic to ancient Israelite religion, even with the biblical tropes such as the decree that the Israelites shall be “a light unto the nations.” Yet Jewish responses to the universal-particular conundrum, which sometimes portray Jews as simultaneously “normal” (as in a normalized people) and “exceptional” (as in victims in perpetuity), continue precisely because the universal still hovers as a specter over the entire Israelite project. In some cases, such as Jewish communism or even certain versions of radical Reform Judaism, the universal becomes paramount, while in some forms of nationalistic Orthodoxy, the universal is subsumed by a highly particularistic narrative to such an extent that its presence is hardly felt. In such cases, the universalist tropes in prophetic religion either become so central as to efface the Jewish people’s particularistic agenda, or become interpreted and swallowed into a highly nationalistic paradigm. But in most forms of Judaism, universalism and particularism function in productive tension with one another.
Magid sorts through various writers on particularity and universality, taking on Chaim Gans’s A Political Theory for the Jewish People (2016). He considers Gans’ notion of universality and particularity and quickly dismisses the weak argument for Zionism’s “particularity.” But he also demolishes Gans’s insistence on a universal form of Zionism. And Magid does the same with Emmanuel Lévinas:
The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas seemed quite concerned with this dilemma, and sought an ethical core of Judaism (what he called “ethics as first philosophy”) that did not succumb to Reform Judaism’s assimilatory project or communism’s utopian one. He wrote numerous essays on this subject, arguing that true universalism can only arise from the particular, while the particular must carry the universal, which implicitly criticizes Kant’s cosmopolitanism, and perhaps Marx’s communism, as naïve and misguided. This remains a central concern for political philosophers to this day. But Levinas’s project apparently could not bear the weight of his own proclivities. When asked in a famous interview about the Palestinian as “other” to whom one owes primary responsibility, he responded, “The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy.” In other words, the Palestinian is not the other, the Palestinian is the enemy. “Ethics as first philosophy” meets Jewish trauma and anxiety. I think in that very honest moment, Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” collapses. (In pointing this out, I am influenced by Fred Moten’s devastating critique of Levinas in “There Is No Racism Intended,” in his book The Universal Machine.)
As esoteric as all this is, Magid is on to something. Zionism could have moved in a humanistic direction — but chose not to. In the end Zionism simply devolved into a naked power grab, devoid of any humanistic or universalist pretense.
Some forms of early secular Zionism attempted to embody this dynamic interplay between the universal and particular: much of it was humanistic in orientation, or at least aspirational, and committed to refracting some sense of universal values through the particularity of Jewish collective existence. This is why Marxism and socialism played such a significant role in early Zionism. The creation of a quasi-utopian collectivist entity that could be an exemplar for the revolution of Trotsky’s Fourth International was a goal of some early kibbutzniks. But that was a long time ago. The ethnostate that is contemporary Israel chose another path.
No one in Israel can live in such a society without recognizing it — even as it is almost impossible to imagine a different identity:
But if being an anti-Zionist means being anti-Israel, I could not embrace that either. Living in Israel, and still holding an Israeli passport, I didn’t quite know what it meant. I remain a citizen of that state, albeit a very ambivalent one. I served in its army. And yet I could no longer believe that Zionism, in any form, could create a just and equitable society. The myth that pervades Zionism, what Chaim Gans has called “proprietary Zionism” — that is, the fundamental precept that the land belongs to us — was, by definition, inequitable.
Magid writes of his ultimate reckoning with Zionism’s supremacist ideology in a chapter called “From My Tragic Love Affair with Zionism.” This reckoning, like that of many Israelis, was simply the product of paying attention to all the injustices around him, coming from the state he loved, and some of which he perpetrated himself:
Like many Israelis, the IDF was a transformative experience for me. I entered out of a sense of responsibility and duty to my adopted country. I served in 1988-1989, during the First Intifada. As a thirty-one-year-old father of three young children, I was what is called a “second-tier soldier”; I was in a combat unit but never saw real combat. […] But anyone who spends months in training in an army camp near Nablus in the West Bank, and travels around as a soldier, sees the ugliness and brutality of the occupation firsthand. The hatred in the eyes of Palestinian children as you walk by them in full combat gear; the humiliation of a father having to submit to the whims of a nineteen-year-old soldier in front of his son’s eyes. […] In a convoy, after dropping off a lone solider at the entrance to the Casbah (the main market) in Nablus, a fellow solider turned to me and said, “What the fuck are we doing here?” I had heard all the answers, but I had no answer for him then, and I have no answer now, other than domination, pure and simple. We do what we do because we can. That’s all. That is the reality of the Hebrew term ribbonut: not just sovereignty but a more potent implication of power over another in other words, domination. We are “masters” over the Palestinians — the settlers call “Lords of the Land.” That has become Zionism on the ground, certainly on the right but also on the center and center-left.
Sharing an American identity, Magid also makes the inevitable associations with our own, and international, history:
As a child raised in America, we learned about Jim Crow. As a graduate student during the boycotts of South African apartheid, we protested systemic oppression. Of course, each situation has its own contours and its own context, but as I experienced the reality of the occupation first-hand and, in some sense, the reality of Zionism through that lens, they were all comparable to what I witnessed as a soldier. […] The relationship between one’s experience and how one constructs the world they live in, and the world they want to create, is both vexing and complex. I moved to Israel to live in the land and to be a part of Jewish history. I experienced both deeply, intensely, and then painfully. Not being a native, my point of reference in regard to Israel, and to Zionism, was always contingent and never unconditional.
But once you have seen what cannot be un-seen, there’s no going back; there can only be alienation from what has shown itself to be an illusion. Magid’s experience is precisely like that of liberal Jews who — today, Spring of 2024 — have seen what cannot be unseen and cannot use the same vocabulary as beloved friends and family.
One can also be a stranger in one’s own home. My choice to no longer identify as a Zionist was not easy, and the choice came with considerable anguish, and pain. I lost friends, and it has strained relationships with those I still consider friends. […] But whatever I had envisioned Zionism to be, and whatever I believed I was getting myself into, at some point began to dissolve as I grew increasingly alienated from that national project. I no longer cared what it aspired to be because I could no longer bear what it was.
So if I have abandoned Zionism, now what? I believe the term “counter-Zionism” better represents my views about Israel today. I suggest we need another ideology — not a “post” but a “counter” to better equip Israel to face the next century. Zionism is too chauvinistic, too ethnocentric, too inequitable — it came to counter a diasporic existence in the wake of the cataclysmic failure of European emancipation, yet Jews today are now integrated into the countries in which they live.
In some way, Zionism was thus an understandable outgrowth of the ugliness of prewar European antisemitism. But the response to that ugliness has produced another ugliness. Here I follow Arendt who warned us of this in 1948. Maybe it was inevitable, maybe not. But that’s what has transpired, against the efforts of many truly heroic detractors, then, and now. Zionism had its time; it did its work; now it can be set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past.
Magid’s thought project was to look beyond Zionism. He draws heavily from Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, הרב שג”ר [HaRav] Shagar, a postmodernist Torah scholar and intellectual who originally followed Abraham Isaac Kook. Though never progressive in a political sense, Shagar had a lot of influence within both religious Zionist and even liberal Zionist circles. Kook’s teachings were not broad enough for Shagar to reconcile with the reality he lived. Zionism’s political and religious limitations were increasingly clear and Shagar began to conceive of a next step in a redemption of the land that superseded cruel domination with a multicultural democracy. Shagar’s writings also emphasize the return to the cultural and religious wealth of a bygone age of Hasidism that became a repository for many of the Jewish values that Zionism has dismissed.
In a chapter called “Exile in the Land” Magid invokes Shagar and others, turning toward Jewish identity and the moral values that existed in exile and diaspora for hundreds of years after biblical Israel’s short 125-year run. For Magid the state is superfluous. He reminds us that many of the early Zionists specifically envisioned a mere Jewish homeland and some specifically warned against a state for both political and religious reasons.
There are those ultra-Orthodox Jews and non-Orthodox Jews such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig who were against the state for this very reason. They held that the authentic Jew is the exilic Jew and thus they rejected the construction of Jewishness as connected to history and politics. The answer to their critique is that the establishment of the state is not a rejection of exile but rather a dialectical move, even a Hegelian one, that redirects exile into the state itself and thereby elevates it to its next phase, the phase of the political, to a state of justice and compassion.
Shagar viewed the positive and constructive notion of exile as a humbling force that enabled Jews to develop a deeply empathetic and ethical posture toward the world and toward themselves. He recognized the hazards of sovereignty as that which could erase both a relationship to the Divine and a sense of humanism toward the “other.” Here, we see again the notion of “substitution,” which Shagar describes in this context as a turn from a belief in God to a belief in the IDF, as a kind of inversion of the “substitution” of Nahman’s messianic vision. It reminds one of Golda Meir’s famous line as recounted by Hannah Arendt: “As a Socialist, I do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.”
Books like Magid’s are important for Jews at a time when the moral failures and crimes of Zionism have been so well documented, and they follow decades of political critique of Zionism as the anachronism and abomination that it is.
Neither peace in the Middle East nor Judaism can survive Zionism. A different Israel is possible and an authentic Judaism freed of racist nationalism is also possible. A growing number of Jews know it and are working to repair the world that Zionism risks destroying.
Joe Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s uncritical support for Israel’s war on Gaza will probably cost them the next election. Growing support for third party candidates will also do Biden no favors. Just as the Democrats are taking it on the chin, a broad coalition of well-organized and well-financed far-right and Christian Nationalist organizations have announced a national “reorg” of the judiciary, the Presidency, the civil service, and they have their sights set on far-reaching legislative changes.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47 both represent nothing less than an ambitious, detailed neofascist plan to jettison what’s left of America’s secular democracy and replace it with authoritarian rule and Christian Nationalism.
But if Democrats can’t hold the Presidency, then the damage to American democracy, such as it is, will have come from a party that has failed to capture the confidence of voters and has also managed to alienate even its own members.
Completely divorced from issues of his age, mental fitness and electability, a significant number of Democratic voters are furious that Joe Biden, who describes himself at every opportunity as a Zionist, has been complicit in a deliberate genocide that has moved from destroying an entire population’s housing and slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, to harrying millions of people all over their open-air concentration camp, to now starving them to death and blocking food and supplies from reaching them.
Channeling outrage among Democrats of conscience, and with no Democratic candidates courageous enough to reject unconditional support for Israel, “Uncommitted” campaigns were organized in several states to use the Democratic primaries themselves to register protest. In Hawaii, over 29% of Democrats voted “Uncommitted” in the presidential primary. In Minnesota that number was almost 19%, in Michigan, 13%. Here in Massachusetts 9.4% of Democrats voted “Uncommitted” to North Carolina’s 12.7%, Colorado’s 8.1%, and Tennessee’s 7.9%.
Even with No Labels still trying to recruit a presidential candidate, there are still plenty of third party challengers: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Green Party’s Jill Stein, Cornel West, a slew of Libertarians who will select a candidate at their May convention, Claudia de la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Joseph Kishore of the Socialist Equity Party, to name a few.
There is something for almost every political taste — and all taste better than the featured entrees of a fascist and an accomplice to genocide.
As both major parties continue to lose faith with the electorate, the percentage of people voting third party has been steadily increasing. In 2012 1% of the popular vote went to the Libertarians and 0.4% to the Green Party. In 2016 the Libertarians received 3.28% of the vote and the Greens 1.07%. In 2024, based on an average of several polls, RFK Jr. would receive 12.4% of the vote, Cornel West 2.4%, and Jill Stein 1.8%.
If you listen to Republicans, America is at a crossroads for white privilege and white domination; only by reinforcing white Christian domination can the nation be saved from Marxists, atheists, diversity programs, and trans children. And if you listen to Democrats, America is at a crossroads for democratic ideals that have only been available to some Americans and never to those of the many nations Democratic presidents have invaded or destroyed.
While I would prefer to not have Project 2025 or Jesus jammed down my throat during a second Trump presidency, I’m no longer convinced that Democrats (like their GOP brethren) really care about, or can convincingly defend, American democracy. I’m also not convinced that American democracy and freedoms are any more important than everyone’s right to a democracy or freedom. Joe Biden’s administration advocates imposing an unelected government on Palestinians, who will remain under Israel’s yoke, as he continues to sell weapons to some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
If I vote for American democracy and thumb my nose at everyone else’s — as the Democratic Party chides me I must — how is this any different from what MAGA Republicans are asking of America? Aren’t we in this mess because too many politicians have exhibited moral cowardice and hypocrisy while pursuing political expediency and money? And are we really obliged to reward them with our votes?
Nope.
In my next post I’ll look at Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47.
The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens by Richard N. Haas ISBN: 9780525560654
For starters, it helps to know who Richard Haas really is. Read this. Haas characterizes himself as apolitical but he is an ideological dinosaur who was hatched in the Cold War and went on to support every manner of US intervention, most notably in Iraq. His love of democracy, if he really has one, certainly doesn’t extend beyond US borders. He bemoans diminished US influence, wants to promote a type of democracy that can stand up to Chinese intervention (even mockery) and be an example for the world to emulate. Who says the United States should aim to foist its own overripe democracy on the world? Haas goes on to talk about how the executive branch has assumed war powers from Congress but as a neoconservative he himself took full advantage of it
Haas writes, “Americans are required to observe the law, pay taxes, serve on juries, and respond to a military draft, if there is one.” Right. Just like Bone Spur Trump. Haas downplays the fact that the rights of the highest and lowest in America are vastly different. Even our obligations are different. Shouldn’t we fix this rather than making appeals to citizenship and nostalgia? Haas provides numerous examples that show how the Constitution is deformed and has led to virtually every democratic crisis in our history, but despite his own knowledge of all this, his book is about citizenship. Haas’s thesis is constructed by completely rejecting the structural inequalities and defects in law and society as primary threats to a healthy democracy. This is a sneaky little book for Liberals who want to listen to MAGA bedtime stories.
Haas tells us that fixing voting rights, making election day a holiday, making it easier to vote, eliminating barriers to voting, regulating social media, getting rid of dark money in political campaigns, offering open primaries, ending the filibuster, expanding the court, eliminating income inequality, improving education, introducing paid family leave, offering free college, student loan forgiveness, tax reform, and immigration reform – none of these things are going to do anything to fix our democracy. “This is where obligations come in: American democracy will work, and reform will prove possible only if obligations join rights at centerstage.” This is exactly the same”pull yourself up by your bootstrap, there is no racism in America” magical bullshit that MAGA America loves to sip on. In reality, we need massive structural reforms, if not a complete do-over, and then we can talk about citizenship – within a completely new context.
Haas’s 10 obligations are intended to be uncontroversial, appeal to patriotic emotion, and invoke an America of 50 years ago. But, given the state of our democracy, and the fact that we are 2 minutes to midnight before a new Fort Sumter, almost all of Haas’s prescriptions require copious caveats and exceptions:
(1) Be informed: OK; (2) Get involved: Americans waste a lot of time trying to get little single-focus groups to do something when their political institutions should be leading the charge. So get involved in what?; (3) Stay open to compromise: Within reason, but what ever happened to sticking to your guns? The last debt ceiling impasse revealed that Democrats’ idea of compromise was rolling over and sacrificing Black people; (4) Remain civil: Civility is vastly overrated. Civility is what liberals demand of those who (rudely or not) speak justice to power; (5) Reject violence: This is a strange appeal given that Haas’s necon buddies killed a million people in Iraq. And if America ends up fascist, it will be the obligation of every American to fight it; (6) Value norms: We ought to question what the norms are. Racism and American exceptionalism are norms and I don’t want any part of them; (7) Promote the common good: Fine; (8) Respect government service: This asks too much when the levers of government are usually tilted against the poor, those of color, and non-citizens – especially if those service employees are in the military, jails, border patrol, or police or work in an unjust legal system; (9) Support the teaching of civics: Not if the civics taught was concocted at Hillsdale College or promotes flag-waving neoliberalism; (10) Put country first: Why not an internationalist outlook?
This is a book that both Democratic Neoliberals and MAGA Conservatives can read because, without either caring to admit it, they share many of the same values.
Although Joseph Robinette Biden, like Donald John Trump, has already been crowned by his party as “the only Presidential candidate who can win,” there are other choices. Not great choices, admittedly, but choices nevertheless.
On March 5th Massachusetts voters will be presented with a ballot with three Democratic Presidential candidates to choose from. If we apply the “lesser evil” principle to these choices — as the Democratic Party insists we must in the general election — then it becomes a choice between Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, Biden having disqualified himself by supporting the world’s best-documented genocide.
Let’s consider the candidates in order of their appearance on the 2024 Primary ballot.
Dean Phillips
2024 will be the first Presidential try for Dean Phillips, 54, a Minnesota congressman who made his fortune by inheriting his family’s liquor business and buying Talenti Gelato and Penny’s Coffee.
Phillips has called for Joe Biden to step down. “I would like to see Joe Biden, a wonderful and remarkable man, pass the torch, cement this extraordinary legacy,” Phillips told NBC’s Meet the Press. Phillips worries about Biden’s age: “God forbid the president has a health episode or something happens in the middle of a primary,” he told the Washington Post.
Phillips is a right-of-centrist Democrat who has been endorsed by Andrew Yang, who left the Democratic Party to start his own “Forward” party with former GOP officials. Phillips is a leading member of the Problem Solver’s Caucus, which spun off the No Labels party.
Phillips, like our own MA-CD9 representative Bill Keating, serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has voted with Joe Biden 100% of the time. Voters can reasonably expect only minor deviations from Biden’s ruinous environmental, foreign policy, militaristic, and immigration policies. Interestingly, as an undergraduate Phillips interned with Senator Patrick Leahy, for whom the Leahy laws are named (these prohibit the transfer of weapons to countries like Israel that commit human rights abuses).
Shamelessly pandering to the Far Right, Phillips expunged all references to DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusivity”) from his campaign website. Phillips, who is Jewish, has accused progressive Democrats of “antisemitism” in regard to Israel. But Phillips laudably also defended Ilhan Omar after Republicans removed her from the Foreign Affairs Committee and has denounced Israel’s carnage in Gaza, calling for an “immediate and mutual ceasefire of large-scale military operations and indiscriminate terror” to be upheld by both sides.
Joe Biden
Biden is a complete non-starter in my view. It’s not merely that Biden is too old; it’s that his policies, like the man himself, are from an era that celebrated America as a global hegemon. Biden’s militarism and foreign policy are dangerous, expensive, and immoral. His policies on immigration, the environment, and his inaction and lack of support of numerous human rights and democratic reforms are inexcusable. Most importantly, Biden is complicit in and actively supporting a genocide, and this is a red line that no one can ignore.
Marianne Williamson
2024 will be Marianne Williamson’s second shot at the Presidency. Williamson, 72, is a motivational speaker who got her start as spiritual leader of the Church of Today. She bristles at being called a “New Age guru” but if the shoe fits…. Williamson has written a slew of self-help books, including a best-seller promoted by Oprah Winfrey, who claimed that she had received 157 miracles after reading Williamson’s book. Williamson has also been a cabaret singer, bookstore owner, and coffee shop owner. She lived in a geodesic dome for a year.
Williamson was raised in the Jewish Conservative tradition but has long identified as a Christian, lecturing at Episcopal, Methodist and Unitarian churches. She explained her dual religious identity, telling Vanity Fair, “A conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity. It is a conversion to a conviction of the heart.”
Williamson’s platform calls for an end to the War on Drugs, a federal minimum wage, reparations for racial injustice, the establishment of a U.S. Department of Peace, and serious efforts to address poverty.
Let’s begin with an unpleasant but glaring truth – nobody is going to easily “flip” Bill Keating’s seat.
As the following political profile shows, William R. (“Bill”) Keating has solid numbers at the voting booth, and his centrist positions are exactly what voters in Massachusetts’s oldest, whitest, less-educated, military-friendly Congressional district appear to want. As a long-time member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Keating is a major beneficiary of the defense industry’s largesse, but he receives far greater support from organized labor. It’s not clear how the union money spigot could be shut off, but this is the thing that would hurt him the most.
Congressional District 9
Massachusetts Congressional District 9 is older and whiter than most of Massachusetts. The median age is 47.3 (20% higher than both US and MA averages) but the mean is 60-69. Likewise, 83% of the district is white (43% higher than the national average and 13% higher than the state average). CD9 is in fact one of the whitest parts of the state. 9.8% of the District is foreign-born, half the rate in the rest of Massachusetts and two-thirds the rate in the US. 6.4% of the population of CD9 are veterans, 1.5 times the rest of Massachusetts and only slightly higher than the national average. 43.3% of the District has a college degree. This is 20% higher than the national average but 10% less than the state average.
Keating’s background
William R. Keating was born in Norwood, Norfolk County, Massachusetts on September 6, 1952. Keating received his B.A. from Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. in 1974, an M.B.A. from Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. in 1982, and his J.D. from Suffolk University, Boston, Mass. in 1985. After passing the bar Keating went to work for the law firm Keating & Fishman. Keating was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1977-1984, having been elected at the ripe old age of 24. He has been a career politican literally his entire adult life.
After Joseph Timility resigned from the state Senate, Keating won his seat, remaining in the state Senate from 1985-1998. Keating ran on a tough anti-crime platform. He also joined the Joint Public Safety Committee, where he wrote a drug sentencing “reform” package which lowered thresholds for possession “with intent to distribute.” Keating’s legislation was pilloried for being both unncessarily draconian and vague. But his voters loved it.
Keating then advanced his political careerism as Norfolk County, Mass. District Attorney from 1998-2010. Upon taking his oath of office, a third of the Norfolk DA staff either resigned or was fired. He served two terms as DA.
In 2011 Keating was elected as a Democrat to U.S. Congress, where he remains today. He is considered a typical “Massachusetts liberal” and in the 118th Congress Keating voted with President Joe Biden 100% of the time. Keating’s 2022 election cost him $1.36 million and he won 59.2% of the vote, beating Republican challenger Jesse Brown. Keating enjoys donor support from not only defense contractors who benefit from his votes in Congress, but receives support from numerous Massachusetts unions.
In the current (119th) Congress, Keating has sponsored a number of bills and resolutions, many related to Russia and Ukraine. See Keating’s full list of sponsored legislation at the end of this report.
Democracy and Transparency
Despite the tremendous amount of money now being spent on elections at all levels and ballot questions in 2012 and 2014 which showed over 70% of Massachusetts voters supporting a Constitutional amendment to restrict rights to natural persons and to take money out of elections, Keating was not a co-sponsor of H.J.Res.48, which would have addressed “Citizens United.”
Other members of the Massachusetts Congressional Delegation — JIm McGovern and even Seth Moulton — co-signed Representatives Bill Pascrell and Debbie Dingell’s letter urging the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to ensure that the NAFTA renegotiation process remains open and transparent. Bill Keating did not.
Health Care
One hundred and sixteen Democrats co-sponsored H.R.676, John Conyers’ Medicare for All Act. Keating was not one of them.
Keating has not endorsed any other public healthcare option.
Worker’s Rights
Keating did not support Worker Rights: H.R.15 – Raise the Wage Act.
Women’s Rights
The Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH Woman) Act of 2017, H.R.771, sought to defend a woman’s right to choose. Keating did not support it.
Former DNC chair Tom Perez and former DCCC chair Ray Lujan, as well as some in the New Democrat Coalition, of which Keating and Seth Moulton are members, argue for “flexibility” on abortion and against abortion as a litmus test.
Education
Twenty-seven Democrats co-sponsored H.R.1880, the College for All Act. Keating was not one of them.
Taxation
The Inclusive Prosperity Act, H.R. 1144, a Wall Street Speculation fee, is a fraction of a percent tax on stocks, bonds, and financial derivatives that can be used to fund public university tuition and would be offset by tax credits. Keating did not support this.
Consumer
Keating voted YEA with Blue Dog Democrats on H.R. 3192, a Republican bill which reduces transparency for mortgage lending institutions. This bill was a hit with the American Bankers Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Home Builders lobby, but it prohibited consumers from suing mortgage lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau disclosure requirements under the Truth in Lending Act. Keating doesn’t believe in amnesty for immigrants. Why then an amnesty for mortgage lenders?
Keating also voted YEA with conservative Democrats on H.R. 1737, a Republican bill which neutered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s oversight of Indirect Auto Lending and Compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Keating and a minority of House Democrats broke with his own party to vote for Republican sponsored H.R.1737, the Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act. This bill prohibited consumers – particularly minorities – from suing auto lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules against discrimination in lending. The bill takes the unusual step of preventing disclosures of violations with Freedom of Information Act requests. The NAACP, the Urban League, La Raza, the Consumers Union, and many others, were opposed.
Immigration
Keating is a hard-liner on immigration. From “On the Issues”: “Bill Keating opposes amnesty. As a District Attorney, Bill Keating enforces our laws and believes that everyone must obey them. His office has prosecuted thousands of criminal cases that resulted in defendants being detained for immigration and deportation action. Bill believes that we must secure our borders, and wants to punish and stop corporations that hire workers here illegally. Bill does not support giving people who are here illegally access to state and federal benefits.”
Keating and five other Democrats voted for H.R. 3009, the “Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act,” a Republican bill to withhold funding for states and municipalities with “sanctuary” policies.
Keating and Blue Dog Democrats voted for H.R. 4038, the “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015.” The Republican bill added additional obstacles to the already-onerous screening and vetting of Syrian refugees.
Keating voted YEA on H.R. 3004, “Kate’s Law,” a Republican bill which expands indefinite detention of migrants who repeatedly cross the border. The bill will do nothing to prevent future actions by desperate people but it will increase the number of private prisons in the United States.
During the January Shutdown, only Keating and Stephen Lynch voted for a stopgap spending bill that kept the military happy but threw Dreamers under the bus. The other seven Massachusetts congressman and both U.S. senators voted against it.
Civil Liberties
Keating is no friend of the Fourth Amendment and gets only middling ratings: “Keating supported ‘cybersecurity’ legislation, and opposed defunding the government’s Section 702 surveillance programs (PRISM and Upstream); however, he supports banning backdoor searches on US persons.
Keating voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which reformed the small amount of government surveillance that occurs under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and continued to support it even after its reforms were watered down to the point where there was much debate about whether it would do more harm than good to pass it.”
The Justice is Not for Sale Act, H.R.3227, places restrictions on private prisons. At a time Republicans are trying to re-institute discredited justice and prison practices, and pushing privatization, including prisons, schools, and even the war in Afghanistan, Keating did not support this.
Voting Rights
The Automatic Voter Registration Act, H.R. 2840, would make voter registration easier and automatic. Keating did not support this.
Foreign Policy
Politically, Keating is liberal on some domestic issues. However, when it comes to foreign policy, Keating is a pro-NATO, “anti-terror” war hawk who voted to expand both the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Keating has worked on providing Ukraine with more weapons and on legislation to sanction Russia and Russian parliamentarians. He has lobbied the EU to have Iran classified as a sponsor of state terror and advocated imposing additional sanctions on it. When Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, Keating told Radio Boston it was indeed a US “escalation” but no one was going to mourn the death of a war criminal.
In keeping with Keating’s across-the-aisle militarism and adventurism, he signed a resolution sponsored by far-right Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in behalf of the Falun Gong, which claimed that Chinese political prisoners from the religious community were having their organs harvested by China. These claims were debunked by the Washington Post and denied by lawyers from the Falun Gong itself.
Keating’s Foreign Policy webpage describes him as a “staunch advocate of human rights and freedom of expression and press.”
Militarism and Foreign Policy
Keating voted NAY on a resolution to bar President Obama from using an AUMF to invade Libya. The resolution would have required Congress to declare war — per the U.S. Constitution. Keating did, however, vote YEA on ending the war in Afghanistan.
Keating was reluctant to support Obama’s and Kerry’s Iran deal (though he was critical of Trump for backing out of it) and has courted the MEK, an exile group which until 2012 was designated a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow and replace the Iranian government with its own “government-in-exile.” Republican and Democratic hawks managed to lift the designation.
Keating is pro-Israel. He has fought international efforts to support a Two State Solution, advocated moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, opposed the use of the word “Palestine” and threatened to cut off U.S. contributions to the U.N. and funding for U.N. refugee efforts because of the international body’s criticism of Israel’s land theft and occupation.
Keating, along with Democratic hawks, sent a letter to Rex Tillerson affirming their support for Trump’s policies on NATO and for Tillerson’s office. Keating shares Republicans’ view that NATO needs to be stronger to oppose Russia and joined Democratic war hawks in passing legislation to prevent a US President from leaving NATO.
Bombing
When President Donald Trump sent 50 Tomahawk missles into Syria on April 6th, 2017, the top five American newspapers ran 18 editorials praising the attack. There was not a single criticism. Sending a barrage of missiles into another nation is without question an act of war. The War Powers Act requires the President to report to Congress within 48 hours of initiating “hostilities.” Defense hawk and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Trump’s attack and urged him to take out Assad’s airfields.
By bombing Syria, CNN’s Farid Zakaria said, Donald Trump had finally “become president.” MSNBC’s Brian Williams called the missiles flying off to do their lethal work “beautiful.” For the most part Democrats didn’t even bother to question whether the Syrian government deserved the attack. The Liberal Atlantic Monthly ran a piece titled Why America Should have Hit Assad Four Years Ago. Keating hopped on the militarist bandwagon, cheering Trump’s deployment of the Raytheon tomahawk missiles, which was in violation of both the AUMF and the U.S. Constitution.
Israel-Palestine
After October 7th, Keating condemned Hamas’s “senseless terrorist attacks” and promised Israel that America had its back. He pooh-poohed any dissention among Democrats over President Biden’s immediate military aid, telling the Boston Globe that the “vast majority” of Democrats support Joe Biden’s stance on helping Israel bomb Gaza.
Rep. Keating has rarely sponsored legislation with the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” in it. Only one of his resolutions, H.Res.872, which appears to have been authored by the ADL, refers to contemporary Israel. Two other co-sponsored bills commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which Jews built bunkers, smuggled in weapons, and fought the Nazis who had locked them into a section of Warsaw turned into a concentration camp. Otherwise Keating is focused on Europe, particularly Russia and Ukraine.
Donors
Much of Keating’s support comes from organized labor since his domestic policies are much more liberal than his foreign policies. However, ignoring what goes on in the rest of the world, organized labor views the Democratic Party as a partner in transactional politics. This philosophy may be changing, but the union movement is still quite conservative overall.
OpenSecrets tracks Congressional donors. Of the thousands of donors to Keating’s campaigns between 2015 and 202, two defense contractors appear in hi top 20 donors – BAE Systems and Raytheon. Two pro-Israel lobby groups also show up – JStreet and AIPAC. Both AIPAC and BAE are tied for fourth place, along with a number of unions.
Rank
Contributor
Total
Indivs
Pacs
1
Democracy Engine
$15,500.00
$15,500.00
$0.00
2
Thornton Law Firm
$12,600.00
$12,600.00
$0.00
3
JStreetPAC
$10,600.00
$8,100.00
$2,500.00
4
American Federation of State/Cnty/Munic Employees
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
American Israel Public Affairs Cmte
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
BAE Systems
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
Laborers Union
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
Nelson, Mullins et al
$10,000.00
$2,000.00
$8,000.00
4
Operating Engineers Union
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
Plumbers/Pipefitters Union
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
Teamsters Union
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
4
United Parcel Service
$10,000.00
$0.00
$10,000.00
13
National Assn of Realtors
$8,000.00
$0.00
$8,000.00
14
Cape Cod Healthcare
$7,950.00
$7,950.00
$0.00
15
American Crystal Sugar
$7,500.00
$0.00
$7,500.00
15
American Federation of Teachers
$7,500.00
$0.00
$7,500.00
15
National Beer Wholesalers Assn
$7,500.00
$0.00
$7,500.00
15
Raytheon Technologies
$7,500.00
$0.00
$7,500.00
15
Sheet Metal, Air, Rail & Transportation Union
$7,500.00
$0.00
$7,500.00
15
United Food & Commercial Workers Union
$7,500.00
$0.00
$7,500.00
According to the Federal Election Commission, which tracks the details of each donation, Keating took money from defense contractors BAE, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, L3 Harris, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, OSI Systems, and RTX/Raytheon. This the total haul from these defense contractors and also the Israel Lobby:
Donor
Amount
AIPAC
$22,900
JStreet
$4,000
BAE
$100,500
Boeing
$44,000
General Dynamics
$86,000
General Electric
$27,000
L3 Harris
$1,000
Lockheed-Martin
$326,000
Northrop Grumman
$178,000
OSI Systems
$2,000
RTX / Raytheon
$178,000
TOTAL
$969,400
The American Friends Service Committee’ Investigate project has researched the role of each in either the carpet bombing of Gaza or corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation and Apartheid system.
The world’s seventh largest weapons manufacturer, UK company BAE Systems manufactures the M109 howitzer, a 155mm mobile artillery system that the Israeli military has been using extensively, firing tens of thousands of 155mm shells into the Gaza Strip. Some of these shells are white phosphorus bombs, the use of which is forbidden in densely populated civilian areas and potentially amounts to a war crime. BAE also manufactures electronic missile launching kits and other components for Israel’s F-15, F-16, and F-35 fighter jets, which the Israeli Air Force has used extensively in all of its attacks on Gaza, including in 2023. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments) see our company profile on the Investigate database.
The world’s fifth largest weapons manufacturer, Boeing manufactures F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, which the Israeli Air Force has used extensively in all of its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, including in 2023. Boeing also manufactures multiple types of unguided small diameter bombs (SDBs) and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, which convert these bombs into precision-guided munitions. Israel has been using these bombs extensively, including in a Nov. 1 bombing of Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, which killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and could amount to a war crime, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. On Oct. 10 and 22, the Israeli military used bombs equipped with Boeing JDAM kits to carry out what Amnesty International calls “unlawful air strikes on homes full of civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip.” The attacks, which could amount to a war crime, killed 24 people of the al-Najjar family and 19 people of the Abu Mu’eileq family. Immediately after Oct. 7, Boeing expedited delivery of 1,000 smart bombs, and another 1,800 JDAM kits, to Israel. Both deliveries were part of a 2021 order that Israel made during its previous large-scale attack on Gaza. Headquartered in Chicago, the company has important production facilities outside of Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Louis. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
The world’s sixth largest weapons manufacturer, General Dynamics, supplies Israel with artillery ammunition and bombs for attack jets used in Israel’s assault on Gaza. The company developed the F-16 fighter jet, although it has been manufactured by Lockheed Martin since 1993. General Dynamics is the only company in the U.S. that makes the metal bodies of the MK-80 bomb series, the primary weapon type Israel uses to bomb Gaza. The bodies of the bombs are filled with explosives by the U.S. military, and then can be made into a guided bomb using Boeing‘s JDAM kits. It is also the only company in the U.S. that makes 155mm caliber artillery shells, which have been used extensively to attack Gaza. One source reported that, by Nov. 25, one Israeli brigade fired some 10,000 such shells using BAE’s M109 howitzer. 155mm shellshave been part of the U.S.’s recent weapons shipments to Israel. The U.S. is planning to send “tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells that had been destined for Ukraine” to Israel. Their use by Israel, according to Oxfam, is “virtually assured to be indiscriminate, unlawful, and devastating to civilians in Gaza.” On Nov. 13, more than 30 organizations issued a letter opposing the transfer. General Dynamics also partnered with Flyer Defense (see above) to develop an armored patrol vehicle that Israel is testing. On an Oct. 25 call with investors, General Dynamics CFO, Jason Aiken, said, “I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of [the attacks on Gaza], the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.” General Dynamics is based outside of Washington, D.C., in Fairfax, Virginia. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
The world’s 25th largest weapons manufacturer, General Electricmanufactures T700 Turboshaft engines for Boeing‘s Apache helicopters. GE is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
The world’s ninth largest weapons manufacturer, L3Harris manufactures components that are integrated into multiple weapons systems used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including Boeing‘s JDAM kits (see above), Lockheed Martin‘s F-35 warplane (see below), Northrop Grumman‘s Sa’ar 5 warships (see below), ThyssenKrupp’s Sa’ar 6 warships (see below), and Israel’s Merkava battle tanks. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
The world’s largest weapons manufacturer, Lockheed Martin supplies Israel with F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has been using extensively to bomb Gaza. Israel also uses the company’s C-130 Hercules transport planes to support the ground invasion of Gaza. Lockheed Martin manufactures AGM-114 Hellfire missiles for Israel’s Apache helicopters. One of the main weapon types used in aerial attacks on Gaza, these missiles have been used extensively in 2023. Some 2,000 Hellfire missiles were delivered to Israel sometime between Oct. 7 and Nov. 14. On Dec. 28, Lockheed Martin was awarded a $10.5 million contract for continued support for Israel’s fleet of F-35 warplanes. On Dec. 11, the Israeli Air Force used a Lockheed Martin C-130-J Super Hercules aircraft to drop approximately seven tons of equipment to Israeli soldiers engaging in ground attacks in Khan Younis, located in the southern Gaza Strip. This was the “first operational airdrop” that Israel has carried out since the 2006 Lebanon War. On Nov. 9, an Israeli missile hit journalists sitting near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The missile was reportedly a Lockheed Martin–made Hellfire R9X missile, a version of the Hellfire that was developed by the CIA for carrying out assassinations. Instead of exploding, the missile shreds its target using blades, allowing for a direct hit without collateral damage. The target in this case was not a military one. The Israeli military also uses Lockheed Martin’s M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). Used to fire Elbit Systems‘ high-precision AccuLAR-122, the weapon was used by Israel for the first time, since the 2006 war in Lebanon, on Oct. 6, according to the Israeli military. On an Oct. 17 call with investors, Lockheed Martin CEO, Jim Taiclet, “highlighted the Israel and Ukraine conflicts as potential drivers for increased revenue in the coming years.” Lockheed Martin is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, and has key production sites in Denver, Houston, New Orleans, and San Diego. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
The world’s sixth largest weapons manufacturer, Northrop Grumman supplies the Israeli Air Force with the Longbow missile delivery system for its Apache attack helicopters and laser weapon delivery systems for its fighter jets. It has also supplied the Israeli Navy with Sa’ar 5 warships, which have participated in the assault on Gaza. On Dec. 15, Northrop Grumman was awarded an $8.9 million contract for 30mm MK44 Stretch cannons for the Israeli military, funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money. The weapons will be manufactured in Mesa, Arizona, with an expected completion date of March 2025. Israel uses these guns on its Namer Armored Personnel Carrier, which has been used extensively in Gaza. Northrop Grumman is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, and its most important production sites are located in and around Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Diego. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
Israel has installed OSI scanners in several of its illegal military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to Who Profits, as of 2020, Rapiscan scanning machines and full body scanners are installed at three military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, as well as at the entrance to the Western Wall area in occupied East Jerusalem. This equipment is provided through OSI’s exclusive representative in Israel, G1 Secure Solutions (formerly G4S Israel).
In addition, since 2016, Rapiscan metal detectors have been installed at 10 offices operated by the District Coordination and Liaison Offices (DCO), a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense that administers the civilian aspects of the military occupation of the West Bank, such as issuing travel permits to Palestinians.The world’s second largest weapons manufacturer and largest producer of guided missiles, RTX supplies the Israeli Air Force with guided air-to-surface missiles for its F-16 fighter jets, as well as cluster bombs and bunker busters, which have consistently been used against Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure. RTX subsidiary Pratt & Whitney manufactures engines for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. As part of a joint venture with Israeli state-owned weapons manufacturer Rafael, RTX makes interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, which have been part of the U.S.’s recent weapons shipments to Israel. On an Oct. 24 call with investors, RTX CEO, Greg Hayes, said, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking.” RTX moved is headquarters from Waltham, Massachusetts to Arlington, Virginia in 2022. For more locations, see this map. For more information on this company (not including these latest developments), see our company profile on the Investigate database.
Like Keating’s donations from unions, he has received money from the Human Rights Campaign PAC, a group with an LGBTQ+ focus, and NARAL PAC, which has a reproductive rights focus. And like the Democratic Party, the center of gravity for both unions and liberal causes, many progressive organizations apparently can’t see beyond the borders of the United States.
Israel Lobby
According to OpenSecrets Keating has received a total of $26,395 from pro-Israel lobbies (mainly AIPAC and JStreet) since entering Congress. For context, the average of 1404 (past and present Congressional) lifetime Israel lobby donations is a shocking $93,450. On average, Massachusetts Congresspeople received average lifetime totals of $51,740.
As things go, Keating is hardly the worst offender. The suprise in the numbers is now-Senator Ed Markey. As a Representative he received considerable money from AIPAC.
Massachusetts Representative
Total pro-Israel receipts
Auchincloss, Jake
$261,761
Clark, Katherine
$230,549
Markey, Ed
$137,171
Kennedy, Joe III
$97,067
Neal, Richard E
$84,300
Moulton, Seth
$61,636
McGovern, James P
$56,725
Trahan, Lori
$41,688
Capuano, Michael E
$27,500
Frank, Barney
$27,324
Kennedy, Joseph P II
$26,600
Keating, Bill
$26,395
Olver, John W
$21,250
Tsongas, Niki
$14,200
Blute, Peter (Republican)
$9,000
Conte, Silvio (Republican)
$5,000
Moakley Joe
$3,050
Mavroules, Nicholas
$2,550
Tierney, John F
$2,000
Atkins, Chester Greenough
$1,500
Studds, Gerry E
$1,000
Pressley, Ayanna
$5
Average
$51,740
Organized Labor
In terms of the scope of Keating’s donations from unions, the FEC database is the place to look. If Keating has one obvious vulnerability it is the uncritical support he receives from organized labor.
Keating’s Personal Investments
In October 2023 RAWStory investigators Dave Levinthal and Alexandria Jacobson published an article, “Busted: Dem lawmaker with military oversight is playing the market with a military supplier.” The Democratic lawmaker was William R. Keating and the defense contractor was Boeing.
In a House financial disclosure filed the previous month, Keating reported he had purchased up to $50,000 of stocks in Boeing and $848.75 in Caterpillar. Boeing manufactures the Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that have been used extensively in Gaza, while Caterpillar notoriously and in flagrant violation of international law provides demolition equipment used to destroy Palestinian homes and infrastructure. Readers may recall that Rachel Corrie was a US activist who was crushed to death by a militarized Caterpillar D9 bulldozer in 2003 when she attempted to block the destruction of a Palestinian home with people still inside it.
When asked about Keating’s investments, a spokesperson said that they “do not influence the congressman’s policy positions.” But Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University, described Keating’s investments as a “raging conflict of interest.”
Legislation
Keating has either sponsored or co-sponsored the following legislation throughout his time in Congress:
I am one of those voters who cares more about foreign policy than making Wall Street great again. Don’t try to sell me Bidenomics when the president hired a war criminal, sent cluster munitions to the Ukraine, fist-bumped a Saudi prince who had an American journalist hacked into pieces, gave Indian fascist Narendra Modi a bear hug, gave the same to Israel’s fascist Prime Minister, and twice bypassed Congress to provide military aid for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
In case you hadn’t noticed: Donald Trump does not have a monopoly on presidential depravity.
This week Biden thumbed his nose at that pesky Constitutional requirement to consult with Congress on US military operations in Yemen, and he has expanded the military budget to obscene levels in order to prepare for a war with China that his own disastrous foreign policy is making much more likely.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has decided that in a nation of 330 million people there is only one old white guy capable of winning the Presidency. They can’t sell Biden on either charisma or policy, so all they do is shriek about Trump while furiously waving their Bidenomics PowerPoints.
Democrats tell us the danger to America is a war-mongering fascist when their guy is waging wars at an unprecedented pace and defending fascism abroad. Democrats tell us we need Biden to fight creeping American religious nationalism even though Biden himself defends a similar variant and even identifies with it.
With approval ratings in the toilet, Biden is barely acceptable to mainstream white Democrats. But if you ask 83% of Arab-Americans who they’re going to vote for, it’s anyone other than Joe Biden. Similarly, if you ask young voters, 70% disapprove of his support for Israel’s genocidal war. Biden began his presidency with a generous 86% approval rating from Black voters but today that number has declined by 23%. Likewise Biden’s numbers among Hispanic voters have shrunk almost 30% from an initial 72% approval rating to about 42% today.
A Gallup poll this week showed that the damage Biden has done to his approval ratings are not confined to himself. Biden’s losses have translated into losses for the Democratic Party as a whole:
“Democratic identification has now declined by one point in each of the past three years. These declines, and the new low registered in 2023, are likely tied to President Joe Biden’s unpopularity.”
It’s not just Biden’s war-mongering that rankles some of us. Leaving aside Biden’s disgraceful history of racist legislation, fighting desegregation, and demeaning Anita Hill while greasing Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Biden’s lukewarm support for reproductive rights, his refusal to enlarge the Supreme Court, his lack of concern for the environment (including actual expansion of oil drilling), the ease with which Biden threw the poor under the bus during debt ceiling negotiations, and his shameful capitulations to the Far Right over immigration – all point to a man who, as his age might suggest, is living in an alternate reality of the 1980’s when Corvettes ruled the roads and White Men ruled the world.
You can go online and sign a petition to Step Aside, Joe – not that the DNC is ever going to listen to you. The Democratic Party is a private entity run by partially- or non-elected leadership. Biden’s name will be the only one on Democratic primary ballots in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and possibly Massachusetts. According to an article in POLITICO, Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin can simply add a candidate to the ballot as a figure “recognized by the national media” or may choose not to place them on the ballot “if their party doesn’t put their name forward.” Democracy, you say!
Regardless of how much liberal peer pressure and guilt-tripping is employed to make you assent to the coronation of a candidate complicit in genocide, you don’t owe Joe Biden or the DNC a thing. If the Democratic Party wants to win the Presidency in 2024, it needs another candidate. Plain and simple. But if the DNC sticks with Biden, his entirely predictable loss will have been completely self-inflicted.
I am an unapologetic anti-Zionist. I do not accept that a “chosen” people ought to have exclusive ownership over any chunk of the planet. No self-respecting omnipotent deity — if such even existed — would sign over real estate of a paltry seven or eight thousand square miles of land to a tiny number of people on a puny planet in a vast cosmos of trillions of possible worlds. Where’s the ambition in that?
Moreover, I do not accept that any privileged group has the right to lay claim to any part of the planet or its resources. Each of the many worlds in the universe belongs to all of the living creatures in it. This essential belief probably explains why I’m a socialist on top of my many other faults.
Last week, on one of my walks, I listened to a couple of episodes with Shaul Magid on Daniel Denvir’s podcast, “The Dig.” Magid has exceptional recall, insight and clarity into the nature and history of Zionism and the two episodes I listened to covered a lot of ground. They are an excellent, quick introduction for anyone interested in what Zionism is, and how it came about:
Besides being an historian, Magid is also a rabbi. Having listened to his dissections of Zionism in “The Dig”, for all those criticisms I don’t think I ever heard him actually repudiate Zionism. It may be relevant that he’s also a citizen of the state of Israel. And yet — Magid’s a sort of un-Zionist Zionist. One of a growing percentage of American Jews.
In one of the podcast episodes, Magid remarks how similar his thought is to Hannah Arendt’s and that he almost always has one of her books on his desk. Like Arendt, Magid wrestles with the many contradictions and malignancy of Zionism’s illiberal, racist supremacism and its inherent incompatibility with democracy. But what really bothers him is how limited Zionism is, and how much damage it has done to Judaism.
So it was perfect timing that a new book of Magid’s just appeared. Emily Tamkin’s review of Magid’s The Necessity of Exile in the Forward, a Zionist Jewish cultural magazine, describes it as a book to challenge Jews to imagine something new and different. Tamkin diplomatically describes Magid not as an anti-Zionist but as a “counter-Zionist” — which will nevertheless provoke strong antipathies from some of her readers.
In his podcasts, Magid makes the point that Zionism has to a great degree replaced or become a dangerous central tenet of Judaism. Early Zionists had little or no interest in religion, today many Israelis are secular, and if Jews in North America and elsewhere do not support Zionism they are not even acknowledged as being Jewish.
Magid cites the November 3rd essay in the Jerusalem Post (“No longer part of us”) in which anti-Zionist Jews are characterized as Hamas sympathizers or more “charitably” as the “wicked child” in the Passover Haggadah — as outsiders, as non-Jews. Break the Sabbath all you want, eat pork and shellfish, and marry outside the faith. But don’t question Zionism!
Judaism may be an ancient religion, but rabbinic Judaism, particularly the elaboration of religious, ethical and moral positions developed in the Talmud over centuries, is of more recent vintage and is the legacy of disaporic Jews. On the secular side, innumerable elements of Jewish culture, from Yiddish and Ladino, literature, theatre, Klezmer music, food, humor, and general Yiddishkayt, are likewise cultural products of the diaspora.
With all this richness, and with the manifest poverty of Zionism, Magid’s book seems to promise an exploration of how Jews can reclaim both the religion and the culture from the death grip of an ethno-nationalism that violates so many of Judaism’s ethical prohibitions.
While there have always been tensions between Judaism’s liberal and conservative sensibilities, the religion of Rabbinic Judaism and the culture that developed around it have at least preserved liberal elements not found in the Revisionist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, the religious Zionism of Bezalel Smotrich’s National Religious Party, or the Jewish supremacist Zionism of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power Party. For those who wax nostalgic for the defunct Labor or Meretz parties, their “kinder, gentler” version of Zionism was equally dedicated to ethnic cleansing and occupation as any of the recent extremist parties.
I reject the common view of older American Jews that Israel is an insurance policy, “the only safe place on earth for Jews.” If the last 75 years — and especially the last 75 days — have shown us anything, it’s how delusional this view is. Israel is neither a safe haven nor a light unto the nations. It is a profoundly screwed-up, repressive state run by extremists, coddled and preserved only at enormous cost by non-Jewish colonial world powers who need it for their own geopolitical purposes.
It enrages Zionists that young Jews are calling for freedom in Palestine “from the river to the sea.” The moral rot of Zionism can only envision ethno-nationalist supremacy within this geography. Any other vision invokes an irrational, illogical, and propagandistic reflex that claims these young Jews want a second Holocaust to extinguish the lives of their Israeli cousins.
Such claims invariably regurgitate talking points from the many Zionist organizations that exist solely to run defense for Israel’s indefensible foreign and domestic policies. But they also represent the failure to envision anything beyond the de facto Apartheid state that now exists from the river to the sea.
Magid’s book’s in the mail. I’m looking forward to reading what he’s got to say.
Last February Massachusetts state representative Steven Howitt (R-Seekonk) filed H.1558 (“An Act relative to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism”) which, like a recent U.S. House Resolution, seeks to define any criticism of Israel as antisemitic. The Massachusetts bill declares:
The term ‘Antisemitism’ shall have the same meaning that is endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which shall mean a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
Howitt’s description is incomplete if not intentionally dishonest. While the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, originally concocted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, does enumerate actual manifestations of antisemitism found in the politically-neutral Jerusalem Declaration, much of the IHRA’s definition centers on Israel and Zionism and is intended to weaponize any criticism of Israel, particularly to criminalize the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement.
Anti-BDS legislation, which threatens Americans’ First Amendment rights, is now found in 37 states. How such bills can even be filed boggles the mind. The right of Americans to boycott was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1982 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. Fortunately, most Massachusetts legislators have had the good sense to reject anti-democratic bills like these, as they ought to reject the adoption of a weaponized, revisionist definition of “antisemitism.”
The Jerusalem Definition of antisemitism explicitly rejects several elements of the IHRA definition Israel and Zionist groups use for transparent political purpose. Regarding Israel (and not Jews), the Jerusalem Definition says:
Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.
Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.
Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state. This includes its institutions and founding principles. It also includes its policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world. It is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. In general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.
Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.
Political speech does not have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. In general, the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.
Let’s say it again –opposing Zionism, criticizing or boycotting Israel is not antisemitic.
Long before the establishment of the State of Israel — and long after — there has been considerable disagreement about the nature of the Israeli state, especially among Jews.
Orthodox Judaism rejected Zionism until the establishment of Israel, and Jews like Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Albert Einstein voiced numerous criticisms of the Zionist founders of Israel. For over a century even Zionists themselves have warned of the dangers of harshly treating Arab neighbors in Palestine. For example, see Hannah Arendt’s articles in Aufbau, recorded in her “Jewish Writings” (ISBN 9780805211948) .
Zionism and the nature of the Jewish State have long been a polarizing issue within Reform Judaism. The American Council for Judaism is a contemporary anti-Zionist organization that formed after Reform Judaism abandoned its previous condemnation of Zionism (see Thomas A. Kolsky’s “Jews Against Zionism” (ISBN 9781566390095).
Today anti-Zionist Jews include people from the Reform, Reconstructionist, Havurah, Humanist, and Masorti movements, even some Orthodox sects such as the Satmars and Neturei Karta. One public intellectual, Peter Beinart, a modern Orthodox Jew, was once a well-known Zionist but has since joined the anti-Zionist camp. The most likely anti-Zionist Jews today are young people who grew up embracing the promises, if not the reality, of American democratic values, not racist ethnocentrism. There are dozens of organizations in the United States, Europe, and even Israel who represent these overwhelmingly young Jews, among them Jewish Voice for Peace and Not In Our Name.
At the end of the day, Americans have a Constitutional right to disagree about foreign policy. Should we fight with Taiwan if China invades? Should we have expanded NATO after Gorbachev? Should we have invaded Iraq? Is India a democracy? As with any of these examples, Americans ought to be free to hold an opinion on whether Israel is a democracy or not, whether its treatment of Palestinians respects human rights and human dignity, and whether we ought to continue pumping billions of dollars into the economy of a nation that keeps millions of people caged in concentration camps.
Most controversial of all, should Americans support the continued existence of Israel as an illiberal ethnocracy or are we free to advocate for a true democracy “from river to the sea”? Anti-Zionists answer this question with a call for freedom — while those who promote the IHRA definition dishonestly characterize any call to abandon Zionism’s inherent racism and colonialism as somehow advocating a second Shoah.
As it happens, the IHRA definition has a long and twisted history. It was concocted by an extremist settler, Natan Sharansky, ideologically related to settler extremists Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who serve in Netanyahu’s coalition government. Sharansky’s definition of antisemitism wended its way from the Israeli government to an Israeli think tank, to Zionist advocacy groups, to the US State Department, only to be subsequently weaponized against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. A short chronology:
1978: For many years the Hansell Memo was the policy of the United States in terms of illegal Israel settlements. “While Israel may undertake, in the occupied territories, actions necessary to meet its military needs and to provide for orderly government during the occupation, for reasons indicated above the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law.”
1986: Soviet Refusenik Natan Sharansky is released in a prisoner exchange and moves to Israel
1995: Sharansky founds the Yisrael BaAliyah Party to advocate for the eventual absorption of 2 million Russians, many not Jewish, as a demographic offset to rising Arab population growth. He holds a variety of governmental posts.
1999-2005: Sharansky serves as Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, Minister of Housing and Construction, Interior Minister, and Minister of Industry and Trade. Sharansky becomes Israel’s Minister without Portfolio, responsible for Jerusalem’s social and Jewish diaspora affairs. In this position, Sharansky chairs a secret committee that approves the confiscation of East Jerusalem property of West Bank Palestinians.
2005: Sharansky resigns from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet in protest of the Prime Minister’s withdrawal from Gaza.
2005: Sharansky invents the New Anti-Semitism (his term). This innovation includes the “3D Test” – demonization, double standards, delegitimization. The definition eventually finds its way into the EU working definition and then, after being dropped by the EU, is recycled by the IHRA. As employed today, “demonization” can refer to any type of condemnation of Israel. Avoiding “double standards” requires that, as the only Jewish state in the entire world, Israel must not be criticized. And “delegitimization” means that Israel has a right to exist in any form — even as a repressive state. Hence, criticism of Israel’s Apartheid system, for example, is off-limits if since calls into question Israeli self-determination, regardless of the form.
2005: The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights develops a working definition of antisemitism in conjunction with the Wiesenthal Center. It doesn’t take long before that definition is misused to smear critics of Israel.
2005: The EU drops the use of the working definition precisely because it is so political, igniting anger from Israel.
2010: Israeli Think Tank, the Reut Group, creates a “conceptual framework [as a] response to the assault on Israel’s legitimacy.” Reut has specifically studied critiques of South African Apartheid in order to develop a political firewall against so-called “delegitimization” of Israel.
2010: Israel’s National Security Council determines that a Palestinian state will delegitimize Israel — hence both Palestinians and supporters of a Palestinian state are by definition antisemitic.
2010: President Barak Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorse Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel’s “right” as a Jewish state. HIllary Clinton begins using the draft version of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition in her State Department.
2016: If at first you don’t succeed… The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance announces its working definition of “antisemitism” which includes Sharansky’s 3D test and recycles the EU’s working definition. The Pompeo State Department formally adopts the IHRA definition.
2018: Israel approves the Jewish Nation-State Law affirming that Israel is not only a Jewish state but “a state for all Jewish people.” The Law also establishes “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” When the law is passed, Arab parliamentary members rip up copies of the bill and shout, “Apartheid,” on the floor of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). United States Secretary of State (under Trump) Michael Pompeo voids the Hansell memo.
The IHRA definition is not benign. It is intensely political and the creation of an Israeli extremist in a previous extremist government who then turned it over to a think tank tasked with weaponizing it. The purpose of the IHRA definition is to pervert the natural meaning of antisemitism (baseless hatred of Jews) and punish any criticism of Israel or the nature of the Israeli state.
For any legislature to regulate what is “acceptable” speech is not only a violation of civil liberties but also (when directed at anti-Zionist Jews) both laughable and antisemitic.
Yes, antisemitic because for any legislative committee to hold a preconceived notion of what all Jews believe, or ought to believe, is the very definition of antisemitism.
Objectivity Wars panel held at the Columbia School of Journalism, with Masha Gessen speaking (Kegoktm, 2022, CC)
Masha Gessen knows something about totalitarianism and human rights abuses. The Russian journalist, translator, trans rights activist, and public intellectual was born in Russia in 1967 to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust only to experience Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1981 Gessen’s family relocated to the United States. As a journalist, Gessen (they, their) have written extensively about Russian authoritarianism. In 2020 they wrote in The Nation about MAGA World’s threats to American democracy. Until last week everybody wanted to hear from Masha Gessen.
In mid-December Gessen was in line to receive the Hannah-Arendt-Preis from the [Heinrich] Böll-Stiftung and the German State of Bremen for their prescient warnings and advocacy for human rights. But the latest Gaza war erupted, and with it a wave of repression of voices critical of Israel’s human rights abuses — or any advocacy of Palestinian liberation.
Just before the Böll award was to be conferred, Gessen published a piece in the New Yorker entitled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” The piece was mainly about how memory and history are managed in Europe. In it Gessen casually ripped Israel’s human rights abuses in Gaza. They framed the piece with a visit to the Berlin Jewish Museum:
“There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled ‘Fallen Leaves,’ consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.”
Gessen chafes at governmental regulation of thought and language, and takes issue with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “antisemitism” which “began with the obvious — calling for or justifying the killing of Jews — but also included ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’ and ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.'” A competing definition, the Jerusalem Declaration, does not regard as antisemitic: support for the Palestinian demand for justice; criticizing or opposing Zionism; or evidence-based criticism of Israel.
Gessen goes on to criticize the German Bundestag’s resolution to condemn the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement], which was originally introduced by the ultra-right and Nazi-connected AfD Party (Alternative für Deutschland). Gessen writes: “one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews — although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish–it is antisemitic.” Gessen reminds us that the Director of the Berlin Jewish Museum Gessen began their essay with was forced to resign in 2019 for supporting the non-violent BDS movement.
Gessen mentions Zionist extremism, fascistic tendencies within it, the unprecedented extremism of the current Israeli government – and yet the demonization of any criticism by the German government and cultural institutions. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” Gessen quotes historian Tony Judt in his 2005 book, “Postwar.”
Their New Yorker article contrasts the “Holocaust Memory Wars” in Germany and Poland and the involvement of the Far Right in both countries which includes even Holocaust deniers. Despite this, “Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.”
Babyn Yar is a giant ravine outside Kyiv in the Ukraine. In September 1941, in just 36 hours, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in what is known as the “Holocaust by bullets,” which Benjamin Netanyahu inevitably compared to the Hamas attack on a rave in the Negev desert. Netanyahu has also compared Palestinians to the Jewish concept of Amalek – a biblical story about a race of people who attacked the Hebrews and mix multitudes in the desert but which now refers to the very personification of evil. Gessen writes: “Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it–that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood–has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time.”
And now we get to Gaza and the quote that landed Gessen in hot water with the German arbiters of Holocaust memory:
“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time–in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”
The reaction in the German press was predictable. Even supposedly “left-leaning” media like taz.de (Die Tageszeitung) savaged Gessen. Die Zeit, considered to be a newspaper of record (like the NYT or WaPo), favors the narrative of the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, the German-Israel Society, or DIG, which was founded by German protestant theologians in 1957. According to die Zeit, the German-Israel Society maintains that Gessen’s article is in:
“clear contrast to Hannah Arendt’s thinking” with such statements. […] Gessen is free to repeat such views, [DIG] goes on to say. “But Masha Gessen’s views should not be honored with a prize intended to commemorate the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt.”
Anyone who has read Arendt’s work on Nuremberg, Totalitarianism, or her “Jewish Essays” knows this to be a dishonest characterization. Arendt may have been a Zionist inasmuch as she had been hounded from Germany herself, but Arendt was no friend to the Zionism that emerged following the Biltmore Conference in 1942. Arendt’s Zionism gravitated more to a binational concept promoted by Judah Magnes, whom she revered (and who was called a “Quisling” by American Zionists for warning that the Arab world was not going to accept Revisionist Zionism’s cruel vision of “Israel” and for opposing the Biltmore Conference).
Arendt gave credit – albeit with her characteristic side of critique – to a fringe Zionist group called the Ihud which promoted an Arab-Jewish federation. She made an absolute distinction between a Zionist state and a Jewish homeland. In Arendt’s writings, the latter (as long as it also provided refuge for Shoah survivors) was to be preferred. The Ihud was in fact only one of several groups with similar bi-national proposals that, as early as the Twenties and Thirties – a century ago! – knew that forcing Palestinians into cantons or concentration camps was a recipe for disaster.
Throughout her essays in Aufbau and later in the New Yorker (collected in The Jewish Writings) Arendt was brutally opposed to the extreme Revisionist Zionism that became normative Israeli Zionism and which was widely promoted by American Zionists. To cite one example, in December 1948 Arendt wrote a long essay in the New York Times in which she violated the “antisemitic” Verbot of comparing Israeli fascists to other fascists – which Gessen quotes in part in their article:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the”Freedom Party” (nuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.”
“A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April, The New York Times reported that terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants — 240 men, women, and children-and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Transjordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”
“The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last year of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”
In today’s new climate of suppressing all criticism of Israel, Masha Gessen has joined thousands of victims of firings, cancellations, shutdowns, and even arrests throughout the Western world.
The irony is that Gessen’s essay — though it may have run up against the perfunctory New German Philosemitism that replaced the reptilian Old German Antisemitism — is true to Hannah Arendt’s legacy, right down to its reaction by mainstream pro-Israel groups and the Western nations too eager to blindly defend it.
The October 7th assault on Israel by Hamas militants was a heinous, gruesome, and traumatizing act of terror for Israelis who had become complacent to inevitable resistance from people they have subjugated for 75 years. Despite members of Israel’s new government now speaking openly of genocide and ethnic cleansing, there was never much doubt that the US would side with Israel. Americans, who learn their history and geography only when wars break out, generally have little idea what kind of state they are funding, or even what kind of conflict this is.
Though almost always painted as a religious war, this last outbreak of violence is the latest chapter of a long-festering land dispute that drags on, largely because of the amount of money and weaponry the US sends Israel to maintain their grip on Palestinians and slowly erase them from lands they should have had when colonial powers carved up the Middle East in the wake of World War I.
After the attack, with concern for Israel rarely displayed toward any other country, a stream of US politicians — congressmen, senators, mayors, presidents — flew to Tel Aviv to be photographed with Israeli officials and offer condolences, even as Israel launched a barrage of over 6,000 bombs into Gaza, killing thousands of civilians indiscriminately. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” on Gaza’s civilian population (illegal under international law) and added, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Member of Israel’s Knesset Ariel Kallner called fora “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Kallner was referring to the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs in 1948, many of whom fled to Gaza and have lived in refugee camps for three generations. Similar appeals to cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians are routine now.
Ignoring these genocidal intentions, 420 congressmen signed a resolution supporting Israel without reservation and omitting any mention of war crimes being committed in reprisal for Hamas’s attack. A parallel House resolution calling for a pause in Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians and allowing Gaza to receive humanitarian aid was supported by only thirteen Democrats — all people of color. Biden’s ambassador to the UN vetoed a similar resolution, cynically saying “We believe we need to let that diplomacy play out.” As the US well knows from previous vetoes, only mass civilian casualties will result from letting missile diplomacy “play out.”
Americans love Israel so much that an Israeli “lobbying” group is permitted to operate in violation of FARA laws and regularly flies congressmen on junkets to Israel. Laws in 37 states punish criticism of Israel. Israel has been the recipient of the largest amount of foreign and military aid of any ally, to date receiving more than $150 billion, with more dished out every year. The United States reliably vetoes any UN resolution critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. State Department officials regularly speak of “no daylight” between US and Israeli positions and the two countries’ “unbreakable bond.” Israel is routinely described as “the only democracy in the Middle East” although it is no democracy at all for Palestinians inside Israel itself or in Gaza and the West Bank.
Although it’s not clear the love is reciprocated, American love for Israel is a product of similar history and religion. In addition to the ethnic cleansing both the US and Israel were founded on, there is also a religious dimension to the relationship. When Anthony Blinken flew to Israel after the Hamas attack he told the Israeli Defense Ministry, “I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state but also as a Jew.” From the Christian bleachers Lindsay Graham managed to inject good-ole-boy American racism into a call for genocide on Gazans: “To Cornel West and the Black Lives Matter group […] We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.”
When George Washington stepped down after a reasonable number of years of service (listen up, Joe!) he left behind his thoughts on foreign entanglements in his famous Farewell Address. Warning of precisely “unbreakable bonds” and “zero daylight” with allies, Washington wrote, “nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.” Washington could have been speaking of Israel and Iran.
So when progressive Democrat Pramila Jaypal referred not long ago to Israel as a racist country practicing Apartheid, all hell broke loose. Republicans seized the opportunity to force a non-binding resolution that read: “(1) the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state; (2) Congress rejects all forms of antisemitism and xenophobia; and (3) the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” The second point served to reinforce the taboo of criticizing Israel – lest one be accused of antisemitism. All but nine Democrats of color voted for the resolution.
To be fair, most white Democrats defend the United States precisely as they do Israel (we are a good people, this is not who we are) even though the U.S. was founded on genocide and slavery and continues to oppress people of color. In the case of Israel, theirs is a nation with an immense occupation by Jews of an almost equally-sized population of Palestinians, depriving them of their human and civil rights for the last 75 years and systematically taking more and more of their land.
Like the old American Confederacy through Jim Crow days, Israel promulgates laws to enshrine and reinforce Jewish supremacy and ethno-religious segregation. The degree of segregation even applies to Israeli Jews. Haredi women ride segregated buses. Segregated communities are common. Their Supreme Court affirmed the right of communities to exclude Arabs, LGBTQ+, and the disabled. Vigilantes attack Arab men dating Jewish women. More than 65 laws discriminate against Arab citizens of Israel – the 20% who were not expelled to refugee camps.
Although Israelis are officially prohibited from entering Palestinian areas, over 650,000 settlers have already seized land in the West Bank. Separate highways have been built for settler use only. Israel may be a nation of laws but Israeli courts are overly friendly to land-grabbing scofflaws while all Palestinians get is endless martial law. Life for Palestininans in Gaza and the West Bank is hell. As an occupier, Israel destroys Palestinian civilian infrastructure arbitrarily and attacks civilians indiscriminately. In the West Bank settlers operate with impunity while the government destroys Palestinian homes, schools, and crops or decides to clear a village for military purposes – only to turn around and hand it over to settlers.
Just as in the United States, where Christian nationalism is rapidly destroying what’s left of our so-called “democracy,” Jewish nationalism, with its attendant racism and illiberalism, has similarly brought Israel’s “democracy” to the point of collapse. Almost every Israeli political party has historically embraced Palestinian expropriation or expulsion to some degree, but now the most extreme Zionist elements have “taken the gloves off” and are coming not only for Palestinians but for secular Jews and their secular values. Suddenly religious settlers are being recognized for the dangerous fanatics and racists they are.
Israel’s 37th government includes elements from the Kach party, once banned as a terrorist organization. Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “tak[ing] the Ku Klux Klan and [bringing] them into the government,” equating ministers Itamar Ben Gvir, Betzalel Smotrich and others with the KKK (which actually operates in Israel). Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionism had a long association with extremism and fascism, long before the founding of the state.
Israel’s extremist government acknowledges that Apartheid is their goal. Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who once displayed a photo of the man who massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in his illegal settlement home, told an Arab journalist on Israel’s Channel 12, “excuse me, Mohammed, but this is the reality. This is the truth. My right to life outweighs your right to move on the streets.”
The West Bank Yishi community, which was built on land stolen from the ethnically-cleansed village of Dayr Aban, used to advertise two-acre plots with tennis courts and a forest preserve to Americans eager to emigrate. “Looking for the American Dream in Eretz Yisrael? …. Do you want American neighbors and immediate access to Bet Shemesh and Ramat Bet Shemesh schools? …. Does an Arab-free environment sound appealing? Yishi is miles inside the green line and even further from the nearest Arab settlement… A place in Israel that comes as dreamed, no concessions, no compromise.” Its residents would heartily endorse Alabama governor George Wallace’s declaration, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
While American politicians ignore the grim reality for Palestinians and pretend that Israel is a Western democracy, Israelis are much more willing admit that their country practices Apartheid.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem asserts it. Israeli author David Grossman has said it. The Israeli anti-occupation group Yesh Din calls the occupation Apartheid. Before he was assassinated by an extremist from the settler movement, Yitzhak Rabin called the settler movement a “cancer” and warned that Israel risked becoming an Apartheid state. In the 1980‘s Uri Davis, an Israeli activist, and Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli political scientist, used the phrase. The Israeli groups Adalah, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace, Gisha, HaMoked, Haqel: In Defense of Human Rights, Human Rights Defenders Fund, Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel and Yesh Din all supported an Amnesty International report calling Israel’s practices Apartheid.
Many other voices recognize parallels with the old South African system. Last April, for the first time, the venerable journal Foreign Affairs ran an article calling Israel an Apartheid state. Human Rights Watch considers Israel’s treatment of Palestinians Apartheid. Amnesty International says so too. The American group Jewish Voice for Peace agrees. The American Friends Service Committee uses the term “Israeli Apartheid.” Former UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon cautiously says Israel is “inching” toward Apartheid. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman blasted a Republican pro-Israel position as pro- Apartheid. Marine Corps General James Mattis used the term describing Israel’s “democratic” dilemma: democracy or Apartheid. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made exactly the same argument. Former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean called Israel an Apartheid state. Former President Jimmy Carter thought so too. He even wrote a book making the case.
And if compassion for Palestinians is antisemitic, you’d better tell American Jews. Among respondents of a 2021 survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats, 34% agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25% considered “Israel is an apartheid state” and 22% thought that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.”
Yet none of this has managed to reach the ears of Congress or the President.
House Republicans may have an excuse for the open embrace of ethnic cleansing and ethno-religious supremacy – that’s just who they are – but Democrats who refuse to call out a violent occupation and an Apartheid regime deserve nothing but contempt for their cowardice. In fact, the defense of racist ethno-religious nationalism in Israel only undermines Democrats’ credibility if not their ability to fight it here at home.
The United States has never applied either carrots or sticks to Israel. Instead we just turn on the spigot and keep the money flowing for Apartheid. This needs to stop now. Let Israel fund its own repressive racist regime without our help.
Poster in Wing’s Court, New Bedford (Author, 2023)
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) considers the call for Palestinian liberation — “from the river to the sea” — to be both anti-semitic and an endorsement of terrorism:
“This rallying cry has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the PFLP, which seek Israel’s destruction through violent means. It is fundamentally a call for a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, territory that includes the State of Israel, which would mean the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.”
But it’s not quite so simple as the ADL would have it, and accusations like theirs are symptomatic of a new McCarthyism that demonizes people who recognize that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict simply cannot continue without a just resolution, and that the root cause has always been the injustice of oppressing Palestinians.
Setting aside for a moment the terror required to subjugate millions of people for three generations in prisons, reservations, city-sized ghettos, or refugee camps weaponized into concentration camps, let’s consider the terror of only the last month.
Long before we heard an Israeli general call Palestinians human animals and long before our jaws dropped as a member of the Knesset demanded a doomsday nuclear strike on Gaza, fatalities related to Israel’s occupation were already over 10,000. Craig Mokhiber, a UN human rights official who recently resigned in protest, called Israel’s actions in Gaza “a text-book case of genocide.” US State Department Political-Military affairs analyst Josh Paul resigned in protest over US aid to Israel, while State Department foreign affairs specialist Sylvia Yacoub wrote a policy dissent, warning that the US is “complicit in [Israeli] genocide.”
Plans for dropping the entire population of Gaza in the Sinai desert — which an intelligence report called the “final rehabilitation” — were published in even the Israeli news. And now that Israel has surpassed Hamas’s terror by slaughtering another 10,000 civilians (with another 2,200 missing and presumed buried under rubble) and has imprisoned 10,000 Palestinians without charges versus the 200 kidnapped by Hamas, it’s clear that the winner of the terror sweepstakes is Israeli state terror — aided, abetted, and funded by US tax dollars.
Subject to steady encroachment by violent fundamentalist settlers who refer to it as Judea and Samaria, the West Bank has for decades avoided total annexation by Israel and represents an inconvenient impediment to a contiguous span of entirely Israeli territory. If Israel’s extremist government succeeds in their stated goal of full annexation of the West Bank and completes its task of ethnically cleansing Gaza, it will mean the death of any sort of Palestinian state and the denial of self-determination for Palestinians. But that has been the objective of Zionism since the beginning.
You’ve got to hand it to the ADL — which has moved over the years from sounding the alarm on discrimination against Jews to becoming little more than a pro-Israel mouthpiece — for the consistency of its hypocrisy. The ADL regards any challenge to or criticism of Zionism to be anti-semitic. Protests are anti-semitic. Boycotts are anti-semitic. Calls for freedom and liberation are anti-semitic. Murals like the one in Wing’s Court, New Bedford (image above), which use the dreaded phrase must also be anti-semitic.
But is there really anything objectionable in “from the river to the sea” — other than the obvious shorthand for borders, as Americans might use “coast to coast” or “sea to shining sea”? Or is it because American protesters, many of us Jews, are allies in pushing for Palestinian freedom? Such accusations and pushback from pro-Israel mouthpieces like the ADL are precisely like the segregationists who had derisive names for whites who supported civil rights. One was “race traitor” and the other ended in “–lover.”
As it happens, the word “river” never actually appears in the original Hamas Charter, which is indeed an offensive document rivaling equally offensive Zionist documents like Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall or the propagandistic and racist pseudoscience coughed up by Yair Netanyahu, the Prime Minister’s son and Israel’s Eric Trump.
But the 2017 Hamas Charter does contains two mentions:
“Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit.”
and another sentence uses the ADL’s censored words:
“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
Interestingly, the Likud uses similar language in its1977 platform, which calls for complete Jewish control of all of Palestine between the river and the sea, and specifically rules out a Two State solution:
from Jewish Virtual Library
“Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan [river] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
Israel’s Revisionist Zionist movement, the progenitor of Netanyahu’s Likud party, had greater territorial ambitions than a state bounded on the east by the Jordan River. In pre-1948 posters from the Irgun, the Harut youth movement, and in fundraising appeals to North American Zionists and others, Revisionist Zionists used a verse from Bereshit (Genesis) 15:18 which refers to the Euphrates river, not the Jordan:
On that day, the Lord formed a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt until the great river, the Euphrates river.
That biblical quote appears at the top of the left-most poster shown below with the caption “Land of Israel” and in another Irgun poster advocating taking not only the portion of the British Mandate reserved for Jews and Arabs (west of the Jordan) but Transjordan (present-day Jordan) as well — by force:
Left to right: 1947 Irgun map; Herut youth movement; Tel Chai fund; Irgun Poster showing all of Transjordan as “the only solution”
The Revisionists, and every bible-thumper they appealed to, were no doubt also familiar with verse 13:
And He said to Abram, “You shall surely know that your seed will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and they will enslave them and oppress them, for four hundred years.“
Whatever the origins, and whoever has adapted or used it in some variation, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now used by peace activists — anti-Zionist rabbis among them — to signify liberation and justice for Palestinians in both Gaza (which borders the sea) and the West Bank (which touches the Jordan but is an occupied military zone).
For many the phrase is simply an affirmation — long denied — of a Two State Solution that successive US administrations give frequent lip service to. For some of us it’s the recognition of both the futility of Two States and the impossibility of continuing to support an Apartheid state while denying any kind of statehood to Arabs. A bi-national secular democracy uniting Jews and Arabs in a single secular state could be a solution. Israel, as a Zionist nation built on an Apartheid model, would cease to exist. And so would Hamas’s dreams of an Islamic state.
In any case, just as Israel still has no Constitution after 75 years, it also has no internationally recognized, undisputed borders. Perhaps the best anyone can do is to speak of the river and the sea and the possibilities of freedom in between.
Shortly after October 7th, the Atlantic Monthly published a piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore, British aristocrat, Tory, earnest defender of colonialism, and sloppy Pop historian.
Montefiore’s article was nothing but Zionist apologetics laced with talking points from the American far right’s war with “woke” intellectuals. It was not surprising that the Atlantic printed it, as this has long been a publication for Democratic neocons and Zionists. The issue of Palestine has always exposed the dishonesty and hypocrisy of certain liberals, quoting conservatives and claiming to support democracy and equality here at home while supporting the opposite in Israel. This is precisely the debate that is now tearing the Democratic Party apart. Young Americans who grew up knowing nothing but non-stop American wars since 2001 now understand that support for Israel is part and parcel of the militarism and imperialism that followed September 11th, 2001, and of course the militarists and imperialists are pushing back.
These Young Americans have also taken note of the undeniable similarities between Zionism and Christian nationalism. Both are malignant nationalist, supremacist ideologies. Zionism, which pretends to be a perfectly natural, reasonable form of self-determination by one people is in fact the ideology underlying a racist state built upon the suffering and ethnic cleansing of another.
Jews, especially those from the Austro-Hungarian empire who settled in Palestine long before Herzl wrote “Der Judenstaat,” had a very different conception of what life in the “Heiliges Land” meant. Early “Palestinians” were largely motivated by religion. These early Zionists thought of living in the land peaceably with the indigenous people and it was normal to think of themselves as citizens of the Ottoman empire. It wasn’t until the Revisionist Zionist movement that the notion of territorial maximalism took root. This was formalized at the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York City. In any case, there is only one Zionism now, and it is a cruel, savage, selfish ideology based on a zero-sum calculation — Jews must own all of Palestine, and no sharing or compromise can be possible for the state to be fully “Jewish.”
There are now almost 10 million Israelis. No one imagines anyone marching them into the Sinai desert — as Israel has long fantasized about marching Gazans. Even without formal recognition, there are numerous regional trade deals, particularly between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If official recognition is withheld it is chiefly because of the brutal treatment of Palestinians. Israel’s preoccupation for its existence — at a time when it is the 14th military power in the world, BFF’s with every other colonial power, can claim to have had a couple of US aircraft carriers deployed as a courtesy, and is the only nuclear power in the Middle East — is overwrought if not outright propaganda. The “massed Arab armies” so often cited (as in Montefiore’s piece) are in fact Palestinian liberation movements without states, navies or air forces.
Although Israel has always regarded Palestinian statehood as a non-starter (see Jabobinsky and the Likud platform), it is touchy when anyone questions its legitimacy.
But Israel’s legitimacy is not a question of the right of Jews to exist, or even to remain in Palestine. The question of Israel’s legitimacy concerns Israel’s “right” to exist as an Apartheid state — a designation many Israelis accept, by the way. Israel’s legitimacy also depends on its geographical boundaries. Just as I have a legitimate claim to my own home but not my neighbors’ or the entire neighborhood, Israel’s legitimacy depends on how much of other people’s property it has stolen or has claimed.
Besides annexing the West Bank and openly seeking to reclaim Gaza, Israel occupies both Lebanese and Syrian territory. Israel’s legitimacy is also called into question when asking why Jews should hold all the power in the state, while 56 laws discriminate against non-Jewish citizens of that state. Or when asking what right Israel has to keep millions of stateless Palestinians under martial law, in ghettos and concentration camps. Or the legitimacy of a Law of Return for Jews that lets any Jew anywhere “return” to Israel while the same is denied to Palestinians. In the United States, the legitimacy of the state flows from the consent of the governed. In Israel, the legitimacy of the state seems to flow from the fact of being a Jew. To describe Israeli and American democracy as indistinguishable is completely wrong. Americans may live in a racist nation, but not one with laws literally based on race.
So let me get on with my critique of Montefiore’s rubbish.
The usual racist trope of the barbaric Palestinian versus the civilized European: “The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies–except it was recorded in real time and published to social media.” However, Israel’s siege of Gaza seems to harken back in history before the Mongol’s, to the Hebrew genocides recorded in the Bible – sieges of civilian populations behind walled cities (as Gaza is) and genocide of civilians.
Anti-intellectual posturing: Western academics have supposedly “denied, excused, or even celebrated the [October 7th] murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.” Montefiore has been watching FOX News too much, as apparently have the editors of the Atlantic. If you take the effort to look at the first controversy at Harvard, one by a group of students supporting Palestinians, it is in fact not a celebration of Hamas at all. For the most part academics have nuanced views of both colonialism and the right of oppressed people to fight back, and apparently Montefiore believes there is no colonialism or oppression in Palestine.
Right-wing epithets used for effect not clarification: “fashionable ideology” “leftist intellectuals” “Marxist theory” “Soviet propaganda” “anti-semitism” “intimidating jargon” “once-respectable intellectuals” “radical follies.” I can only conclude that Montefiore has been hanging out with Ron DeSantis or Chris Rufo and exchanging notes on Truth Social. He’s not talking to the average liberal; he’s signaling to Christian and Jewish Zionists — extreme ones. Montefiore is one more link in the attack engine that has been going after academics who don’t toe the line on Israel.
Resents calls for “decolonization: Well, guess what? Israel is a colonial settler project. Zionism had a long history of appealing to colonial empires (Ottoman, British, American) for its existence, and it now depends on colonial empires (Britain, France, US) for its continued existence. It may be a great shock to Montefiore, but colonized people resent being colonized. There is nothing wrong with trying to shake off the oppressor, though I wish Hamas had not ended its breach of the Gaza concentration camp security walls with the massacre of civilians and kidnappings. He goes on to insult those who share the view that colonized people have a right to fight their oppression as poseurs, wine-drinking fakes.
Antisemitism: Montefiore claims that the Hamas massacre is pure and simple antisemitism, and he provides a list of all the Jewish calamities that Jews recall at Tisha B’Av. He fails to mention that in the Zionist madrassas in the West Bank they are teaching kids that Palestinians are Amalek — the personification of pure evil. He fails to mention that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is first and foremost a land dispute.
Genocide denial: Montefiore denies that a genocide is taking place in Gaza. When General Yoav Gallant announced a total siege on civilians and called them “human animals,” it was clear that a genocidal war was about to begin. And sure enough, it began with cutting off everything civilians need to live. Then half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people fled south for their lives, only to be bombed there. Over 8,000 civilians have been killed, half of them children. More than half of all Gaza homes were destroyed a week ago; by the end of the war there will not be anything left. Wolf Blitzer interviewed an Israeli colonel who left him speechless when he admitted slaughtering 50 civilians to kill one Hamas commander. PBS showed an Israeli tank shooting a passenger van in Gaza. Thirty journalists have been bombed. The New York Times reported that Israeli officials told State Department officials they were going to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Gazans. And liberal Israeli media is reporting on two different plans to illegally transfer whatever is left of the carpet-bombed Gazans to 10 cities in Egypt in further violation of laws of war. Of course this is genocide. Instead, Montefiore mentions some harassment of West Bank Palestinians by settlers but glosses over the 1948 Nakba, where Zionist militias wiped out 500 villages and displaced 750,000 Arabs, many of whom live in Gaza today and for whom this is a second Nakba. He claims the Jewish exodus of almost a million Mizrachi Jews is somehow equivalent. However, two thirds were recruited by the Jewish Agency and the Knesset debated the necessity of doing so. The only thing that makes them equivalent is that both the Nakba and the various aliyot were organized by Israel.
Montefiore whines about corrupt Arab governments – as if the multiple-indicted Netanyahu were also not the head of a corrupt government.
Montefiore admits that the British stiffed the Arabs when it promised its new spoil of war to British Zionists in a letter from Balfour to Rothschild. He writes that the only promise of an Arab state was a 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein, but he omits the many partition plans that were proposed. One, the Morrison-Grady plan, included the Negev in an Arab state, but it was thwarted by the Jewish Agency’s establishment of “11 points” — militarized kibbutzim in the Negev which included some of those attacked by Hamas on October 7th. I could go on, but Montefiore’s history lesson is simply a dishonest exercise by a professional historian.
Montefiore writes: “It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state. Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in.” What a warped portrayal. Montefiore would have you believe that the West was opposed to Zionism but it was only saved by plucky Zionists who persisted. Not so. The British outsourced much of the administration of Palestine to the Jewish Agency, which was a plus because it didn’t cost Britain a cent, and the departing colonizers bequeathed Israel with most of their infrastructure, armaments, and the military laws used to subjugate Palestinians to this day. Britain had departed long before May 14, 1948 and when they finally issued the official Termination of the Mandate it praised Zionists for making the desert bloom. The United States recognized Israel 11 minutes after its independence was declared. Israel has always been the darling of colonial powers and not the plucky little victim. It didn’t take long at all after independence for the colonial powers to arm Israel with nukes.
Montefiore is either wrong or lying when he writes: “Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949.” This is complete garbage. In 1947 the population of Israel was roughly 650,000 Jews and Arabs twice that number. From 1948-1951, 690,000 Jews immigrated; from 1952-1960 300,000 Jews immigrated; from 1961-1971 430,000 immigrated; from 1972-1979 268,000 immigrated; from 1980-1989 154,000 immigrated; from 1990-2001 over a million; from 2002-2010 181,000 immigrated; from 2011-2020 237,000 immigrated. An overwhelming majority of Israel’s population came as a result of recent settlement efforts funded by Zionist organizations, notably the Jewish Federations of North America. Over 2 million European Jews immigrated after 1948 and 1.2 million Russians came in the Seventies — many of them not even Jewish but useful as a demographic counterpoint to Arab birth rates. Although the American Jewish community has played an outsized role in colonizing Israel, only about 140,000 Americans have immigrated.
Montefiore writes that if Americans are no longer settlers, then Israelis should not be considered such either. I suppose the implication of his argument is that if Americans can normalize the occupation of indigenous lands, why can’t Israelis do so too? There’s too much to unpack here but I will point out that Native Americans can move anywhere they like within the United States, can vote, run for political office, and are subject to dual systems of law ONLY when one system is their own, not imposed on them by race laws.
Montefiore attempts to put a spin on Israel’s ethnic mix, citing Ethiopian Jews and Mizrachim. It’s the “some of our best friends are X” argument only slightly repackaged. But Ethiopians and Mizrachim serve in the IDF and prisons and drive the bulldozers which destroy Palestinian homes. They live in West Bank settlements where they destroy Arab and Bedouin crops and livestock. Israel’s Ashkenazim are sill the Cabots and Lodges of the Jewish state. Newer olim (immigrants) from Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq, and even Russia lack the status but thank their lucky stars they’re not reviled Arabs.
Identifying Israel as a colonial settler project is antisemitic: “But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians.” This is quite the stretch. What Hamas did was immoral and a war crime; What Israel is doing to Palestinians is immoral and a war crime. I think we can condemn both, especially when the scale and historical breadth of Israel’s crimes is so much greater.
Identifying Israel as a colonial settler state blocks a solution: “The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.” This in itself is vapid rhetoric. How can anyone deal with systematic land theft, an occupation, a double set of racist laws, and genocidal suppression without talking about throwing off the yoke? And if Apartheid and settlements are the problem, they should be named and stopped.
Zionist lobby groups have made it difficult to criticize Israel. In 37 states there are laws on the books which create penalties for people and organizations who support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. But Montefiore is ready to declare war on academic institutions where students and faculty exercise their free speech: “Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.” For a guy who hates boycotts, here he is ready to launch boycotts on multiple levels.
Montefiore laments the feckless Palestinian “governments” of the West Bank and Gaza. Surely he must know that Abbas has only one function: to be the West Bank’s police chief. Abbas was not elected, while Hamas held elections most recently in 2006 — a full generation ago! It’s safe to say, Palestinians never voted for any of these crooks and thugs. And how could they? Democracy can never thrive in a prison, or where faux Palestinian “governments” are selected by Israel.
Montefiore waxes poetic as he sings of the peace made between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat. He neglects to mention that Israel’s settler movement, now in power, actually assassinated Rabin while Israel tried to take out Arafat before he became ill, and then cynically invested millions of shekels in Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood group they thought had no chance of gaining traction or popularity, in order to marginalize Fatah and the PLO. And now we’ve seen how that’s worked out.
In May 2022 Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), spoke at the organization’s leadership summit, telling attendees, “To those who still cling to the idea that anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism — let me clarify this for you as clearly as I can — anti-Zionism is anti-semitism.” Greenblatt directed his remarks at three organizations. One of them was CAIR, the Council for Islamic American Relations, which fights discrimination against Muslims.
Another was Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), with half a million mainly Jewish members and 70 chapters throughout the country. JVP rejects Zionism as strongly as it condemns Christian Nationalism, Zionism’s equally evil twin. But JVP is not an anomaly. For decades if not longer there has been strong anti-Zionist sentiment within the Jewish world.
Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet “Der Judenstaat” outraged Orthodox Jews. Zionists arriving in Palestine were informed upon by Palestinian Jews to the Ottoman authorities. Before it eventually embraced Zionism, Reform Judaism rejected Zionism at its 1885 convention in Pittsburgh:
“We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
Jewish communities in Lithuania, Britain, Germany, the United States, and Russia objected to Zionism for a number of reasons: Jews were already at home in their own countries; creating a temporal state contradicts the messianic promise of Judaism; it would jeopardize relations between Jews and Muslims in Palestine (!!); it would destroy acceptance of Jews in countries in which they live; Judaism is a religion, not a political theory; Zionism would exacerbate suspicions of dual loyalty and foster anti-semitism (!!); and a Jewish state is inherently undemocratic (!!).
In 1919 Jewish Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to Woodrow Wilson signed by 300 prominent American Jews including Henry Morgenthau, Sr.:
“We protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a ‘race’ or as a ‘religion’, it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.”
In 1944 Hannah Arendt published Zionism Reconsidered, in which she points out the obvious:
“Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours […] If the Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future […] it will be due to the political assistance of American Jews […] if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country, who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East.”
And in fact, Zionists have depended on colonial powers for Israel’s existence as well as its continued existence. The dependency has persisted for over 75 years.
According to Zionists like the ADL’s Greenblatt, anti-Zionism is “anti-semitic” because it rejects the “peoplehood” of Jews. “Peoplehood” in the political sense is a Zionist innovation, not a necessity of Judaism. Even between the destruction of the Second Temple in the 2nd Century and the establishment of Israel in 1948, Jews managed to remain a “people” in cultural, religious, and linguistic terms. With the founding of Israel, however, Zionists expected Jews everywhere to embrace, if not immigrate to, the temporal state of Israel without questioning its policies, legal structure, or its human rights practices. This expectation was doomed from the start because of the long Jewish antipathy to Zionism.
American Jews, particularly younger generations, recognize the many obvious defects of American democracy but revere the ideal of a secular republic which privileges no one and offers justice to everyone. Some of America’s most democratic jurists have defended this kind of America, from Louis Brandeis to Ruth Bader Ginzburg. But Zionism, in order to express itself in a Jewish state, must privilege Jews and Jewish rights at the expense of “others” it must subjugate. When anti-Zionists hear the words “Jewish and democratic” in relation to Israel they hear the same contradictions in terms that anti-Zionists a century earlier noticed.
Peter Beinart may be one of the best-known ex-Zionists in the United States. In 2019 Beinart penned an article for the Guardian, concerned with the rise of anti-semitism but also cautioning to distinguish between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.
Beinart systematically debunked the Zionist argument that anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism by pointing out that (1) statehood for any group is neither guaranteed nor always desirable; that (2) there is nothing inherently discriminatory in dismantling a state itself built on discrimination (the example he gives is South Africa); and that (3) the conflation of the two terms is contradicted by the existence of anti-semites who are full-throated supporters of Zionism (examples provided are Christian Zionists and Christian Nationalists).
In a 2020 podcast Beinart advocated a One-State solution in Palestine. Rejecting the hollow phrase “the Two-State solution,” now impossible because not enough contiguous land remains for a Palestinian state, Beinart explained his reasons for writing another essay, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”
“If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fulfills his pledge to impose Israeli sovereignty in parts of the West Bank, he will just formalize a decades-old reality: In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago. Israel has all but made its decision: one country that includes millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights. Now liberal Zionists must make our decision, too. It’s time to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”
In an article in Jewish Currents Beinart explained that, just as Judaism thrived when it transitioned from temple-based practice to rabbinic study, it will likewise be the better for abandonment of Zionism:
“For roughly a thousand years, Jewish worship meant bringing sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem. Then, in 70 CE, with the Temple about to fall, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai imagined an alternative. He famously asked the Roman Emperor to “Give me Yavne and its Sages.” From the academies of Yavne came a new form of worship, based on prayer and study. Animal sacrifice, it turned out, was not essential to being a Jew. Neither is supporting a Jewish state. Our task in this moment is to imagine a new Jewish identity, one that no longer equates Palestinian equality with Jewish genocide. One that sees Palestinian liberation as integral to our own. That’s what Yavne means today.”
Beinart went on to explain why the Two-State solution is dead and what might replace it. He warned that “Averting a future in which oppression degenerates into ethnic cleansing requires a vision that can inspire not just Palestinians, but the world. Equality offers it.”
With the carpet bombing of “human animals” in Gaza we just saw how prescient Beinart’s words were.
Nobody in Palestine is going anywhere. Millions of Jews, millions of Palestinians will remain attached to the land. The only thing prolonging the conflict is the massive financial and military aid to Israel by the United States, used mainly for the repression and carpet-bombing required to maintain Jewish supremacy.
But would the fabled “massed Arab armies” actually attack a democratic Jewish-Arab state that offered the same rights to everyone? Would a unified state be any more dangerous to live in than two states, each building walls and stockpiling weapons against each other?
This is why many anti-Zionists share Beinart’s vision of a single state in Palestine. But to get there Israel’s Apartheid state must be dismantled and in its place something equitable for both people must be built.
Killing the “animals” – Israel’s “surgical” bombing of Gaza
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are part of America’s DNA and many of us would prefer to not think about it. Maybe that’s why American politicians bristle at those words when applied to Israel. It is inconceivable to many of us that a nation often described as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and (for Believers) the second incarnation of Biblical Israel could ever commit such atrocities. Congressional resolutions, preferred trading status, military and intelligence cooperation, and vetoes at the UN shield Israel from the consequences of its actions. Israel has received over $165 billion in aid from the US, the largest for any country. Laws in 37 states penalize or criminalize criticism of Israel. It’s been a veritable love-fest. Until this month Israel has largely enjoyed impunity for humanitarian crimes against a civilian population almost as large as its own.
But these last couple of weeks have been very different. Israel’s bombing of Gaza has moved well beyond retaliatory, far beyond indiscriminate, to a level bordering on genocidal. And there is no clearer sign of the persistence of the ethnic cleansing that created Israel than a widely-discussed plan to use it again in concert with the bombing of Gaza.
On October 9th Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared a siege on the entire civilian population of Gaza, calling them “human animals.” Intended was apparently a return to primitive warfare where walled cities are conquered by destroying all life within. But a walled city is more than just a metaphor in Gaza, where the world’s largest open air prison is surrounded by deadly border technology.
Palestinian home vandalized, reads – “Death to the Arabs”
Voice after Israeli voice promised vengeance on Gaza’s civilian population for the Hamas attacks. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” retired IDF Major General Giora Eiland wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. In a nation that enshrines Jewish supremacy in law and where “Death to the Arabs” is chanted at marches, rallies, soccer games or sprayed on Palestinian homes and graves, and where government ministers invoke it while encouraging anti-Arab pogroms, it’s not just Hamas Israel is looking to expel or kill. It’s every Palestinian in Gaza.
Gallant’s orgy of bombing, which launched as many strikes in a single day as the United States launched in Afghanistan in a year, was originally to be followed up by forcible transfer of all Palestinians from Gaza.
Leaflet warning Gazans to flee south
On October 13th Israel dropped leaflets telling residents of Gaza City:
“You must evacuate your homes immediately and go to the south of Wadi Gaza. For your security and safety you must not return to your homes until further notice from the Israeli Defense Forces. Public and known shelters must be evacuated. It is forbidden to approach the security wall, and anyone who approaches exposes himself to death.
Gazans from the north made the trip by car, donkey cart, and on foot in scenes reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba. Almost as soon as compliant refugees from Gaza City arrived in Khan Yunis, Israel began carpet bombing them. An episode of the New York Times podcast “The Daily” gave listeners a sense of the desperation of civilians and the indiscriminate nature of the bombing. Nowhere was safe. Everything was being bombed. Thousands of children have been killed as a result. A panel of U.N. experts has called Israel’s bombing “collective punishment” and “a war crime.”
But vast destruction and massive civilian casualties, not precision strikes on Hamas, were always the objectives.
A document provided to the Israeli financial magazine Calcalist (roughly, the Economist) and circulated within the Intelligence Ministry promotes the forced transfer of all residents from Gaza. According to Calcalist, “the document, [recommended by Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel], which is unlikely to affect government policy, may have been written to give a boost to the settler movement and its objectives [but] in any case it is a direct continuation of the extreme policy that the government has been promoting since it was established.”
“Gamliel’s document supposedly looks at three alternatives in the post-war era, but the alternative ‘to yield positive and long-term strategic results’ is a transfer of Gaza citizens to Sinai. The move includes three steps: establishing tent cities in Sinai to the southwest of the Gaza Strip, creating a humanitarian corridor to assist residents and, finally, building cities in northern Sinai. At the same time, a sterile area of several miles will be established within Egypt south of the border with Israel, so that evacuated residents cannot return. In addition, the document calls for cooperation with as many countries as possible so that they can absorb the displaced Palestinians from Gaza and provide them with absorption packets. Among other things, Canada, European countries such as Greece and Spain, and North African countries are mentioned.”
A similar white paper calling for ethnic cleansing of Gaza was produced by Misgav, the Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. The document, “A plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” is exactly what it sounds like – a plan to force all of Gaza’s inhabitants over the Rafah crossing into ten refugee cities in the Sinai desert. As with Gamliel’s white paper, the international community is expected to fund Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gazans and absorb the resulting stateless refugees. According to Misgav plan, whatever the cost, it’s
“actually a very worthwhile investment for the State of Israel. The land conditions in Gaza, which are similar to the Gush Dan area, will in the future allow many Israeli citizens to live at a high level and in fact will expand the Gush Dan area to the Egyptian border. It will also give a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”
The white paper goes on to say that a deal between Egypt and Israel (and also Saudi Arabia, which would provide some of the funding and construction) could be easily concluded in days. The authors salivated over the Hamas attack as an opportunity that might never come again:
“The IDF must create the right conditions for the Gazan population to immigrate to Egypt [and] there is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.”
Click image to hear Ayalon discuss the Misgav plan to expel Gazans from Gaza
While Calcalist did not anticipate that the Gamliel document would get much traction within the government, in an interview with Marc Lamont Hill on Upfront, former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon cited the Misgav plan (with its ten cities) and downplayed the forced transfer as a “temporary relocation.” But who was Ayalon kidding? Building ten cities for refugees in Egypt sounds like a “relocation” that is anything but temporary.
Nof Zion is a religious Zionist settlement in East Jerusalem created by removing the Palestinian residents of Jabel Mukaber (Author, 2009)
Friends and family know that I am no partisan of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, its 75-year occupation of Palestinians now either relegated to refugee camps or internally-displaced, controlled by barbed wire, high-tech fences, whose movements are controlled by ubiquitous checkpoints, who are surveilled, suffer warrantless searches by the Israeli military and indeterminate detention without recourse to a justice system only for Jews, whose houses are bulldozed or expropriated by settlers, who are denied their own state, ringed by settlements that further ghettoize them and breed resentment and hatred, such as we saw last week.
for Palestinians in the West Bank there is no such thing as freedom of movement. Instead, checkpoints and walls and barbed wire (Author, 2009)
I have friends and family with Israeli roots, and I am still in touch with peace activists from the Eshkol district in Israel where almost all the attacks occurred. I have plenty of anger and grief over what happened in the Negev. But I do think we have to be honest about where Palestinian resentment comes from. We also need to admit that killing a child, whether by commando, blockade, sanctions on medical equipment, or F16, is still the murder of a child.
Over the years I have followed Israel’s many military operations against both Fatah and Hamas; its shameful participation in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of 3,500 Palestinians in Lebanon by Falangist militias; a commando attack on the Mavi Marmara, which killed 19 peace activists, including Americans trying to deliver aid to Gaza; Israel’s disproportionate use of military force in Operation Cast Lead, the 2008 version of what is likely to come this week; and the killing of journalists, last year Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, three days ago Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah.
I have met Palestinians whose olive groves are routinely vandalized or destroyed by settlers, whose young men are routinely harassed in often deadly versions of Stop and Frisk, and whose children are detained without warrant or counsel in adult prisons for throwing rocks. I have met Gazans who live in the tiny enclave of refugee camps the size of Detroit – but with 3.5 times the population – and can’t even fish the waters off their own coast. And I have met Palestinians who still have the key to a home now occupied by a Jewish family in Jerusalem. Both historical and daily wounds afflict Palestinians because of ethnic cleansing and occupation that began in the 20th Century and festers well into the 21st.
Over time Israel’s politics have lurched from right to far right. Its 37th government is now comprised of extremists who intend to neuter Israel’s supreme court – the last obstacle to full annexation of the West Bank. And they also want to impose religious restrictions, such as gender segregation and changes to marriage law, on even secular citizens. Last week’s trauma to Israel has been compared to 9/11. As with 9/11, when Americans began chanting “USA! USA!,” Israelis now heed the call to “Stand with Israel.” Trauma seems to feed nationalism. This is also true of Palestinians.
A member of the ruling coalition recently endorsed pogroms on Palestinian villages after extremist settlers went on a rampage of killing and arson. “I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the state of Israel should do it,” said Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who is also responsible for civil administration in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir enlightened journalists with his Jewish supremacist views: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria [biblical names for the West Bank] is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”
These are the gloves-off versions of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing that Israel’s government was once too ashamed to say out loud. Before Hamas attacked Israel such talk was beginning to frighten semi-liberal secular Israelis. Now Israel’s pro-democracy demonstrators are fully behind a new war government that has already killed over 2,000 in Gaza with indiscriminate bombing.
But territorial maximalism is a primary goal of all the political parties in Israel’s coalition government. Israel’s settler movement and its friends in the Knesset are still angry about Arial Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. Even if Hamas had not attacked Israel last week, many expected extremist ministers to propose re-establishing some of the 21 Jewish settlements that once occupied 45% of the Gaza Strip. Such talk has surfaced in the wake of the attacks, and Israel is now forcing 1.1 million Gazans to flee south – an incomprehensible number which Palestinians fear could create a second Nakba (catastrophe). Those with passports are fleeing across the Erez Crossing into Egypt. Between the bombing and the forced expulsions, there will surely be another reduction in the population of Gaza. Someone has called it “ethnic cleansing on the installment plan.”
Throughout the years the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians through raids, military operations, or settler violence. Israel calls this periodic bloodletting “mowing the grass.” In its efforts to target Hamas fighters, Israel manages to mow down mostly civilians, more often than not children. Each time a payment on the aforementioned installment plan.
Even assuming that reports of children being decapitated by Hamas fighters last week are true, why have so few tears been shed for the thousands of children whose bodies are blown apart by Israeli bombs paid for by American tax dollars? Perhaps for the same ugly reason it has been so easy for Americans to kill Mexicans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Puerto Ricans, Afghanis, and Iraqis. Israel certainly has some soul-searching to do. Americans too.
For all the US State Department and Israeli Foreign Ministry press releases expressing shock, anger, and solidarity — for all the many emotional appeals, for all the bias in the media, the cynical invocations of the Holocaust, the unfortunately necessary pushback against antisemitic incidents that inevitably occur in the wake of this conflict, or the religious and racial connections between Western Jews and Christians – we’re still ignoring the most glaring feature of this conflict: the wrongs done and wrongs being done to Palestinians.
The Occupation is Israel’s and Israel’s alone. Every death that emanates from this conflict weighs most heavily on Israel because Israel chooses not end the Occupation. No nation should enable, justify, defend, or fund the Occupation. Let Israel go it alone and see how quickly change can come about – when the US isn’t subsidizing it.
It is an abomination that Israel’s occupation has gone on for 75 years. The human misery it has inflicted and inflicts daily ought to shame every Western power complicit in its continuation.
The United States must not provide a cent more to Israel.
For some people, the Hamas attacks came out of nowhere and can only be explained by sinai chinam, the Hebrew term for baseless hatred. This of course ignores the history and the reality of the moment. With American politicians streaming into Israel to express sympathy and solidarity, it has become politically and socially dangerous to point out that the Hamas attack, while violating every standard of human decency and every law of war, was not unprovoked. It is also politically and socially dangerous to note that, unless something changes, Hamas’s savage attack and Israel’s savage response won’t be the end of it. That “something” is Israel’s 75 year occupation of a population almost its own size.
W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, is a deeply dark and political poem about the rise of Nazism culminating in the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939. In it we find these lines: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” As today, Auden’s expressions of simultaneous revulsion at Nazism and disgust for the reparations and humiliations Germany was subject to, and which fed Nazism, were not appreciated by a flag-waving public averse to nuance.
Managing the occupation of a population almost its own size has left Israel with basically three options: (1) to grant citizenship to Palestinians and create a democratic secular state; (2) clear out of the illegal settlements to permit a Palestinian state to exist; or (3) kill as many Palestinians as possible and force them to flee elsewhere. Israel has always chosen the third option and, appallingly, most Western nations with histories of colonialism and ethnic cleansing themselves have been complicit enablers — the United States especially.
Some of the 20 sites attacked
Americans may not like to face facts, but for years many Israelis, including those in Israel’s security establishment, have warned that Israel has become an apartheid state. In September, Tamir Pardo, the former head of Mossad, used exactly those words: that Israel was forcing an apartheid system on Palestinians in the West Bank. The month before, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir acknowledged exactly how the system works: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria” — the biblical names for the West Bank — “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.” And this was the West Bank he was talking about, not the strip of squalid, densely-populated refugee camps in Gaza to which residents of hundreds of Arab villages in the Negev were forced to flee and which is now the largest open-air prison on the planet.
Last week’s attack on Israel was stunning and ambitious. Amid a barrage of rockets which temporarily overwhelmed the Iron Dome defense, Hamas commandos also used low-tech ordnance, drones, and paragliders to overwhelm Israel’s border surveillance systems, then systematically attacked over 20 kibbutzim. All were within striking distance of Gaza, and the targets in most cases were kibbutzim and moshavim of military importance or which had been built on “cleansed” Arab villages. There is no question that Hamas used terror, but it was not merely a symbolic act like felling the Twin Towers or crashing into the Pentagon. Hamas was conducting a military operation to test Israeli defenses, new tactics, and its own reach. For next time.
Nahal Oz, which was one of the 20 attacked, is half a mile from the town of Sakarya in Gaza. After the 1967 war it became an access point for the Gaza Strip. Because of its proximity to Gaza, it has been under steady attack since its founding in 1951 as Israel’s first Nahal (paramilitary/vocational) settlement.
Density of Israel’s agricultural settlements and Gaza’s refugee camps
In April 1956, Nahal Oz’s security officer Ro’i Rothberg was killed and his funeral was attended by none other than Moshe Dayan, whose eulogy acknowledged Gazans’ anger at being ethnically cleansed from their own land, the burden that Nahal border settlements bore to serve as security buffers for the rest of Israel, and – freely expressed – that Israel’s settlement can only proceed by ignoring the pain and anger of those it has consigned to the life of refugees. It is an astoundingly warped and profoundly un-Jewish perspective on human suffering:
Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders? […] We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.
Ashkelon, which was bombarded by missiles during the attack, was once the Palestinian town of al-Majdal with 10,000 residents, mainly Muslim and Christian. It was ethnically cleansed in 1948.
Be’eri, one of this hardest-hit by Hamas, is roughly 2 miles from Gaza and, as the crow flies, perhaps 5 miles from Gaza City. It is one of 11 settlements in the Negev established by the Jewish Agency in 1946 to block the Morrison-Grady Plan, a partition plan which would have assigned the Negev to a Palestinian state. The rave at which over 260 young people were slaughtered is just outside Be’eri, where over 107 were also butchered at the Be’eri kibbutz. Most of Be’eri’s members belong to Israel’s secular left. Vivian Silver, who was on the board of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization reviled by the Netanyahu government, was one of those abducted by Hamas.
Kfar Aza was another scene of brutal butchery of civilians by Hamas. Established in 1951 by Maghrebi Jews from Egypt and Morocco, Kfar Aza lies 3 miles east of Gaza.
Kissufim, whose residents were murdered and abducted, is another Nahal settlement founded in 1951 by the Zionist Youth Movement and is quite close to the former Gush Katif settlement in Gaza, one of 21 settlements evacuated by Arial Sharon in 2005. There is also a crossing to Gaza two miles to the West.
Magen is 2.5 miles from the Gaza border and was also overrun in the Hamas attack.
Nirim is another 11-point settlement founded in 1946 by Hashomer Hatzair volunteers to thwart the Morrison-Grady partition plan. An important battle took place in Nirim in 1948 but Israel was able to hold the town.
Ofakim was founded in 1955 by Moroccan and Tunisian Jews, displacing Bedouins in an area called Khirbat Futals. The original residents fled to Al-Muharraqa, from which they were then expelled to the Gaza Strip. Many of the hostages from the October raid by Hamas were from Ofakim.
Sderot s only a half mile from Gaza and was built on the site of the Palestinian village of Najd, whose 13,576 residents were ethnically cleansed the day before the British Mandate ended and Israeli independence was declared. Villages like Sderot were intended to serve as buffers to prevent “re-infiltration” by Palestinians to Israel. For years towns like Sderot in the Negev were where Israel’s Ashkenim settled new arrivals from the Maghreb, then Ethiopia and Russia.
The Eshkol district which includes most of these communities includes Yesha, where Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, himself a settler, owns a home.
Urim, which was attacked but not penetrated by Hamas, is built over the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Imara, whose original residents were forced to flee to Gaza.
Yad Mordechai kibbutz was founded in 1936 by Polish Hashomer Hatzair on the site of the Palestinian village of Hiribya.
Yated (“anchor”) was founded in 1982 and is among the southern-most settlements near Gaza’s Rafah crossing to Egypt.
Zikim, which was the scene of a naval assault by Hamas, was originally known as Hiribya. In 1945 it had a population of 2500. Its residents fled Jewish militias and most fled to Gaza. In 1949 Hiribya was re-settled by Hashomer Hatzair, a Labor Zionist youth group which formed several kibbutzim in Israel’s South.
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One of the most disturbing videos that surfaced after the attacks was of the attack on young Israelis at a rave barely two miles from Gaza. Disturbing because 260 young people with the rest of their lives before them were massacred just to make a political point. But also disturbing that anyone can imagine the freedom to dance with joyous inhibition barely two miles from so much inflicted human misery.
Israel’s occupation has been ongoing since either 1947 or 1967, depending on how you count. An indisputable fact is that Israel has kept Palestinians under martial law for the last 75 years and has steadily chipped away at land intended to be their national homeland.
Israel and the Western nations, however, have continuously thwarted Palestinian statehood and winked as endless incursions, assassinations, land theft, and marginalization has created a de facto Apartheid state. American politicians speak of their deep commitment to a “two state” solution, knowing full-well that the land theft has now progressed so far that, without dismantling the illegal settlements, “two states” is nothing but a cynical, meaningless slogan.
Much like the US creation of the Taliban, Israel’s creation of Hamas (which was intended to neutralize the political power of Fatah and the PLO) has backfired spectacularly.
In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the decision to “withdraw” from Gaza. The Israeli military indeed withdrew from Gaza, but more controversial and traumatic for Israelis was the decision to physically dismantle 21 illegal settlements. This was seen as a betrayal of Zionist ideals by Israel’s far right, which still lists Sharon’s “betrayal” in its long enumeration of grievances.
Israel’s 2008 war on Gaza, known as “Operation Cast Lead,” killed 3 Israeli civilians and left 10 IDF soldiers dead by “friendly” fire. It also left vast devastation in Gaza and killed between 759 and 926 Palestinian civilians. A prize-winning photo by AFP photographer Mohammed Abed shows Israeli phosphorus munitions (which melt human bodies) raining down over a ruined school in Gaza. This was a brutal, disproportionate use of Israel’s military, which drew widespread international condemnation — though very little from the United States.
Israel is now in the throes of a crisis of its one-sided democracy. Amid demonstrations that have exposed fault lines in Israeli society, the nation formed its 37th coalition government around Netanyahu’s ultraconservative revisionist Zionist Likud party, Bezalel Smotrich’s ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, and Itamar Ben Gvir’s Neo-fascist Jewish Power party, which openly calls for expelling all Arabs from Israel and territory that Israel claims.
Ben Gvir’s political base is the old Kach party, which was banned for its advocacy of terrorism, and consists of extremists from the settler movement with links to Ygal Amir, who assassinated Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995, and Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer and injured 125 in Hebron in 1994.
Last year Netanyahu and Ben Gvir agreed to legalize settlements frozen, not coincidentally, in 2005. The entire West Bank is to be Israel’s Wild West. In a nation without a constitution, Israel’s supreme court is the only obstacle to human rights abuses. And now this coalition wants to neuter the nation’s court. Liberal Israelis fear the country is headed toward a future like Hungary’s.
With greater Palestinian suffering and the rise of a more authoritarian Zionism with fewer restraints and greater territorial aspirations — this is the dangerous context to this weekend’s invasion of Israel by an undisciplined group of Hamas fighters who carried out horrific murders, rapes, assaults and abductions of Israeli and international civilians in violation of international law.
But as an opinion piece by Sanjana Karanth reminds us, the Hamas attack may have been sadistic, indiscriminate and illegal. But to consider it totally “unprovoked” is to ignore 75 years of Israeli repression and Palestinian suffering.
As I watched videos of Hamas fighters moving systematically house-to-house in Sderot, it reminded me of the many videos I’ve seen of IDF troops moving house-to-house in Palestinian villages. It is likely that the Hamas kidnappings were intended in some twisted way to parallel Israel’s arrests, removal to Israeli soil, and indefinite imprisonment of Palestinians, arrested without warrant and imprisoned without court proceedings.
In 2009 I visited Israel and Palestine. I saw one of Israel’s physical Apartheid walls with my own eyes, the dehumanizing checkpoints, and I got a sense of the grim reality and deprivations for Palestinians. I visited a refugee center that generations of Palestinians have had to call home. I also visited an illegal settlement so large and so “American” that it was indistinguishable from an Orange County suburb with its ACE Hardware store and a community college. I visited Hebron and met an ultranationaist settler whose zealotry and violent fantasies alarmed me more than walking around Ramallah unchaperoned looking for a lunch spot.
In Sderot, which this weekend was ravaged by the Hamas invasion, I met with Mizrachi (Jews from Arab countries) peace activists who used to go into Gaza City to shop and who described the widespread PTSD of adults and children who have to hide in safe rooms. At the Zikim kibbutz, which was also breached by Hamas, I met with lefty Jews like me who sympathized with the plight of Palestinians despite being shelled. A huge concrete shield is built over the kibbutz’s daycare center to protect it from ketusha rockets fired so often that a cheeky rockets-to-ploughshares menorah was constructed out of the spent cylinders.
Everyone I met on that visit were all dear people, all precious lives. For everyone, Israelis and Palestinians alike, I want what we should all have – peace, enough to eat, security, a future for children and grandchildren. But for both Palestinians and Jews there can be no peace so long as Israel and Western nations (themselves no strangers to colonialism) wink at Israel’s colonial oppression and refuse to recognize the explosive potential of an oppressed people rising up in frustration because no one cares about them.
Once again this week we saw that potential.
As Israel’s “pro-democracy” movement suggests, Israelis themselves are beginning to understand that a state only for Jews with laws that privilege only Jews cannot ultimately even be a democracy for Jews. Just as white Americans have started to acknowledge this truth and our own history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow, many Israelis are beginning to grapple with the realization that Zionism is not so different from good old-fashioned American white supremacy. It might help that many are former Americans who emigrated.
The long-awaited Third Intifada has finally broken out. The old slogan “no justice, no peace” seems particularly apt. Palestinian desperation and Israeli insecurity will be permanent features of Israel’s Apartheid state unless there is sufficient American and international pressure on Israel to abandon its vast illegal settlements to finally enable a Palestinian state to become a reality.
If you have long suspected that the Massachusetts legislature purposely tanks most progressive pieces of legislation, you’d be half right.
Half right because the Massachusetts legislature actually tanks 99.8% of all legislation filed.
According to ACT ON MASS, the Massachusetts legislature has not been in session since July 31st and is officially the least effective legislature in the country. But don’t blame it all on your local legislators, who rank #3 among the most prolific filers of new legislation:
Blame it instead on the House and Senate leadership who kill legislation by consigning it to “study” or “committee.” As a result of this – as well as our habit of electing Republican governors – Massachusetts is dead last in the percentage of legislation actually enacted:
And we can thank House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka for this.
As a consequence of the legislature being prevented from doing its job, ballot initiatives seem to pop up like mushrooms amidst all the dead wood on Beacon Hill. Massachusetts voters can expect as many as 34 ballot questions before them in the next two election cycles. Many of these will be sponsored (or challenged) by lobbyists, worded deceptively, or funded to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars. All because the legislature can’t, or won’t, do it’s damned job.
In 2021 Massachusetts ranked 47th in government transparency according to the Open States project of the Sunlight Foundation. It takes great effort to discover how your representative voted – that is, if they ever get to vote on legislation that is more often than not tanked in the House or Senate.
Once again, we can thank House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka for this.
In 2018 an environmental lobbyist perfectly summed up the reality in the State House when a young reporter asked him when a bottle bill would come up for a vote:
“Probably never,” I shot back.
“But isn’t the majority of the committee in favor of it? Won’t they call for a vote?” he queried.
That moment, I broke an unspoken but absolutely firm rule among lobbyists: never criticize the State House political system. “Let me be clear,” I asserted. “Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.”
It is encouraging that State Auditor Donna DiZoglio is fighting to audit both houses. Unlike forensic audits which search out criminal activity, the State Auditor’s reports are friendly performance audits that suggest ways to make the organizations studied more efficient and more transparent.
If you think Democratic Senators are going to save us from creeping authoritarianism, you haven’t been paying attention to the legislation that some of them are filing — often with the co-sponsorship of far-right Republicans.
These include: Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s Kids Online Safety Act; Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s Stop CSAM Act; South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act (co-sponsored by Blumenthal and Durbin); Kansas Senator Roger Marshall’s Cooper-Davis Act (co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Dick Durbin, and Amy Klobuchar); and Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s RESTRICT Act. You can find them all described here.
I had no sooner posted an article about the deluge of Democratic-sponsored legislation when they did it again. This time it’s the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, filed by Hawaii Democratic Senator Brian Schatz (and Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton).
Adding to the imposition of firewalls, censorship, the neutering of encryption, and extensive surveillance of user content in the preceding bills, this one requires social media platforms to verify the ages of users and bans children under 13 from using social media — completely! Children over 13 can only use social media with parental permission. To enable access to the internet, Schatz’s bill creates a digital ID program to be run by the Department of Commerce which will then be used for tracking citizens and legal residents.
It would be a disaster if even one of these bills were enacted into law. They must all be stopped.
Please write Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey urging them to reject these bills.
Dear Senator ___, I urge you to reject: Senator Blumenthal's Kids Online Safety Act; Senator Durbin's Stop CSAM Act; Senator Graham's EARN IT Act (co-sponsored by Senators Blumenthal and Durbin); Senator Marshall's Cooper-Davis Act (co-sponsored by Senators Shaheen, Durbin, and Klobuchar); Senator Warner's RESTRICT Act; and Senator Schatz's Kids on Social Media Act. Most of this legislation disingenuously promises to protect children from online predators. Even if we accept these claims at face value, they are to be accomplished by dangerous if not unconstitutional means: policing the internet, imposing firewalls and censorship, effectively snooping on users, and weakening or breaking online encryption. One bill creates a national ID program to track users and significantly limits use of the internet by children. What's next? Books? It is no surprise that Republicans are involved in attempts to censor and surveil American citizens, but it is unconscionable that so many Democrats have joined with them. Shut this legislation down now. Sincerely, [your name and town here]
PLEASE take action against a suite of repressive legislation intended to police the internet, ban encryption, allow the banning of online platforms, and impose firewalls and dragnet surveillance on American internet users.
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When a politician comes to you with legislation claiming to “protect children” it’s wise to be cautious and read the legislation.
Republicans have perfected such appeals in hundreds of bills claiming to “protect” children from history, social studies, vaccinations, and sex education — just as an earlier generation “protected” children by imposing segregation and fighting busing and fluoride. If Republicans really cared about children, they’d pass comprehensive gun control legislation, support universal childcare, and put safety belts in school buses. But they don’t.
So it’s disheartening when Democrats join Republicans in trying to destroy online privacy by policing the internet.
Connecticut Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal has had the internet in his sights since at last 2007 when he called it “a playground for predators.” Last year Blumenthal filed his Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) legislation and it immediately triggered some well-deserved outrage from almost 100 civil rights organizations. You can read their objections here to a bill that would have made online platforms impose Chinese-style “Great Firewall” controls on what children can access online and would have mandated a “duty of care” to implement various types of surveillance and data collection to “protect” children from “bad actors.”
Still smarting from the criticism, Blumenthal went back to the drawing board and this year, together with far right Tennessee Senator Marcia Blackburn and equal numbers of center-right Democrats and right-wing Republicans, filed S.1409, An Act to Protect the Safety of Children on the Internet (KOSA 2023). Unfortunately, this one is just as awful as the last.
KOSA’s Republican co-sponsors include: Marsha Blackburn; Katie Britt; Shelley Capito; Bill Cassidy; John Cornyn; Mike Crapo; Steve Daines; Joni Ernst; Lindsey Graham; Chuck Grassley; Cindy Hyde-Smith; James Lankford; Cynthia Lummis; Roger Marshall; Markwayne Mullin; Lisa Murkowski; James Risch; Marco Rubio; Rick Scott; Dan Sullivan; Roger Wicker; and Todd Young.
It’s doubtful that the members of this right-wing crew are as interested in protecting children as they are in policing the internet.
Their Democrat fellow-travelers include: Tammy Baldwin; Richard Blumenthal; Ben Cardin; Thomas Carper; Bob Casey; Chris Coons; Dick Durbin; Maggie Hassan; John Hickenlooper; Tim Kaine; Mark Kelly; Amy Klobuchar; Ben Lujan; Joe Manchin; Robert Menendez; Chris Murphy; Gary Peters; Brian Schatz; Jeanne Shaheen; Mark Warner; Peter Welch; and Sheldon Whitehouse.
KOSA comes at a time when states like Idaho have banned TikTok and others are imposing laws to limit teen access to the internet. Of course, the most glaring problems with the internet — hoaxes, disinformation, and threats from the far right — are not easily addressed because censorship violates the First Amendment.
But if you “protect” the children through surveillance and censorship, then all the same surveillance and censorship infrastructure can be used on grownups. In order to impose selective censorship on just children, you’ll need some method of age verification. And here’s where the trip down the slippery slope begins. Everyone — not just children — will have to verify their age by providing personal information typically not required for online services. Adults won’t really be able to opt-out either; otherwise every 11 year-old would simply claim s/he’s an adult.
According to the ACLU, EFF, and 90 other civil rights organizations, “age verification may require users to provide platforms with personally identifiable information such as date of birth and government-issued identification documents, which can threaten users’ privacy, including through the risk of data breaches, and chill their willingness to access sensitive information online because they cannot do so anonymously. […] Rather than age-gating privacy settings and safety tools to apply only to minors, Congress should focus on ensuring that all users, regardless of age, benefit from strong privacy protections by passing comprehensive privacy legislation.”
Neither Republicans nor Democrats have done much to guarantee citizens online privacy to the degree that the EU has, but center-right Democrats and far-right Republicans sure love to invent ways to “protect children” which inevitably destroy privacy and curtail civil liberties.
Melissa Gira Grant writes in the New Republic that “KOSA […] has been billed as a new way to protect kids from a more pervasive and more dangerous internet. But in reality, KOSA hands powerful tools to the far right to further wage its war on kids, whether it’s censoring education on racism or demonizing queer and trans youth. Meanwhile, Democrats who support KOSA appear to either not have noticed or not minded.”
KOSA requires online platforms to “take reasonable measures” to “prevent and mitigate” harms to minors such as “anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors,” and monitor “patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors” and “physical violence, online bullying, and harassment of the minor.” State attorneys general are tasked to “prevent and mitigate” and to prosecute platforms for failures to protect children. Describing harms ambiguously much like anti-CRT legislation, state AGs can prosecute platforms if children are “threatened or adversely affected by the engagement of any person in a practice that violates this Act.”
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Still from “Das Leben der Anderen” – Stasi surveillance in East Germany
Even if well-intentioned, which it is not, the burden of surveillance that this legislation imposes on internet platforms and the vast sweep of monitoring hundreds of millions of users is something right out of East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Stasi).
As Floridians are well aware, their governor and legislature regard teaching Advanced Placement Black History as harmful, so that could end up being censored. KOSA is a gift to the far-right, to white supremacists, and to homophobes since it will effectively legitimize anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ and racist provisions like Florida’s nationally.
Consequently, 90 civil liberties groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warning that “online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people. […] At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes arebeing banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of ‘grooming,’ KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”
In addition to the mandated censorship and surveillance, internet platforms would be required to file annual public reports itemizing risks to children and listing their prevention and mitigation efforts:
an assessment of the extent to which the platform is likely to be accessed by minors
a description of the commercial interests of the covered platform in use by minors
an accounting of the number of individuals using the covered platform reasonably believed to be minors
an assessment of the reasonably foreseeable risk of harms to minors posed by the covered platform
an assessment of how recommendation systems and targeted advertising systems can contribute to harms to minors
a description of whether and how the covered platform uses system design features that increase, sustain, or extend use of a product or service by a minor
a description of whether, how, and for what purpose the platform collects or processes categories of personal data that may cause reasonably foreseeable risk of harms to minors
an evaluation of the efficacy of safeguards for minors
an evaluation of any other relevant matters of public concern over risk of harms to minors
The specificity of these burdensome reporting and data collection requirements is remarkable, given these same legislators’ lack of interest in accountability for police officers, Pentagon contractors, or oil and gas companies.
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Enigma machine: it’s encryption was eventually broken
KOSA, and worse
KOSA is only one of several malignant pieces of legislation intended to police the internet. Several others do so at the cost of effectively banning encryption.
The STOP CSAM ACT from Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin requires online platforms to snoop on their users to detect child pornography. While this makes it easier to prosecute Dark Web operators, the legislation also depends on disabling data encryption to permit snooping by law enforcement and the user’s own platform. Effectively banning encryption is such a radical step that it explains why STOP CSAM was quietly sneaked into the [annual] National Defense Authorization Act, which is often passed without much scrutiny by both political parties. In addition to breaking encryption, and like KOSA, STOP CSAM would also mandate a take-down mechanism that can be used by far-right politicians to remove any kind of content considered harmful to children, including resources for LGBTQ+ teens or African-American curriculum.
The EARN IT ACT from South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham is ostensibly to “protect” children from child pornography. But once again, it does more to advance dragnet surveillance than its stated purpose. This bill permits the scanning of your online family photos, messages, and emails. And of course in order to do that your provider has to disable your encryption.
The Cooper-Davis Act, an amendment to the Controlled Substances Act from Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall, is intended to monitor the online use and sale of controlled substances, particularly fentanyl. This legislation requires your internet provider to monitor your communications and proactively report suspected drug use or drug sales to law enforcement. No warrants are necessary! Aside from violating the Fourth Amendment, the bill also relies on disabling encryption to enable the snooping.
The RESTRICT ACT, sponsored by Democratic Senator Mark Warner, claims to target data collection by foreign governments. It was specifically intended to ban TikTok but it also penalizes users for employing Virtual Private Networks (VPN) or side-loading (unconventional installation) of apps to circumvent censorship.
The Supreme Court, as an increasingly illegitimate institution, has robbed the majority of its civil liberties while granting Christian Nationalists a wish list long denied by the Constitutional separation of church and state. In a perversion of judicial interpretation, discrimination no longer exists — unless it’s us pushing back on the “rights” of Christian Nationalists to discriminate for “religious” reasons.
The Court’s rulings have emboldened the Christian right to attack every secular institution — including schools, libraries, school boards — and the Court grants them permission to suppress Black history, demonize LGBTQ+ people, and censor ideas and science that conflict with their own narrow religious views.
This new era of Christian fundamentalism could last 30 years, or will hopefully be of shorter duration. But a sharp and angry reaction to religious repression will likely follow. Around 2016 Ireland began repealing repressive laws based on its long troubled relationship with the Church. France, once overrun by saints and cathedrals, is now hostile to religion and is among the top ten countries with the largest percentage of atheists. Germany, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and the birthplace of Protestantism, is now one of the least religious nations in Europe. While familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, it often leads to a realization that religion is toxic to democracy. It’s even beginning to dawn on Israelis that their tolerance of religious extremism – in a religious state! – is about to cost them their democracy – at least the one on their side of the Green Line.
Of the articles I read this morning, two couldn’t have been more different.
One was from Massachusetts Informed Parents, a project of the Christian Nationalist Massachusetts Family Institute, which tries to force their “Christian” values down everybody’s throats, particularly in matters of education. MFI was incensed that the Lexington schools talk to kids about the diversity found in their own district, about skin color, understanding that some parents are not mom and dad but mom and mom, or that sometimes people suffer silently from disabilities. That some boys and some girls don’t like to play with toys traditionally associated with their sex. Or that we have to be respectful of how people think of themselves, that some people are white, some black, some bi- and multi-racial. Or ask: what is empathy? All this is simply too much for the “Christians” at MFI, who think that any discussion of empathy and acceptance “makes it easier to turn kids into good little activists.”
The other was a wonderful essay by Suzanne Stillinger, a queer early childhood educator who does the work that MFI despises so much, and who took the opportunity in Commonwealth Magazine to thank her community for embracing her and the work she does in Northampton. Stillinger addresses the Christian Right’s objection to her work: “The epithet ‘groomer,’ a new slur based on a tired and very old stereotype, is being tossed at any adult who supports LGBTQ+ rights, but is especially damaging when directed at those of us who work with children. There are those who insist that talking about LGBTQ+ identities radicalizes children, when all of the data tells us that the true risk lies in denying children access to information and support that validates their full sense of self and belonging.”
So, what we see here are two ways of living in and seeing the world. One seeks to preserve hate and ill-judgement while marginalizing certain people, and to keep children’s eyes closed to both injustice and a changing world. The other is to open children’s eyes to social realities, and to celebrate the differences and the beauty of diversity in their communities, schools, and classrooms – to foster acceptance and solidarity, not hate.
There was a time when Americans wanted to say, “we’re all in this together.” I think we still want to. The work the Lexington and Northampton schools are doing affirms this way of moving within the world. In contrast, the toxic efforts of hate groups like MFI and MIP only undermine social cohesion.
The choice really is this stark – we have to choose the kind of world we want to live in.
Most Americans still think of Israel as the “little country that could” – what Israelis call their “startup nation.” Some fondly recall the kibbutzim or the old Labor governments, liberal-ish but not really all that liberal and certainly not democratic — at least for those in Arab villages inside and outside Israel’s borders. But since the 1967 war Israel has moved quite far to the right and has had a succession of right-wing governments. Over the years the U.S. has pumped over $150 billion into its economy, dedicated, at least in part, to maintaining a ethno-religious state many liken to South African Apartheid.
The 37th government of Israel, formed at the very end of 2022 and led by Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and Netanyahu, is the most right-wing of all time. It’s so extreme that Israel’s apologists now have an almost impossible job of defending the nation’s illiberal and openly racist policies. Liberal Israelis are alarmed by authoritarianism now directed against them and by religious extremism that now seeks to marginalize them. 28% are considering leaving the country. Tech companies (many of which are registered in Delaware) and some physicians are relocating. Both Smotrich and Ben Gvir openly call for murdering and expelling Palestinians. A settler now under arrest for murder in a pogrom on a Palestinian village once worked for an extremist Member of the Knesset who praises him as a hero.
All this is so over-the-top that a completely different response is required from the United States. And when I say “over the top” I mean: what’s happening today exceeds the routine mistreatment and deprivation of human rights that Israel has inflicted for 75 years on a population almost its own size — realities the U.S. ignores as it dishonestly claims to support a “Two-State Solution” — now impossible because of the colonization of the West Bank by over 650,000 settlers.
As enablers of Israel’s occupation and illegal settlements, U.S. administrations have complained unconvincingly that they have no real leverage with Israel. But the United States has always had both carrots and sticks. “Tough love” for Israel does not necessarily mean dismantling US-Israel military cooperation or slapping sanctions on a state that is arguably doing some of the same things to Palestinians that Russia is doing to Ukrainians. It could involve stopping the annual billions in subsidies (which even progressive Israelis are calling for). It might entail altering diplomatic status or pulling our embassy out of a colonized Jerusalem. It might be voting in the UN Security Council for or against resolutions condemning mistreatment of Palestinians on the basis of desired policy choices by Israel. Or it might take the form of rewarding Israel with economic deals (particularly in the tech, energy, and security sectors) when – and not until – Israel fully withdraws from the West Bank. That is, if the U.S. really wants to see a Two State Solution.
Speaking of economic development, a current focus for both Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu is making the Saudi-Israeli deal a reality. It’s to the personal political advantage of both to make the deal happen. Netanyahu is fighting to regain control of a coalition in which he’s now in the minority, and to stay out of jail on corruption charges. Biden is trying to score points with the American Right and Center. Supporting this effort, Hakeem Jeffries was in Israel recently with the Israeli lobby group AIPAC, which has been spending a lot of PAC money on attacking Democrats. Jeffries’ goal was apparently to send a message to an American Right that loves ethno-religious nationalism: Biden hasn’t given up on Israel. In fact, there’s a never-ending procession of Democratic supplicants arriving in Israel on either AIPAC or state and city-funded junkets. This week it was New York’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams seeking an audience with Netanyahu.
Instead of all this slavish ass kissing, Democrats ought to be exerting pressure to save what’s left of Israeli democracy and preserve the Two State option they claim to support – not endorsing an extremist government led by a prime minister about to be indicted, who was just presented with a plan from his coalition partners to put a million settlers in the West Bank.
For Netanyahu, who recently had a pacemaker implanted and has poured the last of his political, if not physical, capital into a government built out of the old Kach movement (at one time declared a terrorist organization and banned from Israeli politics), a Saudi-Israeli deal could be part of his legacy — that is, if it’s not tarnished by a prison sentence for corruption.
Liberal and Progressive — and even some not-so-liberal — Israelis are begging the U.S. to show some tough love for Israel. Organizations like ACRI (the Association for Civil Rights in Israel), the Israel Policy Forum, Partners for Progressive Israel, even the right-of-center Shalom Hartman Institute, and US Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Americans for Peace Now are concerned about the judicial coup now underway, which is intended to remove Supreme Court impediments to “unreasonable” actions by an extremist government. If the judicial coup succeeds, it will be the death of what is left of “democracy” in Israel proper (though neither democracy nor legal redress have ever existed in the West Bank or Gaza).
But that doesn’t faze Biden or Jeffries one bit. They’re playing to a right-wing or right-of-center electorate accustomed to displays of affection for “our unbreakable bond” with a nation whose ethno-supremacist dynamics are precisely like our own. And when the President invokes jingoist American exceptionalist rhetoric, calls for God’s blessings on the nation, and cheer-leads religious-ethnic supremacy elsewhere, it looks an awful lot like the “Lite” version of the Christian Nationalism that suffuses GOP politics. What ever happened to universal human rights and real democracy?
Neither Israel nor the U.S. has ever truly had a democracy for all of its people. In both cases the design of our democracies has privileged one group at the expense of deeply harming another. And now, because both designs were so deeply flawed right from the beginning — because neither even pretends to be a real democracy — they’re not even working for the privileged.
I am working on another piece on the “startup nation.” In the meantime there are some excellent books and online resources for readers and people who follow podcasts.
The following websites feature Jewish Center and Progressive news and views, as well as Palestinian perspectives on Israel’s occupation and politics. Most have associated RSS feeds and podcasts.
I’m sure there are plenty of great books on the subject. I can only recommend ones I’ve actually read:
1949: The First Israelis by Tom Segev A co-editor of the Israeli newsweekly Koteret Rashit and a former writer for the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’aretz, Segev was given access to previously restricted official documents and personal diaries. The book tells the unvarnished story of the first year’s effort to build the State of Israel and in 1986 raised an uproar in Israel when many of the country’s founding myths were shown to be untrue. “1949” documents directives, many from David Ben-Gurion, to expel and prohibit readmission of Palestinians. Negev was perhaps the first Israeli to document the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The second part of the book documents Israel’s cruel treatment of Mizrahim (Arab Jews) and the growing conflict between religious and secular Jews.
A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time by Howard M. Sachar This is a monster of a book. While Laqueur’s book (below) is on placing Zionism in historical context, this book places Israel in historical and world context. Just as one example, it describes the British Mandate which was the agar plate on which Israeli statehood grew. If you are interested in long descriptions of battles in Israel’s various wars, with accompanying maps, this is for you (I skipped past a lot of it). Though Sachar is no friend of the “new historians” and much of his material seems to reflect “official” positions of the government, other parts of the book seem fair. In a later chapter on Israeli politics, for example, he cites a 1984 Knesset report on Orthodox schools warning that “our schools have been thrown wide open to chauvinist and antidemocratic influences.” Considerable anti-Arab hate was generated by Rabbi Zvi Kook, spiritual leader of the Gush Emunim settler movement. Religious arguments were twisted into hate speech. Arabs became Amalek. “Death to the Arabs” became a common phrase. The Techiya Party was founded by Gush Emunim zealots who began calling for the expulsion of all Arabs. Other “hate” parties popped up (Tsomet, Molodet, and Kach, established by Meier Kahane). Kahane was a Brooklyn racist who founded the Jewish Defense League and then emigrated to Israel. As Sachar describes him, Kahane was a civic cancer much like Donald Trump: “Attracting public attention with his demagoguery, [and] his flagrant appeals to racism and mob intimidation […]” Israel’s Jewish nationalist bigotry is the twin of America’s Christian nationalist bigotry and Kahanists now dominate Israel’s current government.
A History of Zionism by Walter Zeev Laqueur This is an excellent companion to Hertzberg’s anthology (below). While Hertzberg lets Zionists speak for themselves, Laqueur places each in historical context. He begins with the Jewish ghettos of the Middle Ages and ends with the establishment of the state of Israel and, finally, Thirteen Theses on Zionism. It is not unfair to say that Laqueur is a conflicted admirer of Zionism. For him the jury’s still out, but as far as he’s concerned it was a necessity. His theses are worth reading, and their implications tell us certain things about Zionism. Thesis 3, for example, points out that assimilation is the enemy of Zionism and a product of contact with Europe. Thesis 8: The Zionist movement was unclear about its objectives until Nazism arrived. The betrayal of Palestinians by the West created much of the animosity toward Jewish settlement. Thesis 9: This animosity sharpened as Zionism moved from a cultural renewal focus to statehood. Thesis 10: “Seen from the Arab point of view, Zionism was an aggressive movement, Jewish immigration an invasion […] Throughout history nation-states have not come into existence as the result of peaceful development and legal contracts. They developed from invasions, colonisation, violence, and armed struggle.” Laqueur adds, “It was the historical tragedy of Zionism that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map.” Thesis 13: Zionism has succeeded in restoring dignity to Jews in the eyes of the world and becoming a focus for world Jewry. But in terms of “fanciful” expectations (“Zion as a new spiritual lodestar, a model for the redemption of mankind, a centre of humanity”) it has not panned out quite as the early Zionists had hoped.
How Israel Lost by Richard Ben Cramer Cramer writes, “any Jew who isn’t an Israeli and not on psychotropic drugs, could solve this Peace-for-Israel thing in about ten minutes of focused thought. Give back the land to the Palestinians. All of it [the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem]. And since Palestinians are already living in their own country, they should have equal rights, a fact so laughably obvious – the only nation that can’t see this is Israel.” And this, remarkably, is from a guy who doesn’t bother to disguise his contempt for Arabs in general.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé Pappé is one of Israel’s New Historians who, with the release of British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, began rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians that same year. Pappé maintained that the expulsions were not on an ad hoc basis but constituted the intentional ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. By the time he left Israel in 2008, Pappé had been condemned in the Knesset, a minister of education had called for him to be fired, his photograph with an attached bullseye had appeared in a newspaper, and Pappé had received several death threats. American historians grappling with our own white supremacy know exactly what Pappé faced from those who refuse to look clear-eyed into the mirror of history.
The Iron Cage by Rashid Khalidi This is an interesting book by a Palestinian who looks at not only Israel’s (and the West’s) tight control of Palestinians but at the historical errors pre-1948 which Palestinian leaders made and which contributed to the non-existence of a Palestinian state. Of course the West dealt the death-blow to Palestinian statehood when Britain gave up Palestine. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour stated in 1919, “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” Translation: Fuck the Arabs. Khalidi ends with an appeal to the U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian leadership to “look honestly at what has happened in this small land over the past century […] and especially at how repeatedly forcing the Palestinians into […] an iron cage, has brought, and ultimately can bring, no lasting good to anyone.”
The Israel-Arab Reader edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin Israel is situated in a very big neighborhood and its nearest neighbors, the Palestinians, often have no voice in historical accounts. This book does not have a “through” narrative like many anthologies, but it is provides a handy reference of important historical documents. It includes hundreds of official documents and speeches, from some of the first Zionist Congresses to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, to the San Remo Conference assignment of Palestine to Britain, to the Balfour Declaration, the PLO Constitution, speeches by Anwar Sadat, George Schultz, Yasir Arafat, and more.
The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl In many ways this is the blueprint for Israel. This book is also found in Arthur Hertzberg’s anthology as well as on Project Gutenberg in both English and in the original German. It is a fascinating read. Herzl did not have a democracy in mind for the Jewish state (“I incline to an aristocratic republic”). Settlement was to be coordinated by a colonial enterprise he called the “Jewish Company” (not far off from the Jewish Agency which actually accomplished the task ). The Constitution (which never materialized) was to be forced upon the settlers (“Our people, who are receiving the new country from the Society, will also thankfully accept the new constitution it offers them. Should any opposition manifest itself, the Society will suppress it”). This year Herzl got his wish for an openly anti-democratic state. And as for those living In Palestine already? Expropriate their property and kick them out! “We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”
The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin This is a collection of essays by writers, journalists, academics, and historians on the Israeli Left. These critics of Apartheid, Occupation, settlements, human rights abuses, and Israeli domestic and foreign policy are as reviled as many of their American equivalents on the progressive and socialist democratic Left. In 2009 I was in Israel and met Jeff Halper, one of the contributors to this volume, who discussed Israel’s “matrix of control” for the systematic theft of Palestinian land. His essay on the topic is included in this collection. The book concludes with Tom Segev’s essay on “Transfer” – a common euphemism for ethnic cleansing used by many on the Israeli right and center. And to be clear: ethnic cleansing is intended not only for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Former Labor Party minister Ephraim Sneh actually proposed transferring sovereignty of Israeli Arab towns, including Umm al-Fahm which is near both Haifa and Jenin, to the Palestinian Authority.
The Zionist Idea edited by Arthur Hertzberg Zionism may have originally been intended to be Jewish self-determination in the service of self-protection, pride, and autonomy, but it has become a lot like its evil twin Christian nationalism. In this volume you hear the words of Zionists themselves. And there are many. Those whose names you may recognize include: Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State); Max Nordau; Hayyim Nahman Bialik; Abraham Isaac Kook; Martin Buber; Mordecai Menahem Kaplan – and some who actually had a hand in creating the state of Israel: Meir Bar-Ilan; Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky; Chaim Weizmann; Abba Hillel Silver; and David Ben-Gurion.
Whither Israel? The Domestic Challenges edited by Keith Kyle and Joel Peters This book by British foreign policy specialists was first published in 1993 – thirty years ago – but still identifies many of the issues catching up with Israel today. From the book’s blurb: “As it enters the 1990’s Israel faces crucial political, economic and social challenges. Its parliamentary system is proving increasingly ineffective, prompting demands for electoral and constitutional reform; its economy is beset by stagnation, inflation and unemployment and its economic difficulties feed and exacerbate existing social and political tensions. This book considers the impact of these problems and their implication for the future direction of Israeli politics and society. Different chapters examine the social and ideological divisions that beset Israel, the roots of the country’s economic problems, the dynamics of the Israeli political system and recent developments within political parties.”
Required Reading
If you want to understand Israel you have to understand its longest-serving Prime Minister and his attachment to Jabotinsky’s strain of Zionism.
The Iron Wall by Ze’ev Jabotinsky “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” Jabotinsky was an admirer of Mussolini as were many of the Revisionist Zionists (until Italy’s alliance with Germany). Benjamin Netanyahu is at heart a Revisionist Zionist and, not coincidentally, his father was Jabotinsky’s secretary.
It doesn’t take much to keep a 72 year-old man up at night. And caffeine and over-hydration are not what I’m talking about. What worries me is the country’s race toward fascism, cheered on to the amens of fake-Christian nationalists and accompanied by the angry whiteboy tunes of Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” or Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
But right at the top of my worry list is the Democrat Party’s lack of concern that its presumptive nominee, the current president, is such a bad choice he could actually lose against an opponent with 91 criminal indictments. That’s not just my opinion; it’s a view supported by multiple polls (for example, here and here and here). Joe Biden’s candidacy is such a terrifying prospect that it is irresponsible for the DNC to not be looking for a replacement. And it would be irresponsible not to be writing essays like this one.
Bidenomics
Aside from the fact that he’s not Donald J. Trump — which is really the only reason to vote for him — Biden’s entire campaign is based on “Bidenomics,” a time-worn bag of post-Keynesian tricks for tweaking the economy. By traditional measures that consider inflation, the consumer price index, the health of the investment industry, the value of the dollar, personal debt, consumer spending, or view “employment” generously to include those working three dead-end jobs at a time or “gig economy” jobs without benefits, “Bidenomics” is going gangbusters. Biden’s bag of tricks, according to his PowerPoints and dry talking points, is “working.”
“Bidenomics” is no doubt the product of some genius’s riff on “Reaganomics,” the trickle-down theory that what benefits Big Business must ultimately help the American worker. By now almost everyone knows trickle-down economics was a big lie, what another Republican called “voodoo economics.” And maybe that’s the problem: Americans are simply tired of having their Presidents lie to them about economic policies. Whatever its merits, Bidenomics was destined to fall on deaf ears.
Yet for all the centrist Democratic cheerleading (see examples here or here or here) Americans have not been convinced by Bidenomics’s rosy numbers. The title of a recent article by Monica Potts in FiveThirtyEight says it all: “Biden Says The Economy’s Doing Great. Lots Of His Own Voters Don’t Believe Him.” Americans’ precarious personal finances are rarely acknowledged. It’s not the health of the dollar, the Dow, the Consumer Confidence index, or even inflation that terrifies Americans. Millions of Americans are one medical disaster or one week of unemployment away from complete financial ruin. They can’t afford housing, they can’t afford healthcare, they can’t afford childcare, and they’re struggling to pay off medical debt, credit card debt, and student debt. Both food insecurity and financial hardship are only worsening.
And then there’s Biden himself.
Voters just don’t want Biden
Reflecting America’s misery and hopelessness, Biden’s abysmally low approval ratings from working people shouldn’t come as any surprise. An AP-NORC poll found only 34% of Americans approve of Biden’s economic leadership. 78% say the economy is fair or poor, according to a New York Times Cross-Tabs survey. A Reuters-Ipsos survey found that 69% of Americans think the economy has deteriorated since Biden assumed the Presidency. Biden’s popularity with Black voters has dropped from 82% to 52% in three years. A Yahoo/YouGov poll found that only 27% of Americans thought Biden was fit to be President compared to 31% who felt the same about Trump. Here in Massachusetts, 59% would prefer that Biden never run again.
Why, then, doesn’t the Democratic Party believe any of these people?
Ignoring people, believing pundits
FiveThirtyEight’s Galen Drake and guests made a good-faith effort to explain the disconnect in “Why Americans Aren’t Feeling ‘Bidenomics’.” Jeanna Smialek, who covers the Fed for the New York Times, suggested, “inflation feels worse than the job market feels good.” Axios’s chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin, conjectured that the disconnect was due to diminished earning power. To their credit, they actually looked for missing datapoints to explain the disconnect.
Compared to that, however, liberals seem to be consuming a lot of sweet, empty calories in the many puff pieces written to defend Bidenomics. The New Republic’s Timothy Noah simply pooh-poohed Bidenomics’s critics, asking “What Drives Blind Denial of Economic Good News?” His TNR Colleague Michael Tomasky called Biden a “terrific president” and chastised Democrats for not being enthusiastic enough: “Democrats are walking around in some state of somnolent indifference about Joe Biden. They need to snap out of it.” The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper asked, “Can Democrats Sell ‘Bidenomics’?” Then proceeded to write off Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for Bidenomics as unchallenged propaganda from the right, claiming: “Most ordinary voters appear to be doing reasonably well in their own personal finances. Witness the consumer confidence index, which recently hit the highest level since January 2022, before the major inflation surge. But then they turn on the news each night and hear dire stories about inflation, supply chain difficulties, housing prices, interest rates, and so on, with little or no consistent pushback from Democrats.”
I’m not so willing to dismiss voters’ own assessments of Biden. They’re the ones voting in 2024, not the pundits.
Biden the faux unionist
For all his “Joey Scranton” shtik, Biden is not, and has never been, a genuine champion of working class Americans. Biden may have had working class parents, but he began his professional life as a lawyer, owns four homes, is worth at least $10 million, and since 1972 has had a guaranteed pension and healthcare from the Senate. In the negative sense that most Americans experience it, Biden has never had to “work” a day in his life.
While “Union Joe” claims to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history, the Revolving Door Project notes Biden’s “encouraging” appointments to key executive positions in his administration — Jennifer Abruzzo to General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Julie Su to Labor Secretary at the Department of Labor. “Unfortunately, the list of the administrations’ pro-labor achievements basically ends there.” The article goes on to mention chronic underfunding of the National Labor Relations Board, his breaking of the rail strike last November, the UAW’s concern about Biden’s reckless funding for non-union automotive startups, and Labor’s absence from trade deal negotiations.
For instance, Biden’s “Build Back Better” program promised to reverse the corporate takeover of trade policy seen in the NAFTA and TPP agreements. But with the new corporate-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, Biden’s business-as-usual approach consists of giving an outsized voice to corporations in matters of trade policy.
Biden and the Democrats
As party leader, Joe Biden may be skillfully holding the Democratic “big tent” together with chewing gum, bailing wire, and duct tape. But the tent is a centrist tent, always has been, and always will be. Those of us who are not centrists get cranky when we see that the party could be a much more effective and passionate advocate for average Americans than it is. But face it: the Democratic Party operates on corporate largesse and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) itself just hired a union-busting consultant leading an effort to deprive workers of labor protections. The current DNC Chair is Jaime Harrison, among other things a former lobbyist with the Podesta Group, which services major U.S. corporations. Chris Korge is the DNC’s Finance chair. Korge too is a former lobbyist, fundraiser, and real estate developer.
Mixed signals on Abortion
You might recall that Biden was not endorsed by NARAL in 2019 because of his support for the Hyde Amendment, which bars using federal funds for abortion. Just this year, when asked his views on Roe v Wade (he does feel the Supreme Court “got it right” back then), Biden still couldn’t resist showing where he actuallystands: “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion.” Despite the mixed signals, and to be fair, Biden does actually support abortion and contraception — and NARAL finally endorsed him this year. But with abortion and contraception threatened nationally, an 80 year-old guy with needlessly-vocalized reservations may not be the best choice to fight for reproductive rights for women.
Defending Private Prisons
Despite publicly opposing private prisons, Biden’s administration filed suit against the state of New Jersey citing the “Supremacy Clause” in the Constitution in a case in which New Jersey was trying to get rid of private prisons operated by CoreCivic.
Supporting the Surveillance State
The Biden administration announced its intention to renew Section 702 of the invasive and unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
A long history of racism
Many people have not forgiven Biden for his 1975 anti-busing crusade that the NAACP called “an anti-black amendment”, or his shabby treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings in 1991. Over a long and damaging career in the Senate, Biden managed to be associated with all types of racist legislation — attaching the death penalty to over 60 crimes, minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses, civil asset forfeiture, and establishing different sentencing for powder vs. crack cocaine. Biden demonized “super-predators” and attacked George H.W. Bush for being soft on crime.
In 2020, when Biden was campaigning, he was asked about undecided Black voters. His reply shocked everyone: “If you’ve got a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” That same year 500 Asian-Americans asked Biden to take down a racist anti-China ad that his campaign created.
Last year Biden proposed $30 billion in funding to hire more police, a move critics slammed as a betrayal of Black people and one completely hostile to appeals for demilitarizing and slimming police forces. Biden’s DOJ argued that people born in U.S. territories do not have a Constitutional right to U.S. citizenship.
Unsurprisingly, during his presidency Biden’s support from Black and Hispanic voters has been tanking.
Sticking with Trump’s Immigration policies
Biden retained Trump’s restrictive refugee caps as well as Trump’s Title 42 asylum denials (on the basis of public health) longer than necessary.
Botching Student debt relief
After botching version 1.0 of his own student debt relief program, the Supreme Court literally manufactured a plaintiff without standing to gut student debt relief. Biden’s “Plan B” is predicated upon the Department of Education invoking the Higher Education Act to dispose of the debt, a strategy many doubt can work.
Both Massachusetts senators and a large number of Senators and House representatives want to expand the Supreme Court. But Biden’s not on board.
Sacrificing the Social Safety Net
Progressive Democrats were not happy about Biden’s cuts to Medicaid, Pell grants, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in order to resolve the debt ceiling impasse. NAACP President Derrick Johnson warned Congress, “To our many allies and partners in Congress who have claimed to support Black Livers, we are grateful for your past support and need you to know: this is a moment of choosing.” In gutting social programs for the most vulnerable in society, Biden and the Democrats chose wrong.
Foreign policy a complete disaster
Biden’s ambassadors have been plucked mainly from the ranks of corporate lobbyists, big donors, and Big Oil. He just nominated war criminal Elliott Abrams, convicted of lying to Congress, to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Biden’s foreign policy is driven by three war hawks: Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland (who most famously was recorded in 2014 ordering up a new Ukrainian president).
Biden’s neocon war whisperers have him continuing to expand NATO, selling cluster munitions to Ukraine, and raising military spending to new and obscene levels. His Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is another hawk who supports torture and managed to conceal CIA spying on senators from Congress. Biden has continued the secret wars of his predecessors, including weekly drone attacks. He won’t even call the coup in Niger (by US-trained generals) a coup.
There is no authoritarian state Biden won’t praise. From Israel to India, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, it’s White House visits, state dinners, hugs and fist bumps — even for a Saudi dictator who dismembered a Saudi-American journalist. As long as there is a strategic objective, Biden will turn on the flattery for any authoritarian regime.
Biden blocked resumption of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump abrogated in 2018 by introducing new preconditions and pronouncing the original agreement “dead.” Recently, Biden recklessly placed 3,000 troops on commercial ships in the Persian Gulf, a move that the Washington Post called a “remarkable escalation” with Iran.
The President is betting the ranch on a Saudi-Israeli peace deal which would (besides spinning mendacious fantasies of a Two-State solution) give Saudi Arabia a package of military aid, replenish Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s empty tank of political capital, reduce Saudi flirtations with China, and aim more nukes at Iran. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, this is an incredibly stupid idea: “Would the mullahs of Tehran hold still if their mortal enemies in Riyadh suddenly signed accords that gave them nuclear technology and formal military backing from Washington? It is a fair bet that they would accelerate their uranium-enriching programs if just to obtain a deterrent.”
Environmental policy in the dumpster
Biden began his presidency by naming Big Oil appointees to the State Department. He then set about rolling out pipelines, LNG terminals and has permitted more gas and oil exploration on public lands than Trump, including in the Arctic. In May and June 2022 the Biden Administration auctioned off more than 140,000 acres of public land for gas and oil development.
Rather than boosting alternative energy, Biden has embraced carbon capture and carbon accounting schemes that do little to actually reduce environmental CO2. And environmentalists have noticed: “We don’t want to see New Mexico have a continued legacy of sacrifice zones, so we’re here demanding the ending of fossil fuels and investment in renewable energies,” said Julia Bernal, the executive director of Pueblo Action Alliance on the occasion of a Biden visit to New Mexico. “No hydrogen, no carbon sequestration, and no false solutions in general.”
In August, under Biden, US crude oil production actually hit a new all-time high. Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter blasted Biden’s hypocrisy, especially on methane which is a byproduct of fracking: “If the White House is serious about reducing methane pollution, it should [ban] fracking and [prohibit] the use of methane for heating in new construction. President Biden should also use his executive authority to stop the buildout of new gas infrastructure, ban the export of methane in the form of liquified natural gas, and stop fracking on federal lands as he promised during the campaign. […] So far, White House policies have bolstered the interests of corporate polluters by dramatically increasing fossil fuel permits and aggressively promoting the growth of fracked gas exports – a catastrophic move that will increase methane pollution and keep countries hooked on fossil fuels for decades.”
Disappointingly, Biden’s DOJ maintains that “there is no constitutional right to a stable climate system.” And, even with the world burning and melting, he still won’t declare a climate emergency. This is a president who may talk the talk but says “nah” to the walk.
Biden or not?
These are only a few of the many reasons no one should ever vote for Joe Biden.
But after all of the foregoing, here’s the one and only reason I still may end up voting for him.
I might prefer a particular third-party candidate for his love of all the values I care about — a candidate whose morality and humanity extend even to democracy and human rights outside the United States. A candidate who mercifully drops the American exceptionalist jingoism and instead looks critically at how race, class, and inequality play out in our nation. A man who is actually willing to do something to solve real problems for real people.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no chance that this principled man will ever win the next election. And there is every chance a fascist will return with his “base” to deliver the coup de grâce to our dying democracy.
Many are calling for Biden to step aside. That includes half of all Democrats. And that includes me. I have hopefully given readers sufficient reason to do the same. However, if and when it becomes clear that no hope for an alternative to Biden remains, I will join in supporting him over the fascist with the spray-on tan and an army of pitchfork, bible, and AR15-wielding nut jobs.
But I hope the Democratic Party will come to its senses long before that happens and select a better, stronger, more appealing, and more principled candidate for President of the United States.
Today’s culture wars are being fought by supposed followers of Jesus. But the version of Jesus they revere is not the man of miracles and multitudes who showed compassion for a woman about to be stoned to death. For Christian Nationalists the canonical Jesus is a lamentable “woke” sissy who would turn the other cheek, look for the best in people, oppose exploitation, and feed the hungry. As for that adulterous woman he pitied, they’d stone her to death in a second if the hangman’s rope were not the preferred tool of their vigilantism.
Instead, the version of Jesus that Christian Nationalists prefer is the vengeful killer from Revelations 19:13, riding in on a war horse, robe dripping with blood, eyes blazing with fury, sword slashing, bronze boots stomping to death anyone who ever got in his way.
Anthea Butler, theologian, professor, and author of “White Evangelical Racism,” described in an interview with Political Research Associates how Evangelicals became politicized by religious crusades starting in the Forties:
“As early as the 1940s, Billy Graham had fused Christianity with patriotism and White supremacy. His goal was to make believers–including Black and Brown folks who had started to listen to him–conform to White, male, Western Christian ideals. He demonized Communists, Catholics, and immigrants. Interestingly, he got support from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, which gave these ideas added prominence. […] American exceptionalism–the idea that the U.S. is blessed by God–as well as Christian patriotism were used by Billy Graham, the Rev. Bob Jones, and other White male religious leaders of the mid-20th Century to put parameters around what it meant to be an American and a Christian. It does lead directly to MAGA.”
In a 2021 the centrist Christian magazine Christianity Today (CT) published Christian Nationalism is Worse than You Think. Written one week after the MAGA coup attempt, CT interviewed Paul D. Miller, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, who contrasted Christian Nationalism with Christianity:
“It’s easiest to define Christian nationalism by contrasting it with Christianity. Christianity is a religion. It’s a set of beliefs about ultimate things: most importantly, about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s drawn from the Bible, from the Nicene Creed, and the Apostles’ Creed. [] Christian nationalism is a political ideology about American identity. It is a set of policy prescriptions for what the nationalists believe the American government should do. It’s not drawn from the Bible. It draws political theory from secular philosophy and their own version of history as well.”
And the “Worse than you think” part Miller discussed happens to be fascism.
Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead are co-authors of the book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. In the run-up to the 2020 election, writing in Religion in Public, the two observed that “Christian Nationalism Talks Religion, But Walks Fascism.”
Perry and Whitehead frequently, and correctly, place “Christian” and “Christianity” in quotes because Christian Nationalism “represents more of an ethno-cultural and political identity that denotes a specific constellation of religious affiliation (evangelical Protestant), cultural values (conservative), race (white), and nationality (American-born citizen)” than religious orthodoxy.
Working from the definition of fascism in Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, there are obvious similarities:
“an ideology built on reference to a mythic past; populist support for strongman demagogues; a culture of anti-intellectualism, including anti-education and anti-science beliefs; an ideology that views social hierarchies as normal and necessary; idealization of patriarchal families; peace maintained by authoritarian “law & order” tactics; strongly pro-nativist/anti-pluralism; foments cultural anxiety about sexual deviance; and pervasive victim mentality.”
In a piece titled Beware of Authoritarian Christians New England United Methodist minister Rev. William Alberts highlights the authoritarian dynamics within Christian Nationalism. Much of the racism, sexism, and homophobia in authoritarian “Christianity” indeed have roots in scripture, both Old and New Testament. While churches have always been free to highlight the good and ignore the bad in their own traditions and scripture, sometimes they just pivot from bad to bad. But this is done for political purpose.
Albert quotes Civil Rights leader Gilbert Caldwell, who explains how Christian Nationalists pivoted from racism to homophobia: “White traditionalists in 1972 realized they could no longer use the Bible to justify the segregation of blacks in the ‘new’ UMC. Thus same-gender loving persons and their ‘practice of homosexuality’ provided them the opportunity to continue to discriminate, not because of race but because of sexual orientation.”
In all of this, love and Jesus are missing, Alberts says, replaced by Christian Nationalists’ insistence on authority, doctrine, discipline, obedience, and literal interpretation. In contrast, Alberts cites the loving Jesus in John 13:35 who expresses the essence of normative Christianity: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Russell Moore, former evangelical and editor in chief of Christianity Today, told NPR that a number of evangelical pastors have told him that when they’ve quoted Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, with its reference to “turning the other cheek,” congregants would come up to them and ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” When the pastor replied, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response was, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
What those “followers of Jesus” prefer is the vengeful warrior from Revelations. The one who promises, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you.” The one who promises to “start slitting throats” the day he’s inaugurated. Romans 12:19 says, “avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Trump the Redeemer
While normative Christianity teaches that vengeance is the Lord’s, Christian Nationalists had no problem hearing Trump tellinghis Believers, “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” It’s no surprise that many Trump supporters actually believe Trump is the messiah (see this and this and this and this and this).
In 2019 Christianity Today published an editorial entitled “Trump Should be Removed from Office.” It argued that Trump’s actions were illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral; that his Twitter feed was a “near perfect example” of a human being “morally lost and confused.”
Greater Boston interviewed Evangelicals to get their take on the editorial. Andrew Beckwith of the Christian Nationalist Massachusetts Family Institute was unconcerned about Trump’s crimes or immorality. Beckwith’s view was that as long as Trump delivered to the 200 Evangelicals he mentioned, it was all for the greater good. His criterion was abortion, saying evangelicals had to weigh Trump’s three ex-wives against 60 million “murdered children.” Beckwith ended his Trump apologetics by quipping that MFI was above partisan politics, even democracy, saying that “Jesus was a monarchist” who was the “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” As if authoritarianism were Jesus-approved.
But Beckwith isn’t the only proto-fascist to be less interested in the “Prince of Peace” than the “Lord of Lords.”
In the Thirties it occurred to Germany’s National Socialist regime that, besides Jews, Jewish books needed to be destroyed. You can find countless archive photos of book burnings that show the scope of the Nazi destruction. Poetry, art, philosophy, history, and literature books were all consigned to the flames if they had a Jewish author.
But then it occurred to the National Socialists that the book most “Jewish” of all was The Bible. In 1939 the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben) was founded, with symbolic purpose, in Eisenach, where Luther (that other notorious anti-semite) translated the Bible into Hochdeutsch.
The goal of the Institute was to produce a Bible that no longer contained the Old Testament or any of the “Jewish” elements in the New Testament. Susannah Heschel, a Jewish scholar at Dartmouth College, wrote a fascinating account of this in “Reading Jesus as a Nazi” and expanded her research into a book, The Aryan Jesus. The Nazi Institute with the ambitious goal of de-Judaizing the Bible produced two documents: one was a replacement for the New Testament, Die Botschaft Gottes (The Message of God). The other was a catechism called Deutsche mit Gott (Germans with God) which was distributed widely to soldiers during the war.
This presented the dilemma of what to do about the very popular Ten Commandments, which had been given to a Jewish guy on a mountain top and which had a whole dramatic backstory involving the arc of poorly-behaved Jews becoming worthy of receiving the Law.
The Nazi “Twelve Commandments”
A replacement would just have to do. Where the Torah offered butter, Deutsche mit Gott offered margarine. Because Moses and his tablets were streng verboten, the revisionist catechism offered its own set of replacement commandments – twelve in number: (1) Honour God and believe in him wholeheartedly; (2) Seek out the peace of God; (3) Avoid all hypocrisy; (4) Holy is your health and life; (5) Holy is your wellbeing and honour; (6) Holy is your truth and fidelity; (7) Honour your father and mother – your children are your aid and your example; (8) Keep the blood pure and your honour holy; (9) Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers; (10) Be ready to help and forgive; (11) Honour your Führer and master; (12) Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice.
Like its American cousin, German Christian Nationalism polluted religious teachings with virulent nationalism. Section 7 of Deutsche mit Gott is called Gottes Vorsehung in der Geschichte der Völker (God’s Providence in the History of Nations) and is so cringeworthy that a translation is in order (mine): “According to the eternal plan, God directs the history of the races, nations and man in their rise and fall. He decrees tasks and awakens strength through leaders and masters. God has given us Germans the Reich as a sacred mission. In the course of history, base thoughts, wild passions and destructive powers oppose divine rule. Through all these threats, God leads us to his goals and creates his eternal Reich.”
Religion in the service of nationalist ideology
This may very well be National Socialism speaking, but similar verbiage and sentiment is found in the “sacred mission” of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, the Puritans’ “City on a Hill,” Zionism, Hindutva, Chinese Han nationalism, and in every colonial empire throughout history that sought to bring its “god-given” values to weaker, “inferior” “shithole” nations, which would elevate humanity through conquest and genocide.
The Botschaft was of course stripped of the Old Testament, but Christian scholars have noticed how, particularly, the Sermon on the Mount was rewritten to make Jesus less an effeminate woke wimp and more the bloody warrior. A review of Heschel’s book The Aryan Jesus by John Connelly in the Catholic Commonweal magazine summarizes the revisions to Jesus 2.0:
By contrast, when the “German Christians” got to work de-Judaizing Christianity, they found Scripture so full of positive references to Judaism that they had to rewrite it. In 1940 Grundmann and his associates published their own, bowdlerized version of the Bible, called The Message of God (Die Botschaft Gottes). Missing from it were the Old Testament, John’s Gospel, and all references to Jesus as servant or lamb of God. The institute argued that supposedly original understandings of Christ as warrior had predominated “in a lost original Gospel whose message had been distorted.” Thus the Sermon on the Mount appeared, but with no blessing for the merciful. In the hands of Grundmann and his colleagues, Christian teaching was warped to fit Nazi obsessions: the need to meet hatred with hatred; the virtues of manliness; and above all, the dark powers of the Jews to subvert the German people. Where Paul was a solution for anti-Nazis, as a Jew he was a problem for Christian racists, who argued that he “distorted” an originally Hellenic Christianity. In 1942 Grundmann proclaimed that “a German faith cannot be based upon Paul, because it would be deformed by his Jewish system of coordinates.” Two years later a Thuringian pastor called for removing Paul altogether in order to focus faith upon Jesus, who had gone to death “in battle against Judaism.” The hierarchy rejected these calls–fearing that such radical revisions would bolster the arguments of those who said that German Christians were not really Christian–and postponed them until some future time after the war had been won.
This emphasis on “Christian soldiers” is reflected in the Botschaft. One page is particularly illustrative.
Section 5 is titled Sein Kampf (his fight, which you would not be wrong to assume invokes Mein Kampf). The first lines are taken from Mark 2:21-23, widely interpreted as Christianity replacing Judaism. The reader summary in the right column (“new and old are incompatible”) makes that plain. The text reads (my translation): “Jesus spoke: No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old garment. Otherwise the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the wine will burst the skins and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins.” The Nazi censors omitted the last verse: “But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” Understandable, since against their own advice they were putting new wine in old wineskins.
This is followed by a verse from Matthew 10:34-36, where Jesus has gathered his disciples to say goodbye. This Jesus is not the Prince of Peace but the Lord of vengeance (my translation): “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? I have not come to bring peace, rather the sword. I have come to call man to account, even against his father. And even members of his own household will become enemies to man.” Here the Nazi editors censored Jesus: “For I am come to raise up man against his own father and the daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” This might have been too much for the Third Reich’s family values.
If you think American Christian Nationalism would never go to such extreme lengths – rewriting scripture to distort the message of a religion of love – think again. Long before the Nazis did it, as Anthea Butler shows us, Southern Christianity transformed Christianity from a religion of peace into a religion of master, slave, punishment and obedience. Slavery’s leading apologists were predominantly clergymen.
Today a vast army of self-appointed “prophets,” “intercessors,” preachers, influencers, talking heads, “patriots,” and megachurch pastors reshape, distort, censor, edit, and transform Christianity into an unrecognizable goulash of hate and authoritarianism. Political power is their god, and “sincere religious belief” is a convenient Constitutional shield for systematically creating a theocracy from the corpse of Jeffersonian democracy.
For the moment this extremist minority has the wind in their sails and the Supreme Court in their pocket. I hope what’s left of our democracy will survive their assaults.
Across the country — and unfortunately, here in Massachusetts — we are seeing right-wing advocates mobilizing on behalf of narrowing school curricula, banning books, and erasing the experiences of LGBTQ youth.
That’s why it was great to hear that Governor Healey is taking steps to move Massachusetts in the opposite direction – that of inclusion.
According to Sex Ed for Social Change, which follows state trends in sex education, the curriculum framework for schools here in Massachusetts was last updated in 1999.
Healey’s proposed updated curriculum framework reflects the Healthy Youth Act (MA bills S.268 and H.544) by requiring that sex education be comprehensive, medically accurate, age-appropriate, consent-based, and inclusive — as it should be, and as it should have been a generation ago.
This legislation offers parents the ability to opt their children out of classes, and local schools the flexibility to shape their own curriculum. It is endorsed by the MA Healthy Youth Coalition (HYC) and has broad legislative support.
In a 2022 interview on Red Pill Politics, MFI’s Director of Community Alliances Michael King, described MFI as a local affiliate of Focus on the Family (FOF), a fundamentalist Christian organization created by James Dobson. FOF has affiliates like MFI in 32 states and in 2018 declared itself a church. MFI is a member of the Family Policy Alliance, Focus on the Family’s national network of conservative Christian-right state groups.
MFI’s astroturf group Massachusetts Informed Parents was originally a Facebook group but now functions as a separate entity with its own Substack blog. MIP offers Christian conservatives a checklist for attacking schools and libraries and maintains a book banning list. MIP/MFI is categorically opposed to sex education in schools and advocates not education but counsels abstinence. When MFI is not counseling parents to homeschool their children, they are laser-focused on turning public schools into mirrors of the private Christian academies they send their children to.
MFI, working closely with the right-wing legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty Institute, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has won some well-fought victories by intimidating municipal government officials. However, when it throws its considerable weight behind ballot initiatives it has not always had the same success in convincing Massachusetts voters that they need more religion in their schools, bedrooms or legal system.
This disparity in success may explain the far-right’s, and in particular the GOP’s, focus on municipal elections. It’s much easier to make political gains when town governments, who are barely able to pay the bills thanks to tax limits like Proposition 2 ½, often have to make the tough call that fighting religious bigotry is just too expensive.
Organizational Structure
MFI, Inc. was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) with EIN 04-3113783 in 1990 as the Pilgrim Family Institute, changing its name to the Massachusetts Family Institute in 1994. A related organization, MFI Action Inc., was incorporated in 2008 as a 501(c)(4) non-profit with EIN 00-0974938 and was dissolved in 2014. MFI’s 2019 Form 990 filing, the most recent on the IRS website, shows donations of $623,050. ProPublica’s nonprofit search tool shows donations in 2021 of $904,875. Despite MFI’s support of anti-vaxxers and it defense of the Christian “right” to let unvaccinated children infect others, MFI applied for and received $59,514 in COVID Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds from the federal government.
Leadership and Staff
MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith serves as an attorney with the “Christian liberties” law group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). MFI staff members include: Michael King, Director of Community Alliances, who who has a degree in “Christian Leadership” from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, believes democracy must be based on the Bible, and developed MFI’s program to inspire Christians to engage with their local government leaders and inspire Biblical decisions to be made”; Sam Whiting, who also works for the ADF: Mary Ellen Siegler, who runs the MFI-directed astroturf group Massachusetts Informed Parents, and together with her husband Bill runs Chosen People Ministries, a Messianic sect that tries to convert Jews to Christianity – despite MFI’s stated mission of “affirming Judeo-Christian values”; Mariah Newell, Communications and Social Media Specialist and former intern with the Family Research Council; Marci Anthony, Education Research Assistant and Christian home-schooler; and several others who are co-pastors churches with their husbands.
MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), whose vice chair is Robert H. Bradley of the Bradley Family Foundation. Beckwith is also associated with the Renew Massachusetts Coalition, a 501(c)(4) corporation that targets legislators, as well as the anti-abortion Legal Defense Fund. Other MFI board members include Ray Ruddy, who is affiliated with the Renew Massachusetts Coalition, Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, both in Fredericksburg, VA, and whose fellow board members include Scott Walker and Leonard Leo. During the Obama administration Ruddy funded a series of hoax videos attacking Planned Parenthood and accusing Obama of “infanticide.”
Besides Beckwith, MFI’s staff attorney Sam Whiting also works for ADF. Whiting attended George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, later becoming an Alliance Defending Freedom Blackstone Fellow, a program created by ADF to put Christian lawyers into “positions of influence, thereby impacting the legal culture and keeping the door open for the Gospel.” Other Fellows include Josh Hawley and Amy Coney Barrett.
ADF was incorporated in 1993 by Christian Dominionist Bill Bright, who also founded Campus Crusade for Christ; Larry Burkett, an evangelical financial advisor; James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; Marlin Maddoux, a Christian radio personality; and Alan Sears, former director of the Meese Commission.
ADF attorneys have argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court, including cases about religion in public schools, the Affordable Care Act, the legalization of same-sex marriage, business owners’ right to not provide services for same-sex marriages, and prayers before town meetings. ADF lawyers wrote the model for Mississippi’s anti-abortion legislation involved in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overruled the fifty-year-old precedent case Roe v. Wade establishing the right to abortion. ADF was also responsible for the recent 303 Creative v. Elenis case, which legalized religious bigotry against LGBTQ+ citizens. ADF was also involved in a scheme with the discredited American College of Pediatricians to use anti-LGBTQ+ “junk science” to “substantiate” many of ADF’s anti-LGBTQ+ talking points and provide “medical” justification for interpreting Title IX to exclude gender-identity protections for trans students in several states.
Besides ADF, MFI frequently works with First Liberty Institute, a group that works to insert Christianity into government. The First Liberty Institute argued the Kennedy v Bremertoncase before a friendly Supreme Court, a case in which a football coach coerced his teenage players to pray with him at the 50 yard line. MFI also works with the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a group which opposes student debt forgiveness, the existence of the CFPB, protections for renters, and regulation of bump-stocks. MFI supports the interests of and is supported by deep pocket right-wing foundations like the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Bradley Foundation, and dozens more. MFI has also partnered with Child and Parent Rights, another legal attack group that “defends parents’ right to secure their children against the social contagion and harms caused by gender identity ideology, providing legal representation before administrative agencies and state and federal courts.”
Opposing abortion
Though the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which once made abortion legal throughout the U.S., the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution still provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Following the Dobbs ruling states rushed to pass laws to protect abortion, and Massachusetts has a bunch of them. In 2020 when a budget amendment with an abortion amendment in it came up for a vote, MFI labelled it the “Infanticide Act.”
And though the Christian right has had to accept the laws of the Commonwealth, it has still found creative ways to subvert them. Besides calling for bans of books that mention abortion, curriculum mentioning it, creating fake abortion clinics that prevent women from receiving actual medical care, or cheering the ban on the interstate shipment of mifepristone, the MFI is also trying to reframe their own opposition to abortion as “feminism.”
In 2022 MFI’s Andrew Beckwith joined with others from the Christian right to “modernize” the “pro-life” movement. CNN’s Elle Reeve visited MFI and spoke with MFI supporters trying pass off anti-abortion as “feminism.” According to this narrative, “consequence-free sex” places the burden of pregnancy on women and “we’ve really let men off the hook.” Therefore, regardless of what the pregnant woman herself wants, the man involved in the pregnancy must be forced to accept its consequences by banning abortion. Even as MFI supports a MAGA Republican agenda committed to slashing the social safety net, its faux feminists argue for a system where women give up individual liberties in exchange for expanding the social safety net, for example by bolstering programs and laws like parental leave.
Men are the real victims here, characterized by Beckwith as devalued by society. But MFI believes there is nothing more ennobling to men than marriage. Unmarried yet sexually active men ought to be forced into marriage by abortion bans, Beckwith says, “We believe men should be responsible and be fathers and not use abortion as a kind of after-the-fact contraception or get-out-of-jail-free card.” He says that banning abortion will make men more responsible as fathers and will “restore the culture to where fatherhood is valued and [will] give them something better than just video games and Netflix.” Reeve then asks Beckwith to clarify his ideological goulash: “I just don’t see why I have to give something up so that men can be better people. […] What if you made policy to address the man problem that [actually] addressed the man problem directly?” To this Beckwith had no answer, so it was up to the Christian ladies interviewed to try to explain.
Defending Fake Abortion Clinics
Fake Abortion Clinics, sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), operate in more than 30 locations in the Commonwealth. They mislead patients about abortion and are not held to patient confidentiality standards because they are not actually medical clinics. One in New Bedford is literally on Catholic church property. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 71% of crisis pregnancy centers “use deceptive means such as spreading thoroughly debunked misinformation” and 38% fail to disclose on their websites that they do not provide abortion care.
In 2021 Connecticut passed a law regulating CPCs. The state was then sued by lawyers from the ADF, MFI’s sister organization. In January ADF and the state attorney general agreed to Connecticut’s stipulation it would not enforce the law, thus dismissing the suit. MFI is now attempting the same in Massachusetts.
In July 2022 Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey warned patients to be careful when seeking reproductive health care. “While crisis pregnancy centers claim to offer reproductive healthcare services, their goal is to prevent people from accessing abortion and contraception,” Healey wrote. “In Massachusetts, you have the right to a safe and legal abortion. We want to ensure that patients can protect themselves from deceptive and coercive tactics when seeking the care they need.” Healey had also warned Abundant Hope Pregnancy Resource Center in Attleboro that the center could be held accountable for violating people’s civil rights by “interfering, or attempting to interfere, with the exercise of the constitutionally protected right to access abortion care in Massachusetts.” The fake clinics were incensed.
MFI’s Beckwith, partnering with the First Liberty Institute, a hardball Christian legal outfit, wrote to Healey, warning her that “Your office’s hostility against our clients’ religious beliefs raises serious concerns that you intend to take legal action against our clients in violation of their constitutional rights…”
In 2023 the legislature held hearings on “An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services.” This legislation protects patient privacy and prevents unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services. It also allocates $1 million to informing the public about the risks of fake clinics. Predictably, MFI has ratcheted up its rhetoric on the legislation, calling legislators’ efforts to protect women from medical misinformation and proselytizing a “gag order.”
On July 5th in Easthampton, the City Council approved an addition to town ordinances that would have explicitly prohibited city employees from assisting another municipality in the prosecution of a person seeking an abortion in Easthampton. The ordinance would also have protected women from being preyed upon by fake clinics.
As recognized in M.G.L. c. 12 § 11I ½ access to reproductive health care services and gender-affirming health care services is a right secured by the constitution and laws of the commonwealth. Interference with this right, whether or not under the color of law, is against the public policy of the commonwealth and of the City. [¶] This ordinance is promulgated pursuant to the City’s power to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the citizens and is intended to provide more stringent protections than those afforded by the Laws of the Commonwealth or the United States of America.
But, for the first time since being elected in 2017, Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle vetoed the ordinance, clearly intimidated by organizations like MFI and the ADF: “Even with our City Solicitor assuring the ordinance’s legal merit, we know it will face legal challenges by well-funded organizations intent on limiting the rights of women and the LGBTQIA+ community.” An override attempt failed when one City Councillor changed his vote, another abstained from voting, and a third was absent. MFI took a victory lap. The mayor had caved to extremists who didn’t even need to lift a finger to get her to do it.
Opposing same-sex marriage
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Public Law 104-199, was a federal law that explicitly denied same-sex couples the right to marry by creating an arbitrary definition of marriage. The law was signed by President Bill Clinton and remained in force from 1996 to 2013. As it became obvious that DOMA was highly discriminatory and increasingly likely to be ruled unconstitutional, the Christian right began furiously cranking out amicus briefs in support of DOMA. In Massachusetts, same-sex marriage has been legal since May 17, 2004 because of the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in Goodridge v Department of Public Health that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates equal protection of the laws and due process, thereby violating the Massachusetts Constitution.
In 2005, fundamentalist preacher Roberto S. Mirando, then- MFI President Kris Mine, and Robert H. Bradley of the Bradley Family Foundation and vice-chair of MFI, attempted to create their own Massachusetts version of DOMA legislation. They filed papers with the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) to create a ballot initiative, votonmarriage.org, to promote a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. MFI as an organization also contributed over $82,000 to the campaign.
VoteOnMarriage was accused of forgery and bait-and-switch tactics to obtain fraudulent signatures. There were numerous complaints of improper actions by paid signature gatherers. According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, “Angela McElroy of Florida, who until recently was a paid signature gatherer, is expected to testify on what she encountered during her 2-1/2 weeks working in Massachusetts. She said in an interview with the Telegram & Gazette that she saw one co-worker forge signatures from the petition to allow beer and wine sales in grocery stories to the petition that would put the same-sex marriage issue on the ballot. She said she also observed some gatherers induce voters to sign one petition and then slipped the second petition underneath and asked them to sign that paper without telling them what they were signing.” Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly launched a criminal investigation of the forgeries. VoteOnMarriage pushed back, describing the allegations as the work of “homosexual activists” who simply didn’t want to see the petition succeed.
In 2011, writing that “MFI is concerned with the untold consequences same-sex ‘marriages’ will have on American society, moral principles, and the family,” MFI filed an amicus brief, arguing that the Supreme Court failed to consider Minnesota’s Baker v Nelson case, which ruled that there is no fundamental right to same-sex marriage under the Ninth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Christian Right continued losing state after state on same-sex marriage. With Obergefell v Hodges in 2015 a very different Supreme Court from ours today ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license same-sex marriages and to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.
Promoting Gay Conversion
Gay Conversion “Therapy” is – in the words of the American Psychological Association – NOT therapy. It is a harmful and ultimately ineffective attempt to apply ideological and religious pressure on a person to change their sexual or gender orientation and expression. Experts with the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration say it is “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”
Conversion “therapy” is opposed by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, American Association of School Administrators, American College of Physicians, American Counseling Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Psychological Association, American School Counselor Association, American School Health Association, Interfaith Alliance Foundation, National Association of School Psychologists, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of Social Workers, National Education Association, Pan American Health Organization, and School Social Work Association of America.
But what do they know?
In 2019 Massachusetts became the 16th state to ban Conversion “therapy.” House bill H.140, An Act relative to abusive practices to change sexual orientation and gender identity in minors, passed both houses of the legislature and was signed into law by the then-Republican governor, but not before MFI mobilized the Christian Right to testify against it. MFI President and General Counsel Andrew Beckwith told the press with a straight face, “Some legislators don’t understand that the focus is on eliminating any counseling options that don’t affirm a LGBT-centric view of human sexuality.”
Defending discrimination of school children
In Middleboro, Massachusetts middle schooler Liam Morrison came to school one day with a t-shirt that read “there are only two genders.” While it might have been slightly more accurate to say “there are only two sexes,” even that is not quite true, as there are intersex people, those with chromosomal differences, people whose external sex characteristics don’t match their genetics, and so on. But where “gender” is concerned, Christian fundamentalists absolutely reject modern definitions of gender as vehemently as they reject the Theory of Evolution.
“Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits. In this dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender). This delineation also tends to be observed in technical and medical contexts, with the term sex referring to biological forms in such phrases as sex hormones, sex organs, and biological sex. But in nonmedical and nontechnical contexts, there is no clear delineation, and the status of the words remains complicated.”
So when Liam Morrison marched into school with his obnoxious t-shirt, he was presenting his “sincere religious belief” that gender only means sex. Morrison’s case is currently being appealed by MFI and ADF, and it is likely he will eventually prevail because he most certainly has a First Amendment right to his parents’ and pastor’s opinion.
To his school’s credit, it recognized that Morrison’s t-shirt was, besides being a limited interpretation of gender, mainly intended to offend, marginalize, and harm fellow non-binary students who do not rigidly identify with their biological sex. A study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that in the United States alone there are 1.2 million non-binary people, the majority of whom are under 29 years of age. According to the UCLA study, life for teens who identify as non-binary is not easy. Thus the care Morrison’s school took to ban the t-shirt was intended to reduce injury to other students:
“Tables A.4 – A.10 provide information about stress experiences of nonbinary LGBTQ people. These data show that a majority of nonbinary people were hit, beaten, physically attacked, or sexually assaulted (55%) at some points since they were 18 years old (Figure 5). Also, most felt that they were less respected (54%) than other people over the year prior to being interviewed. Many suffered chronic stressors, including not having enough money to make ends meet (68%), feeling mentally and physically tired because of their job (68%), being alone too much (56%), and having strained or conflicted relationships with their parents (60%). Nonbinary LGBTQ adults also experienced stress in childhood (before age 18, Figure 6), including emotional (82%), physical (40%), and sexual (41%) abuse. More than one in ten nonbinary people (11%) had gone through conversion therapy to change their sexual orientation (cis LGBQ respondents) or gender identity (transgender respondents).”
One can only hope that, following Morrison’s likely First Amendment victory, other students in his school will be permitted to wear t-shirts bearing their First Amendment-protected opinion of Morrison, just as he did of them.
Sponsoring Anti-Trans Legislation
In 2016 the Renew MA Coalition, a right-wing lobbying group, created an anti-trans “Bathroom bill” campaign, Keep Massachusetts Safe, whose goals were “protecting the privacy rights and right to safety of all Massachusetts citizens, particularly women and children by preserving lawfully sex-segregated facilities based on biological and anatomical sex.” The ballot initiative was intended to repeal Chapter 134 of the Acts of 2016, which protects transgender rights. Over three years MFI donated over $104,000 to Renew MA’s unsuccessful “Bathroom bill” and was neck-deep in both ballot and legal efforts to deny civil rights to trans people.
In 2018 Question 3 asked Massachusetts voters to reject a law signed by Governor Charlie Baker in 2016 that expanded the state’s existing nondiscrimination protections for transgender people to include public accommodations such as bathrooms and locker rooms. Existing law already protected transgender residents from discrimination in housing and the workplace. Christian groups came out in force to oppose Question 3, but despite MFI’s misinformation and scare tactics, Question 3 affirmed trans rights in Massachusetts by a 67% majority. Not one county in the Commonwealth wanted to turn back the clock and strike a civil right. Once again, when put to the voters, MFI’s bigotry was rejected.
In 2022 MFI partnered with Child and Parental Rights, a legal attack group, to sue the Ludlow School Committee and Superintendent, as well as the Principal, guidance counselor, and librarian of the Baird Middle School for failing to disclose to two sets of parents of 11 year-old middle schoolers that their non-binary children were using both pronouns and sex-segregated bathrooms not matching the sex on their birth certificates. The school attempted to follow DESE guidance on non-discrimination on the basis of gender. One of the students was quite clear with their friends and teachers about their identity:
“Hello everyone, If you are reading this you are either my teacher or guidance counselor. I have an announcement to make and I trust you guys with this information. I am genderqueer. Basically, it means I use any pronouns (other than it/its). This also means I have a name change. My new name will be R. Please call me by that name. If you deadname me or use any pronouns I am not comfortable with I will politely tell you. I am telling you this because I feel like I can trust you. A list of pronouns you can use are: she/her he/him they/them fae/faerae/aer ve/ver xe/xem ze/zir. I have added a link so you can look at how to say them. Please only use the ones I have listed and not the other ones. I do not like them. Thank you. R.”
DESE guidance suggests that transgender and gender-nonconforming students may not be open about their gender identities at home because of safety concerns or lack of acceptance. For those reasons, teachers in the state should speak with the students prior to discussing their gender identity with their parents. But state law (603 CMR 23) referenced in the lawsuit also gives parents of children under 14 complete control over school records and communications with guidance counselors and teachers. The legal distinctions here are that, while information was not explicitly denied to the parents, it was withheld out of concern for the safety of the children. Only when one teacher sent an email to parents – actually a legal violation in itself – did the parents discover their children’s non-binary identities.
Both sets of parents regard their children’s identities as a mental illness and their complaint is framed as the school’s neglect in informing them of a mental problem. The MFI suit references this in the complaint that the defendants “In reckless disregard of Plaintiffs Foote’s and Silvestri’s parental rights to make mental health decisions for their children […] Said Baird Middle School staff did not notify Plaintiffs Foote and Silvestri of these conversations, but instead followed the Protocol to conceal this information from B.F.’s parents” MFI’s Beckwith toldTheBoston Globe, “By deliberately circumventing the authority of parents over the mental health and religious beliefs of their children, activists at the Ludlow schools are violating time-honored rights guaranteed under the US Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution.”
And how was all this framed in the right-wing media’s headlines? “Parents Allege a Massachusetts Middle School Carried Out Secret Gender Transitions on Children.”
But as one summary of the complaint shows, the lawsuit’s prime objective was to completely hobble any support for non-binary and LGBTQ+ children in the schools:
“The complaint seeks a declaration that teachers and staff may not facilitate a child’s social transition to a different gender identity without parental notification. A declaration is also sought that the related school protocol and associated policies and procedures are to be publicly rescinded. [..] The complaint seeks a preliminary and permanent injunction that stops school officials from using the protocol and related rules as guidance for Ludlow Public Schools. The proposed injunctions would stop any training of staff to exclude parents in discussions related to their children’s gender identify, and require notification of parents should that topic arise in the school setting. The proposed injunctions would stop school officials from ignoring parental instructions about gender identify, and stop any meeting with children to discuss gender identify unless parents are notified.”
Opposing Sex Education
Although there are over 20 million LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. alone, and though a 2020 Pew Research poll shows that 72% of Americans believe that “homosexual relationships should be accepted by society,” the Massachusetts Family Institute believes otherwise and its bigotry is reflected as well in its views on sex education.
To MFI any sort of secular sex education amounts to “indoctrination and sexualization,” particularly if it concerns non-heterosexual relationships, gender, or sexuality. MFI supports abstinence education or “sexual risk avoidance,” an ineffective form of indoctrination the Guttmacher Institute recommends that the Federal government stop funding.
As part of Focus on the Family, MFI recommends a “biblically holistic approach” to sex ed, which insists on heterosexuality, rigid sex roles, and instead of science relies on scripture. If MFI is appalled by secular sex ed, secular parents will be left scratching their heads by this: “We want our children to understand that the Bible begins in Genesis with the marriage of a man and a woman and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church (Revelations 19:7).” How does such “curriculum” deal with teenage sexual feelings? It teaches about “David who looked lustfully at Bathsheba and sinned, and Joseph who ran from Potiphar’s wife when tempted.”
In 2019 MFI’s Director of Community Alliances, Michael King, joined with predominantly Hispanic church leaders in Worcester to oppose a local implementation of state educational frameworks with Planned Parenthood materials, the Proud Choices curriculum. Members of King’s church alliance outnumbered secular supporters and wanted their children to be taught abstinence and marriage, objecting particularly to the Proud Choices curriculum, which is intended for older students likely to engage in risky sexual behavior and includes references to contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. A 2022 study of the Proud Choices curriculum funded by the U.S. Department of Health found a couple of things MFI might actually appreciate: students who used the curriculum were more confident refusing sex and overall they had less sex. However, students had been given facts rather than bible stories.
MFI’s biblical orientation holds no sympathy for teens discovering they are gay, trans or non-binary, or for the needs of their parents. In 2013 MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith authored a piece in Public Discourse, a journal of the Witherspoon Institute which funded a discredited study on LGBTQ+ parenting which pronounced gay parents unfit. Beckwith sputtered that in 2011 Massachusetts prohibited discrimination in public schools on the basis of gender identity. He went on to attack non-discrimination by appealing neither to logic nor to law – rather to personal bigotry: “As lawyers, we perceive the logic of this latest regulatory innovation. But as fathers, we think that those who are dismayed by MDOE’s regulations are the only Massachusetts residents who can plausibly claim to be in their right minds.”
In 2023 newly-elected (and quite “out”) Governor Maura Healey observed that the state’s sex ed standards had not been updated since 1999, did not even require the subject to be taught, and were deficient in a number of areas. Healey proposed a series of updates that were realized in both legislation and a new Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Health and Physical Education Framework. The legislation has broad support in both the House and Senate as well as from the Healthy Youth Coalition, and the DESE draft is a vast improvement over the quarter-century old non-standard. Among the DESE framework components guaranteed to upset MFI are sexuality, gender, consent, and contraception. Even though the accompanying legislation gives parents an opt-out and communities freedom to tailor the curriculum, MFI has launched a vicious attack on the standards.
Adoption of the legislation will not be easy. It has been filed repeatedly for over a decade and has died several times in the legislature, usually because of pressure from MFI and its sister organizations.
Defending questionable educational and counseling standards
In 2021 Vida Real Church in Somerville applied to open a private school, the Real Life Learning Center (RLLC), submitting an application to Somerville’s Subcommittee for Educational Programs. According to the director, Pastor Luis Morales, “The mission of Real Life Learning Center is to lead the student into a deep, personal, and growing relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything else is secondary.”
With “everything else secondary” the Somerville subcommittee had good reason to inquire more deeply into what, besides Lord Jesus, students would be learning. After sending a list of 35 questions to the school, the school forwarded them to Andrew Beckwith at the MFI instead of replying to the Board. Initially, then, the school’s approval was denied.
One subcommittee member, Sara Dion, had specific unanswered concerns: the school’s policy of admitting only Christian students; teaching creationism instead of science; the school’s position on homosexuality and its implications for health education; the school’s approach to student services and counseling based on a belief that mental illness is caused by sin and demons; and its methods of discipline being “Biblically” based (Rods? Stoning?)
Dion was apparently the only subcommittee member asking about the implications of such mis-education and her questions were perceived as hostile by MFI and the First Liberty Institute, who served notice on the Somerville Public School Committee. In the end all but Dion voted to approve the school’s application. A combination of cowardice combined with state laws that give priority to religion over sound educational principles had doomed Somerville’s ability to say no to a school that believes “everything else is secondary” to religious indoctrination.
Opposing COVID restrictions
During the height of the COVID pandemic, the Commonwealth issued a number of emergency public health directives. Different classes of organizations and enterprises were required to adhere to different restrictions, As the pandemic waned in severity, newer directives began relaxing those restrictions, though not always in the order or at a pace the public liked. Order 66 rescinded Order 45 but did not phase out limitations altogether, a decision based on the typical number of people, and density, in a given enterprise. This irked New Bedford’s New Life Church, which also objected to the way the New Bedford Health Department calculated occupant density. In 2021, at the request of New Life’s pastor Marco DeBarros, MFI and the First Liberty Institute sued both Governor Charlie Baker and New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell, claiming that “where less onerous COVID-19-related regulations suffice for comparable secular activities, those same regulations [ought to] suffice for religious activities. Massachusetts’ regulations fail this standard. The regulations make it easier to meet at Applebee’s or an AMC theater than at New Life. This cannot stand.” Ultimately MFI prevailed.
Opposing common-sense infectious disease measures
And of course MFI opposes COVID vaccinations. For years Massachusetts has irresponsibly granted religious exemptions to vaccination against diseases like diptheria, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, and chickenpox, The religious right has never believed your child’s health was just as important as their “sincere religious beliefs.” Now a bill in the legislature, An Act promoting community immunity (S.1458), will strengthen and modernize tracking of both immunizations for infectious disease and exemptions to the vaccinations. Contrary to MFI’s misinformation, parents can still pursue exemptions; however they will be processed by the Department of Public Health and not a school nurse. And more importantly the legislation drops religious exemptions for these potentially fatal diseases – some of which have returned with a vengeance. Parents will now have to show a valid medical reason for not immunizing their children if they want to place them in a congregational public setting (like a classroom) with other children. MFI is suing.
Spreading conspiracy theories about COVID tracking
In 2022 the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing legal advocacy group, filed a class action lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Health, claiming that it had conspired with Google to covertly install a COVID tracking app on one million Android phones. During the pandemic there were many downloadable apps that used bluetooth to gather proximity data from other devices with similar software. The idea was, if you developed COVID you could alert a health authority and those who had come into contact with you would be alerted to a potential risk. The concept relied on widespread user downloads and installation.
The Massachusetts Department of Health, together with Apple and Google, offered such an app called MassNotify, which was used by 3.2 million users, of whom 1.8 million were notified of potential exposure to COVID. New Civil Liberties Alliance charged that the Massachusetts DOH was pushing the app onto Android devices, as opposed to via user-initiated downloads. An article in the online tech journal Ars Technica showed that the state had no role in the rollout but that Google had indeed used push installs to add a tracking code stub (not a full-featured app) to Android’s alert mechanism. Users of Google Android had discovered one more problem with their insecure mobile operating system. Ignoring facts and nuance, MFI’s Andrew Beckwith huffed that this was “yet another example of government bureaucrats using the COVID hysteria to run roughshod over clear Constitution rights.”
Defending Crime, Autocracy, and Insurrection
In 2019 Christianity Today published an editorial entitled “Trump Should be Removed from Office.” The centrist magazine argued that Trump’s temporal actions were illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral; that his Twitter feed was a “near perfect example” of a human being “morally lost and confused.” The editorial acknowledged the political opportunism behind evangelical support of Trump, but the “impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”
Greater Boston interviewed Evangelicals to get their view on the influential magazine’s charges. MFI’s Andrew Beckwith didn’t mind if Trump was an immoral criminal. His take was that Evangelicals had no choice but to choose an immoral criminal who was likely to destroy American democracy – as long as Trump delivered to the 200 Evangelicals he cited. Beckwith then reduced it all to abortion, saying evangelicals had to weigh Trump’s three ex-wives against 60 million “murdered children” since the beginning of Roe v Wade. Beckwith ended his Trump apologetics by fully embracing authoritarianism when he replied that MFI was above partisan politics, even democracy, smiling and pointing out that Jesus was a monarchist who was the “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” Which is just what a Christian Dominionist would say.
If you’re a health-conscious consumer, you want to know how much cholesterol, saturated and trans fats, sodium, potassium, or sugar is in the yogurt you’re buying, and whether there’s anything unhealthy (like aspartame or additives) in it. Similarly, if you’re an environmentally-conscious energy consumer, you want to know how much solar, wind, biogas, or hydro is in the energy mix you’re buying, and if there’s anything bad (like diesel, gas, coal, or nuclear) in there.
There ought to be a straightforward way to find out, but despite the many conversations I’ve had and emails I’ve exchanged with the energy people who provided much of the information in this post, no one can give me a clear answer to the simple question — what exactly is in the energy mix I’m buying and where does it come from?
Part of the problem is that reporting is not geared toward addressing consumer or environmental concerns — but instead on reporting compliance with energy certificate tracking mandated by a series of laws following the 1998 deregulation of the energy industry. Here is the type of information typically shared with energy consumers:
Rather than telling you what’s in the yogurt container, instead you get numbers that represent a theoretical mix of energy types under Class I RPS Requirements, “Other” RPS Requirements, “Additional” Class I power requirements, and “System Power” requirement (“RPS” stands for “Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard” and “APS” is “Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard”). It all looks like so much word salad for the average consumer.
What these reports tell you is that when you buy “renewable” energy you are buying a mix that can be satisfied from a variable number of generators providing all sorts of energy. Because you don’t know what you’re getting or where it came from, it’s impossible for anyone to describe with any degree of precision the difference in energy mix between Dartmouth’s default 50% “renewable” plan and its opt-in 100% “renewable” plan. And that’s a problem if the state is trying to woo consumers to buy greater percentages of renewable energy.
According to the program summary above, “NEPOOL GIS tracks all electricity generated within the ISO New England (ISO-NE) control area and fed onto the New England grid, as well as electricity exchanged between ISO-NE and adjacent control areas.” The NEPOOL GIS website is:
It sounds like a promising information source, but when you visit the site this stands out: “Due to the confidentiality reasons, the identity of the generator is masked.” This means that a consumer has no ability to learn who is generating the energy being purchased, or how much they produce. You’d hope that some of this information might be published by the state in its annual compliance reports, but (for starters) mass.gov’s RPS and APS most recent reports are 3 years old:
None of the data tables in the referenced spreadsheets can answer my consumer question. The 2020 Executive Summary’s accompanying spreadsheet does list suppliers (in table 13), but not what or how much each supplier generates. Dartmouth’s supplier, Constellation New Energy, is listed only as a “Competitive Retail Supplier.” And only the value of energy credits for the three energy suppliers who failed to live up to their contracts are shown in table 14.
So the state isn’t telling the consumer much, and with a goal of 100% renewables by 2037 (if the planet hasn’t already burned up by then), the state’s energy goals don’t reflect much of a sense of urgency.
If we want to know what we’re actually buying — as well as having information to advocate for more and faster adoption of renewables — Massachusetts needs to start requiring energy resellers to put their own “Nutrition Facts” on each consumer’s energy bills.
Because there’s so little that displays energy data in a consumer-friendly format, one suggestion I received was to download an app called “ISO to GO” to track what the state’s energy grid is currently powered by.
It’s entertaining, and may give you a sense of what’s in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Canadian grids, but it still won’t answer the question of what you’re actually buying and who’s generating it.
As many are aware, anti-abortion organizations have begun setting up fake abortion clinics, such as the Crossroads Pregnancy Center in Georgia, a state with over 90 such “clinics,” in an attempt to prevent women from receiving actual health care.
These “crisis centers” or “fake clinics,” as reproductive rights advocates call them, deceptively advertise medical services but offer none, use strong-arm tactics including releasing or threatening to release personal information to third parties, and frequently engage clients in counseling and religious proselytization well into late stage pregnancy in order to make the abortion impossible. National organizations like SPARK, ReproAction, and Abortion Access Front have exposed these clinics for what they are and Massachusetts bills S.174 and H.377 thankfully put legal protections for women into law.
The Massachusetts Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure will hold hearings tomorrow that will include testimony on Senate Bill S.174 (also filed as House Bill H.377), An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services. The legislation is accompanied by an appropriations component found in House Bill H.57, An Act making appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2023 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations and for certain other activities and projects.
Besides legal protections for women, the appropriations bill specifies that “not less than $1,000,000 shall be expended for a public awareness campaign to educate providers and the public about so-called crisis pregnancy centers and pregnancy resource centers and their lack of medical services; provided further, that said campaign shall include information on the availability of providers across the commonwealth that provide legitimate medical and family planning services.”
Naturally, right-wing groups are up in arms. The Massachusetts Family Institute is rallying supporters to show up at tomorrow’s hearings. MFI takes great offense at the appropriations bill and has framed the legislation as an attack on Christian Nationalists’ First Amendment rights [to deceive women], calling it a “gag order.”
But this is first and foremost a health and consumer protection issue. These fake abortion clinics are as much a menace to public health as the guy who does liposuctions in his garage.
Please write to your legislator and to the Joint Committee to express your support for An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services.
Aside from blogging I was never much of a social networking person, mainly because for the most part these platforms are angry places run by sociopathic billionaires who want to steal your personal data. However, I have recently begun to use a few social networks and for the most part they are civilized places that respect my privacy. Recently, several people have asked me about alternatives to Twitter. And Facebook’s founder just announced a social network called Threads. I decided to do a roundup of social networks I’ve tested. The list below focuses on social media for communicating short messages; consequently I didn’t mention Facebook, VKontakt, Telegram, Hive, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, or other social media.
Facebook was launched in 2004, and Twitter followed up two years later as a minimalist social network for posting 140-character messages. By 2023 Twitter had between 250 and 550 million users, while Facebook had nearly 3 billion users and its media-centric network, Instagram, had 2 billion.
In 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter and set about almost immediately making it inhospitable for 3rd-party developers, anonymous readers, and even his own users whom he tried to gouge with monthly charges and verification fees. Adding injury to insult, Musk welcomed back Nazis, gay-bashers, and racists who had been banned, and Twitter quickly went from already-bad to worse.
As a result, Musks’s users have been defecting in droves to alternate social media sites like Mastodon, BlueSky, Post, Substack Notes, Spoutible, and Spill. And now Threads.
By now everyone knows that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) just launched a Twitter competitor called Threads. Threads leverages Meta’s Instagram platform (and its two billion users) and within 48 hours Threads had attracted 70 million users.
Because of its rapid adoption, as well as the realization that Elon Musk is rapidly destroying his own vanity project, some are calling Threads a Twitter-killer. While that remains to be seen, Threads has enormous potential because Threads is literally built on top of Instagram and leverages Instagram’s 2 billion users.
I have been experimenting with Threads. It’s still pretty primitive. Since you can’t use Threads without an instagram account, you also can’t cancel your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account. Unlike Instagram, there is also no way to use Threads in a web browser. What you see in your feed is (rather annoyingly) determined by a Meta algorithm, not by you, and it seems half-finished in comparison to three other apps (Mastodon, Post, and Spoutible) I have been testing.
Commercial social media networks embody the adage: “if you’re not the customer, then you’re the product.” In other words, your data is the source of their profits. And the Threads app (like all Meta products) wants pretty much all your data. You can find a comparison of data collection practices of top social networks here.
Julia Angwin, who is both a keen observer of social media as well as an online privacy fanatic, wrote (on Mastodon), “Joined Threads but immediately regretting it. [Wired link].” A light-hearted faux advertisement poked fun at Thread’s privacy issues, which are serious enough that they will prevent Threads from being rolled out in the EU until it finally complies with European privacy laws.
Since I had never used Instagram before, I set up a new account, providing them with my email address and cell phone address. I used my real name and added a current photo of myself to my profile. I made one test post:
The next day I added some more contacts and received a surprising message:
I appealed their algorithm’s “decision” in the Zuckerberg Court of Appeals, and I prevailed:
I don’t have these sort of problems on other social networks. Overall, between the privacy risks, the lack of features, and the aggravations of dealing with an evil monopoly, I simply can’t recommend Threads.
But I’m sure people are going to love it because all their friends will be there.
Mastodon is a federated (clustered) network, distributed over thousands of privately-owned instances (servers). It has between 4 and 5 million users. Mastodon distinguishes between a local and a federated (global) feed. Another feed consists of all the people you follow, regardless of which instance they’re on. On Mastodon a Tweet is called a Toot. I have not found any reason to care which instance I’m on because I can follow people anywhere. And because Mastodon has been around since 2016 there are a surprising number of writers, journalists, and political commentators on the platform. But it’s not a place to follow your favorite actress or hockey player.
Besides Mastodon’s web interface, you can also choose between a large number of apps to use with it. On iOS alone you will find: the official client, Mastodon; Ivory, Ice Cubes; Mammoth; Metatext; Tooot; Tootle; Mona; Radiant; Toot!; Mastoot; Wooly; Trunks; Tusker; Mast; Manny; and Feather.
Mastodon, silly name notwithstanding, is still the most democratic and privacy-conscious platform today. However, at the moment it lacks encrypted DM’s (direct messages), a feature supposedly in development.
BlueSky is the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and has much the same political views as Elon Musk. I can’t tell you much about it because I am still waiting for an invitation to join. BlueSky is still in very early stages, although mobile apps are available. Users who have experienced the site say it’s less toxic than Twitter. However, given Dorsey’s politics and his reticence to moderate right-wingers, it probably won’t be long before BlueSky follows Twitter’s path. Let’s not forget that Twitter under Dorsey was a MAGA paradise even before he sold it to Elon Musk.
Post has a nice design and has focused on recruiting journalists and writers to its platform. Post’s monetization scheme is based on selling journalistic content for points, although you don’t have to use points for most interactions. Post offers an app, although at present it is very basic. Post has fewer privacy risks than Twitter or any of Meta’s products. Post is a great place to have informed and civilized discussions since there is a notable absence of unhinged haters on the platform.
Substack is a great blogging platform and there are many excellent blogs on the platform. By the same token, since Substack is politically neutral, there are also many you might not care to read, depending on your taste and politics. Substack makes its money by sharing profits with authors of monetized content. However, many blogs do not enable the monetization feature. While Substack has always offered commenting on individual posts, it now offers the ability for Substack subscribers to post messages for all Substack content creators using a new feature called Notes. I have posted a few Notes but have not found the feature to be all that useful. Bloggers would actually find it more useful for Substack to provide hooks to re-post content to other social media.
Like Elon Musk, Spoutible’s founder Christopher Bouzy is a cantankerous guy who picks fights with his critics. Spoutible is in early stages of development, but has a beautiful design and its community is friendly. And Bouzy has promised to keep it that way, as well as moderating any kind of content of a remotely sexual nature. There is presently no app, so I don’t know what its privacy risks are, but I commend Spoutible for their encrypted DM’s (direct messaging). Mobile apps for Android and iOS are reported to be coming out this month.
Another interesting alternative that has popped up is Spill, sometimes described as Black Twitter. Spill is the creation of Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, two young Twitter veterans. Spill’s user interface is unlike any other, and its terminology is different as well. The app uses spill for post, sipping for following, and serving for being followed. Fresh Tea is a live feed from everywhere, while My Brew is a feed of everyone you’re sipping. Because the app’s conventions are unique, I initially had difficulties getting around but ultimately I got the hang of it.
Spill is still a work in progress. For example, it’s impossible to paste text plus a URL into Spill, which many people do when commenting on an online article. I found I could only enter the text and URL separately, which is rather cumbersome. Perhaps this is by design, but the result is that most spills are short thoughts or observations. There is also no web app at the moment, which the developers promise to rectify shortly.
The vibe on Spill is quite different from other social networks. Black vernacular is the lingua franca on Spill. Many of the users are well-known Black journalists, authors, professors, and social activists, but you might not even know it because frequently these self-aggrandizing details are not mentioned in the profiles (although it’s possible). Rather than exploiting the opportunity to network professionally, Spill is clearly a more personal, safe, Black space where folks are just sharing their thoughts and feelings in ways that are most comfortable and fun.
Donald Trump did tremendous damage to the Supreme Court by appointing two Christian Nationalist zealots during his single term. Trump, a sexual predator in his own right, appointed accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh to join accused sexual predator Clarence Thomas in a court already swimming with misogyny.
In a nation where only 23% of all citizens regard themselves as Catholic, 7 of 9 — 78% — of current Supreme Court justices are Catholic (Kagan is Jewish, Jackson is Protestant). Several of the Catholic justices reject the liberal Catholicism that came out of the Second Vatican Council, a papal nod to modernity, equality, and justice. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointment, actually belongs to a Catholic cult replete with handmaids (not precisely what you think). There is not a single gay justice on the Court, although at least 7.2% of all Americans are gay. This is a court that knows little and cares even less about the diverse lives of ordinary Americans.
The Court’s recent, explosive rulings both snub their nose at stare decisis and dishonestly select cases based on fraudulent standing before the court. Where once it took a panel of legal experts to discern the legal principles behind a decision, now it only requires asking the question: what would Donald Trump want?
Worse, the Court is now encroaching upon the functions of the other branches of government. In her dissent to the Court’s ruling on student debt cancellation, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the result here is that the court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness”.
“Congress authorised the forgiveness plan… the [education secretary] put it in place; and the president would have been accountable for its success or failure,” she wrote. “But this court today decides that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits of the plan (so says the court) that assistance is too ‘significant'”.
Most dishonestly, the Court violated a basic legal principle of standing (as it also did in the website case) by conjuring up an aggrieved party with no standing to actually bring its complaint before the Court. The Court claimed the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a student loan servicer that conducts day-to-day operations on federal student loans, would lose revenue as a consequence of debt cancellation. The only problem is that MOHELA did not bring the suit and said in its own financial documents that it didn’t plan to make any payments in the future.
Furthermore, an analysis from the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective shows that MOHELA stood to gain revenue if debt cancellation had gone forward. In selecting this case and faking the plaintiff, the Court was not settling a dispute; it was going out of its way to preempt both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
For the past year following the Dobbs decision, the Court has drawn intense criticism, with critics eager to revisit the lies and ethical violations of its black-robed sexual predators, as well as those who took cash and gratuities from billionaires and then ruled on cases affecting these sugar daddies.
But the last straw has been the Court’s outrageous violations of judicial precedent and dishonesty in picking and choosing cases as well as manufacturing aggrieved parties. We have finally reached the point where many are calling for impeachment, reforms and court expansion.
The Constitution’s Article III, Section 1 says that federal judges can hold their offices “during good behavior.” With a corrupt Supreme Court, it’s sobering to consider that the Supreme Court itself may have the last word in deciding if conspiring with your wife on an insurrection, letting billionaires buy your decisions, or violating basic legal principles that would disbar lesser judges constitutes grounds for impeachment. One hopes it is entirely in Congress’s hands.
Reforms can be accomplished by the Court itself, others only by Congress, and others (term limits or court diversity) only by Constitutional amendment. The reform group Fix the Court does not advocate the expansion of the Court but does advocate: term limits, tighter ethics and disclosure rules, public access to court proceedings, divestiture of individual stocks by justices, more rigorous recusal rules, comprehensive financial disclosures, and public disclosures of the many media appearances most of us didn’t even know that justices make.
Expanding the court, however, does not require altering the Constitution. It could theoretically be done today. This is a position that an increasing number of legislators, including both Massachusetts senators, advocate. The group Demand Justice advocates for court expansion. Democrats have already filed legislation to expand the court, though it is unclear why they think it would survive a Constitutional sniff test. Expansion is something the President can do with Senate approval. The only problem is: the current president refuses to expand the court.
But adding justices is hardly a new idea. Donald Trump’s next favorite president (after himself, of course) was Andrew Jackson, who added two justices to the Court in 1836. In 1937 the very threat of expanding the Court to 15 justices by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was enough to return several obstructionist justices to less ideologically-motivated positions.
Which is not to say the court does not also need major reform. There is nothing sacred about nine justices or lifetime presidential appointments. The way justices are appointed in other Western nations puts our poorly-defined scheme to shame.
The Supreme Court of Canada is appointed by the Governor in Council and consists of nine justices. The number started out as six, was bumped up to seven, and ultimately became nine. On the surface Canada’s looks like ours, but Canada’s Supreme Court Act requires that three judges come from Ontario, three from Quebec, two from the Western provinces or Northern Canada and one from the Atlantic provinces. And judges must also retire before their 75th birthdays.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has twelve justices (shown above) and they must have already served on the bench for 15 years, or two on a “federal” bench. The UK convenes a selection commission chosen from judiciaries in Britain, Scotland, Northern Island and Wales, and it strives for at least regional balance. After selection, a justice is formally appointed by the Queen. Even with 12 justices that number can still be increased. Justices must retire at 70 or 75, depending on when they joined the bench.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, or BVerfG), has sixteen justices divided a couple of ways into two senates and three chambers. Judges are elected by both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, each of which selects eight justices. A Justice must have previously held a position on the bench and be at least 40 years of age. Justices serve for 12 years or until the age of 68, whichever comes first.
The French Court of Cassation is the highest appeal court in France and has an elaborate system of chambers and sitting and administrative judges, but 15 justices head up the court. These 15 judges serve a 9 year term and 3 each are appointed by the President of the Republic and Senate and National Assembly presidents. To become a judge a lawyer must be admitted to the Supreme Court Bar after passing an exam from the National School of the Magistracy. Typically, candidates are already judges in lower courts.
Our Supreme Court selection process is a mess. Not only is it highly politicized, but it lacks regional and demographic representation, professionalism, and justices typically serve well past normal retirement. More importantly, the selection process is simply undemocratic. And timidity, inertia, and a vague Constitution seem to prevent Congress from using its powers to rein in abuses by the Judicial branch.
We need a serious re-do of the selection process as well as term limits for the Supreme Court. And there are many places to look for good ideas, starting with those of our closest allies. Add Supreme Court reform to a long list of Constitutional changes necessary to update American democracy rather than overturn it — now that we’ve seen how fragile ours really is.
But in the interim, let’s expand the Supreme Court.
In June 2022 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that women no longer have a Constitutional right to abortion. While previously the personal privacy of women had been balanced by the State’s interest in the life of a viable fetus, a woman is now little more than a uterus without rights for the majority-Catholic court. Once Dobbs was decided, an emboldened Republican Party quickly announced it had other reproductive and civil rights in its crosshairs.
While the Democratic Party in general is now pushing to strengthen reproductive rights in Blue states, and claims it wants to make abortion a winning 2024 campaign issue, President Joe Biden told a group of wealthy donors recently that, while he supported the Roe v Wade compromise, “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion…” This lack of urgency (or real commitment for that matter) coming from an 80 year-old male citing his religious reservations is guaranteed to take the air out of the Democratic Party’s support for the bodily autonomy of women.
Yesterday the majority white Supreme Court dismantled Affirmative Action programs and upheld the rights of Christians to refuse to work on Sundays. Today it handed down rulings barring student debt forgiveness and upholding the right of Christians to discriminate against gay people.
We seem to be well on our our way to the Christian theocracy the GOP has in mind for us.
Most Democrats recognize that we are right on the edge of irrevocably losing whatever shreds of democracy the Court’s Christian Nationalists have not already torched. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer expressed outrage when the Dobbs decision was announced and lashed out with, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” Despite the tough guy impression, Schumer has done little to provide meaningful oversight of the Court and has resisted calls to expand it.
Other Democratic Senators led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey are calling for enlarging the number of Justices. In 2021 a group of progressive New York legislators called for enlarging it as well, appealing for Democrats to give up the ridiculous pretense that the Court is even-handed. “The Republican Party […] uses aggressive tactics to stack the courts with right-wing ideologues, cultivated in their own parallel legal ecosystem. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has fought to preserve the myth of our apolitical judiciary,” stated an appeal organized by State Assembly member elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani of the 36th district (NY).
Regardless, President Biden remains firmly opposed to court expansion.
You might recall that Biden embraced the role of “healer in chief” when he won the Presidency. In retrospect, part of the healing was to reassure Republicans he wasn’t going to tinker with the Supreme Court. Biden created a 36-member commission to look at the Court and its final report infuriatingly cautioned that enlarging the court would call the Court’s legitimacy into question.
The scope of the SCOTUS Sugar Daddy problem might have been unknown at the time but the corruption and conflicts of interest of several of its justices (and one insurrectionist spouse) were well-known. Last year Democrats sponsored toothless performative legislation to impose term limits on Supreme Court Justices, but the Constitution is the only mechanism that can actually change a justice’s term of office.
Critics questioned the centrist composition of Biden’s commission, its objectivity, and an Atlantic article wrote it off with: “Biden wished to avoid weighing in on this politically explosive proposal. The commission was his attempt to avoid having to do so.”
Yesterday the President doubled down on his do-nothing strategy, telling an MSNBC reporter that, while the court “may do too much harm […] I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we are going to politicize it maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy.” Once again, the 80 year-old President seemed to dismiss the severity of the problem. And Biden’s given reason for refusing to expand the Court only made a mockery of how politicized it is already.
To find similar upheavals in legal systems elsewhere you need only travel to Central Asia, where Iran suffered similar rapid-fire decrees by religious courts as the Shah’s dictatorship became a religious dictatorship. Remember conservative Americans whining about “shariah law” and “Islamofascism” in the Muslim world? These same Americans are now all-too eager for a religious dictatorship here.
The Supreme Court’s rulings have enabled a dictatorship of sorts for a shrinking, desperate demographic — white Christians. They and their party have become oppressors of a long list of victims which include: women of childbearing age, LGBTQ+ individuals, migrants, people of color, Muslims, public school teachers, librarians, secular Americans, liberal Jews, academics, union workers, environmental scientists, civil rights activists, civil libertarians, police reformers, war resisters, historians, sociologists, child psychologists, reproductive rights physicians, and anyone even barely to the left of the John Birch Society.
With today’s ruling barring college debt forgiveness, the Supreme Court now adds young people to its hit list – young people who indebted themselves in order to play the American meritocracy game. The Court’s ruling should have been a surprise to no one. As savings and loan, stock market, auto industry, insurance industry, bank, and pandemic bailouts for corporations have repeatedly demonstrated, human capital is never of equal importance. When actual living, breathing humans experience real crises in their lives, we discover all too quickly that, in America, you are on your own.
The issues America faces require political leadership people can believe in. And secular America needs a fighter rather than a healer.
Given Biden’s poor polling, his age, his gaffes, his reckless foreign policy, his apparent lack of interest in tackling controversial problems, a dangerous primary opponent (RFK Jr.), a wildcard from the Left (Cornell West), and a stealth MAGA candidate who will probably run under the No Labels label, the Democratic Party is going to have a serious problem in 2024 if they stick with Biden.
It’s time for the DNC grownups to begin thinking of an alternative to Biden in 2024. If the Democratic nominee won’t fight the GOP like he really means it, a secular and diverse America is going to lose even more than we have already.
As I feared, a misguided Democrat has suggested that Biden pardon Trump when and if he beats Trump at the polls (again). This misguided individual and a self-described Democrat is Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at Duquesne University, who explicitly mentions Gerald Ford’s famous precedent of pardoning Nixon..
Ledewitz argues that democracy is dying from the downward spiral of violations of norms and laws. He even agrees with former Attorney General William Barr that prosecuting Trump is absolutely justified.
But — so argues the law professor — to hell with the rule of law.
Ledewitz argues that, despite every legal justification and the fact that ignoring crimes like Trump’s has brought us to this point, Democrats ought to pardon Trump — not for justice but out of a political calculus intended to mollify MAGA zealots.
For a little historical context, I don’t recall the Justice Department ever hesitating to prosecute Klan members in Mississippi because some substantial portion of the electorate there didn’t want it to happen. But conflict avoidance is at the heart of Ledewitz’s argument. And this is a despicable case for a law professor to be making.
Ledewitz employs such ridiculous and simplistic logic that he embarrasses himself. Although it’s hard to imagine that he never saw an innocent defendant accept a favorable plea deal (in a legal system where more than 90% of all defendants take pleas), Ledewitz’s argument is based on a simplistic logic: Biden will offer Trump a pardon and Trump will turn it down if he’s not actually guilty. But — so Ledewitz reasons — Trump is guilty, ergo accepting Biden’s pardon will be an admission of his crimes. Voila! Case closed. Perry Mason does it again!
But it’s not as if Trump doesn’t wolf down legal maneuvers along with his cheeseburgers every day. Or that he would never take anything given to him freely (by some accounts he was prepared to sell pardons). Or as if Trump’s supporters are actually moved by ethics, logic, facts, or respect for the rule of (secular) law. Despite all the damning proof of crimes provided, Trump survived two impeachments precisely because his many enablers just don’t care about facts, the rule of law. Or Perry Mason logic.
Let the rest of us — those who actually believe in justice — agree that if Donald Trump broke the law then he must suffer the same consequences as any other citizen. If especially a law professor is prepared to reject this basic premise of justice, then let’s just open the doors to all the jails and let out all the criminals.
Either we believe in the rule of law, or we don’t. I hope someone is still teaching that at Duquesne Law School.
As Donald Trump fights the numerous criminal charges he earned while running the Presidency into the ground, I am reminded of Trump’s second impeachment trial in which he was exonerated by an all white jury – well, actually, Republican Senators. Same principle, though. Men who believe they are above the law.
The House’s Articles of Impeachment had already been watered-down and consisted only of Trump’s most recent attempts to extort Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 presidential election. Those charges did not include anything from the Mueller report, Trump’s numerous emoluments clause violations, lying about illegal payments to porn stars or mistresses, or any of the many obstructions of justice to come. Prosecution by the Senate should have been a slam dunk but we all know what happened.
If all that winking and looking away at crime, and the kid-glove treatment, was not bad enough, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fast-tracked the Senate trial down to two weeks — three times shorter than Nixon’s. For sake of comparison, in 2016, when South Korea impeached president Park Geun-hye for corruption and influence-peddling, prosecutors charged her with 13 counts remarkably similar to Trump’s, and her trial in South Korea’s Constitutional Court lasted 10 weeks. Gun-hye’s refusal to appear before the court was never an impediment to her conviction.
But with Trump, well, kid gloves.
The travesty of justice Americans witnessed in the Senate that year was reminiscent of special treatment numerous white criminals have received in other sham trials:
In 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury after one hour of deliberation.
In 1963, after Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi, two all-white juries acquitted his killers in separate trials.
In 1998, when 13 white supremacists were charged with attempting to murder a federal judge and FBI agent, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
In 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin by a jury with only one juror of color.
In 2016, a group of armed sovereign citizens who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were acquitted by an all-white jury — while on the same day unarmed Native Americans protesting a pipeline on their own land were maced and beaten by police.
It’s not even possible to list the thousands of times that white police officers have murdered unarmed black men and been acquitted or simply not charged.
Yesterday, after only a brief pause from its election denial propaganda, FOX News was back at it, calling Biden a “wannabe dictator” and portraying the real wannabe dictator, Trump, as the victim of – well – prosecution for crimes anybody else would be prosecuted for. To hear just about every Republican tell it, not one of the standard rules of justice applies to a white supremacist criminal like Trump. Apparently only [non-white] “banana republics” prosecute their corrupt politicians.
But let’s not forget the many other get-out-of-jail cards available for white men. Stand Your Ground laws, statutes encouraging vigilantism, and the doctrine of Qualified immunity — a magic wand to wave away police murders. Add to this the increasing abuse of presidential and gubernatorial pardons for MAGA criminals and insurrectionists. Criminals who believe they’re above the law.
For the moment it’s not looking so good for Trump in 2024. If Biden does win this election, I am troubled by the nagging concern that Biden – in pursuing some sort of misguided national unity objective – might end up pardoning Trump’s federal crimes, just as Gerald Ford wiped the slate clean for Richard Nixon. This would be a huge mistake.
Rubbing the average citizen’s nose in impunity for serious criminality will do nothing to alter the perception that American justice is a cruel joke. If the most corrupt man in America is not subject to the same laws as the rest of us, we might as well open the prison doors and let all the criminals walk free.
Since 1977 Native Americans have been trying to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. The text of a bill in the Massachusetts legislature is short, sweet, and uncomplicated:
Chapter 6 of the General Laws is hereby amended by striking out section 12V and inserting in place thereof the following section:– Section 12V. The governor shall annually issue a proclamation setting apart the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day and recommending that it be observed by the people, with appropriate exercises in the schools and otherwise, to acknowledge the history of genocide and discrimination against Indigenous peoples, and to recognize and celebrate the thriving cultures and continued resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations.
Columbus’s First Encounter with the Indians, Senate Doors, Washington DC
The image above is not just any piece of federal artwork. The “Rogers Doors” (seen in videos of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th) are a set of 17-foot high, 10 ton bronze doors in the Center Building East Portico of the U.S. Capitol building which open into the Rotunda. The panel on the left (top right square on the door) depicts Columbus arriving in the Americas to claim the land and its people; one of Columbus’ sailors is shown carrying off an indigenous woman as his slave. Rape and pillage of Native Americans are a matter of public record and, unfortunately, even official memorialization.
The culture wars have put many Democrats on the defensive, especially when Republicans accuse them of “wokeism” or “political correctness.” But Democrats ought to first consider from what noxious pit of white supremacy these accusations are coming — and should also be less concerned about so-called “cancel culture” and “erasure” than the actual historical erasure of Native people.
Yet while Massachusetts legislators dither and squirm, other states have ratified some form of an Indigenous People’s Day that either replaces* Columbus Day outright or (the coward’s choice) coexists with it: Alabama (2019); Alaska* (2015); Arizona (2020); California (2019); District of Columbia* (2019); Hawaii* (1988); Iowa* (2018); Louisiana* (2019); Maine* (2019); Michigan (2019); Minnesota* (2016); Nebraska (2021); Nevada (2020); New Mexico (2019); North Carolina* (2018); Oklahoma (2019); Oregon (2021); South Dakota* (1989); Texas (2021); Vermont* (2016); Virginia (2020); Wisconsin (2019).
Indigenous People’s Day is also celebrated in over 130 American cities.
In 2021 President Biden signed a proclamation making Indigenous People’s Day a federal holiday, although Columbus Day remains.
And, internationally, the United Nations honors Indigenous people on August 9th.
Despite all this, some Massachusetts state legislators still regard indigenous people as a trivial issue that will go away if they ignore them long enough. But they are mistaken. If Indigenous People’s Day doesn’t move out of committee (again) this year, legislators can expect to see it on their desks once again in 2024. This has been the sad reality with Massachusetts legislators for 47 years now.
Replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day is one of five legislative priorities of the Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda which include: native education, protection of indigenous heritage, replacing the flag and seal, and retiring the 20+ Massachusetts school mascots that still dishonor Native Americans.
To support the Agenda, come to the state house in Boston on Thursday, June 15th, for the 11:30 am to 1:30 pm rally and Advocacy Day. For more information, or to participate even if you are not able to attend in person, RSVP to: www.facebook.com/MAIndigenousAgenda.org/
I realize that some of us are vastly outnumbered by folks who think that Democrats should move to the right to accommodate the swing voter, whoever he may be. Many sins emanate from this strange dogma, not confined to discounting gay, black or women candidates in 2024, a willingness to soften demands so as to appeal to the swing voter, or a failure to defend marginalized Americans — as we saw play out during the budget ceiling negotiations last week.
In fact, most Democrats probably saw last week’s fight as a win for pragmatism and centrism. But I see their conclusion as a gross miscalculation.
Rather than being the party of ideas and principles, the Democratic Party is mainly, as Robert Reich once characterized it, a vast “fund-raising machine” that has lost its way if not its soul. The comedian Lewis Black once quipped that the Democratic Party is the party of “no ideas” while Republicans are the party of “bad ideas.” Black’s joke was only funny because it was true.
Unlike the GOP, which operates on an uncompromising and visceral level (and, it must be conceded, very successfully), Democrats operate like a house thermostat, adjusting a blast of cold here or a jet of hot air there to maintain some abstract perfect “middle” temperature that pleases no one. Ask your spouse if you don’t believe me.
A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center actually looked at this mythological being, the swing voter. It turns out that the 40% of voters who identify as so-called “independents” are not really all that independent. 13%, in fact, are pretty much reliable Republicans while 17% are fairly reliable Democrats. This leaves 7% — mostly young and male — who are politically unmoored.
This should be no great revelation in a polarized political landscape in which the “middle” has largely eroded. And yet it is an article of faith of centrist Democrats.
What’s especially significant, however, is that, of these 7% only a third actually vote, which reduces the actual percentage of “independents” to about 2.3% of the American electorate. Democrats might actually appeal to some of these disaffected young voters if they chose a progressive candidate under 70, but in the last election most of the Democratic Presidential candidates thought they could appeal to the unicorn by bashing the social safety net, going weak on abortion, or alienating minority voters by slamming “identity politics.” Last week the same Democratic centrists alienated minority voters even further, not to mention the left wing of the party.
Steve Phillips is the author of How We Win the Civil War and Brown is the New White. In the latter book he argues, and I agree with him, that it would be a much smarter move to woo reliable Black and Brown voters and progressives than a mythological creature. The numbers are simply better.
Rather than trying to lower themselves to GOP standards, Democrats ought to be doubling-down on issues that distinguish them from Republicans. And redoubling fierce opposition to the fascist train barreling down upon us. Instead, while the Democratic Party insists on poll-testing and calibrating a perfect room temperature, its right wing will likely flirt with RFK Jr. and then end up voting for a GOP candidate.
And — let’s not blame them when they do — some percentage of the Democratic left wing will end up voting for Cornel West out of disgust — a disgust borne out of the Democratic Party’s limp and vacillating policies and neglect. And because West will raise many of the festering issues that Democrats are simply too frightened to deal with.
In our economic system, to make money investors rely on the stability of the dollar as well as the fiscal duty of the U.S. government to back up all debts. But profitability requires even more of government. The gears of commerce must be greased by the Fed, the Treasury, by Congress, by the President, by financial institutions, by legions of business groups and lobbyists, by laws and tax codes that privilege investors and “job creators” – all cheered on by a mainstream press almost exclusively owned by billionaires.
Our complex, fragile Capitalist economy has failed several times in recent memory, requiring extraordinary levels of governmental support and bailouts. For something so precarious, the system requires faith and superstition as much as technocratic know-how and can only survive when all the previously-named actors play their parts in theatrical rituals designed to keep the whole rickety house of cards from toppling. The debt ceiling crisis illustrates this perfectly.
CNN warned us of economic “armaggedon” while the New York Times claimed that a failure to reach an accord would unleash a “horror scenario,” the total collapse of the world economy. It was widely reported that the U.S. had never in its history defaulted – except for all the times it had. In 1933 the U.S. refused to honor the gold standard, instead opting to pay its debt off in devalued currency. And in 1971 the U.S. refused to honor the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had pegged the dollar to a value of gold, again opting to pay off debts in devalued currency. In both cases creditors got stiffed.
Running low? Just print more.
The U.S. national debt is now almost $32 TRILLION. This is a number so staggering that, in practical terms, it can never be repaid. Nor does the U.S. government ever need (or intend) to. Unlike you, the U.S. Treasury can simply print more money. If “trust me” is all that is required for the economy to work, and skepticism is severely discouraged, then government doesn’t even need to raise sufficient taxes to pay for its programs. In this way the super-rich aren’t required to pay their fair share.
Add to this the fact that the largest government programs – especially “defense” outlays – are bloated beyond imagination and can’t even pass an audit. Despite this there is little effort by either political party to slow down military spending. Of all the expenditures responsible for our massive accumulating national debt, military spending is #2 and interest on that debt is #1. In short, the national debt is bipartisan in origin and the failure to deal with it equally bipartisan. And where there is “debate” without actual disagreement you find only staged theatre and spectacle.
White House OMB 2023
Thus, the debt ceiling “crisis” we just witnessed was another semi-annual performance completely divorced from reality. No other nation on earth has a debt ceiling – with the exception of Denmark, where the average citizen has never even heard of it. There is no intention of ever paying off the U.S. national debt. There is no intention of ever reaching a balanced budget. And staging such congressional theatre is completely unnecessary in the first place – because the U.S Constitution says that, no matter what, the bills must always be paid:
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
But assuming creditors would come banging on the door, demanding their money, who are they and how much leverage do they have?
Contrary to a common notion of China holding an exaggerated quantity of the national debt, it turns out that roughly 40% of the debt is held by the U.S. government itself. The Federal Reserve is the largest single creditor, followed by Social Security, the U.S. military, Civil Service retirement funds, and other intragovernmental accounts. The remaining 60% is held by millions of public investors, sometimes nations, sometimes huge bond holders, sometimes a teenager who has forgotten about the treasury bond his nana bought him at birth.
Foreign nations account for less than a quarter of our creditors and include: Japan ($1.08T); China ($870B); United Kingdom ($645.8B); Belgium ($332.9B); Luxembourg ($312.9B); Cayman Islands ($283.3B); Switzerland ($266.7B); Ireland ($250B); Canada ($229B); Brazil ($225.9B). Nations like Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands do not even necessarily hold all these U.S. treasury notes themselves; instead much of those portfolios represent tax-shelters parked offshore for oligarchs, mobsters, and multinationals.
According to the conventional wisdom, “In a default, interest rates on U.S. Treasurys would skyrocket (because investors would demand a higher rate in exchange for taking the risk that they might not be paid back), and Treasurys might no longer be usable as collateral (because their underlying value would not be clear). The entire world financial system could simply freeze.”
That is, a world financial system frozen not because Treasurys became worthless overnight or debts cannot be repaid, but because momentarily the value of Treasurys cannot be quantified. It’s hard to sympathize with the financial markets. Most working Americans deal with much more urgent uncertainty than this every day.
Given the constitutional obligation to back debt, the debt crisis means only that the process of repaying bills might be delayed. Barring the dissolution of the United States of America and the abolition of the Constitution, debts will be paid – eventually. Thus, a “world financial crisis” would not result from an actual default but because of uncertainties regarding the possibility that the U.S. might not pay off its bills immediately.
It is shockingly of lesser importance that the debt itself has become so large that no one actually expects it to ever be paid off or intends to ever tax the rich sufficiently to pay for a government whose machinery guarantees their own profits. Or that neither party insists on the primacy of spending the national treasure on actual people with real needs. Instead, the whole machinery of government seems designed to mainly service financial markets and gun runners.
The real object of this week’s high theater seems to have been to propitiate the gods of investment. And these old scoundrels require human sacrifice. Since the debt ceiling was invented in 1917, the main object of such “negotiations” has been to demand austerity and deregulation. Inasmuch as some government programs address poverty, starvation, healthcare, the environment, and joblessness, the destruction of these programs through so-called bipartisan “fiscal responsibility” makes the former beneficiaries of the hobbled social safety net more vulnerable than ever.
When the debt ceiling deal was first announced, the Business Roundtable (Josh Bolton), the National Association of Manufacturers (Jay Timmons), the Chamber of Commerce (Suzanne Clark), and various securities markets groups like the Financial Services Forum (Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, etc.) all congratulated the political performers for their “bipartisanship” — and then demanded even more austerity and deregulation.
The press stepped up as well to play their assigned role, sticking to the narrative that the manufactured and unique-in-all-the-world political ritual was a real “crisis.” Politicians who supported the deal were lauded by the press for their bipartisan pragmatism and sensibility while those who opposed it were labelled “fringe” and excoriated for their recklessness. Democrats reluctant to inflict suffering on Americans relying on SNAP and TANF programs were lumped together as “extremist” with sadists from the GOP for whom no measure of suffering inflicted on the poor is sufficient.
Why, then, did more House Democrats than Republicans vote for the Financial Responsibility Act? First, there are two wings of the Democratic Party. One, relatively tiny, includes Democrats who believe in social and economic justice. The other, the overwhelming majority, numbers those eager to be recognized for their bipartisanship.
Happily, both Massachusetts Senators (Warren and Markey) and two members of the Massachusetts House delegation (Pressley and McGovern) voted against the FRA for moral and ethical reasons. But it was troubling that a majority of Democrats, including the President, were all too willing to sacrifice America’s most vulnerable citizens on the altars of bipartisanship and market stability.
Centrist Democrats, who comprise the majority of their party, embrace bipartisanship while Republicans thumb their noses (or flip their fingers) at it. The debt ceiling vote reflected this. The centrists are not really enemies of austerity, militarism, or neoliberalism, and many of them give only lip service to social and racial justice. There’s simply not enough distance between these creatures and Romney Republicans to make them enemies. hence, “bipartisanship” becomes an excuse for accommodation and outright agreement. A virtue.
Jon Schwartz has a great article in the Intercept about Democrats hiding behind bipartisanship. And a lot of sins have been committed in its name:
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, passed during the Clinton administration overwhelmingly by Democrats, exempted a boatload of financial instruments from regulation
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Force, which unleashed America’s most costly war (which today accounts for 25% of our national debt) and which all but one Democrats voted for is still in effect and has expanded military strikes, drone attacks, and assassinations to 12 countries.
The AUMF of 2002 was used to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 gave tax breaks to corporations repatriating to U.S. shores. It didn’t create many jobs but it sure padded corporate pay.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 was the daddy of this week’s “fiscal responsibility act.” It imposed $1 TRILLION worth of cuts on social programs and made millions of Americans financially more vulnerable.
At some point Americans are going to have to confront a couple of very simple questions: Why do we live together in a society? And: What is the purpose of government?
If we live together in a society to undermine and ignore each other’s needs, this is no kind of society at all. If the purpose of government is only to enable the exploitation of citizens for the benefit of the wealthy, this isn’t going to work either. At some point those being duped are going to get wise to being unfairly treated.
This week the debt crisis again raised these questions. And for the most part neither Republicans nor Democrats could come up with satisfactory answers.
While I am especially interested in national political and social issues, I also post things of interest to hometown progressives. And I have no plans to stop doing this. But I hope readers will seek out your local Democratic Party town or city committee for opportunities for engagement. You might be surprised. Or even pleasantly shocked.
It was once the case that up to 60% of all Massachusetts Democratic Town committees were either on life support or had passed away in their beds, leaving only a foul odor where they had once slumbered. Well, Trump changed all that.
If you are a New Bedford Democrat, or even an unenrolled liberal or progressive, get on Richard Drolet’s mailing list. Richard is the co-chair of the NB Dems and is known for both his tireless enthusiasm and his cookies.
If you live in Dartmouth, hats off to the Dartmouth Dems, who worked to get a new sheriff elected, fended off a rightwing crackpot in the School Committee elections, and have a new sense of mission. You can say “hi” tomorrow at the Dartmouth Dems table at NB Pride in Buttonwood Park. Or subscribe to their new online newsletter.
Speaking of which: Democrats across the state are signing up delegates NOW for the September Platform Convention in Lowell. Again, if you live in New Bedford, contact Richard Drolet.. If you live in Dartmouth, contact Jim Griffith or Susan LeClair at links found here.
*Long-time readers know I have many criticisms of both the national and state Democratic Party. Yesterday I voiced my displeasure that so few Democrats rejected negotiating with terrorists over the debt ceiling. But for the time being Democrats are about the only thing standing between us and the neo-fascism taking root in places like Florida.
There is only one other nation on earth with a budget ceiling. Denmark’s, unlike ours, is set so high that it has never triggered even the threat of a government shutdown. By contrast, since 1960 alone the United States has had 78 mini “crises” over a debt ceiling that is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution but was created in 1917 to make managing wartime economies easier. And we’ve had no end of wartime economies.
What is in the Constitution is Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says unequivocally “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
“The validity of the public debt … shall not be questioned.” This is crystal clear: defaulting on public debts is unconstitutional. The sky would not fall and the world economy would not collapse if Republican hardliners had no way of holding Congress hostage. And yet the budget ceiling has become a semi-annual occasion for producing political theater and grandstanding.
The “deal” that the Biden administration has apparently negotiated with Kevin McCarthy, who serves at the pleasure of the GOP’s Freedom Caucus, is being portrayed as a necessary, pragmatic, “best possible” deal by the administration. “It could have been worse” is about the only excuse centrist Democrats can make for this shameful capitulation.
If fiscal responsibility was supposed to be the objective, not much effort was made to generate revenue by rolling back tax breaks for the super-rich or reducing debt by paring down the obscene, marbled fat “defense” budget. The military budget, which together with Homeland Security provisions is now well over a trillion dollars, historically accounts for a major portion of the national debt.
The debt ceiling talks ended in a deal that both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers praised — even as they called for even more austerity and a second course of regulatory rollbacks.
Instead, the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) imposes (fiscal responsibility = austerity) on those not responsible for debt but who need government help the most. “Responsibility” is only for welfare mothers, not oligarchs, social media barons, agribusiness, the fossil fuel industry, or for defense contractors. Besides the cuts, the FRA places limits on discretionary spending for the next two years — yet none on military spending.
Over 80 programs, many of them social, are having their funding rescinded. Funding for the IRS — long in the GOP’s crosshairs — is also being hit. Pay-Go provisions will hobble government programs, where budget increases here must now be offset with financial cuts there. The Congressional Budget Office has prepared a 17-page summary of the FRA’s main features. Read it and weep.
FRA hits Brown and Black families the hardest, ending the student loan payment pause, adding additional work requirements to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, impacting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and rolling back environmental protections for communities of color. NAACP President Derrick Johnson issued a statement:
Let’s be clear: while the original intent of the debt ceiling was to solve a practical challenge of paying the nation’s bills during World War I, it has become a weapon used by conservative extremists to hold the lives and livelihoods of Black America – and countless others – hostage. The NAACP calls on Congress and the Administration to end this practice before it can again be used to inflict more harm on Black America.
Progressive Democrats are justifiably unhappy with this gutless, immoral deal.
Among other missed opportunities, President Biden failed to show enough spine with Speaker McCarthy to stand on the Fourteenth Amendment and risk / provoke a revolt by the GOP Freedom Caucus, which would have both highlighted the GOP’s cruelty to voters and divided the GOP.
As for Biden’s hopes for a second term, his age is already a hard sell. But now the negotiator-in-chief has shown himself to be a weak and unreliable defender of America’s most vulnerable citizens. Biden has also dispelled any notion that he has moved to the left over the last two years. Whether Progressive Democrats will forgive him for this capitulation is not yet clear, but the bitter aftertaste of this budget ceiling negotiation will do him no favors in 2024.
I recently received a couple of replies from friends mentioning both Artificial Intelligence and social media. AI and internet technology are often treated as separate disciplines, but the two have now fused as search engines, help desk software, and medical diagnostic and other research tools increasingly incorporate sophisticated neural network processing and natural language models.
Both a novelty and a threat, AI has now blown past the Turing Test – a test of human verisimiltude – as we are increasingly bombarded with wholly invented images, almost-convincing “scholarship,” and computer-generated replies to human social media posts.
Since to some degree AI performs certain tasks like a human, this now calls into question our value as real humans. Under Capitalism, economic vulnerability has now become sharpened by a very specific kind of existential fear.
Both of my friends’ observations stand by themselves so I will simply reproduce them here:
“The bigger problem is what to do about lack of regulation of a technology that poses a threat on a number of levels in the name of a sacred freedom. The technology has long since outpaced societal regulation to prevent its misuse and harm and that needs to be redressed, not just offending platforms boycotted.”
and
“While Stephen Hawkin thought AI was our biggest threat, and it may well be, I find it sad that we collectively refuse to see that our fears that machines will have no use for us and do us in are also a projection of our culture’s attitude towards many humans and all of the non-human world.”
To the first reader, computer technology poses an intractable regulatory issue pitting personal freedoms against the uncontrolled forces of technological development. To the second, it is a moral issue. AI awakens human fears of suddenly finding ourselves lower on the food chain. And since AI calls into question our value as humans, we are reminded of how inhuman we have been to the world around us: to other humans, animals, and our environment.
These are both apt and wise observations. But both are framed in terms of the present realities of our economic and legal systems. Neither observation identifies a particular culprit or a possible solution.
Yet computer technology today poses precisely the same problems that 19th Century British Luddites encountered with the introduction of automation and steam powering of textile factories.
Contrary to the common understanding of the term, “Luddites” were not technophobes who disliked technology they could not comprehend. These weavers and spinners knew exactly how the technology worked. Rather, Luddites resented that the new technology was being forced upon them by industrialists bent on destroying their livelihoods because they now owned all the means of production and distribution. For the Luddites, this was a fight for economic survival, not an effort to keep up with technology.
As early as 1811 Luddites in the English Midlands began destroying textile factories and almost immediately became targets of both private retaliation and state repression. There were mass hangings and deportations to Australia. Children, rather than adult artisans, were soon put to work in these factories. The Industrial Revolution was so grim and foul that Charles Dickens wrote about it and Karl Marx developed a whole theory around it.
But even Karl Marx showed little sympathy for the Luddites. After all, for him economic progress was human progress; feudalism replaced barbarism; Capitalism replaced feudalism; and socialism would ultimately replace Capitalism. Opposing technological development wasn’t the answer for either 19th Century Marxists or Capitalists. And for 20th Century Capitalists and Communists alike, technology was practically fetishized.
Many of us internalize a fatalistic view of technology forced upon us by billionaires: we regard the introduction of new technologies as inevitable and we struggle to keep up and pay for it. We rarely ponder what life would be like if we actually had a voice in deciding how to use new technology. Instead, it is always up to the courts to address wrongs and abuses, and the courts can’t keep up either. But in any case, this is the wrong institution to regulate technology.
But back to Marx. Marx had no crystal ball, though he certainly had a keen mind. But for all that intellect he also had no idea that two feudal societies, Russia and China, would skip right over Capitalism directly into a broken form of socialism. Marx never fully connected slavery or racism with colonialism; for him slavery was simply a more extreme form of theft of labor value and, in the end, just another “economic category.”
“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”
It would be up to later writers (Cedric Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams) to make the case that Capitalism could never have existed without colonialism and racism.
But Marx was right about at least two things: (1) the labor of workers is being stolen; and (2) the end of Capitalism will involve changes in both production and social relations. After Capitalism’s time is finally up, capital (and this includes technology and intellectual property) will pass from the exclusive hands of industrialists, venture capitalists, and billionaires and become a commonly-owned, socially-controlled resource. A social good.
With the end of Capitalism – at least the predatory, completely unregulated Stage 4 variant the GOP champions – we all will finally have a say in how capital / technology / IP can be used – and for what social ends.
No more Murdochs (FOX), Musks (Twitter), Zuckerbergs (Facebook), or Sam Altmans or Peter Thiels (ChatGPT) changing your world.
Last night’s Presidential campaign announcement by Ron DeSantis on Elon Musk’s “Twitter Spaces” was a hot mess. DeSantis, generations younger than Trump, no doubt thought social media was a cooler platform than descending a golden staircase.
But neither Musk nor DeSantis have much of what anyone could call a personality. And that was the campaign announcement’s first problem.
Musk also didn’t do Twitter any favors by showcasing his fragile, audio-only streaming platform, which crashed after only moderate demand. The “failure to launch” soon acquired its own hashtag: #DeSaster. Nevertheless, DeSantis supporters turned the technical disaster into a talking point – it crashed, they explained, because so many people love Ron and wanted to hear him that he just broke the Internet.
Like DeSantis, Musk too seems impervious to his own disasters. Not content to injure employees, kill people with his Tesla auto-pilot feature, or blow up his own spaceships, Musk acquired Twitter only to become the new Julius Streicher of social media and begin running the platform into the ground.
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has re-platformed most of the Nazis and white supremacists who had previously run afoul of Twitter’s common decency standards, banned developers of the third party apps that made Twitter so popular and useful, abused his employees, tried gouging users with “verification” fees, caused half his advertisers to abandon the platform, and turned general incivility on Twitter into a riotous cesspool of hate.
So much so that Twitter is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Telegram, or Truth Social. Whether out of disgust or principle, organizations, celebrities, politicians and ordinary people have started moving their Twitter accounts to Mastodon, BlueSky, Post.News, and elsewhere.
By now everyone is familiar with the political stunts of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, as well as the many pieces of authoritarian and White Christian-nationalist themed legislation he has signed. Needless to say, a Mussolini wannabe like DeSantis and a Nazi admirer like Musk are birds of a feather. And so were the few speakers permitted to join DeSantis’s campaign event.
DeSantis and Musk were joined by: Christopher Rufo, an evolution denier and enemy of critical race theory (which he claims is being taught to kindergartners); Jay Bhattacharya, signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting COVID run rampant to kill a certain percent of the population; Steve Deace, a Born-Again Blaze Media talk show host and election denier; Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whose 2021 Christmas card depicted his whole family pointing assault rifles at the camera; Laura Ingraham, recently fired FOX hostess and white supremacist; Nate Silver, a well-known pollster who will soon be signing off fivethirtyeight.com and should have known better; Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympian, FOX News correspondent, and weirdly a MAGA trans woman who hates trans people; and Megyn Kelly, a former FOX News anchor.
So in case Twitter users hadn’t noticed before, Twitter is now another far-right platform. Last night’s campaign event, hosted by Musk himself, ought to dispel the last doubt. Progressive organizations still maintaining a Twitter account really need to do some soul-searching. Get out, get off, find something else.
White racists burning something: the common notion of white supremacy
The gunman who opened fire with an AR-15 at a Dallas mall on May 6th, killing eight including numerous members of one Korean family, was clearly targeting Asians. Perhaps it was the shooter’s name, Mauricio Garcia, that confused Texas governor Greg Abbot, who told reporters that the killer’s motivations were “unclear.” Within hours, however, investigators had discovered the extent of Garcia’s white supremacist views and connections, which included being an admirer of Adolf Hitler.
The very idea that a member of an ethnic or racial minority could be a white supremacist continues to boggle the minds of far-right pundits. Don Trump Jr. mockingly posted on Truth Social, “Because the name Mauricio Garcia screams white supremacy.” Elon Musk tweeted images of carnage from the shooting as well as disinformation, including a conspiracy theory that a Hispanic white supremacist just had to be a “psyop.” His speculation seemed to resonate with Musk’s far-right followers. When NBA-to-Twitter personality Rex Chapman called Clarence Thomas a white supremacist, FOX News mocked it as a typical liberal reaction to overturning Roe v. Wade (we will return to Justice Thomas shortly).
So don’t you have to be white to be a white supremacist?
The far-right insists that we now live in a post-racial society free of white supremacy and bias. Sure, there may still be a few overt haters out there – but not us! Denial of racism is such an important weapon of the far-right that now even speaking of America’s history of racial crimes is itself a crime in numerous states.
References to slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, white-only water fountains, lynchings, genocide of Native Americans, colonialism, racist immigration laws, redlining, disparities in healthcare, life expectancy, education, or generational wealth – all this is regarded as “divisive,” intended only to make white school children feel bad about being white, and therefore something to be censored.
Still, the far-right is equally clear that White Christian Nationalism is their political platform. Republicans point to Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s regime as their model for a white, Christian America. Former Congressman Steve King, an unrepentant white supremacist, granted an interview with Austrian fascists. Former president Trump, now looking like the leading GOP presidential candidate, has embraced neofascists in Italy, France, and Brazil. Trump’s one-time campaign advisor Steve Bannon has made the creation of a fascistInternationale one of his projects.
In July 2022 Marjorie Taylor Greene came out as an unapologetic Christian nationalist. Ditto her moral and intellectual equal, Lauren Boebert, who told a group of white fundamentalists, “The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church.” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, once thought to be a “moderate” Republican, echoed the sentiment, stating that government ought to be “bowing the knee” to the church. And by “church” Scott does not mean Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Quakers, or once-mainstream Christian denominations.
Just this week Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville defended white nationalists in the military, calling them good Americans. This recalls Trump’s characterization of the Tiki torch-bearing white supremacists as “very fine people.”
Despite its obsession with white Anglo-Saxon “culture,” the dangers of multiculturalism, the Great Replacement of white people by people of color, and its perverse, nationalist conception of “Christianity,” White Christian Nationalism is also increasingly being embraced by people of color.
A few examples: former HUD secretary and denier that racism exists Ben Carson; South Carolina Senator and Christian Nationalist Tim Scott; perennial presidential candidate and antisemite Kanye West whose campaign advisor is a racist, misogynistic British fascist; North Carolina gubernatorial aspirant, Islamophobe and homophobe Mark Robinson; convicted seditionist and Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio; self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes; and domestic terrorist and repeat seditionist Brandon Rapolla.
It came as a surprise to no one in Memphis’ Black community that the five officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death were Black. Turns out, how Black police officers approach policing is shaped by policies based on lingering structural racism in law enforcement institutions. Again, white supremacy is much more than overt hatred.
Such observations are nothing new. In the wake of the Dallas shooting Joan Walsh wrote an excellent piece in the Nation. Frank Vyan Walton published a short piece in the Daily Kos. Philip Bump offered an explanation in the Washington Post of why non-whites embrace white supremacy.
One factor is self-identification with a dominant racial and ethnic group. Increasingly, some non-white communities now identify as white. Another is placing one’s self closer to the sources of political power. Hispanic Americans now increasingly identify with white supremacy. And that includes Mauricio Garcia, the Dallas shooter.
A new TV series “Beef” features two Asian characters acting out their very “white” grievances with each other and America. In a piece in Electric Lit Frankie Huang dissects the two protagonists and their complicated relationships with white society. He parenthetically blasts members of his own community for cultural expropriation, exploiting “model minority” status, and a lack of solidarity with other minorities – all of which applies to every other ethnic group throughout American history that has embraced “whiteness” by turning its back on egalitarian ideals in order to stand nearer the sources of power and money.
Clarence chose his side and it pays pretty damn well
In an old article in the Nation, Randall Kennedy asks “Whose Side is Clarence Thomas On?” and proceeds easily to a conclusion. Quoting Corey Robin, who has written a number of books on far-right ideology, “Thomas has rationalized nearly all of his efforts to maintain the legal architecture under which African Americans have suffered most because ‘adversity helps the black community develop its inner virtue and resolve.’ Robin adds, ‘It’s astonishing how openly Thomas embraces not just federalism but a view of federalism associated with the slaveocracy and Jim Crow.'”
Ouch.
Thomas then, regardless of race, turns out to be the ideal Supreme Court justice for the far right and its white supremacist agenda. In a new PBS documentary, Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court, we learn that Thomas has a whole list of his own grievances meshing improbably with White America’s.
Add to this Thomas’s marriage to one of America’s most zealous far-right activists and arguably a seditionist, as well as Thomas’s selling himself to Sugar Daddy Harlan Crow, and it becomes clear that white supremacy is not so much about spewing racial epithets as the preservation and concentration of political and economic power.
White supremacists of whatever race know exactly which side they’re on.
Efforts to redress old wrongs and make the country a welcoming place for people of color, indigenous, gay, trans, and religious minorities are increasingly met with rage and violence by the American far-right. The very mention of minorities being denied a share of the American Dream immediately provokes Republicans to invoke so-called “divisive concepts.” Social justice has become such a dirty word for the GOP that they denigrate any effort to address racial and sexual injustices, whining instead that white people are the real victims of racism.
In the last century and a half, new history and new analyses have posed uncomfortable questions about our national origins, the nation’s many wars against black, brown and yellow people, and the dismal truth about Reconstruction. New analysis poses uncomfortable questions about a system that generates massive generational wealth for white Americans but denies people of color similar advantages. New studies shed light on the myriad systems that adversely affect people of color – housing, medical, education, police, prisons – and they document in detail how these systems work and how they are “broken” by design.
If you watched Senator Ted Cruz trying to put Judge Katanji Brown Jackson “in her place” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, you surely heard the phrase “Critical Race Theory” or CRT. Republicans, who have adopted the white Christian Nationalist critique of scholarship challenging institutional racism, disparage CRT as the spawn of Marxists, atheists and “woke” academics who devised it expressly to make white school children cry.
You probably also heard Senators grilling Judge Jackson about gender, asking her for an open-ended definition of “woman” while accusing her of lenient sentences for child pornographers and being complicit with “child sexual predators” in the “grooming” of victims. Much of this is the stuff of QAnon conspiracies. Some is part of a White Christian Nationalist agenda that Republicans openly pursue. The rest is simply terror that America is changing – and the only tool that Republicans can think of to stop it is repression.
Republicans lampoon books written to help white liberals understand how culture and privilege sustain structural racism. They ridicule books that simply explain how Black folks feel about life in a racist society. Although they may be read by white people who sometimes clumsily embark upon a bit of self-reflection, titles like Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Anti-Racist” or Michael Eric Dyson’s “Tears We Cannot Stop” are dismissed by the white Christian Nationalist Party as malicious and “un-American.”
These blanket dismissals apply as well to popular and well-researched works: how laws have been written expressly to harm minorities (Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law“); how structural racism works in the criminal-legal system (Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow“); how racist concepts evolved to justify slavery and other forms of oppression (Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People“); how America was founded on genocide and slavery (David E. Stannard’s “American Holocaust” or Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning“); and how, for every gain Black America makes, White America pushes back (Carol Anderson’s “White Rage“).
In fact, Anderson absolutely nails it in “White Rage.” White Christian Nationalists resent having themselves and their “Lost Cause” called out.
The ferocity of white Christian Nationalists “pushing back” includes banning or ensuring that books like those mentioned have no place in libraries or ever find their way into school curricula. Academics who conduct research, educators who design curriculum, public officials who turn new findings into policy, or legislators who address social justice issues – all now find themselves with targets on their backs, placed there by Republicans with their white Christian Nationalist agenda.
But none of this is new.
Early 20th Century writers like James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois, and mid-century writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin were widely-known and gave white Americans much to think about. They may have been literary giants but the wisdom of each was discounted. Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” (1962) was quickly savaged by American Conservatives, notably William F. Buckley who called the book a “poignant essay threatening the whites” and a call for “the end of Christian Civilization” and “morose nihilism.” White Christian Nationalism was alive and apparent in America’s best-known Gentleman Conservative of the day.
In 1958 Lederer and Burdick’s “The Ugly American” created quite the stir when it challenged American motives, morality and competence as the U.S. began placing “advisors” in Vietnam. We still feel the divisions that the war in Viet Nam caused. Some people today will say “thank you for your service” to members of the military who were directly or indirectly responsible for killing as many as two million Vietnamese civilians. Others question if the services these servicemen and women rendered in questionable wars actually served any constructive purpose.
In 1968 the Kerner Report pointed out that we were moving inexorably toward two “separate but unequal” Americas, one Black, one white. The report pointed to structural and cultural racism in America and it angered white Americans, including many Liberals. In Chapter 4: Basic Causes, the report says bluntly, “… certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive m1965 mcixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”
Instead, most white Americans preferred to read about the supposed moral deficiencies of Black families in overtly racist reports such as the 1965 McCone Commission’s report on the Watts riots or the 1965 Moynihan Report, which laid blame on Black families and Black culture for their own mistreatment.
The 1619 Project is a collection of materials curated by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by the New York Times which show how the United States was founded upon slavery and genocide. Like their book-banning German cousins, Florida explicitly bans 1619 Project materials. Instead, among the GOP-preferred 1776 Project’s recommended readings on race, curated by a private Christian university, is the old Moynihan Report.
Martin Luther King, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin were each disappointed with white liberals for being unreliable allies in a struggle for justice that can only succeed with dependable friends. Baldwin’s seven-hour discussion on race and society in 1970 with Margaret Mead was eventually transcribed into a book “A Rap on Race.” Yet for all of Mead’s considerable learning and Yankee sensibilities, her discussion with Baldwin revealed a white Liberal blindness to many aspects of racism and privilege. This is a blindness that extends from simply not “getting it” to complaisance in the face of white supremacy.
For as long the the United States has existed, facts, research, science, and statistics have all been at times inconvenient secular truths for some Americans. In 36 states we have regressed so far into the past that we have returned to the year 1925, when the state of Tennessee arrested a teacher, John Thomas Scopes, for violating the state’s Butler Act which criminalized the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
Those of us of a certain age remember Spencer Tracy playing a fictionalized Clarence Darrow in “Inherit the Wind,” pleading movingly for modernity and science. Perhaps because Darrow’s dialog was so moving, and perhaps because our founding myths always have a Hollywood ring to them, it’s easy to forget that Darrow actually lost the case. John Scopes was found guilty and the Butler Act remained on Tennessee’s books until 1968 when statutes violating the Establishment Clause were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. It took another decade for Tennessee itself to remove the statute.
The end of Creationism in the schools must have been a hard pill for white Christian Nationalists to swallow. And they have continued to chip away at the Establishment Clause.
Americans don’t fully recognize the importance of labor or the potential combined political power of working people. Or maybe we have simply allowed ourselves to be persuaded that that’s a “far-left” viewpoint.
Somehow it’s only class warfare when workers make their demands known.
Throughout the world, and in Europe particularly, May Day (or International Workers’ Day) is celebrated with displays of unity and power, such as today’s protests in France against President Macron’s decree raising the French retirement age.
Meanwhile, in the US, GOP-controlled states are rolling back worker protections, including those barring child labor.
For the most part it is anathema — or down-right “communist” — to point out the degree of exploitation of workers in America.
A new book by Melissa Hope Ditmore, a scholar who focuses on sex trafficking, makes the observation that sex and human trafficking are not all that different from the routine exploitation of workers. “Trafficking into agricultural, industry, and domestic work has always received scant attention compared with trafficking into sex work, despite its enormous scale and impact on the economy,” Ditmore writes.
Many of these most difficult jobs are still exempted from Social Security benefits created under the New Deal — which incidentally occurred during Jim Crow. Domestic laborers, nannies, lettuce pickers, elder care workers, house cleaners, teacher’s aides, and non-professional workers in the medical industry are all low-paid, mainly female and, more often than not, exploited. This extends to immigrants and the working poor who toil in the so-called “Gig economy” — basically piecework jobs that exclude them from full benefits.
In the worst days of the pandemic, the elderly and immune-compromised, in particular, depended on “gig economy” delivery services. We depended upon checkout clerks who did not have the luxury of working from home. These and the millions of healthcare workers who went to work every day, running the risk of contracting a virus for which there was then no immunization or treatment, were the real heroes of the day.
All over America, often in abysmal and unsafe working conditions, agricultural workers kept supply chains running so that the more privileged could continue to buy meats and vegetables even as the pandemic raged.
And across the country, particularly in Florida, being a teacher has now become a virtually impossible job for those who believe in teaching the truth and protecting vulnerable students. This is a profession that has never been adequately compensated, but is now literally under attack.
We are in the habit of reflexively thanking servicemen for participating in fairly questionable foreign wars and adventures, but we never thank the real heroes for their service. So in the absence of widespread May Day celebrations, I’m raising a toast tonight to the workers of the world and the power and remuneration they so richly deserve.
A couple of months ago I woke up with significant vision loss in one eye. As someone in his seventies I was probably overdue for a health crisis, and there is nothing like losing eyesight to focus you on your mortality. I was terrified that my writing days might be over and I was in grief at the prospect of a shrinking world. Worse, the type of optic neuropathy I was diagnosed with sometimes claims vision in the remaining eye. After a month, life is returning to normal. I’ve made adjustments, learned to see without the headaches I initially experienced, and I’m taking driving a step at a time.
But needing to take as much control over my situation as I can, I resolved that if I lost the other eye I would be prepared. The Hadley Institute has many resources for blind and low-vision people, including the Braille lessons I have started “just in case” the worst happens. Another of Hadley’s many resources is a podcast where I first heard an interview with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, whose experience with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) was identical to mine.
Bruni is also the narrator of the Audible version of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and I was of course eager to see how he negotiated his own adjustment to vision loss. However, “The Beauty of Dusk” is not merely about Bruni’s experience of sudden partial blindness but is more a meditation on mortality, our ability to meet challenges head-on, to transform our ways of doing things, to change our thinking and even ourselves — as well as the satisfactions of meeting those challenges and discovering strengths and possibilities we never imagined were within us. In confronting all his own fears and questions, Bruni managed to write a wise and generous meditation on what it means to be human and vulnerable.
The title of Bruni’s book is apt and comes from this passage: “[…] my story isn’t about dawn. It’s about dusk. It’s about those first real inklings that the day isn’t forever, and the light inexorably fades. It’s about a rising and then peaking consciousness that you’re on borrowed and finite time.” Exactly. Those of us “of a certain age,” for whom “old age isn’t for sissies,” may prefer more humorous characterizations of our silver years. But dusk is a perfect reminder that our day is almost over and there’s just so much light to be snatched before it all ends. It’s a sobering but a brutally honest and even actionable metaphor.
Bruni’s meditation explores almost every aspect of his medical experience as well as much in his own life. But it is far from a medical memoir. Most of “Dusk” is devoted to stories from the many friends he has — as we all have — whose burdens are far greater than his. These are tales of people who met unthinkable challenges that most of us imagine would have stopped us in our tracks.
But it doesn’t work that way. Buried within each of us is the capacity to adapt, to change, to look at the world differently. Bruni draws from the work of numerous psychologists and neuroscientists to remind us that our brains and our personalities are far more elastic than we imagine. Bruni also pokes fun at the comic irony of how he was forced to “see the world differently.” As he half-jokes, “when one eye closes, another one opens.”
Bruni reminds us of the polite caution, if not disinterest, we show those with disabilities. After his own experience with disability Bruni started asking every one he knew about how they navigated the world, what their challenges were. Many of their answers surprised him. Their desire to talk about their struggles initially surprised him.
“The Beauty of Dusk” is a triumphant book, a slightly sentimental book, and occasionally a tedious book of things (like his dog) that only some readers will find engaging. But it is also a book about the hard realities, both good and bad, of aging and disability. As I listened to Bruni narrate, barely a month after my own opthalmological adventure, I at times found myself weeping. There were naturally tears of sadness for what is lost, but also tears of triumph over my initial terror, despair, and grief. There were also tears of recognition — felt more fully now than ever before in my life — that I am finite, that life is finite, that what is left to us of each day is not to be wasted. That vulnerability and disability are waystations that each of us will visit sometime in our lives.
The resolution was sponsored by Florida House Republican Maria Elvira Salazar, the daughter of Cuban exiles who likely knew Cuban military dictator Fulgencia Batista, who fled to Florida about the same time as they. For Cuban exiles like Salazar’s parents, who lost sweat shops and colonial plantations to agrarian reforms, socialism was all-too easily conflated with a Holocaust.
But just to keep things in perspective, and perhaps as one indicator of just how lopsided wealth in Cuba was before, after the revolution Castro nationalized his own family’s 25,000 acre estate. Plantations like Castro’s family’s were worked by landless farmers living and working in conditions similar to Southern plantations and pre-revolutionary Russian estates. For Cuba’s virulent anti-Communists, plantations and military dictators were the “good old days.”
Salazar’s resolution conflates socialism with totalitarian regimes, famine, mass murder, and places Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in the same company as Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin. Salazar’s resolution is filled with hysterical hyperbole and concludes with a ridiculous claim found neither in the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution: “Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it resolved…”
None of this is surprising coming from the Republican Party, which has clearly lost its collective mind and is in fact, and in Florida most acutely pursuing, the systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights.
But most Americans make a distinction between European democratic socialism and the distorted dictatorships found in North Korea, Russia, and China. No sane individual believes for a second that “National Socialism” (aka Nazism) had anything to do with socialism. A 2021 Gallup Poll found that 52% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans view American Capitalism positively and, rather counter-intuitively, that 65% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans think of socialism in a positive light.
For Republicans, who are now the “either-or” heirs of the John Birch Society, it is either Capitalism or socialism. Democrats, on the other hand, understand “socialist” in the context of European social-democratic governments whose support for national healthcare, heavily subsidized education, housing, and parental leave contribute to a social safety net Republicans dismiss as “Communism.” For most Democrats “socialism” means features of social governance that can conceivably exist alongside a less predatory version of Capitalism. For Republicans, only the most predatory form of Capitalism is worth saving.
So it was disappointing to find that 109 Democrats — including a majority of the Massachusetts House delegation — signed on to Salazar’s resolution. Only Jim McGovern, Richard Neal, and Ayanna Pressley refused to make a show of red-blooded patriotic anti-Communism. At the very least they made a distinction that 65% of registered Democrats share regarding the nature of “socialism.” I was not surprised by Bill Keating, Stephen Lynch, Seth Moulton, or Jake Auchincloss. I had expected more of Lori Trahan and Katherine Clark, previously (and significantly) the Assistant House Democratic Leader.
“Disappointing” doesn’t even begin to describe Massachusetts House Democrats. Their disgraceful vote was another sign that the Democratic Party is as ambivalent about the social safety net as it is about every other liberal issue or democratic right it has already conceded to Republicans through collusion or neglect. From police reform to the defense of abortion and voting rights, Democrats allow Republicans to set the agenda on every issue, and they seem only too happy to join their Republican colleagues in betraying working people and minorities as they undermine true liberals within their own party.
With the ascendancy of the Tea Party, Trump, De Santis, and others in the GOP’s far-right starlight — and with a slim Republicans majority in the House — it appears we have entered a new McCarthy era. In the Fifties, the first targets of Joe McCarthy were liberal Democrats he claimed were “communistically inclined”, along with Jews, gays, and “Hollywood elites.” McCarthy succeeded in having libraries throughout the US purged of books, including Philip Foner’s The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson and The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman, a play about false accusations in a girl’s school that had obvious parallels with what McCarthy himself was doing. If you live in Florida today, no doubt you are experiencing either deja vu or PTSD.
I have long believed that the Democratic Party, sadly, is the only thing standing between Republicans and the final nail in the coffin of American democracy. But if Democrats are not up to the task, it may be time for a new party to take on that responsibility. The formation of a new party — a regular occurrence in any other democracy — is hampered only by our lack of imagination.
It is Black History Month and there are a couple of streamed documentaries I heartily recommend: Jeffery Robinson’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (Netflix); and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, a six part docuseries (Hulu).
I watched Robinson’s film last night on Netflix and it is excellent. At the beginning of the film Robinson meets a man standing in front of a Confederate statue waving a Confederate flag. The two have a conversation about whether that flag was a symbol of slavery and even about the nature of slavery itself. The Neo-Confederate maintains that slaves were just like members of slave-holders’ families and his flag had nothing to do with slavery. But in less than a minute the Harvard Law-trained film-maker demonstrates the contradictions of the flag-waver’s contentions. This confrontation with willful ignorance frames the film’s narrative.
Robinson, who is from Memphis and whose personal story is interwoven into the documentary, goes on to show — using the words of politicians of the time, state and federal laws and rulings, and historical documents — that America most definitely was founded on slavery. He quotes former president Donald Trump — yes, America’s chief racist ignoramus and a fan of Jackson — who says that Andrew Jackson would never have let the US slide into civil war, then points out that Jackson died 16 years before that war. Robinson goes on to show that Jackson in fact was a slave-owner himself who even posted an ad for the return of one of his own slaves — promising to pay the finder a little extra for giving the slave 300 lashes with a whip. This is who is on our $20 bill.
We wait for Robinson to complete the sentence with “this is who we are” but his stealth title “Who We Are” instead does that job for him. Robinson not once mentions the usual bromide that White America uses on the occasion of some new racial atrocity (“this is not who we are”). Robinson just knows. And we all ought to know by now: this is exactly who we are.
In perhaps the most moving segment of the film Robinson, who worked with the ACLU for many years, returns to Memphis with his brother and visits their boyhood home — a house that had to be purchased with a little subterfuge by a white couple and then transferred to Robinson’s parents. He talks about how that home made him who he is today and how everyone on that street worked hard, did their best for their children, and had all the same hopes his parents did. It is not a bitter reminiscence, but Robinson points out that what white supremacy really means is that the playing field will never be level for everyone on that street — because of government institutions that created land-grant colleges for whites, redlining for blacks, land dispossession for indigenous people, and the recycling of slave-catching practices in police institutions. Robinson methodically shows us how many of our racialized institutions are still working as designed years after the Civil Rights movement ended. And the damage to their victims continues.
The 1619 Project has become a lightning rod for people who can’t accept that America was founded on slavery and continues to do everything it can to preserve slavery’s vestiges and inequities. FOX News predictably wrote the series off as “fan fiction” and “slander.” The New York Post called it “cartoonish” and a “pretense” and wrote off one of the interviewed academics as a “Marxist.” And of course, the 1619 Project has been banned in Florida by racist governor Ron DeSantis and his appointees to the state Board of Education.
The series consists of six episodes, the last of which will air tomorrow: Democracy; Race; Music; Capitalism; Fear; and Justice. While Jeffery Robinson never indicts Capitalism outright for the sins of slavery, Hannah-Jones does so explicitly and this is the most likely reason for her rough treatment. But let’s be honest: slavery was a commercial enterprise. The value of slave labor made Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia among the richest in the nation. When slavery ended these states instantly ended up at the bottom of the American economic barrel because human capital (that is humans as property) had been instantly struck from the ledgers. And it wasn’t just Southern plantations which profited from the products of slave labor. Massachusetts textile factories depended on cotton that had been harvested for free by humans under the whip. The New York stock exchange, companies like Lehman Brothers, and insurance industries like AIG — as Robinson shows, too — fed off slavery and toyed with declaring themselves neutral in order to continue to profit from human bondage.
In what is most certainly one of the great ironies of history, while the 1619 Project has been banned and its use in Florida schools now constitutes a felony, it is now available in Germany — a country that knows something about white supremacy and book burnings — and is now ashamed of it.
The Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried a review of the 1619 Project in its book section, pointing out that Americans are woefully (even willfully) ignorant of their own history. Andreas Eckert cites a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study which shows how ignorant of American history, particularly its ugliest aspects, American High School students are. Only 8% of American high schoolers could identify correctly the reason the Civil War was fought: slavery. Eckert quotes Yale history professor and Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight, who wrote the introduction to the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History.” Blight observes that Americans always prefer to view our history in the most positive light, regarding ourselves as a beacon unto the world, bringing progress, freedom, justice, prosperity, and happiness to the benighted. This certainly seems to constitute the “patriotic curriculum” that Ron DeSantis is now about to jam down the throats of Florida public school students.
One of the greatest controversies over the 1619 Project is whether the American Revolution was fought (even in part) to preserve slavery. Hannah-Jones unapologetically says it was. In the same SPLC preface to “Teaching Hard History,” Hasan Kwame Jeffries writes, “In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals of their radical experiment in democracy; racial justice, however, was not included in that list. Instead, they embedded protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the founding document, guaranteeing inequality for generations to come.” It doesn’t take much to verify these facts.
For starters, 34 of the 47 signers — a majority — of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. Among the most famous slave owners: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and (a distant relative on my mother’s side) Charles Carroll. So don’t even try to convince me these morally compromised men created a nation for all the beating hearts in it.
The Declaration of Independence has always rung hollow to Black people. Frederick Douglass delivered a scathing oration “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Aside from its authors and its hypocrisy, the Declaration calls indigenous people “merciless Indian Savages” and whines that King George is inhibiting the theft of indigenous land.
William J. Aceves, in “Amending a Racist Constitution,” shows us precisely where slavery was baked into the Constitutional cake:
While the Constitution never uses the words “slave” or “slavery,” the shadows of these malignant words inhabit its text. Four constitutional provisions reflect a legal architecture that treats Black people as property. Two of these provisions are substantive, and two are procedural.
Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 is the notorious Three-Fifths Clause. This provision is used to determine the number of congressional representatives apportioned to a state as well as its corresponding tax obligations. Free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, were included in the calculation of state populations. In contrast, slaves would be calculated as three-fifths of a person. Native Americans who were not taxed would not be included in these calculations. While the Three-Fifths Clause did not directly affect the rights of slaves, it served as clear evidence of their inequality. The Clause also had a profound impact on the power structure in Congress by providing slave states disproportionate political influence in the House for decades. Because of this, the slave states were even less inclined to end slavery.
Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 represents the Fugitive Slave Clause. It provides that any person who escapes from servitude and flees to another state may not gain their freedom. Instead, that person must be returned to the custody of their owner. This clause was used on countless occasions to perpetuate slavery. Individuals who had escaped from bondage by crossing state lines were subject to capture and returned to slavery. Those who aided such efforts were subject to civil or even criminal liability. While there was some resistance to its application, this pernicious clause made anti-slavery states and the federal government complicit in slavery. This complicity even extended to the Supreme Court.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 limited the ability of Congress to adopt legislation prohibiting the migration or importation of slaves until 1808. Congress drafted around this restriction in 1803, when it adopted An Act to Prevent the Importation of Certain Persons into Certain States, Where, by the Laws Thereof, Their Admission is Prohibited. This statute was adopted at the request of the slave states, which were concerned with the rise of free people of color in the United States and viewed the successful slave rebellion in Haiti with trepidation. Four years later, Congress took a more significant step with the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves Into Any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States. While the statute was drafted to end the slave trade in the United States, the practice of slavery remained legal.
Finally, Article V addresses the process for constitutional amendments. These amendments can be proposed for state ratification by a two-thirds vote in both Houses. Alternatively, amendments can be proposed through a constitutional convention called by a two-thirds vote of the states. Either process then requires approval by three-fourths of the states. Reflecting one of the central compromises to the Constitution, Article V prohibited any amendment to Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 until 1808. Working in tandem, these provisions ensured that the slave trade would remain legal in the United States for at least twenty years.
In Robinson’s film, Black students sing the third stanza of the American National Anthem (“the Star-Spangled Banner”) by Francis Scott Key, a Maryland slave owner. This stanza sings of the depravity and deserved slaughter of slaves who try to escape:
No refuge could save the hireling and slaveFrom the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth waveO’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And the last stanza implies that the republic is meant only for non-slaves:
O thus be it ever when freemen shall standBetween their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
American Conservatives may be incensed at scholarship that at long last proves our nation was founded on and built by slavery, but there is no getting around the fact: it was. The battle for the nation’s soul may be on some people’s lips but it means little without recognition, repair, repentance, restitution — and major revision of our laws. But we can’t even begin if we can’t agree on facts of history that can be easily and objectively verified.
In our hearts of hearts we know the contents of our nation’s soul and who we are as a people. And, if we’re honest, it isn’t very pretty.
I have about 30 unfinished plays. As I learn more about plays that “work” I have concluded that most of these moldering first attempts are probably not worth salvaging, although a few could work with major rewrites. But I’ve also realized that maybe I should just say kaddish for my characters and start from scratch.
Together with the many plays I’ve read are books on structure, plot, character, and dramaturgy. Of the ambitious compendia, Richard Toscan’s Playwriting Seminars 2.0 is very good. And Louis E. Catron’s Elements of Playwriting was also very helpful. Lenora Inez Brown’s The Art of Active Dramaturgy talks about how a dramaturg works with a playwright and a theatre company to tune a play for production. In my head I know a lot about what makes a good play, yet for all the books and writing workshops, I’ve never really known how (or been confident enough) to tackle the complex process of completing a play. Now that the light is dawning somewhat, it’s clear that if you know even something about process, you will write much more confidently.
Recently I have been listening to playwriting podcasts. The most helpful (to me) of these is by a young Australian playwright, Emily Sheehan. Her Playwright’s Process podcast is just that: full of wisdom and ideas for tackling process step by step. Another podcast I found helpful is Jonah Knight’s Theatrically Speaking, which focuses on writing plays that can actually be produced as well as suggestions for submitting plays. There are numerous podcasts from the British National Theatre which are excellent. Another, Not True, but Useful, is a British podcast that highlights the work of a couple of roving theatre producers and designers. Add to these: Hey, Playwright; Women Playwrights Podcast; Playwright’s Spotlight; Necessary Exposure; Not in Print; Pint Size Playwriting; Playwright to Playwright; Playwright’s Horizon; Playwriting Real-Life; The Cultivated Playwright; The Subtext; Women and Playwriting; and many more than I have time to listen to.
If you are in the same boat (dinghy, inflatable raft) as I am, hopefully some of these mentions are useful. The world may need major repair. But it has always relied on good theatre to remind us of our humanity.
I have been afraid of this for some time. The Dartmouth Schools are now indisputably under attack by right-wing fanatics. If you are a liberal or progressive who doesn’t want to see the banning of books and diversity programs come to our schools — and better yet, you are the parent of children in the school system — now is the time to stand up for those pretty words on the sign sitting on your front lawn — and run for School Committee.
The present Dartmouth School Committee consists of: conservative Chris Oliver; ultra-conservative and would-be book-banner John Nunes; liberals Mary Waite, Kathleen Amaral, and Shannon Jenkins. Kathleen Amaral and Mary Waite’s seats are up for re-election this year. Mary Waite has not filed papers. So assuming Kathleeen Amaral keeps her seat, it is Mary Waite’s now being challenged by Lynn Turner, Troy Tufano, and Erica Lyn Morney.
Now that we find ourselves in the George Santos era, it’s worth knowing something about the increasing number of reprobates running for office. So here’s my best attempt at a survey of the School Committee candidates.
I still don’t know much about Ms. Morney, so if anyone has any information to share, please contact me and I will update this post.
However, I am familiar with Lynn Turner — whom I wrote about the last time she ran for the School Committee. Turner is an evangelical book-burner who wants to dismantle diversity programs. I looked into Turner’s background last year and also reported on her campaign remarks at a candidate forum. She is a two-faced piece of work who literally quotes Martin Luther King as she tries to undermine everything he stood for.
Joining her this year is Troy Tufano, a self-described political consultant who has dabbled in both Republican and Democratic politics. Regardless of whatever party he is enrolled in, judging from his abandoned Twitter account Troy Tufano is also an evangelical book-burner who wants to dismantle diversity programs. Besides Tufano’s bromances with domestic right-wing personalities like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and prosperity gospel mega-preacher Joel Osteen, Tufano has frequently re-Tweeted European neo-fascists like: Ragnar Gardarsson of the Danish Nye Borgerlige Party; and Marine LePen of the Rassemblement National Party. Tufano has also retweeted conspiracy theories, such as the long-discredited accusation that the Clintons had Vince Foster killed. If Tufano’s tweets should mysteriously disappear during the run-up to the town election, you can find a zipfile of screen shots here.
Dartmouth’s Town elections are only two months away. This year the town election is April 4th. I hope that kind and decent people will step up. Candidates need to pick up filing papers at Town Hall no later than February 10th, collect 50 signatures (double or triple that in case of challenges), and submit the paperwork to the Town Clerk by February 14th.
Especially if you are the parent of children in the Dartmouth Schools, now is the time to step up. That sign on your lawn is nice and all, but British social philosopher and Liberal John Stuart Mill said it best: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
Since the midterm elections I have been behaving myself — relatively speaking. No long-winded missives or rants for quite some time. But today I am about to break my streak. There is just too much going on to to remain silent.
For starters, there are the police who just murdered another black man, Tyre D. Nichols.
As a New York Times editorial argues, we have an obligation to view — to face — each one of these abuses of police power — the tortures, the beatings, the tasering, the gassing, the terrorizing of young black men like Mr. Nichols. Each day in America a dozen civilians are killed by police — double that if you factor in the asphyxiations and Taser deaths police inflict on disproportionately people of color.
It can’t go on this way.
We must also acknowledge the humanity, the love of their families, the talents, the potential, and the hopes of each of these victims. Nichols, who was just trying to get home when he was intercepted, dragged from his car, and murdered by a group of thugs with badges, died with his mother’s name on his lips and left behind a portfolio of lovely photography. How is his life any different from yours or mine?
We need to get up off our asses and finally do something to rein in police abuse. While a few people associated with an organization called BLM may have taken some wrong turns, let’s not ignore the point — that Black lives really do matter. Police abuses really are an epidemic and they put all of us at risk.
Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, wrote an excellent response to a piece in the Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf, who pronounced “Black Lives Matter” a dead letter and argued that public outrage wouldn’t fix bad policing and that, well, police killings are actually fewer than in the past. Ifill tore into Friedersdorf’s flabby and execrable arguments by pointing out that, first of all, the lack of public outrage and apathy is a white people problem. Moreover, Ifill argues, “Whatever modest reforms to policing have been adopted [following BLM pressure], were undertaken after long, pitched battles with those determined to maintain the status quo.” We saw it in the 100% Democratic Party controlled Massachusetts state legislature when the police lobby preserved Qualified Immunity — the license to kill without consequence.
With the murder of a Black man by five Black cops, many have finally realized that it is police training and police institutions which create bad cops — who just happen to police in racist fashion regardless of their own color. Compounding this is the fact that police are organized as paramilitary organizations where target practice is valued more than deescalation, where loyalty to fellow officers counts more than responsibility to the public. Police are truly a gang unto themselves. A few years ago a former California police officer spelled out exactly how the institution corrupts individuals. In his accounting, no cop can completely escape becoming an abuser.
Recent demonstrations over Cop City in Atlanta and the killing of a protester ought to also make us all think twice about America’s growing Police State. Over the strenuous objections of voters, the police lobby succeeded in getting approval for an 85 acre, $90 million (and growing) facility some have described as Fantasyland for cops. And a Police State also means that citizens must be convinced, ham-handedly if necessary, in the eternal good intentions and necessity of the police. We are constantly reminded, via well-placed Copaganda, that Officer Friendly is our pal. Particularly when he’s a “School Resource” officer.
In America everything is ultimately connected in some twisted way to race. In the case of Tyre Nichols’s murder, all five cops were Black. And in the case of Cop City, the City Council that approved the project is majority Black and the former mayor who pushed it is herself Black. Ex-mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is now working — just as ironic as it sounds — as “Senior Advisor for Public Engagement” in the Biden administration.
So how do we account for this? Is Bottoms a flaming racist? Is Biden a flaming white supremacist? Of course not, but the institutions they work in and through, and to which they have hitched their fortunes, are most definitely racist. Capitalism, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism — all have built and corrupted everything they touch. Our Constitution is the rulebook by which our institutions can stack the game against citizens. Racist laws, racist institutions, and racist justice operate by that rulebook have created a nightmare for some of us.
And a culture war is raging about teaching these truths.
We learned this week that the Sports Medicine Committee of the Florida High School Athletics Association wants to make mandatory the reporting of menstrual cycles by female student athletes. The same state — just in time for Black History Month — has also banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in AP African American Studies. In fact, Florida teachers now face felony charges if they use non-approved textbooks in their classrooms. You can view the AP African American History course framework here. The AP course consists of four principal units: Origins of the African Diaspora; Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance; the Practice of Freedom (including a critical view of Reconstruction); and (most damning) Movements and Debates (including anti-colonial responses to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement). Somehow, Florida did not feel the need to ban AP European History which also covers philosophical and political debates. Just not Black ones.
What Florida Republicans have done is to edit out Blacks from American history in exactly the same manner that Nazis did in removing Jews from Germany’s civil service and its cultural institutions. Before they really got going.
Hitlerjugend (Hitler youth)
If you think Florida is an outlier, you would be wrong. Local school boards and librarians are under attack by town Republican committees all over the country. The Massachusetts ACLU points out that a very small minority of ultra-conservatives is responsible for all the noise. This may or may not be the case, as it has been my observation that much of this is the work of Republican Town Committees. Indeed, virtually every Republican in Congress mouths these same sentiments.
In the Tri-Town area [of SouthCoast Massachusetts] a couple of Republican hacks are trying hard to do their own impressions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Joe Pires worries that Diversity and Equity committees are harming white students. Pires also doesn’t like library books that represent the identities and concerns of gay kids. Well, too damn bad! Schools and libraries are for all the children in a community — not just for kids whose parents look like Ozzie and Harriet.
Ozzie and Harriet was a television program in the 1950’s
Joining town Republicans like Pires with precisely the same views and similarly attacking marginalized members of society are neo-Nazis and Proud Boys who use physical intimidation as they did recently in Fall River. If attacks like these on gay and brown and black children and their families don’t concern you, they are precisely the same tactics the Hitlerjugend and Brownshirts used in Germany of the Thirties. As a famous German theologian famously observed, first they come for the “other”; then suddenly it’s you. Contact the SouthCoast LGBTQ+ Network if you want to help fight back.
I have been filling the gaps in my theatre literacy by tackling plays of the masters. One who cannot be ignored is Anton Chekhov, whose stories I have read and loved in both English and German translation. A volume of twelve of The Plays of Anton Chekhov edited and given a new American English translation by Paul Schmidt is an enjoyable improvement over British English versions of plays I have read previously on Project Gutenberg.
A new book on Chekhov by Bob Blaisdell reviewed in TNR peeks over the young writer’s shoulders at his journals and correspondence with friends, family, contemporary writers, and theatre people. As with the plays, both correspondence and journals can be found on Project Gutenberg. “The Vast Humanity of Anton Chekhov” by TNR writer Scott Bradfield discusses the author’s supposed apolitical humanism and where it originated. I’m not totally convinced he was all that apolitical, however. Chekhov was the grandson of a serf who had purchased his own freedom and the son of a failed middle class businessman. But he was also a hard-working physician and early on began writing potboilers to support his family. Although Chekhov’s connections to the old aristocracy may have been superficial and of recent vintage, he certainly knew what audience he was writing for: the dying aristocracy. As I read Chekhov’s plays, I kept looking for social commentary. What I found at first was sympathy and humor, then stronger moral judgment, and finally a medical diagnosis that the aristocratic patient was not long for this world.
It is not surprising that the physician/observer character found in many of his stories and plays was either saved from the corruption of the aristocracy — or fully plopped into the muck along with them. Much of the melodrama and material of Chekhov’s theatre pieces played out in his own family. His older brother was a drunk and a debt-ridden gambler. His younger brother took up with a married woman. As in Ivanov, one of Chekhov’s brothers married a Jewish woman (who had been a nanny). Chekhov’s parents’ home was repossessed. Chekhov wore himself down like several of the doctors in his plays to the point that he contracted tuberculosis in his twenties and died in his early forties. It seems clear enough: Chekhov wrote what he knew. But he had also joined a club that would be gone within a generation.
Though he no doubt influenced the trajectory of European theatre, I don’t share the sentiment that Chekhov was a master of both short fiction and drama. The fact is, while Chekhov’s stories are less cluttered and less mannered and can still be enjoyed by a modern reader, most of Chekhov’s plays have not aged equally well. Despite Schmidt’s intention to free Chekhov’s plays from the snobbish-sounding British-isms of earlier translations, the plays themselves will never be free from Chekhov’s preoccupation with the rotting Russian aristocracy and the embarrassing histrionics and conventions of European theatre circa 1900. Nor should we forget that most of these plays were written for quick cash, just like most of Chekhov’s short stories.
Swan Song (1887) is an awful monologue by a drunken, elderly actor who can’t decide if he’s over-the-hill or still has that je-ne-sais-quoi. I guess, as long as you think you’ve still got it, you do. But there’s not really much more to this play.
The Bear (1888) is a farce whose adaptation by Brian Friel I read first. An attractive but overwrought widow has decided to wear black and mourn her husband for the rest of her life, never leaving her house. But she is intruded upon by a thuggish neighbor who demands instant repayment of a loan supposedly given to the woman’s dead husband. The home invader refuses to leave until paid, both characters demonstrate they have ample backbone, and a duel of honor is about to occur but is then sidetracked by professions of love from the thug.
The Proposal (1888) is another farce marred by histrionics and melodramatic flourishes no longer in vogue. A young man who is either a walking catalog of real ilnesses or simply a hypochondriac visits his neighbor to propose to the man’s daughter. The conversation with the (inexplicably) eager young woman goes south when they argue over a property line. Once they resolve to overlook the property line in order to marry, they are still arguing over dog breeds. As the couple continues to argue, the prospective father-in-law yells to the audience: “Bring on the champagne.”
Ivanov (1889) is a full-length play in four acts. Ivanov is a profligate 35 year-old debtor who has married a Jewish woman whose family disinherited her as a result. As such she has no dowry. And then she contracts tuberculosis and is not long for this world. But Ivanov is a congenitally unhappy man for reasons that make no sense to a modern theatre-goer. Perhaps it’s that his projects and his energies have spread him too thin, perhaps he’s just a restless guy, or perhaps he’s just an aristocrat with too much time on his hands, but Ivanov simply stops loving his wife and resolves to marry another woman as soon as his present one is dead.
The play features anti-semitic aristocratic idlers that include a card player, a count, various landowners, and a smug, judgmental physician. On the day of Ivanov’s second wedding the still-tormented (for whatever reason) groom argues with his bride, her father, and a friend about his decision to back out of the marriage. Despite the glaring fact that it’s in nobody’s interest for this sweet young woman to marry a financial wreck who was despicably cruel to his last wife, for no reason at all these friends and her family still want to see the marriage go ahead. Only the self-tormented Ivanov himself recognizes how bad the marriage will be, and at the last moment he hurries out of sight and shoots himself. This is far more histrionics and melodrama than any modern viewer can stomach. And it only hints at the perverse world that Chekhov would later indict.
A Reluctant Tragic Hero (1889) is another farce that relies on the trope of the much-abused and henpecked husband. Tolkachov breathlessly visits his friend Murashkin in a panic. The poor man needs a gun and is preparing to rough it in the wilderness — all because his wife and neighbors have tasked him with an impossibly long “Honey, do” list. The actor who plays Tolkachov recites five pages of frenetic dialog while guzzling gallons of water and enumerating all the many reasons for his panic. The punchline, of course, is that his friend Murashkin manages to calm him down — only to pile on additional errands of taking a sewing machine and a canary in a cage with him when he returns home.
The Wedding Reception (1889) is another stale little confection, another farce in which a nouveau riche father hosts a reception for his recently-married daughter. The old beau shows up, a fake general is hired to lend respectability to the event, a Greek guest stumbles over his Russian, and that’s basically what passes for humor here.
The Festivities (1891) is another awful farce. It takes place in a Russian Savings & Loan. The head clerk and the owner, who has arranged a recognition ceremony for himself, are joined by a cast of nitwits who run around sighing and carrying on.
The Dangers of Tobacco (1902) is a monologue by a self-described half-wit who comes before an audience as if he were an “expert” to speak about the dangers of tobacco. Of course, the man speaks about everything except tobacco.
The Seagull (1895) is a warmly-regarded play for its supposed introduction of subtext, symbolism, off-stage action, invisible characters, and other innovations — but didn’t playwrights before Chekhov employ all of these? Despite multiple readings I never found Seagull a particularly enjoyable play. The histrionics so common in the previously-mentioned plays are all present in Seagull. And the conceits of the idle Russian aristocracy have not aged well or deserve any more sympathy than the Bolsheviks showed them.
Chekhov’s experiment with a Shakespearean play-within-a-play may have been intended to show us how crass philistines reacted to a brilliant young avante-garde playwright, but Chekhov’s play within a play featuring glowing devil eyes and stinking sulphur was truly as ridiculous as the philistines in Seagull thought it was. What’s more, the first audience to view Seagull had exactly the same reaction as Seagull’s philistines. So savage was the reaction to the play that the lead actress was rendered speechless, in subsequent performances the actors sucked on anti-anxiety drops, and Chekhov almost gave up writing for the theatre altogether.
Seagull features much the same cast of characters as Ivanov — an older writer seduces a younger woman, and it includes a rich landowner, a doctor, and various specimens of the idle rich. In Seagull everyone loves someone they can’t have. All the characters — and even the audience — are bored and jaded and exhausted by play’s end. Treplev is a terrible but earnest young playwright who loves Nina, who in turn falls in love with the famous hack writer, Trigorin, who is in a relationship with a shallow conventional theatre actress, Arkadina, who is the mother of Treplev.
Treplev shoots a seagull, a symbol of Nina’s attraction to a world she can only admire. Trigorin tells Nina he is inspired to write a story about a girl who is destroyed by a man, just as Treplev has casually destroyed the seagull’s life. Nina and Trigorin fall in love, Nina decides to make a go of acting in Moscow and — long story short — Trigorin cheats on Arkadina, runs off with Nina, impregnates and deserts her, the baby dies, he returns to Arkadina, and he ruins Nina’s life. Nina eventually comes back and meets Treplev again, who by now is a famous writer and still carries a torch for her. But Nina (again, out of a logic found only in vaudeville) proclaims she still loves Trigorin despite everything and — boom! — Treplev shoots himself in the head. Again. And it is up to Chekhov’s reliable narrator, Dr. Dorn, to tell us that this time it’s probably fatal. Curtain.
Chekhov seems to have been conflicted about what sort of play he was writing. On the one hand, Seagull had some artistic pretensions. On the other, it was still essentially a Russian telenovela. Judging by the many descriptions of past productions and adaptations, to this day no one is 100% sure if Seagull is a tragedy or a comedy. It has defied successful transplantation to the silver screen. And for very good reason. It’s a bit of a mess.
Uncle Vanya (1896) is another melodrama of unrequited love, and (again) it involves a doctor and bored and depressed aristocrats. Uncle Vanya’s now-deceased mother has married Professor Serebriakov, a pompous art history professor and a bit of a fraud. Her daughter Sonya and mother Maria continue to live on her estate and Sonya (for the most part) runs it because Vanya is increasingly found drinking himself into a stupor with his friend, the doctor. Maria’s son Vanya (Sonya’s “uncle Vanya”) as a young man was impressed by and totally dedicated to Serebriakov. Now the old and infirm professor has remarried the young and lovely Yelena, leaving Sonya (and to a lesser extent Vanya) to the day-to-day management of the estate.
The play begins as Vanya has suddenly realized he (and this applies to Sonya as well) have wasted their whole lives serving Serebriakov. Vanya, now 47, has been enamored of Yelena for a decade but objectively he is too old for her and never once expressed his feelings to her before she married. And Sonya has admired the self-pitying Dr. Astrov (who tends Serebriakov’s many illnesses) from afar for at least six years. Vanya tries but can’t persuade the constant Yelena to leave Serebriakov, and Sonya finally asks Yelena to find out if Astrov has any interest in her (turns out, the shallow doctor doesn’t because he has a thing for Yelena himself and expresses his interest to her in rather crude terms).
All this self-inflicted misery and hypocrisy from people who have it far better than the peasantry is infuriating and tiring. Astrov pities himself for the trauma of seeing newly-freed serfs sicken in hovels they share with their pigs or die of farm and mining accidents and typhus. Both he and Vanya drink excessively, and the selfish Serebriakov is about to leave everyone in uncertainty by selling the 26-room estate for mutual funds and buying a condo in Finland. As Yelena puts it in Act Three: “The despair and boredom around here, these grey smudges of people: they’re so petty. All they know how to do is eat, sleep, and drink –.” Well, that’s the essence of Uncle Vanya in a nutshell.
Chekhov subversively hid uncomfortable truths about the Russian aristocracy in plain sight as he humored them with the love triangles they loved so much. Chekhov’s Russian aristocrat characters watch their world turn to shit by their own hands as Russian aristocrats in the audience applaud.
In the end, Vanya has it out with Serebriakov, even taking the by-now obligatory Chekhovian gun in hand and unsuccessfully firing it. In rage, Vanya screams, almost Brando-style: “I coulda been contender!” Actually, what Vanya says is “I could have been a Schopenhauer… another Dostoevsky!” Chekhov was right to describe the play as a farce. In Act Four Vanya has stolen morphene from Astrov and intends to kill himself. Serebriakov and Yelena are leaving for Harkov and Yelena and Astrov have final words. They admit some small mutual attraction but that a relationship would have been a disaster for both of them, and then Astrov signs off with finita la commedia (end of the comedy). Again Chekhov tells us this has all been a farce.
Serebriakov departs with the admonition to everyone to “get down to work” and “do something” — which is, of course, damned ironic. The play ends with Sonya’s invocation of the Kingdom to Come, a world kinder to them than the present, one where they can finally rest. This oddly unsatisfying ending seems as if Chekhov himself had tired of the whole thing and decided to wrap it in a shroud and give it a quick Christian burial. But there is much more going on here. I think Chekhov was beginning to really hate the upper class that he had recently become a part of.
Three Sisters (1900) features many of the same conventions and characters –drunken freeloading doctors and idle aristocrats nibbling their caviar, drinking their vodka, and lusting after all the wrong people. In this one, the three sisters live in the biggest, most luxurious and (as it turns out) the only fireproof house in the neighborhood. Their late father’s house is not only a cultural island in a provincial backwater; it is also a meeting place for a tiny slice of Russia’s vast pre-revolutionary bureaucracy and the military that holds it together.
The plot is almost as convoluted as General Stanley McCrystal’s Afghanistan pacification PowerPoint — one featuring multiple love triangles, duels, gamblers, sick children, alcoholics, yogurt, cuckolds, you name it. Expanding on the dreariness of work so present in Vanya, work plays an important part in Sisters. Brother Andrey is nothing like his man of action father; he’s a chubby shlub with academic potential but he seems happier working as a county bureaucrat. Andrey has a gambling habit, is married to a woman of dubious taste and morals, and lives with sisters Irina (who works at the telegraph office), Olga (at the board of education), and Masha (who is married to a high school teacher and gym coach).
Sisters is a play about the decline of the aristocracy fully underway. At one point Irina says, “You say life is so beautiful. But suppose it isn’t? Look at us. Three sisters. Our life hasn’t been so beautiful; it’s choking us up like a lawn full of weeds. […] We have to work, we really do. The reason we’re unhappy and think life is so awful is because we don’t know what it means to work. We come from families who thought they never had to work…” Each is about to experience further shocks in lives outside their own control.
But this ambitious play’s mechanics are so overly complicated that Chekhov had to use extremely awkward exposition in multiple places to lay out backstories and plot complications. In many of Chekhov’s plays characters use the aside to make clear what they are thinking, whereas a modern playwright would either show us or use more oblique and artful dialog. And this has not aged well.
But what makes many of Chekhov’s plays, especially Sisters, most dated and unlovable is what apparently made them so lovable for British audiences at the start of the 20th century. Martin Esslin has a chapter in Harold Bloom’s book on Chekhov in which he mentions that George Bernard Shaw may have been the first to recognize the attraction that Chekhov’s plays held for the English upper classes — for no other reason than both the Russian and British aristocracies were crumbling and they knew it. According to Esslin, Shaw — the socialist dandy — modeled his Heartbreak House (1919) on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1903). By the Twenties Chekhov’s plays were having great successes in London, and throughout the Forties and Fifties British plays were increasingly borrowing from Chekhov.
In the United States Tennessee Williams tapped into the same insecurities, miseries, mental illness, alcoholism, and decline of the Southern aristocracy. Like the Russian nobility now losing their fortunes because they couldn’t extract free labor from their serfs, the Southern planter class could no longer rely on free labor from slaves. In Williams’ Streetcar Blanche DuBois has been widowed by her husband’s suicide, has been reduced to teaching (before she is fired for having a sexual relationship with one of her students) and she wistfully and frequently recalls her family’s lost estate, Belle Reve, the same “lovely dream” that Chekhov’s nobility cling to. Like Olga, Irina, and Masha, Blanche is living with her sister out of necessity. You can’t get much more Chekhovian than all of this.
Esslin goes on to credit Chekhov with influencing whole generations of modern playwrights and even taking “Chekhov’s technique of characters in apparently idle and trivial chatter to its extreme” in absurdist works like Waiting for Godot. Interestingly, the film version of Streetcar featured Marlon Brando, who embraced the Stanislavsky method — the same Stanislavsky who directed some of Chekhov’s plays and most likely saved his playwriting career after the disastrous premiere of Seagull. And Chekhov’s nephew Michael, an actor, created a variant of the Stanislavsky method which he taught in Germany and Hollywood.
The Cherry Orchard (1903) is probably Chekhov’s best-known play and one that resonates best with modern audiences. In it Chekhov has again preserved all of the elements of then-popular farce and vaudeville, but even clearer than in Three Sisters is the uncluttered and indelible theme of the Cherry Orchard: The End for the aristocracy. In the end the family’s vast estate with its orchards are literally chopped down. And not just the end of aristocracy but its unsuitability to continue to rule Russia along with the simultaneously bright and terrifying prospects of a rising middle class taking over the reins.
Cherry Orchard was Chekhov’s last play and he maintained until the end that it was a farce, not a tragedy. And how could it be a tragedy when he had made it so plainly about Russia embarking on a new, uncharted path? How could it be a tragedy when he painted his perpetual student as the victim of the Czar’s prisons? How could it be a tragedy when both the former owners of the orchard and its almost 90 year-old former serf were clearly not going to survive in this brand new world? Only the wheeler-dealer who ultimately buys the estate seems to have his head screwed on properly — despite his obvious shortcomings in education. But it’s not as if the man didn’t try to warn the estate owners, who had frittered away their savings and lived in illusion.
It is interesting that Chekhov, who would be dead the following year, again argued with the play’s director, Stanislavsky, about how Cherry Orchard ought to be played. Although he reputedly sat in during rehearsals Chekhov may have never seen the entire piece performed as the tragedy that Stanislavsky insisted it was. Chekhov died the next year in a German sanatorium where he had gone for treatment for his tuberculosis.
Having read Chekhov’s plays several times, I still have not seen the major ones performed. As Chekhov’s own experience with his work shows, direction and interpretation are everything. I would like to see them on stage some day and, short of this, do a desk read with friends and discuss them.
As part of educating myself about the theater, I read The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud. When he wrote it, Artaud was in and out of psychiatric care. He was also waging battles in ink with detractors over concepts he had enunciated in various manifestos of the Theatre of Cruelty.
In launching his arguments Artaud began by asking: what is man’s true nature? How would he react, say, to the end of the world or a massive plague? Artaud goes off on a pseudo-scientific detour on plagues, listing affected organs he believed accounted for human behavior. Elsewhere in this drawer-full of manifestos, text, and polemics Artaud conceives of a new manner of theater in which verbal language is replaced with code, where actions and emotions are broken down into a taxonomy of gestures.
With this said, however, the Theater and Its Double is an interesting read because of its dissection of theater’s persistent and all-too real weaknesses. Naturalism, for one, which was just gaining strength, clearly ticked off Artaud, who expected more of theater. For Artaud, theater is a primal sphere, a holy sphere, filled with man’s greatest longings, his greatest hungers, his greatest fears. Mere representation of social and psychological conflict was a trivialization of theater’s potential. Artaud rails against the bourgeousification of theater, its detachment from the wants and fears of the common man, and its self-castration. And as a major voice of French Avant- garde theater, he certainly made his case, although the common man has a low threshold for lunacy and conceptual art. Still, many of Artaud’s criticisms of theater are spot-on even today.
Even Chekhov, in The Seagull, predated Artaud’s criticisms when he had Treplieff say, “When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run from it… If we can’t [have a new theatre], let us rather not have it at all.”
But Artaud goes off on so many incoherent tangents that it’s impossible for it all to fit together. In concocting his new Occidental theater, Artaud drew from Balinese theater, Tarot, the Kabbalah, astrology, and his own eclectic pseudo-scientific theories.
And, viewing them in a historical context, there was a dark side to Artaud’s theories. Kimberly Jannarone’s Artaud and His Doubles looks at Artaud’s place in theatre and finds “two sets of doubles: one, a body of peculiarly persistent received interpretations from the American experimental theater and French post-structuralist readings of the 1960s; and, two, a darker set of doubles brought to light through close historical examination — those of Artaud’s contemporaries who, in the tumultuous, alienated, and pessimistic atmosphere enveloping much of Europe after World War I, denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of the self.”
It wouldn’t be too many years until Europe was “purified” of those accused of degrading civilization.
After a quarter of a century of Tom Hodgson’s excesses going unpunished and no politician ever mounting much of a challenge, voters finally gave a pink slip to a sheriff who preferred playing the national stage to tending to his office back home.
Hodgson’s defeat represents the tireless efforts of regular citizens, church groups, and community organizations across Bristol County who had simply had enough of Hodgson’s intentional and egregious cruelty. Paul Heroux’s win over Hodgson rides on the wings of surprising electoral wins by Democrats across the country.
Heroux’s victory was not only a rejection of the incumbent and his carceral notions but an endorsement of professionalizing what has become a highly and dangerously politicized office. In Barnstable County voters similarly elected Donna Buckley, who like Heroux ran on a campaign of reducing recidivism and doing more to treat drug and mental health problems in jail.
Because Hodgson had placed himself squarely in the national spotlight, the Bristol County election took on national significance. Heroux, with a much smaller budget and an all-volunteer campaign team, amazingly beat an incumbent with a massive war chest, a slick media campaign, and a professional and unscrupulous campaign manager.
Hodgson’s campaign attempted to re-frame the tough-talking, gun-toting Western sheriff wannabe as a kind grandpa protecting Bristol County from rising crime, which he frequently attributed to “criminal aliens” and the “woke” criminal-loving Democrats who coddle them. Hodgson spared no effort to smear Heroux as a pedophile-loving Communist funded by Jews with a global agenda. His extraordinarily sleazy campaign may have done him in as much as a quarter century of abusing Bristol County’s sons and daughters.
In the end, all of Hodgson’s mendacity and cruelty caught up with him.
It was just a matter of time before religious zealots and culture warriors came for the books in SouthCoast school libraries.
Last Spring Dartmouth had a MAGA school committee candidate who wanted to ban books. Recently, Fall River, Tri-Town (Rochester, Marion, Mattapoisett) and Little Compton, Rhode Island, all had run-ins with religious extremists, most of them sponsored by local Republican town committees.
PEN America, an association that fights for freedom of expression for writers, issued a timely report titled “Banned In the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” PEN has identified over 50 groups involved in censorship campaigns – a number of them listed as hate groups, including MassResistance – a bunch of haters from Waltham, Massachusetts.
On October 24th the “TFP” brought its “Rosary Rally” from Crazytown to Fall River. The group has a long list of policies and people they hate, thinks its antics constitute “spiritual warfare” and defends colonialism and forced conversion based on the “Right of Conquest.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has been watching this group of crackpots for a while and had this to say about them:
“Maybe the weirdest bunch in were from the American Society for Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), a self-described Catholic organization whose representatives seemed to be wearing red cloaks. The TFP table had a particularly noxious pamphlet – ’10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must be Opposed’ – that argued that same-sex marriage ‘ignores a child’s best interests’ and that it ‘turns a moral wrong into a Civil Right.’ The pamphlet blamed same-sex marriage for forcing Christians to ‘betray their consciences by condoning … an attack on the natural order.’ Another TFP pamphlet warned hysterically about the dangers of ‘socialism,’ which, for some unknown reason, given our hyper-capitalist economy, they seem to think is on the march and targeting ‘traditional marriage’ and ‘parental rights.'”
Little Compton
In Little Compton, Rhode Island, the Little Compton Taxpayer’s Association, essentially a proxy for the GOP, sent out a homophobic, Q-Anon inspired campaign mailer asking recipients to vote a straight Republican (what else?) ticket.
Tri-Town (Marion, Mattapoisett, Rochester)
In the Tri-Town area at least two School Committee members are Christian nationalist MAGA supporters flogging “anti-CRT” nonsense and shouting at maximum volume, “They’re indoctrinating our children!”
Old Rochester school committee member Joe Pires and Rochester school committee member Anne Fernandes are also anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-CRT, anti-gay, and (of course) anti-diversity. Posts from both deny that racism exists anywhere than in the hearts of nasty people. Apparently, the moment that Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves, all of America’s race problems simply disappeared magically.
Both of these idiots are up for re-election next year.
Recently, Pires condemned LGBTQ+ books at ORR as “pornographic.” From one side of his mouth Pires claimed to oppose banning books. But from the other he was still calling for, well, banning books:
Pires reposted a Hillsdale College livestream. As Kathryn Joyce pointed out in Salon magazine, Hillsdale is the sharp end of the assault on public schools by Christian Nationalists.
In coordinating his attack on district school libraries, Pires managed to violate Open Meeting laws by coordinating the attack with fellow committee member Anne Fernandes, a kindred spirit, on a Facebook group Pires founded called “Tri-Town Buzz.”
I located three of Pires’ Facebook accounts (this and this and this) and two of Fernandes’ (this and this). Fernandes seems to spend a fair amount of her time promoting an Evangelical church as well as many of the groups that PEN identifies as censorship organizations.
Pires is bad enough, but Fernandes is a real piece of work. In addition to her hate-filled posts about gay children and parents, Fernandes ignorantly dispenses conspiracy theories and just plain bad science. There are numerous examples of Facebook flagging her posts with the polite equivalent of “BS!”
Fernandes is just the sort of creature that Republicans love, which is why the Mattapoisett Republicans sponsored her talk at the local library:
At that October 27th presentation organized by the Mattapoisett Republicans, Fernandes worked from PowerPoint slides, claiming that librarians are indoctrinating children with “CRT” instead of history and passing themselves off as sex education teachers (she’s confusing them with teachers). And for an “expert” with 22 years of teaching, Fernandes seems completely clueless that LGBTQ+ kids are at risk and that books that represent them help.
For all her swearing up and down that she doesn’t believe in book banning — here are the books Fernandes wants to ban:
Efforts like Fernandes’ are part of a wider Republican campaign to gut public schools. In Arizona, gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (who is trailing Katie Hobbs with 79% of the vote counted) promised to scale back education on science, math, and history. North Carolina’s Christian Nationalist Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson, wants to ban science and history outright in elementary schools.
If science shines light on contagion and vaccination, and history sheds light on social ills that still plague us, it’s pretty clear what Christian Nationalists think of both. State legislation, especially in the South, has literally made it a crime to speak of sexual identity or racism in schools.
Moms for Liberty, one of the most vocal and fast-growing groups of Christian Nationalists attacking school districts, has teamed up with so-called “Constitutional Sheriffs” to investigate alleged “indoctrination” of children in the schools. The Claremont Institute, a MAGA think tank, is now offering Sheriff’s Fellowships to facilitate more muscular takeovers or compliance of school boards.
The right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), known for its dangerous legislation, is now targeting local school races. Its spin-off, the American City and County Exchange (ACCE), is now coordinating efforts with the GOP, Moms for Liberty, the Heritage Foundation, the DeVos family, and others to recruit and run candidates to take over local school boards.
The next right-wing school committee candidate your local Republican town committee sponsors will be amply funded and likely supported by not only locals but ACCE.
Community members fight back
One group fighting back is Tri-Town Against Racism. In response to the attempted book bans at ORR, TTAR circulated a petition which described the harms to children:
“Attempts to ban books highlighting underrepresented kids sends them the message: You shouldn’t exist; your story doesn’t matter and we don’t want our kids to empathize with you. This is a dangerous message which can result in grave consequences, like depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation. No child should feel like they are unworthy and undeserving of love and respect.”
The petition received tremendous support in the community, was signed by 631 people, and was presented to the superintendent — who apparently listened.
In a powerful letter to the New Bedford Light, Mattapoisett resident Nicole Demakis explained in more detail why access to books that conservatives find offensive is critically important to LGBTQIA kids:
“I believe it is imperative that we allow kids to have access to literature in our schools which represents a broad spectrum of experiences for those who may be struggling with identity, whether that be children of color, gay, straight, bi, asexual or transgender. It may be an uncomfortable truth for those who don’t understand other’s experiences growing up facing prejudice, confused about their feelings, being bullied, made fun of or excluded because that child does not understand who they are. Not to be cliché, but no one knows another’s reality until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes; and to discount that reality further by stigmatizing literature that may speak to them, but not you, is wrong. As an example of this, studies show that LGBTQIA youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Rather, they are placed at a higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.“
To raise the level of public debate on this issue, TTAR is holding the third of a series of Community Conversations on November 14th. You can sign up here.
In Fall River, United Against Hate is holding a similar Community Conversation About the Recent Rise in the South Coast of Book Banning, Drag Queen Story Time Protests And Hate Speech on November 16th. Contact United Neighbors of Fall River for a Zoom link.
In Rhode Island, Love Wins Coastal responded to the LCTA’s homophobic mailing with a rally in the Town Commons. One Democratic Rhode Island legislator, on her own initiative, joined in solidarity.
Democratic Party needs to start fighting
As much as I hate to say it, all these efforts by kind and caring people, including exemplary legislators acting independently, are still not enough. They are no match for the think tanks, the laboratories of repressive legislation, the rapidly spreading extremism, and the Republican Party itself.
Equality, diversity, education, race, history, libraries, free speech, and respect and acknowledgement of differences. These are today’s battlefields for Republicans.
It’s high time that local Democrats started fighting alongside the brave and lonely defenders who have been waging the Democratic Party’s battles for them.
On October 31st Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson dropped another Willie Horton style campaign ad. He’d already tried to frighten voters by accusing his opponent of coddling pedophiles with a non-existent vote on non-existent legislation.
This time Hodgson’s target was George Soros — who Hodgson accused of coddling criminals, funding his opponent, and having the ultimate goal of destroying America: “They have their sights set on our way of life,” Hodgson warned with an ominous “they.”
The hate groups Hodgson works with — and on whose advisory board he sits — all hate Soros, a Hungarian Jewish philanthropist who was not involved in funding the anti-Hodgson campaign ads that have so irked the sheriff. Nope, it was Everytown for Gun Safety, the work of American Jewish philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, a frequent thorn in the side of NRA shills like Hodgson.
At first blush the sheriff, who already has a racism problem, didn’t seem to be able to keep his Jews straight.
But Hodgson’s “mistake” was intentional. Like his dishonest pedophile-coddling scare ad, this one was calculated to reach a certain constituency who watches Glen Beck (“Soros: The Puppet Master”) or Tucker Carlson (“Soros has decided to destroy the American justice system”) — a constituency whose political heroes returned recently from CPAC-Hungary, where autocratic Christian nationalist president Viktor Orban, shut down a university Soros founded and used the pandemic as a pretext for a power grab.
For today’s new crop of antisemites, George Soros has replaced a 19th Century j’accuse involving financier Nathan Rothschild which went on to become a 200-year conspiracy theory.
The sheriff’s antisemitic ad was promptly slammed by Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Deborah Goldberg, and other Massachusetts politicos. Hodgson’s Tweet also drew more than 60 comments, most negative: “Well if that isn’t the most antisemitic thing I’ve heard all day… Honestly Southeastern MA, he is the biggest embarrassment in the Commonwealth… Your mustache is too wide. You gotta trim it to just a little patch under your nose… Halloween’s over but maybe next year you can go full Nazi cosplay…”
Another commented: “These people no longer have dog whistles they have bull horns. It is no longer a silent wink wink it is full out public bigotry…”
In choosing George Soros — the wrong Jew, and he knew it! — Hodgson was trotting out time-worn antisemitic tropes, implying that “they” are unpatriotic and systematically destroying “our way of life” — which MAGA politicians themselves freely call white Christian nationalism. There’s really not much of a line between this and the Charlottesville tiki-torch neo-Nazis with their “Jews will not replace us.”
For years the Anti-Defamation League has tracked two organizations Hodgson is intimately involved with — the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The ADL’s factsheet “Mainstreaming Hate” describes one a as hate group and the other as an extremist organization. In 2018 the ADL published “The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories,” which explains why groups like FAIR and CIS are so obsessed with Soros. They routinely employ precisely the same dog whistles Hodgson used not-so-subtly in his antisemitic campaign ad: “They have their sights set on our way of life.”
In his defense, Hodgson tweeted that he couldn’t possibly be an antisemite because his parents are buried in a private crypt on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Yet antisemitism was no impediment to Hodgson’s father, “Sir John,” being buried in Israel. According to a memoir written by Hodgson’s youngest sister, their parents were given a private crypt in Israel because of “Sir John’s” services to the Vatican. The memoir recounts numerous examples of the father’s antisemitism. The elder Hodgson’s burial in a churchyard says everything about his connection to the Church and nothing about respect for Jews.
For years Hodgson has attended events sponsored by FAIR and its front groups, as well as an event called “Hold their Feet to the Fire,” where sheriffs and a variety of homophobes, Neo-confederates, Muslim-bashers, antisemites, and Christian Nationalists fill slots on right-wing talk radio programs. In 2016 Hodgson gave a talk at a FAIR national advisory meeting that preceded one by Ira Mehlman entitled “Soros Hacked: The Truth Behind His Big Money Network to Destroy U.S. Borders.”
Mehlman calls Soros’ Open Society Institute a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is white supremacist code for “Jewish” and FAIR and CIS have an axe to grind with Soros not only because he is a liberal philanthropist, but especially because he is a liberal Jew.
The American Jewish Committee has this to say about so-called “globalists”:
“Much like dual loyalty, Globalist is used to promote the antisemitic conspiracy that Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin, like the United States, but to some worldwide order–like a global economy or international political system–that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments, and media. […] Today, Globalist is a coded word for Jews who are seen as international elites conspiring to weaken or dismantle “Western” society using their international connections and control over big corporations (see New World Order)–all echoing the destructive theory that Jews hold greed and tribe above country.”
In 2001 Stephen Steinlight published a report for the Center for Immigration Studies — a group with which Hodgson has testified at Congress many times — entitled “The Jewish State in America’s Changing Demography.” Steinlight blasted secular Jews for their historical support for liberal immigration policies, arguing that Mexicans would soon erode Jewish political power. Steinlight said that his own views had been changed though dialogue with CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, a racist who once said “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough…”
In 2004 Steinlight ratcheted up his polemics with an essay, “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry,” but he still wasn’t making progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing leading Jewish organizations of censorship and repression.
In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s governmental affairs director and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to be the worst enemies of the country” — a sentiment that former president and Hodgson idol Donald Trump echoed on October 16th when he wrote, “Jews have to get their act together…”
Hodgson is so often found in cesspools with antisemites and racists that he can hardly smell the sewage. A case in point is Hodgson’s flirtation with Rick Wiles, a virulent antisemite and Christian nationalist who renounced his US citizenship because of marriage equality. Wiles broadcasts an “End Time” radio program that has featured Hodgson and received Trump White House press credentials.
Hodgson’s numerous and habitual problems with hate groups and bigotry are bad enough. But this is what he has chosen to do instead of competently running his jails and making a best effort to rehabilitate people.
Vote this embarrassment out of office on November 8th.
Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson must be feeling the stinging criticisms of his substandard jail food, his systematic violations of human rights, his suicides, his recidivism rate, and his refusal to help inmates deal with drug addiction.
After 24 years in office, only this week – barely a week before an election that could well unseat him – Hodgson announced to great fanfare that he had scored a “perfect score” on his opioid treatment program from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, joining his “perfect score” from the American Corrections Association.
ACA Certifications not worth the paper they’re printed on
“The ACA accreditation process is a rubber stamp. It is almost impossible for a facility to fail an ACA audit. The ACA grants facilities three months’ advance notice of audits; provides facilities with “technical assistance,” including “standards checklists” and an “audit readiness evaluation” that help a facility know when to schedule its audit and what to expect; and, at a facility’s request, will conduct a “mock audit” to help the facility prepare.4 If problems persist despite these ample opportunities to correct–or hide–them, the ACA Commissioners can ignore audit finding altogether and allow a facility that failed its audit to receive accreditation, rendering these standards toothless.”
Ditto, NCCHC certifications
It turns out that the NCCHC certifications are equally meaningless. A 2016 article in Prison Legal News showed that the NCCCH misrepresents the stringency of its “inspections.”
“Like the ACA, the NCCHC warns prison officials of upcoming inspections but claims they also conduct unannounced reviews. Also like the ACA, the NCCHC has historically relied on self-reported information from the facilities it accredits.”
Like the ACA, the NCCHC is an opaque organization with too many interests in private prison licensure, and it’s little more than a pay-to-play scheme:
“Both the ACA and NCCHC are also plagued by conflicts of interest, including the fact that they effectively sell accreditation to their correctional colleagues and promulgate their own voluntary standards with no oversight.”
As with the ACA, the NCCHC frequently gives “perfect scores” to institutions that habitually violate the constitutional rights of their inmates. But don’t believe me. Believe the Department of Justice:
“The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division issued a letter in April 2008 that found the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction in Massachusetts had unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Specifically, the jail failed to protect detainees from harm, failed to protect them “from exposure to unsanitary and unsafe environmental conditions,” and did not provide detainees with adequate mental health care. County officials rejected the allegations, noting the facility was accredited by both the ACA and NCCHC – which, in light of the DOJ’s findings, indicates the inadequacy of accreditation.”
The PLN article goes on to recount horror stories at the Idaho Correctional Center, where inmates were subjected to “gladiator school” beatings while corrections staff did nothing to intervene. It mentions the Walnut Grove Youth Correction facility in Mississippi where young people were sexually abused and subjected to high levels of violence. It mentions a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Texas where prisoners were given substandard medical care. It lists a number of mental health abuses at jails in Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, and others – all where NCCHC certifications papered over the abuses, giving the institutions either “perfect” or passing scores.
In 2009 – only after the Department of Homeland Security had revoked Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio of his 287(g) program – did the NCCHC revoke Arpaio’s certifications that had previously given his facilities glowing reports. A facility that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp.”
Hodgson’s “First in the Nation” drug treatment program
In the same self-congratulatory press release announcing his NCCHC “perfect” score, Hodgson went a step further, announcing a drug treatment program in collaboration with Correctional Psychiatric Services (CPS), Hodgson’s healthcare vendor – a major donor to his campaign.
In another press release, Hodgson described his outpatient drug treatment program as the “brainchild” of CPS president Jorge Veliz and a “first-in-the-nation inmate reentry clinic.” Of course it is nothing of the sort. Hampden County Sheriff Nicholas Cocchi has been operating a similar program for four years in conjunction with the Department of Corrections – which ought to be running all county jails. Another Hodgson lie.
But why now?
One wonders why it took Hodgson 24 years – other than facing stiff campaign opposition – to take an interest in medically assisted [drug] treatment. In 2019 Hodgson fielded questions from community members at the last 287(g) hearing he ever conducted. In this clip Hodgson whines that administering MAT treatments to inmates is “controversial,” can take up to 10 minutes, and who has the time for that? Nope, all Hodgson’s going to do is give them a spritz of vivitrol and wish them good luck on the way out of jail.
CPS is part of the problem
Besides the recidivism and suicides, and the many reports of medical neglect, Hodgson’s jail leads in jail deaths. CPS has not only presided over the administration of substandard mental health services to inmates; since 2020 there has been clear evidence that it provides demonstrably bad medical care.
In October 2020 Reuters released a national comparison of jail deaths. Bristol County again was #1 on the wall of shame:
From Reuters data
Roughly one out of 500 detainees in the Bristol County Jail ends up dead compared to less than one per thousand in most other jails.
Dr. Jorge Raul Veliz, the owner and president and founder of Correctional Psychiatric Services, has a staff of about 200 and contracts with Dukes, Bristol, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth and Suffolk county jails in Massachusetts and has contracts in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. His employees are not unionized. Veliz founded CPS in 1994, co-founded Boston Clinical Consulting (a Guatemalan healthcare company) in 2007, and in 2009 co-founded the Hospital Psiquiatrico Mederi in Guatemala.
In 2017 Barnstable County downsized its nursing staff, outsourcing care to Correctional Psychiatric Services. Within weeks, there were two suicides at the Barnstable County jail. Before CPS services even started work, Barnstable nurse Hillarie Gaynor Clarke penned a prescient warning of the risks of using CPS: “I strongly urge the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider CPS as an ally, based on its blatantly poor and sometimes fatal track record. Unfortunately, at this rate, it seems that inmate care will only worsen at our county correctional institution.”
CPS employees have been accused repeatedly of medical neglect by both local and ICE detainees. One report from a California-based immigration group details a case of medical neglect by CPS. A search of nursing licenses for the four caregivers mentioned in the complaint showed one with an Associate Degree in Nursing from Laboure College, another with an LPN from Lindsey Hopkins Technical College, another with a vocational certificate from Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School – all supervised by a Nurse Practitioner from the University of Louisville, who only saw the patient after the worst neglect had already occurred.
Click here for a longer profile of CPS, the detailed account of medical neglect by an ICE detainee which names CPS employees by name, a presentation on suicide by CPS principals Jorge Veliz and Beth Cheney, and the Reuters data.
Conflicts of Interest – “The Paid Jailer”
Besides CPS’s dismal record as a medical and mental health services provider, voters ought to be very skeptical of CPS’s involvement in Hodgson’s latest public relations con.
In January 2022 Common Cause released a report, “The Paid Jailer,” which looks at the role of campaign donations to sheriffs by their vendors. Not surprisingly, the report starts with the Bristol County sheriff:
“In Bristol County, Massachusetts, more than 30 people have died behind bars in the last 10 years. Overwhelmingly, these are people awaiting trial. Some have died because of substance withdrawal and others by suicide. And the people who remain incarcerated say that they’re not receiving basic health care, including one man in Bristol County who has given us permission to share his story anonymously…
Yet Thomas M. Hodgson, the longtime sheriff of Bristol County and the sole leader of the jail facility, has made no changes to the health care provider, CPS Healthcare. CPS has spent more than $20,365 on sheriffs’ campaigns in Massachusetts, and $12,040 has gone directly to Hodgson. The State of Massachusetts reports that state sheriffs paid a total of $9.82 million in contracts to CPS Healthcare from 2012 to 2021. Hodgson appears to be the rule, rather than the exception, which we show in The Paid Jailer: How Sheriff Campaign Dollars Shape Mass Incarceration…”
Final thoughts
Hodgson’s operation is a nightmare. For both inmates and taxpayers. On November 8th voters have a chance to replace death, neglect, starvation, lawsuits, and lies with a sheriff with experience in corrections who takes corrections seriously. Paul Heroux will reform and professionalize a cruel, corrupt, hyper-politicized, patronage-based operation with data-driven programs that actually rehabilitate incarcerated people.
And after all, that’s all Massachusetts sheriffs are supposed to do.
In Massachusetts, sheriffs and deputies are law enforcement officers with limited powers who may assist genuine police officers when requested. But they are not police officers. Sheriffs run jails, transport prisoners, serve eviction and other notices, and are prohibited from patrolling cities and towns — which are chartered (through state laws) to appoint and hire police officers with full police powers (a crucial point mentioned shortly). Sheriffs, however, do enjoy a few limited police-like powers; for example, while they are transporting prisoners through a foreign jurisdiction or when asked to assist in quelling a riot. And that’s about it.
But like Hershel Walker, Bristol County’s Sheriff Thomas Hodgson keeps trying to pass himself off as the police — and whenever Hodgson’s tried it, it’s either been unappreciated or he’s failed at it. Hodgson implies he has police powers by claiming to be tough on crime, but since he has very limited police-like powers all he can really do is suggest that women carry pepper spray, hand out swag to seniors at “safety” talks, lend out canines, and have his jail officers pose with children and his $250K “Homeland Security” command truck at parades.
It may seem like a trivial matter to Hodgson, but democracies require both the consent of the people to be governed — and to be policed. Only law enforcement officers elected or appointed by chartered Massachusetts municipalities have the police powers that Hodgson has repeatedly, and illegally, attempted to usurp.
But don’t expect to see Sheriff Hodgson show up when you call 911
In November 2003, Hodgson (without being asked, and even after being asked to stop) decided that New Bedford’s police force wasn’t doing a good-enough job. So he began sending his officers to patrol the city’s streets. The New Bedford Police Chief was not amused, nor the mayor, and neither was the District Attorney. The Standard-Times reported, “Bristol District Attorney Paul F. Walsh […] said Hodgson has made no effort to coordinate with city police and has a track record of legal failures when investigating crimes inside his own facilities. Walsh also said that arrests made by the sheriff’s deputies, who typically serve warrants and act as guards at the county jail, would be subject to challenges in court. ‘You can’t have the guy who was serving mashed potatoes to inmates last week calling himself a drug detective this week,’ Walsh said.”
But that’s exactly Hodgson’s shtick — playing cop — and he’s been doing it throughout his entire time in office.
Between 1991 and 2005 Peter Larkin was Hodgson’s “Detective Lieutenant of Internal Affairs.” Larkin resigned from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) three years after botching a drug investigation the BCSO undertook — again without “assistance from other police agencies.” One lawyer described the low quality of BCSO investigators, “They’re not trained for investigative work,” while another called the BCSO itself “a task force of goofballs who couldn’t cut it as real cops.”
ABC6 News reported in July 2020 that Larkin, who eventually found work as an attendance officer with the New Bedford Public Schools, had been fired (again) from that job for advocating lynching Black Lives Matter protesters: “I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.” Within days Larkin had to resign. This news was no surprise given Hodgson’s membership in a hate group and memberships in several extremist organizations.
On January 12, 2017 the state Supreme Judicial Court considered the legality of a sheriff calling himself a police officer, and drew a clear distinction between law enforcement officer and police officer in Commonwealth v. Gernrich where it concluded that “sheriff’s deputies are not police officers.”
The SJC had to consider the case of an inmate in the Worcester County jail who had lied to a deputy and was charged with violating G. L. c. 269, § 13A, which reads, “Whoever intentionally and knowingly makes or causes to be made a false report of a crime to police officers shall be punished by…” The inmate disputed that the deputy he had lied to was a police officer, so the matter before the SJC was the “issue whether a deputy sheriff is a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A, present[ing] a question of statutory interpretation…” The Justices reviewed Massachusetts law and concluded:
“For the reasons explained above, a deputy sheriff is not a ‘police officer’ for purposes of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Thus, we reverse the defendant’s conviction, and a judgment of not guilty shall enter.”
The reasoning behind the ruling is critical. The Justices wrote that G. L. c. 41, § 98 defines “unique” police powers that other law enforcement officials lack; therefore only police can be called police:
Although the term “police officer” appears in a variety of statutory contexts, we adopt the definition in G. L. c. 41, § 98, to guide our analysis of the issue. General Laws c. 41, § 98, which authorizes the appointment of “police officers” for cities and towns, is an appropriate guide for the interpretation of G. L. c. 269, § 13A, because it permits a distinction between the broad class of law enforcement officers empowered to perform only certain police duties and those expressly designated as “police officers” without such limitations. The definition of police officer in G. L. c. 41, § 98, encompasses a broad range of authority, including the power to make warrantless arrests, that is unique within the class of law enforcement officers. In other words, a police officer is a law enforcement officer, but not all law enforcement officers are police officers. It is this broad authority, granted only to persons appointed as police officers by cities and towns, that defines the term for the purposes of G. L. c. 269, § 13A.
Bottom line: “a deputy sheriff is not a police officer.” You’d think that a ruling so clear and from the highest court in the state would stop Hodgson from trying to impersonate a cop.
But no.
Barely three months following the SCJ ruling, the Fall River Herald News reported that Hodgson and disgraced former mayor (and now incarcerated felon) Jaziel Correia had entered into a backroom deal to have Hodgson run Fall River’s police lockup. Hodgson had tried and failed to sell a similar scheme before when Deval Patrick was governor. This time around Hodgson enlisted the help of a con man. The now incarcerated former mayor swore up and down that two local state representatives had promised to find state funding for Hodgson.
There were just two problems with the Correia-Hodgson deal. The Fall River police reminded all parties that policing by sheriffs was illegal. And Carole Fiola, who served on the Joint Ways and Means Committee and whose name Correira dropped, had to set the record straight when she told the Herald: “It was the first time I heard about it and I am not aware there is a budget request.”
Not only in Bristol County, but all over the United States, sheriffs are on the ballot. Given the previous administration’s love affair with Anglo-American sheriffs, America is now paying a bit more attention to these races than ever before.
In Massachusetts sheriffs have extremely attenuated powers but extremely long terms — rivaling that of a U.S. Senator — and very little accountability — all of which affords them a lot of time and opportunity to get into mischief.
By now everyone knows about Bristol County’s Angry White Man sheriff — the community college dropout who has been running our jail by the seat of his pants while making frequent trips to the border with militia members and white supremacists. Not to mention letting an indecent number of people die by suicide while half-starving inmates and gouging their families with usurious phone charges.
Tom Hodgson is like your neighbor, the do-it-yourself plumber, who broke the toilet, flooded the first floor, and left sewage all over. Now cooler heads have to call someone with professional skills — somebody who actually knows what the hell he’s doing — to fix the mess the stubborn hubby has made.
And Paul Heroux is just the guy to do it. Heroux has a bachelor’s in psychology, a master’s in corrections, has worked in corrections doing corrections, and has been running a city government with a budget three times larger than Hodgson’s.
In the process Heroux has also managed to steer clear of the state auditor, the state attorney general, and the Department of Homeland Security — unlike the incumbent clown who couldn’t document a third of his expenses to the auditor’s satisfaction, misplaced ICE payments in one of a dozen slush funds he keeps, who has systematically violated the civil rights of his prisoners, and last year lost his prized 287(g) program because of gross incompetence and cruelty — cruelty borne out of pandering to and offering Republican voters angry red meat.
Thomas Hodgson in an election ad telling voters that jail is not a country club.
Paul Heroux, who sometimes comes across as a brainy technocrat and not a movie-goer’s image of a Western sheriff, is nevertheless unlikely to jet down to the Texas ranch of militia members at taxpayer expense to play dress-up with Western sheriffs, take time off to run the Massachusetts Trump campaign, pose on the Capitol steps with Ted Cruz, Louis Gohmert, or various extremist and anti-government groups he belongs to, or sit on the national advisory board of a hate group — like the incumbent.
Heroux’s not going to put inmates in chain gangs, try to circumvent laws that keep Massachusetts sheriffs from doing police work, try to make deals with a Fall River mayor now serving time in federal prison, do favors for a New Bedford waterfront crime boss, or break federal law by deputizing military recruiters (which earned Hodgson a visit from Navy investigators). And no multi-million dollar legal appeals for lost cases that would never have been heard if the incumbent hadn’t broken laws by violating the rights of inmates or his employees.
No, it’s going to be the sound of crickets again when Heroux is elected sheriff.
Besides not racking up massive legal bills paid for by taxpayers for grandstanding and law-breaking, Heroux is also not going to write “love letters” to racists like Stephen Miller, Trump’s evil genius immigration advisor, or rat out his own church like Hodgson did for the “crime” of his parish caring for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. For a guy who likes to remind his Trumpy base how “Christian” he is, Hodgson sure seems to have forgotten Exodus 22:21: “You shall not oppress or mistreat a stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” Like everything about Hodgson the poseur, even his piety is all show.
But the million-dollar question is — do voters want an aggressive grandstander who just won’t stay in his lane and do his damn job — or are they ready for a little professionalism in a sheriff? I honestly have no idea. Who truly knows the heart of the fickle American voter?
But I’m not the only one to speculate. The Marshall Project covers criminal justice issues and only yesterday published a timely piece: “Progressive Sheriffs Are Here. Will They Win In November?” Since Trump was elected, Progressive sheriff candidates have increasingly run and won.
Sheriffs in the thrall of the Dear Leader
Part of that reason is that voters are beginning to realize just how extremist these overwhelmingly Trump-fanny-kissing sheriffs really are. Overwhelmingly white, a survey by the Marshall Project of sheriff’s political views showed that less than 1% consider themselves liberal, 75% support ultra-right politics, most regard protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to be orchestrated by left-wing provocateurs and not reflect an authentic response to a police murder. And forget accountability. Less than half are in favor of tracking bad cops. And so on. In addition, a majority of sheriffs think they are more powerful than a sitting U.S. president and can interpret the Constitution any way they see fit and selectively enforce laws.
In short, today’s sheriff’s hold views diametrically opposed to those of majorities in Democratic states like ours.
In Essex County, Massachusetts, social worker Virginia Leigh ran against incumbent sheriff Kevin Coppinger in the Democratic primary and got 48% of the vote — not bad for a first-timer. In Hampshire County, Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse and (again) a first-time challenger, garnered 25% of the primary vote but hammered away on services. Sepeda ran on a platform of delivering treatment to inmates, pointing out that 60% of her county’s incarcerated people have substance abuse problems and 70% self-report mental illness. “Those are not law enforcement issues. Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues,” Sepeda told one reporter.
And she’s absolutely right. Which brings us to the general election on November 8th.
In Barnstable County, Donna Buckley, who is running on a platform of prioritizing programs for inmates and “preparing our inmates for pre-release,” got 30,000 primary votes in the Democratic primary, while Republican Tim Whelan got only 18,000. May these proportions hold in the general election. Besides delivery of services to inmates, federal ICE programs are on the ballot. Buckley has promised to end Barnstable County’s 287(g) program, the only county jail program remaining in Massachusetts.
In Bristol County, Paul Heroux is similarly promising to use — not Hodgson’s cruel medieval approach — but 21st Century tools to run the county jail, to provide services to inmates, to use data-driven management to evaluate rehabilitation programs, and to focus on the mundane job of care, custody, and control of incarcerated people.
To invoke the incumbent’s platform, “Jail is not a country club.” Well, no, it’s not. But it’s also not a torture chamber. It ought to be a short-term treatment center for mentally-ill and chemically-dependent people. The courts and the DA are in the punishing business. The sheriff provides care, custody, and control. Seems simple. Except, perhaps, for some percentage of voters who want sheriffs to impose their own arbitrary punishments on people already being punished.
In her latest essay in the Boston Globe, long-time Hodgson-watching columnist Yvonne Abraham quoted Carol Rose of the ACLU: “Voters are waking up. […] Maybe not this time, but soon, [a sheriff] is going to be held accountable by the voters.” To which Abraham adds: “Please, please, let it be this time.”
The New Bedford waterfront has its share of crime, including organized crime. Carlos Rafael, aka the “Codfather,” served time in federal prison on numerous charges, including money laundering. Though no criminal connection has been established between Rafael and Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, two of Hodgson’s officers were convicted of using a Thanksgiving turkey airlift to the Azores (for repatriated deportees) as an opportunity to illegally transfer money offshore for Rafael. The money was carefully divided among couriers (so as not to raise suspicions) and was then recombined and deposited into the “Codfather’s” accounts.
James Melo, a captain with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, was convicted in Federal court of “conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States and one count of structuring the export of monetary instruments.” Melo got a mild slap on the wrist: twelve months of probation. Sheriffs Deputy Antonio Freitas was slightly less lucky. Freitas, who also served as a deputized ICE agent for Hodgson, was convicted of charges similar to Melo’s but served twelve months in prison.
There is a fascinating account of Rafael’s money-laundering and the role Freitas played in it buried in an appeal from federal prosecutors Mark T. Quinlivan and Trump appointee Andrew E. Lelling. In the document, Rafael boasted of his close relationship with Hodgson and the influence it played in obtaining both a job and a raise for Freitas:
“I got him the job, I got him the raises, so he’ll do what the fuck I tell him to do. He called me. He says, ‘what the fuck is going on, everybody got a promotion in this fuckin’ place but me.’ So I’m like this [gestures] with the sheriff. I called the Sheriff and I said ‘what the fuck are you doing to me Tom? Fuckin Freitas has been there for so many fuckin’ years, you’re not going to give him a fuckin’ promotion and a raise?’ ‘Jesus Carlos, we do not have enough money in the budget.’ I said fuck off, find a way, give the kid a raise. He got his promotion, right, so he called me and said I want to thank you very much, I finally got my fuckin’ promotion and my raise. So it’s nice to know people.”
Rafael’s claim that Hodgson had assisted Freitas was confirmed by Freitas himself, who admitted to Federal investigators “that he had carried money for Rafael in the past because Rafael had helped him get a promotion [from Hodgson] and had co-signed a home improvement loan for him.”
When Hodgson was called to the witness stand during Freitas’ trial, “Hodgson remembered Rafael saying over the phone that he needed a promotion. But Rafael’s call did not influence his decision, Hodgson stressed.” Incredibly — as in “I don’t believe a damn word of it” — Quinlivan and Lelling simply took Hodgson’s word that he had granted the favor because, well, he was going to do it anyway.
But Rafael had access to the sheriff and knew that Freitas “worked on customs with the immigration unit of the Sheriff’s Department. And Rafael said that Freitas could also help the co-conspirators get their cash out of the country by bypassing airport security.” This is because Freitas had received the requested promotion to deputized ICE agent at the jail and had “completed a multiday training program for ICE officers that covered (among other topics) financial crimes, including structuring and bulk-cash smuggling — an instructor, for example, told attendees that structuring involved”having more than $10,000 in cash and breaking it into smaller amounts to conduct financial transactions in order to avoid the reporting requirements.”
Freitas was not only well-positioned to launder money for Rafael, but perfectly trained to commit the crime.
If not, he would have resigned from this ugly crew of satin sheets and brown shirts long ago
Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson has built a career as a cruel jailer on top of allying himself with white supremacists.
In 1999 Hodgson visited Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Tent City” — a facility for Hispanic detainees that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp,” where inmates lived in 120-degree heat the desert in surplus tents from the Korean War and received half-rations of barely-edible food. Hodgson, who enthusiastically adopted Arpaio’s methods, joked to a Boston Herald reporter, “it’s not a buffet here.” After returning to Massachusetts, Hodgson increasingly modeled his own practices after Arpaio’s and even began using Arpaio’s tag line: “jail is not a country club.” And following the footsteps of Arpaio, who in 2016 lost access to his 287(g) ICE program because of systematic violations of constitutional and human rights of his inmates, Hodgson lost his own 287(g) program in 2021 for all the same reasons — cruelty and incompetence.
After September 11, 2001 Hodgson had realized the financial potential of collaborations with the Department of Homeland Security. With massive amounts of money being thrown around to protect the “Homeland,” Hodgson easily received $3.2 million from DHS to build the C. Carlos Carreiro immigration center in 2007, which later became a full-fledged ICE detention facility. He also received federal money for a $250K DHS command center van — now used primarily for Fourth of July parades and public relations.
In 2011 an organization created by a white supremacist optometrist named John Tanton began recruiting sheriffs to do its dirty work. The 2011 Annual Report of the Federation for American Immigration (FAIR) — which both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) regard as a hate group — began using county sheriffs as spokesmen to oppose (and in many cases to flaunt) national and state immigration and gun control laws. Hodgson was one of the first to sign up. Working with a FAIR organizer named Susan Tully who both the SPLC and the ADL had long been monitoring, Hodgson organized a “fact finding” mission to McAllen, Texas in July 2014. Since then Hodgson has attended dozens of FAIR’s conferences and events, including its “Hold their Feet to the Fire” broadcast events that draw speakers from a variety of allied hate groups. In March 2015 Hodgson appeared with Tully at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford and he has appeared at most of FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events coordinated by Tully (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021).
By 2014 Hodgson was on FAIR’s National Board of Advisors and was “educating” the American Right to the dangers of even DACA recipients. In one of his many trips to Washington DC paid for by Massachusetts taxpayers, on October 11, 2014 Hodgson spoke to fellow FAIR National Board of Advisors on “The Effect of The President’s Decisions on DACA and Its Impact on Our Law Enforcement Challenges.” On September 24, 2016 Hodgson again spoke to FAIR’s National Advisors. The topic this time was “Sanctuary Cities.” Hodgson’s dinner talk immediately preceded one about Jewish “Big Money” and the plot to “Destroy U.S. Borders.” FAIR’s National Board of Advisors is a virtual Who’s Who of conspiracy nuts, anti-Semites, racists, Neo-Confederates, Muslim bashers, white supremacists, eugenicists, and Christian Identitarians.
In October 2015 Hodgson again visited the “Rio Grande” — this time with Robert J. Sylvia, then one of Hodgson’s top brass but now retired, who was all set to run for Sheriff in next month’s election but managed to file his ballot signatures on the wrong form. The sheriffs and their entourage toured the border but also went 70 miles out of their way to visit the ranch of Mike and Linda Vickers, founders of the vigilante group Texas Border Volunteers, an offshoot of the Minuteman Project, a loose-knit group of vigilantes, some of whom are affiliated with White supremacist militias and have been linked to both murders and incidents like the illegal detention of hundreds of migrants in April 2019.
Besides FAIR, Hodgson is also involved with another Tanton group — the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). SPLC does not categorize CIS as a hate group, but CIS functions as a disinformation and lobbying group with extensive white supremacist and antisemitic links. It is led by Mark Krikorian, who first worked at FAIR and who once said about Haiti: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” The group’s most visible face is Jessica Vaughan, who used the antisemitic newspaper American Free Press, founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto, to flog CIS talking points — as did Hodgson’s fellow FAIR national advisor Frosty Wooldridge. On March 28, 2017 Hodgson testified with CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan at Border Security and Immigration Enforcement hearings in Washington. He also appeared with Vaughan at a CIS-organized event in Boston the following month, and another in West Roxbury the month after that. In January 2020 Hodgson again appeared with Vaughan (a resident of South Carolina) before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. FAIR-AVIAC also sent two others to testify before Massachusetts legislators.
In 2015 Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a synagogue run by Islamophobe rabbi Jonathan Hausman. Hausman had previously hosted Dutch Neo-fascist and Islam basher Geert Wilders. Over 100 members of the clergy, including other rabbis, protested a similar hate fest the synagogue hosted the following year featuring Muslim-basher Frank Gaffney and Christian nationalist Jerry Boykin. When I asked Hodgson about his talk with Hausman and Lynch, Hodgson said with a straight face that he was just there doing his duty to inform the public about terrorism: “They asked me to come speak about terrorism. That’s what they asked me to do. […] That’s why I was there, because of my my involvement with the terrorism task force.”
In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s “governmental affairs director” and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to be the worst enemies of the country.” It was not the first time Hodgson ignored the anti-Semites he was rubbing elbows with. His involvement with the Jew-bashing Tanton group is no aberration. In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Rick Wiles, a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite who claimed that Obama was inspired by Lucifer and killed Supreme Court Justice Scalia as a pagan human sacrifice, that the Irgun has kill teams all over America, and that Jews will use gun control laws to kill Christians. Wiles devoted “the first half of the program to recount several profound prophetic dreams his family received years ago” and the second half to Hodgson, who discussed immigration and his work with FAIR.
In 2016 Hodgson was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan. The third speaker was Raymond Hanna from the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America which also maintains white supremacist ties. For example, in Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront. Perhaps because of its far-too-frequent neo-Nazi connections, ACT for America was too toxic for even Donald Trump. Following an article in the Miami Herald announcing ACT’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, which was to have been headlined by Michelle Malkin (another friend of Hodgson’s), the Trump administration had second thoughts: “[The gala] will absolutely not be taking place at Mar-a-Lago,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization announced. In September 2016 the sheriff also appeared at a Republican unity rally in Norfolk county attended by his old friend Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies and by ACT for America’s Ray Hannah.
In June 2017 Hodgson appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Malkin has links to white supremacist groups, including several Tanton groups and VDARE, as well as to Islamophobic organizations. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves. And, of course, Malkin is also a big fan of both John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints, a racist book that has attained almost scriptural reverence among believers in the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that maintains that White people are being consciously replaced and outnumbered by immigration sponsored and financed by Liberals and Jews — a view shared by the 18 year-old white supremacist who marched into a Buffalo supermarket in full body armor last May and murdered ten Black people.
In 2018 Hodgson announced with great fanfare that the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA) would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgson’s NSA project folded after raising less than $100K in three months — despite a false claim that excessive web traffic had crashed the site. The NSA site redirected donors to a group called the American Border Foundation, whose Director of Communications was Jeremy Messina, who identifies with the white Nationalist Identitarian movement and whose Facebook postings bore striking similarities with the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto. The American Border Foundation‘s crowdfunding scheme never reached its $450 million goal. During its three-year run, ABF’s less-than 4,000 donors raised barely over $227K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer — who like Hodgson has ties to FAIR through FAIR’s sister organization AVIAC — went on the conspiracy and white supremacist circuit trying to sell the project. For example, Kramer appeared on the far-right Southern Sense podcast and also on an “anti-federalist” program that frequently invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”).
Despite lackluster donations, Hodgson claimed that as a sheriff he could cut through the red tape to ensure donations got to the Department of Homeland Security and that the wall would be built. In November of 2018, Hodgson claimed he had submitted a form to DHS to donate $100,000 to pay for “border barriers on the Southern border.” But DHS informed the American Border Foundation it could not accept their donation. Nevertheless, in 2019 Hodgson and Kramer were still acting as if the crowdfunding effort was still viable. Both spoke at a FAIR-AVIAC-sponsored press conference in Washington, whose main function was to highlight the “Angel Families” who had lost family members to auto accidents or crimes committed by undocumented migrants. As of today, the whereabouts of $227,657 in ABF donations are still unaccounted for. Neither the ABF nor Hodgson has ever responded to information requests from Bristol County for Correctional Justice or American Oversight.
Hodgson’s newest project is Protect America Now. Once again, Hodgson is not just a member: he’s on Protect America Now’s national advisory board.
On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another collection of uber-patriotic, God- and gun-waving Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members number about 85 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliations. But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I looked into Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer accused of ethics violations, who is also involved with PAN and other voter suppression efforts, and is not coincidentally the owner of Signafide, a company whose AI software is intended to challenge ballot signatures.
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) connects Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election. And by “intervene” we’re talking about sheriffs seizing voting machines.
Besides his leadership role in PAN, Hodgson is also a member of CSPOA; in 2014 his membership dues were recorded by the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would seize voting machines. Lamb, Hodgson’s fellow advisor at Protect America Now, recently teamed up with True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, who was already working with the CSPOA. Lamb has promised to investigate so-called “ballot mules” — a reference to the Big Lie movie “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted on felony charges of using “straw donors” to make illegal campaign donations but was later pardoned by Donald Trump.
This is the world Hodgson not only lives in but has chosen to create. Whether Hodgson himself is a white supremacist — or has simply built a career by supporting white supremacists for decades — is a trivial distinction.
Hodgson is either a monster or a fool. In neither case does he deserve to be returned to his job as Bristol County Sheriff.
Detail
Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is a member of the National Board of Advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR was founded by John Tanton, a white supremacist, and a majority of its advisory board are also white supremacists, Islamophobes, homophobes, racists, and conspiracy theorists. Here are a few of the people Hodgson rubs elbows with at board meetings:
Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazelton, PA who signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later;
Sharon Barnes, clearly no DACA lover, who wrote: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts;”
Gerda Bikales, who regards Spanish as a ghetto language: “I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto;”
William Chip, who wants to repeal the 14th Amendment;
Richard Lamm, former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are;”
K.C. McAlpin, an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different;”
Paul Nachman, a Montana white supremacist who writes for VDARE who calls refugees “good liars” and questions the existence of “moderate Muslims;”
Robert D. Park, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that government has abdicated its responsibility to uphold a Constitutional clause requiring it to defend the U.S. from “invasion;”
Randy Pullen, former chairman of the Arizona GOP and self-appointed expert on black crime: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers;”
John Philip Sousa IV, great grandson of the famous Sousa, a Birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio;
Alan N. Weeden, whose family owns the Weeden Foundation, major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID, a national identification system.
Americans have a strange view of presidential accountability
On August 8th, after a dozen FBI agents showed up unannounced at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of ex-president Donald Trump, MAGAworld began calling for civil war. “Tomorrow is war,” tweeted Steven Crowder, a Trump supporter with 5 million YouTube and 2 million Twitter followers. Another MAGA Tweet invoked civil war directly: “The Feds are currently RAIDING Mar-A-Lago. This could very well be the equivalent of the FIRST SHOT fired upon Fort Sumter. I believe they want a civil war. What other outcome can this bullsh!t lead to?”
For many Americans — including a lot of Democrats — it is unimaginable that even a corrupt, criminal American president like Trump could ever serve a day in jail. For starters, it has never happened. But there is also the matter of presidential pardons which seem to have kept Richard Nixon out of jail. Or maybe we simply regard presidents as untouchable monarchs. While Trump was campaigning in Iowa in 2016 he joked, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He wasn’t wrong.
In general White America views the punishment of criminal presidents and prime ministers as something that only happens in unstable, undemocratic — meaning non-European — parts of the world. After the FBI’s raid on his father’s compound, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics” — a view shared by Ron DeSantis. Even former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang went out of his way to attack the investigation of the corrupt ex-president.
But America has never had any qualms about holding former leaders of other nations to account. When deposed Lybian president Muammar Qaddafi was captured, mutilated, and murdered, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, “We came, we saw, he died.” When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was tried by a US-approved regime and executed, President Bush wrote, “Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.” But when it comes to corrupt American presidents, no such rules of law ever seem to apply.
In fact, the rules by which one foreign despot is a friend and another an enemy seem to boil down to anti-communism and global alliances — and not the rule of law. Joe Biden’s fist bump with Saudi murderer/dictator Muhammad bin Salman while doubling down on sanctions on Cuba’s rulers are a good contrast. America continues to praise Brazilian and Indian democracies as the “largest democracies in the world” (other than our own) — despite their authoritarian character and because of their overt anti-communism.
Indira Gandhi was a corrupt prime minister whose family was Indian royalty and was spared any jail time. The “scourge of communists” and Naxalites, Gandhi issued a series of dictatorial decrees, imposed censorship, suspension of civil liberties, and arrested political opponents (including current PM Modi), which eventually led to her assassination by her own security detail. In fact, long before Modi, Indira Gandhi’s rule marked the beginning of the end of Indian democracy — precisely because she was never held to account.
Upon coming to power, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, a Republican darling, vowed to purge Brazil of political opponents. “These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland. It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.” Bolsonaro, of course, is the product of the U.S. looking the other way at Brazil’s far right (and anti-communist) military, which never really went away.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the GOP’s new idol and another virulent anti-communist, grabbed power this year by declaring a state of emergency and now rules by decree. Judging by his prominence at two recent CPAC conferences, Orban’s Fidesz party is the new model for American democracy.
So while we love anti-communist despots and refuse to prosecute our own criminal leaders, other western-oriented nations have somehow managed to hold their leaders to account.
Norway actually executed its Nazi collaborationist Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling for high treason. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon was convicted of fraud and misuse of funds. The French President Fillon served under, Nicolas Sarkozy, was likewise jailed for corruption, influence peddling, and bribery of a federal magistrate. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went to jail on corruption charges. Former Israeli President Moshe Katsav served time in prison on rape charges. And Israel’s best-known PM Benjamin Netanyahu is now facing prison on multiple charges of corruption and bribery.
Canada’s Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, Lise Thibault, served time in prison for misuse of public funds. The Premier of Western Australia Ray O’Connor was sent to prison on charges of fraud. Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond was arrested on sexual harassment charges. Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates was sent to prison for corruption, tax evasion, and money laundering. Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov was recently arrested on multiple corruption charges. British Virgin Islands PM Alturo Fahie was arrested on drug smuggling charges. South Korean Finance Minister Choi Kyoung-hwan served time in prison for an influence-peddling scheme that also took down the South Korean president Park Geun-hye. Puerto Rican Governor Wanda Vazquez was charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and wire fraud by the DOJ.
Given the hesitancy to prosecute a popular leader with a large following, Americans may end up following Italy’s lead. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and corruption charges and sentenced to four years in prison, which due to his age he never actually served. Berlusconi was also barred from public office, a ban which only applied to Italy and did not affect his ability to serve as a member of European Parliament. It was a resolution that probably made no one happy.
But if Democrats really want to preserve democracy, Trump must be prosecuted. What the nature of that punishment consists of can vary, but if we simply close the books on Trump’s multiple crimes, then we should also empty the jails and prisons because then the rule of law will have absolutely no meaning.
Republicans, Republicans, and more Republicans have joined forces to create a new political party — for Democrats.
This new party, calling itself Forward, will initially be chaired by Andrew Yang, who in 2020 posed as a Democrat for the sake of the primary, and Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and EPA Secretary under George W. Bush.
Forward joins forces with two previous GOP attempts to splinter the centrist wing of the Democratic Party: Renew America, launched in 2021 by a group of Reagan/Bush Republicans; and Serve America, another Republican group founded by Morgan Stanley lawyer Eric Grossman with [George W.] Bush administration figures.
Forward is an idea Christine Todd Whitman has been pushing for at least a year, usually by painting Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party like Jim Jones’ destruction of his own cult.
But rather than simply throwing “rational Republicans” a lifeline, Whitman’s other goal is to hollow out the Democratic Party by peeling away as many centrists as possible from the Democratic Party’s supposed “radical left.” When NPR host Steve Inskeep asked Whitman what she wanted from Democrats, she answered: “We want Democrats, when faced with a radical left candidate from the Democrat Party, to vote for a centrist Republican.”
Andrew Yang might have run as a Democrat in 2020 but earlier this month he showed up at a far-right event called Freedom Fest 2022 to rub elbows with both American and European fascists and to introduce them to his new project with a talk, “Forward — Notes on the Future of our Democracy.”
If you were paying any attention to the Republicans’ CPAC (Conservative Political Action) Conference in Budapest last May, many of the same elements attended Freedom Fest 2022. But instead of painting themselves as “rational Republicans” as they’re now doing with Forward, at CPAC they were fawning all over Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party — precisely because of its illiberal policies.
Fidesz, which is now a hard right Christian nationalist party, originally started out as a center-right coalition offering a “big tent” for both right-leaning liberals and far right nationalists. Over time, Fidesz has become increasingly repressive, antisemitic, and fascistic — so much so that last week, after Viktor Orban delivered a speech warning of the dangers of “race mixing,” one of his long-time advisors resigned from Fidesz, slamming Orban’s remarks as “pure Nazi text worthy of (Nazi propagandist) Goebbels.”
Whether the Republican Party’s new Forward movement will be an oasis of sanity for “rational Republicans” or a tasty cheese trap for Democrats who have to compete in Red districts, Forward is likely to suffer the same fate as Fidesz because the people and organizations who created Forward are just as unscrupulous and authoritarian as the orange meanie they created but can’t control.
If Yang and Whitman’s project goes anywhere — and that’s a big if — no doubt a number of fickle Democrats would be tempted to jump ship and join Forward. And good riddance. But if history offers any sort of guide, the Democratic Party would then try to staunch the hemorrhaging by moving even further to the right itself, creating an even more unfriendly climate for progressives.
This is why progressives — presently stuck in the Democratic Party’s mouse trap — will be forced to leave the Democratic Party sooner or later. Because America doesn’t need a second centrist party half as much as it needs one that represents working class people, the poor, and the marginalized.
A couple of years ago Massachusetts state representatives Antonio Cabral and William Straus sponsored H.5083, An Act Relative to Polling Place Security and Integrity. The bill limits sheriffs and deputies from policing polling places unless both local police and the secretary of public safety request assistance. The bill went nowhere.
Massachusetts law already authorizes police to preserve order at polling places, but the bill was filed only after Donald Trump began laying the groundwork in August 2020 for “Big Lie” accusations of voter fraud — three months before the election — boasting to FOX’s Sean Hannity that “we’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling stations sniffing out voter fraud. Trump’s demand for sheriffs to oversee the 2020 election was clearly intended to recycle time-tested racist and authoritarian voter intimidation and suppression tactics.
No sooner had H.5083 been filed when Bristol County’s scofflaw sheriff — and then-state Trump campaign director — Thomas Hodgson promised to defy the law if enacted. “No legislator is going to tell me when I can and cannot respond to someone who needs protection,” Hodgson told the Boston Herald.
Though still smarting from the loss of his 287(g) ICE program, Hodgson hasn’t dropped his anti-immigration rhetoric. But now he’s focused on enabling GOP voter suppression and ballot box tampering.
Hodgson’s new project is Protect America Now. On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another motley Hodgson crew of faux-patriotic Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members include an additional 69 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliation.
But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I investigated Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer also involved with PAN, both of whom share the same office address.
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) has connected Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election.
In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And last week at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would actually seize voting machines.
Massachusetts voters have reason to fear that Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, ever the Trump sycophant, would put his deputies at Trump’s disposal as enthusiastically as he tried to use his inmates to build Trump’s wall.
Hodgson did not appear on the speakers list of the FreedomFest 2022 conference but there is a gap in his social media posts between July 13-16. I have called, emailed, and texted Jon Darling, Hodgson’s media representative, to confirm if Hodgson attended FreedomFest. So far, nothing.
In any case, if we want to prevent the theft of voting machines (and elections), it’s time to dust off Cabral and Straus’s bill keeping our increasingly partisan and authoritarian sheriffs out of polling places.
And then we need to send Hodgson packing in November.
The Democratic Party is the only thing standing in the way of the Republican Party replacing America with a Christian theocracy.
And that is an absolutely terrifying thought.
The geriatric Democratic Party leadership — faced with an ongoing Republican coup, a Christian nationalist Supreme Court, dramatic assaults on civil liberties and separation of church and state, a war in Ukraine, energy price spikes, galloping inflation, the possibility of a recession, and more mutations of the COVID virus — well, they’ve certainly had their hands full.
But they’re fighting a national five-alarm fire with a home extinguisher.
Rather than leveraging the tools of a government still in power, Democrats have refused to enforce party discipline on Democratic Senate free agents like Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema, abolish the filibuster, prosecute January 6th insurrectionists, expand the Supreme Court, or employ the considerable powers of the Presidency to preserve what’s left of American democracy. There is no presumptive Democratic candidate for President in 2024 and no apparent plan to replace the many geezers in Democratic House and Senate leadership roles.
There’s also no way Joe Biden can run and win the next presidential election. GOP hostility is a given, but many Democrats are worried that Biden & Co. are not up to the many challenges and disasters facing the country. Biden would be 82 if he actually began a second term as President. But who wants him? Not GOP voters, and not engaged progressive Democrats.
Merely competent, Biden has exhibited few of the leadership skills necessary to pull the country back from The Abyss. He is not a reassuring presence, as FDR or even Jimmy Carter were. His public addresses have been few and far between and he and the Democratic Party he leads have backtracked on almost every progressive promise ever made.
Right down the line — canceling student debt, expanding Medicare, enacting police reform, bolstering voting rights, shrinking the Pentagon budget — the Democratic House may have put on legislative dinner theater, but the Senate has done little to advance these bills. Is Chuck Schumer really less gifted than Mitch McConnell? Or is there simply a lack of will when it comes to full-throated support for Democratic policies like racial equity and abortion rights? — values once regarded as mainstream but now apparently too “far left” for some Democrats. A 2019 article in The Atlantic by Peter Wehner enumerates many of the fears of these Democrats who have internalized conservative claims that “self-styled progressives” from the “Far Left” are “taking over” the Democratic Party.
But that’s nonsense, say progressive Democrats. NY Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fires back on the “Far Left” label with: “The extreme left is taking over WHERE. In Texas, Republicans passed a law allowing rapists to sue their victims for getting an abortion. Can anyone name a ‘far left’ policy that extreme implemented anywhere? We can’t even get our party to import cheaper RXs from Canada.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s complaint raises the bigger issue that you can’t get Democrats to take strong action on even wildly popular issues. Take the worst of recent Democratic losses — abortion. Democrats lost abortion because they didn’t try hard enough to keep it.
For years Democrats refused to formalize abortion rights into law. Asked if his administration would fight for the Freedom of Choice Act — which he had promised to do as a candidate — President Obama told CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry that it “is not the highest legislative priority.” Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate was a long-time foe of abortion. Nancy Pelosi famously argued that “of course” you can be [both] a Democrat and against abortion.
Like Obama, the younger Biden also refused to support abortion rights. “I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy,” Biden was quoted in a videotaped interview with Texas Monthly. “I think it should be rare and safe […] I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions.”
Even after the leak of the draft overturning Roe v Wade, the Democratic Party went out of its way to undermine pro-choice Democrat Jessica Cisneros in a primary contest with Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat being currently investigated in an illegal scheme with Azerbaijani energy interests.
There’s no denying that budgets are expressions of priorities. While there never seems to be much money for the social safety net, expanding healthcare, subsidizing education, making vaccines available to poorer nations, or providing debt relief for our own students, somehow Democrats managed to scrounge together an extra $53 billion lying around the house to give to defense contractors for the Ukraine war. And the war is just getting started.
This is in addition to the record $800 billion Pentagon budget passed by a three-to-one majority by the Democrat-controlled House. Representative Andy Levin, a member of the Progressive Caucus, expressed his dismay: “On the whole, the National Defense Authorization Act exemplifies the basic fact that we spend far too much on military-first solutions and far too little on diplomacy and on human needs at home and around the globe.”
Even our foreign policy under a Democratic President has not departed considerably from that of the Trump administration. While Trump (and Bush before him) may have glimpsed a soul in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, Biden is no slouch when it comes to sucking up to autocrats and repressive regimes.
Biden’s recent hat-in-hand trip to the Middle East was an embarrassment. Instead of penalizing Israel for killing American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, Biden gave it an extra billion dollars in military aid and agreed to restrict the rights of Americans who support boycotts against Israel’s Apartheid-style occupation of the West Bank. And by the time he got to Saudi Arabia, rather than sanctioning the Saudi regime for the gruesome murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, Biden allowed himself to be lectured by Khashoggi’s killer in order to extract Saudi concessions to produce more oil.
If Democrats think that they can run Biden or continue to limp along with leaders like Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, and Clyburn, they are mistaken. Yet we are sure to hear that “now is not the time” to let a new crew steer the ship of state. Some new iteration of an uninspiring “Better Deal” or “Build Back Better” campaign will be unloaded on voters and we will be reminded how competently Democratic septuagenarians and octogenarians saved the economy from calamity and kept thousands from dying of COVID.
And they’re not totally wrong. But what American voters want is not mere competence but boldness. And here’s why.
The fact is, no one has much faith that American democracy as it now exists can survive with perpetual gridlock, such intense political divides, endless conflicts between state and federal courts and law, and ongoing assaults on people of color and sexual minorities. To this, throw in the fact that no solution to this stalemate is possible under our deeply flawed, deeply destabilizing, and deeply anti-democratic Constitution.
We are in the midst of a Constitutional crisis not so much because one party figured out how to sabotage it but because the Constitution itself is such a mess. Until this document is shredded and re-written, we can have no political stability.
And this is precisely why American voters are always seeking bold change instead of unexciting competence. Like it or not, setting fire to the country does constitute bold change. If Democrats want to compete, then, where are their bold ideas? Purposely thrown overboard as “too far left.”
I fear that the potential of the idealized “America” which most of us grew up with and truly love will be gone in a few years — permanently disfigured by Christian nationalists and abandoned by those who couldn’t bring themselves to fight harder to hold onto it.
If gerrymandering, voter suppression, Dark Money, the Electoral College, an equal number of Senators for states mammoth or tiny, an Imperial Presidency, or pardons for felons weren’t all bad enough for American democracy — now add the Supreme Court, where Christian Nationalists enjoy a 6-3 edge, thanks to a president who actually tried to stage a coup.
To say that democracy is hanging by a thread is total nonsense. We saw the last frayed thread a long time ago. The Court’s six radical Justices (Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Thomas) are now poised to polish off democracy for good.
When Judge Katanji Jackson ultimately replaces Breyer it should escape no one’s notice that an unelected Christian Nationalist majority will prevail over an all-woman and all-minority minority.
Just like America.
The Court has set about gutting even nominal democratic norms to create a veritable Gilead. States no longer have the right to regulate weapons and are obliged to dole out public money to religious schools. Citizens no longer have the right to be read their Constitutional rights by officers in a growing police state.
Legally, women are now Court-regulated wombs with no say over the most private of medical decisions. Instead, a fanciful and unscientific notion opposed by Jews, secularists and others insists that life begins at conception. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade expected at any moment, the Court has arrogated itself the right to make medical and scientific judgements.
If you thought 1692 marked the last of American witch trials you were wrong.
State courts are ready to prosecute abortionists and women who seek abortions. States have sanctioned vigilantes to report fellow citizens and offer bounties for tips if a woman is found guilty of even seeking an abortion. Even those who suffer miscarriages will now have their personal tragedies compounded by state and mob violence. There are now reasonable concerns that data from period tracking apps will be used as evidence in criminal prosecutions.
It remains to be seen if this totalitarian descent into a new chapter of witch trials will result in the lynching of abortionists or death sentences for women and health care providers.
But, given the mob and state violence that Christian nationalism has unleashed, we’d be foolish to rule it out.
Since 1977 Native Americans have been trying to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. The text of a bill in the Massachusetts legislature is short, sweet, and uncomplicated:
The governor shall annually issue a proclamation setting apart the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day and recommending that it be observed by the people, with appropriate exercises in the schools and otherwise, to acknowledge the history of genocide and discrimination against Indigenous peoples, and to recognize and celebrate the thriving cultures and continued resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations.
Yet, for whatever reasons, some in the Legislature resist making this simple change. And in so doing they are continuing to honor one of the first perpetrators of genocide and enslavement in the New World — instead of the victims of these atrocities.
Republican culture wars have created very real wounds. Some Democrats are now overly defensive to Republican accusations of “wokeism” and “political correctness.” But Democrats ought to first consider from what noxious pit of white supremacy these accusations are coming — and should also be less concerned about so-called “cancel culture” and “erasure” than the actual erasure of Native people.
But while Massachusetts legislators dither and squirm, other states have ratified some form of an Indigenous People’s Day that either replaces* Columbus Day or coexists with it: Alabama (2019); Alaska* (2015); Arizona (2020); California (2019); District of Columbia* (2019); Hawaii* (1988); Iowa* (2018); Louisiana* (2019); Maine* (2019); Michigan (2019); Minnesota* (2016); Nebraska (2021); Nevada (2020); New Mexico (2019); North Carolina* (2018); Oklahoma (2019); Oregon (2021); South Dakota* (1989); Texas (2021); Vermont* (2016); Virginia (2020); Wisconsin (2019).
Indigenous People’s Day is also celebrated in over 130 American cities.
In 2021 President Biden signed a proclamation making Indigenous People’s Day a federal holiday, although Columbus Day remains.
And, internationally, the United Nations honors Indigenous people on August 9th.
Despite all this, some of our state legislators still regard indigenous people as a trivial issue that will just go away if they ignore it long enough. But they are mistaken.
If Indigenous People’s Day doesn’t move out of committee this year, legislators can expect to see it on their desks once again in 2023.
H.3191/S.2027 An Act establishing an Indigenous Peoples Day
There is a bill before the Massachusetts legislature asking that Massachusetts join Vermont and Maine in changing Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. Yet for some reason several of our local state representatives are hesitant to move the bill forward. Perhaps they have forgotten the ugly, brutal history associated with the discoverer of the New World, Cristoforo Colombo, otherwise known as Christopher Columbus.
In the Fifties every kid could recite the poem, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” We learned that Columbus had made an astounding “discovery” of “America” — although it was hardly new to the Arawak and Taino people who had lived there for millennia. For them it was simply home.
We learned that Columbus was a Genoan explorer who finally persuaded a Spanish queen to underwrite his voyages in exchange for a cut of the plunder. Accompanying Columbus in the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria were 87 men. Encountering the Arawak people on what is now the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, Columbus dubbed them “indios” and noted:
“They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion.”
Whereupon Columbus immediately enslaved several, forcing them to show where they had obtained the gold in their earrings. Columbus explored a few more neighboring islands, including what is now Cuba and Haiti. Upon his return, the Portuguese royalty were unhappy at the Spanish royalty’s incursion, so four Papal Bulls (Vatican decrees) were issued to specify how the two Christian kingdoms would divvy up the spoils.
The following year, a second voyage of 17 ships explored a dozen other islands. On the island of Santa Cruz Columbus encountered Caribs, whom they murdered, gutted, and beheaded. The historical record also includes an account of the rape of a Carib woman by one Michele da Cuneo, a childhood friend of Columbus.
Spanish troops remaining on the various islands Columbus visited killed indigenous people at will, forcing them to carry the new slaveholders on litters, like royalty. As King Leopold of Belgium later did in the Congo, the Spanish gave native people quotas of gold to bring to the colonizers. The consequence for failing to deliver was being maimed or murdered.
By now we all remember the breach of the U.S. Capitol Building by insurrectionists on January 6, 2021. One of these breaches occurred at the Rogers Doors on the east entrance to the Capitol. The two doors are almost 17 feet high and 10 feet wide, made of bronze, each weighing 5 tons. Completed in 1861 by sculptor Randolph Rogers, the doors tell the story of Christopher Columbus.
The semicircular panel “Landing of Columbus in the New World” depicts the terror of native people encountering the heavily-armed Spanish. Another panel “Columbus’ First Encounter with the Indians” depicts a rape like the previously-mentioned one.
Howard Zinn may have upset more than a few people when he recounted the grisly details of European conquest in his history books, but all this was old history when the Rogers Doors were cast in bronze. At the time, 1861, the mistreatment, colonization, and enslavement of native people was seen as inevitable — if not desirable — when creating an American empire. And 1861 was the very moment in American history in which the government itself was involved in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native American people.
So here we are in 2022. Rather than continuing to honor Columbus for what in modern times can only be regarded as war crimes, it’s time we honored the indigenous people whose old world became our New World.
Please sign the petition to persuade your representative to get behind H.3191 — or just call them.
He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will be destroyed. (Proverbs 13:20)
Hodgson’s Great Replacement
On Saturday, May 14th, 2022 an 18 year-old white supremacist in full body armor walked into an East Side Buffalo, New York supermarket and slaughtered ten Black people precisely because they were Black.
Payton Gendron left behind a 180-page manifesto citing the Great Replacement – a conspiracy theory which holds that Liberals and mainly Jews (“globalists” or the “new world order”) are intent on replacing white people with compliant mongrel races who reproduce at higher rates. “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility,” Gendron wrote, “is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”
For white supremacists, the end of white domination is as frightening as death. Though whites dominate government, courts and commerce, the fears of white supremacists have nevertheless magnified into nightmares of “white genocide” and “replacement” and are found not only in the manifestos of mass-murderers but in mainstream Republican political dogma.
And this includes Bristol County’s white supremacist sheriff, Thomas M. Hodgson.
Replacement was the theme of a 1973 novel by French nationalist Jean Raspail, a book that has captured the imagination of American white supremacists like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, the Identitarian movement, and a considerable number of anti-immigration and white supremacist organizations – three to which Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson has close ties and all of which flog the narrative of the Great Replacement.
Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints was first published in 1973, translated into Englsh two years later and distributed by the Social Contract Press (more on this Tanton group later). The publisher described the book’s theme: “By the year 2000 there will on present projections be seven billion people swarming on the surface of the Earth. And only nine hundred million of them will be white.” Kirkus Reviews noted the book’s inherent fascism: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
Inspired by Raspail, in 2012 another French writer, Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert Camus), popularized the “Great Replacement” theory in a self-published novel by the same name, Le Grand Remplacement. Camus also penned You Will Not Replace Us, an homage to the American Alt-Right, and Tweeted: “the genocide of the Jews was undoubtedly more criminal but still seems somewhat small compared to global [white] replacement.”
In fact, le grand remplacement dates back at least to the Thirties when the expression was used by Nazi French collaborator Rene Binet, whose brigade ended up (I’m not making this up) in charge of defending Hitler’s bunker. An article from radioFrance notes that the phrase was probably used even earlier to characterize slave revolts in Haiti and Martinique, as well as to disparage Jews around the time of the Dreyfus affair.
While never truly defeated, Western fascism has been making a bit of a come-back. France’s Rassemblement National, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, England’s British National Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, and Spain’s Vox all wrap themselves in the same white Christian nationalism and anti-democratic authoritarianism that now characterize the American Republican Party. And all are preoccupied with “invasion” or “replacement” by non-white immigrants. It is no coincidence that the American Conservative Union’s CPAC Convention took place in Hungary this year. Fusing pan-European Identitarianism and resurrected fascism with good old-fashioned American white supremacy has long been a project of extremists like Steve Bannon.
But white supremacy cannot succeed without maintaining white Christian privilege and white numerical superiority, at least in the voting booth. Laws and maneuvers privileging white Christians, limiting immigration for non-whites, maintaining police control over largely non-white communities, preventing the diminution of the “white race” by abortion, and ensuring white election advantage – all are methods of delaying the inevitable loss of white supremacy.
The Tanton Network
Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman opens with an unhinged racist, Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard, standing in front of a screen as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is projected onto his face. Beauregard laments the halcyon days when Anglo-Saxons were unchallenged masters of the nation, and he repeats several times, “We had a great way of life.” Today that lost “great way of life” has become a dog whistle for white supremacists and anti-immigrant groups who want to “make American great again” by making it white again.
Beauregard may be a fictional character, but John H. Tanton was not. Tanton was a Michigan ophthalmologist who single-handedly created a network of over a dozen white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups, half of which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as hate groups.
The three best-known are: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a lobbying and action group with great influence within the Trump administration; the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS); and NumbersUSA, all of which produce dubious anti-immigration reports and statistics. Tanton also created the Social Contract Press, which first published The Camp of the Saints.
Though they might sugar-coat it a bit, FAIR’s mission is the preservation of Anglo-Saxon dominance from rapacious hordes of non-white, non-English speakers who threaten to replace white Christians and destroy America, thanks to the subversive efforts of globalists and socialists.
Once mainly an anti-immigration lobbying group, during Trump’s presidency FAIR became deeply embedded in his administration. MediaMatters notes that the mainstream media often cites FAIR’s untrustworthy “statistics” indiscriminately. The Libertarian CATO Institute slams FAIR’s studies and statistics as “fatally flawed” and “sloppy.”
FAIR’s legal wing, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, formerly headed by Kris Kobach, provides legal assistance to anti-immigrant groups. In recent years IRLI has dabbled in disenfranchising voters of color based on the claim that “illegals” are risking everything to throw elections for Democrats by voting illegally.
FAIR’s founder John Tanton expressed the organization’s mission most clearly: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And when Tanton spoke of “Europeans” he meant whites: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
George Washington University’s Gelman Library contains a repository of letters between Tanton and Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who served as a board member of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Tanton and Graham wanted to create what they called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research.”
In 1991 Tanton and Graham took great interest in KKK leader David Duke’s campaign for the Louisiana governorship and were encouraged by Duke’s founding of the National Association for the Advancement of White People: “[T]here is a lot going on out there on the cultural and ethnic (racial) difference” [front], Tanton wrote. Appealing to racists was ultimately going to be “all tied to immigration policy. At some point, this is going to break the dam.”
FAIR, then, was created to mirror Duke’s approach and promote white interests: “There is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests,” Tanton wrote. “Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.”
As a proponent of eugenics, Tanton also argued for sterilization of the “lesser” races: “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news to less intelligent individuals, and how will it be implemented?”
Dan Stein
FAIR’s current president is Dan Stein, who often coordinates media appearances and travel for Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson.
In a 1997 interview with “Alt-Right” darling Tucker Carlson, Stein claimed that Latino refugees arriving in the U.S. are godless, low-IQ haters: “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing […] Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans. Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?”
For Stein. immigration is a matter of maintaining white political power. He worries about a power shift attending newer waves of immigration. “It’s almost like they’re getting into competitive breeding,” Stein said in 1991. “You have to take into account the various fertility rates in designing limits on immigration.”
In addition to Stein’s views on recent immigrants, FAIR’s president indulges in a conspiracy theory that invokes the same villains responsible for the Great Replacement: “I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism…”
Center for Immigration Studies
Like FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was founded by John Tanton and publishes questionable reports on immigration. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, CIS maintains extensive links to white supremacist and antisemitic groups. In 2017 the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 2,012 occasions on which CIS circulated white nationalist content.
CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, who first worked at FAIR, quipped after the deadly 2010 Haitian earthquake: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”
Jessica Vaughan, CIS Director of Policy Studies, may be the organization’s best known face – and certainly well-known to Hodgson, with whom she has appeared repeatedly. Vaughan is well spoken and comfortable testifying before Congressional subcommittees. Still, as the Anti-Defamation League reports, Vaughan had no misgivings in April 2014 when she gave an interview to an antisemitic newspaper, the American Free Press, founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto.
Hodgson goes to work for FAIR and CIS
In 2011, According to FAIR’s annual report, the organization began cultivating sheriffs like Hodgson. “In 2011, we identified sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.” FAIR staff “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences, and invited them to come to Washington to meet with FAIR’s senior staff. We invited sheriffs who played the most prominent roles in addressing illegal immigration locally to FAIR’s national talk radio event, Hold their Feet to the Fire, where they shared their stories and expertise with listeners across the country.” Since roughly that time Hodgson has been a FAIR spokesman.
In July 2014 Hodgson visited the Rio Grande on a trip organized by FAIR’s National Field director, Susan Tully, who reported: “What we’re doing down here in the Rio Grande Valley is all about public education of our law enforcement officials so that they can see exactly what is going on along the border.”
The Anti-Defamation league already regarded Tully as a conspiracy theorist. She claimed, with no proof, that four million immigrants were granted amnesty in 1986 and – again invoking the Great Replacement – charged the Obama Administration with running school buses across the border to provide free K-12 education for Mexicans. The SPLC tracked Tully’s involvement in organizing a racist housing ban on immigrants in Fremont, Nebraska in which she called immigrants “invaders.” And, for organizing purposes, Tully simply made up the “fact” that Illinois has more “illegal aliens” than California. Tully has also been involved with an Oregon anti-immigration group with extensive militia and white supremacist links.
When FAIR National Advisory Board member Richard Lamm said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are,” he didn’t mean just Latinos but Muslims as well. Susan Tully clarified Lamm’s remarks: “They are not coming here to become Americans,” she said. Rather, Muslims are “promoting colonization of their own religion, of their own culture in towns and taking them over.”
Tully has been spreading hate since 2002 for FAIR. In one interview with radio host Phil Valentine at a 2006 FAIR event in Tennessee, Tully claimed that a Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas described arresting the same man seven times. Tully said she asked the agent, “What do you do on the eighth time?” and Valentine interjected: “Shoot him!” Tully laughed and the FAIR crowd cheered.
In March 2015 Hodgson appeared with Tully at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford. He has appeared at most of FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events coordinated by Tully, most recently in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021.
In 2016 Hodgson was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan of CIS. The third speaker was Raymond Hanna from the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America which also maintains white supremacist ties. ACT and FAIR have strong connections — and Tully figures into all of them. In 2016 Tully spoke at an ACT for America event in Idaho. ACT for America also happens to have a Nazi problem. In Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront.
On March 28, 2017 Hodgson testified with CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan at Border Security and Immigration Enforcement hearings in Washington.
In June 2017 the Sheriff appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold their feet to the fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Malkin too has links to white supremacist groups, including VDARE, as well as to Islamophobic groups. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves. And, of course, Malkin is also a big fan of both John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints.
FAIR Board of Advisors
Over the years Hodgson has maintained numerous associations with Muslim-bashers, Anti-semites, gay-bashers, Birthers, and every variety of conspiracy theorist — many of them members of FAIR’s National Advisory Board. In November 2017 Hodgson joined that board.
When asked if his board membership might be construed as endorsement of his colleagues’ views, or at least be poor judgment on his part, Hodgson bristled: “I’m on a Board of Advisors. I go once a year to listen.”
But Hodgson is too modest. In 2014 the sheriff was not listening but speaking to FAIR’s National Board of Advisors when he conducted a two-hour dinner discussion on “The Effect of the President’s Decisions on DACA and its Impact on Our Law Enforcement Challenges.” In 2016 Hodgson participated in the National Board’s “Sanctuary Cities and Law Enforcement” roundtable with Putman County, NY Sheriff Donald Smith and FAIR’s Law Enforcement Relations Manager, Robert Najmulski. Half an hour later, FAIR Media Director Ira Mehlman gave a talk entitled “Soros Hacked: The Truth Behind His Big Money Network to Destroy U.S. Borders.”
Hodgson was present for Mehlman’s analysis of materials that Russian hackers had stolen from Soros’ Open Society Institute, which Mehlman caled a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is often white supremacist code for “Jewish” and FAIR, as we will shortly see, has an axe to grind with Soros not only because he is a liberal philanthropist, but also because he is a liberal Jew.
Besides Hodgson, some of FAIR’s National Board members include:
Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazelton, PA who signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later;
Sharon Barnes, clearly no DACA lover, who wrote: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts;”
Gerda Bikales, who regards Spanish as a ghetto language: “I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto;”
William Chip, who wants to repeal the 14th Amendment;
Richard Lamm, former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are;”
K.C. McAlpin, an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different;”
Paul Nachman, a Montana white supremacist who writes for VDARE, calls refugees “good liars,” and questions the existence of “moderate Muslims;”
Robert D. Park, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that government has abdicated its responsibility to uphold a Constitutional clause requiring it to defend the U.S. from “invasion;”
Randy Pullen, former chairman of the Arizona GOP and self-appointed expert on black crime: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers;”
John Philip Sousa IV, great grandson of the famous musician, Birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio;
Alan N. Weeden, whose family owns the Weeden Foundation, major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID, a national identification system.
Islamophobia
Although Hodgson swims with racists, Birthers, and antisemites, If there is one group to which he has more connections than any other, it is Muslim bashers.
In 1998 Hodgson was among the first group of municipal public safety officials to attend a four-day conference in Leesburg, Virginia on Strengthening the Public Safety Response to Terrorism. The conference was organized by the International Association of Fire Chiefs in conjunction with the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance and brought together police and fire chiefs from most metropolitan areas of the United States.
In an interview Hodgson said: “We were down there for four days to learn about this new thing that was coming onto our doorstep if we — Actually we were far behind in law enforcement. Because there [were] already people, terrorist activity long going on before that. In fact, if you look at [Steven Emerson’s] ‘American Jihad’ which will be worth your watching, you will see people — Muslims raising their — terrorists rising their rifles, dancing in the hall above stores in New York, saying, kill the infidels, kill the infidels. It’s all on tape. But anyway, so my training down there, I’m thinking, OK, you know what? This is good training, it’s good to be aware. The bag they gave us to carry our materials had a stencil on the front of it with the New York skyline with a target on one of the World Trade Center.”
Steven Emerson’s account of American Muslim rooftop celebrations of 9/11 in New Jersey, and Donald Trump’s recollections of the same have both been discredited. But Hodgson is drawn to self-anointed terrorism and Islam “experts” regardless how unreliable their information or their memory.
In 2015 Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a synagogue run by Rabbi Jonathan Hausman – another self-appointed national security expert. Hausman’s temple had previously hosted Dutch neo-fascist and Islam hater Geert Wilders. Over 100 members of the clergy, including other rabbis, protested a similar hate fest the synagogue hosted the following year featuring Muslim-basher Frank Gaffney and Christian nationalist Jerry Boykin. When asked about Hodgson’s talk with Hausman, he explained he was just there doing his duty to inform the public about terrorism: “They asked me to come speak about terrorism. That’s what they asked me to do. So I was I was to speak with them. […] I was asked — I was invited to go there to speak. That’s why I was there, because of my my involvement with the terrorism task force.”
Lynch’s film, “They Come to America,” was reviewed by the Anti-Defamation League. “In the documentary, Lynch travels the country interviewing people about undocumented immigration. Lynch talks to figures from anti-immigrant groups such as NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform [both Tanton groups]. Lynch also interviews Glenn Spencer of the anti-Hispanic hate group American Border Patrol.”
Like Hodgson, Lynch is a supporter of the Constitutional Sheriff Movement. In 2014 Lynch made a fawning documentary about sovereign citizen rancher Cliven Bundy and in 2016 his bid for president was so off-the-wall that the GOP stood clear. Lynch routinely exaggerates the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, claims that the Chinese are sneaking across the Mexican border in order to inflict a “cyber 911” on the U.S., and that ISIS is bringing terrorists into the U.S. via Mexico. This is exactly what we hear from Hodgson.
In 2018, Hodgson appeared on FOX News with Bernard Kerik, claiming that in 2015 MS-13 had ordered its members to expand the gang’s presence on Nantucket. Both claimed that MS-13 was recruiting in island high schools. The supposed metastasis of MS-13 in New England has been one of Hodgson’s favorite themes. Yet, as violent and grisly as the gang’s occasional handiwork is, MS-13 membership is down dramatically. In fact, in 2018 the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, said that “we have all but eradicated MS-13 in the Greater Boston area. We’re running out of MS-13 targets.”
Another Islamophobic group that Hodgson is connected to, ACT for America, was founded in 2007 by Brigitte Gabriel. It claims to have more than 1,000 chapters around the country, and espouses the crudest sort of anti-Muslim hate. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented ACT’s many links with antisemitic, neo-Nazi, Christian right, Identitarian, and white supremacist groups. ACT for America sponsors anti-Muslim legislation and organizes anti-Muslim events with neo-Nazis. ACT for America organizes around the claim that Christianity and Judaism are under attack by Islam. Pastor Jack Hibbs and Stoughton Rabbi Jon Hausman — whom we met earlier — were both speakers at ACT’s 2016 “Religious Persecution” conference in Washington, DC.
In July 2007 Gabriel spoke at the Annual Convention of Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI): “The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arabic world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil and this is what we’re witnessing in the Arab and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no soul! They are dead set on killing and destruction.”
Perhaps because of its far-too-frequent neo-Nazi connections, ACT for America became too toxic for even Donald Trump. Following an article in the Miami Herald announcing ACT’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, which was to have been headlined by Michelle Malkin (another friend of Hodgson’s), the Trump administration had second thoughts: “[The gala] will absolutely not be taking place at Mar-a-Lago,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization announced.
ACT might have been too toxic for Trump — but not for Hodgson and his friends from FAIR and CIS. In September 2016 the sheriff appeared at a Republican unity rally in Norfolk county attended by his old friend Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies and by ACT for America’s Ray Hannah.
In 2018 Hodgson and Brigitte Gabriel appeared again at FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event in Washington DC. And on September 26th both Hodgson and Gabriel attended FAIR’s 2019 “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event.
Antisemitism
In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s governmental affairs director and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to bethe worst enemies of the country.”
Hodgson has had a long acquaintance with Rios, having appeared with her regularly at FAIR’s annual “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events. In 2017 Hodgson appeared at one with Rios, Michelle Malkin and FAIR’s Dan Stein. Rios’s interviews were broadcast on the Christian broadcast network, American Family Radio, which also hosts programs by James Dobson and Brian Fischer. Among other members of the far right in attendance were Tom Roten, Congressman Steve King, Robert Spencer, and Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka. Among other gems, Rios told listeners that immigrants “don’t know basic hygiene.”
On February 10, 2019 Hodgson appeared on the American Family Council’s “Washington Watch” program with Tony Perkins. Perkins, who says that teaching evolution to children contributes to mass shootings, whose Family Research Council fabricates false claims about the LGBTQ community, and who would deny Muslims equal rights to religious freedom and ban mosques, played a central role in the Pompeo State Department’sMinisterial to Advance Religious Freedom, a flagrant effort to make Christianity our state religion.
In 2001 Stephen Steinlight of the Center for Immigration Studies – one of the Tanton groups with which Hodgson is involved, and who suggested that Barak Obama be “hung, drawn and quartered” – wrote a report titled “The Jewish State in America’s Changing Demography.” Reflecting the Great Replacement theory and virtually screaming “Jews will not replace us,” Steinlight castigated secular Jews for their historical support for liberal immigration policies, arguing that Mexicans would soon erode Jewish political power. Steinlight offered himself as an example of a Jew who had come to see the light, saying that his own views had been changed by CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian – whose remark about Haiti you are already familiar with.
For FAIR and CIS, their war against the Jewish embrace of multiculturalism has largely been a failure, and secular Jews like George Soros who still advocate for liberal immigration have become a bitter enemy, as seen in Media Director Ira Mehlman’s 2016 talk following Hodgson’s at FAIR’s National Advisory Board meeting. In 2004 Steinlight issued a call to action with an essay, “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry” but he still couldn’t make any progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing the “Jewish Establishment” of censorship and repression.
Philosemitism
If liberal secular Jews are the “bad Jews,” then for FAIR and CIS Israel is the “good Jew” and a model of ethno-religious nationalism in which security and immigration are handled the “right” way. In 2019 FAIR’s Mehlman penned an article in the Daily Caller praising Israel’s “separation wall.” Hodsgon has also cited Israel’s wall as a model for the U.S.
In March 2017 Hodgson attended the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, also on the public dime. AIPAC, which bills itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” is the most powerful foreign lobby in the United States. While Democrats (and this includes most American Jews) have increasingly distanced themselves from Israel’s hard-line policies, Republicans have embraced AIPAC, and AIPAC has returned the favor by supporting extreme Christian Right Republican candidates.
Hodgson has not been particularly discriminating in jumping under the political bedsheets with antisemites and crackpots. A poster boy for this is Rick Wiles, an End Times believer and a fierce antisemite.
In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Rick Wiles, a conspiracy theorist who, like Hodgson, advocates locking up people whose politics he disagrees with. Wiles devoted “the first half of the program to recount several profound prophetic dreams his family received years ago,” and in the second half Wiles interviewed Hodgson, who discussed immigration and his work with FAIR.
Among Wiles’ more deranged statements in recent years: that Obama was inspired by Lucifer, that Obama killed Supreme Court Justice Scalia as a pagan human sacrifice, that the Irgun has kill teams in America, and that Jews will use gun control laws to kill Christians.
American Border Foundation
But for Hodgson it always seems to boil down to immigration.
In 2018 Hodgson watchers took note when the sheriff announced with great fanfare that the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA) would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgson’s NSA project folded after raising less than $100K in three months — despite his false claim that excessive web traffic had crashed the site. For a time Hodgson’s old NSA site redirected donors to a group called the American Border Foundation.
When Hodgson began his association with the American Border Foundation, its Director of Communications was Jeremy Messina, who identifies with the white Nationalist Identitarian movement and whose Facebook postings bore striking similarities with the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto.
The American Border Foundation‘s crowdfounding scheme never reached its $450 million goal. During its three-year run, ABF’s less-than 4,000 donors raised barely over $227K. Its founder, Gary Dolan, had tried wall-building before via a FundRazr campaign that raised only $12K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer – who has ties to FAIR sister organization AVIAC – went on the conspiracy and white supremacist circuit trying to sell the project.
Kramer appeared on the far-right Southern Sense podcast and on an “anti-federalist” program that frequently invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”).
Despite lackluster donations, Hodgson claimed that as a sheriff he could cut through the red tape to ensure donations got to the Department of Homeland Security and that the wall would be built. In November of 2018, Hodgson said he submitted a form to DHS to donate $100,000 to pay for “border barriers on the Southern border.” But DHS informed the American Border Foundation it could not accept the donations.
Nevertheless, in 2019 Hodgson and Kramer were still acting as if the crowdfunding effort was still viable. Both spoke at a FAIR-AVIAC-sponsored press conference in Washington, whose main function was to highlight the “Angel Families” who had lost family members to auto accidents or crimes committed by undocumented migrants.
Hodgson’s latest project is called Protect America Now, which looks like nothing more than several God-and-Country sheriffs who oppose immigration reform, gun control, voting rights, secularism, and socialism. The sheriffs include: the group’s spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb; Green County (MO) Sheriff Jim Arnott; Livingston County (IL) Sheriff Tony Childress; Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas Hodgson; Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey; Culpeper County (VA) Sheriff Scott Jenkins; and Wicomico County (MD) Sheriff Mike Lewis.
Despite Protect America Now’s call to “stand strong against lawlessness,” its sheriffs refuse to enforce state gun control laws or COVID-19 mask or social-distancing mandates. Instead, harkening back to the original function of American sheriffs as slave patrols, this motley crew support arming and deputizing their mainly white county residents against “urban” protesters and – again echoing the Great Replacement – border “invaders.”
Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb is the public face of Protect America Now and a “Constitutional Sheriff” who claimed in one speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread.” Lamb belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founded by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and spoke at CSPOA’s 2020 Virginia Conference. At least three other Protect America Now sheriffs, Thomas Hodgson, Scott Jenkins and Wayne Ivey, are also CSPOA members.
Contrary to Protect America Now’s marketing on Fox News and elsewhere — Protect America Now is not Lamb’s creation. It turns out the incorporator and director of Protect America Now is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative who has been accused of, fired for, and charged with multiple counts of voter fraud, and who set up Protect America Now most recently in June 2020. As a sometime associate of Karl Rove, Sproul’s entire career has been devoted to voter suppression and dirty tricks.
The trademark for Protect America Now was created in 2004 and was the brainchild of Kathy W. McKee, who is still listed on a PAC registration with a similar name. McKee was also the driving force behind a 2004 Arizona voter suppression bill, Proposition 200. As soon as McKee got Prop 200 on the ballot, the GOP and every brownshirt and satin-sheeted group in Arizona took an interest. But McKee made the mistake of bringing an unfiltered white supremacist, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, onto the organization’s national advisory board. Abernethy was so extreme for the rest of the racists that the Federation for American Immigration Reform removed Abernethy and took control over PAN to save Prop 200, despite previous support for Abernethy.
As the GOP increasingly embraces nativism, the extremists have gone mainstream. The innvolvement by high level GOP operatives like Nathan Sproul and Kory Langhofer using sheriffs like Hodgson and their dangerous militia and white supremacist connections says a lot about the party’s transformation.
Not so very long ago it was racists and xenophobic extremists who worked behind the scenes to support the GOP. Now it’s the Republican Party operating behind the scenes to support the extremists.
Confederate Tie(s)
A couple of years ago, someone noticed that an archived page from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department featured an official portrait of Hodgson wearing a Confederate necktie. Howard Graves, a research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), recognized Hodgson’s tie as an “Old South Confederate Necktie” which resembles the Confederate battle flag and is sometimes called an Anglo-Confederate society tie. Graves added, “Many people affiliated with the broader neo-Confederate movement wear that tie either in necktie or bowtie form.” Mark Pitcavage with the Anti-Defamation League, agreed: “The tie in the photograph seems certainly to be derived from the design of the Confederate flag.”
Despite everything you’ve read so far, Hodgson vehemently denies his sly tip of the hat to the Confederacy. “They know I would not be wearing anything that makes me the poster boy for bigotry.”
Hodgson’s spokesman provided an even more flaccid defense – that Hodgson “has never heard of neo-confederates or anglo-Confederate societies or anything like that.”
Despite the faux outrage and feigned innocence, in the last 24 years Bristol County voters have had ample time to observe a sheriff who openly advocates for white supremacy and rubs elbows with neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis. In fact, there is no one in Bristol County who qualifies better than Hodgson as a poster boy for bigotry.
It’s time for voters to finally send this companion of fools into retirement in November.
Those who have watched Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson for any length of time know of his extensive white supremacist connections and attention-grabbing moves like instituting chain gangs, offering to have his prisoners build Trump’s border wall, informing on his own church in unctuous letters to former immigration advisor Stephen Miller, or personally participating in a jail riot. Hodgson is restless and ambitious, and he spends much of his time traveling at Massachusetts taxpayer expense to events organized by the Republican Party or by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and spinoffs like Advocates for Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC), most of which both the ADL and SPLC count as hate groups.
Hodgson’s newest project is called Protect America Now, which purports to be simply seven God-and-Country sheriffs who oppose immigration reform, gun control, voting rights, secularism, and socialism. The sheriffs include: the group’s spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb; Green County (MO) Sheriff Jim Arnott; Livingston County (IL) Sheriff Tony Childress; Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas Hodgson; Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey; Culpeper County (VA) Sheriff Scott Jenkins; and Wicomico County (MD) Sheriff Mike Lewis.
Despite Protect America Now’s call to help “stand strong against lawlessness,” most refuse to enforce state gun control laws or COVID-19 mask or social-distancing mandates. Instead, the sheriffs support arming and deputizing their mainly white counties against both urban protesters and border “invaders.”
Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb is the public face of Protect America Now. Lamb is a self-promoter with numerous businesses and organizations through which he and his wife Janel market themselves and their “God and Country” brand of nationalism. He has interests in two pest control businesses with police themes. One of Lamb’s “charities,” the American Sheriff Foundation, took in $50,000 in donations but can not account for $18,000 of it. The Foundation’s main function seems to be to sell Lamb’s “brand” and the couple’s books about themselves. Lamb is being investigated by the Arizona Attorney General for refusing to seize property in 2018 owned by the family of a lobbyist friend.
Lamb is a “Constitutional Sheriff” who claimed in one speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread”. He belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founded by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and appeared at CSPOA’s 2020 Virginia Conference. At least three other Protect America Now sheriffs, Thomas Hodgson, Scott Jenkins and Wayne Ivey, are also CSPOA members.
Jessica Pishko, in a Slate article entitled “Sheriffs Helped Lead This Insurrection,” hit the nail on the head when she wrote that “ninety percent of American sheriffs are white men, and in recent years they’ve become strongly affiliated with white supremacist groups. Across the country, sheriffs have declared that they will not enforce laws they deem ‘unconstitutional,’ like COVID-19 public health orders or gun laws limiting weapons possession and permits. Their influence has only grown since the pandemic began, as mask wearing became affiliated with progressive liberals and a bare face was a sign of Trump support. Trump has always had an affinity with sheriffs. He met with more sheriffs at the White House than any other president and pardoned ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for failing to abide by a nondiscrimination order, calling him an ‘American patriot.’“
The Protect America Now sheriffs — contrary to their mission to “stand strong against lawlessness” have arrogated themselves the additional roles of lawmakers and judges, picking and choosing which laws they flout and which they enforce. Many of these choices hinge on race.
Pishko explains the racist origins: “[…] the constitutional sheriff movement has explicitly white supremacist roots. When the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was unconstitutional, county sheriffs were among the Southern officials who defied the court’s decision. They claimed that, in fact, desegregation was unconstitutional and invoked a legal theory called ‘interposition,’ which argues that states can independently decide federal laws are unconstitutional and nullify them.”
Which is precisely the approach Trump and the GOP took in fighting both impeachment and Trump’s election loss.
When asked for comment on the January 6th Capitol insurrection, Lamb seemed to echo QAnon, attributing insurrectionist anger to the unpunished crimes of Hillary Clinton and defending the rioters: “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away.” Lamb also repeated accusations of Democrat election fraud in a video that he subsequently took down.
Lamb is well-connected with the white supremacist Tanton network, its groups FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA, Angel Families, AVIAC, as well as border wall scammers like Steve Bannon (pardoned), Brian Kolfage (indicted), and Tom Hodgson, whose crowdfunding partnership with the now-defunct American Border Foundation, still can not account for more than $227,000 it collected.
While Lamb may be the poster boy for Protect America Now, six more sheriffs round out the roster. Some of them are less the ideologue than just cruel, arbitrary, racist, and crooked jailers who work for a white constituency that thinks cruelty is the only way to run jails and conduct police patrols.
Sheriff Jim Arnott serves Green County in the Missouri Ozarks. Like his brothers in Protect America Now, Arnott does things his way, voters and employees be damned. Arnott has made a name for himself insisting on his officers’ belief in a deity. When asked by one reporter what he would do if one of his deputies objected to his mandatory “In God We Trust” decal, Arnott replied, “Well, I guess he’d have to work somewhere else if he didn’t like it that bad.”
Like several other sheriffs, including Tom Hodgson, who was investigated by Homeland Security, the Massachusetts Attorney General, and a Congressional delegation for his personal participation in a correctional officer riot, Arnott runs a cruel, filthy jail where half those incarcerated have contracted COVID-19. In 2018 a county employee blew the whistle on Arnott’s sheriff’s department being pressed into a political campaign for a county tax increase. Arnott sued the state for the identity of the whistleblower and launched a barrage of press releases designed to fight the case in the court of public opinion. Arnott even harassed a county commissioner who had objected to Arnott’s ethics violations. Ultimately Arnott lost his case and finally had to admit that he had indeed violated state ethics laws.
Tony Childress of Livingston County, Illinois, is Protect America Now’s only Black sheriff. Childress was one of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s earliest converts to its xenophobic “border invasion” campaign. With fellow Protect America Now members Hodgson and Jenkins, Childress attended a FAIR- and CIS-led junket to the Mexican border in 2014. Childress was also one of 40 sheriffs who met with former president Trump in 2019 about hardening border security. In 2018 Childress was found to have engaged in a little double-dipping — serving as sheriff while also working as a security consultant for Innovative Security Solutions. Childress defended his actions with the usual sheriff defense — whatever he had done was done solely in the interests of public safety.
Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey is the living, breathing incarnation of the Southern sheriff. In 2013 Ivey re-introduced slave-style chain gangs. It was a racist touch that Arizona’s Joe Arpaio used and which Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson has also tried. If Ivey’s chain gangs were not bad enough, Brevard County’s sheriff produces “Wheel of Fugitive” videos and encourages the county’s 83% white citizens to arm themselves. Slave catching is alive and well in Brevard County.
In 2018 Ivey’s deputies murdered Gregory Edwards, a jailed Black veteran, by punching, tasing, and pepper-spraying him before placing a hood over his head and strapping him into a chair. Edwards died of a non-medical “police diagnosis” called “excited delirium.” At first Ivey refused to turn over the videos of Edwards’ death, but eventually agreed to turn over a sanitized version. In 2020 Ivey’s deputies murdered two Black teenagers,18-year-old Sincere Pierce and 16-year-old Angelo Crooms, by shooting into their moving car. Again Ivey refused at first to release the video.
After his deputies killed Edwards, Ivey paid a surprise visit to Edwards’ widow “for a welfare check.” Ivey, ringed by half a dozen deputies, showed up at Kathleen Edwards’ home unannounced, demanded she “step outside,” upon which Ivey grabbed and then, inexplicably and grotesquely, hugged her. It was a bizarre, cruel, and menacing visit. “Out of respect for Mrs. Edwards’ privacy, the Sheriff’s Office will not be commenting on the nature or purpose of tonight’s service call at her residence,” Ivey’s media spokesman said, while acknowledging that the deputies had also filmed the staged confrontation.
Like Sheriff Arnott, Ivey insists that his deputies affix “In God We Trust” decals to their vehicles. And for those who like their God and Country nationalism in equal doses, Ivey also insists on playing the national anthem or staging some “patriotic moment” every Monday. In 2017 the City of Orlando passed the Trust Act, which limited the ability of city police to assist ICE. In 2018 outraged county commissioners, with Ivey’s help, sponsored an “anti-sanctuary” resolution.
For all his faux devotion to God and Country, upright behavior has not been the result. In 2011 Ivey retired from the Florida department of law enforcement (FDLE) three days after he was accused of threatening a female probation officer who just happened to be the former fiancee of Ivey’s son Robert.
Like Mark Lamb, Ivey sounded the alarm when Black Lives Matter began protesting police murders. At the height of the protests in June 2020, Attorney Alton Edmond, who organized a George Floyd rally that drew more than 3,000 people, announced an election challenge to Ivey. It was the first time the Democratic Party had bothered to challenge the Republican.
Scott Jenkins is the Sheriff in Culpeper County, Virginia. In September 2020 Jenkins posted a video rant on his department’s Facebook page: “Citizens should alert themselves to the true nature of this violence and realize the intent is for it to continue across our nation during the months ahead. Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement is not peaceful and at their heart are violent. They may bring their violence to any community at any time and especially where they see weakness in local government officials. These are a few of the many examples across our nation.”
So frightened of Black protesters was Jenkins that he advocated turning his county’s 80% white citizenry into reserve deputies to fight “lawlessness,” gun control and other forms of legislative or judicial “meddling” that he, Scott Jenkins, determined to be “unconstitutional.” Jenkins openly flouts his state’s gun laws. And if it sounds like the sheriff might just be a CSPOA member, well, it’s because he is.
A number of county residents have launched a legal effort to recall Jenkins, and he was sued by the Legal Aid Justice Center in Falls Church, Virginia, for handing over an undocumented immigrant to ICE in 2017. After serving his time in the county jail, Francisco Guardado Rios was held past his release date in order to be turned over to ICE, as Jenkins had done to 100 other undocumented detainees. It was unconstitutional and violated even state law, but Jenkins fought law and precedent, finally prevailing in U.S. District Court. This made him a hero to the far right.
Wicomico County, Maryland Sheriff Mike Lewis is another Protect America Now sheriff who refuses to enforce gun laws. “State police and highway patrol get their orders from the governor,” Lewis said. “I get my orders from the citizens in this county.” In a video Lewis told one reporter, “As long as I’m the sheriff in this county, I will not allow the federal government to come in here and strip my citizens of their right to bear arms. I can tell you this, if they attempt to do that, it would be an all-out civil war, no question about it.”
Responding to Lewis’ inflammatory rhetoric, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence launched a petition calling for the Maryland Police Training Commission to revoke Lewis’ certification. “It is difficult to see how a law enforcement officer who is threatening to wage war with the United States government meets any recognized standards of public service. In the wake of his threatening comments, Sheriff Lewis should not be given the responsibility of training law enforcement officers in Maryland.”
Contrary to Protect America Now’s marketing on Fox News and elsewhere, Protect America Now is not Lamb’s creation. It turns out the incorporator and director of Protect America Now is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative who has been accused of, fired for, and charged with multiple counts of voter fraud, and who set up Protect America Now most recently in June 2020. As a sometime associate of Karl Rove, Sproul’s whole career has been devoted to voter suppression and dirty tricks.
It is no coincidence that today’s Protect America Now has is roots in a similar organization created 18 years ago or that Nathan Sproul was involved in both. The trademark for Protect America Now was created in 2004 and was the brainchild of Kathy W. McKee, who is still listed on a PAC registration with a similar name. McKee was also the force behind Arizona’s 2004 bill. Proposition 200, a voter suppression bill. As soon as McKee got Prop 200 on the ballot, the GOP and every brownshirt and satin-sheeted group took an interest.
But McKee made the mistake of bringing a white supremacist, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, onto the organization’s national advisory board. Abernethy turned out to be even too extreme for the rest of PAN’s racists and xenophobes, so the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which had previously supported McKee and Abernethy, stepped in to save Prop 200 despite its previous support for Abernethy.
Between 2004 and 2005 there was a power struggle for control of Protect America Now between McKee and the Federation for American Immigration Reform and, once again, it involved Nathan Sproul. As he had done with the Kanye 2020 campaign, in 2004 Sproul paid signature collectors to get Ralph Nader on the ballot in order to siphon Democratic votes. But while Sproul’s signature gatherers were getting Nader on the ballot their prime mission was gathering signatures for the voter suppression bill.
The story gets even weirder when we learn that the lawyer who incorporated Protect America Now for Sproul is Kory Langhofer, an equally ethically-unencumbered GOP lawyer who fought both the Mueller investigation for Trump and challenged Arizona election results for Trump. Protect America Now and Langhofer’s offices share a common address. Langhofer is also the co-owner of Signafide, a company that uses artificial intelligence software to challenge ballot signatures.
Two years ago, Hodgson, Lamb, Ivey and the others were just a bunch of Stetson-hatted MAGA zealots supporting cruel immigration policies promoted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller. But by dutifully groveling and doing whatever was asked of them, each has established a closer personal connection to Donald Trump and to a Republican Party that finally looks like them.
As the GOP increasingly embraces nativism, the extremists have gone mainstream. Involvement by high level GOP operatives like Nathan Sproul and Kory Langhofer with sheriffs like Hodgson and their dangerous militia and white supremacist connections says a lot about the party’s transformation.
Not so very long ago it was racist and xenophobic extremists who worked behind the scenes to support the GOP. Now it’s the Republican Party operating behind the scenes to support the extremists.
If you have been worrying about the white supremacy now openly-displayed within Republican Party ranks, you’re not alone. Last week the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), a research group that keeps an eye on America’s far right, issued a report, Breaching the Mainstream, listing 875 legislators (almost all Republicans) with ties to nationalist groups or ones promoting conspiracy theories. Don’t feel smug, Bay Staters — you’ll find a number of Massachusetts Republicans among them.
Unfortunately, the news just keeps getting worse.
Last week Republicans took one of their conservative political conferences to Hungary — possibly the most anti-democratic Western nation of all — and literally rubbed elbows with European fascists — while only days before in Buffalo, New York a white supremacist tried to launch a race war by slaughtering Black people as they went about their grocery shopping.
On May 19-20, Hungary’s Center for Fundamental Rights hosted the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest. After prayers, of course, Hungary’s antisemitic prime minister Viktor Orban and American white supremacist commentator Tucker Carlson joined the organizers in opening the event, which was off-limits to U.S. reporters.
Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz, the Hungarian Civic Alliance, began life in 1988 as Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Young Democrats), a liberal center-left organization that rejected Hungary’s ruling Communist government. Its members were quickly joined by Hungary’s far right. In 1994 an unlikely mix of centrists and far-right elements led Fidesz to adopt “liberal-conservativism,” driving real liberals out of the party. Within less than a decade Fidesz became a nationalist, then a hyper-nationalist, then an authoritarian party riddled with neo-fascists, antisemites, and open racists. Orban has been Hungary’s president for four terms now.
Orban set about stomping on all vestiges of the liberal order. He did everything possible to smear fellow Hungarian George Soros as both a “globalist” and a Jew, and to drive Soros’s liberal philanthropies out of Hungary. So normalized is antisemitism now within Fidesz that Day Two of the conference featured a close friend of Orban’s, Hungarian writer Zsolt Bayer, who has calls Jews “stinking excrement” and the Roma “unfit for coexistence.” Bayer has also not been shy in voicing his contempt for Black people.
After coffee the program proceeded with: former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, fired from CNN for his homophobic, racist, and pro-colonial comments; former Member of British Parliament Nigel Farage, an endorser of neo-Nazi parties in France, Austria, and Germany; Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s president, member of parliament, curiously present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th; and Ben Ferguson, who broadcasts racist, homophobic, and nationalist bile from a home studio.
Quite the group to set the tone.
For the last 45 years the CPAC conference has shaped the direction that American conservatism takes. CPAC was the launchpad for Reagan-style politics after Watergate and CPAC still defines the path of the American Republican Party. It is significant, then, that CPAC now promotes Hungary — a state no longer a democracy and one with less freedom than even Brazil — as the Republican Party’s model for America’s future.
After lunch, the program turned to “Western Civilization under Attack.” The themes were indistinguishable from those of the Buffalo, NY shooter, who in a long manifesto had written that he feared low white birth rates, the “replacement” and “genocide” of white people by inferior Blacks, and the invasion of America by foreign migrants. Amid the shooter’s Great Replacement worries, he leveled accusations of Jewish and globalist cultural contamination and fears of the erosion of white Christian values. George Soros was mentioned.
CPAC speakers in their “under Attack” session were: Balazs Orban, a long-time friend of the American far-right; Francesco Giubilei, writer and head of far-right think tank Nazione Futura, which is close to far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy); Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group created by white supremacist John Tanton; Frank Furedi, a Hungarian-British sociologist who rants about “woke” identity politics; and Valerie Huber, an American anti-abortion and pro-abstinence zealot. Their topics were stopping abortion, promoting Christian values (over corrupt, “woke” globalists) and preventing invasions of migrants. It goes without saying that many of the speakers were antisemites. And, of course George Soros was mentioned.
Long before the Buffalo shooter invoked the Great Replacement theory, Viktor Orban enunciated it at his fourth inauguration: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations — migrants.”
At the Budapest conference Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union which produces CPAC each year, not only connected Orban’s views on “replacement” with the shooter’s but explained why ending abortion rights was such an important goal of white nationalists: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved. […] You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”
In a segment called “In God We Trust” the conference pushed white Christian Nationalism masquerading as self-determination. Cynically, or perhaps strategically, CPAC chose an Israeli speaker, Eugene Kontorovich, who shills for a number of right-wing think tanks including the Hoover Institute, to defend Christian Nationalism for all the same reasons he supports Zionism: national self-determination. By Kontorovich’s logic, if 51% of a nation’s citizens are Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, everyone else must be forced to live according to the majority’s belief system.
“Culture Wars in the Media” was up next, featuring, among others: David Reaboi of the Claremont Institute; Matthew Tyrmand from Project Veritas (permanently suspended by Twitter) who is also involved in the “paleoconservative” journal Chronicles magazine; and George Farmer, CEO of Parler (whose app was suspended by Apple and Google) and husband of moon-landing and COVID denier Candace Owens. Hungarian news anchor Balazs Nemeth, who shares Orban’s views of the Ukraine as Hungary’s enemy, discussed fake news in the globalist media.
The following morning’s theme was “The Father is a Man, the Mother is a Woman.” Candace Owens was introduced as “the favorite influencer of Donald Trump.” Antisemite Zsolt Bayer did his thing. Péter Törcsi, who wrote “the Gay lobby has society firmly in its clutches,” also spoke. Birgit Kelle, the author of Gender Gaga, discussed the topics of her book: the ills of hiring quotas for women, liberal relaxations of binary concepts of gender, toilets for trans teens, and liberals whose goal is “the destruction of the family.” Gregor Puppinck, a lawyer who has written numerous attacks on George Soros as well as disputations of democratic rights, particularly abortion as a right, led with abortion. Andrea Földi-Kovács, who survived Orban’s purge of liberal Hungarian TV anchors, frequently slams abortion in her pieces.
Ending the program was Gladen Pappin, who has written that “deracinated, gnostic deformations of Christianity […] can’t sustain a true cultural Christianity, precisely because both the ‘Christianity’ and the culture it engenders are immaterial, disembodied, individualistic — which is to say, perfectly suited to liberal order.”
Forget sissified liberal Christianity; what’s really needed is a muscular, authoritarian-approved version of Christianity stuffed down everybody’s throat — but, of course, for their own good: “It is time for American conservatives to grasp what their European counterparts already know. The deep wellsprings of Christian culture offer a permanent source upon which good government can draw, so that, as the psalmist sings, ‘we may know thy way upon earth: thy salvation in all nations.'”
In fact, American conservatives ought to know what European liberals already know — that fascism hasn’t been particularly good for Europe.
After coffee the theme turned to “Conservative Revival” with talks by: Mark Meadows, Trump’s disgraced Chief of Staff; Rojo Edwards, an American-born Chilean fascist; Spanish fascists Jorge Buxade and Santiago Abascal, from the Vox party; and an authoritarian roundtable.
After lunch the theme was “Homeland, Security.” Maria Schmidt, historian and former Orban advisor, frequently writes about the dangers of socialism. Next up was David Azerrad, who worries too much about changing demographics and who teaches at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college that fights “Critical Race Theory.” As one might expect, Azerrad was not received well when he delivered a speech entitled “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria” at Saint Vincent College. Then there was Chris Farrell, director of Judicial Watch and a member of the Muslim-bashing Gatestone Institute. He was followed by John Fund, an anti-immigration zealot who claims that undocumented immigrants risk everything to vote illegally. James Wharton, a member of the British Conservative Party and the House of Lords, finished up the session by unctuously praising Orban.
Finishing up the day was “CPACS All Around the World.” The CPAC conference in Hungary was the American Conservative Union’s first stop in a series of international conferences that include Brazil (June 10-11), Mexico (September 2-3), Australia (October 1-2), Japan (December), and South Korea (TBA). Several speakers talked about plans and opportunities in these countries.
The American far right has long had a white Christian nationalist “internationale” in mind. Steve Bannon may be the poster boy for such efforts, having spent the last several years wooing European fascists like France’sRassemblement National, the Italian far-right, promoting and creating curriculum for the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in an Italian monastery, networking with German neo-Nazis, hanging out with the Bolsonaros and other Boys from Brazil — so ardent and so persistent that even Austrian neo-Nazis spurned him. But CPAC’s international conferences, organized by what are now mainstream Republicans, may gain better traction.
Ending the conference were speeches by Laszlo Kover, speaker of the Hungarian national assembly; Jordan Bardella, president of France’s Rassemblement National; Polish nationalist Patryk Jaki, who created legislation making it a crime to suggest Poland was complicit in the Holocaust; retired German academic Werner Patzelt, whose book on the neo-Nazi group PEGIDA showed a bit too much admiration and argued for Germany’s mainstream conservative party, the CDU, to accommodate the far-right; and Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA, a “Pizzagate” conspiracy nut with innumerable white supremacist connections.
Although the CPAC conference was closed to most U.S. journalists, the full CPAC Hungary program can be found here and online there is an assortment of video clips of the conference.
Hannah Arendt, in her masterful “Origins of Totalitarianism” described perfectly the function of organizations like CPAC: “The world at large […] usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”
This is the future of the Republican Party. And if the GOP gains power in the Fall this could also be the dark future of the United States.
Update May 24, 2022 – Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has neutered the Hungarian Constitution to permit him to rule by decree.
When someone like Payton Gendron walks into a Buffalo supermarket intent on murdering as many Black people as possible it’s natural to want to dismiss him as an outlier, a lone wolf, an aberration.
But, like bacteria on an agar plate, an entire culture of white supremacy landed on Gendron’s petri dish. Rather than being an example of a lone, sick individual, Gendron simply put into motion the genocidal impulses and white supremacist rage that exist within a very sick White America.
Gendron — like New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant — invoked the supposed “replacement,” “invasion,” and “genocide” of white people as his rationale for trying to kick off a race war. As many articles published in the aftermath point out, white victimology is a common theme in MAGA politics and particularly immigration policy (see this and this and this and this and this and this and this for starters).
But besides “replacement theory,” I wondered what else was in Gendron’s manifesto. Since over half of it is actually a “how-to kill” guide, I will not link to the full version but to a redacted version here. True, the document is an artifact of an act of terror. But reproducing it does not glorify a twisted ideology so much as it indicts a toxic culture of white nationalism that spawned Payton Gendron. It really should be read.
Similarities with the New Zealand shooter’s 74-page manifesto are obvious: Gendron used the same white supremacist Sonnenrad (also used by the Ukrainian Azov Battalion), the same document structure, and he stole many of Tarrant’s own words. But Gendron’s 180-page document was not just a manifesto but a “how-to” manual for mass murderers.
Over half of his document discusses the pros and cons of certain firearms, weapon modifications, and body armor — as well as where a future killer might obtain such gear. It was shocking to discover how many thousands of dollars this teenager spent on weaponry, how readily available it was, and how its presence failed to raise alarms in a home Gendron shared with his parents and two brothers.
Gendron’s “manifesto” consists of the following sections: a Q&A about his beliefs and motivations (13 pages); his hatred of Black people (10 pages); hatred of Jews (30 pages); Arabs and whites (2 pages); cryptocurrency (2 pages); plans for carrying out his attack (5 pages); a how-to weaponry buying guide (94 pages!); messages to various political groups (2 pages); and his general thoughts, which are basically Tarrant’s (22 pages).
The ten pages devoted to portraying African Americans as a mongrel race are beyond ugly and cite questionable, discredited, and retracted scholarship. One article written by Philippe Rushton in a Canadian psychology journal brought up this disclaimer:
“Although Rushton ceased teaching for the Department of Psychology in the early 1990s, he continued to conduct racist and flawed studies, sometimes without appropriate ethics approval [1], for two more decades. There are other ethical concerns surrounding Rushton’s research. In particular, much of this research was supported by the Pioneer Fund, a foundation formed in 1937 to promote eugenicist and racist goals.”
Another Rushton article Gendron cited had been retracted:
“Rushton and Templer (2012) contend that animal studies show that dark skin pigmentation is reliably related to increased aggression and sexual activity. They speculate that the same may be true in humans, and claim that the psychological literature supports this contention that is grounded in evolutionary theory. Their thesis is that genetic differences, related to darkness of skin colour, explain supposed racial differences in sexual behavior and violence. Both authors are now deceased, and so we cannot speculate about their motivations and intents when publishing this work.”
On the whole, Gendron’s main point is that Blacks are inferior to whites and that, owing to white superiority, coexistence is impossible. People should go back to where they came from — well, everyone except for white people who after all this time might as well be regarded as natives (arguably, indigenous and African-American people have a greater claim here).
One of Gendron’s graphics depicts a mud hut with the nonsense claim that Africans have contributed nothing of value in 6000 years (ignoring Egyptian, Kush, Nok, Aksum, Mali, Songhai, and Zulu civilizations). But isn’t that precisely what Iowa’s white supremacist Congressman Steve King said?
Now, if Black people are simply inferior, then discrimination, structural racism and civil rights violations are all lies. And white privilege too must be a fake and fraud. And, what the hell, let’s turn it around and declare that Black privilege actually exists. And if the Civil Rights movement, or Black Lives Matter, chafes at inequality, well, then it’s simply an abuse of power, an example of [Jewish] propaganda, or reverse racism. Such is the way a white supremacist’s mind works. But, again, how are these views significantly different from Donald Trump’s half century of overt racism? Or Christopher Rufo’s attacks on the reality of white privilege?
Billions of specks of lethal airborne bacteria like Trump’s, King’s, Rufo’s and Rushton’s, and toxic particles from discredited studies like the Moynihan Report which blamed Black Americans for their own mistreatment, continually swirl around in the American atmosphere, eventually settling on the agar plates that grow citizens like Payton Gendron.
Perhaps not totally unexpected was the vehemence of Gendron’s antisemitism. If you are a white supremacist who believes African-Americans have no intellect and no agency but you are also a conspiracy nut, then you need to blame someone for all the world’s problems. And what better people than Jews?
But now we have stumbled upon the white supremacist’s dilemma: if both are enemies, but Blacks are completely inept, how do Jews and Blacks together create so much misery for god-fearing white Christians? Simple: Blacks are simply a Jewish tool for dividing white America.
“‘The elite’, ‘The 1%’, ‘The bankers’, ‘The capitalists’, (((them))), ‘The marxist’s’ they all refer to the same group: THE JEWS!! […] The real war I’m advocating for is the gentiles vs the Jews. We outnumber them 100x, and they are not strong by themselves. But by their Jewish ways, they turn us against each other. When you realize this you will know that the Jews are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had. They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We can not show any sympathy towards them again.”
Note that “they turn us against each other” is precisely the same formulation that MAGA Republicans have chosen to justify bans on teaching CRT or acknowledging LGBTQ+ realities. To the white supremacist mind, “globalists” — not America’s social inequities themselves — are responsible for sowing division, and this has apparently necessitated bans on “divisive concepts” in schools throughout America.
If you can’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.
Gendron actually spent three times the pages describing “Jewish ways” than he did African-American “inferiority.” I won’t reproduce his crudest images — especially the one with the Hitler quote — but he used cartoons depicting a Jew stuffing African-Americans down the throats of non-Jews, another poisoning the well of white culture, and another identifying “Jews” as a stand-in for anyone with power or influence. And, if course, they are responsible for most of the problems of the Western world:
“The Jews are responsible for many problems that we in the western world face today. They will stop at nothing to ensure that they have full control over the goyim. The most common way the Jew does this is by weakening us with their propaganda. Since they mostly own mainstream media, this is easy. They will create infighting between our people and races so we are fighting each other rather than them. For example, currently the Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people. For our self-preservation, the Jews must be removed from our Western civilizations, in any way possible. I should also mention that not all “Jews” are ethnic or religious Jews. Jeff Bezos for example is not a religious or ethnic Jew, but may be considered a Jew. All elitists and globalists may be considered a “Jew” simply because they act like one.”
Funny he should mention Critical Race Theory. If you have read any of Christopher Rufo’s anti-CRT materials, you will recognize the same Christian nationalist bacilli that ended up on Gendron’s agar plate. Christian nationalist animus toward “globalists” and “elites” betrays its origins in classical antisemitism.
Another graphic implies that African-Americans were not bright enough to create the NAACP themselves (in fact, its primary founder, W.E.B. DuBois, was arguably the brightest of them all), and that the NAACP was not only a Jewish tool but a Communist plot.
According to Gendron, Jews are responsible for pornography, abortion, the grooming of gay kids, and converting children from potential Christian breeders into atheist transsexuals. This is apparently a plot to reduce white Christian demographics. Gendron wrote that he learned the “truth” of all this from following 4Chan, World Truth Videos, Daily Archives, and the Daily Stormer.
The mass-murderer’s choice of neo-Nazi websites may at first appear to be a departure from more mainstream MAGA news and opinion sources like the Federalist, WorldNet Daily or the Daily Blaze. But they all share precisely the same white supremacist and Christian nationalist preoccupations with Communists, “globalists,” Eurocentrism, and rejecting any acknowledgement of the racist society we live in.
But white supremacy is not just for MAGA Republicans.
Ajamu Baraka, contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report, tied together the Buffalo massacre with the concierge service that NATO (and naturally the present Democratic administration) has shown a white European nation — in contrast to their 2011 invasion of Libya:
“Zelensky talks about the need to ‘defend the West,’ ‘Europeanness,’ ‘Western values,’ and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and [that] is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.”
It is ironic that American Liberals, in embracing eurocentric chauvinism in the Ukraine via relaxed immigration caps and steroid-infused defense spending not offered on this scale to any other country, are on exactly the same page as MAGA Republicans celebrating their own eurocentric white chauvinism at their CPAC convention in Hungary.
Baraka connects all the dots:
“Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not be ‘replaced.’ This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe.”
All of which raises the question: if the GOP is based on white supremacy, and white Liberals won’t reject the inherent white chauvinism and white supremacy in their own foreign policy, how can Democrats ever hope to fight the cruder versions from the GOP?
At first these two words seem to have no connection. But ask yourself why both were woven into the racist “chivalry” that the Confederacy cobbled together from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and tales of German nobility — or why race and sexuality were invariably connected in lynchings of Black men accused of talking to white women. Ask yourself why — long after slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow — there were still laws on the books against miscegenation. Ask yourself why racial purity and misogyny are so abundant in far-right groups.
Now ask yourself why men like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz were so fixated upon and could so easily segue between race and sexuality when they tried to put the first Black woman ever nominated to the Supreme Court “in her place.”
Republicans, in their heart of hearts, their dream of dreams, relish the power that white slave masters exercised over people who their slave laws decreed were property — some whose wombs they made property through sexual violence. Slave owners’ wives were property as well, and woe to a woman who cast an admiring, or simply a kind, glance at a Black man.
Male white ownership and control of both race and sexuality was implicit in slavery. The use of religion to establish the “proper place” for both women and Blacks was also implicit. As a system of production by slaves optimized by the production of more slaves, slavery had no use for unproductive sex and relied on selective bible readings which condemned homosexuality.
You don’t have to be a scholar to read for yourself some of the perversions of scripture Southern clergymen came up with to justify slavery. Apologists for the “peculiar institution” were just as prolific as abolitionists. Project Gutenberg has a great (and free) collection you can access online.
In one Gutenberg collection entitled “Cotton is King” Mississippi clergyman E.N. Elliott defended slavery by denying it had anything to do with ownership of human bodies; no, he wrote, it involved a relationship established by God.
But many such defenses of slavery were equally bizarre or inhuman. S.A. Cartwright MD, writing in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, stated with absolute certainty that “the physiological fact that negroes consume less oxygen indicates the superior wisdom of the precepts [enslavement] taught in the Bible regarding those people.“
As to beating slaves, “You hear of the poor negroes […] being beaten with many stripes by their masters and overseers. But owing to the fact that they consume less oxygen than white people, and the other physical differences founded on difference of structure” … well, they can hardly feel it, Cartwright concluded.
The denial of Black humanity was echoed by Chancellor Harper of South Carolina, who wrote, “Will those who regard slavery as immoral, or crime in itself, tell us that man was not intended for civilization, but to roam the earth as a biped brute?”
Intentionally or not, Harper spilled the beans on the real reason that slavery existed — simple Capitalist greed. In fact, Marx couldn’t have expressed it any better:
“Property–the accumulation of capital, as it is commonly called–is the first element of civilization. But to accumulate, or to use capital to any considerable extent, the combination of labor is necessary. In early stages of society, when people are thinly scattered over an extensive territory, the labor necessary to extensive works cannot be commanded. Men are independent of each other. Having the command of abundance of land, no one will submit to be employed in the service of his neighbor. No one, therefore, can employ more capital than he can use with his own hands, or those of his family, nor have an income much beyond the necessaries of life. There can, therefore, be little leisure for intellectual pursuits, or means of acquiring the comforts or elegancies of life. It is hardly necessary to say, however, that if a man has the command of slaves, he may combine labor, and use capital to any required extent, and therefore accumulate wealth.”
Dr. [of Theology] Anthea Butler, in her great little book “White Evangelical Racism,” describes the long history of misuse of religion to justify slavery. She acknowledges the diversity and complexity of white Evangelicals, noting that some later participated in the Civil Rights movement.
But when Republicans pushed their “Southern strategy” and wooed formerly Democratic white Evangelicals with dog-whistles — if not overt racist appeals — the seduction was too easy. Republicans were offering white Evangelicals something they had long desired — political power.
In an interview with Religion & Politics, Butler explained, “It’s not just that the movement is led by a bunch of white guys. It’s that there is a cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive. I try to show, from Billy Graham onward, how this inherent whiteness works, often by way of color blindness. Officially, evangelicalism claims to be committed to a series of beliefs and values that are higher than and so uninvested in questions of race, and yet their political conservatism really seems to limit their tolerance for non-white input, even from peers and leaders who share their belief system.”
Butler links white paternalism in the home, on the plantation, and in American foreign policy: “In the Reconstruction period, the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause’ lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were ‘heathen’ in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity.”
As white Christian Nationalist assaults on secular society mount, it is not surprising that almost all involve the twin Republican obsessions of race and sexuality. Ground zero today is the nation’s schools, where Republicans attack diversity curriculum and district efforts to make schools safe and welcoming places for gay and trans students.
January 6th should have been a wake-up call, but we are failing to take the threat that white Christian Nationalism poses to democracy seriously. Within a generation the Republican Party has become an openly proto-fascist political organization based on white Christian Nationalism. Republican political institutions like CPAC openly flirt with European fascists. Many of its members are white supremacists who make no effort to conceal their neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi sympathies.
And why should they? This is exactly what Republicans now stand for.
Americans have become highly segregated into ideological silos. So much so that if they venture outside their comfort zone they feel endangered, queasy and agitated — as if they had strapped on a VR headset and were gazing into an unsettling virtual reality.
People on the Left and Center don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing virtual reality. And the reverse is true. The far-right certainly doesn’t place a high premium on science, verifiable fact or primary sources.
For example, you would be hard-pressed to find many Republicans who have actually read any of the authors of foundational texts on things they despise — like Critical Race Theory, for instance. Instead, they rely on a network of think tanks and crackpots to interpret and propagandize.
I mean, why read Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — two of the founders of Critical Race Theory — when you can read the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who has a long history with far-right think tanks — and in one gig with the Discovery Institute promoted Creationism for a living?
Now, I am pretty sure my version of reality contains a bit more, well, reality than the right-wing’s virtual world. But it’s important to inform oneself. And not only do I trust primary sources over second-hand accounts, but I want to know what these people actually think, and why.
Just like liberals, the right-wing has its own news sources. FOX News may be the best-known, but any list should include Breitbart News, Epoch Times, WND, One America News, the Daily Signal, Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, the Blaze, and a variety of Christian-ish news sources that offer everything from weather reports and dating advice to devotionals and End Times prophecy.
Then there are the social networks. Parenthetically, let me just say that it has been a huge mistake to “deplatform” right-wing crackpots by kicking them off Facebook and Twitter. These exiled “thought-leaders” have simply fled to right-wing social networks like Gab, Gettr, Parler, and Trump’s new (and still not working) Truth Social — dragging all their supporters with them, where they may be out of sight but are still very much out of their minds. Only, now it’s more difficult to track what they’re up to.
Platforms like Bitchute, Rumble, and PlayerFM host videos and podcasts that might not pass muster on mainstream media streaming services. The messaging program Telegram has also become a popular app for hosting far-right chat groups.
For those determined to keep a toe in the mainstream, YouTube is still an option for delivering content — unless the content creator is spreading COVID disinformation or raises some other flag. Some will just bite their tongues and show a little restraint in order to stay on Facebook and Twitter.
I signed up for Gettr, Parler, Truth Social and Telegram. Gab has been removed from both the Apple and Google stores so I couldn’t try it, and I was never able to actually use Truth Social because two months after signing up I’m still in a waiting queue.
Just like Facebook and Twitter, each turned out to be primarily an echo chamber for news and opinion pieces published elsewhere. The level of civility was no worse than on Facebook or Twitter. But far from being oases of free expression, right-wing social networks do censor liberal views. Trump Truth Social reportedly goes so far as to ban criticisms of Donald Trump.
I ultimately gave up on the right-wing social networks (as I did long ago with their mainstream cousins), instead turning my attention to news and opinion pieces from think tanks and news sources that manufacture (not simply echo) right-wing virtual reality and right-wing talking points.
One of these talking point on which I agree wholeheartedly is that social networks really do pose a problem to democracy with their censorship.
Not only have COVID disinformation spreaders and the most repellent of racists run afoul of censors, but so have socialists, commentators who may have appeared on Russian media at one time or another, foreign policy critics, supporters of the BDS movement, Israel critics, Russian artists and musicians, newspapers covering whatever there is to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and those now falling victim to American social media’s new mission as a partisan in the West’s sanctioning of Russia.
But let’s not blame any one party for this. Censorship and forced political and social exile has been a bipartisan phenomenon as long as I’ve lived — and that’s a life that includes the McCarthy era.
Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine — despicable as it is — has led to the West pulling out all the stops to ban Russian anything and even snatching internet domains. The almost McCarthyite frenzy which Putin’s invasion has unleashed serves to remind us that internet freedom exists only at the pleasure of Western governments and their digital gatekeepers.
The fact that corporations have now become deputized agents of state policy should also shock us. Because if there is no daylight between the media and the state, or if the media is deeply “embedded” with the state (a phenomenon that the Iraq War highlighted), then it’s ultimately the state itself that is engaged in censorship.
That said, the American Right has never been more dangerous than it is today. It is truly an enemy of democracy and tolerance, and a racist and misogynistic force of repression that hasn’t given up on the idea of erasing any separation of church and state. And today, while those of us on the Left and Center bicker, all the far-right’s moving parts are firing in synch like pistons in a well-tuned V8 engine.
The final layer of right-wing opinion-shaping is a stunningly vast network of right-wing think tanks and well-funded foundations which include ALEC, Christian Coalition, Civics Alliance, Claremont Institute, Colson Center, Coolidge Foundation, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Federalist, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (!), FreedomWorks, Gingrich 360, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, National Association of Scholars, National Legal Foundation, Pioneer Institute — and hundreds (if not thousands) more.
But don’t take my word for any of this. Follow the American right-wing yourself. Feedly is a great tool for following RSS feeds. Whenever a new article from any one of the 70 right-wing media outlets I follow is published, it appears in Feedly. If you want to start with my list, you can download my OPML configuration and import it into your own Feedly account or most any RSS reader.
Thankfully, there are a number of organizations that also follow the American Right. Some of the best are the Southern Poverty Law Center, Right Wing Watch, Political Research Associates, the Anti-Defamation League, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, the ACLU, and the NAACP.
Read them, donate to them, and take their warnings seriously. And — I won’t say “enjoy” — but good luck in your own explorations of right-wing virtual reality.
As I wrote in a previous post, many of the ideological battles we are having today were conceived in the war of words between abolitionists and apologists for the “peculiar institution” of slavery which raged in the decades before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Though they may be centuries apart, Republicans today share not only a similar world view but routinely employ polemics strangely similar to those of antebellum apologists for slavery.
Take, at random this Republican Party assessment of now-confirmed Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: “she will act as a Far-Left activist judge and a rubber stamp for Biden’s woke agenda if confirmed.”
If anything, this sounds more like typical snark from right-wing members of Congress. But if you dive a little deeper into the choice of words it’s not just McCarthyite or Bircher vocabulary that the GOP is using. It’s a way of communicating a certain world view.
Whether Ketanji Brown Jackson grew up a red diaper baby devouring the works of Marx and Lenin (which she didn’t) or began her career as a corporate lawyer (which she did) is immaterial. When Republicans say “far-left” Liberals hear the word and want to confront its literal meaning. When Evangelicals hear the word they know it’s code for “un-Christian.” Likewise, when Republicans use the words “woke” or “activist” they also know that Evangelicals will infer certain meanings from them.
The fact is, anyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Green and her Proud Boyfriends is considered “far-left” (ie., infidel, atheist, socialist, communist) by today’s Republicans. And nobody in their right mind would deny that Republicans themselves are effective activists. But as the GOP increasingly adopts white Christian Nationalist language, their rhetoric increasingly mirrors arguments and phrases found in pro-slavery apologetics. One of the most often-cited examples of the latter is James Henley Thornwell’s sermon entitled “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”
Thornwell was a South Carolina Presbyterian minister, slave owner, and prolific slavery apologist. Disgusted with smug abolitionists calling slavery immoral, on May 26, 1850 he preached “The Rights and Duties of Masters” at the dedication of a church for slaves. Thornwell prefaced his remarks with a line from Colossians IV:1. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven. He was reminding each member of the audience, Black and white, that the Confederate social order had been ordained by God.
Thornwell began by accusing abolitionists of “woke” hypocrisy and persecution:
The slave-holding States of this confederacy [this was 11 years before the Confederacy was actually created] have been placed under the ban of the publick opinion of the civilized world. The philanthropy of Christendom seems to have concentrated its sympathies upon us. We have been denounced with every epithet of vituperation and abuse, as conspirators against the dignity of man — traitors to our race, and rebels against God. Overlooking, with a rare expansion of benevolence, the evils which press around their own doors, the vices and crimes of their own neighbors and countrymen…
Then he accused the abolitionists of creating “divisiveness” and insurrection:
This insane fury of philanthropy has not been content with speculating upon our degradation and wretchedness at a distance. It has aimed at stirring up insurrection in our midst.
Thornwell implied that a smug little group of abolitionists actually presented an existential threat to the Confederate order established by God:
A spurious charity for a comparatively small class in the community, is dictating the subversion of the cherished institutions of our father, and the hopes of the human race — the utter ruin of this vast imperial Republick, is to be achieved as a trophy to the progress of human development.
Then he slammed Northern and European “liberal” values for the excesses of “unchecked democracy” and mad secular social scientist tinkerers. In fact, you can practically hear Thornwell railing against the “lawless” Black Lives Matter movement and its allies:
The agitations which are convulsing the kingdoms of Europe — the mad speculations of philosophers — the excesses of unchecked democracy, are working out some of the most difficult problems of political and social science; and when the tumult shall have subsided and reason resumed her ascendancy, it will be found that the very principles upon which we have been accustomed to justify Southern slavery, are the principles of regulated liberty — that in defending this institution we have really been upholding the civil interests of mankind — resisting alike the social anarchy of licentiousness — that we have been supporting representative, republican government against the despotism of masses on the one hand, and the supremacy of a single will on the other.
Ignoring the issue of slavery, Thornwell instead portrayed the conflict between Northern and Southern modernities as a “clash of civilizations.”
But that the world is now the theatre of an extraordinary conflict of great principles — that the foundations of society are about to be explored to their depths — and the sources of social and political prosperity laid bare; that the questions in dispute involve all this is dear and precious to man on earth — the most superficial observer cannot fail to perceive.
Then Thornwell named names of his enemies — leftists and atheists — again offering “regulated freedom” as the alternative. Thornwell predates right-wing critics of Critical Race Theory who object to an “oppressor-victim” dynamic and deplore secular tinkering with the order God has created:
The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake. One party seems to regard society, with all its complicated interests, its divisions and subdivisions, as the machinery of man, which, as it has been invented and arranged by his ingenuity and skill, may be taken to pieces, reconstructed, altered or repaired, as experience shall indicate defects or confusion in the original plan. The other party beholds in it the ordinance of God; and contemplates ‘this little scene of human life’ as placed in the middle of a scheme, whose beginnings must be traced to the unfathomable depths of the past, and whose development and completion must be sought in the still more unfathomable depths of the future – a scheme, as Butler expresses it, ‘not fixed, but progressive, in every way incomprehensible;’ in which, consequently, irregularity is the confession of our ignorance, disorder the proof of our blindness, and with which it is as awful temerity to tamper as to sport with the name of God.
In the Confederate world any threat to the established order (one with plantation owners at the top, white sharecroppers in the middle, and slaves a the bottom) was an abomination. For Thornwell, any sort of “activist” was an enemy of “order and regulated freedom” — and that included not only Communists and Jacobins but “red” Republicans (the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collinses of their day).
The remainder of Thornwell’s long sermon is well worth reading. Highlights include: denying that slavery is the physical ownership of a person; that only a slave’s labor is property; that Paul of the Gospels was less concerned with slavery than a slave’s reverence toward his master, a reverence that reflects God’s order; that, far from denying a slave his humanity, slavery makes him an equal partner in God’s plan; … and the like. The sermon is so long, in fact, that Thornwell seems to have employed every pro-slavery argument he could think of and, in the process, made it a perfect exemplar for future study.
Because of its growing economic and political isolation, and because of the need to defend slavery from liberal criticism, the South slowly developed an alternative view of modernity that turned its back on liberal values that were at least given lip service in Europe and the North. And while one may be tempted to conflate the “Lost Cause” with slavery alone, the “Lost Cause” was the South’s alternative modernity, one that featured agrarian Capitalism based on chattel (not wage) slavery, “regulated freedom” (a high and very selective level of repression), a rigid hierarchical social order, a highly porous separation of church and state, and an ideologically and racially homogeneous citizenry.
Southern Christianity was also diverging from the North’s. For preachers and other apologists of slavery, their sermons increasingly focused exclusively on the life of the spirit rather than the temporal lives of slavers and their “property.” Working for social justice or calling for change to social structures defied the Southern social order established by God (in actuality the C.S.A.) and was therefore “un-Christian.”
Anthea Butler points out in “White Evangelical Racism” that many of these world views still exist in white American Evangelism — including in some cases the refusal to condemn slavery. One such apologist is John MacArthur, pastor of the Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. While acknowledging the horrors of Roman slavery, MacArthur paints a rosy picture of biblical slavery and refuses to condemn the Southern Christian version, explaining that:
New Testament teaching does not focus on reforming and re structuring human systems, which are never the root cause of human problems. The issue is always the heart of man–which when wicked will corrupt the best of systems and when righteous will improve the worst. If men’s sinful hearts are not changed, they will find ways to oppress others regardless of whether or not there is actual slavery. On the other hand, Spirit-filled believers will have just and harmonious relationships with each other, no matter what system they live under. Man’s basic problems and needs are not political, social, or economic but spiritual ….
After Emancipation and well into the present day, this same religious justification continues to be used to wave away state and collective responsibility for current or historical racist oppression. The same religious justification has more recently become a convenient rationale for banning even the mention of racist systems of oppression or teaching about them. While we may be irked to hear Critical Race Theory reviled as a leftist plot, what is really jaw-dropping is to understand that, for Evangelicals, racism does not actually exist in society but instead exists only in the heart.
Using another pro-slavery argument based on the Southern Christian slave / master / God power structure, MacArthur reduces slavery to simply working for a living:
Throughout history, including in our own day, working people have been oppressed and abused by economic intimidation that amounts to virtual slavery–regardless of the particular economic, social, or political system.
For MacArthur resisting the oppression of slavery is “un-Christian” because it violates the power structure. Seen from the same perspective, any opposition to oppression must therefore be “un-Christian”:
Nowhere in Scripture is rebellion or revolution justified in order to gain freedom, opportunity, or economic, social, or political rights. The emphasis is rather on the responsibility of slaves to serve their human masters faithfully and fully, in order to reflect the transforming power of God in their lives. […] In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul wrote unambiguously, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart” (Eph. 6:5–6).
Note that MacArthur uses precisely the same citation from Paul of the Gospels that Thornwell did in 1850. Note also that the Evangelical rejection of injustice in the real world is completely at odds with most of Judaism, mainstream Christianity, Catholic Liberation Theology, and the Black Church. In other words, for all their talk about so-called “Judeo-Christian” values, they don’t actually share critical understanding with Jews and other Christians.
It’s important to acknowledge that while some Evangelicals are white Christian Nationalists, not all are. A perfect illustration is the bitter fight that erupted within the Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) when that organization recognized it had a racism problem and brought in diversity trainers. As you might imagine, the Christian Nationalists within Cru pushed back. Similarly, there are currently two different battles going on within the Southern Baptist Conference: one about Critical Race Theory and another about the Disney Corporation. And SBC nationalists use the same insulting rhetoric against their religious brethren that they use on their outside enemies.
The 179-page document that the SBC nationalists created provides an excellent overview of what white Christian Nationalists believe about subjects as far-ranging as the role of the church, social justice, race, sexuality, gender issues, and Critical Race Theory. It also contains well-organized tables listing think tanks and individuals who manufacture objections to Critical Race Theory, and each of their talking points.
If you want to understand how Christian Nationalists see race — at least within the Evangelical world — readSeeking Clarity and Unity.
Christian Nationalism has been with us almost from the founding of this country. And it has always combined the worst elements of national myth and religion.
The nation was barely a year old when the Articles of Confederation (1777) were written. A decade later the Articles were superseded by the Constitution of the United States (1787), a document drafted in secret sessions by land speculators, Federalists and creditors, and regarded by some today as somewhat of a counter-revolution.
Before ratification, the Federalists (mainly Alexander Hamilton and James Madison) sharpened their quills to sell their new form of government organization to the skeptics. Many of these documents were collected and are known as the Federalist Papers. Federal versus state rights arguments are nothing new.
No sooner was the ink dry on the Constitution than Americans lost their collective minds to the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), another in a series of religious revivals that rejected many of the Constitution’s supposed democratic values (although not as resoundingly as the very fact of slavery).
The United States may have been born respecting the separation of Church and State, but religion had no respect for the laws of man and, almost from the beginning, began undermining secular law and government.
Barely half a century into the new experiment in government the United States was deeply divided, which led eventually to the Civil War. The South rejected even token Enlightenment values professed by Northerners and Europeans and ended up with its own concept of modernity. That modernity happened to include a romantic, chivalric, religious, deeply hierarchical and repressive culture, an agrarian economy based on slavery, with a national myth based on blood and soil. On the other side of the ocean a nationalist myth based on the same Blut und Boden was emerging in what would eventually become Germany.
Partly as a consequence of its defense of slavery but also due to growing economic and intellectual isolation, Southern Christianity soon diverged from that of Northern Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. Because of the role imputed to Southern clergy in upholding social norms, the defense of slavery became their responsibility — one carried out with great enthusiasm and creativity. South Carolina Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell’s The Rights and Duties of Masters offers an example of the tortured logic found in many slavery apologetics.
As Stefan Roel Reyes points out, there were stunning similarities between the proto-fascism of post-Weimar Germany and the Confederate States of America. But there were equally stunning historical differences. In The Lost Cause Rides AgainTa-Nehisi Coates writes:
“The distinction matters. For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South. […] Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.”
How the South lost the war but managed to preserve its “Lost Cause” has been a topic studied in depth. One excellent treatment is Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920.
The amber that preserved the Lost Cause was Southern Christianity — a vessel which preserved not only the moral fervor and anti-secularism of the old-time religion but disgust for federalism and apologetics for repression and slavery.
It should be mentioned that the North and South each developed separate national myths and flavors of Christianity. Wilson notes that a “civil religion” reflects both the political and religious views of a nation:
“A civil religion, by definition, centers on the religious implications of a nation. The Southern public faith involved a nation — a dead one, which was perhaps the unique quality of this phenomenon. One of the central issues of the [Northern] American faith has been the relationship between church and state, but since the Confederate quest for political nationhood failed, the Southern faith has been less concerned with such political issues than with the cultural question of identity. Because it emerged from a heterogeneous immigrant society, the [Northern] American civil religion was especially significant in providing uprooted immigrants with a sense of belonging. Because of its origins in Confederate defeat, the Southern civil religion offered confused and suffering Southerners a sense of meaning, an identity in a precarious but distinct culture.”
Solemn quasi-religious rituals, often relating to the military, evolved in both North and South. In the North’s case, the Union was the Cause that Won. For the South, the Confederacy was the Lost Cause.
Let us now set the calendar ahead, only a few decades from the present, when thousands of Confederate monuments were erected to preserve the honor and nobility of Confederate generals (but so did the North). Almost all were dedicated with blessings from the clergy. And when the South embarked upon an orgy of lynchings, once again, many were carried out right after church for the convenience and enjoyment of white congregants. The terror of “Christian” KKK members and lynch mobs continued through the years with the bombings of Black churches, murders of Black ministers, and cross burnings.
Some Christian Nationalists are simply opportunists (Republicans) or extremists (neo-Nazis with their Aryan “churches”). But although white Christian Nationalism hardly represents the teachings of Christianity it is nevertheless found disproportionately within the Evangelical movement that formed it — even as many Evangelicals reject it.
Take Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) for example. The Evangelical organization realized it had a race problem and brought in diversity trainers. The pushback from Cru’s more nationalist Evangelicals was swift and angry. Similarly, the Southern Baptist Conference is now divided into religious and nationalist factions over the issue of Critical Race Theory.
Many of today’s culture wars have been launched by these followers of Jesus. But the version of Jesus they revere is not the man of miracles and multitudes who showed compassion for a woman about to be stoned to death. For Christian Nationalists the canonical Jesus is a lamentable “woke” sissy who would turn the other cheek, look for the best in people, oppose exploitation, and feed the hungry.
Instead, the version of Jesus best represented by Evangelical opinion polls is the vengeful killer from Revelations 19:13, riding in on a war horse, robe dripping with blood, eyes blazing with fury, sword slashing, bronze boots stomping to death anyone who ever got in his way.
Anthea Butler, a Black theologian, professor, and author of “White Evangelical Racism,” described in an interview with Political Research Associates how Evangelicals became politicized by religious crusades starting in the Forties:
“As early as the 1940s, Billy Graham had fused Christianity with patriotism and White supremacy. His goal was to make believers–including Black and Brown folks who had started to listen to him–conform to White, male, Western Christian ideals. He demonized Communists, Catholics, and immigrants. Interestingly, he got support from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, which gave these ideas added prominence. […] American exceptionalism–the idea that the U.S. is blessed by God–as well as Christian patriotism were used by Billy Graham, the Rev. Bob Jones, and other White male religious leaders of the mid-20th Century to put parameters around what it meant to be an American and a Christian. It does lead directly to MAGA.”
While overt expressions of racism may be out of fashion even as the nation has begun to acknowledge its own racist institutions, nationalist Evangelicals stubbornly deny the existence of racism and actively campaign to shut down any public discussion of it:
“Even though some White evangelicals have made statements about racial reconciliation, or even ‘color blindness,’ right now they’re fussing about having to discuss critical race theory. They’re upset about the 1619 Project’s focus on the racist underpinnings of the United States. And even though Southern Baptists apologized for slavery in 1995, they have not changed any of their behaviors so you can see through their statements and conclude that they’re posturing.”
In 2010 the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights with the assistance of the NAACP published Tea Party Nationalism. This was one of the first warnings about white supremacist, neo-Nazi, pro-KKK, and Christian Nationalist elements within several of the not-so-grassroots Republican groups. IREHR has a website that updates recent developments.
In 2011, Matt Barreto and others published The Tea Party in the Age of Obama: Mainstream Conservatism or Out-Group Anxiety? in Political Power and Social Theory. The paper made the case that the Tea Party had transitioned from pseudo-conservative to simply “paranoid,” that the movement harbored white nationalists, and that their concerns were mainly centered around changing American demographics.
In 2018 the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism published New Hate and Old: The Changing Face of American White Supremacy, which documented the rise of the Christian Identity movement, a good example of White Nationalism outside the Evangelical movement.
In February 2022 the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) jointly published Christian Nationalism at the January 6, 2021, Insurrection. The authors described a long history of similar displays of white Christian nationalist power, starting with the 1925 KKK March in Washington, DC.
We have come a long way from antebellum Southern Christianity to the Evangelical Christianity that preserved the essence of the Lost Cause; from Billy Graham’s crusades to the Tea Party; from the emergence of white Christian Nationalism to Trump; and the metamorphosis of all this into today’s Republican Party.
And we’ve barely scratched the surface. The 1936 presidential election, for example, is worth looking at if you want to see how Christian Nationalism played out within several political parties and managed to attract real-life Nazis for the first time.
America’s illiberal impulses have had a long trajectory. It’s astonishing that the Party of Lincoln is now largely a bunch of white supremacists hiding behind a cross. But this is who they are and who we must fight.
Sweeping racism under the rug while quoting Martin Luther King
I attended the Dartmouth Candidate Forum last night and took notes on the School Committee candidates. I have been following MAGA candidate Lynn Turner’s entry into the race and in a previous piece I summarized what we know about her views and what we still do not:
“If Lynne Turner is every bit the culture warrior she seems to be, electing her will mean: blocking diversity curriculum; censoring the teaching of actual history; handicapping schools’ ability to impose public health and safety mandates when necessary; undermining public schools in favor of charters; promoting privatization and vouchers; banning library books and textbooks; and refusing to play nice with the other kids. It’s also reasonable to assume that Mrs. Turner would do nothing positive for gay kids, trans kids, BIPOC kids, or sex education. These are all issues upon which she has so far refused to elaborate.”
While the forum shed some light on Lynne Turner’s views, there’s still a lot we don’t know. And the forum didn’t really illuminate much.
The forum was moderated Paul Santos, who has a show on New Bedford Guide. Present were Kate Robinson from WBSM and Chris Shea from Dartmouth Week, who put questions to the candidates.
Candidates John Nunes and Lynne Turner were present. Chris Oliver had a work commitment and could not attend the forum. Only two of the three candidates will be (re)elected when voters go to the polls on April 5th.
The hot topic was the Dartmouth mascot, which consumed much of the segment. Each candidate got a chance to demonstrate that his or her love for Dartmouth was deep and eternal and that his or her reverence for the mascot epitomized it. All were in favor of an agreement with the Aquinnah (to the exclusion of all other local tribes) in order to legitimize the town’s use of the mascot. Turner said the quiet part out loud: “I think we should not look any further than our local native tribe to find the answer that we need.”
Sure, because if you ask any other tribe, you won’t get the answer that you need.
Both candidates were asked if books should ever be banned in schools. Shockingly and without reservations, both Turner and Nunes said they had no problem with censorship. Both were asked about School Resource Officers and both replied that armed police playing social workers was great, pointing to how an SRO presence makes children view police more favorably.
Mainly, however, it was an evening for softball. There were no questions about: charters; health classes that dealt with sexual preference, identity, or contraception; what the candidates thought of trans kids on sports teams or in bathrooms; the District’s right to impose masking or vaccine mandates; and – despite questions raised by the MAGA candidate’s anti-CRT campaign – what the candidates understood of Critical Race Theory.
Instead, the question was: “Do you believe the School Committee should have a role in deciding whether to teach about race and identity, or should it be left up to the educators?”
This was a completely botched question. The first half should not have used the word “race” but instead “teaching American history involving racial injustices and struggles.” And the last half should have been “or should it be left up to parents with pitchforks?” A less open-ended question about specific curriculum materials like the 1619 Project or the 1776 Project might have kept candidates on-topic.
But even this wobbly softball seemed to shock Turner, who stammered, “Race and identity? And your question was, the School Board? Could you repeat that?”
After buying herself some time, Turner’s response was still non-responsive. “I believe that the School Committee is already involved in teaching and developing curriculum to address those issues through the Diversity and Equality Committee. They actually have charges that are about equity. There’s nothing in there about equality. But there’s a lot of discussion in them. I do watch them on the Zoom, and there’s a lot of discussion about race at those meetings. So it already exists. And, as far as how that is addressed I think we need to be careful and not to put so much focus on dividing people into boxes by race or identity. I think we need to take people as they come and to love all people however they come. I think that Martin Luther King had it right, that we should not be looking at the color of someone’s skin but the content of their character. I would like for our schools to focus more on….”
Anything but real American history. And since when do people who want to sweep racism under the rug get to quote King?!
Turner had also apparently not bothered to do her homework on school budget issues or the mandates that had irked the culture warrior enough to enter the race. Nunes at least knew his way around state and COVID funding, the schools’ aging infrastructure, and long-term planning, and he pointed out that many of the COVID-related mandates Turner hates so much came from DESE and the state Department of Health.
Both Nunes and Turner agreed with the Superintendent’s proposal to raise administrator salaries, but both managed to confuse salaried administrators with unionized teachers whose pay rates are determined by contract.
While Nunes and Turner share many views, Chris Oliver expressed concern for extremist views that Turner has expressed online and in emails to the Committee, calling them a “political agenda that is bad for our students.” Oliver asked voters to “dig a little deeper” to understand each candidate’s “true motivation for running for school committee.”
Dartmouth voters go to the polls this year more motivated than ever. The hot-button issue that could easily quadruple voter turnout is a referendum on the town’s “Indian” mascot.
On one side of the issue are most Native American tribes and those who find mascots offensive, pointing to a large body of research showing that such imagery is harmful to Native children.
Those who want to preserve the mascot fall into a couple of categories. The majority are people who either went to Dartmouth schools themselves or have kids in sports or marching band. The Indian was a harmless tradition – or so they thought – and they probably don’t give a lot of thought to how offensive it really is.
But a minority, fiercely ideological and unmistakably MAGA Republicans, can be found waging their culture wars on social media and on right-wing talk radio. Retiring the mascot, like packing Confederate statuary off to museums or teaching kids about the Tulsa race massacre, threatens white dominance of “their” culture. Any reckoning with America’s ugly racial history is something they’re just not going to tolerate.
Dartmouth’s Town election on April 5th will return or replace various incumbents, including one member of the School Committee. Two committee seats are held by John Nunes and Chris Oliver, both die-hard mascot supporters. One of them could be unseated if voters are careless.
As in much of the nation, the Bristol County GOP has been overrun by the Tea Party. It doesn’t matter whether you visit the MassGOP website or MARA, the Massachusetts Republican Assembly. Both peddle a similar cocktail of mandate opposition, school privatization, vouchers, charters, parent vetoes on curriculum, and [white] Christian Nationalism. The MassGOP has become so extreme that it regularly disparages its own Republican governor.
“Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is a post-graduate research methodology that has nothing to do with teaching history in public schools but – facts be damned – it has become the latest MAGA dog-whistle in dozens of states where Republicans have enacted Constitutionally-questionable laws to limit speech, control thought, and to have history written by legislators. With MAGA pedagogy, children can’t be permitted to learn about the colonialism, slavery and genocide that made America what it is today.
But if you can’t sanitize and weaponize school curriculum for culture wars, the next best thing is to create a beachhead in school boards across the country, fielding candidates on cautiously-worded anti-VAX, anti-mask, anti-CRT platforms – blowing all the right dog-whistles to MAGA World while trying not to let careless voters know who you really are.
It so happens we have one of these on the Dartmouth ballot for School Committee.
Lynne Turner told Dartmouth Week she was inspired to run for the School Committee after trying unsuccessfully to speak out against school mask mandates. Turner started her campaign on Facebook, telling a reporter that she wants to bring a “fresh view” to diversity issues which can be “very divisive.” Her new website is short on details, but clearly she has a problem with public health mandates, diversity education, talking about race, or teaching an honest account of history.
Safety:I value helping our schools create and maintain a wholesome, safe, environment that challenges children to think and grow into responsible people who strive to reach their potential and develop great character.
What does safe and wholesome mean? Metal detectors? Drug testing? Abstinence vows instead of sex ed? Book bans? What are Turner’s views on School Resource Officers? If “safe” means preventing bullying, how does this square with promoting a mascot that offends non-white students? Turner’s vague formulations just raise more questions.
Mandates:Now that mask mandates have been lifted, I hope we can focus on supporting everyone’s choice on how they want to manage the risks the pandemic incurs. Children thrive in normal, predictable, and social learning environments, and the pandemic has cheated them of all of that. In addition, I oppose segregating and discriminating against individuals based on their “vaccine” status.
Mercy! Discrimination? Segregation? Who knew white Republicans were in such dire need of civil rights legislation to protect them? Here is MAGA victimology on full display. On Turner’s Facebook page the new challenger confirms she is “against all mandates,” including masks and vaccinations. Turner seems to be saying: why bother with public health experts and science when you can decide for yourself if COVID or anthrax is dangerous? “I believe where there is risk, there must be choice or you run the risk of having a dictatorship,” she says, dropping another MAGA vocab builder.
Character Counts:I would like Dartmouth to help our community get beyond race, and strive to help our students “judge not, by the color of one’s skin, but by the content of one’s character.” ~Dr. Martin Luther King
When MAGA Volk wrap themselves in the flag, scripture, or Martin Luther King, watch out! Fifty years ago the Kerner Commission discovered what everyone had known all along – Black and white Americans live in vastly different realities. Today this is still the case. MAGA Republicans may want to turn the page and “get beyond race,” but maybe we ought to do that after every race gets the same great deal that white folks have had for the last half millennium.
Curriculum:I think our children will be best served with curriculum that incorporates many learning styles, and if considering curriculum with an undercurrent theme, I would likely prefer one that it is uniting for our country, giving kids a sense of pride and unity, because in these very unique times, division has run rampant.
No argument about accommodating different learning styles, but talking about slavery or genocide of indigenous people sounds like it might not be quite “uniting” enough or engender sufficient national-patriotic pride for Mrs. Turner. But high-schoolers, old enough to drive to Montreal to drink, and old enough to head down to a military recruiting center, are also old enough to tackle tough subjects and confront the world as it is. Turner’s position on curriculum is in direct conflict with her next talking point – indoctrination. If a topic is too “divisive” for her taste, what’s the solution? Curriculum and book bans? Force-fed patriotic messaging? Compulsory flag-waving?
Indoctrination:I oppose indoctrinating children into trying to get them to think a certain way about controversial topics, and insinuating that if they think differently on a topic there is something is wrong with them. Our goal should be to support respectful, dissenting points of view, and I know many teachers and staff do a beautiful job of it, however, some do not. Older children will be interested in some of the current events but instead of saying this is the right way to think about the topic, I prefer an approach that lets them look at all sides and see what views resonate with them.
I wonder if Turner shares the sentiments of Gina Peddy, curriculum director for the Carroll (Texas) Independent School District, who actually used the Holocaust as an example of an event that required hearing from “the other side” (in her district). But sometimes facts are just facts and the “other side” died by suicide in a bunker. Does Turner really subscribe to the Kellyanne Conway School of Alternative Facts? – if something “resonates” with you, then it must be true? Reality carve-outs permitting “equal time” for conspiracy theories, creationism, and pseudo-science may appeal to MAGA World but they have no place in a real school.
Public Comments:I support public comments at our school board meetings and I feel they should be welcomed and considered valuable. For example, I do not want important comments to be lost, simply because it is not on the agenda.
I actually agree with Turner on this one. But my idea of permitting public comment would be to allow any topic to be added to the next agenda rather than permitting MAGA zealots to completely derail a scheduled school committee meeting like angry truckers circling the Capital.
School Logo:I am in support of keeping our beautiful and respectful Native American Logo. This issue will also be voted on at our town vote on April 5th, so mark your calendars and please get out, and vote!
Expressed just like you-know-who: “Our beautiful and respectful logo.” In this divided town Turner leans heavily on her pro-mascot position. On March 8th she attended the Equality and Diversity subcommittee hearings at the high school and used the opportunity to distribute campaign literature that avoided tough issues but made clear she was against “woke elites.” It’s a smart move: the buzz over the mascot can only work in her favor.
Turner also took pains to signal on Facebook that she’s a member of New England Homeschoolers and considers her platform a Kids First Agenda. It’s not clear if Turner had any connection with the group when she taught in the West, but “Kids First Agenda” is the slogan of a school privatization initiative first launched by the California Charter Schools Association, which promotes school vouchers and privatization, and throws great wads of cash at school board candidates who promote “fresh mandates.”
From Turner’s use of MAGA planks, themes and buzzwords, to her own slogan, to casually dropping her homeschooling bona fides, an attentive reader gets a none-too-subtle hint of how bright red and far right on an ideological litmus strip Lynne Turner is on any given educational issue.
I contacted the candidate to get her views on other matters of interest to voters. She declined a sit-down interview but agreed to answer written questions. After days had gone by with no response, Turner politely informed me she was too busy to answer but added, “I created a website over the weekend with more details about my campaign, […], if you want, you can refer to that in addition my campaign page on facebook.”
After looking at her website and finding few answers to my questions, I made one final attempt: “I am still hoping you will make clear your positions on SROs, charters, vouchers, teaching about race, book bans, and trans kids on sports teams and in bathrooms. Voters have a right to know. That offer to speak in person still stands. Any place of your choosing.”
Crickets.
If Lynne Turner is every bit the culture warrior she seems to be, electing her will mean: blocking diversity curriculum; censoring the teaching of actual history; handicapping schools’ ability to impose public health and safety mandates when necessary; undermining public schools in favor of charters; promoting privatization and vouchers; banning library books and textbooks; and refusing to play nice with the other kids. It’s also reasonable to assume that Mrs. Turner would do nothing positive for gay kids, trans kids, BIPOC kids, or sex education. These are all issues upon which she has so far refused to elaborate.
If voters can’t get a straight answer from a candidate on important issues, it would be wise to vote for someone else. But maybe there’s still one last chance to ask all the school candidates some hard questions.
A Dartmouth Candidates Forum will take place virtually and in person at Dartmouth Town Hall (Room 305) on Wednesday, March 16th at 5:30 pm.
I just finished Anthea Butler’s excellent book, White Evangelical Racism. Butler is an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book is tour through one aspect of our malignant American history, specifically: how a perverted “slaveholders” version of Christianity has managed to corrupt virtually every aspect of American politics over hundreds of years.
As a former Black evangelical, Butler’s book is both a repudiation of white evangelism and a challenge to it. In an interview she gave to Religion and Politics, Butler not only challenges the “cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive” but the white supremacy behind the “cultural whiteness.”
As white evangelicals reached consensus on the inferiority of non-whites, they internalized a white supremacist version of Christianity, which has guided even religious missions: “In the Reconstruction period,” Butler says, “the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause’ lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were ‘heathen’ in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity.” But this is nothing new: it is at the heart of the colonialism that violently conquered the “New World.”
From Reconstruction through 1952, there was not a single year in which Black Americans were not lynched by white mobs. Most of these lynchings occurred on Sundays immediately following church services. Jamelle Bouie, writing in Slate, remarks that “these lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, ‘celebratory acts of racial control and domination.’ They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy.”
White evangelicals have replaced what the religious Right’s Dave Daubenmire calls sissified Christianity — that is, a traditional Christianity that deals in kindness and justice, one that doesn’t suit their purposes — with a more violent, punitive, white dominated, and male dominated version. White Evangelicals pretend that their many intrusions into politics are nothing more than the Word of a Living God. But there is barely a trace of Christ in white Evangelical Christianity — except for the sword-wielding slayer of the Second Coming. The truth is, the white evangelical movement, masquerading as a religion, is little more than cover for white supremacist politics.
If a religion can be hollowed-out to fit a political agenda, then why not also the fabric of reality? For White Evangelical America, truth is what you say it is, what you “just know,” what’s simply “common sense.” What we can’t see can’t hurt us. Everything in the Bible comes straight from God. White people are God’s gift to humanity. Being gay is a chosen lifestyle. Evolution is a lie. God will protect me from COVID-19. Slavery wasn’t so bad. It’s no surprise that reckonings with our white supremacist history, in efforts like the 1619 Project, must be firmly opposed.
No amount of fact, personal testimony, or science will convince white evangelicals of views that challenge white supremacy. Time after time their thought-leaders and politicians not only reject verifiable fact but traffic in manufactured lies, the more outrageous the better. Anything to “own” the Libs. Though the Space Station clearly shows the earth is round, it looks pretty flat down here on earth. So trust your eyes! And, anyway, the whole space program was a hoax filmed on a Hollywood back lot. For white evangelicals, if reality is too convincing, too real, then just call it a lie. And if that fails, you can always claim that God has sent you a prophetic dream or that a failed political candidate was “anointed” by God. Election results be damned.
Given white Christian America’s contempt for any reality but its own manufactured version, the Conservative media — print, online and broadcast — shows little interest in producing fact-based news but instead cranks out rightwing propaganda at a rapid pace, much of it pouring down hate on non-whites, immigrants, LGBTQ people, scientists, academics, and social justice reformers. Much of today’s Conservative media reads like the 21st Century equivalent of Julius Streicher’s Stürmer.
White evangelicals make up only 25.4% of the population but they are the largest single religious denomination in the United States, beating out non-religious Americans at 22.6%, Catholics at 20.8%, and traditional Protestants at 14.7%. 76% of white evangelicals are white, 49% live in the South and 22% in the Midwest. 66% see themselves at odds with mainstream American culture, lamenting positive changes in immigration, secularization and demographic diversity. For white evangelicals, these changes are all related. Immigration, civil rights, secularism and feminism all threaten Christian white male domination.
Which may explain why White America has chosen white evangelicals to be its voice. A recent Atlantic Magazine article notes, “These days, everyone assumes that this is just a fact of life: Evangelicals are Republicans, and Republicans are evangelicals.” The article goes on to describe how white evangelicals made themselves useful to the Republican Party and, within short order, how the Republican Party became a vessel for propagating white evangelical supremacy. This story is also recounted in Anthea Butler’s book as well. It’s a love story of two dying demographics.
But it’s not hard to see the attraction. White America fears the demographic changes that are assuredly coming. Specifically, White America fears the loss of five centuries of racial supremacy. The Republican Party — 81% white and 73% Christian — and disproportionately Southern — has cynically adopted or defended the “Lost Cause” teachings of Southern white evangelism — not to mention its monuments — and tolerates evangelical hostility to science and disregard for mainstream American views, and the many conspiracy theories that it circulates. It is no surprise that QAnon is spreading most rapidly among white evangelicals.
White America has entered a new Jim Crow era. Voting rights, along with secular freedoms, are now being threatened by the GOP and its white evangelical base in dozens of states. Support for police repression has increased. Since George Floyd’s killing, police killings are unabated. 255 more Black people have been murdered by police — the 21st Century agents of lynching. In several states laws permitting motorists to run down Black Lives Matter protesters have been signed. Permission to carry unlicensed or conceal-carry weapons have been written into law. That’s on top of “stand your ground” and dozens of clearly racist laws that permit vigilantism to varying degrees.
Now with Jim Crow just starting up again, it seems all too clear — if parts of White America could get away with it, we’d be seeing Sunday lynchings once again.
There are approximately 132 high school career and vocational technical education (CVTE) programs offered at 102 locations throughout Massachusetts. In 2020 these schools and districts served a modest 63,400 vocational students out of the state’s 911,465 students. Of the Commonwealth’s vocational students, 54% are male, 46% female, 57% white, 9% African-American, 25% Hispanic, 4% Asian and 4% multi-racial. Demographics for CVTE students are not significantly different from averages for all schools in the Commonwealth, but as we will see they are frequently not representative of the communities in which they are situated.
88 of the state’s 132 vocational programs are designated N74, Non-Chapter 74 Career Technical Education (Perkins) programs; 44 are C74, Chapter 74 Approved, and 57 locations offer both C74 and N74 programs. Massachusetts offers 10 career clusters, and student participation in them is depicted in a graphic from a 2020 DESE study of vocational school outcomes:
Student demographics
Racial compositiion of vocational programs varies greatly. The Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers in Boston, for example, is 97% non-white, while Somerset Berkley Regional’s vocational program is 97% white. 22 of the 102 districts are majority-minority, and 79 are majority white. Regardless of their demographics, however, the state’s vocational schools do not reflect the racial characteristics of the “sending” school districts from which vocational students are drawn.
While 43% of the Commonwealth’s students are non-white, with the exception of Boston and a handful of Gateway cities, Massachusetts vocational schools are as white as some of the whitest suburban school districts with the highest percentages of white teachers. The following table built combining multiple DESE data sources shows the general lack of diversity of both students (and teachers) in Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes, and Plymouth counties:
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Vocational teachers are overwhelmingly white
While student diversity is lacking, so also is staffing. Incredibly, in every technical schools of all four counties shown above, all except Brockton have teaching staffs that are more than 90% white. Only four of the 28 vocational school districts depicted above have more than 2% Black or 2% Hispanic teachers.
Under-representation
One consequence of this lack of diversity is under-representation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian teachers. Providing just one example of the importance of representation, a National Education Association study found that when Black students had at least one Black teacher in grades 3-5, dropout rates fell by 30%. That improvement was even more pronounced, 39%, when Black teachers worked in underserved neighborhoods.
In the table below we see the ratio (expressed as a percentage) of teachers/students by the three largest racial categories in the SouthCoast. With with the exception of Bristol Aggie, the Plymouth Schools, and the Silver Lake School District, all SouthCoast vocational schools over-represent white students. None of the vocational schools shown even came close to matching Black and Hispanic youth percentages with teachers of the same race.
And in Bristol County, regardless of the racial composition of the community, the percentage of white teachers is always close to 95%.
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GNBVT Data: a closer look
Using data we received from DESE for a previous look at the New Bedford schools, out of 259 Greater New Bedford Vocational Technical employees in 2020, we found 145 teachers and 18 co-teachers. Of the teachers 135 were white, only 5 were Black, and there were only 3 Hispanic teachers. Looking back as far as 2008, for every year until the present all of New Bedford Voke’s co-teachers have been white.
In line with the SouthCoast numbers above, we find diversity among GNBVT general staff is almost as bad as among teachers. The number of African-American employees at GNBVT reached a maximum of 8 in 2012 (in 2020 it was 5) and the highest number Hispanic employees over twelve years of data collection was 10 in 2017 (it has since dropped to 6). And it gets worse when you start looking at specific jobs.
All-White or Whites-Only?
All of the following job classifications at GNBVT have been all-white since 2008:
Superintendent; Principal; School Business Officer; Special Education Administrator; the Directors of English, History, Social Studies, Math, Science, Technology; Librarians; Media Center Director; School Psychologist; School Nurse; Special Education Administrative Aides; Information Technology Services; and Other Administrative Support Personnel.
The Director of Guidance and Curriculum Supervisor has been all-white since 2017. Support Content instruction has been all-white since 2012. School adjustment counselors have been all-white since 2012.
Numbers like this beg the question — is GNBVT’s overly white staffing a result of market forces or of policies and practices that lead to discrimination, such as patronage, unfair hiring practices, or outright racism?
Admissions
A common complaint about Vocational Technical schools is that they are not only disproportionately white, but that admission policies and informal recruitment and admission practices are designed to keep them that way.
Massachusetts currently has about 63,400 vocational students, a small portion of the state’s almost one million students. A 2019 a state study of vocational school admissions found that there were 1.75 applications for every admission.
Law- and policy-makers have been looking at ways to expand CVTE opportunities, but for now the goal is to make the admissions process fairer. The same study found that there were two main obstacles to admission for non-white children — (1) an “awareness gap,” basically student lack of familiarity with CVTE options; and (2) an “opportunity gap,” in which children are denied access by others.
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For most readers it will not come as a shock to learn that white students were most likely to be admitted, while students of color, English language learners, and economically disadvantaged had their applications placed on the back burner, receiving statistically lower admissions.
Worse, the applications process most schools use is a competitive system based on grades, discipline records, attendance, recommendations, and even interviews. In the past, if it is not still current practice, children are often given priority if a sibling already attends the vocational school. Jack Livramento of UIA objects to an application process that looks like an admission to Harvard. “Vocational schools are public schools.”
Community groups like United Interfaith Action, the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, the North Atlantic Carpenter’s Union, as well as a group of 23 mayors all weighed in on the results, urging reforms to the admission process. New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell suggested a lottery. “It’s good enough for charter schools. It is above board. It is. It can be verified.” The Vocational Education justice Coalition, Citizens for Public Schools, UIA, La Collaborativa, and the Massachusetts Community Action Network have all backed the idea of a lottery.
The Vocational Educations Justice Coalition faults the admissions of students highly likely to abandon their learned trade in favor of a four-year college because it is both harmful to the trades as well as unfair to students not on an academic track. The DESE study cited previously notes that “CTE concentrators are less likely to complete a college degree than the statewide average.” And that “while CTE may be thought of as a means to increase earnings and education, it has also often been seen as an educational model that might reduce adverse outcomes. This is of particular importance for students who face social and economic disadvantages that may make them vulnerable to negative outcomes after high school.” In addition, a 2018 survey of CVTE outcomes currently only 33% of all Chapter 74 vocational students end up working in the career field for which they were trained, while that number is 12% for N74 programs. 18% never enroll in college and 45% enroll in college but never complete it.
State recognition of the problem
State Rep. Alice Peisch and state Sen. Jason Lewis, co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Education, have proposed the Educator Diversity Act (HD.3641/SD.2208), which has four parts that address hiring of minority teachers. The Educator Diversity Act simplifies the path to educator licensure, establishes hiring guidelines, mandates diversity programs and officers, and quantifies the efforts to increase diversity by collecting data and publishing statistics.
Addressing the “awareness gap,” Minuteman Regional Voke Superintendent Edward Boquillon suggests that vocational schools be given student information from the sending school district so that students who are not aware of the programs can be contacted and invited to apply. One of the key findings in a separate 2020 DESE study of vocational school outcomes was that a “majority of 8th grade students reported that they receive enough information to make an informed high school choice, but a significantly lower proportion of students of color reported this than did white students.”
From trades worker to trades teacher
White non-Hispanic Americans represent roughly 60.1% of the population, Hispanic Americans 18.5%, African-Americans 13.4%, Asians 5.6%, Multiple races 2.8%, Native American slightly under 1%, and Pacific Islanders 0.2%. We want workplaces to look like society in general, but we also want teachers, especially, to look like the students they instruct and for whom they serve as role-models.
We want to turn more trades people of color into trades teachers of color.
Since vocational teachers come straight from the vocations they teach, do enough non-white skilled technical workers exist to be able to move into teaching vocational courses? In order to explain an almost complete absence of vocational teachers of color we need to take a quick look.
For years the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has produced annual reports showing white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian labor participation in hundreds of job classifications. There are many BLS job classifications (Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, Hairdressers, etc.) that can be directly mapped to both the 10 career clusters mentioned previously and to specific vocations (Carpentry, Electrical, Plumbing, Cosmetology, etc). We chose over 70 classifications that mirror some of these career tracks..
Skilled Black workers are represented in the labor force in percents greater than representation in the general population for the following professions:
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations; Cardiovascular technologists and technicians; Child, family, and school social workers; Childcare workers; Correctional officers and jailers; Credit counselors and loan officers; Cutting, punching, and press machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic; Education and childcare administrators; First-line supervisors of correctional officers; Food preparation and serving related occupations; Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists; Home health aides; Human resources workers; Industrial truck and tractor operators; Janitors and building cleaners; Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses; Miscellaneous health technologists and technicians; Motor vehicle operators, all other; Office and administrative support occupations; Office and administrative support workers, all other; Other metal workers and plastic workers; Packaging and filling machine operators and tenders; Security guards and gambling surveillance officers; Stationary engineers and boiler operators; Television, video, and film camera operators and editors.
Skilled Hispanic workers are represented in the labor force in percents greater than representation in the general population for the following professions:
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations; Carpenters; Construction and extraction occupations; Construction laborers; Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations; Industrial truck and tractor operators; Janitors and building cleaners; Miscellaneous agricultural workers; Packaging and filling machine operators and tenders; Sewing machine operators.
Skilled Asian workers are represented in the labor force in percents greater than representation in the general population for the following professions:
Architecture and engineering occupations; Cardiovascular technologists and technicians; Computer hardware engineers; Computer, automated teller, and office machine repairers; Electrical and electronic engineering technologists and technicians; Food preparation and serving related occupations; Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations; Marketing managers; Massage therapists; Miscellaneous health technologists and technicians; Motor vehicle operators, all other; Other engineering technologists and technicians, except drafters; Sewing machine operators.
There is, then, absolutely no reason that many of these skilled trades people could not transition to vocational teachers. There is plenty of skill out there. All that’s lacking are the teacher certifications.
Becoming a vocational teacher
On May 20, 2021 the NAACP New Bedford Branch hosted Jarrod Lussier, an administrator at Greater New Bedford Voke, who addressed the monthly General Meeting and gave a short overview of the process of becoming a vocational teacher.
Lussier was previous a Chapter 74 plumbing instructor at Southeastern Regional Vocational High School. He invites anyone interested in becoming a vocational teacher to contact him and he is making his presentation available with the disclaimer that it is “on my own behalf and not as a representative of either [GNBVT or Southeastern] district.”
When Citizens for Juvenile Justice published their study of racially-biased police stops in New Bedford, We are the Prey, the usual Only Blue Lives Matter voices savaged the report, completely rejecting the possibility that racist policies and personnel may be operating within the New Bedford Police Department.
But no one should have been shocked by the results. Most American cities have long suffered from racist policing, as hundreds of studies over the years have amply documented and other cities have even acknowledged.
CFJJ’s report — informed by data the NBPD itself supplied — shows precisely how, when, where, by whom, and why racial profiling is done. Its findings faulted vague disciplinary policies, poor data collection, arbitrary assignment of youth to an opaque gang database, over-policing in certain neighborhoods, clear over-policing of Black and Hispanic youth, and a relatively small number of officers doing most of the racial profiling. In fact, CFJJ identified the NBPD’s “Top Ten” on page 16 of their report.
This small number of officers whom CFJJ found responsible for the many racially-motivated stops was cited in an Amicus Brief on a racial profiling case now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The case concerns the New Bedford Police gang unit’s pretextual stop of a vehicle with a backseat passenger well-known to the unit.
The gang unit officers who searched and arrested passenger Zahkuan J. Bailey-Sweeting after the driver supposedly made an unsafe lane change included at least three officers responsible for the most stops in the CFJJ data. These three officers — Roberto DaCunha, Gene Fortes, and Kory Kubik — alone accounted for one of seven stops in the CFJJ data. Bogus, and very likely unconstitutional, traffic violations no doubt help inflate these officers’ numbers.
I was curious to see if any of these officers appeared in a “Professional Standards” document the NBPD released to the public last year. The NBPD spreadsheet shows a backlog of police complaints over many years with a status (filed, sustained, not, exonerated). The cases go back as far as 2012.
So I cross-referenced the NBPD complaints and disciplinary issues on all officers mentioned in the CFJJ report, using the number preferred by the NBPD — number of stops — rather than CFJJ’s number of individuals affected by those stops. The result was a spreadsheet shown in the image above (available for download).
Even if one stop targeted five individuals, I only looked at discrete officer stops. The results were only slightly different from CFJJ’s, but even when using NBPD’s preferred metric the results still showed a high degree of racial profiling, an apparent lack of officer discipline, and they suggest a culture of police impunity.
CFJJ’s analysis by race depended on counting individuals affected by the police. But mine was focused on the police officers making those stops. Five officers accounted for almost 25% of all stops, eleven accounted for 40%, and eighteen officers accounted for 50%. There was nothing in those results to contradict CFJJ’s conclusions — even using NBPD’s preferred metric.
One officer — Roberto DaCunha — alone accounted for 6.6% all individual stops. That’s one out of fifteen of all stops supplied to CFJJ by the NBPD. And DaCunha did it without incurring even a single disciplinary write-up — ever. In addition to his involvement in the Bailey-Sweeting stop, DaCunha is the same officer named in a lawsuit for the wrongful death of Erik Aguilar, which cost the City of New Bedford almost a million dollars to settle. In the investigation that followed, DaCunha invoked the Fifth Amendment and investigators appeared to be satisfied with that. The Aguilar family’s lawsuit maintained that DaCunha and four others “knew that leaving Mr. Aguilar in this position could cause him to die from asphyxia, yet they did not move him from this position until after his heart had stopped beating.”
I do not have list of officers in the gang unit. However, none of the officers in the gang unit whose names I recognize from past news reports or from Malcolm Gracia’s murder appear to have racked up any consequential disciplinary complaints. And many of the officers with the highest numbers of stops either received no disciplinary write-ups — or received write-ups for only relatively minor issues: mishandling evidence or failing to report for duty. This seems to suggest that their racial profiling is either condoned or incentivized.
Some of the more troubling disciplinary issues among New Bedford’s Finest include: Civility; Respect of Others; Violation of General Order 3-20 Anti-Discrimination policy; Violation of General Order 12-02 Use of Force; Knowledge of laws; Commission of an act of abusive conduct; Immoral Conduct Conduct unbecoming; Conduct injurious to the public; Neglect of Duty; Insubordination; Suspicious Conduct; [Not] Speaking the truth; Issuing False Statements; Consorting with Criminals; Use of intoxicants; Physical and mental fitness; Return of Property to Owner; Absent without Leave; and Ignorance of Departmental Rules and Regs.
Year after year officers keep violating the same policies over and over, yet they remain on the force. Chris Cotter, for example, who also serves on the New Bedford School Committee, has violated computer and social media policies repeatedly since 2014, as his sustained disciplinary cases attest.
14-1752 502.2 Respect of others; 14-1752 502.3 Civility; 14-1752 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 15-1796 Viol of General Order 13-06 – Use of Dept. Vehicle; 15-1796 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 16-1822 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 16-1822 Viol of General Order 3-24 – Social Media Policy; 17-1856 Viol of General Order 3-24 – Social Media Policy; 17-1856 Viol of General Order 7-02 Release of info to media; 17-1857 515.6(c) Insubordination – Disrespect for ranking officer; 18-1951 502.2 Civility; 18-1951 501.6 Providing police service on duty; 18-1951 501.9 Answering questions; 18-1951 515.6(l) Improperly performing duties assigned; 19-2009 515.6(c) Insubordination; 19-2009 502.2 Civility; 19-2009 502.3 Respect of Others
Paul Hodson, accused of killing Erik Aguilar in 2010, had no disciplinary issues until 2019 when he was written up for: [19-1992] 515.6(o) Commission of any act contrary to the order and discipline of the dept; and 501.1 Suspicious conduct. Despite repeatedly and publicly disparaging minorities on social media, Hodson happily enjoyed departmental impunity — until he was finally sent away on federal child pornography charges in 2019.
Damien Vasconcelos, who was also named in the Aguilar lawsuit for failure to render aid and apparently gave Hodson a congratulatory fist bump at the scene, had several, mostly low-level, disciplinary issues sustained.
When you read through the Professional Standards cases, it is striking that in any other job authoritarians, racists, drunks, liars, rude employees, no-shows, and insubordinates would be quickly sent packing.
Unfortunately, the data shows that New Bedford police are doing a far better job of serving themselves and covering their own backs than protecting and serving the people of New Bedford.
When the Citizens for Juvenile Justice report on racial profiling by the New Bedford Police was released in April 2021, the usual police zealots and members of city government attacked CFJJ’s numbers and screamed that New Bedford was different from those “other” cities. We couldn’t possibly be racists.
But it’s not as if police racism has ever been a secret or a surprise. For years local governments everywhere have brushed off community complaints of racial profiling, harassment, and police violence. But over the years a massive body of research has been amassed, showing that — and precisely how — so many of our institutions are corrupted by institutional racism. Sure, there may be a few bad apples in the barrel, but the point is — the barrel itself is rotten. But again, we have long known this and also how to fix it. We just choose not to.
Below is just a small selection of articles on racial profiling available in April 2021, as the Citizens for Juvenile Justice Report was released. While hardly exhaustive, they demonstrate that the NBPD’s racial profiling of Black and Hispanic youth is not unheard of. Everywhere. CFJJ’s numbers are not anomalous. At least one article makes the case that statistical data like CFJJ’s not only confirms the reality of racial profiling, but “furthermore, strong statistical associations should support an inference of discriminatory intent.”
And I agree. Politicians and policy experts have known about the many insidious forms of racial profiling and their costs to society’s most vulnerable for decades, as these articles illustrate. And when cities know the costs of racial profiling and racist policing and still refuse to stop it, then, yes, that’s racism by design.
Like compulsive gamblers, spouse abusers, and alcoholics, White America has a racism problem it refuses to acknowledge. People with problems like these often tell their relatives that they either don’t have the problem — or that it’s actually the fault of family members. Interventions rarely go well. More often than not, families don’t even intervene. This is precisely how White America deals with racism: it doesn’t.
On Wednesday Tim Scott, a Black Republican Senator from South Carolina, went on air following Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress to deliver the Republican response. Although for four years Scott rarely objected to any of Trump’s numerous racist Tweets or cruel executive orders, he attacked Biden for “pulling us further apart” in a matter of 100 days.
White Republicans no doubt enjoyed watching a Black member of their party doing their dirty work for them, defending a party that is 89% white, rushing to institute new Jim Crow voter suppression policies in dozens of states, trying to crush protests over police killings through new and likely unconstitutional laws, writing laws to protect people who run over BLM protestors or get liberal teachers fired, and enacting “religious protection” laws mainly to privilege White Christians.
These mint julep sipping White Republicans must have especially enjoyed watching Scott dutifully delivered the line: “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” The Senator took some well-deserved heat for his nonsensical talking points. Michael Harriot, writing in the Root, tore Scott a couple of new orifices, laying out just how ridiculous Scott’s denial of a racist White America really is.
Of course, Democrats didn’t want to upset America’s racist white majority either, so they mouthed precisely the same words. Vice President Kamala Harris told Good Morning America, “No, I don’t think America is a racist country.” And on the Today Show President Joe Biden said those words as well, suggesting that racism of the past has left wreckage in its wake: “but I think after 400 years African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight ball in terms of education and health, in terms of opportunity.”
In an editorial on WBSM’s website, local bloviator Barry Richard not only rejected white racism but hung the label of racist on those who acknowledge its reality. “I think the real racists are the ones who call racism at every turn. They see racism under every bed and around every corner.” That, of course means most Liberals and most Black people — except for Scott and Candace Owens.
But there’s really not enough distance between Richard and Biden here. Neither want to confront a meth head relative with his problem. And neither is ready to insist on a family intervention.
With such glaring inequities in policing, prosecution, incarceration, housing, education, wealth, health, political power, and longevity, playing semantic games and trying to deny reality is a dangerous game. America has a serious white supremacy problem that neither Republicans nor Democrats want to address. Like any disease, if left untreated the patient is going to die. We’re not going to make it as a country unless we go into rehab immediately. But that requires first acknowledging that you’ve got a problem.
There’s been a lot to unpack this week, both nationally and locally
The United States has over a thousand police killings each year, and many of them are of unarmed Black and brown people. In fact, America has more daily or weekly police killings than some European nations have homicides from all causes combined in a single year. And yet Americans — and I mean the majority, you, my fellow white Americans — are in deep denial of both facts and the reasons for all this spilled blood. Both the Chauvin trial and a recent report documenting the extent of racial profiling by the New Bedford Police have received a tremendous amount of blowback from white people. So I’d like to address both in this rather long essay.
Police serving American cities ought to be able to bring more to the door than a service weapon, but that’s apparently what White America wants. Those serving the public ought to have skills in psychology, first aid, social services, conflict resolution, and de-escalation. Here in Massachusetts all school teachers are expected to have masters degrees in order to be “highly qualified.” Police officers, on the other hand, are more likely to pursue memberships at health clubs and shooting ranges than college credits. And let’s face it: we hire police for their muscle, with a clear preference for combat veterans skilled in the arts of war.
The brutal truth is that the real function of the policing White America wants is evident in almost every police interaction. There’s no sugarcoating it. States hire cops for brutality — to compel immediate compliance with the law. But it’s not working. Or perhaps it’s working so well that in an age of ubiquitous cameras police forces have now exposed this brutality and, in the process, the extent of America’s police state.
For this reason, communities all over the United States are considering reallocating police funding to the essential human services now being mishandled by police. The idea is that targeting mental health and drug crises with professional skills, not Glocks and Tasers, will prevent some of this carnage. And relieving police of routine traffic control is likewise intended to reduce the pretextual (translation: Constitutionally dubious) stops that all too often result in a police shooting. But this is not enough. America also needs to face up to its legacy of policing born of slave-catching. After January 6th, though, I have a low opinion of White America’s ability for self-reflection.
America’s police, at least in Black and brown communities, are not there “to protect and to serve” so much as they are there to maintain old, discredited, unconstitutional models of “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing. You can dress it up — as the New Bedford Police Department has at various points — with euphemisms like “High Energy Patrols” or “Walk and Talk” or the much-abused “community policing.” But what police, many with recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, really mean by “community policing” is actually more akin to occupation and pacification of the enemy.
This “us versus them” attitude, well-entrenched in police culture and seen daily in police Tweets and Facebook posts (like the Fall River Police Department’s post on George Floyd), and reinforced by bad hiring, the rare firing, little discipline, minimal oversight, virtually nonexistent accountability and vague operational policies — none of this can be fixed overnight. Communities need to start from scratch to redefine how they want to be policed — that is, if they really want to stop the bloodletting.
The media may prefer neutral terms like “controversial” to describe the unconstitutional stops and patdowns, the pretextual traffic stops, the 24/7 surveillance, the “predictive policing,” and the racial profiling that accompany a police occupation. But there is nothing “controversial” about it. It is just plain wrong. It is illegal and it’s got to stop. Otherwise America will remain little more than a police state, especially for people of color.
Police, naturally, resist data collection and reporting obligations that might draw attention to racist practices. So, it is often up to community groups and independent researchers, using data only very reluctantly and resentfully provided by the police themselves which is intentionally incomplete or obfuscated — data they were compelled to produce by public information requests — to step into the breach and study patterns of racist policing. The CFJJ report was just that.
Last week’s Citizens for Juvenile Justice report on NBPD field police observations involving nearly 5,000 individuals showed that New Bedford Police have never stopped using racial profiling. CFJJ took some heat from the NBPD, the police union, and the Far Right for reporting on precisely what the NBPD had given them. But a 2018 Organizational Assessment study of the NBPD noted that the NBPD doesn’t collect accurate data because it just doesn’t care: “Obtaining accurate data was a challenge […] The multitude of errors present in all areas of the data indicate a lack of supervision and oversight both in communications and patrol. […] A quick review of some of the entries […] shows the errors in the data along with a disregard for the importance of collecting accurate data…”
To this date the NBPD has failed to make numerous recommendations in that 2018 Organizational Assessment of the NBPD commissioned by the Mayor, which also interviewed members of the community at large. And that report followed a 2015 report by the ACLU documenting the NBPD’s racist policing, and the 2012 Malcolm Gracia shooting — itself the result of racial profiling. Nothing has changed in at least a decade because the NBPD simply rejects reform.
From the same 2018 Organizational Assessment: “There is little evidence of a team approach, and there is significant resistance to change within the patrol division. The command staff does not appear to readily embrace innovation and often gravitated to sentiments such as ‘this is how we have always done it’ and ‘things will never change.'”
The 2018 report also noted that officer discipline cases had languished for many years and that only under the leadership of the most recent police chief was any effort made to address the backlog of disciplinary cases. Naturally, the police union retaliated by forcing a “no confidence” vote on the chief.
It’s clear that change is not going to come from within the nation’s police forces, city councils, or the nation’s mayors. It seems clear that change will be imposed upon the nation’s police by legislation like H.R.1280 – the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, and by eliminating a legal doctrine called Qualified Immunity, which confers impunity to police for even the most egregious acts. For this reason, H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, was filed by Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley.The goal is to eliminate outrageous deviations from normal criminal justice norms. Police shouldn’t get concierge service in the nation’s courts.
As much as New Bedford’s mayor and police officials might like to pretend that New Bedford is unique, the city’s police force is no different from most in America. If you were outraged at Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in front of Cup Foods until he died, while several other officers stood around watching, then you would be equally outraged at watching the video of officer Paul Hodson kneeling on Erik Aguilar in front of New Bedford’s Extra Mart until he too was dead, while several other officers made no attempt to resuscitate Aguilar. The striking difference between these two cases is that, while we all watched Chauvin led off in handcuffs to prison, Hodson remained on the NBPD payroll until he was finally prosecuted — not for killing Aguilar but on federal child pornography charges. And in both killings it was not just one officer demonstrating callous disregard for human life. It was all of them.
Let me repeat that. It was all of them. There are no bad apples in the nation’s police forces. The apple barrels are so rotten that good apples don’t stand much of a chance of preserving individual integrity. This is why change must be sweeping and why it must be imposed. Police are incapable of reforming themselves.
But digging deeper, where does such contempt for non-white life come from, and why is it so easily excused? Most of White America completely rejects police accountability. To listen to many of my fellow white folks’ own words, America’s overwhelmingly white police forces are there to keep non-white “mobs” from overrunning white neighborhoods. Referencing the “carnage” that Donald Trump referred to in his racist inauguration speech, White America also sees the non-white “mob’s” demands for justice as an equal threat to their supremacy. The “Us versus them” mentality of police extends to the “Us versus them” inherent in a race war. A race war that White America seems all to eager to have.
Newsmax host Rob Schmitt called Derek Chauvin a “sacrifice to the mob.” Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s pal Michelle Malkin used almost the same words: “Chauvin was sacrificed.” Donald Trump’s friends the Proud Boys circulated a post, “Derek Chauvin Did Nothing Wrong.” Georgia Congresswoman with No Committees Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed Chauvin’s conviction on Black people — BLM particularly, which has “proven itself to be the most powerful domestic terrorist organization in our country. After Maxine Waters’ threats, could there have been any other verdict?” Fox News’ resident Alt-White host Tucker Carlson also blamed the guilty verdict on Black terror in characteristically offensive terms: “The jury in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict Tuesday afternoon: ‘Please don’t hurt us.'”
That same white supremacy on display following the Chauvin verdict was also on display following the release of the CFJJ report on New Bedford police racial profiling. A lot of it came from WBSM, especially from Barry Richard, whose latest includes the meaningless bromides: “the system works when given a chance” and “a nation divided must learn to heal.” In a post attacking CFJJ’s report on racial profiling Richard accused the mayor of failing to defend the NBPD, and in another he called police critics “malcontents who threaten to destabilize […] society.” Richard wrote that CFJJ was “attempting to create racial division where it does not exist and is looking to drive a wedge between the minority communities and the police […] — people who have co-existed in relative peace and harmony for so many years.” Richard would have you believe that there are no local critics of New Bedford police, only outside agitators. One wonders why Richard didn’t write reams about the many out-of-staters who invaded the nation’s Capitol on January 6th.
New Bedford City Councilor Brian Gomes — the New Bedford Councilor representing the Police Ward — was featured in another of Richard’s posts, calling the CFJJ report “garbage” and promising to introduce a City Council motion to stand in support of the NBPD. Gomes, the same Councilor who introduced a resolution to reject ending qualified immunity, who wanted to buy drones to surveil New Bedford residents, and who supported Southern-style chain gangs, also accused CFJJ of trying to “stir things up” in the City. Once again, no Dixie-style defense of local law enforcement would be complete without calling critics “outside agitators.”
But the CFJJ report resonates with a lot of people in New Bedford, including most of the groups which sponsored the CFJJ webinar. Including old-time observers of local politics like former Standard-Times editor Jack Spillane, who now hosts a website on New Bedford politics. In one of his latest pieces, Spillane noted that, even if the CFJJ study made assumptions that the NBPD could find fault with, the fact remains that “it would be a very good thing if for just once all of us who live here would acknowledge the serious mistrust that exists between large segments of the New Bedford’s minority community and the police department.”
Spillane also noted that the Police based their entire refutation of CFJJ’s report on a questionable discrepancy: “The police statement took pains to paint as serious errors what to others could easily be construed as simple disagreements over what numbers should be counted. […] To be fair, whatever errors are in the report because of multiple counting would apply to the numbers of both Black and non-Black residents, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic individuals. So it’s hard to see how its conclusions would be any different than they were.”
You can view a video of the Zoom presentation of the CFJJ report here, the report itself here, and the slides used in CFJJ’s presentation here. You can also read CFJJ’s reply to the New Bedford Police criticism here. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers — particularly since they came from the police themselves and they only confirm what a similar 2015 study of NBPD field observations showed: New Bedford cops employ racial profiling on a grand scale.
I will cite Spillane again because he sums it up perfectly: “Flawed or not, the Citizens for Juvenile Justice report was a badly needed and serious effort to raise issues about the equity of policing in New Bedford. It was a long overdue attempt to start a discussion with the city’s political and law enforcement establishment about what often amounts to an occupying-force approach to policing in New Bedford. It is an attempt at a data-driven study that the city itself should have done long ago.”
Local police defenders may prefer denial and smears of police critics to actually contending with the data, but that can’t erase the fact that America has a policing problem tied to a long racist legacy. New Bedford is just one of thousands of local police forces that share those problems and that legacy. New Bedford can fix the problems locally — or wait for change to be imposed. After 70 years on this planet, and knowing more than a little about my “people,” I guarantee you it will be the latter.
Wednesday’s presentation by Citizens for Juvenile Justice was extremely powerful and damning. New Bedford has serious policing problems. The departure of a police chief will leave both a vacuum and uncertainty about what sort of leadership replaces him. And the city has a mayor who couldn’t be bothered to attend the unveiling of a study of 5,000 police stops, all of which took place over the last 5 years of his incumbency. Thankfully, New Bedford has many friends and residents who do care.
After the killings of Erik Aguilar and Malcolm Gracia by New Bedford police — which alone cost the city $1.5 million in settlements — all the same conditions still exist today and it is only a matter of time until New Bedford experiences another police killing. Action is needed to fix bad policing both at the national, state, and municipal level.
Some people may not like hearing it, but the heart of the problem of police killings is American racism. While police forces and sheriffs may no longer officially be the slave catchers they were created to be, their modern counterparts still control and surveil Black and brown neighborhoods like military occupiers. Indeed, many of today’s police officers have had recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And aided by the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 program, America’s police forces not only look like military occupations but use identical equipment.
As CFJJ reported, people in non-white New Bedford neighborhoods feel that the NBPD “essentially operates as an occupying force in poor neighborhoods of color.” For the most part, White America’s neighborhoods are spared this bad- and over-policing. While many white Americans have joined the calls for police reform, many more simply don’t want to know what goes on elsewhere.
But thanks to body cameras and mobile devices we are finally seeing just how bad 21st Century policing in America really is. And this includes police training. Whether it’s de-escalation, dealing with mentally-ill people, or the finer points of patrolling neighborhoods, America’s police basically don’t have a clue. And this is precisely as designed. Because the goal of America’s police forces is not so much to “protect and to serve” as it is to keep Black and brown people in line.
Time and time again mental health emergencies turn into police slayings. Time and time again traffic stops result in a homicide. Time and time again authoritarian police “compliance” rapidly resorts to force. Time and time again interrogations turn into tragedies. Given that police officers are trained intensively to kill with skilled center shots but lack training in psychology, social work, or any of the skills that might actually serve the public, it is no wonder that so many interactions end up with a Black or brown death. For this reason, we’ve seen numerous proposals to divert police funding into the hands of agencies that actually provide human and mental health services to the public. Let police investigate real crimes but leave the rest of human services to the real professionals.
Police impunity compounds aggressive over-policing, poor training, and the misplaced use of armed police officers for social services and traffic control by rewarding bad policing. The few cases we now see of officers being tried for homicide are a totally new phenomenon. And they have only come about as a result of public outrage. Unfortunately, these cases, rare as unicorns, do not represent a consistent commitment to racial justice in which police officers receive the same justice as everyone else. On the contrary, over decades police impunity has become enshrined in law thanks to a legal doctrine known as “Qualified Immunity.”
As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7) wrote in a fact sheet to accompany H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act: “The court’s broad interpretation of this doctrine has allowed police to violate constitutional rights with impunity, providing officers immunity for everything from unlawful traffic stops to brutality and murder. Qualified immunity shields police from accountability, impedes true justice, and undermines the constitutional rights of every person in this country. It’s past time to end qualified immunity.” But, as of this moment, impunity is still the rule and the Chauvin trial the rarest of exceptions.
Compounding the structural defects mentioned previously is the absence of community control. Police departments are structured as paramilitary organizations whose members take orders from higher-ups. Therefore, just as we saw in the George Floyd killing, police usually defer to a ranking officer even when it is obvious that a murder by one of their own is in progress. Just ask former policewoman Cariol Horne, who was fired in 2008 for stopping a white officer from administering a lethal chokehold to a Black man. She didn’t “go along to get along” and it cost her a job and her pension.
In a society that refuses to see itself as a police state, why do we blindly accept that police departments look exactly like branches of the military? Who, actually, are police waging war against? Moreover, how is paramilitary organization consistent with fulfilling a municipal services function? And why are citizens completely locked out of managing police forces? You may not like the answer, but here it is anyway: because the goal of America’s police forces is not to “protect and to serve” but to keep Black and brown people in line. Public management of police departments would upend this function pretty quickly.
Following a killing, police are usually permitted to investigate themselves, with police unions setting the terms of investigations and interrogations. District attorneys, who have daily, fraternal, interactions with the police, almost always refuse to prosecute even the most egregious misconduct. We saw all this unfold after Malcolm Gracia’s murder, and America has seen it play out hundreds of thousands of times. The officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times? — he went back to work yesterday.
None of this is what any sane person would call justice. In fact, the bitter phrase “criminal justice” has become such a cruel joke that many of us can’t manage to put those words between our teeth. America may fancy itself as a nation of laws, but each time someone charged with enforcing laws breaks them with impunity while elected representatives look the other way, it shreds our democracy a little bit more.
National and state legislation is needed to set us on a different course. As of this writing, only a handful of states have lifted qualified immunity for police officers. The Massachusetts House, which only very reluctantly passed a police reform bill in an overtime session last year, preserved Qualiifed Immunity after intense lobbying by police unions. This should tell you who many Massachusetts legislators really represent.
Last month the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.1280, the George Floyed Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which addresses policing practices and law enforcement accountability. It increases accountability for police misconduct, requires more transparency and data collection, and eliminates discriminatory policing practices. It also enables federal prosecution of unconstitutional practices by state and local law enforcement, limits qualified immunity in some cases, authorizes the DOJ to subpoena police departments more easily, create a police misconduct database, and mandates the body cameras and the reporting of incidents where force was used. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful this legislation will clear the Senate.
Changes to policing policy, such as the 19 recommendations Citizens for Juvenile Justice offered New Bedford residents, can make a big difference. For too long police forces have not only enjoyed complete impunity but also relative freedom from public controls and mandates. These at least represent policy changes. But they are recommendations, not absolute requirements. For that you need legislation. Yet too many mayors and city councilors habitually defer to the police on police matters while hypocritically micromanaging schools and other municipal departments. Too many legislators defer to police, sheriffs, or police unions. This sloppy, lazy governance has contributed to sloppy, unaccountable policing — precisely what is to be found in most of America’s police departments.
One obvious solution is to vote more wisely. But let’s not be naive. Those who want to preserve 21st Century American policing are constantly told that, without the police having carte blanche (run that through Google Translate some time) anarchy would rein and blood would run in the streets. What they really mean is — without police impunity the Black and brown people would rise up and overrun us.
In the end only complete citizen control of police forces, including the end of Qualified Immunity, will change the structure, practices, reporting, investigations, hiring and firing, discipline, and prosecution of bad cops. Instead of a primary mission to subdue the non-white population, police might then actually start serving communities who hire them.
Hell yeah, I want a COVID passport! But, like everything right now, many people’s brains have been switched off and they’re doing most of their deep thinking with their other end.
The Kentucky Libertarians say COVID passports are exactly like the yellow Stars of David that Jews had to wear during the Holocaust.
In Britain, after recklessly avoiding social distancing and masks in order to obtain herd immunity — and in the process ending up with one of the worst COVID mortality rates in the world — many Britons are now opposed to COVID passports as “divisive” or at odds with “British instinct.”
Obviously not the survival instinct. But mainly it’s sour grapes. if they don’t want a vaccination then you can’t have one.
Next in the parade of fools is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society,” DeSantis said.
Who ever said Florida had a normal society? Too bad DeSantis doesn’t feel the same way about formerly incarcerated people having to show proof they’ve paid off court debts in order to vote.
QAnon and Stop the Steal have also jumped on COVID passports as a World Health Organization (WHO) globalist plot. Representative Without Committees Marjorie Taylor Green says a COVID passport should be called “Biden’s Mark of the Beast” and she has promised not to comply.
One Forbes magazine writer fears that COVID passports will lead to global inequality if worker mobility is restricted. Apparently nobody told him that there are already blanket restrictions on who can travel between countries.
A COVID passport simply shows that you’ve had your shots and that you pose a low risk to others. This is why the International Air Transport Association (IATA) is creating a COVID passport for air travel. It’s really about this simple: if you haven’t had a shot I don’t want to sit next to you on a long flight right now.
Sure, COVID has turned the world upside down. But let’s not imagine that proof of vaccination represents creeping authoritarianism in some new dystopia. We’ve had vaccination passports for years. You can’t get into India without a full set of vaccinations. And speaking of India — in 1958, after spending several years there as a child, the US wouldn’t let me return without proof I’d had a Smallpox vaccination. You can see my “Smallpox passport” in the image below.
Of all the perils of blogging, it’s not the people who send you hate emails that are dangerous: it’s the copyright trolls — and also their occasionally legitimate cousins. I recently got slapped with a legitimate charge for inadvertently using a copyrighted image. If anyone sends you a bill of this sort, verify that in fact they represent the agency they claim to represent. In my case, I called Reuters and determined that the agency that had billed me was, in fact, legit. Here, then, is my advice on how to avoid improperly using copyrighted images on your website. I will assume most readers are running WordPress which purportedly powers 40% of the web.
### Getting legal images
There are plenty of collections of stock images you can use under Creative Commons licenses. Most are generic images, perhaps a little bland, and may not be the type of image you are looking for, or they may require rooting around dozens of collections of stock images. An alternative is to use Google image search — as you may already be doing — but to use the **advanced image search**: https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search Now, for example, let’s search on “black lives matter” and move the cursor down to the bottom next to “Usage rights” where we’ll select Creative Commons licenses:  This should bring up some images licensed under Creative Commons which we can use **with attribution**. I’ve circled one that we’re going to use as an example:  To properly attribute an image this is an excellent guide: https://www.pixsy.com/academy/image-user/correctly-attribute-images/ Our strategy will be to place all the copyright attribution information we need right in the caption of the WordPress image in the WordPress Media Library (more on this in a minute). For this we need **six pieces of information**. We can usually track it all down from the image details provided by Google. Remember: **you must provide attribution to prove your use is legit!** Here’s the information we found:
– Caption: Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced
– Link to caption: https://www.flickr.com/photos/59952459@N08/28113568721
– Author: Alisdare Hickson
– Link to author: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/
– License: CC BY-NC 2.0
– Link to license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
### Attributing an image
Attributing an image is a bit of a pain but it’s got to be done. To make life easier, I developed a [script](https://www.ehrens.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/caption.sh) on my Mac. You should be able to use it on your Mac or a Linux system, or adapt it for Windows command line:
“`
#!/bin/bash # this is a Unix & MacOS script that will generate the correct HTML
# for your WordPress image caption. CAPTION=”Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced” CAPTIONLINK=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/59952459@N08/28113568721″
AUTHOR=”Alisdare Hickson”
AUTHORLINK=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/”
LICENSE=”CC BY-NC 2.0″
LICENSELINK=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”
echo ” “$CAPTION”, by $AUTHOR, licensed under $LICENSE” > caption.txt open caption.txt
“`
The script [produces a text file](https://www.ehrens.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/caption.txt) called *caption.txt* which you can open and use for cut and paste:
“`
“Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced”, by Alisdare Hickson, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
“`
### Media Library
In WordPress, add the downloaded image to your Media Library and also add the title and the generated caption code above to the image’s metadata. The generated code above will go in the **Caption field**:  Now that the nightmare is over **you can use the image in any WordPress post or page**, and the caption (which is now fully attributed) will follow the image to whatever post in which you use it: 
### What about my existing images?
If you are using a bunch of images that could turn around and bite you later, delete them.
1. Go into your media manager and **delete the images**.
2. This **will break some of the image links** on pages or posts that are using the images. **But no worry! We can fix it!**
3. Install the **Broken Link Checker plugin** in WordPress
4. Run Broken LInk Checker to scan all your links and then “unlink” any deleted images that broke links in the pages or posts.
You may still need to check some of the images you did not delete but believe **may be** safe to use. There are two ways that I know of to check an image:
##### Google Reverse Image Search
 https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&ogbl If we upload the image we were just looking at we can find all sorts of uses of it all over the internet. You may have to dig through all the images to find the owner’s version: 
##### TinEye
 https://tineye.com/ Searching with **TinEye** produces a similar list of places the image can be found, but also information on whether it is a stock image or not: 
On January 6th — in addition to avowed white supremacy and conspiracy groups — a number of firefighters, police officers, and military reservists joined the mob storming the nation’s Capitol building. In some cases they severely beat fellow law enforcement officers, in other cases flashed police credentials to gain unlawful entry into the Capitol. Law enforcement agencies around the country conducted internal investigations, and some officers have already been fired.
Yet neither the New Bedford Police, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department, nor the Dartmouth Police Department conducted internal investigations into officers who might have participated in the insurrection. The New Bedford Mayor’s office referred inquires about investigations to the FBI. Chief Cordeiro told a Zoom meeting much the same. A Dartmouth Police spokeswoman said that “at this time” there was no investigation. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office simply refused to answer our question.
The most charitable explanation is that local law enforcement agencies are waiting to see if the FBI turns up anything. A less charitable, but far more likely, explanation is that police and sheriff’s department are showing their usual disinterest in investigating their own, even for crimes that would permanently disqualify them from serving in any law enforcement capacity ever again. Unfortunately, the public has come to expect responses like this from police agencies that operate with increasing impunity.
Historically, the nation’s sheriffs have been closely identified with slave patrols and white supremacy. Our own local sheriff is a spokesman for the white supremacist anti-immigrant group FAIR, state campaign chair for America’s first openly white supremacist President, and spent considerable time attempting to ingratiate himself with white supremacist presidential immigration advisor Stephen Miller, as information requests by the ACLU, Political Research Associates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and others reveal. Sheriffs have a long history of racist impunity, as many remember from the Jim Crow era. Since those days, sadly, not enough has changed.
The nation’s police forces are part of a criminal justice system that Elizabeth Warren took heat for calling “racist, top to bottom.” It ought to be unnecessary to point out, especially after George Floyd’s murder, that police forces, especially, have major problems with disproportionate killings, arrests, and assaults on people of color. But then there are the white supremacist chat rooms — from Facebook, Twitter, Gab, and Parler, to Stormfront and others — where a disproportionate number of participants are law enforcement or members of the military.
A 2019 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of police were members of neo-Confederate, militia, or white supremacist Facebook groups. The Plain View Project created a database of Facebook posts from self-identified police officers in just eight of America’s 350 cities and found tens of thousands of racist posts by police officers endorsing racial violence and bigotry. What would they have found in the nation’s 15,000+ small towns and in the remaining 342 cities?
In 2010 New Bedford Police officer Paul Hodson encountered a disturbed Guatemalan man and, within three minutes, had killed him by first pepper-spraying him and then kneeling on his back. Hodson, who was only removed from the NBPD after being convicted of child pornography charges, was known to post racist content on social media. The Standard Times printed some of his tame contributions: “After having a great time over the past 2 days spending time with friends and family, its back to work to deal with the scum of the earth,” he posted in 2011. “Time to go to work and violate some civil rights.”
Police forces historically do nothing about racism in the ranks. In the 1990’s a white supremacist gang, the “Vikings,” operated with impunity right under the noses of the brass of the Los Angeles Police Department. Klan affiliations of police and sheriffs were well-known during the Civil Rights years, and police today continue the tradition of breaking Black heads by treating Black Lives Matter activists as terrorists for simply demanding accountability or posting fantasies about running protestors over with their cruisers.
And if you think New Bedford is different from other communities, think again.
Former Bristol County Sheriff’s detective Peter Larkin, who went to work for the New Bedford Schools, was fired in 2019 for posting his own disturbed racist fantasy on Facebook. Angry at Black Lives Matter people protesting in New York City, Larkin wrote, “I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.” Is this an example of a someone who needs psychological help – or was Larkin simply posturing for fellow ex-cops who drink from the same racist cup?
Whatever the causes — hiring the wrong people or habitually refusing to hold “bad apples” accountable — police racism is both systemic and a self-inflicted societal wound that only radical reform and public control can fix.
The events of January 6th, which far too many law enforcement officers particpated in, provides one more example of why public oversight of police is crucial. Police simply can’t be trusted to investigate themselves. And why would any sensible person even expect them to?
If local law enforcement officers are found to have participated in the January 6th insurrection, they must be immediately dismissed, stripped of their pensions, and never permitted to betray the Constitution or the public trust again. But since local law enforcement agencies won’t do it themselves, let municipalities investigate. If municipalities won’t do it, then let the state Attorney General conduct credible investigations.
The time for taking white supremacy within the ranks of law enforcement seriously is long overdue.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there are now 253 pieces of legislation in 43 states that limit voting rights and access. A massive voting rights bill, H.R.1 – For the People Act of 2021, was just passed in the House and is now before the U.S. Senate.
Republicans predictably oppose the legislation because expanding voting hours, access to the polls, and absentee ballots cost them dearly in 2020. To preserve their power in Red States and return to glory in Blue ones, they need to put a serious crimp in the last exercise of democracy available to most Americans. The Heritage Foundation has already promised to take H.R.1 to the Supreme Court if it manages to survive a filibuster, claming that it violates the Constitution.
When the Arizona Republican Party went before the Supreme Court to defend ballot disqualification in that state, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked what the party’s interest was in such measures. The party’s lawyer, Michael Carvin, answered a little too candidly: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”
GovTrack.us predicts that H.R.1 has an 87% chance of being enacted. But some Democratic Senators are on the fence. None of the 8 Democrats who opposed the $15 per hour minimum wage have signed on to H.R.1, and fivethirtyeight.com names two of them — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — as weak on opposing voter suppression.
If you think voter suppression is found only in states where not so long ago lynchings took place, or if you think voter suppression is a strategy only Republicans can love — well, you would be wrong on both counts. Massachusetts is one of this states.
Here are some of the bills now before the 192nd General Court of the Massachusetts Legislature. Read the bills, identify the sponsors, and then help get them out of office.
HD.503 – sponsored by Colleen Garry (D-36th Middlesex) and others of both parties
SD.1096 – sponsored by Barry Finegold (D-2nd Essex and Middlesex). Barry Finegold’s bill purports to expand voting rights but contain provisions which do the opposite, which may be why it is included on the Brennan list.
We know that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts neither the schools nor the police are collecting adequate data on school-based offenses. This is not to single-out New Bedford. It reflects a state-wide, if not a national, lack of interest in tracking at-risk youth.
Many types of data describing the process of a child moving through the juvenile justice system — from schools, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), police, district attorneys, courts, probation, the Department of Youth Services, federal DOE and DOJ mandated data — must be analyzed in order to answer two critical questions about School Resource Officers: (1) does the presence of armed police in schools actually deter violence and mass shootings? and (2) is there a risk to children, particularly children of color, of disproportionate discipline and their early introduction into the criminal justice system?
However, there is some data, and we need to look at it. In January the NAACP New Bedford branch hosted a community discussion of SROs and juvenile justice. One of the invited organizations looked at data which school collect and turn over to DESE. Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CFJJ) obtained DESE data on school discipline in Massachusetts Gateway Cities. Aggregated data is published on the DESE site and there it is possible to look at specific infractions by school or by district. For example, you can find the New Bedford schools here:
From this data we find that in 2018-2019, out of 13,811 students in the entire district, 35 were disciplined for weapons (types unspecified), 69 for threats to other students, zero for sexual assault, 70 for fighting, 508 for battery (which includes any form of contact such as shoving or spitting), 65 for illegal substances, zero for felonies, and 5 for bullying.
But the New Bedford Public Schools already knows this. It’s their data.
The relative absence of violent crime in these numbers suggests that SROs are either unnecessary or are preventing serious crimes currently not being documented. Without data or specifics it is impossible to know which is the case. As the Justice Policy Institute has documented, schools have disciplined and expelled children just for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. To determine if armed police are actually needed in the New Bedford schools, a better analysis of disciplinary cases, then, is necessary to determine which cases actually rose to the level of a crime.
CFJJ obtained the raw data behind the DESE numbers in order to look at discipline by race, gender, disability, economic status, and language.
Using this data CFJJ prepared a statistical analysis for each Gateway City. The New Bedford analysis was one of them. CFJJ looked at overall discipline by race, discipline for students with a disability, students economically disadvantaged, and students whose first language is not English.
The NAACP New Bedford branch obtained CFJF’s DESE data extract. You can download it here. It was possible to reproduce CFJJ’s results and also to crunch the data in additional ways. For example, we can view high school and middle school discipline with greater granularity, and by school. You can download an extract for the New Bedford schools here.
The DESE-supplied data relies on Excel Autofilters, which anyone familiar with the software should be able to apply.
Then, using Excel’s charts, visual respresentations of the data can be produced:
While CFJJ’s Gateway City report looked at discipline by the percentage of, for example, Black students over all students disciplined, it is also possible to look at the percentage of Black students disciplined over only Black students. We found that, within each racial group, Black males were always the statistically most likely to be disciplined — reflecting what national research already shows — even when they represented a smaller proportion of total disciplinary cases.
For example, the chart above for Roosevelt Middle School shows that almost one out of three Black males were disciplined while only one out of five white males were. In fact, the discriminatory over-discipline of Black males is a feature throughout all New Bedford non-elementary schools and also at Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech, whose numbers we also obtained.
Similar analyses can be done for non-English-speakers, students with disabilities, and those living in poverty. As both the ACLU and the American Bar Association point out, students of color with disabilities are especially likely to be injected into the school-to-prison pipeline.
The Sentencing Project recently released a report on racial disparities in youth incarceration in the United States. Guess which state had the 9th worst disparity in Black youth incarceration? Massachusetts. And guess which state was Number One in incarceration disparities for Latino children? Massachusetts. And this follows significant 2018 reforms affecting youth in the criminal justice system.
So why is all this important? Because SROs are frequently asked to handle disciplinary matters that have nothing to do with crimes, and the DESE data CFJJ has published shows that school officials who may ask SROs to intercede are more likely to discipline children of color.
Until the New Bedford Public Schools can prove that the benefits outweigh the risks, we call on Superintendent Anderson to suspend, immediately, their SRO program with the New Bedford Police.
The 192nd General Court of the Massachusetts Legislature is considering a number of bills related to school resource officers.
The Chapter 69 Criminal Justice reforms and Chapter 253 police reforms now give school superintendents complete discretion to run SRO programs. New legislation also requires schools to collect discipline and arrest data, which for the most part they have failed to do. With school resource officers being advertised by both police departments and school districts as “mentors” and “teachers,” and with even some SROs admitting they are often pressured into being used as disciplinarians by school staff, several new bills make it clear that police in schools are not to replace professional support staff and that their role is solely to deal with clear criminal activity.
HD.2534 – Lindsay N. Sabadosa (D-First Hampshire) has proposed HD.2534, An Act relative to the location of school resource officers. This bill removes SROs from school grounds and makes it clear that SROs will never replace school counselors, psychologists, or disciplinarians.
SD.2043 – Harriet L. Chandler (D-First Worcester) has proposed SD.2043, An Act relative to safer schools. This bill makes it clear that SROs will not (i) serve as school disciplinarians, enforcers of school regulations or in place of licensed school psychologists, psychiatrists or counselors; and (ii) use police powers to address traditional school discipline issues, including non-violent disruptive behavior. The bill also prohibits SROs from intervening in all but clearly criminal acts.
HD.3090 – Kay Khan (D-11th Middlesex) has proposed HD.3090, An Act relative to safer schools. This bill makes it clear that SROs will not (i) serve as school disciplinarians, enforcers of school regulations or in place of licensed school psychologists, psychiatrists or counselors; and (ii) use police powers to address traditional school discipline issues, including non-violent disruptive behavior. The bill also prohibits SROs from intervening in all but clearly criminal acts.
SD.180 – Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-Second Suffolk) has proposed SD.180, An Act to prioritize violence prevention and social emotional health in school support staff hiring. In the event that schools keep SROs, it should not be at the expense of professional support staff. This bill requires at least seven “Mental and social emotional health support personnel” for every SRO and requires DESE to document compliance.
HD.2748 – Brandy Fluker Oakley (D-12th Suffolk) has proposed HD.2748, An Act to prioritize violence prevention and social emotional health in school support staff hiring. In the event that schools keep SROs, it should not be at the expense of professional support staff. This bill requires at least seven “Mental and social emotional health support personnel” for every SRO and requires DESE to document compliance.
Republicans didn’t care much for the Chapter 69 Criminal Justice reforms passed in 2018 and no sooner did the Chapter 253 police reforms go into effect on January 1st than they began devising ways to return to the good old days when police controlled school hallways, not superintendents.
SD.856 – Patrick M. O’Connor (R-Plymouth and Norfolk) has proposed SD.856, An Act Creating a School Resource Officer Grant Program and Fund. This bill establishes a state-administered fund to be shared only with communities who adopt SRO programs, and funds must be matched by local communities. The Commissioner of Public Safety (a political appointment) appears to exert significant influence in grant awards.
SD.857 – Patrick M. O’Connor (R-Plymouth and Norfolk) has proposed SD.857, An Act promoting local control and effective training of school resource officers. This bill returns appointments of SROs exclusively to police chiefs, despite the title’s claim to restore community control.
SD.2171 – Bruce E. Tarr (R-First Essex and Middlesex) has proposed SD.2171, An Act relative to school safety issues. This bill replaces superintendent’s discretionary appointment of SROs with an appointment by the Commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Two additional bills with SRO provisions from James Arciero and Walter Timilty seem to be cases of Democrats pandering to the police lobby. A third stange bill from Cynthia Creem is sure to offer both opponents of SROs and opponents of gun control something to jointly despise.
HD.2052 – James Arciero (D-2nd Middlesex) has proposed HD.2052, Resolve establishing an Enhanced Public School Safety Commission. This resolution would create a commission to study placing bulletproof glass, classroom surveillance, and retired police officers in schools.
SD.769 – Walter F. Timilty (D-Norfolk, Bristol and Plymouth) has proposed SD.769, An Act relative to school safety and security. This bill involves school resource officers in a requirement to hold live intruder drills within 90 days of the beginning of the school year.
SD.1506 – Cynthia Stone Creem (D-1st Middlesex and Norfolk) has proposed SD.1506, An Act relative to firearms and firearms violence. This bill sets up a Firearms Violence Prevention Trust Fund, which among other things, prioritizes “programs that support the provision of school resource officers.” Revenue for the fund comes from a 4.5% tax on guns and ammunition sales.
Trump’s second impeachment was, precisely as Republicans termed it, a show trial. Though it was not of the Stalinist variety, in which the full fury of a despotic regime is turned on the innocent. No, the Democratic impeachment managers, to the contrary, mounted a moving, professionally staged version of To Kill a Mockingbird in which prosecutors attempted to defend the Constitution. Jamie Raskin, reprising the role of Atticus Finch, mounted a convincing case and delivered an uplifting summation. But it fell on deaf ears of the GOP and the client, Justice, was condemned precisely like Finch’s client, Tom Robinson.
In the end, though, the Senate impeachment trial was nothing more than theater.
It hadn’t helped that the Democrats backed down at the last minute and refused to call witnesses. It hadn’t helped that several of the Maycomb, Alabama jurors — Klan members themselves — had been huddling with opposing counsel. It hadn’t helped that the impeachment process, as designed by the framers of the Constitution, is a joke. So much of a joke that during Trump’s first impeachment trial humor columnist Andy Borowitz joked that when El Chapo found out how impeachment trials were actually conducted he was outraged that his had witnesses!
This staged performance did reveal how broken the United States Constitution is. Operating precisely as designed, the Constitution shields America’s rulers from the whims of the little people. In addition to its broken courts, its broken presidency, its toothless House, and the highly undemocratic Electoral College, we have all seen in the last year alone how a partisan Senate can destroy accountability by any other branch of government. Indeed, the Senate is American democracy’s Achilles heel.
The almost religious reverence for the founders of the Constitution, who as Senator Ted Cruz put it, “fought and bled for freedom and then crafted the most miraculous political document ever conceived, our Constitution,” should really be questioned. The system they created is not merely showing its age. It’s just not working.
After the Senate’s impeachment theater, President Biden issued a bland statement lamenting the “trial” as a “sad chapter in our history” and naming the defense of truth the solution to re-uniting the United States.
But our problems go well beyond truth, as Atticus Finch might have argued — to recognizing and overturning centuries of white impunity. Not to mention ditching our dysfunctional form of government through a Constitutional convention — that is, before it self-destructs.
Speaking for many of us, Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation: “I Don’t Just Want Trump Impeached. I Want Him Jailed.” Mystal pointed to the racial injustices of recent arrests and selective prosecutions by courts, courts and legislators unwilling to pursue the many counts against Trump from the Mueller investigation and, finally, to the coup attempt that had no consequences.
Los Angeles Times editors have called for a Department of Justice investigation, impeachment or not. Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway suggested that the DOJ appoint a special counsel, a view shared by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. And New York Magazine ran a piece reminding readers of what the prosecution of a former leader might look like: in 2012 Italy prosecuted its former authoritarian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a man very much like Trump, on a host of charges ranging from sex with an underaged prostitute to bribery and tax fraud, even sentencing him to jail.
Although President Biden told the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists last August that he would not stand in the way of prosecuting Trump, in the next breath he said that it would be a “very unusual thing and probably not very … good for democracy.” By November Biden was telling advisors that prosecuting Trump wasn’t even an option. “I will not do what this president does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happened.”
Maybe Biden believes he can create bipartisan results, or even save the House from a Republican take-back in 2022. Maybe he thinks appeasing members of a party, 40% of whom believe in political violence, will brake what some see as an inevitable [cold?] Civil War. Good luck, Mr. President, but you’re kidding yourself.
But for all his reticence to prosecute a seditionist coup plotter, Biden still plans to pursue the extradition and prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for publishing evidence of American war crimes. We may eventually get that Stalinist show trial after all.
On February 3rd the Sentencing Project published a new study, Racial Disparities in Youth Incarceration Persist, by Josh Rovner, Senior Advocate Associate at the Sentencing Project. It examines disparities in arrests of white children and children of color, and it does not paint an encouraging picture.
For the NAACP the findings are no surprise. Black, Native, and Latino youth have been historically disciplined and arrested in disproportionate numbers and make up a lopsided percentage of those who are fed into the criminal justice system.
The good news from the study is that in the last decade youth incarceration has been cut in half. The bad news is that, for children of color, they are still targets of overzealous and racist policing and school discipline. Disparities in Latino youth incarceration have dropped by 21% — still not on par with national improvement — but Black and Native youth incarceration disparities have remained “essentially unchanged” in the last decade.
The Sentencing Project study quotes Tufts University Sociologist Daaniki Gordon, who notes that “police are […] more likely to intervene in behavior by youth of color that would go unremarked or ignored by police in neighborhoods where white youth predominantly live. Residential segregation leads to school segregation, and students of color often experience their misbehaviors treated as a disciplinary or policing issue while their white peers’ misbehaviors are more frequently seen as behavioral health concerns, potentially meriting a modified curriculum and additional school support personnel to assist with behavioral needs.”
As the study notes, criminalization of children of color often begins with, and right in, the schools. With very good reason schools have been correctly identified as the first stop in the school-to-prison pipeline. It is NAACP policy that armed police have no place in school hallways. Now that Massachusetts police reform has given school superintendents complete discretion over SRO programs, especially with case after case after case after case after case after case of children abused by SROs, it is up to school superintendents to prove that these programs do no harm to children of color. We call on Superintendent Thomas Anderson to stop the SRO program immediately and prove to city residents that it serves some positive function.
While Massachusetts has the fifth lowest youth incarceration rate in the United States, these low rates do not extend to Black, Native or Latino Children. Massachusetts has the ninth highest disparity between Black and white youth incarceration rates and is #1 in disparity in the nation between Latino and white youth incarceration — and it’s only worsening.
The Sentencing Project has offered three recommendations for state, city, and school policy makers:
Racial impact statements: States and localities should require the use of racial impact statements to educate policymakers about how changes in sentencing or law enforcement policies and practices might impact racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system.
Publish demographic data quarterly: States and counties should publish demographic data quarterly on the number of incarcerated or justice-system involved youth, including race and ethnicity. The federal government should disseminate this information nationwide.
Invest in communities: States and localities must invest in communities to strengthen public infrastructures, such as schools and medical and mental health services, with particular focus on accommodating the needs of children of color.
Let’s look at how these are — or are not — being addressed currently.
As we learned in last week’s forum on Juvenile Justice and School Resource Officers, racial impact and racial justice are poorly-considered factors in both school and policing policy, or are simply not considered at all. Juvenile justice data is either not collected — in violation of state law — or it must be obtained by FOIA request or lawsuit. And budget priorities for communities frequently overlook social and human services in favor of simply throwing more money at policing.
The NAACP believes that this study adds to what many Americans have finally woken up to — that the American criminal justice system is deeply racist and needs much more reform than the band-aids and minimal reforms that timid legislators have come up with to-date.
Since being almost completely exiled from mainstream Social Media networks after his failed coup attempt, people are asking where Donald Trump has gone. Some Americans are actually experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the absence of Trump’s daily crack pipe.
Along with Trump, many of his unhinged supporters have been banned from Twitter, Facebook, and others. But this has just inflamed white grievance and their warped perception that white racists are the real victims. Conservatives have been treating the 25,000 National Guard troops at the Capitol as a sort of Tiananmen Square moment, and their exile from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has now become, for them, the American imposition of the Great Chinese Firewall. While these developments are no such thing, they are overreach and overkill, and Liberals proceed down the road of heavy-handedness at their own, great peril.
So where has the Far Right and all their sewage gone? To answer that question I did a little sewer diving, and here is what I found.
Donald Trump can now be found on Gab and Telegram, although he is rumored to be toying with the idea of creating his own social network — which, based on the history of Trump Water, Trump Steaks, and Trump University, may not end so well. Trump has established an Office of the Former President, which so far does not have a website but did announce its existence on Telegram.
Telegram, a messaging service with channels that users can subscribe to as easily as Twitter, has recently attracted a large number of Far Right voices. They include familiar names like Trump himself, former First Heirs Ivanka and Don Jr., Steve Bannon, Dinesh D’Souza, Sheriff David Clarke, Michelle Malkin, Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Breitbart News, Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, Right Side Broadcasting, Epoch Times, the Bannon War Room, One America News, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Rudy Giuliani, Jack Prosobiec, Scott Presler, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kayleigh McEnany, Andy Biggs, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Ted Cruz, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and others.
American Conservatives frequently supplement an unhealthy, unholy diet with intravenous vitamin drips from QAnon’s Q-Tip, the Boogaloo Boys Intel Drop, the Daily Groyper, and other white supremacist groups. These supplements are entirely unncessary because American Conservatives have been getting far more than their minimum daily requirements of fascism, nazism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy for many years. And the content, it is important to note, is not all that different from the more “mainstream” Conservative views.
Other “victims” of internet moderation have moved to Parler, though it has been unable (or at least slow) to reload its Amazon cloud data to a new site. While inspired by mainstream Republicans, the January 6th coup was coordinated via social networking by extremists, and Parler was instrumental in the effort. With YouTube cracking down on hate speech, Rumble has become the go-to site for uploading videos filled with hate speech and conspiracies.
Since the pandemic, Liberals have been calling for more “moderation” (if not outright censorship) of crackpots spreading dangerous information. For their part, “mainstream” Republicans have been getting nuttier and more extreme. A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the “Capitol Insurrection Shows How Trends On The Far-Right’s Fringe Have Become Mainstream.” This belated revelation has frightened even the GOP. Today RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel distanced herself from election conspiracies Rudy Guilani delivered from RNC offices, wondering “what is the liability of the RNC, if [Giuliani’s] allegations are made and unfounded?” It will be interesting to see if the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party will join Democrats in calling for forms of internet censorship.
Yesterday the New York Times published an article called The Coup We Are Not Talking About by Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff, to her credit, faults surveillance capitalism for monetizing data that ought to be protected from “data mining” by internet services like Google or Palantir. She also faults surveillance capitalism for selling or patriotically donating that data to America’s vast security state. Zuboff is in favor of anti-trust actions to break up large, dangerous monopolies. And Zuboff is also a strong proponent of privacy legislation to protect citizens from facial recognition and other forms of exploitation of personal data.
But Zuboff is also in favor of measures that go well beyond regulation into governmental intrusions into the proprietary algorithms that search engines use, “comprehensive audits” (whatever that means), and most frightening of all — copying European laws like the British Online Harms Bill, which make companies responsible for “public harms.”
The American Security Establishment (NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, DHS, etc.) has long demanded weakened encryption protocols in order to “protect Americans from harm” by snooping on everything transmitted over the internet. But, of course, one person’s “harm” is another’s freedom. If Wikileaks offers a roadmap for what’s coming, censorship and persecution based on “public harm” will soon extend to more whistleblowers the government doesn’t like and those espousing unpopular sentiments, such as defunding police, burning flags, or socializing Medicine.
This is the slippery slope that Zuboff — and many Liberals — want to descend.
At the heart of the “censorship” (or “moderation”) debate is compromise language inserted into the 1996 Communications Decency Act. One section, 47 U.S. Code § 230 — “Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material” — does two main things: (1) it holds internet providers harmless from prosecution for inflammatory or libelous posts by their customers; and (2) it also holds internet providers harmless from lawsuits by their customers if they attempt to block or censor inflammatory or libelous content posted on their platforms.
Liberals and Conservatives both hate Section 230 — for different reasons. Liberals don’t want to hear hate speech and they don’t care much about the Civil Liberties implications of censorship. Conservatives don’t mind hate speech, or they routinely traffic in it, and they too don’t really care about the Civil Liberties implications.
Former president Donald Trump wanted to repeal Section 230, going so far as to threaten to veto the National Defense Authorization act if 230 were not revoked. And our new president is on the same side of the issue. When asked one year ago by the New York Times what he thinks of Section 230, candidateJoe Biden betrayed his ignorance of the law, saying, “[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] can. […] And [Section 230] should be revoked. It should be revoked because [Facebook] is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy.”
Trump’s and Biden’s views are shared by a large bipartisan crowd from Nancy Pelosi to Josh Hawley, and by Centrist Democrats and even a few progressives.
But as Ars Technica internet policy reporter Timothy B. Lee explains, “Biden is wrong to suggest that Section 230 treats Facebook differently from The New York Times. If someone posts a defamatory comment in the comment section of a Times article, the company enjoys exactly the same legal immunity that Facebook gets for user posts. Conversely, if Facebook published a defamatory article written by an employee, it would be just as liable as the Times.”
Those who want to impose more censorship (“moderation”) forget that if legislators can constrain internet freedom of speech, then constraints on print and broadcast media could easily be next.
In September 2020 former Attorney General William Barr weighed in on revoking and/or revising Section 230. One of Barr’s rationales was to permit more federal “oversight” of internet content and to give prosecutors greater latitude to prosecute indecency, terrorism, cyber-stalking, and “illicit content.” Barr also wanted backdoors into social networks and encryption keys the government could use to snoop on internet traffic.
But Barr also wanted changes that held online publishers like Twitter and Facebook to their own Acceptable Use policies — not arbitrary, capricious decisions to permit one user to abuse published policies while banning another:
“Section 230 […] should not hinder free speech by making platforms completely unaccountable for moderation decisions. A platform that chooses not to host certain types of content would not be required to do so, but it must act in good faith and abide by its own terms of service and public representations. Platforms that fail to do those things should not enjoy the benefits of Section 230 immunity. [My] proposal adds a provision§ 230(c)(l)(C) to make clear that online platforms can continue to take down content in good faith and consistent with their terms of service without automatically becoming a publisher or speaker of all other content on their service.”
As much as I revile William Barr, this last suggestion made more sense than convoluted and antidemocratic proposals to enforce “good citizenship” and “prevent harm” through what can only in the end be called by its proper name: censorship.
Legal remedies for willfully spreading lies, slandering or threatening people, or cyber-stalking already exist. Dominion Voting Machines had the right idea when it slapped Rudy Giuliani with a $1.3 billion lawsuit. And guess what? Fears of further liability from Giulani’s lying seem to have gotten Ronna McDaniel’s attention, too.
Ultimately it is up to laws to correct these injustices and to prosecutors to go after internet crime. But if the FBI can only muster the half-hearted prosecution of white supremacist coup plotters, and no one ever attempts to stop the steady stream of interstate phone scams ringing our phones at dinnertime, you can bet that new laws will also be enforced selectively, or not at all.
Liberals believe that the toxicity of the internet is responsible for the January 6th coup attempt. It seems to escape their notice that it was rallying calls by the former president, aided and abetted by numerous speakers and Far Right organizations who showed up on Pennsylviania Avenue on January 6th to urge a mob to lay siege to the Capitol. It was Republican legislators who conducted prohibited tours of the Capitol, informing the plotters where Democratic offices were located, where the safe rooms and tunnels could be found, and about the emergency signals in Congressional offices.
It was Trump’s Acting defense Secretary Christopher Miller who issued “stand down” orders to the National Guard, and the Metro Police. It was Miller who barred the use of weapons, air support, surveillance, who limited National Guard troops to 340 people, who basically de-fanged the police against a violent insurrectionist mob. If we really want to look at how the coup attempt could have been prevented, don’t look at censoring social media — which merely echoed the false claims of Trump and his Congressional co-conspirators — but to those who called the mob to “stand by” and then on the day of the siege urged them to go to war.
Once again, existing law is quite capable of holding plotters and seditionists responsible. But enforcement of existing law is always a matter of political will.
Finally, no matter the medium, there has always been a steady stream of crazy, racist sewage Americans consume, and it will continue to be produced even if its authors must resort to using mimeograph machines again. If we pursue the recommendations of people like Ms. Zuboff, William Barr, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden to attack social networks instead of pursuing prosecutions, we will punish the public instead of coup plotters. And we will still have failed to fix the white supremacy at the heart of the coup attempt — while irrevocably destroying what’s left of our democracy.
The Wilmington massacre of 1898 was actually a coup d’état, in which a mob of 2,000 white supremacists overturned a biracial city government, burned black homes and businesses like the Black-owned Daily Record pictured above, and murdered hundreds of people. This is recounted in Four Threats.
In the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency all hell was breaking loose. A friend, equally alarmed at what seemed on the surface to be a national break with reality and severe psychosis, recommended Four Threats by Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman. It was a good read and I don’t regret the time spent with it. The publisher’s blurb is a solid summary of what the book attempted to present:
In Four Threats, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman explore five moments in history when democracy in the U.S. was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound — even fatal — damage to the American democratic experiment. From this history, four distinct characteristics of disruption emerge. (1) Political polarization, (2) racism and nativism, (3) economic inequality, and (4) excessive executive power — alone or in combination — have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived — so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment in American politics is that all four conditions exist.
Despite its promise to get to the root of our democratic rot, Four Threats could not bring itself to name the primary cause of economic inequality — capitalism. Four Threats could not bring itself to indict the Constitution itself for the gridlock, frustration, dysfunction, and attenuated democracy that perpetuates political polarization. Mettler and Lieberman acknowledge unequal representation of the Senate, the undemocratic Electoral College, but then they just throw up their hands:
“These and other features of the Constitution certainly do make American politics less democratic because they render elections less fair and discourage accountability to the majority of citizens. Many have made cogent calls for them to be changed. But such changes are unlikely to happen. Amending the Constitution is difficult under the best of circumstances, and probably next to impossible in today’s polarized climate. Moreover, those in power are the beneficiaries of current constitutional arrangements, so they have little incentive to change them. As beneficial as some of these reforms might be for American democracy, we need to look elsewhere in the short term to restore democracy’s promise.”
The book never takes us to that “elsewhere.”
In their impassioned plea to save democracy, the authors cite a Pew opinion survey showing that Conservatives and Liberals both share a strong commitment to democracy. But they ignore the glaring fact that today’s Conservatives have quite a different notion of democracy than the rest of us. Conservative “democracy” more resembles Margaret Atwood’s Gilead than the Iowa caucuses.
In order to deal with polarization, Mettler and Lieberman argue, we need dialog. We need to talk openly about issues that really matter, with the preservation of democracy in mind, and cognizent that we have not yet extended democracy to all. It’s a sweet, noble — and damned naive — sentiment. One wonders if the authors have personally ever tried to argue for democracy for everyone with a white supremacist, listened dispassionately to conspiracy nuts hoping for a “storm” to usher in mass executions, or tried to agree on facts with people who don’t believe in science or in protecting fellow citizens by using face masks?
Four Threats was empty of the pragmatic prescriptions promised when discounting more radical solutions. Changing the Constitution? Why not? Letting the South secede? Bringing down the entire corrupt system through national strikes or protest in order to rebuild something that actually works? Again, why not? We’re long past the point that we need to place a “do not resuscitate” notation in the patient’s chart. Software is periodically refactored, shacks are bulldozed to make way for more solid structures. We even change our underwear. Why the hell not government?
An especially glaring omission in Four Threats was its failure to address American imperialism — a factor responsible for much of 20th and 21st century executive overreach. The Bush administration’s dismantling of Constitutional laws and norms, for example, were not sufficiently covered in the book, as they were in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. We are still living with global surveillance, an American gulag, secret courts, and violations of several of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.
While Four Threats to its credit spends time on Reonstruction and touches on Jim Crow, it never really indicts White America itself for white supremacy. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law provides a similarly dispassionate look at the institutions of white supremacy. But we [white folks] created this system, and if you really want to understand where it came from Carol Anderson’s White Rage will gladly hand you a mirror.
To truly understand the Capitol riots, read Carol Anderson. White America can never stand for an improvement in the status or power of Black Americans. So when Georgia turned the tides of the 2020 presidential election and thwarted control of the Senate by America’s openly white supremacist party, that was a bridge too far for White America. It was White Rage we were witnessing at the Capitol, threatening to bring down the entire national project. It very well could have, and they’ve promised to bring their guns next time.
Mettler’s and Lieberman’s blindness to the profound perversity of America’s citizens is possibly the book’s worst deficit. Why do snake oil and bible salesmen repeatedly prey upon — and originate in — White America? We fancy ourselves a nation of dreamers and builders, but in fact we are a nation of deranged, self-destructive, science-denying, racist, hating, religious fanatics. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: Who America Went Haywire makes the case that this insanity is embedded in our national DNA. So if you think the violent mobs you saw on the news on January 6th were something new and unexpected, just read Andersen’s profiles of those who built this country.
As of January 1st, 2021 Massachusetts law on School Resource Officers (SROs) has changed.
In past years the deployment of SRO’s was entirely up to the Chief of Police. But the choice of whether to place armed police in schools is now entirely up to school superintendents.
When Governor Baker signed S.2963, the compromise police reform bill, it redefined many elements of the SRO program, striking Section 37P in its entirety, and now gives superintendents the final word on whether they want armed police in district schools:
“(d) For the purpose of fostering a safe and healthy environment for all students through strategic and appropriate use of law enforcement resources and to achieve positive outcomes for youth and public safety, a chief of police, at the request of the superintendent and subject to appropriation, shall assign at least 1 school resource officer to serve the city, town, commonwealth charter school, regional school district or county agricultural school. In the case of a regional school district, commonwealth charter school or county agriculture school, the chief of police of the city or town in which the school is located shall, at the request of the superintendent, assign the school resource officer who may be the same officer for all schools in the city or town.”
I’ve attached a PDF of the legislation.
The New Bedford schools, which last October kicked off a community “conversation” with a propaganda video supporting SROs, have now enlisted community members to help improve the program. But instead of improving the optics of their SRO program, the school district now needs to justify its continued existence. And there are two questions the School Superintendent must answer:
has the police presence in schools actually kept children safe and deterred rampage shootings?
The NAACP New Bedford Branch is sponsoring a community discussion on January 28th from 6-7PM via Zoom which may offer some answers to these questions — questions the schools ought to be asking as well. The panel will feature: Leon Smith, Seq., Executive Director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice; Dr. Ricardo Rosa, Co-Chair of New Bedford Coalition to Save Our Schools; Matthew Cregor, Staff Attorney at Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee; and will be moderated by NAACP member Moriah Wiggins.
Everyone is welcome to attend. Connect via Zoom at 6PM on Thursday, January 28th:
Tomorrow Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president at a Capitol which now resembles Iraq’s Green Zone. The FBI is vetting all 25,000 National Guard troops who are bivouacking there for the first time in centuries — just in case some of them want to turn American weaponry against the new president. In addition to the National Guard there will be almost 1,000 active-duty military providing medical and bomb disposal support services.
For the 74 million Americans who voted for the outgoing president it doesn’t look much like a democracy. For most, only continued white supremacy makes America a democracy. And for many of the 81 million Americans who voted for Biden, myself included, it won’t feel lik much of a democracy either. For all our wishful thinking, there’s no rolling back the clock on who we are and what we’ve become. Very few of the 155 million people who voted for either candidate in the last election truly believe in full democracy, that is, both at home and abroad.
For years Americans have recognized that democracy and white supremacy are incompatible. Current events now force us to recognize that white supremacy leads only to authoritarianism and mob rule. And if we have the courage to look back with clear eyes on our history, we see it has always been this way.
The Patriot Act, FISA courts, the surveillance state, and the demonization and criminilzation of refugees, have become permanent fixtures under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Conservatives defend fascists while Liberals have now thrown both fascists and intemperate people off social media, proposed extensions of the No Fly List, drafted new anti-terrorism laws, and are now considering relaxing limits to all sorts of surveillance. After 9/11 we have not heard a peep from Democrats about retiring any of the anti-democratic laws and security measures that followed, as they continue to abrogate foreign policy decisions to an increasingly imperial presidency.
For many of us on the Left, Democrats cannot be relied upon to be any better stewards of democracy than Republicans. They will continue to be unreliable allies in police and criminal justice reform, housing, and universal healthcare. Judging by Biden appointments to-date, the Democratic Party’s true constituency continues to be corporate America. It remains to be seen if Democrats will actually help students drowning in debt, families losing their homes, people crushed by medical costs, or if they are willing to give up our long addiction to American Exceptionalism. There is ample reason to doubt this last one.
It’s fair to say that tomorrow, as Joe Biden takes office at noon, progressives will have a new political opponent who, for the most part, does not share anywhere near the same vision of what this country could be. Progressives and Centrists may have both worked to rid the country of Donald J. Trump. But the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. And, so that this is clearer, our remaining enemy is neoliberalism not my well-meaning Democratic friends who haven’t really examined it very closely.
One unquestioned aspect of neoliberalism is maintaining a monstrous military to intervene at a moment’s notice to protect American interests, and to force neoliberalism (usually mis-labeled as “democracy”) down the throats of even nations who don’t want it — all in the name of nation-building. Over decades this has led to U.S.-supported coups all over the world, insurrections, assassinations, and regime change — in other countries, of course, never ours until now. But now the chickens have come home to roost.
Bipartisan war-mongering and constant regime change efforts revealthat America has no real commitment to democracy as a principle. Neoliberalism’s bipartisan sidekick is neoconservativism, another ideology based on American supremacy and the notion that we are obligated to project our “supremacy” or “exceptional” virtue using the biggest, most lethal arsenal in the world. If it sounds evil expressed this way, it’s because it is evil.
As we move from a Republican administration, which literally tried to build a wall around America to shut the world out, to a Democratic adminstration built from spare parts of the 2008 Obama presidency, we move from isolation to international engagement. Some of that engagement, such as restoring the Paris Climate Accords, is very welcome. Unfortunately much of the international engagement we can expect in the next four years will not be so good. We are about to witness the trimphant return of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. And what good is the biggest, baddest military in the world if you don’t use it liberally and keep it in practice?
Yesterday Joe Biden announced that Victoria Nuland will be his Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Nuland, who camped out at various think tanks after leaving her role as Dick Cheney’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, is married to Robert Kagan. Kagan was co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, an organization that relentlessly cheer-led the invasion of Iraq. People forget that when America’s president changed from Bush to Obama, American foreign policy didn’t change along with presidents.
Nuland’s disgraceful involvement in regime change efforts (and the wars they require) should have immediately disqualified her as Biden’s pick. In 2014 Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussed the U.S. removing Ukraine’s elected president Victor Yanukovych. The Ukraine had backed away from a U.S. trade deal in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia. At the same time, a EU trade agreement was about to create new EU customers in the Ukraine. When a phone call of Nuland and Pyatt’s support for a coup to get rid of Yanukovych was leaked, Europeans were incensed and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was livid. It hadn’t helped that Nuland expressed utter contempt for the European Union. “Fuck the EU!” Nuland was heard saying on the same leaked call. The rest of the sordid coup story involves Nuland’s backchannel talks with Oleh Tyahnybok, a Ukrainian fascist.
Besides her regime change efforts in Syria and Libya, this was nothing new for Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was involved in another coup in Honduras — in which the Honduran military supported by the U.S. goverment impounded ballot boxes and forced the likely winner into exile. Clinton regarded the exiled candidate, Manuel Zelaya, as another “troublemaker” like Hugo Chavez, and she quickly organized new elections with pro-American OAS “partners” once it was clear that Zelaya could not re-enter the country. No need to point out that this is precisely the same strategy for overturning the 2020 presidential election recommended by Michael Flynn and attempted by Ted Cruz and a host of other Republican plotters. But Clinton got a free pass from Democrats because her crimes were not directed against Americans, just brown people somewhere else.
Nuland’s choice signals that the Biden adminstration will renew American provocations of Russia — in addition to all the other nations we currently sanction and meddle with. Last year Nuland wrote in Foreign Affairs that “The coming U.S. presidential election offers the United States a chance to get off defense, restore the strength and confidence of the democratic world, and close the holes in its security after years of drift and division. Once that resolve is firmly on display, the United States can seize the moment of renewal at home and stagnation in Russia to stretch out a hand again.” But Victoria (“Fuck the EU”) Nuland is precisely the wrong person to stretch out her claws to Europeans who have a talent for remembering history.
With U.S. military installations in Eastern Europe already literally ringing Russia, it’s not clear what sort of “holes” Nuland really thinks need plugging. Nuland has proposed even greater militarization of Russia’s borders, stepped-up VOA and other propaganda efforts, and a return to the halcyon days of the Cold War. “Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin.” Joe Biden has apparently swallowed this Kool-Aid.
Many Liberals recognize (even embrace) Biden’s explicit reset of the clock from Trumpworld of 2020 to Obamaworld of 2008. But if Biden succeeds in replacing Trump’s isolationism with the muscular American Exceptionalism that preceded it — as Nuland’s appointment clearly signals — expect more global war and no relief from our trillion dollar “defense” and spy agency budgets. And don’t expect Biden to stop provoking China either or repair lapsed or broken friendships with traditional allies. These relationships have been destroyed by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Forbes reports that Europe may have finally given up on a pro-Brexit America which continually insulted the EU project and thumbed its nose at former allies. Biden had asked the EU to delay a new trade deal with China, to not permit member nations to integrate with Chinese digital technology, and to not tax or regulate American Big Tech. An impatient, if not fed-up, Europe showed it wasn’t going to play along with a new U.S. reassertion of power, even if Biden was a familiar face.
The days of Americans barking orders and allies snapping to attention seem to be a thing of the past. Like their Republican cousins, Democrats just don’t realize it yet.
Among the many unsettling images from last Wednesday’s attempted coup at the Capitol were vicious attacks on Capitol police officers, bombs, terrorists with stun guns and spears, a lynch mob with its own gallows, a mob prepared to kidnap legislators, numerous Confederate flags, with many of the participants screaming anti-semitic and racist slurs.
One of the insurrectionists, Robert Keith Packer of Virginia, sported a sweatshirt reading “Camp Auschwitz – Work Brings Freedom.” Packer’s presence at the Capitol reminded us of the very real American anti-semitism which, most starkly, resulted in the murders of 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, and an attack on the Poway synagogue in 2019 which left one dead and three injured.
That year was especially bad because, in addition to Poway, there had also been an attempt to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado, followed by a shooting in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, and a mass-stabbing during Hanukkah in Monsey, New York.
There is no denying that anti-semitism exists. It is toxic and it is pervasive. At Passover each year we recite the line “in every generation they rise up against us.” In good years the oppression is universal. In bad years, it’s all too literal.
But one of the memes that has come out of the unrest and displays of hatred in this country is the claim that both the Left and Right are equally guilty of hatred and violence. These claims have been so powerful that they have become potent weapons. Precisely as intended, they resulted in a purge of thousands of Leftist members of the British Labor Party. In the United States, progressive Democrats have had the same target drawn on their backs.
While memes like this may tap into a naive desire to return to an imaginary “center,” there is really no center to return to. The Democrats have moved right since Clinton, but the Republicans have moved into fascist territory since Trump. We can preserve the center only by moving back a bit to the left.
In a community conversation sponsored by the YWCA yesterday, a couple of people claimed that “Far Left” violence was just as bad as the Far Right’s. But this is a baseless claim. We may have seen people upset with an epidemic of racist police murders marching in the street last May, along with some property damage — but you’d have to go back to the days of the Weather Underground to match the violence of today’s Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, KKK, neo-Nazis, militias, QAnon conspiracy nuts, and lone wolf terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.
Another remark made yesterday by a good friend of mine with whom I have disagreed on this topic for many years is that the Left is equally guilty of anti-semitism.
Sorry, friend. This accusation has only empty calories if you lump in critics of Israeli domestic and foreign policy with those who actually shoot up synagogues or spread conspiracies of Jewish “cosmopolitans” trying to take over the world.
More specifically, the accusation of “Left anti-semitism” targets people with legitimate criticisms. Is it anti-semitic to point out that Palestinians have no legal protections and have lived under martial law since 1948? Is it anti-semitic to point out that, under international law, Israel is obligated to provide for Palestinians but has not even made COVID-19 vaccines available to them? Is it anti-semitic to prefer the non-violent Boycott and Divestment (BDS) campaign to an armed intifada?
Precisely because BDS has touched a moral nerve and has been so successful, its supporters are now in Israel’s crosshairs, and also in the crosshairs of a number of domestic groups which lobby in Israel’s interests. Worse, these lobbying efforts have convinced many Americans that opposing Zionism is precisely the same as hating Jews and this has given rise to legislation that punishes those who support BDS.
Long before Theodor Herzl wrote “der Judenstaat” Zionists dreamed of “returning” to the Israel from which Jews were sent into exile in the 2nd Century. 19th Century anti-semitism made their dream more vivid, and the Holocaust made the dream a necessity, as Jewish refugees were literally turned away at ports by many countries, including Britain and the United States.
But Herzl’s description of the Holy Land as a “land for people without land” was not exactly true, and if you read his pamphlet you note the variety of methods for making those already living there leave in favor of the newcomers. Interestingly, Herzl did not envision Israel as a democracy but as a regency. And Herzl himself proposed Uganda as one possibility for settlement at a Zionist Congress. Zionists also considered buying a portion of Argentina. The Balfour Declaration essentially gave Britain’s post-war colony to Jewish settlers. As in Herzl’s pamphlet, settlement was originally handled by a corporation that would buy land. And for a short while, Israel did purchase land. But then Israel simply took land from the Palestinians.
The history of Israel and Palestine is complicated, but one thing is indisputable. Zionism is a colonial settler enterprise. Stripped down to its basic function, it was designed to send settlers to a land with indigenous people and take land and resources from them. Whatever you think of biblical justifications for taking land, or the fact that two millenia before Jews had lived there, Zionism was a project precisely like the Puritans arriving in Massachusetts with the London Company and taking what the Wampanoag owned — including their lives.
No one expressed this dark side of Zionism more clearly, more unapologetically, than Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Russian admirer of Benito Mussolini, who is credited with creating “revisionist Zionism” and writing “The Iron Wall” — in which he wrote:
It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”
We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “non” and withdraw from Zionism.
Jabotinsky understood well what Israel was doing was replacing Arabs with Jews, committing cultural and political, if not physical, genocide. Jabotinsky’s program was to erect an “Iron Wall” — not a literal wall like Trump’s but a “no concessions to indigenous people” policy. This is the policy that the Likud Party has followed since its inception. It is no coincidence that Binyamin Netanyahu’s father was Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s secretary.
The Neo-fascist revisionist Zionists of yesterday were more honest than their American defenders today who ignore the ongoing oppression, land theft, and human rights abuses. Jabotinsky actually called the Palestinians by their name in contrast to Golda Meir — often associated with a more “liberal” pre-Likud Israel — who denied Palestinian peoplehood.
Today, Liberals continue bending over backward to defend Israel’s abuses and to demonize its critics. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Israel’s definition of anti-semitism for the U.S. State Department, and it includes the murder of Jews in synagogues but also numerous forms of criticism of Israel. The author of this definition was Natan Sharansky, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs and Jerusalem. Imagine not being able to criticize the House of Saud or the Vatican. Imagine not being able to “single out” Britain because it is the only nation whose official church is the Anglican Church.
Israel’s defenders include not only pro-settler elements of the Republican Party like former ambassador David Friedman or the late Sheldon Adelson. But reflexive defenders also include American liberals who long ago decided that having white nationalist, Christian fundamentalist control of the goverment did not add up to a democracy — but, somehow, Jewish supremacy and extreme racism toward Arabs does. This is a country where half of Israelis believe in expelling Arabs and where one out of four prefer Jewish law to democracy.
To the credit of many Israelis — including a sizeable diaspora of those who have left, and for a large segment of American Jews — nationalism of any kind is a scourge.
If you think these are fringe observations, check out the human rights reports of B’Tselem, take a look at Israel’s liberal newspaper Haaretz, visit +972, a collective of Jewish and Palestinian writers, or get on the Jewish Voice for Peace mailing list. And inform yourself about the BDS movement.
Nationalism — white, Christian, Hindu, Polish, Hungarian, German, or Jewish — is fundamentally undemocratic, divisive, and toxic.
Honestly, I don’t know why I even have to write these words.
On January 6th Bristol County Sheriff and Massachusetts Trump campaign Chair Thomas M. Hodgson condemned in the weakest terms possible the violence of fellow Trump supporters storming the Capitol building, planting bombs, preparing to lynch both legislators and the Vice President, and attempting to prevent certification of Electoral College votes. Hodgson tweeted, “What happened at the United States Capitol today was outrageous and completely unacceptable. It is never acceptable or appropriate for anyone to resort to violence and malicious destruction to express grievances.”
Hodgson, a supporter of United Cape Patriots, a Massachusetts group that descended on the Capitol on January 6th, echoed the rioters’ false claim that the vote had been stolen: “The fastest way to end the ongoing debate over elections issues and the deep divide in our country is to have an audit prior to Jan. 20 so both Democrats and Republicans can be assured they can continue to have faith in our elections.” The problem is, post-election vote audits are not a Constitutionally-permitted alternative to counting Electoral College votes that the states have already certified.
The January 6th siege, which claimed the life of at least one police officer, was barely two months from the date Hodgson praised Trump for his “commitment to uphold the rule of law and support law enforcement in our mission to keep our families, neighborhoods and nation safe.”
Hodgson hypocritically claimed right before the election that Trump’s enemies were “attempting a ‘coup’ based on their ‘Russian Hoax’, in an attempt to deny the American people the legitimate outcome based on our nation’s electoral process.” Hodgson’s non-condemnation of the protesters and complete dismissal of the President’s responsibility for inflaming them, tell us a lot about his concern for the electoral process, the rule of law, or even Hodgson’s support of law enforcement. There is none.
The Bristol County Sheriff knows full well that marauding rioters at the Capitol had been enraged by Trump’s non-stop lies that the presidential election was fraudulently stolen from him, an assertion that Hodgson has not sufficiently distanced himself from.
If Hodgson is truly sad at “disorderly and violent behavior” then let him acknowledge the Massachusetts Attorney General’s report that he, himself, was largely responsible for an unjustified attack on detainees in his own jail. Hodgson, who has repeatedly been found by both state and federal judges to have violated the civil rights of his prisoners, personally attacked and unleashed dogs on non-resisting ICE detainees on May 1st, 2020. Hodgson would not consent to be interviewed by the AG, and the ACLU has had to sue for tapes of the riot that Hodgson provoked, which Hodgson will not release.
If Tom Hodgson truly wants “an election audit before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration” — an audit whose only goal is erasing over 60 state court rulings rejecting challenges to their election outcomes — he ought to welcome audits of his own jail. But Hodgson crudely dismissed the Attorney General’s report: “It’s about halfway down the sewer pipe,” Hodgson said. “That’s about how much value I put into the attorney general’s recommendations that are politically motivated.”
The validity of the presidential election was certified in fifty states, upheld by a multitude of court decisions, and then supported by Republican and Democratic officials who adhered to their oaths of office. But that’s not good enough for Hodgson, who only a day after the coup attempt said, “I do believe that there’s likely fraud, based on what I’ve seen so far, it appears that [fraud] is very likely.”
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Capitol insurrectionists were fed false and fantastical conspiracy theories that undermined any possibility of accepting a valid election outcome. They assembled, marched and viciously attacked the Capitol because of those lies.
In my almost 70 years on this planet, this is my first American coup. And I had been thinking that 2020 was the interesting year. I was certainly wrong.
I was going to write about the similarities between last Wednesday’s coup attempt and its precedents in the Munich coup of 1923 or Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922. I though I might mention that the Mar-a-Lago Führer had long been fascinated by his fascist forebears, even keeping a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches in his nightstand, a fact confirmed by multiple sources including Trump himself.
It occurred to me I should also mention the differences between these coups — that, unlike Trump’s 2021 attempt, the Munich police actually fought the 3,000 Bierkeller fascists, killing a number of them. Instead, it was reported today that off-duty police from around the country may have participated in Trump’s attempt to derail the certification of Electoral College votes and physically intimidate lawmakers.
Or that Capitol police, some who appeared in selfies with the mob, appear to have actually invited the insurrection into chambers, some armed, some carrying plastic ties to take lawmakers hostage, some erecting gallows, fixin’ to lynch the Vice President and House and Senate leaders. Videos show police actually opening the doors. And now we read that the deployment of Maryland National Guard troops may have been slow-walked by Trump loyalists in the Pentagon. There are a lot of questions to be answered in the investigations I hope are coming.
Unlike Mussolini, who triumphantly entered Rome with his fellow blackshirts, Trump retreated back to his bunker for another cheeseburger, despite promising the mob he would be marching with them. Unfortunately, America’s First Fascist didn’t even show the courtesy of committing suicide in his bunker like the man whose speeches he loves so much.
But who can say today that they were really suprised by this coup — coming from a man whose administration built concentration camps for children, proposed putting DACA recipients in boxcars and shipping them out of the country, never once distancing himself from his white supremacist base and in fact speaking for them? Who could say they were truly suprised at any of this — from a man who managed to corrupt everyone around him and never once encountered anything but impunity for even the most treasonous actions?
Yet what upsets me the most are the reactions the coup attempt has provoked.
Even after four years of the most egregious corruption and authoritarianism, the mainstream press still finds it difficult to pronounce Trump’s attempt to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes a failed coup. Instead, this retrospectively ham-handed effort is variously described as an insurrection or a riot — as if it were a fraternity party or a Superbowl celebration that got out of hand.
It was, of course, no such thing.
I had planned to mention that the all-too-frequently published photo of the Norseman with his spear provided an undeserved comic veneer to what was actually a deadly coup that cost the life of six people, including two Capitol police officers. Anyone who watches the videos now surfacing understands that many of the participants thought they were part of a “revolution” liberating Congress, just as they had been instructed to “liberate” state capitals by the President.
Despite all this, Republicans have refused to invoke the 25th Amendment and we now hear from Jim Clyburn that Democrats will likely conduct an impeachment inquiry 100 days into the Biden administration. Some voices gravely warn us that pursuing justice at all will only divide the country.
In the face of all this bending-over-backwards to avoid prosecuting white supremacists and rich white guys, the only concrete response to Trump’s coup has been for three social network giants to de platform Parler, the far right version of Twitter, and to ban Trump himself from Facebook and Twitter. There is a long precedent for this. Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been cancelling accounts of terrorists since 9/11, and telecom giants have on occasion blocked entire websites like Wikileaks. Social networks — precisely like members of the Trump administration now writing their resignation letters — simply didn’t care about lies, white supremacy or the threats of violence they suborned until they were forced to care.
But punishing one undemocratic action with another is not going to fix what’s wrong with American democracy.
Trump’s calls to invade the Capitol and disrupt the Electoral College ought to have had immediate consequences. But those who swore to uphold the Constitution violated those oaths. A bunch of pitchfork-wielding white supremacists — even when calling for lynching — apparently did not alarm authorities as much as BLM’s calls for police reform this Spring. Support for overturning the Electoral College vote from Republican legislators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should also have set off alarm bells. Well-telegraphed plans to disrupt the election should have resulted in immediate investigations and extra protection for Congress members. Instead, impunity for legislators driving and supporting the coup and violating free speech for everyone else are the only solutions we can come up with.
If overturning the results of a democratic election has no consequences, if coup attempts are trivialized and any thought of prosecuting ringleaders is not pursued, then autocracy will have won.
There have to be consequences for last Wednesday’s coup attempt. People must serve some serious time in prison for it, including the President, several Senators and a number of Congressmen, and thousands of white supremacists and conspiracy nuts who broke into Congress and attempted to crush police to death. Some of these spineless Congressmen are now blaming their actions on their own constituents. Michigan Republican Representative Peter Meijer claimed that many Republicans went along with the President’s attempt to subvert the election because their constituents had threatened them.
But if none of these instigators, ringleaders, or the organizations responsible for ground operations are held accountable, then let’s simply open the nation’s prisons — which contain tens of thousands serving life sentences for trivial drug and property offenses. Seriously, just let them go. If there are no consequences for ringleaders of a large-scale coup to overturn an elected government-in-waiting, then why should there be any consequences for a guy who arrested with a little too much weed on him?
The American Constitution has made many of the anti-democratic maneuvers we’ve seen in the last four years possible, granting excessive power to the Executive, undermining fair elections that everyone must have faith in — and these are all worries of both Liberals and Conservatives. It’s something we should all agree on.
If we really want to fix our democracy, we must start by rewriting the awful rule book that governs its operation.
Part 3: Comparing your city’s police spending to others
Part 1 of this series was a quick overview of New Bedford’s 333-page FY2021 city budget along with a spreadsheet created from those numbers. Part 2 was a look at New Bedford’s department funding and how it changed from last year’s numbers. In general, the New Bedford Police is being spared the brutal “defunding” that other departments will suffer — even as COVID-19 wipes out the city’s cash reserves.
What should a community really be spending on policing? How much is enough? What do similar-sized communities to ours spend? Is there a relationship between spending on policing and crime? Education and police? Do grants and state subsidies permit municipalities to spend more on police? How are poverty and race related to policing?
There are 75 communities in Massachusetts with populations over 25,000 for which more extensive demographic, economic, racial, and policing data are available than the state’s smaller towns. Since larger communities wrestle more with police issues we’ll focus on this subset.
From these downloaded numbers I constructed a second spreadsheet and built multiple worksheets which look at policing rates (measured as officers per 10K population) compared to staffing of teachers, crime rates, median family income, degree of political conservatism, and race.
You can refer to the spreadsheet for city-specific data, but the graphs depict only the general relationships between factors.
Increasing officers per 10K did not affect (raise or lower) teachers per 10K population. In Massachusetts many communities are free to spend a greater percentage of their budgets on police since they know the state will pick up the tab for education. New Bedford is one of these. Not every community spends similar proportions of their budget on police or teachers; and the data shows it.
Increases in police per 10K population correspond to increases in violent crime. Note that some communities with lower crime rates have the same proportion of officers per 10K as others with higher crime rates. There is great variation in what a community deems an appropriate level of policing for the crime it experiences.
The next graph surprised me. There seems to be no connection between the degree of a community’s political conservatism and an increase in officers per 10K. I had suspected that the more conservative the community, the larger its police force would be. But in fact the trend line for officers per 10K decreases almost imperceptibly as Trump support rises. Go figure. Massachusetts.
Another result that matched prediction was that the higher a community’s median family income, the lower the police per 10K. The trend line shows that upscale [and usually whiter] communities do not police themselves as intensively as poorer communities.
Finally, race. I computed the percentage of non-white students in each community’s public schools and plotted them against policing per 10K. As I had suspected, as the percentage of Black and brown children increases, police per 10K increases as well.
We have known for a long time that poverty is an incubator for crime, and that racism creates conditions that create and sustain generational poverty.
A simple-minded solution for dealing with crime is to militarize, surveil, and occupy neighborhoods with over-policing, and to fill jails and prisons with people who after entering the “system” will never work, vote, or have sustained connection to their children or communities again.
For many of our elected officials there is always some excuse for slashing social programs but there is always money in the budget for mass-incarceration and increasing police presence on our streets and in our schools.
So while we debate whether the New Bedford police budget ought to be $32 million or some other arbitrary number, or if armed police serve any useful purpose in our schools, we should not forget that lifting people out of poverty, not promoting a police state, is the only thing that reduces crime in the long run.
Part 2: Most departments “defunded” except for the New Bedford Police
Budget: bud-jet; n. A systematic plan for the expenditure of a finite resource, such as money or time.
Part 1 of this series is a quick overview of the City’s 333-page FY2021 New Bedford City budget along with a spreadsheet created from the numbers. In this post we look at department funding and changes from last year’s numbers. Besides the generous funding they receive, and even with a delay in building a new police center, New Bedford Police will be spared the brutal “defunding” that other departments will suffer — even as COVID-19 continues to overwhelm city resources and cash reserves.
Let’s jump right into the revenues. In 2021 the Buttonwood Zoo will bring in $150K less, revenue from traffic tickets will decrease by $200K, building permits will be down by $200K, half a million dollars in investment income are up in smoke, and a quarter of a million dollars of “miscellaneous non-recurring” revenue will be lost. But the most painful loss of all will be $3.9 million of so-called Free Cash revenue lost to the pandemic; this is the money carried over from the preceding fiscal year. It’s all gone now. Consequently, funding for many city departments will be slashed in 2021. But the NBPD is not one of them.
On the Expense side the loss of $4+ million in revenue doesn’t worry City Council enough to stop it from giving themselves a 5% raise while taking away $50K in funding from the Mayor’s office and another $50K from Purchasing. “General Government” — the catch-all budget category for most familiar city services — fares worst of all, losing more than a million dollars in funding.
The Department of Public Safety will also be defunded — that is, all departments but the Police. The projected FY2021 Police Department budget increases ever-so-slightly, but the Fire Department is defunded to the tune of $1 million and EMS services loses $180,000 despite contributing an additional $200K in revenue. This has got to be an especially painful slap in the face for public employees who actually save lives.
While the City spends $50 million a year on “Public Safety” (most of it for the police) it spends only $5 million a year on human services. In 2021 New Bedford will spend slightly more ($1.2 million) on Community Services than it did last year but will slash Health Department funding — even as the pandemic is still raging. You might think of Veterans Services as a federal responsibility, but the City pays more ($2.7 million) for Veterans Services than Community Services and Health combined.
The budget is just full of surprises.
The Zoo and libraries get a tiny boost in 2021, and there is another $35K more for parks and beaches, but funding for tourism and marketing will be slashed by $65K.
Two big changes in City expenses are a $30 million increase in the school budget and a $25 million decrease in Health and Life Insurance. These numbers are related because, in a bookkeeping change, the school budget now reflects healthcare costs. This is not the case with other departments, however.
It would be nice if future budgets would do the same for all departments — reflecting health care costs in their total operating expenses. Future budgets should also reflect pension obligations and the portion of debt maintenance that each department or Enterprise Fund incurs, as well.
The City Council — over-represented by bankers and real estate agents, beneficiaries of patronage, and the Chamber of Commerce — has consistently opposed raising property taxes on City residents but is only happy to cash state checks which fund more than half of all City programs. And when the “free money” or state aid dries up the City has always been quick to borrow. In fact, it’s done so much borrowing over the years that it now pays roughly $12 million in debt service each year to lenders.
Besides the New Bedford Public Schools, the City’s single largest expenditures are $32 million in pension payouts, a similar number for police, $18 million for healthcare, a similar number for Fire, $6 million for running Greater New Bedford Voc, and a similar number for EMS.
Some city services are organized into Enterprise Funds which are somewhat self-supporting. The airport costs about $1 million a year to run, cable access costs about $1.2 million a year, the parking authority $1.2 million, wastewater $25 million a year, and city water $17 million. But these are use-based services which invoice customers instead of levying taxes. Unlike police or general government, Enterprise Funds themselves fund the wages of those who provide their services.
When it comes to police spending, the best estimate of the cost of the 302 officers on the job in 2021 and the infrastructure required to support them is about $32.6 million. This number is derived from the $25,527,814 shown in the budget, plus another $4,235,554 in estimated pension payouts and $2,894,190 in estimated health premiums, for a total of $32,657,558. This is a conservative estimate because police benefits and salaries outstrip everyone else’s and police pensions are much higher. In all likelihood total police costs are much higher than $32.6 million.
So when we look at city budgets we ought to return to the definition of a budget — planning around a finite resource called money — and think about what else we might purchase with all those finite resources.
The cost of the New Bedford Police Department is more than all the tax money the City spends on EMS, highway and street repair, Community Services, Health Services, Veterans Services, Parks and Beaches, Refuse Management, and making interest payments on its debt — combined.
A “budget is a profoundly moral document,” presidential advisor Paul Begala once noted. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.”
In the wake of a national moment of reckoning with policing in America, while some communities are making deep cuts to their police budgets, others have begun to examine them. To my knowledge no one has yet started the process of studying the New Bedford Police budget, so I offer this introduction to the City Budget as nothing more than a starting point for anyone who wants to open an honest conversation about how the City spends taxpayer money.
Download and read through the 333-page FY2021 New Bedford City budget. You may also want to download the spreadsheet I created from the budget numbers (I also talked with the City’s CFO, Ari Sky, to obtain additional insight into the percentages of pension and healthcare money spent on various departments).
The 2021 New Bedford City budget is slightly over a third of a billion dollars — $363,897,500. Of that amount, local taxes raise 8%, real estate and property taxes pull in 36.7%, and borrowing and grants account for another 2.77%. But the largest chunk of revenue — a whopping $190,962,433, or more than 52% of the budget — comes in the form of state aid.
The $190 million in revenue from the Commonwealth is very nearly the entire cost of running the New Bedford Schools. The remaining revenue, which New Bedford residents themselves contribute through assessments and property taxes, is $167,247,075 and must be used to pay for everything else.
Of this portion paid by New Bedford taxpayers, 20% goes to the New Bedford Police, 15% to the Fire Department, 14% to state and county assessments, 7% to debt service, and the rest to running a variety of municipal services — highways and streets, inspections, human services, culture and recreation, refuse management, and many others. Naturally, the greatest expenses occur in departments which offer pensions and healthcare to large numbers of employees. My spreadsheet reflects departmental pensions and healthcare in Department budgets.
According to the FY2021 budget the City will employ 3,227 people — 2,162 school employees and an additional 1,065, including 302 police officers, 211 firemen, 88 Water Department employees, 70 City fleet mechanics, 64 Public Infrastructure workers, 42 EMS technicians, 34 Wastewater workers, 25 zoo employees, and 24 library workers. Many of these other services appear under “General Government” in the graph above. The New Bedford labor force numbers roughly 42,308. Of these, 38,482 are employed. This means the City of New Bedford is a major employer, providing work for approximately 8.3%, or one out of twelve people.
What is striking about the budget numbers is that, while two-thirds of all City jobs are in the New Bedford Schools, of the remaining jobs almost a third are police officers.
So read the budget yourself. Crunch the numbers yourself. Create a budget with your own priorities.
And ask yourself — should a hard-luck city that can’t even pay a half of its own expenses be spending 20% of its taxpayer money on police — and reserving 30% of its non-teaching jobs for police?
Wouldn’t New Bedford’s many pressing needs be more appropriately met by employees whose toolkits aren’t limited to a Glock and a Taser?
In his 13-page letter to both the House and Senate, Baker proposed extensive changes to the Legislature’s reforms. His main objection to Police Accountability was public accountability itself. Baker’s amendments to the Police Accountability bill remove:
civilian oversight
specifically, advice and oversight from racial justice groups
provisions to ban facial recognition
As Progressive Mass points out, Baker had three options. “(1) He could show that he cares about police accountability and listen to the activists demanding action and just sign it. (2) He could show that he doesn’t care and simply veto it. (3) Finally, he could again show that he doesn’t care, but by sending back amendments to weaken the bill. He chose #3.”
This wasn’t a passive veto, and yet it wasn’t Baker negotiating either. This was the governor mailing a Fuck You Very Much letter to racial justice advocates written for him by the Massachusetts police lobby.
After George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered, Baker made all the right noises, giving lip service to the concerns of civil rights groups, civil libertarians, and people of color. In early December Globe columnist Joan Vennochi asked, “Will Charlie Baker back police reform or police unions?” It was mainly a rhetorical question, as she reminded the governor that it ought to be a no-brainer since he claimed to believe in the bill’s reforms. In the end, of course, Baker caved to the police unions.
In rejecting civilian oversight Baker even regurgitated the police line: “I do not accept the premise that civilians know best how to train police.”
Until recently the United States has had a tradition of excluding ex-military from running the Pentagon. Baker himself ought to understand how it works: the National Guard is ultimately under his command, not its own. Only in weak and failed states are paramilitary organizations accountable only to themselves.
But in rejecting civilian control Baker struck a number of sections from S.2963 (3, 5, 7-8, 12, 14, 17, 19-20, 24-25, 27-29, 31-36, 40, 55-56, 62, 66, 71, 75-76, 81-82, 88-89, 93, and 121) — for the most part simply restoring the name of the training committee from the Legislative reforms to the original “municipal police training committee.”
Baker also struck section 26, which barred the use of facial recognition, and significantly modified section 30, which requires officers to use proportional force and de-escalation techniques and which prescribes decertification and revocation procedures. Baker’s section 30 makes officer misconduct subject (as before) to internal affairs investigations that can take up to a year or more to complete and places additional constraints on officer interrogation. Who else gets to investigate themselves but police? And where else but a police state?
It was apparent that the unions had leaned heavily on Baker because he also removed section 60, which specifies the process required for an officer to return to work after a year-long break in service; and section 61, which describes requirements for returning from physical or mental disability. Baker also removed Section 74, which defines an officer as a trainee regardless of collective bargaining agreement, until the officer has completed his certification course.
There are few bright spots in Baker’s hollowed out and gutted version of police accountability. But one may be that the Governor left the Legislature’s changes to SRO programs in place, the most important of which gives School Superintendents discretion to use SROs instead of Police Chiefs.
Baker’s letter to the Legislature opens by completely cutting the public out of public oversight of the police and restructuring the Municipal Police Training Committee. His letter calls for 16 voting appointees, each to serve a 3 year term: five police chiefs by region; one selected by the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association; one of his own choice; one officer from the Massachusetts Police Association Executive Board; two sheriffs of his choosing (God help us if one is Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson); the chair of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement (Eddy Chrispin); president of Massachusetts Association of Women in Law enforcement (Marie Cleary); Boston Police Commissioner (William Gross); Colonel of the State Police (Christopher Mason); Attorney General (Maura Healey); and one person designated by his EOPSS Secretary.
The Municipal Police Training Committee also includes several non-voting members from: Personnel Administration; Corrections; Youth Services; Probation; Parole Board; Committee on Criminal Justice; Chief Justice of the Trial Court; Chief justice of the District Court; Commissioner of Education; Massachusetts Bar Association; Special Agent in charge of the Boston FBI; a District Attorney; and a grab-bag including city administrators; the Clerk of Superior Court; one social worker; one mental health clinician; and one lonely public defender.
Baker’s training committee is responsible for re-writing policies for Use of Force and hiring new officers. Given that the public now has no say in their own policing, neither the type of officers hired nor the manner in which they are trained to shoot to kill or interact with civilians will change.
No reforms, no oversight, no accountability, no change. Just the way the police lobby likes it.
But Blue Lives most certainly matter to the Governor. Baker’s police version ensures that police officers get a 2-hour in-service course each year to help them with their PTSD and suicide prevention, and each officer will attend and complete a course on mental wellness and suicide prevention. Unfortunately, the public won’t know which officers are time bombs ready to go off. But even if we could identify them, we’d have no say in removing or disciplining them.
The tepid reforms that made it into the conferenced version of S.2963 were weak and disappointing enough after the House stripped out limits on Qualified Immunity. But now the governor is determined to deliver the coup de grace to police accountability. Police will continue to be accountable only to themselves, shielded by a governor who has decided that Black and brown lives don’t matter all that much — and that the real goal of police reform is complete impunity for cops.
Ignoring the concerns of people of color, deaf to the demands of civil rights and racial justice advocates, Baker’s edits are not only bad — they’re an insult to the people of the Commonwealth, especially those who need protection from bad cops the most.
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” — U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2
The U.S. Constitution is a mess. By preserving slavery for prisoners it has never fully abandoned that institution. In creating a Senate orginally intended to be appointed rather than elected, it preserved the vestiges of a House of Lords that gives outsized power to miniscule states. By establishing the Electoral College, we ended up with an institution that has undermined the will of the people several times in recent history.
Though the Founders were tired of a mentally-ill despotic monarch, they absolutely failed to remove imperial rule from the Presidency. It’s been a straight line from George II to Donald Trump. Checks and balances that the Constitution were supposed to provide have created instead a system of gridlock in four-year increments. The resulting inability of legislators to accomplish anything has led many Americans to question democracy itself and to to start flirting with authoritarianism — all to “make the trains run on time.”
But the problem is not democracy. It is the creation our slaveholding Founding Fathers left behind. Their rushed creation, the American Constitution, once a charming house, is now a rotting hulk with a deed that prohibits repair.
One piece of monarchical residue in our Constitution is the presidential prerogative to grant pardons and commutations. In all-too-many cases the President has pardoned cronies who committed serious crimes. Examples include Ford’s pardon of Nixon, Clinton’s pardon of his buddy Marc Rich, Bush’s pardon of Scooter Libby, and any of Trump’s pardons of people whose crimes include: bribery, mail fraud, election tampering, treason, sedition, human rights abuses, and cold-blooded murder.
Changing the Constitution is difficult enough, and downright impossible when the country is as divided as ours is. But we desperately need a Constitutional Convention. Retiring the Electoral College, denying corporate personhood, altering or abandoning the Senate, limiting presidential pardons, expunging vestiges of slavery, returning powers to the legislature long lost to an imperial presidency, permitting snap elections to be held as in most parliamentary democracies — features like these are necessary for the survival of democracy in the United States.
Unfortunately, Americans don’t really want democracy. Especially those who benefit the most from a system slaveholders left behind.
But if Democrats are nauseated by the spate of presidential pardons we’re about to witness, the next President could easily use the power of the pardon for better purposes.
Grant amnesty to illegal immigrants and whistleblowers. Empty the prisons of people over the age of 75. Pardon the nation’s many political prisoners. Pardon Crystal Mason, who cast a provisional ballot while out on parole. Lift the federal death penalty from those sentenced to be murdered by the state. Abandon impossible-to-prosecute cases against the last detainees in Guantanamo, and find someplace to send them before shutting down that national disgrace.
Whatever moniker fits best — monarch or president — the nation’s top executive and her Department of Justice should never have the right to unilaterally thumb their noses at laws established by the people. Overturning convictions should be a power for the lawmakers who originally wrote those laws, perhaps through a Congressional Pardons Commission. Or, at the very least, make presidential pardons subject to House approval.
In the meantime, Democrats ought to exercise the power of the pardon to the max. Perhaps then both Democrats and Republicans could finally agree that such a power is simply too much of a risk in the hands of one person. Such a bipartisan realization might move us one step closer to that much-needed Constitutional Convention.
I don’t mean to veer into satire — it’s not really a strength and this is hardly a joking matter. But yesterday, as I was checking out the limitations of a piece of “freemium” software (as opposed to buying the full “Pro” plan), it dawned on me that our “justice” system is exactly like software with the Freemium model.
The justice most Americans receive — unless they are white, well-connected, tasked with keeping the poor and people of color in their place with state-sanctioned violence, or can buy impunity — is the inferior “Lite” version.
It’s hard to know what Massachusetts Democrats really believe in — besides power. One would be hard-pressed to find a lot of concern for racial justice. MassDems certainly don’t believe in immigrant rights, or they would have supported the Safe Communities Act. They don’t believe there is a problem with Native American mascots or a racists state flag, or they would have decisively fixed both by now. Recently the MassDems overwhelmingly re-elected a party chair who will keep steering the party toward the rocks of irrelevance and decline. When the 420-member state Democratic committee did so, it also rejected two challengers who had both pledged to make the party truly more diverse.
Massachusetts Democrats show unquestioning support for police and correctional officer unions — even the Trump-iest among them, the Massachusetts Correctional Officers Federated Union, got one progressive senator to file legislation to give officers a $100 million raise. No, what keeps legislators up at night is the nightmare that prosecuting bad cops for murdering people of color will somehow undermine police morale.
No surprise, then, that Massachusetts Democrats removed ending Qualified Immunity (impunity) for police from a Police Accountability bill that just barely survived being deep-sixed by the Massachusetts House.
If this isn’t bad enough, Bristol County’s Democratic House Representatives are among the worst of the Democratic Party’s morally-flexible do-nothings.
Thanks to Progressive Mass we can view the results of the December 2nd vote on the Police Accountability bill, S.2693, which now awaits Governor Baker’s signature. Of 14 representatives from Bristol County, only six voted for Police Accountability — even after Qualified Immunity had been stripped from the bill.
What was so wrong with a POST Commission that professionalizes and certifies police officers? What was so upsetting about giving school superintendents discretion to decide whether they want SROs in their schools instead of letting police chiefs decide? The legislators won’t say — only that they get most of their information from the police.
Below is a table of how Bristol County legislators voted.
Remember their names when they ask for your vote in 2022.
On December 1st, after an endless and opaque process of reconciling House and Senate versions of police accountability legislation, both houses of the Massachusetts legislature voted to send S.2963 (“An Act Relative to Justice, Equity and Accountability in the Commonwealth”) to the Governor’s desk for signing.
Following national outrage at the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and thanks to unrelenting pressure by police reform advocates, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Joint Judiciary Chair Claire Cronin were unable to bury police reform, as the House often does with reforms or progressive legislation.
Still, the reconciliation process ended up shielding police unions from many of the reforms in the Senate version. Among the legislation’s bitter disappointments: it preserves Qualified Immunity for police officers; fails to reform civil service laws which govern the hiring of police officers; leaves unchanged shoot-to-kill training for police cadets; doesn’t touch structural racism anywhere — including police departments; and fails to create alternatives to police handling of medical and psychiatric emergencies.
On the plus side, S.2963 adopts language regulating the use of face recognition, establishes a POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) Commission with subpoena power to certify and investigate law enforcement officers — though not corrections officers. The bill also spells out the types of evidence necessary to suspend or revoke officer certification.
Under the POST Commission established by this legislation there are to be two divisions: one for police training and certification; another for police standards. This second division maintains a database of complaints of misconduct for each officer, and investigations carried out are subject to public records law (with some limitations).
The bill before the Governor limits the use of chokeholds, attack dogs, tear gas, and specifies de-escalation policies. It is the POST Commission’s responsibility to enforce these use of force standards. The bill also ends no-knock warrants — unless police can demonstrate they are life-saving.
School Resource Officers (SROs) will now be assigned by request of the school Superintendent, not the Chief of Police. And both school personnel and SROs are prohibited from sharing certain types of student information with law enforcement. The bill also expands expungement of juvenile records.
S.2963 defines police violence as a public health issue and requires the Department of Public Health to collect and report information on injuries or deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Besides the commission to study Qualified Immunity, the bill also establishes commissions to study: body cams; facial recognition; emergency hospitalization; civil service law; police cadet training; structural racism in correctional facilities and in the parole and probation systems; rewriting the model Memorandum of Understanding for SRO programs; and examining alternative emergency services.
While not daring to touch discriminatory hiring practices, the bill tweaks hiring, promotion, and discipline rules, especially where overtime fraud, corruption, and patronage may be involved.
The many study commissions established and the many decisions deferred by S.2963 show that the legislation is only the beginning in achieving real police accountability in the Commonwealth.
The City Councils of Springfield and Boston — where there have been numerous and high-profile cases of police abuse — have both applauded the bill’s measures. Boston City Council President Kim Janey and Springfield City Council President Justin Hurst penned a letter to the Governor on December 2nd urging him to sign the legislation without delay and without amendment.
In New Bedford, where Councilors were quick to condemn the Senate version of the bill for its Qualified Immunity provision, only a few members of the Council were prepared to offer opinions on any of the other provisions. Most I talked to claimed ignorance of its provisions.
Joseph P. Lopes, Ward 6 Councilor and Council President, said his main concern with the bill was Qualified Immunity and its impact on the morale of police and EMS workers. Lopes supports the School Resource Officer program and is concerned that, whether it’s the Chief or the Superintendent who requests SROs, that they have the discretion to move them around between schools. Lopes claims students want police officers in their hallways and he took a swipe at the Legislature for not inviting student testimony on SROs. Lopes was not alarmed by the establishment of the POST program, but could not comment on other provisions because he said he’d need more time to read through the entire bill.
Brian Gomes, the chair of Mayor Mitchell’s Use of Force Commission, and an author of a letter to the Legislature blasting Qualified Immunity, told me emphatically that he would never support the new bill. In consultation with the Police Union president, Gomes told me, he has determined that the bill will do a disservice to the public. When asked what provisions of the bill he objected to — now that Qualified Immunity is no longer a concern — Gomes told me that’s all he was prepared to say.
Councilor Debora Coelho, who earlier this year enrolled herself in the New Bedford Citizen’s Police Academy, is not only a fan of the police but an enthusiastic supporter of School Resource Officers. Asked about the change in discretion over SROs, Coelho said it’s not necessarily a bad thing to give a Superintendent discretion over their assignment. Similarly, she supports Qualified Immunity but does not oppose establishing a commission to look further into the issue.
Coelho disagrees with the bill’s ban on facial recognition. She has been a long-time supporter of CCTV and sees no reason that facial recognition should not be added to the law enforcement toolbox. Coelho does not oppose the new POST commission; in fact she believes it will ultimately give the public more confidence in officers and, therefore, actually be a good thing for police. Coelho doubts whether the Council will issue a statement on the entire police reform package anytime soon.
Scott Hovsepian, president of the 4,000-member Massachusetts Coalition of Police, is not happy that he didn’t get everything he wanted at the State House. Even after the Legislature yielded to police unions on Qualified Immunity and abandoned reforms of hiring and training of police, any measure of accountability was too much for Hovsepian: “The final compromise legislation is a final attack on police officers by lawmakers on Beacon Hill. It is 129 pages crowded with punitive measures, layers and layers of new bureaucracy and the abridgment of basic due process rights of police. It was delivered with almost zero notice and zero time for our leadership, our legal team and our members to process it before debate and votes were scheduled.”
But police reformers have found enough good in the legislation to get behind it.
Sonia Chang-Diaz is a member of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, a fierce proponent of police accountability, and one of the sponsors of S.2963. On December 2nd Chang-Diaz sent out an email to supporters requesting that they contact the Governor about swiftly signing the bill.
Carol Rose, Executive Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, also welcomed the legislation. “This bill represents meaningful progress for Massachusetts, even as more work remains to be done. The ACLU will keep fighting for reforms to protect Massachusetts communities from over-policing and police violence–and end the impunity with which some officers operate. It’s time for systemic change and an end to policing as usual.”
Marlene Pollock, an organizer for the Coalition for Social Justice and a member of Bristol County for Correctional Justice, characterized the bill as “an important piece of legislation [that] bans racial profiling and chokeholds, creates a Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission which establishes the possibility of civilian oversight of police, among other things. This bill has enough in it that police unions are fighting like mad to tank it. The fact that Qualified Immunity was not tackled shows how much still needs to be done both at the legislative and grass roots level to elevate the many voices of victims of police misconduct.” Pollock urged immediate and un-amended passage of S.2963.
NAACP New Bedford Branch President, Dr. LaSella L. Hall, expressed disappointment with a Democratic legislative supermajority tasked with addressing police accountability in the midst of a national reckoning. “In the context of all the blood spilled in 2020, if this legislation is the best we can do, then we have a hell of a lot further to go. This bill is about 25 years too late. Police accountability should not be a political football. It’s about the lives of innocent people.”
Hall faulted the timidity of the Legislature in failing to end Qualified Immunity, the “get out of jail” doctrine that provides impunity for even bad cops. He cited the bill’s limited input from community groups, the disproportionate influence of police voices, weak community representation on civilian boards, ineffectual tweaks to hiring and training, and the lack of value placed on multilingual officers.
Despite the bill’s weaknesses, Hall describes S.2963 as “a necessary step in a long campaign for police accountability. The NAACP will use the measures afforded in the bill as a tool to advance the policies we believe in: community control or abolition of SROs, improvements to a long-overdue POST system, and promoting a task force that will promote ending racial bias.”
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, formerly a Boston City Council member, said that the bill “fell short” of needs and expectations by refusing to rein in Qualified Immunity: “For far too long, the doctrine of qualified immunity has protected the very people charged with enforcing the law from any consequence for breaking it, allowing police officers to use their badge as a shield from accountability. The legislation does not go far enough to address this systemic problem. By merely creating a commission to study the impact of qualified immunity in the Commonwealth, and limiting immunity only for decertified officers, rather than ending the harmful doctrine outright, Massachusetts has missed an opportunity to lead by ensuring that those responsible for upholding the law are subject to it too.”
Pressley continued, “In any other occupation in America, there are standards of conduct and consequences for violating them — doctors can be sued for malpractice, lawyers can be sued for negligence. Policing should be no exception.”
Despite the legislation’s shortcomings, Police Reform Now (MA), a grassroots coalition of civil rights, religious, labor, and other organizations that advocate for legislative solutions to over-policed communities and for greater transparency in policing, is also urging the Governor to sign the bill without changes. But the coalition stops short of calling S.2963 “real” police reform because it doesn’t end Qualified Immunity, fails to include racial justice leaders in the POST Commission, and does not change how police are hired and trained.
Though America’s moment of national reckoning seems to have appeared quickly, it was grassroots organizing and years of advocacy that paved the way for these legislative reforms.
New Bedford police reform activist Erik Andrade, a member of Police Reform Now (MA) and BREATHE!, notes that “this bill affirms the power of the people and the importance of grassroots solidarity across the state. This step forward is promising and yet this is not a promised land. So we must continue to organize until real police accountability and restorative justice is achieved for families like Malcolm Gracia’s and for communities like New Bedford.”
Demands for police accountability aren’t going away in SouthCoast, Massachusetts, no matter what some officials think.
In the absence of progress on police accountability in a legislature with a Democratic supermajority, residents have been attempting to address police abuse at the local level. But at every step of the way they have been thwarted and disrespected by politicians who don’t even bother to conceal their contempt for police accountability or those demanding it.
New Bedford City Councilor Brian Gomes has convened another of his “non-listening” session to consider only the PD’s Use of Force policies. Bigger issues — qualified immunity, SROs, community review boards with subpoena power — aren’t up for discussion. And in any case, neither the Mayor nor the Council care to listen: “The public hearing is not intended to be a forum to engage in debate nor address issues not directly relevant to the policies.”
2020 New Bedford Commission on NBPD Use of Force Policies Public Hearings on Zoom Wednesday, December 2nd, 6:00-7:30pm
United Interfaith Action, which is one of a number of community groups that has been attempting (unsuccessfully) to gain the ear of Fall River and New Bedford mayors, has scheduled two events in both cities:
UIA Police Reform Community Action Fall River: Community Action Meeting on Zoom Monday, November 30th, 6:30-8:00pm
Sometime after midnight on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor was sleeping when plainclothes Louisville narcotics officers, acting on faulty information, executed a “no-knock warrant” — a violation of almost everything in the Fourth Amendment — breaking down her front door with a battering ram and killing her in the hallway of her own home.
According to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, police were looking for a drug stash owned by Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who did not live with her and had already been arrested. During the botched raid, Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, assumed it was a home invasion and fired what he said was a warning shot. Police then unleashed a fusillade of 35 rounds on both occupants of the apartment. Taylor was hit six times and several shots were fired into adjacent apartments, endangering three people. As Breonna Taylor bled out, police stood around watching her die, offering her no aid.
Breonna’s killing has brought some changes to Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) procedures and also resulted in a $12 million wrongful death settlement with the City of Louisville.
But holding police to account was a bridge too far.
A Kentucky grand jury presented Judge Annie O’Connell with its recommendation that none of the three officers who shot Taylor ought to face charges. Although former Det. Brett Hankison was indicted on three charges of wanton endangerment — for shooting up the apartments next door — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove will not face any charges for killing Taylor.
Police have been less than honest. Although at least one officer, Tony James, was photographed wearing a body camera, and another officer was filmed wearing a bodycam mount on his vest, LMPD at first insisted there was no bodycam footage. Then Todd McMurtry, Sgt. Mattingly’s attorney, miraculously produced bodycam footage of the raid that showed that his client, who was shot in the leg, could not possibly have shot Taylor.
Likewise, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s whitewash makes a mockery of fact and law. Cameron claims that Walker was the only one at the scene who could have shot Mattingly because all the officers were carrying .40 caliber handguns. But Det. Brett Hankison — the one who shot up the neighboring apartments — had a 9 mm weapon. Worse, Cameron turns justice on its head by declaring that the police had a right to defend themselves from Walker — even after breaking in, unannounced, in error, and plainclothed. Whatever Cameron’s tortured rationale, officers were not defending themselves from a little 26-year-old EMT when they fired almost two dozen rounds at her.
Following the release of Cameron’s findings, on September 21st the same police department that killed Breonna Taylor declared a state of emergency, announcing that in anticipation of protests they would be shutting down traffic, limiting parking, and setting up barricades — to protect property.
Breonna Taylor’s killing has left Louisville in turmoil. Hearts are broken and in the absence of justice many windows are going to have to be broken to vent outrage at a system that values property more than human life, and black lives least of all.
Breonna Taylor. Say her name. Honor her name.
If we truly believe in the rule of law in this country, Breonna Taylor’s killers must be held to account.
There’s quite a story behind New Bedford’s City Council offering up a “Blue Lives” resolution at precisely the time the City needs reassurance that Black Lives matter.
On May 25, 2020 George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer triggered protests all over the country. In New Bedford, where the memory of police murders of Malcolm Gracia and Eric Aguiar were fresh, Mayor Jon Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor, appointed a Use of Force Commission on June 15, 2020 and put it in the hands of City Councilor Brian Gomes, a law and order zealot who supported chain gangs in the late 90’s. Both Mitchell’s Commission, and his choice of Gomes to lead it, drew howls of protest from citizen groups who foresaw that neither Michell nor Gomes were likely to act in good faith.
On July 7, 2020 NAACP New Bedford President LaSella Hall gave New Bedford and county officials a list of demands for protecting communities of color, including establishing a Community Review Board, prohibiting choke holds, training and officer credentialing, reducing blanket surveillance, revisiting the police budget, reopening the Malcolm Gracia case, and stopping High Energy Patrols — aggressive stop an frisk.
BREATHE! Timeline here
But as far as Mitchell and the Council were concerned, they had created a “study” — and that would be the end of it. Behind the scenes the Council was moving — not to reform the police — but to shield it from public accountability.
“a member of the Mitchell Administration, the Police Chief, the Fire Chief, the EMS Director, the New Bedford Police Union and the New Bedford Fire Union meet with the members of the Committee on Public Safety and Neighborhoods to discuss the implementation and protection of Qualified Immunity language for the members of the Police Department, the Fire Department, and the Emergency Medical Service.”
The motion carried and was referred to the Council’s Committee on Public Safety and Neighborhoods. On October 14, 2020 the committee met to discuss LED street lights, crosswalks, and vandalization at pocket parks. The Council had also invited New Bedford Police Chief Joseph Cordeiro to consider
“the implementation of using drones to monitor high crime neighborhoods for surveillance across the City, adding another tool in fighting crime; and further requesting, that the drones be used for surveillance and security purposes when the City is holding major events, along with monitoring the City as a whole.”
At this meeting the Council revisited a 2018 request to Mayor Jon Mitchell and then- School Superintendent Pia Durkin to install
“security in all schools throughout the City, which includes panic buttons, cameras, and evacuation plan; and further, consider hiring armed guards possibly using former retirees from the Police Department and/or Veterans; furthermore, that the School Department install a hotline within the school system for students to report unusual activity, threats or even comments about guns or anything that threaten [sic] the wellbeing and safety of all faculty and students, titlle it ‘YOU HEAR IT, YOU SEE IT, YOU REPORT IT, TOGETHER WE MAKE OUR SCHOOLS SAFE.'”
But the highlight of the October 14th committee meeting was to follow through on the August 20 motion on Qualified Immunity. Lopes moved, seconded by Councilor Brad Markey, that the Council write a letter to the State delegation (Rep. Tony Cabral and Sen. Mark Montigny) “voicing the Council’s position against the proposed Qualified Immunity Proposition” in the Police Accountability legislation still languishing in the State House. According to minutes of the October 14th meeting filed by Clerk of Committees Denis Lawrence, Jr.:
“Councillor Lopes asked Police Chief Cordeiro how the current legislation at the State Capital, as it relates to Qualified Immunity, would affect the local police force. He was told if passed, this would cause a problem with the city along with other cities of the same size in Massachusetts. It may end up preventing the police force from protecting the very people they are trying to protect. Neighborhoods that are struggling will continue to struggle if not more so. A police officer will now be hesitant to be proactive if their decisions to act can be used against them. [Cordeiro] believes that the people who should know about the possible problems with Qualified Immunity do not know about it at all. Councillor Lopes expressed his concern for the future quality of police officers this would attract when the department looks to recruit officers; the Chief agreed. The Chief explained that currently the department is operating below their budget and does not have full complement of officers. He predicts an exodus of officers from cities to better communities. The Chief suggested that the Council and other entities flood the State Legislature with calls against the Qualified Immunity proposal. Councillor Lopes expressed his concern of when an Officer uses Narcan to revive a person from an overdose that they can be held liable. The Chief agreed that this could be an issue if passed.”
On September 21, 2020 the 60-Day Use of Force Commission report was released. There were no surprises. The mayor’s mission had been accomplished in those 60 days — to blunt public anger at the police. On September 24, 2020, reading that political winds were in their favor, Mitchell and Cordeiro backed out of a community discussion on police accountability sponsored by United Interfaith Action.
The Qualified Immunity motion had been the product of closed discussions involving the Mayor’s office, the Police Department, Police, Fire, and EMS unions, Lopes, Gomes, Markey and others on the Council. No troublesome citizens were invited. Gomes rushed to announce the motion in an October 22, 2020 statement to the same Councillors who had voted for it. The list of recipients who would soon receive copies was far more important.
On October 26, 2020 the actual letter was supposedly sent to Tony Cabral and Mark Montigny. On that same date Gomes scheduled a Zoom-based Use of Force Commission hearing, which he said would record public questions regarding the New Bedford Police Department’s Use of Force Policy, but Gomes ruled out answering any questions related to police accountability in general.
On November 13, 2020 WBSM’s Chris McCarthy wrote about the Council’s letter, incorrectly characterizing it as “unanimous” when at least one Councillor was not present, and the New Bedford Police Union celebrated McCarthy’s piece on Facebook.
As of November 14, 2020 at least one of the the intended recipients, Rep. Tony Cabral, still had not seen the letter to him that WBSM, the Police Union, and the Standard Times had all received. And Sen. Mark Montigny, when asked for comment by the Standard Times, had none.
These back-room machinations are a slap in the face to New Bedford residents, community groups, and the religious community that had all attempted to engage in good faith with Mitchell and the City Council on matters of police accountability.
The letter Lopes and the Council sent to SouthCoast legislators demonstrated once again that, rather than reflecting the opinions of New Bedford’s citizens, the Mayor and Council have little regard for them. When the Mayor, the PD, police and fire unions, and much of the City Council (half of whom are not accountable to any specific ward) begin doing backroom political favors for the police — locking the public out of the discussion in the process — voters ought to take notice.
There is no reason that police, who claim to need Qualified Immunity because they make split-second, life-and-death decisions, need it any more than surgeons or air traffic controllers. Accountability to the public by both police and public officials is at stake here.
Just as Qualified Immunity confers special protections on the police that no other citizen enjoys, the Mayor and Council doubled down on the injustice by permitting the “special” police voice to be the only one to represent the city on Qualified Immunity.
As the remaining votes in the 2020 presidential election continue to be counted, the math is showing that more than 75 million Americans have had enough of Donald Trump, while 70 million still think he walks with Jesus. Biden’s win over a white supremacist does not necessary add up to a mandate, but the almost 5 million difference in votes was a clear victory for Americans who felt they had been brought to the edge of a cliff.
Regardless of Biden’s win, he will be severely hobbled if Republicans maintain control of the Senate. The election decided 96 Senate seats — 48 for Republicans, 48 for Democrats — but two Senate seats from Georgia remain to be filled by recount and special election.
The battle for the United States Senate is just getting started.
Two Senate seats remain undecided in the exceptionally close races in Georgia. Besides a presidential vote that is almost certainly headed for recount, in January Raphael Warnock will face Republican Kelly Loeffler in a special election after a four-way race, and Jon Ossoff will face Republican David Perdue in a Senate runoff election.
If both Warnock and Ossoff win their elections, Democrats would have a majority in the Senate.
After Trump’s stinging repudiation, and because the Senate hangs in the balance, Republicans are not going to go down in Georgia without a fight. These two Senate races will almost certainly be the most expensive in history. Republicans will pull out all the stops to raise large sums to defeat Warnock and Ossoff. And then they will try to suppress the vote and challenge ballots.
Funding for both candidates, and for voting integrity, will be necessary to win this fight.
You can donate to either candidate via their links above — or navigate to gasenate.com.
Here you can choose to donate to one, or both, or to both and to FairFight.com, Stacey Abrams’ voting integrity project, which will work to make sure that Georgia voters will have their votes counted.
The battle for the United States Senate is just getting started.
On November 12th, state committee members of the Massachusetts Democratic Party will vote for a new Chairman. At present the party is led by Gus Bickford, who for years has held the post in conflict of interest with his day job as a political consultant. Bickford recently took his ethics challenges to a whole new level by poking his nose into the Morse-Neal race for the 1st Congressional District and launching a homophobic attack on Morse. This misstep, not so distant from Thursday’s vote, will probably end his tenure. Thankfully.
Under Bickford’s tenure the MassDems have fallen into greater and greater disrepair. Membership is down, town committees aren’t operating, and democracy has been a casualty. The party hasn’t been able to successfully challenge Republican governors and Bickford has failed to provide help in critical county and legislative races. Voters who have left the MassDems to become unenrolled say the party’s platform, revised every other year, doesn’t bear any similarity to to how Democratic lawmakers actually vote.
Bickford is being challenged by Mike Lake and Bob Massie.
Lake is deputy treasurer of the MassDems and CEO of Leading Cities, which promotes “business development and government cooperation opportunities and implementing public policy that effectively addresses the shared challenges facing 21st century cities.” Massie is known for his advocacy of environmental, climate, human rights, economic issues, and corporate responsibility. Both are affluent white guys who established nonprofits and helped themselves in the process.
Massie authored a roadmap called “BUILDING OUR FUTURE TOGETHER: A 10-Point Plan to Strengthen the Massachusetts Democratic Party and Win the Governorship in 2022.” And at least according to Lake, he and Massie are on the same page about many of the changes necessary to fix the party: “I think Bob Massie and I frankly have a much more aligned vision of what the party can be. […] We have already pledged to support each other.”
So, Massie or Lake — either would be a vast improvement over the ethically-challenged do-nothing currently presiding over the demise of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.
Razor-thin margins of the 2020 presidential election left many Democrats scratching their heads in dismay at the almost 49% of the population supported Trump, and wondering what had gone wrong. In a three hour long conference call, Democratic Party leaders identified their scapegoat — it was progressives who had tanked the 2020 elections for them.
Democrats are quick to dismiss their own failures. In 2016 the same accusing fingers pointed at so-called identity politics as the reason for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Centrists linked arms with the American Right in denigrating the unique challenges of marginalized people and the idea of inviting them into the Democratic Big Tent.
2020 was no different. Democrats wasted no time channeling their inner Joe McCarthy, admonishing that “socialism” was responsible for soft Democratic performance and that support for abortion, LBTQ, trans rights, and gun control was too “divisive.”
Repeated attacks like these demonstrate that progressives will never find a permanent home in the Democratic Party. As Joe Biden begins assembling his cabinet and planning his first 100 days, we will see exactly how party centrists intend to reward progressive contributions to his win.
For almost four years I was a Democrat. But from almost the moment I joined the party I discovered — at least at the state level — an inert, ineffective and undemocratic organization, entirely focused on fundraising for political machines and lazy incumbents, whose business is conducted mainly in the dark.
Nick Martin, writing in the New Republic, describes his unhappy relationship with his home state, North Carolina, but also his disappointment in the half-hearted efforts of the NC Dems. Martin also describes his grudging admiration for the clear, persistent, and ruthlessly effective messaging of Republicans:
“You don’t have to understand much about electoral politics to grasp that the Republican Party’s ground game in rural North Carolina was leagues beyond whatever slapdash operation the Democratic Party rolled out of the back of the shed. The GOP understood that it wasn’t going to pick up enough votes in the state’s bluer hubs to beat Biden in the state, so they organized the hell out of their base…”
Democrats scratch their heads in wonder at evil geniuses like Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove, and marvel at the Republican long game. But what Martin describes in his article is no magic formula but instead simple common sense — organize the hell out of your base, appeal to their values, make them excited to vote, and use the base to magnify and echo the message. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And Republican values don’t change, no matter how unpopular they are. And Republicans don’t apologize for them.
In her response to the Democratic Party’s most recent Joe McCarthy moment, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered a few observations of her own. Reviewing the unsuccessful ground games of several Democrats who laid blame for their losses at the feet of a party supposedly too “socialist,” Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee failed in its digital messaging — right in the middle of a pandemic — by blacklisting political consultants who work with progressive primary challengers and who actually know how to deploy social media effectively. In Ocasio-Cortez’s view, some of these Democratic losses were self-inflicted.
Readers may recall the “Better Deal” that Democrats rolled out in 2017 following Hillary Clinton’s defeat — but most likely not. The intended reboot of the Democratic Party was dead the moment Schumer and Pelosi’s press conference ended. Democratic messaging then — as it still is now — was timid and vague and nobody, much less Democrats themselves, believed a word of it.
On the left side of the party, progressives proposed concrete programs — Medicare for All, rescuing students from lifelong debt, and a Green New Deal. And they made efforts to explain their policies, not just the social but the economic benefits. Elizabeth Warren famously had a plan for everything but faced an uphill battle in the primaries because many in the Democratic Party, including almost everyone on the primary debate stage with her, thought she was too “socialist.”
Love ’em or hate ’em, we know exactly what progressive Democrats stand for. This cannot be said of centrists, whose campaign promises are rarely convincing. If this sounds harsh, just look at the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform. It sounds fairly progressive but when you see how Massachusetts Democrats actually vote you realize the platform is nothing but a cynical heap of verbiage, revealing only that its professed values ultimately mean nothing.
And voters have taken note, especially in the three counties that comprise the 9th U.S. Congressional District. Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable counties are slowly moving from purple to red, and the party’s answer to this rightward drift is to accelerate it.
But Democratic failures are also structural, particularly at the state level. If you voted in the September Democratic primaries you may have noticed that there were almost no challengers to incumbents who, for the most part, vote pretty much like Republicans. Town Democratic committees in Massachusetts have long since given up holding weekly or monthly meetings and only emerge from hibernation during presidential elections. Bob DeLeo runs the Massachusetts House exactly like Mitch McConnell does the U.S. Senate. Neither is a force for good.
And when the stakes are high for marginalized people, most Massachusetts Democrats are nowhere to be found. In 2016 the Massachusetts Democratic Party couldn’t be bothered to challenge Bristol County’s white supremacist sheriff. And Massachusetts Democrats still haven’t passed comprehensive police accountability legislation or the Safe Communities Act. Or thrown enough support behind efforts to get rid of a racist flag and racist school mascots. And Democrats wonder why groups they take for granted, including Black voters, were induced to vote for Trump in small but surprising numbers.
All over America Republicans are taking control of state houses. State Democratic parties are lying half-dead on gurneys and have to be shocked back to life. The party needs to become a bottom-up organization again. But throughout the Democratic Party it is political machines, consultants and donors who wield the power, fighting challenges to incumbents, failing to revive state and local committees and resisting party reform. And all power flows from the top. Again, the party’s wounds are self-inflicted.
There are obvious and commonsense ways of addressing the state party’s structural problems. Bob Massie, who is gunning for MassDems president Gus Bickford’s job, just released a plan to reform and revive the party. It’s worth a read.
But my guess is that Massie won’t have any more luck fighting headwinds in his own party than Keith Ellison did when he made a bid as Chair of the national DNC. It seems that Democrats hate change as much as Republicans. And they hate progressive change even more.
It seems inevitable that the Democratic Left will eventually be forced to build itself a new political home. But for the moment we can all breathe a sigh of relief that within a few months the country will no longer be run by a mentally ill fascist whose midnight Tweets re-traumatize us daily.
Voters in King County, Washington just amended their county charter. Charter for Justice had endorsed the 7 amendments and all passed. Of note were three amendments to the charter that pertaine to sheriffs and a fourth that applies to all law enforcement officers in the County.
According to the Seattle Times, the Charter Review Commission overwhelmingly recommended returning the sheriff to an appointed position. An appointed sheriff can now be replaced between elections in case of wrongdong or incompetence, and it removes politics from administration of the department. In addition, an appointed position enables a national search for the best law enforcement and jail administration candidates.
Amendment 1 requires an inquest any time a prisoner dies in custody. And Amendment 6 gives the county discretion to redefine a sheriff’s duties — rather than giving carte blanche to a sheriff.
Finally, Amendment 4 gives teeth (and subpoena power) to King County’s civilian Office of Law Enforcement Oversight (OLEO).
Amendment
Description
Vote
1 – Inquests
Require an inquest when a death occurs in a King County detention facility. Require an inquest when an action, decision, or possible failure to offer appropriate care by a member of a law enforcement agency might have contributed to a person’s death. Require King County to assign an attorney to represent the victim’s family in the inquest proceeding.
81%
4 – Oversight
In 2015, King County voters established the civilian Office of Law Enforcement Oversight (OLEO) to investigate, review, and analyze conduct of county law enforcement. However, at the moment they don’t have access to much of the information they need to conduct investigations. This amendment would give OLEO the power to subpoena witnesses, documents, and other evidence relating to its review and investigations. Any subpoenaed witnesses would have the right to be represented by an attorney.
83%
5 – Sheriffs to be appointed
Returns the office of sheriff to an appointed position, to be appointed by the King County Executive and confirmed by the King County Council. Gives voice to those who can’t vote or who face serious barriers to voting. Requires community and stakeholder engagement throughout the appointment process. Allows for greater public oversight of county law enforcement. Increases the ability to implement reforms. Takes political money from the sheriff’s guild and the inherent conflict of interest out of the election process. Allows for prompt accountability rather than waiting years for an election and hoping there is a qualified alternative.
57%
6 – Public determines Sheriff’s duties
Removes language from the 1996 Republican amendment that prevents alteration of sheriff’s office duties. Gives King County Council the authority to establish the duties and purpose of the Department of Public Safety. Enables King County to explore more effective public safety, rooted in community-based alternatives rather than the traditional criminal legal system.
The way many viewed the 2020 elections, it was supposed to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 virus. Instead it turned out to be a referendum on how much Americans care about the lives of their neighbors and children, racial justice, science, and democracy.
Well, we don’t.
That such significant numbers of people voted for white supremacists, QAnon wingnuts, and xenophobes showed that Trump correctly grasped how much Americans worry about criminality, fascism, and corruption in their electeds.
Again, we don’t.
An editorial in last night’s Tageszeitung hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that not only do Americans not care, “they know exactly what they’re doing.” Trump voters knew full well last night that they were burning down the house with everyone in it. And that there would be no survivors.
But this is who we are. Trump didn’t burn down the house. White American did.
Democratic pollsters told us that America needed a steady voice from the “middle.” It turned out their prescriptions were no better than their polling. Pinning all their hopes on Biden’s character and promising a reset to the halcyon days of 2008 backfired on Democrats. in the end Biden’s only strategy was running on Trump’s COVID failures. It wasn’t enough.
After the death of 3,000 people in 911, Americans were ready to invade the world, gut their own Constitutional protections, seal the border, and then bring their foreign wars back to America’s cities. But now, with a quarter of a million deaths directly attributable to Trump’s denials and sabotage, there is barely a peep of outrage from his supporters. The Coronavirus is just the flu and, anyway, Trump’s not responsible, China was. No, America hit an iceberg and we just have to throw women and children overboard and crowd as many billionaires into the lifeboats as we can.
One obvious takeaway from this election is that it was less a referendum on Trump’s corruption and impunity — which Americans obviously admire — than on the Democratic Party’s inability to offer something different. The DNC’s idea of “new” was a 78 year-old with hair plugs and dentures. A piece of meatloaf from the ice box with just a hint of freezer burn.
It may be hours or days until we know who won the election. I don’t share the view that both candidates were equally terrible. Trump is a fascist. If he wins, or the presidency is handed to him by the Supreme Court (for the 3rd time in my life), it will be the final nail in the coffin of our ersatz democracy. If Biden manages to prevail, Lady Democracy will still be on life support, her funeral delayed but relatives encouraged to book quick flights to visit her while she moves in and out of consciousness. Still, it’s the better option.
But the greatest lesson of this election for me was that White American may not vote their interests but we certainly vote for people who look like ourselves. Time after time the white voter looks into the mirror and refuses to see the ageing, racist sociopathic bully on the other side of the glass — yet each time he invariably looks like Donald Trump.
Elections and widespread voter suppression disenfranchise voters throughout the United States. In this most recent presidential election we have seen almost every trick used to make voting difficult or impossible. But there are many paths to disenfranchisement. Who we see on the ballot, who we see on the debate stage, and how we select the winners all determine whether we get the politicians we need.
The hegemony of the so-called Two Party System isn’t doing democracy any favors. Like the convention of having 9 Supreme Court justices, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that requires a two-party system. The reality is that we have dozens of political parties. Yet this magic number is taken by many as an article of political faith.
This year more than a dozen presidential candidates qualified to appear on state ballots, but you wouldn’t know it since only two parties were invited to appear at debates hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Despite its government-y name, the CPD is a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose board members are a Who’s Who of establishment politics. It was founded by the then-chair of the Democratic Party, Paul Kirk, Jr., and by his Republican equivalent, Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr. Since 1996 CPD’s sponsors have included Anheuser-Busch, Dun & Bradstreet, Philip Morris, Sara Lee, Sprint, AT&T, Ford Motor Company, Hallmark, IBM, J.P. Morgan, U.S. Airways, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and — well, you get the idea.
The entire election process — including the voting procedure itself — is designed to disadvantage third parties. The American preoccupation with “viability” always trumps presenting new ideas to voters. When, as Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein did in 2016, a third party candidate does overcome all odds and manages to get on the ballot, s/he is usually vilified, as Stein was, for stealing votes from “viable” candidates who are only viable thanks to free coverage from media giants and non-profits like CPD. Stein was arrested when she tried to “crash” CPB’s 2016 debates.
I recently viewed a 2016 video of Stein being interviewed by “Headliner” anchor Mehdi Hasan. When asked what she could uniquely offer voters, she pointed to: student debt relief; an emergency jobs program based on a green energy economy; and and end to police violence. While today’s Democrats are still struggling to address police violence, income inequality, and climate change, Stein nailed it four years ago.
Fast forward to 2020. It wasn’t just Bernie Sanders and the Squad who brought progressive platform planks to voters. Planks from Stein’s platform were eventually embraced by at least several Democrats in the 2020 election cycle.
I was one of those who voted “Green” in 2016. Admittedly, my vote was lost in a sea of Massachusetts votes for Hillary Clinton. But I felt it was important to support a fundamentally decent candidate with a more humane and rational platform than Democrats were offering. And — no — my vote didn’t bring Donald Trump to power any more than Russian troll farms or Jim Comey did. Democrats anointed the wrong candidate, and she lost because not enough people wanted her.
Which brings me to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV is used in a number of American cities, Maine, Australia, New Zealand, Malta, Ireland, and elsewhere. It gives voters more than one choice on a ballot, so that if their first candidate is not viable — in the real sense of the word — then their 2nd, 3rd, or 10th choice will at least influence the final vote. Ranked Choice Voting also avoids costly runoff elections by calculating instant runoffs.
On November 3rd Massachusetts voters will have a chance to choose Ranked Choice Voting by checking “Yes” on Question #2. The 10-way Democratic primary in the 4th Congressional District offered a perfect example of why RCV is needed. As a Boston.com article pointed out, “winning without the support of the vast majority of voters has become a feature of most recent open House primaries. In 2018, Rep. Lori Trahan won her 3rd District primary with less than 22 percent of the vote. In 2013, Rep. Katherine Clark won with less than 32 percent. In 1998, former Rep. Mike Capuano clinched the nomination with 23 percent.”
And we call this democracy?
Had Ranked Choice voting been available in 2016, I imagine that Green voters like myself would have held our noses and chosen Hillary Clinton as our second pick. But that wasn’t even an option.
So if Massachusetts voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, still end up rejecting Ranked Choice Voting in the face of increasing problems with conventional voting, then I will be quick to offer this piece of advice: Shut up about third parties spoiling “your” wins. You had your chance and you blew it.
Remarks at the Pleasant Street Police station on October 24th, 2020 at the BREATHE for Malcolm march.
My name is David Ehrens. I am a member of the NAACP New Bedford Branch and Bristol County for Correctional Justice.
Many of us have viewed Attorney Brisson’s evidence in Malcolm Gracia’s murder. It deserves a second look — not by the New Bedford Police, which rushed to exonerate its own officers. And not by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office, which produced a disgraceful whitewash eight years ago. They weren’t up to the job then — and they certainly aren’t now.
We have called for an investigation by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division and by the U.S. Department of Justice. But ultimately only community police review commissions with the power to subpoena and fire officers can really address police abuse. Law enforcement institutions and the legislators they lobby show little interest in holding police accountable to the public. This is what I’m talking about:
A Police Department that has called the public “thugs” and cannot be trusted to investigate itself.
A police department that over 2 years paid more than a million and a half dollars in payouts for wrongful deaths.
A DA who defends his predecessor’s whitewash and is personally responsible for some of the highest pre-trial detention and pre-trial death rates in the state
A sheriff who serves as a spokesman for a white supremacist group, abuses ICE detainees, and has the highest jail suicide rate in the state.
An Attorney General who refused to use her Civil Rights Division to investigate those jail suicides and whose predecessor wouldn’t look at the Gracia case.
Representatives on Beacon Hill who — right now — are trying to water down a police accountability bill
Police unions whose contract provisions bar the public from participating in police misconduct commissions.
A mayor who co-opts community voices while refusing to listen to them.
And in this same community we have a school superintendent who began a “community discussion” about police in schools with a police propaganda video.
What these men and women and institutions have in common is that they are all part of a dual system of justice — one in which the law comes down like a ton of bricks on the powerless, while police and the privileged get a pass when they break the same laws.
We’re supposed to be a nation governed by the rule of law. But this is empty rhetoric when every day laws are applied so arbitrarily — or depending on the color of your skin.
This is what has brought us to this march today — to demand equal justice for Malcolm — and for every other Malcolm.
Police reform is not training the public to accept police control. This is how you train a dog. Police reform isn’t singing kumbayah or having coffee with the police. Police reform is changing how communities are policed, and that will NEVER be achieved by ride-alongs, listening sessions, gimmicks or placebos.
Police reform will only come about when WE have the power to hire, fire, train, and discipline police — and when WE get the final say in how our own communities are served.
If he manages to be elected, Joe Biden must add at least two Supreme Court justices. I would welcome his choice of Barack Obama for one new seat and Merritt Garland for the other.
Adding justices is what should happen if Republicans jam through the appointment of an “originalist” judge who is also a member of a cult featuring handmaids.
Of course, not everybody thinks expanding the Supreme Courts is a great idea. Some Democrats — including Biden himself — fear the sky would fall if such an audacious thing were done.
But given that the Republicans have been packing lower courts for years, maybe we need to trade in “Hope and Change” for some “Audacity and Change.” The threat of so-called “court packing” would send a chilling message to Republicans pondering Trump’s eclipse — do it and see what happens.
But forget about Barrett’s cult for a moment. Shouldn’t we restore some religious balance to the highest court in the land? 63% of Supreme Court Justices are already Catholic in a country where only 23% identify as such. If Barrett is confirmed that number would hit 75%. Many American Catholics don’t even share the views of their more conservative co-religionists on the Court. And more Americans than ever check off “none” in the religious box.
Expanding the Court is hardly a new idea. Donald Trump’s next favorite president (after himself, of course) is Andrew Jackson, who added two justices to the Court in 1836.
There is also nothing sacred about nine justices or lifetime presidential appointments. The way justices are appointed in other Western nations puts our process to shame.
The Supreme Court of Canada is appointed by the Governor in Council and consists of nine justices. The number started out as six, was bumped up to seven, and ultimately nine. On the surface theirs looks like ours, but Canada’s Supreme Court Act requires that three judges come from Ontario, three from Quebec, two from the Western provinces or Northern Canada and one from the Atlantic provinces. And Judges must also retire before their 75th birthdays.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has twelve justices and they must have already served on the bench for 15 years, or 2 on a “federal” bench. The UK convenes a selection commission chosen from judiciaries in Britain, Scotland, Northern Island and Wales, and it strives for balance. After selection, a justice is formally appointed by the Queen. Even with 12 justices that number can still be increased. Justices must retire at 70 or 75, depending on when they joined the bench.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, or BVerfG), has sixteen justices divided a couple of ways into two senates and three chambers. Judges are elected by both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, each of which selects eight justices. A Justice must have previously held a position on the bench and be at least 40 years of age. Justices serve for 12 years or until the age of 68, whichever comes first.
The French Court of Cassation is the highest appeal court in France and has an elaborate system of chambers and sitting and administrative judges, but 15 justices head up the court. These 15 judges serve a 9 year term and 3 each are appointed by the President of the Republic, the Senate and the National Assembly presidents. To become a judge, a lawyer must be admitted to the Supreme Court Bar after passing an exam from the National School of the Magistracy. Typically, candidates are already judges in lower courts.
Our Supreme Court selection process is a mess. Not only is it highly politicized, but it lacks regional and demographic representation, professionalism, and justices typically serve well past normal professional expiration dates. More importantly, our selection process is simply undemocratic.
We need a serious re-think of the selection process, as well as term limits for the Supreme Court. And there are plenty of places to look for better ideas, starting with some of our closer allies.
But in the interim, let’s expand the Supreme Court.
The Gracia family’s lawyer, Don Brisson, finished a series of presentations last week on Malcolm’s murder. Brisson spent considerable time discussing inconsistencies in detectives’ testimony and forensic evidence collected at the crime scene.
But one of the more shocking pieces of evidence Brisson released were videos that had been withheld from the public until December 2018. There are three videos of the evening of May 17th, 2012. One is high resolution surveillance footage from the Temple Landing basketball court. It is what Detective Safioleas would have been watching from the Rockdale Ave. police headquarters. The other two are residential CCVT camera footage from Middle and Ash streets displayed side-by-side.
What is striking is the sheer speed with which New Bedford Police murdered Malcolm Gracia.
At 8:36 Malcom is seen leaving the Temple Landing basketball court. He walks down Middle and turns left on Cedar Street. Eleven seconds later New Bedford police speed around the same corner. And 27 seconds after that, a camera records neighbors and children out skateboarding scattering as Malcolm is apparently shot out of sight of the cameras.
The 27 seconds it took police to kill Malcolm Gracia is never questioned as investigators simply accept detectives’ accounts of a much more professional, by-the-book, and leisurely encounter.
If you watch the videos, it’s clear that police accounts could not have been truthful.
Video #1: the elaborate handshake
This is the surveillance footage from the Temple Landing basketball court, which shows Malcolm Gracia interacting with other observers at pick-me-up basketball games.
The Gang Unit’s surveillance camera, which recorded the correct date, was about 24 minutes, 51 seconds fast. For reference it was best to use seconds into the video instead of erroneous time stamps on it.
At about 413 seconds into the video (estimated to be 8:28:55 PM) the surveillance camera first picks up Malcolm Gracia and Adam Carreira. At about 520 seconds we see Gracia wearing black pants and a black hoodie, smiling and shaking hands with a spectator seated in the bleachers of the basketball court farthest from Cedar Street. This is the handshake that sets a police murder in motion. Sgt. Brian Safioleas, who has been watching Adam Carreira’s cigarette, switches to Gracia for a minute, and zooms in on Carreira’s cigarette again as he passes it to Gracia. Viewing the video now it appears Safioleas’s interest was what the boys were smoking. At about 585 seconds Safioleas zooms out to the entire bleacher and zooms back in to put Gracia entirely in the frame of the camera. Gracia is a bit more reserved than Carreira. But he is smiling, talking to a spectator in a striped shirt, and having a smoke. At about 880 seconds spectators start getting up out of the bleachers and are getting ready leave. By my calculations the actual time is around 8:28 PM. By 900 seconds into the video the spectators are leaving and all are shaking hands as they leave. At about 936 seconds Gracia says something to Carreira and both exit the camera frame. It is only a few footsteps to the Middle Street entrance and a residential CCVT camera records them leaving. The estimated time is roughly 8:36:19 PM.
It is interesting that the camera stops following Gracia and Carreira at this point and remains directed at the remaining spectators and ball players until everyone has left the frame. Of course, Safioleas could now be scrambling to dispatch Fonseca, Sylvia, Barnes and Brown and may have simply left the camera unattended. But wasn’t Safioleas concerned about the direction they were headed? The camera keeps recording a static image of the bleachers until 1310 seconds, when it then pans north across both basketball courts to show at least four police cruisers and an ambulance. The video runs another 500 seconds, zooming into the corner of Cedar and Middle where officers are stringing crime scene tape and residents — later described as a “mob” by the EMS technician who first treats Barnes — stand around watching the aftermath of another police shooting.
Video #2: police chase Gracia around the corner
The second video displays synchronized footage from two different Housing Authority cameras. One shows officers arriving on the scene. Another shows Malcolm leaving the courts and turning the corner of Middle and Cedar. Seconds later police do the same.
The camera which provided the footage in the left frame is most likely housed in a street lamp in front of 347 Middle Street and looks southeast down Middle Street toward Cedar Street and toward the entrance of the basketball courts. The camera which provided footage in the right frame is likely in a walkway behind 263 Ash Street. It looks northeast, down Ash Street, through the climbing structures and swing sets, past the basketball courts to the corner of Middle and Cedar. Unfortunately, both video quality and lighting are poor and, owing to the distance, distorted like telephoto photos. Both frames in the one video are time-stamped but do not record seconds.
At 8:36 PM — 27 seconds into the composite video — you can see Malcolm Gracia leaving the courts with Adam Carreira. His pointed hoodie is clearly visible as he makes his way down Middle Street and at 63 seconds the two turn the corner to Cedar. At this precise moment you can see Sylvia and Fonseca’s cruiser in camera two’s frame on the right. Fonseca, the driver, has driven past Middle Street in error, and is seen backing up onto Elm Street near the white rock at the intersection. The children’s playground on Ash Street is clearly visible in front of him. At 8:37 PM — 68 seconds into the video — Fonseca turns left and races back down Middle Street.
At 8:37 PM on camera one — at 71 seconds — you see Fonseca and Sylvia speeding down Middle Street. An unidentified silver vehicle just beats them to the intersection and precedes them as they turn onto Cedar at 74 seconds into the video. At 103 seconds another vehicle comes up Cedar. At 110 seconds — 27 seconds after the police turn onto Cedar — camera one picks up residents scattering and running. Fonseca and Sylvia have probably just fired the last of six shots caught by Shotspotter. This would make the time 8:37:42 PM. At 194 seconds into the video residents start running toward the corner of Middle and Cedar to see what’s happening. Police cars begin arriving at 225 seconds.
Timeline
Video
Time
Action
08:28:55 PM
Gracia Shaking hands
16
08:36:08 PM
Gracia and Carreira leave basketball court
27
08:36:19 PM
Gracia seen exiting court from Middle St.
63
08:36:55 PM
Gracia turns corner onto Cedar
74
08:37:06 PM
Fonseca and Sylvia turn corner onto Cedar
110
08:37:42 PM
Residents scatter in alarm **
194
08:39:06 PM
Residents run toward intersection
225
08:39:37 PM
Police cruisers arrive
** estimated from Shotspotter records and video of residents reacting to sounds of shooting
Last year I began working on a profile of Bristol County Thomas M. Hodgson’s associations with far right and white supremacist organizations for The Public Eye magazine. It took a long time to research and write, and even longer to edit, but after Covid-related delays it is finally out and you can read it online here or download the issue’s PDF here.
Allow me to plug buying a subscription to PRA’s print magazine, even in the digital age. Your support will help Political Research Associates keep investigating and reporting on America’s extreme Right.
PRA is running a Fall Webinar series that so far has tackled sheriffs, militias, and austerity. They have all been interesting and the moderator does a great job of posing questions and keeping everyone on schedule. Tomorrow’s webinar is Mobilizing Misogyny in the Service of Authoritarianism.
Legislators are elected to help people. Some think their responsibility stops with constituents; others have a broader sense of responsibility to the earth, humanity, and global concerns. This is who I want representing me.
When it comes to immigration issues, I want legislators to take action against the Trump administration’s enlistment of local police in increasingly brazen and cruel roundups of desperate and paperless refugees. But the majority of Bristol County legislators are profound disappointments. Most coast to re-election without challengers. Instead of democracy we have political machinery and patronage in Bristol County. And with a few exceptions, we get hacks instead of leaders as a result.
Hall of Fame
I am grateful to the following state representatives and senators for stepping up to support the Safe Communities Act. It takes guts and principle and that broader sense of responsibility to help suffering human beings, whether they can vote for you or not.
The Republicans on the list below all belong on the Wall of Shame. Their party has become a rotting husk and a personality cult whose immigration policy is literally written by white supremacists. No surprise that Massachusetts Republicans march in lockstep with White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller, who proposed deporting Central American DACA recipients in railroad boxcars.
But the Democrats on this list? To be charitable, if they don’t share the xenophobia of their Republican friends, then their only excuse is that they are cowardly machine politicians afraid of angering rightwing police unions and some of their more racist constituents. Everyone on the list below will protest that they’re not racists or xenophobes — and a few can even point to programs they’ve funded which help disadvantaged communities.
But when it’s time to show their mettle, they are invariably too timid to help refugees whose lives have been upended by war, climate change, political instability, or hunger. Their love of humanity is conditional and narrow, reserved only for campaign contributors and potential voters. For refugees they look away, and for that — Democrat or Republican — they ought to be deeply ashamed.
Legislators are elected to help people. Some think their responsibility stops with constituents; others have a broader sense of responsibility to the earth, humanity, and global concerns. This is who I want representing me.
When it comes to immigration in this state, I want legislators to take action against the Trump administration’s enlistment of local police in increasingly brazen and cruel roundups of desperate and paperless refugees. But the majority of Bristol County legislators are profound disappointments. Most coast to re-election without challengers. Instead of democracy we have political machinery and patronage in Bristol County. And with a few exceptions, we get hacks instead of leaders as a result.
Hall of Fame
I am grateful to the following state representatives and senators for stepping up to support the Safe Communities Act. It takes guts and principle and that broader sense of responsiibility to help suffering human beings, whether they can vote for you or not.
The Republicans on the list below all belong on the Wall of Shame. Their party has become a rotting husk and a personality cult whose immigration policy is literally written by white supremacists. No surprise that Massachusetts Republicans march in lockstep with White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller, who proposed deporting Central American DACA recipients in railroad boxcars.
But the Democrats on this list? To be charitable, if they don’t share the xenophobia of their Republican friends, then their only excuse is that they are cowardly machine politicians afraid of angering rightwing police unions and some of their more racist constituents. Everyone on the list below will protest that they’re not racists or xenophobes — and a few can even point to programs they’ve funded which help disadvantaged communities.
But when it’s time to show their mettle, they are invariably too timid to help refugees whose lives have been upended by war, climate change, political instability, or hunger. Their love of humanity is conditional and narrow, reserved only for campaign contributors and potential voters. For refugees they look away, and for that — Democrat or Republican — they ought to be deeply ashamed.
Since Malcom Gracia’s killing in 2012 there is now a new New Bedford police chief, a new Bristol County District Attorney, and a new Massachusetts Attorney General. Almost everyone who could have investigated or pursued Malcolm Gracia’s wrongful death has been replaced with interchangeable functionaries equally disinterested in righting the wrong done to him– except for Mayor Jon Mitchell, a former Federal prosecutor who was mayor at the time and should have shown more interest in justice for all of his citizens.
Instead, Mitchell convened a group of citizens to work on a Department of Justice “Action Plan” to address hate crimes. No real change ever came of it, but it successfully cooled off an angry city.
Fast forward to 2020. We now find ourselves in an unprecedented moment of change. Following the murder of George Floyd, with a nation focused on police violence and impunity, the Gracia case is once again in the news. Mitchell’s 2012 tactics worked so well for him that he convened a Use of Force commission. From what we’ve seen so far, we can expect little to come of this exercise in blunting public anger, as well.
With compelling evidence of mishandled forensics, overly friendly interrogation of the police officers who murdered Gracia, an assistant DA who couldn’t be bothered to gather critical evidence, mishandled forensics, the DA’s final report riddled with factual errors and implausible assumptions – and now a gag order on medical records of the police officer who claimed to be stabbed – the Gracia case screams out for a second look. But Mayor Mitchell won’t look at the information, won’t talk to the family’s lawyer, won’t be questioned by the public, and won’t lift the gag order in question.
Despite the City’s half-million dollar settlement with the Gracia family, citizens are still calling for the prosecution of officers Trevor Sylvia and Paul Fonseca, and discipline for filing false police reports by officers Tyson Barnes, David Brown, Paul Fonseca, Brian Safioleas, and Trevor Sylvia. The Gracia family’s lawyer, Don Brisson, just finished a five-part series on how these officers managed to elude prosecution for their crimes – and his evidence, some of it newly released, casts a disturbing light on the New Bedford Police, the District Attorney’s office, and even the Mayor himself in the wake of Malcolm Gracia’s shooting.
We think there’s enough substance in Brisson’s presentations to at least take another look. We join with others in our community calling for re-opening the case. Despite the many years that no one has been held accountable for the 15-year-old’s death, we remind everyone that there is no statute of limitation on murder.
Throughout the United States, justice is routinely denied to Black and Brown victims of police killings. Despite taxpayer-funded payouts to their families for unlawful death, both Malcolm Gracia’s and Breonna Taylor’s lives were cheap enough that no one felt the need to hold their killers to account. And that has got to change.
The NAACP New Bedford Branch demands that the Gracia murder case be reopened and that charges be filed against officers for lying to investigators. Local and state police and the Bristol County DA’s office couldn’t manage a credible investigation in 2012, and we doubt they can in 2020. We call for new investigations by the Massachusetts Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice. For those who committed murder, prison not pensions must be the consequence. For those who falsified reports, lied to investigators or colluded with others to coordinate their tales, they must feel the sting of justice. Any of these officers still on the job should be fired. The pensions of officers and others who knowingly derailed a murder investigation must be returned to taxpayers who are always expected to fund civil settlements.
If America is truly a nation of laws, then laws have to mean something. And they must apply equally to all. The Gracia case is far from over.
In 2017, the Standard-Times ran an article, “New Bedford school officials pleased with job fair turnout,” which covered the School District’s 4th Annual job fair at Keith Middle School and described the District’s hiring process:
“The setup reflects the hiring process. Dr. Pia Durkin, the superintendent, has the legal mandate to hire personnel. First, Durkin has principals screen applicants and interview them. The one a principal recommends will be sent to the Human Capital office to be vetted and interviewed [by Heather Emsley]. Then the nominee is sent to the superintendent for approval…
As the job fair wound down, Deputy Superintendent Jason DeFalco was beaming. Once again the schools have acted early on the calendar “and are scooping up the talent,” he said.”
The only problem is: NBPS seems to be scooping up mainly white talent.
Photos accompanying the article depicted hiring teams from each school — most of them white. Representatives of Congdon Elementary, which to this day still has an all-white teaching staff, sported t-shirts that read “Straight Outta Congdon.”
This was only months before current Superintendent Anderson’s arrival, but little appears to have changed in the three years since the Standard Times’ Job Fair article was written.
In a September meeting the NAACP New Bedford Branch held with Superintendent Anderson, Human Capital director Heather Emsley, and other members of the school administration, the Branch was informed that hiring is still left to individual principals. In describing how he intends to fix hiring inequities, Superintendent Anderson listed outreach and training programs intended to change the hearts and minds of prinicipals — but which leave NBPS hiring practices and processes unchanged.
To the NAACP New Bedford, this is worse than mere wishful thinking. The Superintendent doesn’t appear to be in full control of District-wide hiring.
In August we issued a report detailing systemwide racial inequities throughout the District. Upon discovering that the buck doesn’t stop at the Superintendent’s desk but at the desks of each of New Bedford’s 25 school principals, we took a second look at staffing by school.
Staffing, by School
A number of New Bedford schools are 100% white. Taylor, Swift, and Rodman have no employees of color. Zero. Winslow, Pacheco, Lincoln, DeValles, Congdon, and Ashley each have staffs that are more than 94% white.
Teachers, by School
When it comes to teaching, the inequities are even worse.
Taylor, Swift, Rodman, Pacheco, and Congdon teaching staffs are all 100% white. Teachers at Lincoln, Winslow, DeValles, and Campbell are all more than 95% white. Pulaski, Carney, Whaling City, Normandin, Jacobs, Ashley, and Keith Middle are all more than 90% white.
Representation, by School
Students achieve more when teachers look and sound like them. We took teacher race percentages and compared them to student race percentages throughout the District. You can view the raw data here but the graph below shows (for example) that at Gomes Elementary and Renaissance Community schools the percentage of white teachers is six times that of white students. There are only three schools in the District where Black teacher percentages match or exceed Black student percentages. Nowhere in the District is there adequate hiring of Latino teachers in terms of representation.
Lessons Learned
What School Superintendent Anderson and Human Capital director Emsley are doing simply isn’t working — and it’s never going to work as long as no one office is in charge of fixing the problem.
“Hoping” to change the hearts and minds of 25 school principals in order to fix systemic racism within the District is at worst folly, and at best wishful thinking. The ultimate responsibility for fixing the District’s systemic racism lies with the Superintendent.
At our September meeting with Superintendent Anderson we suggested that he:
Allow non-NBPS employees and qualified community members of color to sit on each hiring committee at the school site;
Mandate that all hiring positions have applicants of color represented in the top three candidates;
Make a public statement of intent, meet with principals around hiring POC, and address the issue publicly in a forum;
Meet with the NAACP General Body at our next General body meeting in October 2020 (we are awaiting the Superintendent’s response).
In discussions with Superintendent Anderson and director Emsley, we were told that the District has not had much success in recruiting from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Some of the institutions named are not known for their education programs. This makes us wonder if the District has tried others that are? Outreach, like anything, is all about relationships. What sorts of relationships has the District established with local alumnae of HBCUs? Are they part of recruiting efforts?
We think the District can do better. Fixing persistent racial inequities in New Bedford Public Schools staffing is going to take resolve, creativity, community involvement, a solid plan, measurable milestones for progress, transparency, and much greater control by the Superintendent himself over his hiring process.
Sometime after midnight on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor was sleeping when plainclothes Louisville narcotics officers, acting on faulty information, executed a “no-knock warrant” — a violation of almost everything in the Fourth Amendment — breaking down her front door with a battering ram and killing her in the hallway of her own home.
According to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, police were looking for a drug stash owned by Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who did not live with her and had already been arrested. During the botched raid, Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, assumed it was a home invasion and fired what he said was a warning shot. Police then unleashed a fusillade of 35 rounds on both occupants of the apartment. Taylor was hit six times and several shots were fired into adjacent apartments, endangering three people. As Breonna Taylor bled out, police stood around watching her die, offering her no aid.
Breonna’s killing has brought some changes to Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) procedures and also resulted in a $12 million wrongful death settlement with the City of Louisville.
But holding police to account was a bridge too far.
A Kentucky grand jury presented Judge Annie O’Connell with its recommendation that none of the three officers who shot Taylor ought to face charges. Although former Det. Brett Hankison was indicted on three charges of wanton endangerment — for shooting up the apartments next door — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove will not face any charges for killing Taylor.
Police have been less than honest. Although at least one officer, Tony James, was photographed wearing a body camera, and another officer was filmed wearing a bodycam mount on his vest, LMPD at first insisted there was no bodycam footage. Then Todd McMurtry, Sgt. Mattingly’s attorney, miraculously produced bodycam footage of the raid that showed that his client, who was shot in the leg, could not possibly have shot Taylor.
Likewise, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s whitewash makes a mockery of fact and law. Cameron claims that Walker was the only one at the scene who could have shot Mattingly because all the officers were carrying .40 caliber handguns. But Det. Brett Hankison — the one who shot up the neighboring apartments — had a 9 mm weapon. Worse, Cameron turns justice on its head by declaring that the police had a right to defend themselves from Walker — even after breaking in, unannounced, in error, and plainclothed. Whatever Cameron’s tortured rationale, officers were not defending themselves from a little 26 year-old EMT when they fired almost two dozen rounds at her.
Following the release of Cameron’s findings, on September 21st the same police department that killed Breonna Taylor declared a state of emergency, announcing that in anticipation of protests they would be shutting down traffic, limiting parking, and setting up barricades — to protect property.
Breonna Taylor’s killing has left Louisville in turmoil. Hearts are broken and in the absence of justice many windows are going to have to be broken to vent outrage at a system that values property more than human life, and black lives least of all.
Breonna Taylor. Say her name. Honor her name.
If we truly believe in justice in this country, there must also be justice for Breonna Taylor.
Police in schools are not a new phenomenon. Apparently the first school police were used in the Fifties in Flint, Michigan. In the 1990’s the Clinton administration created the COPS program which expanded and militarized the police, deepened mass incarceration, and put police in schools to wreak more damage there, too.
SRO’s disproportionately harm poor students and students of color – all in the name of protecting students from mass shootings. But the irony is that school shootings are largely a suburban and rural phenomenon, virtually all school shooters are white, and 92% are male.
Suburban kids do the rampaging but city kids get the cops. Something’s wrong with this picture.
The following links are to mainly research studies and organizations, and they overwhelmingly point to how little empirical data actually exists to support the contention that SROs deter school shootings. Links to commonly-cited NRA and DOJ/COPS materials are provided so you can see for yourself how thin their claims are.
On the other hand, there is a mountain of evidence showing that SROs harm poor children and children of color.
Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers (2018) Although school security has grown into a $2.7 billion market — an estimate that does not account for the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — little research has been done on which safety measures do and do not protect students from gun violence.
Averted School Violence Statistics (2017) 95% of school violence is suburban and rural. There are numerous cases of attackers being stopped by teachers, guidance counselors, and others; and of attacks that an SRO would not have seen coming: Sandy Hook, for example, where the attacker was not a student.
Bullies in Blue: The Problem with School Policing (2016) Over the past 50 years, our schools have become sites of increased criminalization of young people–a disturbing fact that is even truer for poor Black and Latino communities. Today, police officers assigned to patrol schools can legally use physical force on students, arrest and handcuff them, and bring the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear on kids who are simply misbehaving. The primary role of police in schools is to enforce criminal laws, and virtually every violation of a school rule can be considered a criminal act if viewed through this police-first lens. Though these police are often referred to as “school resource officers,” their legal power and attending actions reveal that this designation only serves to mask that their presence has transformed schools into another site of concentrated policing. Such policing marks the start of the school-to-prison pipeline–the entry point to the criminal justice system for too many kids–and fuels mass incarceration.
Circumventing the Law: Students’ Rights in Schools With Police (2010) Over the past several decades, public schools in the United States have been increasingly transformed into high security environments, complete with surveillance technologies, security forces, and harsh punishments. The school resource officer (SRO) program, which assigns uniformed police officers to work in public schools, is one significant component of this new brand of school security. Although the intentions of the SRO program are clear–to help administrators maintain order in schools, deter students from committing criminal acts, and arrest students who do break the law–the potential unintended consequences of this program are largely unknown. This study employs ethnographic methodology in two public high schools with SROs to examine how students’ rights, including Fourth Amendment rights, Fifth Amendment rights, and privacy rights, are negotiated in public schools with full-time police presence. The results of this study suggest that schools administrators and SROs partner in ways that compromise and reduce the legal rights of students.
Cops and Cameras: Public School Security as a Policy Response to Columbine (2009) To implement effective policy, officials need to know what options work. A review of the existing literature emphasizes the need for evaluative studies of school security measures to determine whether these measures are truly effective. The few studies that have been conducted rely on perceptions as to whether security measures are effective. Such information provides initial insights but ultimately is not helpful. Programs such as Scared Straight and D.A.R.E. sounded incredibly promising and were proven to be ineffective (or even harmful) through evaluative studies (Gottfredson, 1997; Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, & Finckenauer, 2000). The dearth of evaluative work is surprising given the growing movement in criminal justice toward evidence-based policies. The lack of evaluations is also in stark contrast to other, more vetted school policies and programs implemented since Columbine, such as antibullying and antidelinquency programs.
Discipline and Participation: The Long-Term Effects of Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth (2014) Since the early 1990s, schools across the United States have tightened their security practices and increased the punishments they give to students (see Cornell, 2006; Dinkes, Kemp, & Baum, 2009; Kupchik & Monahan, 2006). It is now common to find armed police officers, drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras, and zero-tolerance policies in all types of schools and all areas of the United States. Existing research documents several problems with these new school discipline and security practices, including the increasing marginalization of poor students and youth of color (e.g., Noguera, 2003; Skiba et al., 2000), unnecessary denial of future educational opportunities due to suspension and expulsion (e.g., American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; Fabelo et al., 2011), and increases in the numbers of students who are formally prosecuted in the juvenile and criminal justice systems (known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”; for example, Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010; Na & Gottfredson, 2013; Wald & Losen, 2003). This body of research consistently finds large discrepancies in punishment rates between White youth and youth of color, where African American and Hispanic American students are far more likely than Whites to be punished, even when controlling for self-reported rates of misbehavior (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008).
Do Police Officers in Schools Really Make Them Safer? (2018) While there are conflicting studies about the effectiveness of police in schools, Schindler says research shows they bring plenty of unintended consequences for students. He says that includes higher rate of suspensions, expulsions and arrests that funnel kids into the criminal justice system. That’s especially true, he says, in schools attended predominantly by students of color.
Focusing on School Safety After Parkland (2018) The Heritage Foundation, as to be expected, does not believe in gun control but in arming teachers and installing a massive security presence in schools.
Mass Shootings in America: Moving Beyond Newtown (2013) The white students who perpetrated the massacre at Columbine High school apparently chose Hitler’s birthday for their attack. This article looks at a number of myths surrounding mass shootings and also asks the provocative question: If armed guards and armed teachers are indeed worthy strategies for protecting children, then what should schools do to protect the students before and after school? Expanding this approach would dictate providing weapons to coaches, athletic directors, and even bus drivers. How slippery do we want the slippery slope to be?
On the school beat: police officers based in English schools (2017) The results of this British study clearly show that police officers are more likely to be based in schools with higher levels of pupils eligible for free school meals, that is, with a more disadvantaged population of pupils. Almost allschools where 50 or more percent of pupils are eligible for free school meals have an onsite police officer deployed there. The fact that the percentage of schools with a police officer increases as the percentage of pupils eligible for FSM increases indicates that this is not an accidental occurrence. None of the, albeit small, number of schools that have no pupils eligible for free school meals have an onsite officer. It has long been argued that the origins of mass compulsory schooling in Britain lay in attempts at social control, particularly of the children of the urban poor (Cunningham 2012; Rose 2000; Walkerdine 1992). Schools are more than enclosures for a certain sector of the population, as Andrew Hope writes: Schools are institutions of social control that seek to dictate, monitor and enforce ‘appropriate’ behavior. Historically, surveillance has played a central role in such processes. (2015a, 2) Schools are increasingly adopting diverse methods of electronic surveillance (Hope 2015a). Given the levels of electronic surveillance in place in many schools, Taylor (2012) claims that school pupils in the UK and the US are becoming the most surveilled subgroup of the whole population.
Patrolling Public Schools: The Impact of Funding for School Police on Student Discipline and Long-Term Education Outcomes (2018) The widespread use of police officers in public schools is a relatively recent development. While school police programs have gained popularity as a policy to protect students against rare but tragic school shooting events, in practice, these officers are often actively involved in the enforcement of school discipline. When school police officers, or school resource officers (SROs), are involved in the daily lives of students, they have the capability to alter student behavior, disciplinary consequences, attachment to school, and educational attainment. Though the potential consequences of school police interventions are large, there have been few evaluations of their efficacy. There is a large qualitative and ethnographic literature that documents the growth of harsh school sanctions policies and their disparate impact on low-income minority students (e.g. Nolan, 2011; Kupchik, 2010; Devine, 1996). This work has found that administrators’ and teachers’ roles in school discipline and classroom management are increasingly outsourced to SROs, and that SROs not only utilize their ability to arrest students for criminal offenses, but frequently participate in school discipline matters such as code of conduct violations.
Policing Schools: Examining the Impact of Place Management Activities on School Violence (2015) The present study examines whether the presence of school resource officers (SROs) and their level of involvement in place management activities are associated with higher or lower rates of school-based serious violence. This study uses data from the 2010 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) conducted by National Center for Educational Statistics. Propensity score matching is used to create a quasi-experimental design and isolate the influence of SROs and their level of involvement in place management activities on school-based serious violence. The analysis reveals that schools with a school resource officer are associated with higher rates of reported serious violence and those schools with SROs that participate in more place manager duties are also associated with higher rates of reported serious violence. These findings do not support the notion that SROs are acting as effective place managers and through this place management, reducing reported serious violence. Rather, it appears that the presences of a SRO and their execution of place manager duties is associated with an increase in the reporting of serious violence. Policy implications and limitations of the current research are also discussed. In other words, SRO’s don’t prevent violence but merely increase reports of it
Preventing School Shootings: The Effectiveness of Safety Measures (2017) The key policy issue, however, is whether SROs reduce school crime. To that point, few studies have examined the role of SROs in reducing crime in the school, with no study assessing the preventative capabilities of an SRO with mass school shootings (James & McCallion, 2013). Research testing the link between SROs and crime or victimization have yielded mixed results. […] With the current state of the research, the true effect of SROs remains inconclusive. Further, as Madfis (2016) explained, it is important to note that two of the deadliest school shootings — Columbine and Virginia Tech — were not deterred by the presence of armed police. In 1999, Columbine High School had both an armed SRO and an unarmed school security guard. During the shooting, one of the killers exchanged multiple rounds of gunfire with the SRO then proceeded to murder students in the library (Erickson, 2001). The morning of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, five officers plus the police chief were present on campus (TriData Division, System Planning Corporation, 2009). The killer at Virginia Tech was familiar with the police, having had a previous encounter with them five months prior to the shooting. All three killers involved in these two cases were well-aware of the armed officers present on their respective campuses, yet in neither instance did that deter them from carrying out their crime.
Race, Poverty, and Exclusionary School Security: An Empirical Analysis of U.S. Elementary, Middle, and High Schools (2014) As violence and crime within and around U.S. schools has drawn increased attention to school security, police, surveillance cameras, and other measures have grown commonplace at public schools. Social scientists commonly voice concern that exclusionary security measures are most common in schools attended by poor and non-White students, yet there is little empirical basis for assessing the extent of differential exposure, as we lack research on how exclusionary measures are distributed relative to school and student characteristics. To address this gap in the research, we use nationally representative school-level data from the School Survey on Crime and Safety to consider the security measures employed in elementary, middle, and high schools. Results indicate that while security measures are ubiquitous in U.S. high schools, those considered more exclusionary are concentrated in elementary, middle, and high schools attended by non-White and/or poorer students.
Rampage School Shooters: A Typology (2014) School shooters match Trump voters quite nicely: “A few of the common individual features included narcissism, bigotry, alienation, poor anger management, fascination with violence, low self-esteem, and a lack of empathy.”
School Resource Officers: Law Enforcement Officers in Schools (2013) In 2013 the Congressional Research Service was tasked with determining if additional SRO’s were warranted. It answered the question by saying that school students are quite safe, but “middle schools, city schools, and schools with a higher proportion of low-income students have higher rates of reported violent incidents, and schools with a higher proportion of low-income students had higher rates of reported serious violent incidents.” To the question of whether minority and low-income students would find their way quicker into the criminal justice system, the answer was “Research in this area is limited to a small number of studies, but these suggest that children in schools with SROs might be more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses. On the other hand, some studies indicate that SROs can deter students from committing assaults on campus as well as bringing weapons to school. Schools with SROs may also be more likely to report non-serious violent crimes (i.e., physical attack or fights without a weapon and threat of physical attack without a weapon) to the police than schools lacking SROs.”
School Safety Technology in America: Current Use and Perceived Effectiveness (2003) Between 1999 and 2001, the COPS program of the U.S. Department of Justice provided $567 million through the Cops in Schools program (CIS) to hire 4,900 SROs. Although this sounds like a large number of SROs, one must consider that there are more than 92,000 public schools in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002); therefore, there are simply not enough SROs to go around. Although there has been no large-scale systematic evaluation of this program, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a successful collaboration. […] In the spring of 2002, COPS allocated another $121 million to hire more SROs. Though this appears to be a positive step toward improving school safety, it should be noted that each new SRO will cost the federal government approximately $125,000 (COPS, 2002). As such, only about 968 more SROs will be hired — far short of what is needed in our schools. […] It is not good public policy to continue to expand programs and invest resources in programs that are untested. This mistake has been made time and again with unsatisfactory results (e.g., zero-tolerance policies and the widespread installation of complicated school security technology systems). Thus, the efficacy of individual SRO programs in each school district should be measured to ensure that the programs actually enhance school safety and are not just another “cosmetic response” to school violence.
School Suspensions and Adverse Experiences in Adulthood (2017) During the 1980s and early 1990s, violence and drugs in American schools emerged as a policy priority. The available statistics and anecdotal evidence suggested that these problems were common in American schools, particularly those in poor, urban settings (Midlarskey & Klain, 2005; Skiba,2013). In response, the federal government passed two key pieces of legislation aimed at addressing the problem. The first piece of legislation, the Gun Free Schools Act of 1995, made education funding contingent on the adoption of zero tolerance policies that mandated the expulsion of students who brought weapons on school property. Following its enactment, zero tolerance policies spread rapidly throughout the country (Stinchcomb, Bazemore, & Riestenberg, 2006). States and school districts often expanded the scope of their zero tolerance policies beyond weapons offenses to include drug offenses, interpersonal violence, and more minor misbehavior. Not surprisingly, the spread of zero tolerance policies led to a significant increase in suspensions and expulsions (Skibaet al., 2014). The second piece of legislation, the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994, provided support and funding for school resource officer programs through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. School districts received funding to contract with local police departments to place trained police officers in schools. These officers respond to incidents of student misbehavior, such as breaking up fights in the hallways, and arrest students accused of criminal behavior, thus expanding the potential disciplinary consequences facing students. Importantly, arrests are not mutually exclusive of school disciplinary responses, so students often face suspensions or expulsions in addition to delinquency or criminal charges (Kupchik, 2010). Thus, just as schools increasingly turned to suspensions and expulsions, they also integrated the justice system into their disciplinary responses to student misbehavior. In addition to stationing school resource officers in their hallways, Americans chools also introduced other heightened security measures. These measures included security cameras, random locker and personal property searches, identification cards, metal detectors, and strictly controlled school entrance and exit procedures (Hirschfield, 2008). It is reasonable to assume that these measures contributed to the expanded use of exclusionary school discipline punishments, as they made it more likely for students to be caught violating school rules, mandated strong disciplinary responses to relatively innocuous behavior (such as talking back or acting disorderly), and provided additional strict rules for students to violate (such as requiring students to always carry their identification cards) (Lyons & Drew, 2006). Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and in-school arrests grew as the punitive school discipline trend became entrenched (see, e.g. Losen, 2011; New York Civil Liberties Union, 2013; Skiba et al., 2014). More than three million students are suspended each year in the United States (see Losen, Hodson, Keith, Morrison, & Belway, 2015). Data also suggest that the use of other exclusionary actions are more common now than they were two decades ago, including arrests in school (e.g. Advancement Project, 2005; Blue Ribbon Commission on School Discipline, 2007; Fields & Emshwiller, 2014; Krezmien, Leone, Zablocki, & Wells, 2010). Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health, we analyze whether being suspended from school relates to the likelihood of students experiencing a number of adverse events and outcomes when they are adults. We find that being suspended increases the likelihood that a student will experience criminal victimization, criminal involvement, and incarceration years later, as adults.
School-Based Policing in Maine: A study on School Resource Officers in Maine’s public schools (2019) While school-based policing has become commonplace at campuses across the country, there is no centralized or continuous tracking of how many schools use SROs, no national governance of SROs’ roles and training requirements, and only ad hoc evaluation of their effectiveness in improving school safety. Local law enforcement agencies deploying SROs are not required to register with any national database, and school systems are not required to report how many SROs they use. The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) estimates there are between 14,000 and 20,000 SROs deployed in schools nationwide. The National Center for Education Statistics found that 42% of all public schools in 2015-16 employed at least one full-time or part-time SRO, and that 94.4% of public high schools with enrollment of at least 1,000 students maintained a law enforcement presence for security enforcement and patrol. Similarly in Maine, neither schools nor police departments have been required to report whether they deploy SROs.
The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative: 2015 Report to Congress (2015) Schools have adopted a number of approaches for increasing safety, including the use of controlled access to buildings, security cameras, metal detectors, and the placement of school resource officers (SROs). Using SROs, generally sworn law enforcement officers, is a costly and widely used practice: the 2009-2010 School Survey on Crime and Safety estimated that 43 percent of public schools have at least one SRO present at least once a week. However, few rigorous studies have evaluated the effectiveness of SROs, including whether there are possible unintended consequences that may harm students, such as increased arrests for disorderly conduct (which might otherwise be handled by a school administrator) or exclusionary disciplinary practices (such as suspensions and expulsions) that disproportionately affect minority youth and youth with disabilities.
The Cost of Arming Schools: The Price of Stopping a Bad Guy with a Gun (2013) The common denominator of most school shootings is the availability of semi-automatic weapons. The price of implementing the NRA’s proposal (which does not involve controlling semi-automatics) to place an armed security guard in every school building in the nation is nearly $13 billion a year (2013 dollars). The opportunity cost to taxpayers for fully protected schools can reach $23 billion. The cost per student approaches $500 and would take up half of federal spending on elementary and secondary education if paid for by the federal government. Is this the cost of protecting schools? Or, is it just one cost for permitting unlimited access to semi-automatic weapons and large capacity ammunition clips and preventing the potential for mass murder in our schools?
The Menace of School Shootings in America (2018) While the murders of children by semi-automatic weapon was what was keeping America up at night, American politicians decided that fighting terror, profiling potential perpetrators, outfitting school and office in high-tech security gear, and increasing police presence in schools was what we needed – a beefed-up police state.
The New American School: preparation for post-industrial discipline (2006) We take as a starting point the socializing effects of schools to analyze armed police officers and technological surveillance systems on school campuses, and relate these new social control strategies to the social relations engendered by mass incarceration and post-industrialization. In contrast to schools in the early twentieth century, which prepared youth for dependable factory labor, contemporary schools prepare youth for volatile labor markets and uncertain service sector employment. The modern world that embraces students is marked by the demise of the welfare state, privatization of social services and entrepreneurial approaches to modern social problems, including private for-profit prisons and mass incarceration of over two million people (in the United States alone). Public institutions and public life are subjected to ongoing processes of globalization, militarization and corporatization, altering how citizens participate in politics and react to social problems, as well as how states control citizens in places like schools (Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). We argue that these larger forces are mediated by public education and manifested as police and surveillance presence at school sites, such that students are exposed to social control forces that simultaneously create and are produced by conditions of mass incarceration and post-industrialization.
The Presence of School Resource Officers (SROs) in America’s Schools (2020) Similar to the declines in national crime rates in recent decades, school-basedoffenses have also been steadily falling. As of 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that victimization, theft, and violent crimes are at a multi-decade low. In the 2015–2016 school year, there were 18 homicides at schools, accounting for 1.2 percent of all youth homicides. Despite the rarity of serious violence in schools, a major policy argument in favor of SROs has been the claim that they are needed to respond to active shooter situations. Those events remain extremely rare, and in 2015-2016 accounted for 43 deaths on school property, including 10 deaths by suicide. This is not to minimize the importance of efforts to respond to school shootings, but there are little data supporting the efficacy of SROs in preventing these rare events.
The prevalence of police officers in US schools (2018) Students attending high schools that have substantial shares of black or Hispanic students attend schools with a police officer at higher rates than students attending schools with few black and Hispanic students.
The school resource officer perspective: examining crime, violence, law enforcement, and education on public high school campuses (2012) Can SRO’s successfully provide the mentoring, teaching, and community-building that proponents claim to be co-responsibilities of the job? Through interviews we were able to see how SROs are symbolic to theories on law enforcement, police, and crime. As it was previously noted, SROs display some of the same characteristics representative of traditional police culture. Examples include SROs discussing ways in which they maintain control, authority, and an edge on students paying particular attention and awareness to gangs and drug activity. There were also numerous times when the SROs reinforced their legitimized power over students, shared instances in which they had to use aggressive and punitive action, or discussed the great differences that lie between police and non-police. Although we are nowhere close to being able to define a distinct police subculture amongst SROs, the substantial differences in settings and experiences between them (SROs and other law enforcement) which impact their beliefs and behaviors, are evident. On the surface many elements of traditional police culture seem problematic to the successful functioning of our public education system. However even though some of the characteristics of traditional police culture were found amongst this small sample of SROs, the extent to which all SROs display the same culture is unclear.
The School-Security Industry Is Cashing In Big on Public Fears of Mass Shootings (2016) Reality check. School shootings aren’t quite the national epidemic the media depicts. Far more children and young adults are killed on the impoverished streets of America’s large cities every year. By several orders of magnitude, far more kids die each year in car crashes or drowning accidents–or from asthma. And far more young lives are lost to a host of other diseases closely correlated with poverty. There are approximately 55 million K–12 students in America and roughly 3.5 million adults employed as teachers. There are also millions of support staff – janitors, nurses, cooks, after-school-program providers, and so on. Even in the deadliest years, the chance of a student or adult being killed at school is roughly one in a million. By contrast, roughly five out of every 100,000 American residents are murdered each year. Extrapolating from this, schools are somewhere in the region of 50 times safer than society overall. But lately, America’s school-security fetish has reached a whole new level of bizarre. In the wake of the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, one company after another has rushed to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the epidemic of fear that emerged in response to school violence, and to exploit the emotional vulnerabilities of terrified parents. As a result, a huge number of utterly inane products have entered the market.
Threat Assessment for School Administrators and Crisis Teams (2020) The National Association of School Psychologists is not not wild about SRO’s and encourages schools to weigh whether they legitimately need them. If so, SRO’s are not to be used for zero-tolerance discipline or in positions a “civilian” could fill. However, SRO’s are preferable to armed guards, in their view.
Understanding School Rampage Shooters: Implications for Police Use of Force (2019) This study looked at a number of factors and took a generally positive view of SRO’s, as 26.9% of all shooters were stopped by police. However, it concedes that civilians do a much better job of terminating school rampages. Knox found that “Police intervention, however, was not the winner with respect to saving lives: intervention by unarmed citizens was. Unarmed citizens stopped 23 (39.5%) shooters, as many as stopped their rampages by committing suicide. However, when unarmed citizens intervened, the shooters killed an average of only one person. When school rampage shooters ended their rampages voluntarily or by firearm malfunction or ammunition depletion, they killed six times as many people on average as did shooters who were stopped by the intervention of unarmed citizens.”
What Do We Know About the Effects of School-Based Law Enforcement on School Safety? (2018) Are SRO’s effective in preventing school shootings? “There is insufficient evidence for drawing a decisive conclusion about the overall effectiveness of non-educational, school-based law enforcement programs (Petrosino et al., forthcoming; Petrosino et al., 2012; Gonzalez, Jetelina, & Jennings, 2016; James & McCallion, 2013; Raymond, 2010).” OK. Forget efficacy. Do students feel safer with SRO’s? “There is no conclusive evidence that the presence of school-based law enforcement has a positive effect on students’ perceptions of safety in schools. In their review of 12 quasi-experimental studies, Petrosino and colleagues (forthcoming) found that school-based law enforcement is not associated with statistically significant changes in students’ perceptions of safety at school.”
On May 17, 2012 15 year-old Malcolm Gracia was shot by New Bedford police. The circumstances of the killing are something that today would receive a more thorough investigation than the Gracia family got in 2012. Following a $500K settlement for the unconstitutional stop that triggered Gracia’s murder, various reports which exculpated the City and New Bedford Police, an effort to conceal information from the public, and finally a gag order to muzzle the family attorney, many people thought the Gracia story had gone away.
But Don Brisson, the family’s lawyer, just can’t let it go. In a Zoom meeting on September 20th, Brisson said there are a number of things that continue to haunt him about the Gracia case. Foremost is the fact that police didn’t have to illegally stop, and then assault, Gracia. If they thought he was a gang member, they could have gone back to their offices and checked their photo registry.
Despite Brisson’s ambling pace and a four-hour marathon Zoom meeting, it was impossible to leave the online meeting. Brisson raises some very disturbing questions. His walk through the evidence reveals an unnecessary killing, an improbable tale concocted and clearly coordinated by officers on the scene, revealing contradictions between police and a civilian witness, overly friendly questioning by the state police, a DA whitewash, with much information about the case sealed by a gag order to this day.
Brisson raises questions that still deserve an answer.
Named as defendants in the Gracia family’s civil suit were police officers Tyson Barnes, David Brown, Paul Fonseca, Brian Safioleas and Trevor Sylvia, along with the city of New Bedford and the estate of David Provencher, who was the police chief at the time.
The heart of Brisson’s marathon 4 hour presentation was a review of witness reports of the altercation between Tyson Barnes and Malcolm Gracia, an examination of DA Sutter’s report, and a summary of Barnes’ medical records.
DA Sam Sutter
Sam Sutter was the Bristol County District Attorny at the time. Brisson notes that Sutter’s report is full of omissions and failed to ask criticial questions. For example, it does not mention Detective Tyson Barnes’ initial assault on Malcolm Gracia.
Sutter’s report also claims Gracia grasped Barnes’ back, removed his knife from a sheath, thrust the knife twice into Barnes’ abdomen and made repeated attempts to stab him after that. Then, carrying the sheath, Gracia runs at another officer. Brisson points out that Barnes, if he actually feared for this life, could have shot Gracia but did not. Although Sutter’s report says that eyewitnesses corrorobate police accounts, this is not actually true.
Det. Tyson Barnes
Brisson reviewed testimony from various witnesses. Despite the fact that the interviews referenced diagrams and witnesses occasionally physically acted out events they were discussing, video interviews were apparently banned. What the public has going on a decade later is audio-only.
In Barnes’ interview eight days after the shooting he says he does not know what happened to his Taser. Barnes says Gracia began running South and was no longer a threat. “I just knew he wasn’t a threat anymore.” But there was no mention of jamming Gracia against the building, which several other witnesses recalled.
The questioner, State Police Sergeant Dolan, never asks why Barnes doesn’t shoot Gracia if he is in fact attacking other officers. Dolan also never asks Barnes about the extent of his injuries — an issue of considerable controversy. Sergeant Dolan asks Barnes about being stabbed in the “chest” (not in the abdomen). So which was it?
There are numerous pauses in the questioning, as if to provide officers to get their stories straight. After one such pause, upon requestioning, Barnes now says he was in a lot of pain, while previously he claims not to have felt anything. Suddenly Barnes hears “officer down, suspect down” A Detective Gangi is now applying pressure to his chest, Detective Fonseca is calling for an ambulance, and Trooper Mark Lavoie takes Barnes’ belt and gun. EMS staff cut off Barnes’ clothes as he is transported to the hospital, supposedly with a “sucking chest wound.” Barnes says he gets his gun back several days later.
Det. David Brown
Dolan interviews Detective David Brown four days after the shooting, again audio-only. Brown contradicts Barnes’ testimony about seeing the unholstering of the knife. Brown says Barnes immediately grabs him and drives him into the building. Then Gracia “controls” Barnes and stabs him twice. Now Brown says Barnes is in shock, white as a ghost, suprised at events.
Brisson asks how it is possible that a 200-pound, 5’11” detective with two hands could be controlled by a 5’8″ 150-pound kid with one hand on his shoulder. And why doesn’t Brown either Tase or shoot Gracia, given that he has just purportedly stabbed Barnes? And why would Barnes be surprised, given that he had just assaulted a kid?
Brisson again questions the pauses in the interrogations, the hints, the guided testimony, the lack of video, the “clarifications” and the leading questions. Brisson finds it totally biased. No tough questions are asked.
Det. Trevor Sylvia
Before encountering Barnes, Detective Sylvia recounts Gracia running, Barnes is running to intercept Gracia, then Gracia turns around, fumbling in his waistband. Sylvia does not pull his own weapon and warn Gracia. Dolan asks Sylvia if anyone has issued verbal commands, and Sylvia says “no.” Barnes catches up with Gracia and tackles him from the side and pushes him into the house. Then Sylvia says he hears someone say “he’s got a knife” — which contradicts both Brown and Barnes. Also, Sylvia reports Gracia switching to his non-dominant hand after attacking Barnes.
Det. Paul Fonseca
Paul Fonseca is the officer who shoots Gracia through the head. He claims not to know if Barnes has grabbed Gracia or not (despite the running tackle Sylvia describes). Fonseca claims Barnes pushes him with his shoulders into the building as Gracia tries to control him. Brisson asks why the Asst. DA, DA Sutter, Sergeant Dolan, and others fail to ask if Gracia may have felt threatened. Fonseca says Gracia says is grabbing Barnes by the back of the head. Brisson asks how this is possible, given the difference in height and physical stature between Barnes and Gracia, and why the location (head/shoulders) is not consistent.
Postmortem Trial by Press
An EMS report mentions a “sucking chest wound” and WBZ and CBS report “serious life-threatening injuries.” The exaggeration of injuries and demonization of Gracia by Gracia’s former teacher Nick Baptiste are fodder for news articles. Sutter’s report also exaggerates the threat Gracia posed and omits mention of the Taser. The press loves pictures of Gracia’s knife, a scary-looking gut hook (fishing knife). The press also indulge in arm-chair psychology, imagining why a crazed teen killer was trying to go out in a blaze of glory, taking as many cops with him as possible. Such demonization, as we see in many police shootings, is either launched by the police or the press. Take your pick.
Medical records
Interrogrator Dolan asks Barnes’ lawyer Gambaccini for a description of his injuries — no one apparently ever looked at RI Hospital records and it is now subject to gag order. The question of whose blood is on the knife was never answered as no one ever tested the knife. Under his T-shirt, Barnes was wearing a white muscle shirt. There was no blood on it. A photo of Barnes’ torso shows a small 1cm superficial scratch. Barnes didn’t need either stitches or trauma treatment. He got two percosets and ibuprofen. Barnes was cleared to go home without restriction. He arrived in the hospital at 9pm. He was cleared by doctors by 11:43pm. X-rays ruled out pneumothorax involvement. Barnes was observed overnight. No antibiotics were administered. He got a tetanus shot. Vital signs were normal. Barnes had been taking prednisone, percosets, and valium for a “back injury.” He was discharged at 5:12am. Barnes’ tox screen, which Brisson had to fight to obtain, revealed benzodiazepine and opiates. Valium lowers inhibitions, Brisson points out. Prescriptions written by Barnes’ doctor were never delivered to Superior Court — in violation of a subpoena.
DA Sutter’s report never mentions Barnes’ tox screen — only the marijuana in Gracia’s system.
Medical Record requests by Brisson
Despite police and EMS concern for Barnes’ injuries — they considered medevac at one point — Brisson ask why EMS didn’t stop at Charlton or St. Anne’s if Barnes’ injuries were truly life-threatening.
Animation
An animation depicts the improbable 20 foot distance that Barnes fell back, according to his follow detectives’ accounts. The animation also raises questions about why no one tried to stop Gracia. There are also discrepancies in where shell casings were found.
Misc
After the killing Barnes goes out on disability for a non-injury.
Restraining Order
Brisson raises the issue of Barnes’ mental health and behavior.
It turns out that Barnes, in addition to having questionable drugs in his system at the time of the shooting, has a restraining order requiring his weapon to be confiscated.
The restraining order is not found in personnel file. Brisson asks why the NBPD didn’t ask for Barnes’ weapon. Brisson has to fight for discovery of injury, drug, and personnel records on Barnes, which it turns out strongly call his conduct in question. Brisson asks why Sutter didn’t drag Barnes through the same mud as he did Gracia?
Barnes apparently received explicit photos from another officer’s wife or girlfriend at some point. He meets with the officer regarding this dispute at a city Burger King and threatens to shoot the other officer. Then Police Chief Teachman gives Barnes a one-day suspension — which Mayor Scott Lang simply voids.
Disability
Fast forward to 2020. Barnes is now applying for disability.
The New Bedford Commission on Use of Force just issued its four-and-a-half page 60-day findings. Aside from three pages of bureaucratic blather about its mandate and a rather defensive section on how it complied with Open Meeting laws, it was short on both analysis and prescriptions. The only real substance was found on the last page and a half.
It begins by dismissing accountability. According to the author, presumably Chairman Brian Gomes, there is already adequate accountability for police officers:
The NBPD “use of force” policies guide officers in performance and behavior. When an officer violates any of those policies, he/she is held accountable through the department’s governing Rules & Regulations. Disciplinary action ranges from counseling to termination. The department receives an average of 60 complaints a year. Reports of violations can come from both inside and outside of the department.
No, the real problem is apparently lack of training. Training has become the “go-to” prescription for “doing something” that everyone can get behind: the public can be deceived into thinking it will help; and the police can always use more money. Here are the Commission’s thoughts:
Officers are required by state statue to also undergo 40 hours of In-Service Training annually. The agenda of this training is set by the MPTC (Municipal Police Training Committee) and the MA Chiefs of Police. Topics that are mandatory every year are Legal updates (both Criminal Law and Motor Vehicle Law), Use of Force/Defensive Tactics, and CPR & 1st Responder. Topics that are additionally added are usually based on the landscape of what is going on in policing that we need additional training on or what is new in policing. During the past 2-3 years topics have included Fair & Impartial Policing, Officer Wellness & Suicide Prevention, Active Shooter Response, Dealing with Alzheimer issues, conducting Cruelty to Animal Investigations and responding to calls from those experiencing a mental health crisis, Alzheimer’s, Autism, other cognitive conditions and disabilities.
The 2020-2021 schedule is not quite completed, but discussions are centering around additional training in de-escalation, Integrating Communication, Assessment and Tactics (ICAT), Racial Profiling, Cultural Competency, Effective Communication and LGBTQ Rights. This Commission has discussed the importance of including trainings on unconscious bias, racial justice and racial equity along with other programs to address the needs of diverse communities who are experiencing oppression.
De-escalation training
Tactical de-escalation involves the use of techniques to reduce the intensity of an encounter with a subject/suspect and enable an officer to have additional options to gain voluntary compliance or to mitigate the need to use a higher level of force, while still maintaining control of the situation. The goal of de-escalation is to avoid a violent encounter with the key elements of de-escalation techniques being for officers to create distance, take time and use shielding. Throughout the summer, the Commission has repeatedly discussed the topic of de-escalation. Currently, the Commission is in the process of writing recommendations to further articulate and strengthen de-escalation language in the NBPD Use of Force Policies. The main learning objective of de-escalation training is to provide police officers with an organized way of making decisions about how they will act in any situation, including situations that
In light of the events of 2020, the MPTC is currently in discussions about additional training that can be brought in at the state level. This will include officers of the New Bedford Police Department.
The Commission provides no insight into the accountability required after incidents in which officers fail to use their new expensive training.
Other than this, the Commission could not come to any other conclusions — even after a raucous public meeting at which community members demanded that the Commission look at an independent police review commission and create meaningful accountability measures. In fact, the Commission’s report doesn’t even acknowledge any of these concerns:
To date, the Commission has reviewed data on public complaints of police abuse or use of force. The data has included the race of the complainant when known. The Commission has not yet determined which recommendations it will make and present to the Mayor. This will only occur after full deliberation of the Commission on each recommendation being considered.
There is a link to a form the public can use to comment on the Commission’s 60-day results.
But why bother?
Mayor Mitchell has accomplished what he set out to do — which was to blunt public demand for police accountability in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and renewed demand to revisit the Malcolm Gracia case.
Neither the public nor SouthCoast community organizations ought to continue participating in Mayor Mitchell’s and Brian Gomes’ charade.
Police Accountability legislation, which was expected to die in the Massachusetts legislature this Summer, has been given a surprising reprieve. In the wake of George Floyd’s asphyxiation murder by a Minneapolis cop, while three others stood around watching Floyd die, the Massachusetts House has been unable to pursue its usual tactics of deep-sixing progressive legislation. Members of a conference committee are still hammering out differences between a thoughtful Senate version of the Reform, Shift + Build Act and a toothless House version apparently edited by police unions.
Police unions have lobbied hard to neuter any legislation for reining in police excesses. They don’t appreciate being held accountable to the public — or to courts — for the felonious assaults and murders committed while on duty. Unions object to limits on “Qualified Immunity,” bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and are only truly happy when legislators offer them more cash for “training” intended to make them sweeter, gentler souls — but never to hold them accountable by discipline or termination.
Angry that such legislation was ever filed in the first place, Boston Police Patrolman Association President Lawrence Calderone said, “Angry would be an understatement.” And dismissing the need for legislation, Calderone added, “We’re angry about it. Boston, Massachusetts in general is not Minneapolis.” State Senator Ryan Fattman echoed the sentiment, saying that Massachusetts cops aren’t like bad cops elsewhere: “… our Massachusetts law enforcement officers are the best trained, well educated, and well-meaning in our nation, bar none. […] The egregious sins of other law enforcement in other parts of our country should not be their burden to bear.”
This is, of course, absolute nonsense. Massachusetts has plenty of police abuse horror stories. Most recently, in July 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded an investigation of the Springfield Police Department’s Narcotics Bureau. Undercover police in Springfield were routinely beating suspects about the head, using immediate force without identifying themselves as police, and routinely lying in statements and in court.
Closer to home, where people are still calling for the release of details on Malcolm Gracia’s killing — the details of which are subject to a gag order related to the City’s $500,000 settlement with the Gracia family — we only have to look back two years earlier to find a case similar in many ways to George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.
No, Massachusetts is exactly like Minnneapolis. We have a breathing problem in New Bedford too.
* * *
At about 4:17 am the morning of July 22, 2010 Erik Aguilar, 42, walked into the New Bedford XtraMart gas and convenience store and asked for help. Aguilar said someone was about to kill him. The store clerk called police for help. The store’s security footage captured Aguilar’s subsequent killing by one officer and a civilian, and the contempt for human life shown by five more officers who arrived on the scene and did nothing to try to revive Aguilar.
Seven minutes after entering the XtraMart Aguilar exits the store and is seen wandering around the parking lot when Officer Paul Hodson arrives. At 4:25:28, with the store clerk looking on, Hodson gets out of his car, playing with his baton, wedging Aguilar between himself and his cruiser. Hodson reaches into Aguilar’s pockets and conducts some sort of inspection. Aguilar looks uneasy, as if he is about to run off.
At 4:26:40 — only slightly over a minute after arriving — Hodson grabs Aguilar by the arm and wheels him around onto the hood of the police vehicle. Aguilar, who has committed no crime, resists. At 4:27:29 Hodson pepper-sprays Aguilar in the face after taking him down onto the pavement. At 4:27:41 Hodson flips a handcuffed Aguilar onto his stomach and both Hodson and a civilian passer-by kneel on Aguilar’s back with his face pressed into the pavement. From about 4:27:48 forward in the video the civilian can be seen kneeling on Aguilar’s neck. For the next minute we see Aguilar’s legs move a little, then his struggling ceases at about 4:29:44.
Aguilar is either dying or is already dead.
At around 4:29:57 a second officer shows up. He looks at Aguilar’s immobile body. Hodson and the civilian release their hold on Aguilar, though Hodson keeps kneeling on him. At 4:31:28 three more officers show up and the civilian leaves. A sixth officer appears. Not one of them at any point makes any effort to resuscitate Aguilar. At 4:33:36 Hodson stands up. He has been kneeling on Aguilar for a full seven minutes.
For the next 18 minutes the five officers stand around talking. At 4:51:40 an ambulance finally pulls up in front of the XtraMart. At 4:54:09 Aguilar’s body is placed in the ambulance. At 5:09:03 the ambulance leaves the convenience store. At 5:11:52 the last of the police cruisers leaves the scene.
* * *
Attorney Howard Friedman, who previously took on the NBPD in the case of Morris Pina, filed a lawsuit, naming five of the stand-about officers as defendants: Paul Hodson, Antonio Almeida, Damien Vasconcelos, Roberto DaCunha and John Martins.
The usual machinations of the state kicked in to exonerate the officers. Former Hampden County District Attorney William Bennett was tasked with an “independent” investigation. Bennett concluded that alcohol and cocaine were responsible for Aguilar’s death. However, he did note that “the failure to detect that Aguilar needed immediate medical care and the miscommunication and time wasted waiting for a van that never arrived are troubling circumstances of this tragic loss of life.”
Police Chief Provencer refused comment, as did City Solicitor Markey — three separate times. And Mayor Jon Mitchell — about to become a recurring fixture in New Bedford police abuses cases — refused to talk to the press. No one wanted to take responsibility, especially city officials.
The Bennett report — to the surprise of no one — did not recommend prosecution. Jon Mitchell, apparently satisfied that no one would have to take the heat, issued a statement: “New Bedford residents can take confidence in knowing that the New Bedford Police Department will demand that its officers hold themselves to the highest standards of professionalism and respect for our citizens now and in the future.”
Bennett’s report was naturally seen as a betrayal by Aguilar’s family : “We are not surprised that Mr. Bennett did not recommend criminal prosecution of the police officers. Police officers are almost never charged with crimes. The video shows the officers disregarded police policies. The police were called to provide assistance. Eric needed immediate medical attention. Instead of providing care, the police officers left Eric handcuffed lying face down on the ground. They finally provided emergency medical care after it was too late to help. We believe the police officers violated Eric’s civil rights.”
Strangely enough, the New Bedford Police Department — not the police union — agreed with the Aguilar family. Lieutentant Robert Aguiar [no relation] of the New Bedford Police Department’s Division of Professional Standards wrote, “I would classify this event as a tragedy for the family of Erik Aguilar, an embarrassing disgrace to the New Bedford Police Department, and a case of absolute negligence on the part of the … police officers on scene, as well as their supervisor Lieutenant Michael Jesus. [… They]”had the training, the duty and the obligation as police officers to help and protect Erik Aguilar, and they undeniably failed to do so.” An internal investigation recommended disciplinary action, though not termination, for seven officers involved in the Aguilar case. Their slap on the wrist — four day suspensions.
The New Bedford Police Department’s Divison of Professional Standards maintains a spreadsheet of case files which the NAACP New Bedford was finally able to obtain. In it, Officer Hodson, appears twice in June 2019.
Neither lawsuits, video, nor even the Police Department’s own disciplinary mechanisms were enough to get rid of the bad apples, much less punish them meaningfully. Officer John Martins left the New Bedford Police Department in 2012 after being charged with drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident. The rest stayed on the force after receiving their four-day suspensions.
It wasn’t until December 18, 2019 that Hodson pled guilty — in the United States Attorney’s office in the District of Massachusetts — and not for klling Aguilar, but for the distribution of child pornography.
Hodson is now serving a sentence of five to twenty years in federal prison.
After decades of shielding police from prosecution for the murders of Black and Brown people, and four centuries of systemic racism, many Americans have had enough of police impunity.
But state violence is just one symptom of a society founded on white supremacy. The upwelling of protests demanding police reform is not simply about the police. After four years of unprecedented presidential criminality and corruption, the protests are as much about the Trump administration’s impunity as they are about his friends in law enforcement.
Since the George Floyd murder there have been over 100 days of protests. Despite the rare occasions of rioting, almost all have been peaceful. To White America, however, such unrest is a frightening reminder that white supremacy’s days are numbered. Race, like the Coronavirus, is on everyone’s mind.
But having failed to save the lives of what are projected to top 400,000 COVID-19 victims by year’s end, Trump is (again) running on race and avoiding the subject of his incompetence in dealing with a national emergency.
Racialized Law and Order
In June Trump announced “I am your president of law and order.” Forget the pandemic, Trump was saying. What White America should really fear is accountability for both his administration and America’s unfettered Police State. Accordingly, “gun couple” Mark and Patrica McCloskey were invited to address the July GOP convention after they aimed weapons at Black Lives Matter protestors in Saint Louis, Missouri. Other GOP speakers, including Rudi Guilani and Michael McHale, president of the National Association of Police Organizations, painted an apocalyptic image of America under Biden and Harris. Mike Pence comforted the white base: “We will have law and order on the streets of this country.”
But if that appeal to authoritarianism and racism were not sufficiently obvious, after the convention Trump warned supporters that holding police accountable would threaten white suburbia. Having traded in an inaudible dog whistle for a racist bullhorn, Trump went for broke by issuing a September 4th memo banning anti-racism and anti-bias training as “un-American.”
So, if anti-racism is anti-American, what then is “American?”
The Killer of Fifth Avenue
Maya Angelou had it right when she said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” In January 2016 Trump made the now-famous statement: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.”
And it was incredible. The Killer of Fifth Avenue was letting everyone know that laws and norms — which everyone else is obliged to follow — don’t apply to him or his base.
No one should have been surprised then by the epidemic of corruption and criminality that followed.
Donald Trump is “a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”
These are the words of Trump’s own lawyer, Michael Cohen.
“All he wants to do is appeal to his base. […] He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this. […] His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God. […] The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit. […] It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
Those were the words of Trump’s own sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.
Trump’s astounding collection of criminal associates
The assortment of con men and sociopaths who committed crimes in Trump’s behalf is astounding: Cohen, who pled guilty to tax evasion, lying to a bank, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress; former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI; ex Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, convicted of “conspiracy against the U.S.” and lying to the FBI; former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, conspiracy against the U.S., tax evasion, bank fraud, hiding bank accounts, and obstruction of justice; former Trump campaign advisor George Papadapolous, lying to the FBI; former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone, lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering; and most recently, Steve Bannon, Trump campaign manager and White House advisor, arrested and charged with defrauding investors in a border wall crowdfunding scheme.
Pardon me — and my pals
Even if you wave away the Mueller investigation or ignore the astounding collection of criminals Trump has hired and surrounded himself with, then look at his presidential commutations and pardons — beginning with the murderers and war criminals.
War crime and murder
In May 2019 Trump pardoned war criminal Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of committing murder and assault in Iraq. In November 2019 Trump pardoned Mathew L. Golsteyn, convicted of another war crime, a murder in Afghanistan. The same day Trump also pardoned Clint Lorance, convicted of killing two Afghanis and ordering his unit to shoot civilians. And, to highlight that impunity for murder was the basis for his pardons, Trump just slapped economic sanctions on International Criminal Court officials investigating American war crimes.
Civil rights abuses
If war crimes deserve impunity, then why not civil rights abuses too?
Trump’s first Presidential pardon in August 2017 was for Joe Arpaio, convicted not of the many civil rights abuses and racial profiling he committed over decades as Maricopa County Sheriff but ultimately for contempt of court. By pardoning Arpaio Trump was signaling to a white supremacist base that laws don’t apply to them. Senator John McCain noted that Trump’s pardon “undermines his claim for the respect of rule of law “
Treason and sedition
Trump, who was photographed fondling an American flag at a CPAC Convention, and whose faux Christianity seems equally dubious, may play an uber-patriotic Commander-in-Chief on TV, but the evidence suggests he has stronger attachments to cronies who actually undermine national security.
In April 2018 Trump pardoned Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted for “outing” CIA agent Valerie Plame for political purposes, and whose sentence was commuted by George W. Bush. Most recently, Trump pardoned Libby for convictions on obstruction of justice and perjury. Likewise, Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, who was a Trump operative coordinating 2016 Russian election interference and was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.
Trump may scream “law and order” at the sight of unruly people protesting police murders, but Trump’s actual support for sedition by far-right white people casts the whole “law and order” shtik into question.
In 2012 Dwight Hammond and his son Steven were convicted of arson on federal property. Their sentences were stiffened in 2015, which led to the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by far-right extremists, including milias and sovereign citizen groups. Trump pardoned the Hammonds in July 2018.
Election fraud and interference
Trump claims that GOP voter suppression and the rejection of absentee ballots is done to protect the sanctity of the voting booth. But it’s clear he has no respect for election integrity.
In May 2108, Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a Fox News crony, who was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to a Republican Senate campaign. In May 2019 Trump pardoned Pat Nolan, another Republican, who was convicted of soliciting illegal campaign contributions. And in February 2020 Trump pardoned Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy, attempted extortion, perjury — all related to his offer to literally sell the gubernatorial Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.
Looting and lying
And despite Trump’s staged tour of the site of arson and looting in Kenosha, he doesn’t oppose corporate looting — or individual acts of looting committed by his cronies.
In December 2017 Trump commuted the sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, who ran America’s largest kosher meat-processing plant in Iowa. Rubashkin had been charged with immigration violations, sexual harrassment, and child exploitation, but it was the 86 counts of bank fraud that did him in. Son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Trump for Rubashkin’s commutation. Another of Trump’s cronies, Conrad Black, former media mogul and author of a glowing biography of Donald Trump, was pardoned (only after the book appeared, of course) in May 2019 for mail fraud and obstruction of justice related to embezzling funds from the newspapers he owned. Edward DeBartolo, Jr., was pardoned in February 202 after being convicted of extortion and a quid-pro-quo involving a casino license. Michael Milken, whose name is virtually synonymous with financial corruption, was pardoned the same day for securities, mail, and tax fraud. To these names add Paul Pogue (tax fraud), disgraced cop Bernard Kerik (tax fraud), Ted Suhl (bribery), and Judith Negron (health care fraud and money laundering).
Two Americas
There are two Americas. One is the idealized America taught in Social Studies and naturalization classes. In this version, government operates like a well-oiled machine, humming along nicely thanks to fail-safe checks and balances. In this America everyone is equal under the law. This fictional America has never really existed. But there’s no reason this “more perfect union” should and could not exist.
But in the twisted kleptocratic oligarchy that does exist, big cats prey upon smaller animals. The only real law is the Law of the Jungle. Power and privilege, and maximizing that power and privilege, strangle democracy. Checks and balances only get in the way. Laws are insults and inconveniences to white men in power. And their power is only sustained by impunity for those who wield power in their name.
We can thank Donald Trump for making it undeniably clear what type of America we really live in — a nation where the President has completely corrupted the legislature, the judiciary, and his own executive office. Where personal loyalty subverts Constitutional accountability. Where presidential crimes go unpunished and where the President’s cronies and bag men literally receive “Get out of Jail” cards. A nation on the brink of fascism, if it hasn’t already arrived.
The 2020 election boils down to a simple choice between the aspirational America most of us want — an imperfect, loud and messy democracy with accountability for public servants — or a police state in bed with a kleptocracy.
This is the simplest and most stark choice any American voter will ever have to make.
Three Massachusetts school districts retired their Native American mascots this week.
But Dartmouth was not one of them.
On August 5th Barnstable School Committee member Kathy Bent described her town’s decision: “I think it is time to retire the Red Raider as our mascot” she said. “We can take our time coming up with a new mascot, but that certainly should not be a decision we make as a school committee, but one that the community makes.”
That same day Hanover Schools retired its “Indian.” Libby Corbo, a member of Hanover’s School Committee said, “My opinion as a white person as to whether the sacred symbol of Native American heritage is offensive or not frankly doesn’t matter,” said Corbo. “I think the days of the white majority telling minorities what is best for them or how they should feel… it needs to end today with our voice saying this is no longer acceptable in our community.”
Hanover’s decision had been informed by a virtual public meeting on July 29th at which Indigenous people, including a Hanover Middle School teacher, explained why their Indian mascot was so offensive.
Again on the same day, North Quincy announced a new mascot would replace “Yakoo,” the racist depiction of a Native American North Quincy’s School Committee had retired the previous Monday. The team name, like Barnstable’s, is the “Red Raiders,” but no decision has been announced on a name change.
In June, while opponents of racist mascots were still gaining steam, Faries Gray, sagamore (war chief) of the Massachusett tribe, explained: “These mascots create such a negative environment for the indigenous [people], it is ridiculous that we even have to have a discussion about why this is a racist thing. That is not our culture. It is really disrespectful to us.”
Ridiculous though it may be, Dartmouth school board members would like this whole issue to just magically disappear. This time around they have decided to hand off this hot potato — not viewing it as a human rights or moral issue — to a yet-to-be-named “diversity committee” that will consider the mascot and an anti-racism resolution being voted on by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. And report back. At some point. Unless they forget.
Last October 2019 the Dartmouth School Committee refused demands to bring the issue of the mascot before a public hearing, providing an account of how the present-day “respectful” mascot was designed by Native American children who were overjoyed at their people finally being honored. In this tale, the childrens’ logo is used to this very day. And in this fable, too, Native Americans support the mascot because the words “honor” and “respect” appear in the Student Manual.
But last November, the Standard Times asked Bonnie Gifford, the school superintendent if she had actually contacted any Native Americans. Nope. “We have never had any response from anyone from the tribes,” she told a reporter by email.
But Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, of the Aquinnah tribe, managed to take questions from reporter Jennette Barnes of the Standard Times, noting that, although she helped redesign the Dartmouth “Indian” image as a child, she now thought there should be a public discussion.
The Standard Times also managed to ring up Chief George Spring Buffalo of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe of the Pokanoket Nation, who told the same reporter that the Dartmouth mascot issue should have been dealt with years ago. “It’s all about cultural respect, so children who go to your school don’t have to feel like they are cartoon characters when it comes to Halloween or Thanksgiving.”
With the Washington Redskins, Aunt Jemima, Land o’ Lakes, and Uncle Ben all scrapping their racist images, and legislation to ban school mascots, it would seem to be a good time to reconsider racist images in Dartmouth. But Dartmouth — which had plenty of time to plan, and plenty of cash to fund, a $1.8 million football stadium last Fall — decided to punt the issue to a committee for “study.”
A “diversity committee” to include two members of the School Committee, two faculty, two students, two community members, and two administrators will consider the mascot and race issues. All members must be Dartmouth residents. Committee member John Nunes made a point of excluding community members from New Bedford — and the “Dartmouth only” rule will exclude the Maltais family, trotted out regularly as designers of its mascot — because they live on tribal lands outside Dartmouth. And with virtually no Native American students in any of the Dartmouth schools, this is one more constituency the School Committee won’t have to listen to.
As a disappointed Maggie Cleveland so eloquently put it last Fall: “Ah, the southcoast region of Massachusetts, where we take pride in our ignorance.”
Some of that ignorance appears in curriculum. One example on the DPS website is guaranteed to insult Native American children, and the exercise itself is maddeningly Eurocentric. The objective of “Rate the Colony” is to attract more European settlers to your 18th Century colony. The exercise goes on to describe Indians as a potential danger to one’s health and the colonial enterprise.
The School Committee account of how today’s “respectful” mascot came into existence has never been adequately fact-checked. In this mendacious tale, two children proudly designed a logo used to this very day and they continue to support its use, as do the majority of Native Americans consulted.
But the children have changed their tune and most tribes are opposed to the mascot, thanks to a piece in the Standard Times which debunked these parts of the tale. And a hunt for Dartmouth High yearbook covers debunked the rest of the tale by showing that the design the children created was scrapped — only to be replaced with one Dartmouth College abandoned in 1974 because many people thought it was racist.
Dartmouth has apparently never been very original in its choice of mascots. In 1970 the Dartmouth “Indian” was a cartoon character that looks suspiciously like it was lifted from Quincy’s now-retired “Yakoo.”
By 1975 the Dartmouth Public Schools were using a newer Indian mascot with a Western headdress. In 1977 the Pathfinder Indian was designed by Cheryl Andrews-Maltais and her brother while students at Dartmouth High School. That may be the only true part of the tale.
Their Pathfinder appeared on yearbooks until at least 1988 (and possibly longer) but that image bears no resemblance to the one used today. At some point, when replacing the Pathfinder, the Dartmouth Schools managed to choose virtually the same mascot rejected by Dartmouth College in 1974!
This is the version that brings in royalties to the Dartmouth Schools — royalties not shared with any tribe.
The Massachusetts House just passed their own police accountabily bill — long on police concessions and short on accountability. Despite language that says Qualified Immunity will be “studied,” everybody knows what that means. This is House Speaker Bob DeLeo’s way of strangling progressive legislation — even reforms that a majority of the public supports. As a lobbyist once said of the Massachusetts Legislature, “Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.”
Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, released the following statement on the House bill:
“For months, people across the country and the state have been marching in the streets to demand systemic change. Unfortunately, this bill does not reflect the fierce urgency that deadly police violence against Black people demands. Instead, it reflects the depth of entrenched opposition to necessary police reform. Police unions and officers used the weapon of fear to maintain the status quo and undermine even very moderate reforms.
“Ultimately, this piece of legislation misses the mark, because it will not help victims of violence hold police accountable. Let’s be clear: Massachusetts is not immune to police misconduct. In order to make any laws about excessive use of force or other police abuses meaningful, Massachusetts must reform our civil rights laws – including by ending qualified immunity, which denies victims their day in court. When the final bill is negotiated, it should empower victims of police violence to seek justice for the harms they have suffered and to hold abusive officers directly accountable.”
When it comes to supporting wars and the police state, we can usually count on the media to tell us a plastic fork is silver cutlery. Several media outlets have described the House bill as “sweeping” when in fact it sacrificed critical police accountability measures to police union lobbying.
Let’s be honest. neither political party wants police reform — even in supposed Liberal bastions like Massachusetts. What just happened in the Commonwealth has played out all over the nation. In Missouri, for example, when Kansas City Mayor David Alvey assembled his Task Force on Community and Police Relations, he invited Police Chief Michael York and Wyandotte County Sheriff Don Ash — but snubbed Kansas City’s reform District Attorney Mark Dupree, a Black man, because he wasn’t sufficiently “objective.”
Finally, no discussion of police accountability would be complete without the local press quoting a man who is neither a police officer nor has ever been held accountable to the Massachusetts legislature.
In the last few weeks Aunt Jemima ditched the mammy on its syrup bottles with a press release explaining why images from slavery’s past were no longer in fashion. Perhaps it finally occurred to them they had been selling, as author M.M. Manring put it, a “Slave in a Box.” Uncle Ben’s retired its house servant because “now is the right time to evolve the Uncle Ben’s brand, including its visual brand identity.” And Land O’ Lakes dropped its Native American maiden, saying only “we need packaging that reflects the foundation and heart of our company culture.” Soon Mrs. Butterworth and Cream of Wheat followed suit.
On July 1st ADWeek reported that “three separate letters signed by 87 investment firms and shareholders worth a collective $620 billion asked Nike, FedEx and PepsiCo to terminate their business relationships with the NFL’s Washington Redskins unless the team agrees to change its controversial name.” ESPN Senior NFL Insider Adam Schefter reported the franchise was “undergoing a thorough review of the team’s name. And let’s be clear: There’s no review if there’s no change coming. Redskins on way out.” But the mother of all surprises was Mississippi’s abandonment of the Confederate flag.
One would think that in “liberal” Dartmouth, we could at least do as well as Mississippi. But one would be mistaken.
The Dartmouth Schools have kept their “Indian” mascot — the same one shared with Dartmouth College until 1974, when the college abandoned it because it was racist. Superintendent Bonnie Gifford and Board Chair Kathleen Amaral — both white — claim that the “Indian” and the greenface that “honors” it at sports events are townfolk’s way of “respecting” people murdered and sold into slavery when this area was colonized in 1619. And Dartmouth children contribute to “The Weekly Tribe” — a student showcase featuring mainly white faces.
To add injury to insult, Dartmouth pockets royalties it receives from a mascot merchandising agreement with OhioPyle Prints, which according to the District’s lawyer are not shared with any tribe. Dartmouth “Indian” gear is sold locally in drugstores and supermarkets, and Prep Sportswear, Spirit Shop Custom Apparel & Sportswear, Jostens, Inc., and Apparel Now all resell Dartmouth Indian gear online, though the District claims to know only of OhioPyle.
Last year the School Committee voted to block public hearings on mascots. Committee member John Nunes thought it was an insignificant issue, declaring at an October 28th meeting that he “bleeds Green” — the color of “war paint” students smear on their faces at sports events.
If Aunt Jemima was a “slave in a box,” all this is nothing more than an “Indian in a box.” For residents who cling to the lie that such cultural expropriation honors Native Americans, it’s the same lie slaveowners repeated of slaves enjoying being “cared for.”
A 2020 study at UC Berkeley found that 57% of Native Americans and 67% who engage in tribal cultural practices are insulted by mascots. The Chappaquiddick, the Herring Pond, and the Mashpee Wampanoag have all called for banning them.
Researchers have known for decades the damage mascots do to Native American kids (see Freyberg et al, 2008; Stegman and Phillips, 2014; Chaney, 2011; and Davis-Delano, 2020). The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) banned Native mascots in 2005. The American Psychological Association recommended retiring them in 2005 and the American Anthropological Assocation condemned mascots in 2015.
But in Dartmouth you’d think that Sherman was marching on Atlanta. A recent letter to the editor by Harvey Ussach asks, if we get rid of mascots, how are kids going to learn history? Well, why not teach kids the real history of genocide and enslavement and stop pretending that exploiting Native Americans is respectful?
It’s time to quit humoring clueless townies and immediately drop the Dartmouth Indian and hundreds like it. Senate Bill S.2593, “An Act Prohibiting the Use of Native American Mascots by Public Schools in the Commonwealth,” just moved out of committee. Legislators need to pass this bill to do what Superintendent Gifford, Committee Chair Amaral, Committee members Oliver and Nunes, and others entrusted to ensure a safe environment for all children simply refused to do — ban racist mascots.
A few days ago, ABC6 News reported that Peter Larkin, a former attendance officer with the New Bedford Public Schools, was fired over comments advocating violence toward Black Lives Matter protestors that could best be described as lynching:
“I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.”
Deirdre Ramos, the mother of two boys, one of whom is still a student at New Bedford High, alerted the School District to Larkin’s violent ravings. She told ABC6 reporter Amanda Pitts, “It makes me wonder, you know, what type of behavior was he displaying to the students of New Bedford?”
A great question. How many other racist lunatics are New Bedford students being exposed to?
On June 30th, Superintendent Thomas Anderson issued a statement decrying “individual statements” by racists and calling New Bedford Schools an “anti-racist organization” but did not specify whether Larkin would continue to be employed with the District. On July 2nd ABC6 reporter Pitts announced via Twitter that Larkin is no longer employed with the New Bedford Schools.
According to Larkin’s LinkedIn page, he is a 2005 graduate of UMass Dartmouth, has a masters degree in Education from American International College, and was employed by the Bristol County Sheriffs Department from 1991 to 2005 as a “Detective Lieutenant of Internal Affairs.” Larkin resigned from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) three years after botching an investigation the BCSO undertook without “assistance from other police agencies.” He had failed Basic Interrogation 101: reading a suspect her Miranda rights. One lawyer described the low quality of BCSO investigators, “They’re not trained for investigative work,” while another called the BCSO itself “a task force of goofballs who couldn’t cut it as real cops.”
Larkin then tried his hand as a “Corporate/Private Security Agent” specializing in “sensitive employee” issues, “union strike and picket line security, and surveillance.” All this Pinkerton and inept police work apparently qualified Larkin to go to work for his wife’s employer as an attendance officer working “closely with school resource officer[s] and [the] juvenile court system.”
Despite his degree in education, Larkin’s professional background is mainly that of a cop. His homicidal fantasies on Black Lives are hardly unique to cops and may not be all that unique among school employees. ABC6 asked the School Department if another contributor to the same Facebook discussion was a School District employee but a spokesperson replied only “that NBPS does not comment on ongoing investigations or personnel matters.” We imagine this problem runs much deeper in the School District.
The Larkin incident, which necessitated a response from Superintendent Thomas Anderson, is bound to cause more ripples in New Bedford. In 2018, while Superintendent Anderson was being considered for the position he now serves in, so was Larkin’s wife Heather. And her candidacy was supported by an unlikely ally: the New Bedford police union.
One might ask why the New Bedford police union has any interest in the choice of a school superintendent, but in March 2018 union president Henry Turgeon endorsed Larkin with this rationale: “A safe and secure school system will directly translate into a more positive culture and climate,” Turgeon said. “Dr. Larkin’s expectations for the New Bedford Public Schools, both culturally and academically, are in line with our union platform and it is our opinion that safety, a climate of security, and positive police/student intervention will directly lead to our students academic and social success.”
While Heather Larkin may have been seen as ready to do her part for police culture in the schools and ultimately to keep the school-to-prison pipeline moving, hubby Peter wanted to skip the pipeline altogether and go directly to public lynchings.
We are gratified that Superintendent Anderson moved so quickly to address parent concerns and register NBPS disapproval of Larkin’s threats, but it is clear that Larkin is hardly an exception. How many other Larkins — owing their jobs to political or family connections, and with questionable or totally unsuitable professional backgrounds — are we imposing on the city’s children?
If the New Bedford Schools truly are an anti-racist organization — and we have every reason to take Superintendent Anderson at his word — NBPS must undertake a thorough review of its staff and teachers and begin to make it reflect the demographics of the community it serves. NBPS can start by examining the extent of racism in hiring and firing policies, and move on to assessing the extent of patronage and nepotism in the schools.
With many white people suddenly taking an interest in structural racism and with Mississippi now about to remove the Confederate bars from its state flag, maybe it’s time for Bay State residents to think about replacing our flag and seal — a white man’s sword hovering over the neck of a Native American. Gone now are Aunt Jemima, the Land O’ Lakes maiden, Uncle Ben, and a slew of other racist caricatures. Maybe now it’s finally time for the people of Dartmouth to rid their schools of their own racist mascot — one copied from Dartmouth College, which banned it in 1974 because… it was too racist. The following is based on a post from September 2019.
If you haven’t looked closely, both the Massachusetts seal and the state flag feature a belt modeled after one worn by Wampanoag Chief Metacomet (beheaded by Puritans) and a white artist’s conception of Wampanoag Chief Ousamequin (Massasoit) standing in submission beneath the sword of Miles Standish. A shortened version of a Latin aphorism — manus haec inimica tyrannis ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (this hand, an enemy to tyrants, seeks with the sword a quiet peace under liberty) — accompanies the image, conflating Native Americans with tyranny.
The original version of the seal bears no trace of tyrants or Miles Standish, but instead depicts a naked man with a cartoon bubble saying “come over and help us.” For a few short years around the time of American Independence the seal depicted a white man holding the Magna Carta and a sword, after which both versions were combined into what is more-or-less today’s seal. The history of the seal thus charts an arc from a patronizing White Man’s Burden to triumphant White domination. The new seal is one of many images throughout the United States depicting the defeat and humiliation of Native Americans, such as this WPA-era mural by Victor Arnautoff at George Washington High School in San Francisco.
In order to better understand the seal and its symbols, it may help to review some of the Massachusetts history you never learned in school.
The Puritans, named for their intent to “purify” Protestantism of Catholic influences, arrived in Provincetown Harbor in 1620 in a ship owned by the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, the Mayflower, accompanied by an English-born Dutch mercenary named Miles Standish. Many regarded this group of religious zealots as quite extreme, even for England in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. Religion certainly played a part in the Puritan’s appearance in the New World; but colonial avarice was what brought them to it.
Upon their arrival, the Puritans swore allegiance to the English King, James (for whom a version of the Protestant bible is named) and signed the Mayflower Compact, “having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia [the Hudson Valley, now in New York].” With supplies running low and winter approaching, they never made it to the Hudson Valley and instead established the “Plimoth” colony.
Forget the communal First Thanksgiving potluck you learned about in school. It was war against brown people from the moment the Puritans arrived. Miles Standish had a well-earned reputation, even among some of the colonists, for brutality and slaughter of Native Americans. Hartman Deetz, of the Wampanoag Nation, notes that in 1623 Standish committed “one of the first recorded egregious murders of native people by colonists in north America. […] the murder of a man, Pecksuot, just south of Boston. Standish […] lured him into a house under the premise that they were going to conduct trade. And when he got into the house, they barred the doors, and he stabbed [Pecksuot] through the heart with his own knife.” Standish also killed and beheaded another warrior named Wituwamat, slaughtered his family, and brought Wituwamat’s head back to Plymouth and displayed it on a wooden pike.
In New England the genocide and enslavement of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans are bound together in a history that began almost simultaneously.
In 1633, European slave-hunters came to Southern New England to look for Native Americans to press into slavery. Two of them were killed by the Pequot and the Puritans demanded that the killers be turned over for colonial justice. The Pequots refused. In May of 1637 English troops set fire to a Pequot village near Mystic River in Connecticut killing 700 women, children, and elderly; the survivors were enslaved. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, reported, “It was a fearful sight to see them [Pequots] thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them […]”
In 1638, the Puritans began trafficking enslaved survivors of the decimated Pequot nation, trading them for African slaves from the West Indies. Historian James Drake notes that “the war produced hundreds of Indian refugees, who lived as vagabonds within or on the edges of New England towns.” Slavery “[…] helped satisfy the dilemma of what to”do” with them.”
It is understandable that a flag consisting of a subservient Native American, a colonial mercenary’s sword hanging over his head, and a Latin phrase insinuating that he is a tyrant would surely offend people in the 21st Century. More importantly, the sentiments on the seal and flag no longer represent the aspirations of a 21st Century democracy.
For this reason there are currently two resolutions in the Massachusetts legislature, both entitled “Resolve providing for the creation of a special commission relative to the seal and motto of the Commonwealth” — a House version, H.2776, sponsored by Reps. Lindsay N. Sabadosa and Nika C. Elugardo; and S.1877, sponsored by Senator Jason M. Lewis. Rep. Sabadosa told WGBH that “the legislation does not spell out what we want to change the seal and logo to, […] It just says that we need to put together a commission really composed of native voices so that we can find a symbol that represents the values of Massachusetts that’s true to our history but is also respectful at the same time.”
The current state seal was created in 1908 — eighteen years before the Wounded Knee Massacre and sixteen years before Native Americans were given American citizenship. 1908 was not a time of great sensitivity to Native Americans, who were not even regarded as fellow citizens when the “new” seal was created.
In parallel with calls to change the state flag, there is also a national movement to end the use of “Indian mascots” on school sports teams. Maine just became the first state in the nation to throw racist mascots into the dust bin of history. Nationally, over 2000 schools have mascots with names like Warriors (#1), Indians (#2), Raiders, Braves, Chiefs, Redskins, Redmen, Savages, Squaws, Shaman, or specific tribal names — like the Braintree Wamps (named for the Wampanoag).
As with the cigar store Indian, Native Americans have been frequently de-humanized and reduced to avatars and mascots for commercial products — on the same low level as the Geico gecko or the Aflac duck. And yet — here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century! — the Land o’ Lakes maiden still serves alongside Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima as a racist mascot for corporate America.
But corporate exploitation just echoes the widespread racism in society. Caricatures of Native Americans join the lawn jockey, the sleepy Mexican, Sambo, Chief Wahoo, mammies, Golliwogs, tar babies, pickaninnies, hooked-nosed Jews and Arabs, squinting Asians, and countless racist depictions of non-white people on White America’s lawns and curio shelves. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) created a poster to try to convey to White America how racist the Cleveland Indian mascot was — but the lesson was apparently too difficult, or too subtle, to comprehend.
On June 25th, 2019 the Massachusetts legislature will conduct joint hearings on two bills prohibiting the use of racist mascots. House bill H.443 sponsored by Reps. Nika C. Elugardo and Tami L. Gouveia joins Senate bill S.247 sponsored by Senator Joanne M. Comerford in charting a path for the phase-out of offensive mascots without imposing financial hardships on the schools that have them. Local schools include: the Barnstable Red Raiders; the Braintree Wamps; the Bristol Aggie Chieftains; the Dartmouth Indians; and the Middleborough Sachems.
Closer to home, the Dartmouth Schools don’t understand how redface and caricaturing Native Americans actually undermines their own anti-discrimination, anti-bullying and anti-harassment policies: “The school system shall establish and maintain an atmosphere in which all persons can develop attitudes and skills for effective cooperative living in our culturally diverse society.”
Unless, of course, you go on Twitter.
A frequent justification for not retiring Native Indian mascots is that schools are somehow honoring Native Americans rather than simply turning them into cartoons. Dartmouth High School’s mascot is the “Indian,” patterned after Dartmouth (NH) College’s. The nickname “Big Green” remains the same for both schools, and the green letter “D” is still exactly the same. But in 1974 the College decided it was time for their racist mascot to go. Not so for the eponymous high school.
A number of Native American groups, including the National Congress of American Indians, Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda, and the Nipmuc nation, reject mascots outright. In Oregon one school district negotiated with a tribal council to set parameters for the use of tribal imagery. In Utah a tribal council took to social media to slam a parody of a tribal dance done by cheerleaders with wigs on a basketball court. Tribes are being consulted, or at least being heard, in other states.
Why not Massachusetts?
In 2005, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) looked at offensive mascots, 14 schools decided to drop them altogether, 19 were cited for abusive names and imagery, and many were prohibited from participating in tournaments. Several schools which previously used the name “Indians” changed them to: the Arkansas Red Wolves, Indiana Crimson Hawks, McMurry War Hawks, Midwestern State Mustangs, Newberry College Wolves, and so on. Change can be easily, and quickly, accomplished.
It is not known if the Dartmouth High School Student Manual’s “respect” rationale for continuing to use the “Indian” mascot was based on approval from local tribal councils or if they were ever consulted. The School Committee controls the mascot logo as if they held a copyright on Native Americans. I emailed and then followed-up with a call to Dr. Bonnie Gifford, Dartmouth’s Superintendent of Schools, passing along several questions to her assistant. But as of publication time I have not received a reply. Likewise, emails to every member of the town School Committee have gone unanswered.
When it comes to respecting or honoring tribes, “honor” is not a verb white people get to define. Tim Giago, an Oglala-Lakota from South Dakota, has his own definition:
“If the white race wants to honor Native Americans, start by honoring our treaties.”
“And please, please keep in mind; there is no difference between wearing Blackface than there is in wearing”Redface.”
The Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda supports both the flag and seal and mascot legislation. It is also supported by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Both bills are before the legislature and both bills need your support.
It’s 2020. There has been a recent shift in thinking about racism. Here in New England, and particularly the SouthCoast, we ought not congratulate ourselves for our supposed tolerance, given that even Mississippi has now retired their racist flag and a New Hampshire college banned Dartmouth’s identical racist mascot — 46 years ago. Let’s get rid of these insulting reminders of our white supremacist legacy and build on this first step by working to rid the rest of our institutions of the structural racism that is America’s most serious pandemic.
The following is reposted with the author’s permission from an editorial in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. The community Lois refers to here is unimportant; it could be any in America.
Lois Ahrens: Defund the police and break the chain
I want to talk about one long chain. Starting in this tiny city and in every city where mayors and councilors decide on policing budgets. Here the amount for police is almost $7 million a year. A big chunk considering there is almost no crime. But like everywhere, it starts with mayors and city councils giving too much money and too much power to too many cops.
The money goes to cops in schools where Black children and Latinx children get disciplined, suspended and expelled at much higher rates than white children. It moves on to racial profiling with stops of drivers and people walking down the street.
And, sometimes policing and especially over-policing leads to arrests and then charges and then over-charging by district attorneys, including Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan. That means piling up so many charges that people have little choice but to take a plea bargain out of fear of a longer sentence if they risk going to trial.
From there, the chain goes to prisons and jails. In Massachusetts, we pay $1.2 billion to keep about 14,000 people caged in jails and prisons, overstaffed by guards with unions as powerful as the ones police have. Like police outside, they are trained in the same us versus them “warrior “mentality.
When you add this up — too many police, racial profiling, cops in schools, district attorneys and plea bargains — what we get is a state where more than half of the prison population is Black and Latinz, even although those groups account for 17% of Massachusetts’ population.
And, right now prisoners, that is people, in state prisons have been locked down for months. This is really a “lockdown,” not just being unable to eat in a restaurant or take a trip to California. This is being locked in a cell the size of a parking space. This is locked down where social distancing is impossible. This is locked down, where in the Framingham women’s prison, 85 of 180 women have COVID.
It starts here. In this city council and in every city council, which is why we need to defund the police and start breaking the chain.
These are interesting times. Suddenly many White people are looking at racism and capitalism with much more critical eyes. In a perverse sort of way, COVID-19 has opened avenues for change and given White people an unexpected opportunity to reflect on how our society fails all but a handful of us.
With the economy going down like the Titanic, suddenly many White Americans have noticed who’s being escorted into the First Class lifeboats, and it’s been an eye-opener to see how the whole system is rigged. Overnight, multiple crises have generated a little more understanding and sympathy for people who have been in coach or steerage their whole lives. Sitting at home during an enforced “time-out” White Liberals have had a chance to do some much-needed and long-postponed introspection. Everyone is learning more about the depths of depravity and dysfunction of a system built around White Supremacy.
But there is a certain tendency of White Liberals to start with introspection and stop there. Robert Kuttner, writing in the American Prospect (“Beyond White Navel-Gazing”) gives an example of dutiful but hollow Yom Kippur apologies a few of us offer, where the resolve to change and repair is absent from the apology.
Unless an apology is specific and accompanied by a specific plan to repair the injustice, injury, or insult, most Talmudic scholars don’t regard it as serious. The requirements for Jewish Tshuvah are very similar in the Muslim world. Depending on the offense, repentance often includes restitution or reparations.
Many of the anguished White tears we’ve been seeing lately are empty gestures unless accompanied by work for racial justice. Book groups and discussion groups are important, don’t get me wrong. Most of us have an incredible lack of understanding of structural racism, much of our own history, many of our own laws, and we know surprisingly little about the lives and cultures of a third of our American friends and neighbors. Discussion groups help provide understanding and strengthen resolve to join the fight.
But, above all, White people mostly need to just choose sides. We either choose justice and equality — or we continue, comfortably and complacently, failing to change a system that works better for some of us than others. This country really is going down like the Titanic. And, in a time of crisis, action ought to supersede navel-gazing.
I think of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who described marching in Selma as “praying with his feet.” Though I completely lack any religious impulse, I admire the Jewish Prophetic tradition of challenging unjust kings and laws. Heschel literally wrote a book about it, and he was aware of the connections between the Jewish tradition and the African-American prophetic tradition. But at the end of the day it wasn’t history or scripture or even common cause that motivated Heschel. He was just a White guy who understood that what went on inside his own heart and head was much less important than fixing a broken world.
Although Republicans have defunded education, food stamps, public housing, Planned Parenthood, NPR, sanctuary cities, environmental and occupational health, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the UN Refugee agency, what really upsets Liberals is when police reformers call for “defunding the police.” Objections range from worries that Hannibal Lecter will be running loose, to how it might look if Liberals called for something radical.
In the midst of a pandemic and the breakdown of American democracy, it’s the least of our worries.
Liberals have been as incapable as Conservatives of re-imagining a world without a highly-militarized paramilitary force occupying, in effect, urban neighborhoods. If only now they are beginning to understand the need to demilitarize the police, they still seem more afraid of the blowback from adopting this phrase — and of alienating the mythological white swing voter — than of finding common cause with police reformers. Hopefully this will change.
But there are many police programs that can be, and ought to be, completely defunded. There is no need to quibble or clarify what “defunding” means in these cases. It means exactly that — stop wasting taxpayer money making cops more dangerous, and stop throwing money at useless and deceptive public relations gestures.
Here’s what many of the “defunders” have been proposing:
defunding the 1033 program, which puts military weaponry into police hands
defunding the Department of Justice COPS program that assures preferential hiring of ex-military and subsidizes local P.D. hiring of them
defunding school-based police (so-called “resource” officers) and the construction of actual jail cells for children in some schools
defunding forfeiture programs that permit police departments to keep the proceeds
defunding municipal fine programs that automatically flow to police departments
defunding the enforcement of non-violent crime and harrassment of the homeless (fewer officers are necessary)
defunding sensitivity training for officers who should never have been hired in the first place
defunding “advisory” boards, ride-alongs, drug awareness and athletics programs that are basically public relations campaigns that offer the public no real oversight or control of the police
defunding costly overtime and “details” programs (why can’t the electric company provide a flagman?)
If people think that “defunding the police” requires too much parsing and too much explanation, they aren’t spending any time questioning the phrase “community policing.”
Liberals have been some of the greatest champions of “broken windows” policing and “community policing,” which filled city streets with hundreds of thousands of additional cops, filled the nation’s jails and prisons to overflowing, and led to unconstitutional “stop and frisk” practices by police forces which suddenly began receiving piles of cash and military gear — including cities run by Liberal politicians.
One of their inventions, “community policing,” is little more than a public relations sham — a transparent attempt to convince a community [that knows better] that the White buzz-cut with a badge on their porch is really Officer Friendly. “Taking a knee,” as some police officers did last week (instead of putting that knee on someone’s neck), was another P.R. stunt, a “charm offensive” police departments resort to on occasion.
But it’s not working. And the police response to recent protests showed it’s all a big act when people protesting police abuse and members of the press were shot at, beaten, injured, tear-gassed, and pepper-sprayed by police, often for no reason. It only confirmed how comfortable police are with abusing the public and getting away with it.
As the Department of Justice defines it, “community policing” is based on [unequal] “community partnerships” involving the police, media, and community groups, and places a few hand-picked community leaders and clergy on various “advisory” boards — which in the end have no real political power.
In its most benign form Community Policing is simply lipstick on a pig.
New Bedford residents will recall the Justice Department-brokered Action Plan, which was meant to defuse community anger and distrust after the murder of Malcolm Gracia, and which constituted an advisory board of community representatives and the media — but never challenged the power of police unions and never resulted in real community oversight or control of the New Bedford police.
Provisions of the Action Plan were striking: the community, not the police, was responsible for being informed of its own rights and avoiding complications with rogue police officers; and community “relations” and “choices” by young people — not police misconduct — were identifed as the root causes of the Gracia murder.
So here we are again. We’re way past the lipstick. Clearly, somebody needs to do some thinking outside the box.
Max Rameau, an activist with Washington DC based Pan African Community Action, recently discussed a more democratic definition of community policing — members of a community board are chosen from the community by lottery and directly oversee police hiring, firing, and management of their own police departments. Voters in every precinct vote on whether to decommission or continue using existing police personnel. But oversight and management of the newly-constituted police departments is very different from today’s.
If it makes Liberals feel any better, taxes are used to fund the operations of this form of policing — Hannibal Lecter isn’t a worry — but old, ineffective, dangerous, repressive and undemocratic forms of policing would be decommissioned. And all the old budgetary and legal machinery are scrapped and defunded.
Last year over a thousand Americans, mainly men of color, were shot and killed by police. Almost the same number died after being electrocuted by Tasers. In contrast, in Germany, a country with a quarter of our population and certainly no stranger to racism, there have been roughly 11 police killings each year since 1990, and the number has been going down. Police accountability and oversight is the reason for the dramatically smaller number of killings.
It’s going to take ideas like Rameau’s, studying how police in other countries are managed, and experiments like the decommissioning of the Minneapolis Police Department, to re-imagine what policing ought to be. Given that America has a race problem not going away any time soon, police reform solutions must cede control of policing to victimized communities — today.
Yes, today — and no uncomfortable phrase, no uncharted territory, and no experiment is too radical in the service of stopping the unnecessary slaughter of Americans by their own police, particularly people of color who are its disproportionate victims.
On Tuesday Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson was photographed standing behind Donald Trump as the President signed an executive order on policing.
Trump’s police “reforms” may have been meaningless — especially since his administration deep-sixed real reforms as soon as he parked his rump in the Oval Office, and none of the families of police murder victims Trump claims to have invited with were present for the signing — but it was an opportunity for Trump to show off what Trump does best — dousing fire with gasoline.
Trump’s signing speech was precisely the plate of red meat people like Hodgson love. In fact, Hodgson could easily have written it himself: “Americans know the truth, without police there is chaos. Without law there is anarchy and without safety there is catastrophe. […] As we did in Minneapolis after it got out of control for 4 days. We sent in representatives, commonly known as the National Guard and it was all put down very quickly.”
But Bristol County voters may be wondering: what the hell was Hodgson doing there?
Good question. For starters, a Massachusetts sheriff’s job consists solely of running a county jail — something Hodgson can’t even do without killing and abusing a disproportionate number of his detainees. For all his posturing and attempts to expand his powers to patrols — rejected by the DA and the cities of New Bedford and Fall River — Hodgson is nothing but a jailer. He’s not a lawman. And if this was ever in doubt, in 2016 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that “a deputy sheriff is not a ‘police officer’ for purposes of G.L. c.269, §13A.” Hodgson runs four jails in Dartmouth and New Bedford. That’s it. Or should be.
If Hodgson had a role to play at the White House yesterday, it was as an extra in whatever cowboy drama Trump thinks he’s starring in, and to sell his tough lawman image by rubbing elbows with Stetson-hatted brethren.
But playing a lawman on TV is not the same as competently doing the job. Hodgson is such a clueless and reckless martinet that he appears to have personally triggered a recent riot in his own facility. Hodgson is absolutely the last person anyone would want to ask for “good policing” best practices.
Hodgson will get red in the face and sputtering mad any time a detractor mentions his cruelty and incompetence or pleads with government officials for long-overdue oversight. In Hodgson’s book anyone who thinks he’s unfit for office must be a pinko Commie anarchist with a political agenda.
But the fact is, the phrase “political agenda” was custom-made for Hodgson and everything he does — from sucking up to Stephen Miller, to ratting out his own church, to shilling for Identitarians at the American Border Foundation who are raising money for Trump’s border wall, to testifying with racists and eugenicists from the Center for Immigration Statistics, to attending meetings of the national advisory board of the Federation for American Immigration “Reform,” to participating in training exercises on the ranch of a couple affiliated with the Minuteman [militia] Project, to his numerous media appearances with racists, Muslim bashers, Christian nationalists, gay bashers, Birthers, End Times preachers, and conspiracy nuts. Not to mention Hodgson’s never-ending pilgrimages to the White House on the public dime.
His recent controversy is hardly surprising. That Hodgson would pose for an official photo in Confederate Battle Stars demonstrates that Hodgson the politician values the power of silent signals and dog-whistles, which apparently work as well in Massachusetts as they do in Mississippi.
No, very little of what Hodgson does is related to his day job, but everything he does is political — and of the worst sort.
It’s time taxpayers stopped paying for Hodgson’s white supremacist hobby. And where are those Congressional, state Senate, and AG investigations?
I woke up strangely optimistic this morning. At times it seems like we are floating in a vast sea, no winds to return us home or to take us to another port. Just stuck, waiting either for rescue or for a change of weather.
This week almost felt like a change of weather.
Yes, our Führer-wannabe is still in the White House, but as a sign of his decreasing power and increasing fear of his own subjects, he turned his executive complex into something resembling the Green Zone, surrounding himself with generals, lackeys, and his own Republican Guard. Orange Saddam even retreated to his bunker (aren’t mixed metaphors great?).
Here in Dartmouth, an overwhelmingly white town, a high school student organized a parade against racism and local businesses donated water to marchers. It was only last year that the Black Lives Matter movement was considered too extreme for most of White America. But now, here the locals were, marching and shouting “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” with gusto.
Now, if only they would get rid of the racist Dartmouth school mascot.
Sometimes White America hops on movements in the same spirit as attending a fiesta: many hashtags are consumed and a good time is had by all. Then everybody goes home — to read about it with their support system or their reading group, with the emphasis on personal growth (there’s got to be something in it for me).
Sometimes a hashtag movement gains a bit of traction and actually results in something. Let us hope that the fight against structural racism is more than a passing fad and that proposals for police, criminal justice, and economic reform are daring, sweeping, and radical — in the sense of dealing with the root causes of these problems.
But so far I am seeing White Americans pretty much buying up anti-racism books, scheduling Zoom coffee klatches, and having deep and abstract conversations with one another. There seems to be a lot of discussion about reforming police training — but a lot of push-back against progressive efforts to reduce funding for police departments; wrest control from police unions of discipline, hiring and policy; and using taxpayer money for social services for distressed, police-occupied communities — while “defunding” the police at local, state, and federal levels.
Kaffee klatches for discusting racism are certainly no substitute for working for meaningful reform, but (as one person texted me): “To be charitable, they need to work their feelings out and that is important in its own way.” Ouch.
And as anemic as White America’s response has been, it is still cause for cautious optimism.
But we — fellow white people — we ought to be able to do a hell of a lot better than this.
The following is based on an unpublished 2011 article.
When a policeman “Tases” you, a seven-ounce gun shoots nitrogen-propelled darts which puncture up to one inch of clothing and deliver 50,000 volts to your central nervous system through filaments that stretch up to ten meters.
The manufacturer’s website describes the product as “turning off” a person for up to 30 seconds. Police departments are buying up the thousand-dollar devices like hotcakes. Close to a million are in police use in the United States because law enforcement officers say they need new “non-lethal” tools in their arsenal for dealing with violent criminals without resorting to shooting them. Tasers are also available for personal use in 43 states (not MA or RI).
Despite public relations campaigns to sell these weapons, in which willing subjects, often police-friendly journalists, allow themselves to be zapped by a Taser while being lowered gently to the ground by officers, the “real world” deployment of these new “Electronic Control Weapons” (ECW’s) has been much more destructive.
That’s because Tasers, while less lethal than firearms, still kill. And they can and are routinely abused by police officers.
In one case of Taser abuse, a conservative student, Andrew Meyer heckled John Kerry at a campaign speech, refused to stop talking, and was then zapped with 50,000 volts after pleading, “Don’t Tase me, bro.”
In 2009 in Oakland, California, officer Johannes Mehserle reached for his Taser to “turn off” Oscar Grant, who was already lying on a subway platform on his stomach in handcuffs. Mehserle instead shot Grant in the back with his service revolver, killing him. This fatal confusion of Taser for firearm has occurred several times in other cities.
But, even taking Mehserle at his word that he had confused the service revolver for a Taser, the officer’s purpose for using a Taser on a handcuffed subject was not because Mehserle was ever in danger — but to simply compel “compliance.”
In 2009 in Oklahoma, Lona Varner, an 86 year old stroke victim on oxygen, was Tasered in her bed after her grandson called for medical assistance. Mrs. Varner, who had dementia, has lashed out at police who were stepping on her oxygen.
Also in 2009, Prospero Lassi, a Southwest Airlines employee, suffered a diabetic seizure. While being transported to the hospital and still experiencing seizures, he bumped the arm of an officer who then Tasered him 11 times while he was still unconscious.
Again in 2009 in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Deacon Frederick Williams suffered an epileptic seizure but was taken to jail instead of to the hospital. A video of his being Tasered five times while in police custody and then dying on-screen was seen by millions.
At a Phillies game, a rowdy fan ran around the field until he was Tasered by a policeman. The crowd, which had first laughed at the man’s hijinks, booed the official for excessive brutality. There had never been any concern the man posed a danger to anyone. He was simply holding up a baseball game.
Many victims of Tasers, both by abuse and homicide, are those without medical care, with mental and psychological problems, the poor, and very often minorities.
There have been numerous cases of protestors being Tasered in civil disobedience actions where only passive resistance was being offered. In former times, protesters would be led to a van in plastic handcuffs, booked, and that was it. Increasingly, people are now being Tasered for “non compliance.”
At some point, the level of physical coercion of citizens a Taser provides stops being preservation of the peace and simply becomes suppression of dissent. It is not surprising, then, that the United Nations and human rights groups have reacted with alarm to their increasing use in peaceful protests, using the word “torture.”
And the abuse of Tasers is only growing.
Between 1999 and 2004 there were approximately 71 Taser-related deaths in the US and Canada, but the death rate is rising fast. Between 2001 and 2008 there were 334 deaths and many cases of abuse like those mentioned which have been recorded in some cases by an officer’s own cruiser or body camera, or which have been posted on YouTube and Vimeo.
The use of this technology is outpacing community control of it.
The company which manufactures the Taser ascribes the many fatalities to “preexisting medical conditions” or offers an explanation popularized by a former medical examiner, Vincent DiMiao, who was hired by the company to promote so-called “Excited Delirium Syndrome” (EDS) as a rationale for the deaths. Other studies of the Taser include those by the military, which never met a weapon system it didn’t like, and law enforcement agencies like the Department of Justice, which have never questioned the EDS explanation.
Neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychological Association recognize Excited Delirium Syndrome, but the American College of Emergency Physicians does recognize it as a cause of death. However, the definition provided by fellows Matthew Sztajnkrycer and Amado Baez of the Mayo Clinic offers little more than cocaine and struggle with police officers as contributing factors and this does not logically rule out excitation by Taser. They write:
The actual cause of cocaine-associated ED and sudden death is unknown. Studies have suggested that the elevated temperatures seen in these patients is due to abnormal changes in brain dopamine receptors. The vast majority of these patients died after a struggle. Such struggles increase the levels of circulating epinephrine, and may also result in a metabolic acidosis.
The National Association of Medical Examiners also recognizes EDS, but also qualifies it: “Chronic drug use is necessary to induce the changes in the neurochemistry that lead to agitated delirium.” Many of the cases of “EDS” linked to the many Taser fatalities did not involve drugs; merely repeated shocks.
Almost all studies purporting to demonstrate Taser safety are based on delivering shocks to healthy volunteers who do not fight the 50,000 volt blast to their central nervous systems. However, a University of California (San Francisco) cardiology study found the device to be far more lethal than the company would have us believe. And a “real world” statistical study of 185 deaths by White and Ready at the University of Arizona found that Tasers are widely abused or misused by officers who either shock subjects repeatedly when not in any real danger themselves, or who fail to recognize that the subject is already in some kind of medical or drug-related distress in which using a Taser contributes to their fatality.
Dartmouth Police officers receive only six hours of training on the Taser X26, a device which according to its marketing literature has “greater incapacitating power than the Advanced Taser M26 ECD.” How many hours of firearms training do officers receive in comparison? In Los Angeles, that number is 113. According to Massachusetts law 501 CMR 8.05, the Taser curriculum may be anything Taser International provides. Given the company’s adamant protestations that the device is non-lethal, the provided information is either incorrect, should be augmented, or the device regulated in order to eliminate fatalities.
Dartmouth Police rules for Taser use permit it to be used on minors over the age of 10 and seniors under the age of 70. How do you feel about having your 13 year old daughter or 67 year old grandmother Tasered? Even if they are on drugs or are experiencing dementia?
Dartmouth Police rules permit the device to be used for non-violent (Level 3) “non-compliant behavior.” If the Taser is intended to keep officers from harm, the public should also be kept from harm during its deployment. Dartmouth’s Level 4 is a more proper threshold for use of a device which can potentially kill. Normally Level 5 is the only one in which a firearm should be used. Why then is the criterion for a Taser so much lower, given lethality which is not common to the other remedies in its class (spray, restraint, and canine)?
The Dartmouth police guide to force and firearms states that Tasers may be employed “for self-defense, defense of another against unlawful violence or attack to his/her person or property, to overcome resistance to arrests, to conduct searches and seizures, prevent escapes from custody, preserve the peace, prevent the commission of crimes, or prevent suicide or self-inflicted injury.” Some of these categories include fleeing (which presents no danger to an officer) or are sufficiently vague (“preserving the peace”) as to be downright frightening from a civil liberties perspective.
But where is the justification for using the device in the first place? What are the cases of officer injury which could have been avoided only by the use of a Taser, and not pepper spray, a K9, bean bags, or some other non-lethal means? Is it a great new toy, like your iPhone, or is the Taser really necessary? Perhaps the department’s “less than lethal” force reports could shed light on this.
At a minimum, it is something a community itself should review and control.
Without knowing a subject personally, an officer can unwittingly use a Taser on a disabled, pregnant, minor, senior, handicapped, intoxicated, epileptic, uremic, acidotic, autistic, deaf, or diabetic person; a pacemaker patient, someone with an undiagnosed heart problems, stroke, neurological problems, psychotic, or someone on drugs for whom electroshock could contribute to death. Most of these people are not going to be able to respond to an officer’s commands predictably or quickly-enough (especially for an impatient officer), and especially given a disability or impairment.
We have seen numerous examples where officers have had no idea what type of medical or psychological episode a subject was having but “turned off” the subject with a Taser. The solution, it seems to me, is to limit Tasers only to situations where someone’s life is in danger. Simple “non-compliance” is not a good enough reason to use these lethal devices.
As in many communities, Dartmouth Police regulations do not place restrictions on Tasering subjects even after they have been taken down or handcuffed. Other communities do impose this restriction. What purpose, other than running the risk of killing someone, does repeatedly shocking a person who’s already in cuffs?
According to Dartmouth police guidelines, there is nothing to prevent Tasering fleeing subjects, even though the officer is not in danger. Would Dartmouth officers actually Taser a rowdy fan running around at a Crapo Field little league game? After all, we have a precedent in Philadelphia. Yet nothing is worth risking a human life just so a game is not delayed. If officers can show restraint in imminent pursuit of motor vehicles, they can also treat a Taser with as much caution as an automobile.
Dartmouth and Massachusetts regulations call for an EMT to be called to treat a Tasered subject, yet there is no requirement that officers using Tasers be able to revive a subject or even carry a defibrillator. There have been numerous cases where an apparently healthy young drug-free man was Tasered and died within 15 minutes, well before EMTs could arrive.
Some communities (for example, Mountain View and Boise) restrict the use of Tasers effectively to situations in which the use of a service revolver would be permitted. Rather than supplement less-than-lethal options like K9 and spray, in these communities Tasers are an extension of options to be used only where lethal force would be employed. This is a sensible recognition of the fact that Tasers are lethal. Shouldn’t we have such restrictions on their use in every community?
The Town of Dartmouth’s guidelines for the use of a Taser are so vague that it is not clear how “excessive force” would ever be defined. Any claim of “resisting” by an officer would be justified by vague rules and, by definition, whatever force an officer applied would not be regarded as excessive. With a service revolver it’s obvious if a mistake has been made. But how do you define excessive force when Tasers are used? And what about transparency and oversight?
For example, is there a process for community review whenever a Taser is deployed in Dartmouth and neighboring communities? In cases of lethal force, the District Attorney is to be notified. However, for less than lethal force, only a shift commander is notified, according to Dartmouth police regulations.
According to a University of Arizona study, there is a striking correlation between multiple Taser shocks and death. This is something that cannot be safely left solely to the judgment of an officer who wants to believe in the non-lethality of the device. What, then, is the maximum number of shocks which officers are permitted to administer to a person? What happens if an officer exceeds this number? What are the legal ramifications? And are members of Select Boards and City Councils aware of the insurance and legal risks?
In Charlotte, North Carolina a jury awarded a 17-year-old’s family $10 million for a wrongful death claim against the Taser manufacturer. Cities are directly on the hook for damages if officers violate civil rights, ignore Taser operating instructions, or fail to provide adequate medical care for a subject after being Tasered. The city of Albuquerque paid out $275,000; Moberly, Missouri paid out $2.4 million; Antioch, California paid out $750,000; Fort Collins, Colorado $225,000; and dozens of other cities paid out sums capped by $100,000 or $200,000 limits of state liability for wrongful deaths. Several Illinois cities joined in a suit against the manufacturer because Tasers had been marketed as non-lethal and the cities were themselves being sued in wrongful death cases. Max Vasquez was awarded a $1 million settlement from the Ventura County police department. A man who was having a stroke and was Tasered for “non-compliance” won a half million dollar settlement from the city of Riverside, California. A man in Marin County, California who was Tasered for falling and refusing to go to the hospital was awarded $1.9 million. Waveland, Missouri had to settle an epidemic of police abuse cases in which town officers improperly used Tasers on people who were stopped, detained or arrested. Even law enforcement officers accidentally shocked by Tasers have sued for lost wages and injuries. Rosalind Jones of Galveston, Texas was training officers on the use of Tasers when she suffered lasting nerve damage. Two officers in Las Vegas won similar cases. While Massachusetts has limits on punitive damages, the lifelong care of a paraplegic or coma victim of Tasering would be quite expensive.
The Taser X26 permits downloads of usage statistics. What procedures are in place for an independent body to collect and review these statistics? Again, accountability is the concern. Currently, according to Massachusetts law St.2004, c. 170 data must be conveyed to various state offices and transmitted to a university for analysis within one year. This same information should be conveyed monthly to municipal government and made available to the public long before it is bundled for academic studies.
Finally, Massachusetts is one of eight states that restrict the use of Tasers to law enforcement officers. Why? Because Massachusetts recognizes the lethality of the device:
Section 131J. No person shall possess a portable device or weapon from which an electrical current, impulse, wave or beam may be directed, which current, impulse, wave or beam is designed to incapacitate temporarily, injure or kill, except: (1) a federal, state or municipal law enforcement officer…
We, as a community, ought to severely restrict the use of such equipment. Tasers should only be used by specially-trained officers with EMT training or used only when EMT’s are en route. It should be up to a community, not the police, to adopt guidelines for Taser use similar to those used by Mountain View, California and elsewhere.
Technology can be extremely seductive. Whether you’re a teacher, auto mechanic, or a police chief, you want the latest gadgets and technology. But Tasers are not toys. They’re not pepper spray. They’re not bean bags. They’re not K9’s, which might chew someone’s hand up a bit. Tasers can and do kill. They can also be easily abused for trivial or punitive purposes, as many examples demonstrate. For all these reasons there must be restrictions and community oversight on their use.
No one should be surprised by this week’s outpouring of sadness and rage over the nation’s most recent police slaying of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop who had 10 complaints of bad conduct, none ever resulting in disciplinary action. As much as the president attempted to portray the protests as the handiwork of lawless criminals, to many it is now finally dawning that the issue is really lawless cops and systemic racism.
As with Ferguson and Minneapolis, whenever we read stories of police abuse they invariably involve white cops and black or brown citizens. If not the police it’s the courts, prisons, or immigration authorities dispensing routine cruelty to people of color. You don’t have to be particularly perceptive to recognize the common factor; you just need a long memory and open eyes. Racism permeates every aspect of American life — especially the criminal justice system. Most lethal and shameful of all, American police are murdering black and brown men and women with impunity.
And if you think George Floyd’s protesters are angry only at so-called officers of the law, think again. That the protests are happening on a national scale ought to tell you that it’s the system protesters are angry at — and those who defend that system.
The Black Lives Matter movement arose after the murder of Michael Brown by a white Missouri cop. Since the Ferguson riot that followed Brown’s death there have been many more such killings — regarded properly as lynchings since no court of law condemned the accused, pronounced a guilty verdict, or determined a death sentence.
No, a buzz-cut with a badge took it upon himself to end a black man’s life. And, with rare exceptions, white police officers often manage to avoid consequences with a phrase few even believe anymore: “I feared for my life.” Then, the officer’s union makes sure no serious investigation is done, while the city offers blood money to the victim’s family while refusing to press charges against the officer. In this manner most of these lynchings have been quietly resolved without ever creating a ripple in a system that actually encourages them.
The particular outrage of George Floyd’s murder was that officer Derek Chauvin calmly knelt on the handcuffed man’s neck for seven minutes until he died on the spot. All while a frantic public recorded the slaying, imploring Chauvin to get off Floyd and let him breathe. This time there could be no “I feared for my life” defense. It was simply a case of a white cop committing a murder he thought he could get away with in broad daylight.
Because a thousand other cops have gotten away with exactly the same.
Early in the Democratic primaries, when Elizabeth Warren was still campaigning, Scott Hovsepian of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police (MassCOP) blasted Warren for referring to the shooting of Michael Brown as a “murder.”
But Warren was spot-on. With black men having a one in a thousand chance of being fatally shot by police in their lifetime — two times the rate for whites — there really is no other word that suits such extreme indifference to life but murder. We are in fact so indifferent to these killings that police shootings aren’t even tracked by a government agency.
Delicate ears may prefer the phrases “wrongful death” or “unauthorized use of force.” But who are we kidding? Even when the evidence is crystal-clear that a police shooting was completely unnecessary and violated any number of departmental policies or protocols, officials rarely admit to mistakes, instead trotting out a legal doctrine known as Qualified Immunity which effectively gives policemen a license to kill — even when they have previously exhibited bad judgment, have psychological problems, or a history of violence toward the non-white public. Even when the officer lies. Even when there is a video.
Hovsepian’s angry letter to Warren recited a litany of bullshit arguments law enforcement officials regularly use to reject public oversight and accountability:
“I want to make this as clear as possible and every member of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police wants you to understand; your labeling of law enforcement as racist and violent is unacceptable and dangerous. Maybe I didn’t deliver the message strong enough the last time we spoke. YOUR POLITICAL PANDERING FOR PRESIDENTIAL VOTES IS GETTING POLICE OFFICERS AND CITIZENS HURT AND KILLED. […] Your inflammatory rhetoric results in the erosion of relationships that members of law enforcement have developed within our communities. […] Graham v. Connor 490 U.S. at 396-97 (1989), provides in part: The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene…”
Unacceptable and dangerous. For a moment, a reader might be excused for thinking Hovsepian meant the national epidemic of police officers slaughtering black men, two thirds of them unarmed. Hovsepian actually cited Qualified Immunity as the police officer’s shield from charges that would normally count as murder in the second degree — “acts that demonstrate extreme indifference to human life.” But it’s not police killings that we ought to be worried about, says Hovsepian — no, it’s public criticism of the police that is killing officers.
Two years ago at Dillard University, Hovsepian took issue with Warren’s characterization of the entire U.S. criminal justice system. Warren said that “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist… I mean front to back.” Hovsepian hissed at Warren’s characterization as “cancerous rhetoric” and charged that criticism of police was lethal: “Your statements put each and every one of us in danger. Your statement dehumanizes every officer who puts on a uniform…”
Playing the part of the wronged and “dehumanized” party may be nothing but a rhetorical ploy, but it is precisely the same racist argument that Alt-Right darling Tucker Carlson makes that White Supremacy is a hoax because white people have become the real victims of the American legacy of slavery.
Last year the Washington Post reported that, “among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death, according to a study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University.” In 2018 police killed 1,164 people. The number of black people killed by police (215) exceeded all police officers who died in the line of duty (148), servicemen killed in action (2) and Americans killed by Islamic terrorists (0) combined. There were only 23 days in 2018 when police did not kill someone. Thirteen of the 100 largest police departments accounted for a large percentage of police murders that year. 99% of all police killings never resulted in officers being convicted of any charges. In 2018 Americans were ten times more likely to die from being shot by a cop than in a mass shooting.
So, if anyone has a legitimate and “reasonable fear,” it is civilians fearing police violence, not the other way around. Americans are increasingly afraid, too, of militarized policing that is morphing into something very like an occupation. Following the protests of Michael Brown’s murder, police turned Ferguson’s Canfield Drive into Fallujah. This week, in an absolutely fascist move for no other purpose than a photo-op, Trump called in a heavily militarized force to disperse non-violent protestors.
While there are obviously many good police officers and some decent police chiefs, from the 30,000 foot view Warren was absolutely right. The list of black victims of the pandemic of police abuse never stops growing – Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, just to name a few of the thousands in my lifetime.
We know what skin colors predominate among America’s 2.5 million incarcerated brothers and sisters, sons and daughter, mothers, and fathers. The legacy of slavery is apparent to anyone who has studied criminal justice issues or simply reads the newspaper. The Central Park Five, whose story was recently portrayed in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” embody everything that is wrong with America’s racist criminal justice system — police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct and overreach, brutal prisons — even an ad from a future president that read like a call to lynch five young men of color.
No, MassCOP’s Scott Hovsepian had it completely backwards when he charged that criticism of police racism puts officers at risk and undermines their work. In truth it is racist cops who undermine community confidence in police departments and contribute to a community’s fear of helping police reduce crime. No matter how many public relations campaigns, youth programs, listening sessions, or ride-alongs police departments use to blunt community criticism, nothing compensates for all the damage that racist officers inflict.
Take the case of 20 year Muskegon, Michigan police officer Charles Anderson. Anderson put his house on the market and apparently didn’t think he needed to put his KKK application or his Confederate flags away. A black couple touring the home realized the officer was a racist and dug into Anderson’s history, discovering he had been cleared in the fatal shooting of a black man in 2009. Neither the killing nor the exoneration was a surprise.
Or a story last year describing Galveston, Texas cops leading a black man, slave-style, between the mounted officers’ horses. Police chief Vernon Hale offered a feeble explanation, “Although this is a trained technique and best practice in some scenarios, I believe our officers showed poor judgement in this instance.” But it was poor judgment neither investigated nor punished.
Sergeant Heather Taylor, a member of the St. Louis Metro police department, was interviewed by CBS News as part of a series on racial bias in American police departments. “Do you think that there are white supremacists on the police force?” CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues asked. “Yes” Taylor replied. “You didn’t even pause,” Pegues said. “Have you seen some of the Facebook posts of some of our suspended officers right now?” Taylor responded. “Yes.”
Taylor could have been referring to Facebook posts collected by the Plain View Project, which to date has permanently recorded over 5,000 racist posts — that’s from only eight cities. The Project’s homepage says that “our concern is not whether these posts and comments are protected by the First Amendment. Rather, we believe that because fairness, equal treatment, and integrity are essential to the legitimacy of policing, these posts and comments should be part of a national dialogue about police” — a dialog shut down by police officials who claim that such a discussions put their lives at risk.
Blue Lives matter to police officers, but the same concern for human life doesn’t seem to extend to civilian life — especially black lives. In 2016 an Oregon police officer posted an image of a Black Lives Matter protest with a comment, “When encountering such mobs remember, there are 3 pedals on your floor. Push the right one all the way down.” No surprise, this was precisely what at least one NYPD cop did to citizens in New York protesting the murder of George Floyd: hit the gas pedal and plowed into the crowd.
The Facebook page of Santa Fe, New Mexico Sergeant Troy Baker, also the police union president and a police cadet instructor, was a veritable cesspool of racist and homophobic rants, violent threats, and Confederate flags. Baker survived an internal investigation when no violation of department policy was determined, and he was allowed to retire early, remaining on the city payroll for eight months to obtain his pension.
Springfield, Massachusetts cop Conrad Lariviere thought white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. running down Heather Heyer in Charlotteville was pretty funny. “Hahahaha love this, maybe people shouldn’t block roads,” Lariviere wrote on Facebook. When confronted with the post, Lariviere told MassLive.com, “I am not a racist and don’t believe in what any of those protesters are doing, I’m a good man who made a stupid comment and would just like to be left alone.”
Lariviere was eventually fired but the damage had already been done. “It will take us months, if not years, to earn back the level of public trust we once had,” Police Commissioner John Barbieri said. “It’s never easy to terminate a fellow officer, and I take no comfort in doing so.” But Lariviere’s union, Local 364 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, issued a statement saying it was —
“extremely disappointed in the decision of Commissioner Barbieri to terminate the employment of Officer Conrad Lariviere. Officer Lariviere’s comments on Facebook were made in his capacity as a private citizen […] While some may find Off. Lariviere’s comments to have been insensitive, we do not believe that they rise to the level of misconduct, and certainly do not warrant termination, even if there was a clear policy involved […] We also believe that the subject of the Facebook posting was a matter of public concern, and protected speech. We believe that the termination is based on political considerations, not a fair, impartial assessment of the evidence…”
Racist conduct and exercising poor judgement are, for many police associations, insignificant or irrelevant concerns for officers charged with serving the public fairly.
In Phoenix, Arizona, 75 cops were caught on Facebook bashing Muslims, African-Americans, gays, and feminists. When Trayvon Martin was murdered, Phoenix officer Joshua Ankert wrote, “CONGRATULATIONS GEORGE ZIMMERMAN!!! Thank you for cleaning up our community one thug at a time.” Officer Dave Swick posted a roadside sign that said, “Ferguson protestors ahead, speed up, aim well.” Police dispatcher Christina Begay shared a picture of two cops laughing with the caption: “They said, ‘F–k the police,’ so I said ‘F–k your 911 call, I’ll get to your dying home boy when I finish my coffee.” Officer David Pallas posted a meme showing the Quran, with a caption that read: “HOW ABOUT BANNING THIS. IT OFFENDS ME!!” The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association defended the posts. “People — including cops — say things they regret.”
Add to a climate of hate the many unfortunate interactions between police officers and young people. Stop and Frisk — violations of the Fourth Amendment — go by many names: “community engagement,” “meet and greet,” “youth liaison.” But they only add to the fear, distrust and hatred many people have of police officers. In New Bedford a young man, Malcolm Gracia, is dead because police officers decided to aggressively “engage” a group of young men at Temple Landing after seeing what they thought could be a “gang handshake.”
After allegedly stabbing an officer — the details of which the police greatly exaggerated — Gracia was shot three times in the back and once in the side of the head. But the entire interaction should never have happened. “Even on the [police] version of the facts, the stop would be unlawful,” Judge Thomas F. McGuire Jr. wrote in a memorandum on a civil lawsuit filed by the victim’s sister. The City of New Bedford for many years claimed that the incident had occurred because of insufficient policies on “engagement” with youth. But after the ACLU filed several FOIA requests, the city’s argument collapsed. Police should have simply followed the law.
But it’s not just a few bad apples or the frequently-cited lack of clear policies. As we saw in the case of Santa Fe, New Mexico, departmental racism often reflects, and is even encouraged by, the leadership of police unions and associations who represent tens of thousands of officers.
Consider Hovsepian’s Brother in Blue, Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, New York City’s second largest police union. Mullins thought it was fine to share a video made by white supremacist Colin Flaherty (author of “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry”) that calls black people “welfare queens,” “scam artists” and “monsters.” The film uses Trump-styled language:
“When a suspect chooses to flee from police, it is never for anything good,” the narrator says. “When a suspect flees a car at night in the projects, it can only be for something incredibly bad. One of the most astonishing aspects of police work in an urban environment, is the fact that almost literally no one has a job. The section 8 scam artists and welfare queens have mastered the art of gaming the taxpayer. Bounce from baby mama to baby mama, impregnate as many women as possible. She gets the welfare benefits, and you get the flop house benefits. Symbiotic.”
Mullins, nose freshly rubbed in his own white supremacy, uttered “I have black friends, white friends, Asian friends. I wouldn’t want to insult anyone. I don’t think one incident defines who I am.”
Or consider the nation’s largest group of sheriffs, the National Sheriff’s Association, which once sponsored its own crowdfunded border wall donation site but has now outsourced it to the American Border Foundation (ABF), an organization managed by white supremacists and supported by armed militias. (After months, ABF has raised only $222K of its $450 million goal).
According to Political Research Associates, a group that tracks nationalist currents in the U.S., sheriff departments throughout the country are riddled with members of the Patriot movement, Constitutional Sheriffs, militia members, Christian Identitarians, and white supremacists. Right here at home, Bristol County Massachusetts sheriff Tom Hodgson sits on the board of a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group — FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, established by white supremacist John Tanton.
But combine police racism with hyper-patriotism, militarism and PTSD, and you’ve got a big, big, big problem.
Since 9-11 more than 2 million Americans have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Justice runs a program called COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) which provides grants to communities to turn “vets to cops.” In 2016 the DOJ handed out $119 million to help communities pay for approximately 900 policemen. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has created a recruitment guide for veterans, and veterans can use their GI Bill benefits while attending police academy. America increasingly says “thank you for your service” to its warriors by re-deploying them domestically.
But programs like these, and hiring practices that favor ex-military, have a serious downside. By prioritizing military experience over diversity, police departments put communities at risk. For example, the San Jose Police Department, a force with serious racism problems, sees veterans as naturals for the police “because we have a paramilitary structure, [and] military veterans often times can easily integrate.” What ever happened to community policing?
Then there are the after-effects of war. With an increasing percentage of veterans becoming police officers thanks to programs like COPS, many officers seem to think they are still fighting the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. Ellen Kirshman, a psychologist who works with police officers, says that between 19% and 34% of all officers show some sign of PTSD: “This is pretty alarming. An officer with PTSD cannot think clearly, is probably hyper vigilant, has a short fuse, may not be sleeping well because of nightmares, might be policing in a reckless manner…” And this is precisely what one frequently sees in videos of police encounters with black men. Legislation has been signed into law to help officers with PTSD, but what about the public? Aren’t there cops who are simply too traumatized to serve the public? Even when they are identified, it’s difficult to remove them from the force.
When Elizabeth Warren spoke about the criminal justice system, she was talking about much more than policing. Yet police unions have become powerful lobbies and relentless opponents of criminal justice and prison reform. Natasha Lennard reports in the Intercept on the savage negative campaign the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) waged against Governor Mario Cuomo’s criminal justice reforms. Likewise, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent over $10 million lobbying for the Three Strikes law, mandatory life sentences, and prison expansions. In Illinois, police unions waged a campaign to stop the closure of the brutal Tamms Supermax prison. And we have fifty states just like this.
But nothing shows how racist the criminal justice system is as clearly as the history of opposition to reforming it.
In 1991 Rep. William Edwards introduced H.R.2972, the Police Accountability Act of 1991. The bill made it “unlawful for any governmental authority to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives persons of their constitutional or statutory rights, privileges, or immunities.” The bill had only 10 co-sponsors and never made it out of committee.
In 2000 John Conyers Jr. sponsored H.R. 3927, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act of 2000, which sought to impose national standards on law enforcement as we currently do in education. It had only thirteen Democratic co-sponsors and never made it to a vote. In 2015 Conyers again filed H.R.2875, this time with 48 co-sponsors. But again it died.
In 2015 Rep. Henry Johnson Jr. sponsored H.R.1102, the Police Accountability Act of 2015, which had 15 co-sponsors and died. The bill amended “title 18, United States Code, to provide a penalty for assault or homicide committed by certain State or local law enforcement officers, and for other purposes.” Again in 2017 Johnson filed H.R.4331, with 8 lonely co-sponsors. Again, it died.
In 2017 Rep. Gwen Moore sponsored H.R. 3060, Preventing Tragedies between Police and Communities Act of 2017, which required that police departments receiving federal funding train officers in de-escalation techniques. The bill had only 24 co-sponsors and died in committee — having also failed in 2016.
In 2017 Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee sponsored H.R.47: Kalief’s Law, which sought to amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to provide for the humane treatment of youths in police custody. The bill had only one co-sponsor and there was never a roll call vote.
Whether a majority or minority in Congress, police accountability has never been a priority for Democrats or Republicans. E. Tammy Kim, in an excellent piece in the Nation (“What to Do About the Police”), writes that, “as it stands, the three branches of government are unwilling to regulate the police. Mayors and governors defer to police chiefs and union presidents; judges make cheesecloth of the Fourth and 14th Amendments; and legislators vote again and again to increase law-enforcement budgets.”
In a 2015 ruling the Supreme Court gave police broad latitude to shoot at citizens recklessly and with impunity, when it rejected a suit against a Texas police officer who fired into a car with a high power rifle from an overpass, paralyzing a driver. The officer joked: “How’s that for proactive?”
In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Kisela v. Hughes that police officers can not be sued for arbitrary and unnecessary shootings — effectively granting law enforcement a deluxe edition of Constitutional rights. In dissenting, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling another sign of “unflinching willingness” to protect rogue cops and wrote that the decision “transforms the doctrine [of qualified immunity] into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.” Cops in America today truly have a license to kill.
With one exception, every piece of reform legislation mentioned above was sponsored by an African-American. And that ought to tell you something — white people are failing to step up in sufficient numbers to fix injustices involving police, the courts, prisons, parole and probation systems, or to provide adequate rehabilitation and treatment of those ensnared in the “system.”
To quote Warren’s again, “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist… I mean front to back.”
This is a lightly edited version of a post from August 2019.
It has been 57 years since James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time — 28 years since Rodney King was beaten down by police in L.A. and 6 years since Michael Brown was murdered by one in Ferguson, Missouri. In the interim there have been hundreds of these police lynching, all but a handful ever prosecuted.
Baldwin’s warning, from which his title was chosen, calls out the “racial nightmare” of this country by name, challenging America to “dare everything” to end it:
“If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophet, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”
But White America not only refuses to do anything about racism, it doesn’t even want to hear about it.
But if even the silent, nonviolent protest of “taking a knee” while the national anthem is being played is too much for delicate white sensibilities, then it is inevitable and expected — even reasonable to assume — that those most affected by America’s racial nightmare will have no other choice but to rage and try to burn the entire system down — over and over again, until the system stops killing them.
Like everyone I have been watching events of the last few months with horror. I don’t mean the Corona virus, which most civilized nations, even the hardest-hit, have managed to confront with strength, medical science, and social responsibility — while the United States instead has chosen denial, lies, and finger-pointing.
No, as bad as it is — and it’s not over by a long shot — the world will survive this as it did the 1918 Spanish flu.
It’s our “democracy” — and the word is in quotes because I’m not convinced we actually have one — it’s our democracy’s demise that’s making me lose sleep.
No need to recite the long list of crimes and usurpations from the fascist playbook that the current President has committed in only the last few months. No need to point out the erratic, disturbing behavior on display daily. Encouraging acts violence, threats to the press, the Justice Department run by a gang of cronies defending criminals. All part of a four year nightmare from which we have not yet awakened.
Even the steady approval the President receives from his “base” of White Christian nationalists, anti-government militias, overt white supremacists and treasonous grifters — this, in one form or another, has been with us since the founding of this slave republic. Historians can fill you in on past centuries, but if you don’t know what’s transpired in your own lifetime, you haven’t been paying attention.
I’ve been relatively silent these last months. Truth is, I’ve said just about everything I’ve had to say about Capitalism, American imperialism, foreign policy, militarism, white supremacy, inequality, immigration, press freedom, democracy, criminal justice, and police accountability.
If, after the second collapse of the American economy in little more than a decade — and if, after seeing precisely on what kind of foundation American Capitalism is based, the kind of people running the show, the total disregard they have for the lives of citizens and how easily they will abuse the power of the state for their own advantage — if after all this inescapable reality people cannot recognize America’s true face, then what’s the point of hurling more words into the void?
Hardly surprising, my conservative friends and relatives don’t understand why I have a problem with things that have been working so well for them — for us, for white America — these last 400 years. But it is American Liberals that worry me the most.
Here we are, on the cusp of a national election, and Democrats — correctly identified as the party of upper middle class elites — don’t know what side they’re on. Of the several trillion dollars of COVID-19 bailout money allocated, little is actually finding its way into human hands. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the amount “crumbs” when refusing to support one rescue bill.
Here we are, faced with the loss of 50 million jobs and the Democratic nominee is still clinging to Obamacare — employer-based healthcare — and his party has never debated generational poverty.
Here we are, faced with a resurgence of lynchings and police abuse, viral infection of prisoners in tightly-packed prisons — and Democrats have said almost nothing about mass incarceration and police accountability.
Here we are, faced with the obvious connections between global pandemics and global environmental crises, and the need to address them urgently — and the DNC still thinks environmental policy and the Green New Deal are too controversial to discuss in public.
My Liberal friends expect me to support a gaffe machine who was just pulled out of storage and still smells of mothballs — this after watching younger, better, smarter candidates of color being systematically flicked off the primary chess board.
But of course I’ll vote for him. What’s the alternative? A neurosyphilitic white supremacist? Liberals are not wrong to describe the 45th president as a toxic menace. But he’s only a menace because he has so successfully exploited every loophole in a Constitutional government designed by slaveholders to thwart a functional democracy.
My Liberal friends tell me their man is just the guy America needs to return things to “normal.”
And this is precisely the problem. The “new normal” in America is really just the unavoidably, undeniable cartoon version of the “old normal” Democrats would have us return to. And it does nothing to address underlying problems of economic inequality, racism, militarism, and systemic exploitation and injustice that have made a lot of Democrats financially very comfortable.
Among Democrats there is an obsessive preoccupation with quashing “divisiveness,” a disturbing avoidance of committing to specific policy positions, and an even more disturbing kinship with Republicans — the obsession with “leadership.” Maybe it’s because in a Capitalist society every chief executive is a mini-Stalin, and it’s just another convention we never question. One friend wrote that a detailed party program was wrong, that we should elect Biden and then let him write it: “once elected, then comes the hard work of determining the specifics.”
What my friend describes is a very American, very corporate, fundamentally undemocratic, and frankly patronizing, process of leaving heavy thinking to a leader who doesn’t have to follow party principles. In fact, in this world parties don’t have any principles. By the time political decisions are made lobbyists are already running the show — because they were the ones whispering into the candidate’s ear from the beginning.
A recent example of the Liberal preoccupation with “leadership” is a Washington Post article by Karen Tumulty attempting to connect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 remarks with Robert Kennedy’s after Martin Luther King’s assassination: “Though Kennedy was a white man of enormous privilege, he spoke with the moral authority of one who had lost his own brother to a murderer’s bullet […] Barely two months later, Kennedy himself would be slain. But the words he said still live. They speak not only to what this country can still become, but its need for a leader who can point the way in that direction.”
But nostalgia, name-dropping, and ham-handed metaphors don’t cut it for a lot of Americans. If you hadn’t noticed this week, African Americans are fed up with being killed and fed up with meaningless verbiage.
From Bakari Sellers to Derecka Purnell to Van Jones to Trevor Noah Liberals have had a recent opportunity to hear (again) from black intellectuals and notables in media outlets they are familiar with. And these men and women are not saying anything past generations haven’t told white Liberals. The question is: why haven’t we been listening?
Van Jones took aim at Liberal hypocrisy: “It’s not the racist white person who is in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about. It’s the white, liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park who would tell you right now, ‘Oh I don’t see race, race is no big deal to me, I see all people the same, I give to charities,’ but the minute she sees a black man who she does not respect, or who she has a slight thought against, she weaponized race like she had been trained by the Aryan Nation.”
I guess some of us are just a special sort of stupid. If Trump was promising “shooting” for “looting,” New York City major Bill DeBlasio was shooting himself in the foot. After NYPD police officers actually ran over demonstrators with patrol cars, the mayor defended their actions, attributing unrest in the city to “out-of-towners” — apparently the Northern version of “outside agitators.”
Liberals just don’t know (without running a focus group or consulting pollsters) whose side they’re on.
An article in the Root ridiculed the White need to “contextualize the anger, frustration and desperation that forced protesters to recreate the lawlessness and chaos that black people experience on a daily basis.” “Alright,” it began. “August 1619…”
It is not a single person, a particular president, or a specific “leader” who is the cancer destroying the United States. It is not bad leadership but Capitalism and White Supremacy that are killing people, impoverishing families, oppressing people.
If Liberals think that replacing one old white hair-plugged, dental-veneered geezer with another is the only remedy for what ails us, I have some hydroquinone I’d like to sell you.
The issue is not leadership, but the system that the leader leads.
Each day we are reminded how corrupt, incompetent, mentally ill, and cognitively impaired Donald Trump is. His administration is a nightmare from which we awake only to discover that the new day’s reality has become even more frightening than the day before.
With over 1.2 million COVID-19 cases and over 73,000 deaths [as of today], Trump is more concerned with “reopening” the country than saving lives, providing testing and masks, or issuing a national shutdown order. Trump’s leadership has been as lacking as with every other GOP response to a natural disaster.
In the midst of all this chaos, ineptitude and deep division over how (or whether) to socially distance, people have no recourse but to fend for themselves, make their own masks, help their neighbors, try to nurture social connections, and somehow keep body and soul together. Trump’s followers, however, are prepping for the apocalypse, stockpiling weapons and ammunition, placing their neighbors in the crosshairs, and putting them in spitting (and coughing) distance — all because it’s their “right” as God-fearing White Americans.
In Michigan, armed militia members opposing the governor’s stay-at-home orders entered the state capitol, forcing legislators to don kevlar vests. In contrast, the full weight of the State has come down on any Black person found ignoring masks or social distancing orders. That is, when Black folks aren’t being harrassed for actually wearing a face mask. In Texas, a white woman refused to obey an order to close her salon and became a hero in a state that objects to asylum seekers crossing the border because “we are a nation of laws.” But laws only for some.
The Coronavirus has also illuminated America’s festering racial, class, and economic inequalities. For Republicans the pandemic has been a bonanza for extracting greater tax and loan advantages for Big Business, enacting bans on travel and abortion while the public is distracted, and for returning the country to the 1950’s. For Democrats, the economic and health crisis on our doorstep hasn’t fully registered. Democrats managed to choose a 78 year-old Centrist with a massive #MeToo problem who just wants to return the world to 2012 and to tweak Obama’s flawed health plan as little as possible. In the meantime, the world has completely changed. Even with Biden’s candidacy in shambles, they’re still sticking with their man and his vision for the past.
Although people of color and America’s working poor have borne the brunt of the pandemic, there is little indication that help is on the way. Although $3 trillion has been disbursed to save American jobs, most of the money is predictably not finding its way into human hands.
Black Americans account for a staggering number of Coronavirus deaths. In Louisiana, the percentage of African American mortality among all COVID-19 deaths is 70%. The same percentage describes the situation in Chicago. Black Americans have long had high rates of asthma (lack of environmental protections), diabetes and heart problems (lack of healthcare and insurance) — and these are all “underlying conditions” which reduce COVID-19 survivability. It’s no exaggeration to say that America is literally killing Black people.
LatinX workers in the nation’s meat processing plants have been forced to work-while-sick at their jobs despite massive infection levels. Likewise, people in the jails and prisons of this nation with the greatest incarceration rate in the world — overwhelmingly poor and people of color — are at risk of contracting the virus in crowded, unsanitary conditions, deprived of soap, face masks and testing.
Many Americans are now literally starving, people are unable to pay for rent or food, and everyone wants an expansion of antibody testing and vaccine development. But corporate immunity is about the only immunity the Trump administration and its collaborators in the Senate really care about. Democrats just signed off on the greatest corporate giveaway in American history, and only one House representative protested the “crumbs for our families.”
I am confident that America will survive a global pandemic — just as it did 102 years ago. Whether we end up with a quarter of a million or several million deaths is largely up to the lunatics running the asylum. Some of us will be statistics; others will be survivors. Life will go on.
But it’s the survival of anything resembling a democracy that’s got me worried. Unless a substantial number of Americans have had enough, the world of 2025 will be run by the same Capitalists who have profited the most from a series of corporate bailouts beginning in the Seventies. For all the lofty Liberal expressions of “rethinking America” and “reconsidering” who is actually an essential worker, don’t expect to see any change unless we — collectively — decide that an essential worker ought to be paid at least as much as a supply chain consultant. But please, somebody, tell me how that happens in a Capitalist economy.
We don’t have a democracy now, and we won’t have one in 2025 unless everyone is equal under the law. Without a serious effort to erase long-standing economic and racial injustices and completely restructure criminal justice and policing in America, cops will still be harassing and even lynching Black men in America in 2025, and the jails will still be full of poor people who can’t make bail. Without health care as a right, some of us will live decades longer than others. Without reparations or a plan to lift up generationally disadvantaged communities, many Black and Native and LatinX Americans will still live in a Third World America while White America continues to live in its dreamy version of Pleasantville.
A new society is possible. But I fear White America, comfortable in its privilege, really has no incentive to tinker with what’s been working for them so well all these years.
In 2016 a small percentage of Bernie Sanders’ supporters refused to support the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton. I agreed with Bernie that Clinton’s “damn server” was not her main problem, nor were her tangled connections to oligarchs and war criminals through the Clinton Foundation, the $2 billion family business, my main objection to Clinton.
No, I was one of those people disgusted at the blood Clinton had on her hands from her stint crafting malign foreign policy and advocating regime change in the Middle East as Secretary of State. I voted Green and don’t regret my protest vote for a second, although some of my friends still believe it was people like me who tipped the scales in Trump’s favor.
They forget, of course, that for every one of us who voted Green — “robbing” Clinton of “her” vote — there were more than three people who voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian, thus robbing Donald Trump of three times our votes. In the grand scheme of things, the Libertarian vote hurt Republicans much more than the Green vote hurt Democrats.
In contrast to 1992, when Ross Perot received almost 19% of the vote, in 2016 third parties received a combined total of only 4.4% of the popular vote. Neither Jill Stein nor Gary Johnson received even a fraction of a single Electoral College vote — the only thing that really counts in a presidential election. The tiniest of fractions were, however, allocated to Colin Powell, John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle. Despite winning the popular vote 48.18% to 46.09%, Democrats were defeated — not by the Greens but by a combination of the Electoral College, voter apathy, and Clinton’s own failure to campaign in key states.
So here we are four years later. Sanders, who once again ran on a progressive platform and lost to Centrist Democratic machinery, finds himself once again being a good soldier, supporting another Centrist. Once again some of his disgruntled supporters are being accused of acting irresponsibly by not playing the Two Party game with sufficient enthusiasm. And once again old accusations against Sanders supporters have re-surfaced.
It’s not clear how many Working Families Party, Our Revolution, or Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members will vote for Joe Biden — in a time of pandemic and incipient fascism it’s going to be a lot more than you think — but the fact progressives are not eager to endorse Biden has some people in a tizzy.
American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson, for example, accuses DSA of “moronic rectitude” for withholding their endorsement of Biden. One hopes that Meyerson knows the difference between a grudging vote cast in the privacy of the voting booth and a full-throated public endorsement. Of course, it might also help if Biden reached out to the Democratic Left with progressive policy changes to earn that endorsement — at a time in our history when progressive policies are needed more than ever. And by now Biden should have chosen an African-American woman running mate. His dithering — and the ongoing market testing of various white female Centrists — say a lot about Biden, the DNC, and the power of Democratic Party’s PACs and big donors.
So I’m going to vote for the guy who’s not a fascist. I will probably even donate money to his campaign. But there are a couple of things about voting that bear repeating.
First, voters don’t owe anyone their votes. Those who don’t vote are a majority in many American elections. Voting statistics reveal the low opinion the electorate has of both parties, their hollow promises and their bullshit platforms. Though most of you will disagree with the following statement, it is true enough for those who hold it — the differences between the two mainstream parties are simply not significant enough to get most people off their couches on Election Day. Want more voters? Offer something worth voting for.
Second, voters don’t owe you their votes. A vote means what a voter wants it to mean. You may regard my vote as an obligation to get with your program and ensure that your candidate wins an election, but that’s not why I show up at the polls. Elections are not horse races. If they were there would occasionally be a pay-out. Elections are just as much referenda on ideas and principles as they are the ritual selection of interchangeable elected representatives.
Phrases like “electability” and “viability” are not Good Housekeeping seals of approval. They are mainly indictments of the hollowness of American politics. It’s not my fault that many of you vote for people you don’t even like that much — candidates who do test polling instead of actually believing in something and committing to fixing the root causes of the nation’s most serious problems. And since when do mainstream Democrats, who just concluded a vicious liberal red-baiting campaign against Sanders, believe in Marxist-Leninist Party Discipline? My vote is my own, not the Democratic Party’s.
By now we all know that elections have consequences, but so do campaigns and candidate choices. Give voters a good and decent candidate with good and decent policies and they’ll vote for her. Offer them the lesser of two evils, and an electorate conditioned to always snap to attention and choose American greatness will choose the greater evil every time.
Biden’s going to be an extremely long-shot this November. Don’t blame his loss on progressives.
In late March Donald Trump told the press corps, “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down […] This is not a country that was built for this.” Since then Trump seems to have backpedaled on his notion to open the nation for business on Easter Sunday — presumably to the peals of church bells announcing the resurrection of the nation and his own polling numbers. But in a move calculated to sideline the nation’s infectious disease experts — including some of his own advisors — Trump is back at it again.
You never thought the pit bull was going to let go of your pants leg, did you?
Trump recently announced the formation of an “Opening Our Country Council.” He indicated that neither his son-in-law and daughter nor the Vice President would be involved, and it is still unclear who will actually be on the council, or why it is really necessary. Regardless, Trump claims that he — not state governors — has “total authority” to decide when workers will be forced to return to work — without testing, without masks, and without sufficient ICU beds or ventilators to let them survive the COVID-19 infections they will receive by returning too soon to the germ pool.
Trump may not have a plan for dealing with the Corona virus, but he claims total authority to carry out that plan.
Naturally, the nation’s governors are pushing back. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that before anyone talks about “opening” the nation for business the first order of business will be testing. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont announced that social distancing would remain in effect until at least May 20th, and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy said that economic recovery depends entirely on public health safety.
As for Trump’s “total authority,” Cuomo told CNN, “The president does not have total authority. We have a constitution, we don’t have a king, we have an elected president.” University of Texas Constitutional Law professor Stephen Vladeck agreed, slamming Trump’s authoritarian move: “Nope. That would be the literal definition of a totalitarian government–which our traditions, our Constitution, and our values all rightly and decisively reject.”
With the nation in the grip of both a deadly pandemic and an incompetent fascist wannabe, the nation’s governors have been left to their own devices.
California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his nation-state of California had no choice but to fend for itself given Trump’s inaction and incompetence. California, together with Oregon and Washington, has formed a regional alliance to plot its own course for economic recovery. The same strategy has been adopted by an alliance of Northeast governors from New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
When Hong Kong temporarily suspended its lockdown after a few weeks, it experienced a spike in new infections and was forced to lock down citizens again. The same sort of spike occurred in Singapore after it prematurely relaxed social distancing. So we know that keeping people sheltered in place must go on much longer, and we know that only testing will tell us how much of the population has been exposed and how much has recovered.
Fifty million Americans receive Social Security payments and many workers are either salaried or still manage to draw an income. These lucky enough to own their homes and have health insurance have a sense they will probably survive the pandemic. For the most part, this segment of America has enjoyed a healthy life of adequate and nutritious food, clean water and a clean environment, and does not have disproportionately high rates of diabetes, hypertensions or asthma. This privileged segment of America does not live in crowded apartments in polluted neighborhoods for which they must pay rent, is not forced to commute during a pandemic on crowded subways or buses, and can afford to have someone else deliver food and supplies to their homes.
But for the rest of America, life is incredibly precarious — and has always been. African Americans, Latinos, Indigenous people, the working class, the working poor, and the disabled are at elevated risk and are dying in shameful numbers. There is an old saying something like, “When white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia.” By sending America’s most vulnerable back to work without adequate protections, we are sending some to their deaths — all for the sake of corporate greed. And because their lives do not hold particularly great value by policy makers.
As we now contemplate the frightening lack of hospital beds and ventilators — and who must die for lack of one — the rules for triage are revealed as decidedly racist. On April 7th Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders released a memo entitled “Crisis Standards of Care Planning Guidance for the COVID-19 Pandemic” which described state guidelines for making decisions about who receives care and who doesn’t during the global pandemic. The memo describes the recommendations of a panel of medical professionals in which those with the lowest scores have the highest priority for treatment. “But among the factors giving patients a higher score, and therefore, a lower priority for medical intervention are health conditions common to black, Latino and Asian people including diabetes, hypertension and obesity.”
Oh, well, they’re just going to die anyway.
Similarly, Alabama’s 2010 triage handbook for ventilator use puts a low premium on the lives of disabled people: “persons with severe mental retardation, advanced dementia or severe traumatic brain injury may be poor candidates for ventilator support.”
We are not so very far away from the world of 1935, when a magazine called “New People” published by the new German “Racial Politics Office” pointed out to subscribers:
“60,000 Reich Marks is the cost to society of caring for those with congenital diseases. Citizens, this is your money.”
A New York Times editorial by Tom Friedman making the rounds offers specific recommendations for a Biden cabinet. Friedman’s terrible picks deserve both scrutiny and comment.
For starters, the “Team of Rivals” approach is even more ill-conceived today than it was in 2016. And backing up for a second, what’s the rush to anoint Joe Biden before he survives the Coronavirus, the last Democratic primary, and a convention? Joe Biden is not Juan Guaidó: he can’t simply proclaim himself president (or nominee) before an election says he is. Premature anointment is a 2016 mistake Democrats seem determined to repeat in 2020. This is a party that never learns.
Instead of a “Team of Rivals” that magically makes Republicans sing Kumbaya along with Democrats, what we really need is an experienced Democratic cabinet that reflects America’s neighborhoods and not America’s boardrooms. We need a kick-ass team of Democrats who believe in science and education and health and economic and racial justice — including Democrats usually relegated to the sidelines while people like Friedman’s choices run America into the ground as ineptly as their Republican golfing buddies.
The Democratic Party is being held together with duct tape and spearmint gum. If Democrats need anything, it is to give power to people already inside the tent, especially progressives and African Americans — rather than handing Republicans, Think Tank ideologues, CEO’s, and Friedman’s Davos crowd any more power than they already have.
Where Friedman casts a few crumbs to progressives and African Americans, they are cynical and ill-fitting posts akin to ambassadorships. With Friedman’s picks, Corporate America can rest assured that Neoliberalism and reckless foreign policy will continue — and his choice of so many American oligarchs all but guarantees it.
Worse, Friedman’s cabinet assignments are an extension of the Centrist Democrat election “strategy” of sidelining progressives and minorities in favor of America’s imagined “heartland” and “center.” The enthusiasm with which Friedman’s half-baked notions have gathered appreciative sighs is discouraging. It confirms my belief that Democrats are a party of small ideas and wishful thinking.
Who on Friedman’s List will finally deal with reparations, student debt, or the formation of a single-payer National Health Care System? Who on his list is prepared to implement economic, criminal, policing, and racial justice reforms? Remember: this will be a Biden monster cobbled together from human parts harvested from the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Basically, the best Friedman has come up with is an offer to share Democratic power with Republicans immediately after being won — that is, if a lackluster candidate and an uninspiring cabinet can even inspire voters to choose a Democratic slate.
Below are my comments on Friedman’s specific choices. Among them are too many Centrists and Republicans, a frightening number of oligarchs, numerous Think Tank and Davos buddies, and a racial and socioeconomic mix that looks little like the real America.
PostPersonNotes Vice President Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala or Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island This is a giant “F*** You” to African Americans. And from which section of his colon did Friedman pull Gina Raimondo? Treasury Secretary Mike Bloomberg Another member of the Ruling Class? Health and Human Services Secretary Bill Gates Another member of the Ruling Class? Secretary of Oversight for the trillions of dollars in emergency Coronavirus spending Elizabeth Warren Instead of letting Warren create a single-payer national healthcare system Attorney General Merrick Garland Why not Kamala Harris and save Garland for SCOTUS (again)? Homeland Security Secretary Andrew Cuomo Another Giulani in the making; he is not acceptable to progressives Secretary of State Mitt Romney A White Republican, and not even one most White Republicans like Defense Secretary Michèle Flournoy A Clinton neoconservative, just what we don’t need Labor Secretary Ro Khanna An attempt to buy off a progressive critic of reckless “Defense” spending Secretary of National Infrastructure Rebuild (Friedman’s new cabinet post) Walmart C.E.O. Doug McMillon Another member of the Ruling Class? Commerce Secretary Former American Express C.E.O. Ken Chenault Another member of the Ruling Class? O.M.B. Director Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio Why is Friedman afraid to let a Democrat run the OMB? Education Secretary Laurene Powell Jobs Friedman has been hob-nobbing at Davos too long with celebrities like Steve Jobs’ widow U.N. ambassador Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Why not put AOC in charge of the Green New Deal? Maybe because Centrists don’t believe in it. HUD secretary Ford Foundation chief Darren Walker Walker is Friedman’s only African-American pick but is not exactly in touch with its problems Interior Secretary Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico Friedman treats this like an inherited position: Grisham’s father, Manuel Lujan, was Bush’s Interior Secretary Energy Secretary Andy Karsner (a green Republican who led renewable energy for George W. Bush) Another from the Davos crowd, and affiliated with Laurene Jobs. But why not an author or cosponsor of the Green New Deal? E.P.A. administrator Al Gore Gore made some nice movies back in the day, but my choice would be Jay Inslee
An authoritative critic of the American national security state is Andrew Bacevich, West Point Class of 1969, retired Army Colonel, and historian specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. Bacevich is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Bacevich’s essay in TomDispatch yesterday (“America Terrorized”) makes the case that billions, and now trillions, of national treasure have been squandered annually since the 1950’s fighting largely phantom enemies. This may have turned us into a national security juggernaut but our dubious status has cost us our democracy and failed to protect us from all-too-real threats.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, keeping us safe provided a seemingly adequate justification for maintaining a sprawling military establishment along with a panoply of “intelligence” agencies — the CIA, the DIA, the NRO, the NSA — all engaged in secret activities hidden from public view. From time to time, the scope, prerogatives, and actions of that conglomeration of agencies attracted brief critical attention — the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Iran-Contra affair during the presidency of Ronald Reagan being prime examples. Yet at no time did such failures come anywhere close to jeopardizing its existence. […]
Presidents now routinely request and Congress routinely appropriates more than a trillion dollars annually to satisfy the national security state’s supposed needs. Even so, Americans today do not feel safe and, to a degree without precedent, they are being denied the exercise of basic everyday freedoms. Judged by this standard, the apparatus created to keep them safe and free has failed. In the face of a pandemic, nature’s version of an act of true terror, that failure, the consequences of which Americans will suffer through for months to come, should be seen as definitive.
The Senate is supposed to reach agreement today on some sort of Coronavirus financial package. There are fundamental disagreements over whether we let families die and slide into even deeper financial ruin while we bail out the travel, hotel, airline, and financial industries; whether we let Trump and Mnuchin access a half trillion dollar slush fund; and what kinds of strings should be attached to corporate bailouts. Both sides have offered their own rescue plans. The Democrat version alone is 1400 pages.
Whether we end up calling it a rescue plan, a stimulus package, a bailout, a lifeline, or a disgrace depends on what we learn later today. Don’t get your hopes up. We live in a county that has always valued the mighty dollar more than human life. Now, this week, today, some are going to face that bitter truth for the first time.
We certainly know what the Republican administration and its Fox News cabinet think. People, at least of the expendable variety, must sacrifice themselve (or have it done to them) through inadequate testing, an absence of virus protection, lack of testing, and privatized healthcare that currently excludes them — just to keep the economy running for the owners.
Three months after the virus was first identified (it’s called COVID-19 because it was discovered in 2019) Americans still have insufficient ventilators, no masks, and almost no testing kits. And there is still no national plan to lock down people at home to minimize fatalities and to keep them financially solvent as the crisis unfolds.
The administration has shown us graphs showing that social distancing may help reduce pressure on hospital admissions. But they haven’t shown us their spreadsheet showing the cost in human lives in one column, and the cost to the economy in another.
Trump failing to keep a safe social distance from Fundamentalists
But Republican priorities are pretty clear. What are a few million deaths if casinos can be kept open? Just ask Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who told FOX News’ Tucker Carlson he’d to worship a golden calf if it saves business — which he confuses for a nation of human beings:
“So, I’m going to be smart, I think all of my fellow grandparents out there are going to be smart. We all wanna live, we wanna live with our grandchildren for as long as we can,” he added. “But the point is, our biggest gift we give to our country and our children and our grandchildren is the legacy of our country.”
Naturally, the President agrees. “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” Trump said. “This is not a country that was built for this.”
No, the United States is an all-day-all-night casino in one of Trump’s hotels.
An effective lockdown could go on for months. The Wuhan lockdown lasted seven weeks, and during the 1918 Spanish Flu public gatherings in the United States were banned in some places for as long as six months. When Hong Kong temporarily suspended its lockdown after a few weeks, it experienced a spike in new infections and was forced to lock down citizens again. So we know that keeping people sheltered in place must go on much longer than just two weeks.
But Trump knows better than the scientists. Appearing to confuse the disease’s incubation period with its duration, Trump thinks everything will be over in a couple of weeks. “America will again, and soon, be open for business.” Anthony Fauci, who is the only person in the entire Trump administration with the guts to disagree with his boss publicly, thinks lockdown measures should be of much longer duration. Trump has acknowledged Fauci’s disagreement, but the very stable genius has decided he knows better than the world’s epidemiologists.
This is the sort of cynical, callous, and criminal disregard for human life we have come to expect from Trump and his bobble-headed sycophants in the new Republican Party — the same people who told Americans with a straight face that a national healthcare plan would create Death Panels to determine who gets life-saving health care, and who must, regretfully of course, die. But now Republicans have outed themselves as the ultimate Death Panel. Money talks, and if protecting the public costs too much, then money says: the public is expendable.
By the end of the day we’ll know if Congress votes for preservation of millions of human lives — or the preservation of Capitalism for a second time in just twelve years.
There are many things a global pandemic ought to make us see with new eyes — what social animals we really are, for one. Now is a good time for us all to insist that we actually live in a society, not just an economy. I’ve heard from and communicated with my friends and neighbors more these last two weeks than at any other time. When these connections are limited, we feel deeply what we take for granted.
Another is the value of our fellow citizens. In a world where the working class doesn’t get enough respect, maybe now we should recognize there is a whole army of “essential workers” keeping the lights on, the stores open, and infrastructure going. It’s not just first responders and medical caregivers who are the real heroes. We all are. We are all indispensable pieces of a whole.
And maybe, too, we ought to reconsider the purpose of government. Our society is not mere scaffolding for Business and Capital, with government there mainly to collect taxes, enforce property rights, and police city streets. There is an essential role for government to play in keeping citizens safe, healthy, and economically secure.
As companies shed workers and lobby [again] for massive economic bailouts, it should be obvious that the market economy is not a machine designed to look out for anyone’s interests but its own. Conversations about the social safety net, basic income, and a government that defends its people in ways besides building walls and bombs must reshape what kind of society we will live in and the quality of lives its citizens can lead.
That is, once the world has been rebooted.
It’s increasingly clear that we also need to take the risks to human life of environmental change and pandemics much more seriously. Deferring action on climate change for 10-20 more years will lead to the same sort of crisis that deferring action on pandemics has created. Google the 2006 TED Talk on global pandemics by Epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant.
About thirteen minutes into the video Brilliant predicts with uncanny accuracy the pandemic we are experiencing today. And he asks for the world to take action to prevent it from happening. But that TED talk was 14 years ago, and today we can see the result of complacency, denial and inaction.
It may be too much to ask — from a nation that voted for “America First” and which does not believe it is truly a part of a world community, doesn’t fully recognize the UN or the legitimacy of international courts, only briefly joined international environmental accords, and which rejects basic science — that we must participate, if not take a leading role, in an international health plan such as the one Dr. Brilliant suggests. But it would be the smart and right and sane thing to do.
We will soon see if the world is capable of saving itself through solidarity, justice and rationality. Unfortunately, centuries of human history present a strong case against it. But what other choice do we have?
America loves its men in uniform. Policemen and firefighters who responded to 9/11 in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania were celebrated as heroes, as many of them truly were. A generation later, members of the American military — even those who fought a war in the wrong country without ever questioning it — are given preferential boarding, preferential hiring, healthcare, paid leave, and state and municipal stipends. Laws in some states place a greater value on a policeman’s life than on an ordinary citizen. State and federal laws criminalize false claims of having received military honors. Even among those who question American wars most fiercely you hear the familiar “thank you for your service.”
Americans have decided that only a very limited (and mainly weapon-carrying) minority of American “workers” are worthy of our praise. When we attend professional sports events we find them running out on the field in fatigues along with the military flyover. It has become so common for an on-leave service member to surprise his son or daughter at a high school sports event or graduation ceremony that the President of the United States staged one of these heart-warming reunions at his last State of the Union address. Cash and spectacle are rewards for those who do the bidding of the defense industry without asking too many questions.
But America has real heroes — and they have been right under our noses all along.
The global pandemic we find ourselves in today has made it crystal clear that those who continue to deliver the mail, pick up the trash, show up for work at supermarkets, staff the help lines, deliver pizza to the door, care for the sick, keep making meals for school children, look in on their elderly neighbors — we/you are just as integral to the functioning of society as those we have chosen to police us and surround our borders with missiles and barbed wire.
To all Americans now being guided by their better angels, to all who look out for their neighbor, care what kind of world we live in, and to all who put their health on the line during this extraordinary crisis:
A March 18 complaint from 51 ICE detainees at the Bristol County House of Corrections warns of a potential outbreak of the COVID-19 virus at the Dartmouth, Massachusetts facility because of unhealthy conditions of their confinement. Another 10 detainees did not sign the complaint for fear of retaliation from jail officials, according to a copy of the complaint. Detainees say that at least two potentially infected officers, one who was sent home on March 16, may have exposed an entire wing of ICE detainees to the Coronavirus.
The complaint reads in part:
“The ICE detainees of Unit B of the Bristol Correctional Center, individually and collectively, would like to highlight serious concerns about the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus within the facility of Bristol Correctional Center.
The facility safety conditions and the conditions of its personnel, in light of two recent and separate episodes, have raised the concern into a very serious matter.
Specifically, on March 14, 2020 a Correctional Officer was observed to be symptomatic of the COVID-19 virus during his shift followed by another C.O. on March 16, 2020 that was later on replaced by a colleague.
Two separate and serious episodes recently occurred and have alarmed the entire detainee population of Unit B and prompted a number of detainees to file their own Sick Call / Medical Encounter Request.
Unit B is comprised of sixty-six (66) beds, fifty-seven (57) of them occupied, one of them filled as recently as 24 hours ago…”
The detainees assert that prisoners are held in conditions that almost guarantee that they will become infected: they are housed closer than 6 feet apart; and in groups six times larger than the recommendation of 10 people in proximity at one time.
The complaint asks that detainees be released if they have serious medical conditions or are considered low-risk, or that they be released on bond if they have rescheduled hearings. The complaint also asks that detainees scheduled for deportation be repatriated within five days instead of remaining in dangerous condidtions for an indeterminate period of time.
Copies of the complaint were sent to Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, the Bristol County Sheriff, Correctional Psychiatric Services (the medical vendor), the Massachusetts Department of Health, and the ACLU.
The ICE detainees are appealing to the public for help.
“We are hoping that you will mobilize on our behalf by contacting your local congressman and any and all TV and media outlets. […] We are trapped inside […] and in fear for our lives. Please help!”
Despite prisoner claims that a couple dozen detainees are already showing symptoms of the virus, including coughing, the Sheriff’s media spokesperson, Jonathan Darling, told us on March 20 that there were no illnesses in the ICE wing and that no one was at risk.
People in the Trump administration like Reagan’s joke: be very afraid when someone says “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But anyone who remembers government responses to Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Maria ought to be doubly afraid when it’s a Republican offering the help. Only with the recent appearance of the Trump administration’s apparently only competent public health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, are we now beginning to get some truth from the White House. There is still a lot of misinformation regarding both the Coronavirus and the government’s response to it.
COVID-19
COVID-19 is the 2019-2022 manifestation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The virus is most dangerous to people over 70 who are immune-compromised, have existing heart, circulatory, or respiratory problems, and who are habitually exposed to pollutants or do not have reliable medical care. COVID-19 is more deadly than the average flu but nothing like the 1918 Spanish Flu. That said, the 1918 Flu illustrates how a global pandemic unfolds, what helps to save lives, and the sorts of denial and stupidity that kill people.
Poor people suffer the greatest during pandemics and the United States stands alone as a nation without a national health care system or universal health care. Worse, Trump fired government global pandemic experts as soon as he came to office. Why? Well, because if Obama thought taking global pandemics seriously was a good idea, well then, it had to be reversed.
The strategy of “shelter in place” or self-quarantine is designed to slow down the transmission of the disease so that the American healthcare ‘system’ is not overwhelmed by too many hospital admissions. The entire United States has 924,000 hospital beds and only 45,000 acute care beds, so we are going to be in deep shit big trouble if too many people are sick at one time, as happened in China, Iran, and Italy. You can show no symptoms and still be a carrier, so it is important — not just for you — but for your grandparents and elderly friends to note expose them to a virus you don’t even know you are carrying.
The death rate in Italy is extremely high — not because Italy has a national healthcare system — but because the average age in Italy is 10 years greater than in the US; the average age of an Italian COVID-19 fatality is 81. So stay at home if you can. For 97.5% of us the virus is survivable. But for the very sick and very elderly, COVID-19 can be a death sentence.
New York expects the number of Coronavirus cases to peak in 45 days, the White House is saying this first wave of the virus may persist “well into July” and German researchers think that the entire course of the virus might repeat the 1918 pattern, taking possibly two years to die out. In some places school is being cancelled until next August or September. People really need to take this thing seriously and devise ways of staying in touch and checking-in with friends and family — without exposing high-risk people.
This is not a two week event. You are going to be bored and inconvenienced and stressed and freaked out for at least a few months.
Despite the science, there has been plenty of stupidity, especially by those who deny the risk to an aging population or who regard the risks as exaggerated or, worse, a plot to smear the president. There are currently several attempts to develop a vaccine, but it’s going to take at least several months to test and produce large-enough quantities to deal with it.
The virus will hurt people’s ability to earn a living, stay in their houses, feed their kids, and has already damaged an economic system that loves corporations but is not structured to help human beings. 63% of all Americans are $500 away from financial ruin, and the Coronavirus is going to take that $500 from most. For this reason Democrats have proposed a bill, H.R.6201, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act.
Families First Coronavirus Response Act
This bill responds to the coronavirus outbreak by providing paid sick leave and free coronavirus testing, expanding food assistance and unemployment benefits, and requiring employers to provide additional protections for health care workers.
Specifically, the bill provides FY2020 supplemental appropriations to the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for nutrition and food assistance programs, including
the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC);
the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP); and
nutrition assistance grants for U.S. territories.
The bill also provides FY2020 appropriations to the Department of Health and Human Services for nutrition programs that assist the elderly.
The supplemental appropriations provided by the bill are designated as emergency spending, which is exempt from discretionary spending limits.
The bill modifies USDA food assistance and nutrition programs to
allow certain waivers to requirements for the school meal programs,
suspend the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program), and
allow states to request waivers to provide certain emergency SNAP benefits.
In addition, the bill requires the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue an emergency temporary standard that requires certain employers to develop and implement a comprehensive infectious disease exposure control plan to protect health care workers.
The bill also includes provisions that
establish a federal emergency paid leave benefits program to provide payments to employees taking unpaid leave due to the coronavirus outbreak,
expand unemployment benefits and provide grants to states for processing and paying claims,
require employers to provide paid sick leave to employees,
establish requirements for providing coronavirus diagnostic testing at no cost to consumers,
treat personal respiratory protective devices as covered countermeasures that are eligible for certain liability protections, and
temporarily increase the Medicaid federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP).
Republicans seem less inclined to help the most vulnerable among us, oppose language in the legislation providing help to single-sex families, generally oppose paid sick leave, and seem to be unduly concerned with the airline and travel industries. Senate Speaker Mitch McConnell has told his GOP friends in the Senate to “gag and vote for it anyway.” But McConnell has not yet convinced them. Negotiations drag on.
The limitations of the plan are significant. Even thought the Coronavirus is a global pandemic that will last many months, the Families First bill only provides 10 days of paid sick leave — and only if you are employed with a company with 500 or more employees. The estimated cost of the legislation was originally $750 billion but was negotiated down to $104 billion by timid House Democrats. To provide a little context, Professor Deborah Lucas at MIT’s Sloan School estimates the 2008 financial bailout to Wall Street ended up costing taxpayers $498 billion. The Families First bill is an insignificant gesture that is unlikely to help much in a crisis of this magnitude expected to linger for many months.
Trump’s Economic Bailout
Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have unveiled a separate $850 bailout program for business and Wall Street. The plan was first discussed at a private lunch with Senate Republicans and provides help to small businesses, retailers, hotels and the airline industry, as well as more tax breaks. The airline industry alone will receive $50 billion in aid. The rest of America must be happy with a one-time $1000 check and 10 days of sick leave. When you hear “we’re all in this together” realize that some are in this thing more than others.
Other Legislation
There are a few other pieces of legislation: modifications of the War Powers Act to help manufacturers in yet unspecified ways; rulings on tax filings (April 15 is Tax Day); and the invocation of the Stafford Act, which (among other things) authorizes Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, to:
Waive laws to enable telehealth services, for remote doctor visits and hospital checkins.
Waive certain federal licensing requirements so doctors from other states can provide services
Waive requirements that critical-access hospitals limit the number of beds to 25 or the length of stay of 96 hours.
Waive a requirement for a three-day hospital stay before transfer to a nursing home.
Allow hospitals to bring additional physicians on board and obtain additional office space.
Waive rules that severely restrict hospital care of patients within the hospital itself, ensuring that the emergency capacity can be enhanced.
Readings
None of this legislation has yet been signed into law. Stay tuned.
I watched part of the Biden-Bernie debate list night. Whatever anyone thinks about Democratic Centrists or Democratic Socialists, it’s clear that either of these two would take on a global pandemic with smarter people and more compassion and honesty than the present inhabitant of the White House. And while one might be tempted to think that Trump’s failed response to the pandemic might lead his supporters to doubt him even a little, one would be wrong. Read this and this and this and weep for a nation of so many willful idiots.
I have to admit: I couldn’t watch the whole Bernie-Biden debate. It was disappointing that even a crisis of this magnitude couldn’t move Biden to acknowledge that a national healthcare system covering everyone could have been more than handy this week, and that (going forward) it would be the best long-term response to another pandemic. Instead, Biden seemed comfortable with the idea of sitting in the Situation Room managing a one-time crisis. Of course, after that we’d still have a patchwork healthcare “system” that excludes 80 million people — and be waiting for the next national health emergency.
The 63% of all Americans who would be wiped out financially by a $500 emergency are the same ones likely to lose the little they own during this pandemic because their services providing rides, eldercare, serving tables, or running corner stores and restaurants won’t be needed for several months. I didn’t hear any satisfactory explanations last night of how Capitalism and The Market were going to handle the massive financial damage to these vulnerable people.
Our nation of 330 million people has 400 million guns and 924,000 hospital beds and we may soon find ourselves in the same situation as Italy, which announced yesterday that people over 80 might be denied treatment because there are simply not enough ventilators and hospital beds. As schools close due to the virus, we are forced to acknowledge how much we depend on them to provide a safe place and food for millions of children. And until last week I thought Andrew Yang’s universal basic income was a gimmick. I was wrong: COVID-19 is the best argument seen yet for providing financial stability to families — now that we’re way past hypotheticals.
Progressives keep saying government has a role to play in providing a safety net for real people — not just defense contractors, the oil industry and big agriculture. But most Democrats still think the market economy can handle everything. I wonder if the Coronavirus has made anyone rethink this assumption, even a little. No, dear friends, this week has been a wake-up call. We’ve been patching the cracked walls of the house for far too long. Even though the floor has buckled and we can hear the beams snapping while even bigger cracks appear with greater frequency, the only solution we ever come up with is to buy more Spackle.
One of the justifications that supporters of the Dartmouth mascot give for “defending” it is that choosing something else would result in the “erasure” of Native Americans and Native American history. This is a view echoed by one Dartmouth school committee candidate who wrote on her Facebook page: “Our local Aquinnah Wompanoag [sic] Tribe was up against cancel culture.” The candidate’s other platform? “Helping our schools create and maintain a wholesome, safe, environment, […] get beyond race, […] oppose indoctrinating children […] to think a certain way about controversial topics.”
This is in a town that can’t even agree on the wording of an historical sign near a place where indigenous people were sold into slavery.
Part of the problem is the schools themselves. Dartmouth has a woeful track record of teaching indigenous history. One 2020 high school graduate wrote, “In my four years of being an Indian, I only was exposed to the mascot in connection to the white people wearing the uniforms.” Dartmouth School Superintendent Gifford seemed to confirm this, noting that students are taught indigenous history “primarily” in the 3rd grade. One AP History competition called the “Colonial Real Estate Agency Project” involved students trying to “attract more settlers to your region of the colonies […] persuade your European audience to migrate.”
So if indigenous history is not being taught in the schools, then precisely what history is being erased? Are football teams the only way to remember indigenous people? And if a mascot is a stand-in for history education, what is the mascot actually teaching kids?
There were plenty of answers to these questions at a school committee meeting on March 8th.
Three years ago the Dartmouth School Committee voted 3-2 against holding community hearings on the mascot. But the issue refused to go away, partly because of state legislation to restrict native mascots. So the Committee formed a “Diversity subcommittee” to look at curriculum and they threw in the mascot, which otherwise would have suffocated in the thin air of neglect. March 8th was the subcommittee’s best work.
The leadership of the Aquinnah, pressing hard at both school and town level for exclusive representation on indigenous issues and exclusive control over the “Indian” logo, attacked the subcommittee, calling its members “outsiders,” a view echoed by ultraconservatives both within and close to the leadership. It was only thanks to the Committee chair, Dr. Shannon Jenkins, and other level heads that Wampanoag tribes other than the Aquinnah received invitations to be heard.
And was it ever enlightening.
For years we have heard that the mascot “honors” Native Americans. Pushing back on that narrative, Mashpee Wampanoag members Dawn Blake Souza, Shawna Newcomb, and Brian Weeden; Pokanoket Wampanoag council member Megan Page; and Aquinnah Wampanoag member Brad Lopes explained in thoughtful detail why mascots and symbols — even if historically accurate — harm indigenous people nevertheless.
For years we have heard that no one is offended by mascots, that only “woke” crybabies and “outsiders” want to “cancel” the Dartmouth mascot. There was plenty of testimony on March 8th to lay that one to rest.
And for years we have heard that retiring the mascot would “erase” history — a laughable assertion from folks who refuse to acknowledge real erasure: genocide, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement of indigenous (and other) people, some right in our own backyard.
Brad Lopes, who spoke for Aquinnah members opposing mascots, provided a perfect example of why “erasure” is a demonstrably false narrative:
“Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of the ban of mascots in the state of Maine. And the Wabanaki people are still here. They do not need a mascot to represent them. They do not need a symbol. They do not need an image. They are still here. And their culture and history are brought directly into the classroom because of LD.291, which is a state law that requires schools to teach Wabanaki history. That is how you provide some sort of honor to native peoples, some sort of respect, as you will actually form authentic relationships. […] I would encourage you all to move away from any narratives that have to do with “erasure” […] A symbol is not the solution, education is. This is something I want you all to strongly consider.”
David Ehrens is a Dartmouth resident and one of the founding members of The New Bedford Light. The Light is a nonprofit, non-partisan community news organization, and donors. sponsors and founders do not exercise any influence over content.
Like so much in America that is touched by race, a reckoning with the Dartmouth High School mascot has been simmering for years. Maine, Oregon and Washington state have all banned Native American school mascots. And here in Massachusetts – even after Pentucket, Groveland, Merrimac, West Newbury, Athol, Barnstable, Nashoba, Hanover, Winchester, Grafton, Brookfield, Taconic High, Braintree, Walpole, and Pittsfield abandoned theirs – many in the Town of Dartmouth insist on defending their “Indian” mascot as if it were a besieged Confederate monument in the Heart of Dixie.
Massachusetts legislation to ban Native American mascots brought the local issue to a head in 2019. That was the year the School Committee voted 3-2 to reject a public discussion of the mascot. With George Floyd’s murder, a short-lived national moment prompted the School Committee to create a “Diversity Committee,” in which the mascot issue was conveniently buried. This subcommittee, though it tried hard to address the issue, never really had the full support of the larger School Committee and the chair became the recipient of numerous ad hominem attacks by mascot defenders.
In 2021 Chairwoman Cheryl Andrews-Maltais of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) registered her formal notice to both the Town of Dartmouth and its School Committee that she was displeased with the “lack of consultation and coordination regarding the name and imagery” used by the school system and that she supported the mascot. A Dartmouth High School graduate herself, Chairwomain Andrews-Maltais’ sentiments were echoed by several other Aquinnah alumnae: her brother Clyde Andrews (who created the 1974 version of the “Indian”); her sister Naomi Carney; her nephew Sean Carney; Massachusetts Tea Party activist and former school committee member Christopher Pereira (who runs Friends of Dartmouth Memorial Stadium Inc. and the Dartmouth Indians Football Alumni Club); and twice unsuccessful anti-immigrant state senate challenger Jacob Ventura.
This group has the full and exclusive attention of both the School and Select Committees. Everyone seems content to let the Chairwoman speak for all Native Americans.
But the Wampanoag Nation is not the only indigenous nation in Massachusetts and it includes numerous tribes, not just the Aquinnah. Even voices within the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah are anything but monolithic. Kisha James, a member of the Aquinnah who supports statewide legislation to ban mascots, told the Boston Globe last Fall that the word “mascot is just another word for pet.” She added, “It solidifies this idea that we’re not people. We’re costumes, we’re characters forever stuck in the past.”
Brad Lopes, Program Director of the Aquinnah Cultural Center, created a change.org petition disputing Chairwoman Andrews-Maltais’ efforts to promote the Dartmouth mascot “as the official position of our Nation.” In a separate letter to the Chairwoman he wrote, “I worked alongside members of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Nations here in Maine in an effort to ban mascots, with that bill passing, and would also think it would be wise to hear from them why. I do not feel this would provide any benefit to our tribal nation, and may in fact just create another symbol that Thomas King would describe as a ‘dead Indian’ for colonial narratives to use as they see fit. We are Wôpanâak after all, not ‘Indians’ or objects.”
Chairwoman Andrews-Maltais suggested in her letter to the Town and Schools that the Aquinnah enter into an agreement “much like the historic Seminole Tribe of Florida and Florida State University agreement of 2005.” In that agreement Florida State created scholarships for some Florida Seminole tribal members.
But Seminole history is complicated. Oklahoma Seminoles remember their ancestors being forced to march the bitter Trail of Tears, and not all were happy with the FSU accord. David Narcomey, a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma who was part of the 2005 NCAA review that banned many Native American mascots, referred to Florida State’s use of Chief Osceola as a “minstrel show.” Here in the SouthCoast, members of other indigenous nations, other Wampanoag tribes, and other members of the Aquinnah have similarly expressed their frustration with Chairwoman Andrews-Maltais for speaking in their name.
Nevertheless, the School and Select Committees have chosen to hear what they want to hear – and who they want to hear it from.
So at the January 24th meeting this year committee member Chris Oliver asked the Committee to “reaffirm” the Indian and to begin discussions with [only] the Aquinnah – discussions he admitted that had long been in “limbo.” Committee member John Nunes went a step further, demanding that the whole issue be “put to bed” with an immediate vote, right then, right there. Nunes argued that “if we need to have discussions with the Wampanoag tribe [sic]” he was good with that. The Committee member revealed a decided lack of enthusiasm for consulting with even the Aquinnah. Level-headed members of the Committee urged that other, unheard, indigenous voices be respected and consulted.
Many of those ignored in Dartmouth were nevertheless heard at state Senate hearings on legislation to ban the use of Native American mascots and through letters and statements published by many local tribes and Native American groups. They include:
A letter of January 21, 2019 from Alma Gordon (White Sky), Sonksq of the Chappaquiddick Wampanoag Tribe: “Any time a school sports team plays a game against a school with an offensive mascot, they experience demoralizing racial prejudice. Native American mascots in sports are not educationally sound for Native American and non-indigenous youth.”
A letter of January 2019 from the Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe: “A state law to address the problem of these nicknames / logos is necessary because many communities in Massachusetts resist calls to eliminate [those] used by the schools. The Tribe / Nation urges you to listen to our voices, and the voices of other Native American tribal nations […].”
A letter of January 2019 from Megan Page of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe: “We have tried at a local level to get offensive mascots removed, but attempts remain unsuccessful. We were not heard, and it solidified the need for state legislation regarding this matter. It is time we are heard. It is time we are celebrated for who we are. It is time for a change.”
A statement by Melissa Harding Ferretti, Chairwoman of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe: “The fact that racist ideas about Native peoples in Massachusetts are deeply ingrained, and are reflected in sports teams mascots, should not have to be explained in 2020 – especially since Native activists and educators have worked so hard for so long to educate other Americans about this. But here we are again today.”
A letter of June 28, 2020 from Elizabeth Solomon on behalf of the Board of Directors of the Massachuset-Ponkpoag Tribal Council: “Despite repeated calls from Native communities, non-Native allies, and numerous professional organizations to eliminate the Native American nicknames/logos used by their schools, many communities maintain them while insisting that no harm is done and no disrespect is meant. The Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag urges you act on the research regarding the actual harm that is generated by Native American mascots and to listen to our and the many diverse voices calling for the prohibition of all Native American sport team mascots/nicknames/logos in Massachusetts public schools.”
A letter of July 7, 2020 from Cheryll Toney Holly, Sonksq of the Nipmuc Nation: “As humans living among the many communities in the Commonwealth, we would prefer to speak and reason with townspeople about the harmful effects of their school mascots. Unfortunately, our voices are not heard.”
A letter of July 22, 2020 from Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians: “Indian Country’s longstanding position on this issue has been made abundantly clear for decades – we are not mascots, and we will not tolerate being treated as such.”
An open letter of February 17, 2022 from Brad Lopes, Director of the Aquinnah Cultural Center: “Native American mascots can have a harmful effect on the development of self in indigenous students, even in settings where the tribal entity has been involved in these designs. The American Psychological Association acknowledges the negative impacts these mascots can have on students, and I was one of those kids unfortunately. I attended Skowhegan High School, which was the last Native American mascot here in Maine. Due to our ‘Indian’ mascot, which was meant to ‘honor the Wabanaki people’, I faced continually bullying and torment from students and some staff as well. I found my daily life in that school to be about survival, and whenever I could pretend to be white, I would. This has taken me years to unravel and heal from. I would not wish a similar experience on any other indigenous student.”
The website of MA Indigenous Legislative Agenda: “According to 2019 data from the Census Bureau, there are more than 50,000 Native American people living in Massachusetts, many of whom attend Massachusetts public schools. Native American mascots are likely a violation of state and federal anti-discrimination laws, including the Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Law. Often school districts fear community backlash and so fail to fulfill their legal responsibility to protect all students from this discrimination.”
(non-native but relevant): American Psychological Association Resolution Recommending Retirement of American Indian Mascots: “The use of American Indian mascots as symbols in schools and university athletic programs is particularly troubling because schools are places of learning. These mascots are teaching stereotypical, misleading and too often, insulting images of American Indians. These negative lessons are not just affecting American Indian students; they are sending the wrong message to all students.”
Despite an impressive number of towns that have done the right thing and retired their nicknames and logos, about 20 Massachusetts school districts still choose to ignore Native voices and a large body of research shows how harmful their use is to both Native and non-native children.
It remains to be seen if any indigenous views will be honestly considered on March 8th at a special hearing for Native Americans on the mascot – or in time for a town referendum on the mascot on April 5th that the town’s Select Board decided to drop on the ballot at the last minute. The referendum vote is barely three weeks after the town’s first, last, and only community hearing on the issue on March 22nd.
Only between 11-15% of the 91% white residents of Dartmouth historically cast votes in the town election. When a voter walks into the booth and stares at the reverse side of a ballot, they will probably know little about what indigenous people think of mascots and will have had little or no time to digest any Native American testimony. They will also have been amply influenced by constant dog-whistling about “woke” “aristocrats,” “elites,” “outsiders” and “cancel” culture.
But people don’t just wake up one morning and decide to be arbitrarily “PC” or “woke.” Human dignity involves real issues, real moral values, and real people. The NAACP, whose members are hardly “aristocrats,” includes people of all colors and our local branch includes members of the Wampanoag nation. We have consistently opposed Native American mascots since at least 1999. We’ve said it again and again and again – and we’ll say it once more:
Native American mascots should not be a matter for a plebiscite. Human dignity is a moral issue.
We took some heat for remarking previously that if this were 1965 and not 2022, some of the “Dartmouth defenders” would be railing against “woke” white allies of the Civil Rights movement like Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched to Montgomery, Alabama with Martin Luther King. This is the same Abraham Heschel, a respected German rabbi, who had to flee Nazi Germany.
It doesn’t take a genius to guess what Heschel would have thought of letting an ethnic majority take a vote on what rights or what level of tolerance a minority deserves.
As America changes, a reckoning with real history and real respect for every member of society is needed more desperately than ever. But great swaths of White America are pushing back with book and curriculum bans, and there is considerable whining from those who no longer feel free to practice their racial insensitivity at will.
Dartmouth College created not only the big “D” letter and the “Big Green” nickname but also the Indian logo that is virtually identical to the one Dartmouth High School uses today. But in 1974 – almost 50 years ago! – Dartmouth College actually honored Native Americans by agreeing to a 1971 student petition and retired a stereotype that, as the students described it, “is a mythical creation of a non-Indian culture and in no manner reflects the basic philosophies of Native American People.”
If the Town of Dartmouth can “borrow” every other sports symbol from Dartmouth College, why not also adopt a principled, ethical decision to retire their Indian?
Today the whole story of the “Indian” mascot at Dartmouth College has become a teachable moment. In 2020 the college offered History 08.07: The Indian Symbol at Dartmouth: A Story of Voices and Silence. Likewise, Dartmouth Schools could incorporate the town’s struggle with a tough issue into their own History or Civics curriculum.
Supporters may regard the Dartmouth mascot as a trivial issue foisted upon them by “woke” “outsiders,” but the stakes for the Town and the Schools are much higher. According to state data Dartmouth has 443 teachers and 436 of them are white. In a town that’s 91% white and where 98.4% of the teachers are white, how can Dartmouth ever attract BIPOC teachers and staff or make BIPOC students feel like they really belong?
Calls for retiring the mascot, which to some appear as nothing more than an arbitrary assault on a beloved town symbol, have much in common with ultra-conservative efforts to purge school curriculum that reckons with America’s racist history.
“Critical Race Theory,” a post-graduate research methodology that has nothing to do with teaching history in public schools, has become the latest Trumpian bogeyman in dozens of states. The many Constitutionally-questionable initiatives and enacted laws to limit speech, control thought, and let history be written by politicians of a certain sort, are designed to result in the Disneyficaton of American history and the whitewashing of America’s crimes against indigenous and enslaved people.
This is what can be found in the deeper waters of the mascot debate.
Let’s give Kisha James the final word. “It’s like settlers are hearing ‘no’ for the first time and they don’t like it. […] Getting rid of mascots and acknowledging racism humanizes us and a lot of people aren’t comfortable with that. Because if you do, you also have to acknowledge the other wrongdoings, like genocide.”
As the March 3rd Democratic primary approaches, I have been arguing with just about all of my centrist Democrat friends. It was interesting to come across an essay about the centrist-progressive dispute by Jim Hightower, who may be best known (at least in Texas) as the agriculture commissioner whom Rick Perry unseated. For progressives Hightower is probably best known for the many causes and candidates the sprightly 77 year-old has worked for, including Bernie Sanders.
In an essay entitled “The Irony of the centrist-progresssive Debate” Hightower argues that centrists “tinkering around the edges” aren’t going to fix America’s problems, and those who fear to make real change won’t appeal to voters in numbers sufficient to vote Trump out of office. Moreover, Hightower writes, polls show that voters want substantial and progressive change, not centrist diddling.
So — forget moral arguments for a moment and focus on tactics — you can’t replace a solid, political platform with a vague appeal to throw some bum out of office. Voters are not going to vote the bum out if Democrats propose the same cold, cautious, poll-tested and spreadsheet-engineered technocratic B.S. they always come up with. Instead, Democrats ought to be appealing to people’s hearts — you know, like the Republicans do. More importantly, I completely agree with Hightower’s South Texas dictum — grandes males, grandes remedios. Big problems, big solutions. And we have some incredibly big problems.
But — aside from nostalgia for a democracy centrists themselves had a hand in vandalizing when they voted for the Patriot Act, FISA courts, ICE, 287g, border walls of their own, the war on drugs, the war on crime, wars, wars, and more wars — centrist Democrats don’t really have a problem with the nation’s staggering economic, military, foreign policy, environmental, and race problems. If they did, we’d be seeing them proposing ambitious platforms like progressives. But for centrists a little tinkering suffices and no big solutions are necessary.
The centrist argument seems to boil down to this — that America isn’t ready for a progressive agenda and that Democrats can win only by being slightly less depraved than Trump. Specifically, that Democrats must align their own platform with Republican values. And more specifically, that Democrats have to embrace white Republican values. Flag-waving, red-baiting progressives, going soft on abortion, avoiding national conversations on reparations and criminal justice reform, and showing they can pray as fervently as Evangelicals is now their ticket to centrist Democratic victory.
This is not only distasteful but a fool’s errand because common sense dictates that nobody is going to rush out to buy a case of Pepsi when they already have a pallet of Coke in the garage. If you want flag-waving, god-fearing patriots, NATO, corporation-friendly trade agreements, a belligerent foreign policy, regime change, wars of choice, saber rattling with China and Iran, a new Cold War, coddling Israel, and the defense of private insurers and bailouts for Wall Street, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the centrist Democratic playbook.
Republicans do it so much better.
What America is desperately looking for are real solutions, and Democrats had better offer them now — or lose the next presidential election.
Hillel the Elder famously wrote in the Pirkei Avot: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Desperate Americans have been asking the first of Hillel’s questions — “who will be for me” — and have yet to receive an honest reply from either party. In 2016 Republicans lied to voters, and continue to do so. As 2020 unfolds, Democrats — rejecting “identity politics” and unlikely to make desperately needed structural changes in a broken America — appear to be ignoring Hillel’s last two questions.
If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
This essay was written about, and intended for, a group of friends I respect for their political engagement and civility. I hope this is received in the spirit of dialog.
I can’t believe it was fifty years ago that I first read Robert Paul Wolff’s “The Poverty of Liberalism.” Written in 1968, Wolff’s book took on the limitations (and poverty) of Liberalism — with its technocratic and individualistic utilitarianism, its grudging tolerance instead of full embrace of diverse community, and its acceptance of power dynamics instead of working toward shared values. Today, Liberalism continues to suffer a crisis of confidence, and its frequent conflation with democracy leads some people to believe that the crisis of Liberalism is really a crisis of democracy. Wolff’s book shows that this is not the case.
I have been attending a series of Wednesday night political dinners which, until last night, were mainly discussions of the Democratic presidential primary and current affairs — specifically impeachment and our descent into autocracy.
Most of my Liberal dinner companions support centrist Democrats. There are a couple of Progressives and a couple of conservative Republicans — though they are nothing like the MAGA-hatted racists seen behind Trump at his rallies. These are earnest, civil people trying to explain what they find wrong with American society and why they have embraced Donald John Trump.
Mind you, I don’t agree with their analysis — at all — and I haven’t been shy about saying so. But they know something that some of the others don’t — that a successful politician must passionately express a clear vision in terms voters understand. I don’t think any of the Democrats are doing that yet.
I’m no Republican, but I can still tell you all about Trump’s platform. Individual One ran on a platform of ridding the country of Mexicans and Muslims, building a wall that Mexico would pay for, bringing back dirty coal, eliminating regulations, giving billionaires tax breaks and padding his administration with them, making America Great (by which he meant White), privileging Evangelicals, outlawing abortion, and filling federal courts with extremists. That was Trump’s clear vision, as evil as it is.
But — quick! — without consulting an “on the issues” web page, tell me what Amy Klobuchar’s platform is. Or Biden’s or Buttigieg’s. No points if you say “Anybody but Trump.” That’s a phobia, not a platform.
Even Elizabeth Warren has the same problem of clarity, but it’s not because she hasn’t spelled out in great detail her many plans for healthcare, education, a 2% Wall Street tax, and other issues. It’s because Warren has drowned voters in a thousand policy memos — while failing to offer a stirring, coherent vision of a new America.
For the first time, last night’s discussion veered into Trump’s appeal to voters. Some at the table thought his simplistic, vague, and easily digested policy positions were absolutely the wrong approach for Democrats. Several said that radical policies of any kind would derail party unity (whatever that is), that what we really need is to simply focus on beating Donald Trump. And each of the centrist candidates my dinner companions support says the same.
One participant pointed out that even Bernie Sanders has failed to talk about deep structural injustices in America. Nobody is really talking about Native Americans. All of the candidates of color have been pushed out by the DNC and nobody is talking about racism. Now that Jay Inslee has exited the debate stage, climate change is scarcely mentioned. Another participant mentioned that no candidate has a coherent foreign policy. The White American Middle Class seems to care mainly about itself, its retirement, its health insurance. But there is a huge, forgotten America that centrist Democrats have never regarded as their natural constituents. If you haven’t read Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal,” buy yourself a copy.
First it was Republicans, but now Democrats have followed them in pandering to White America. And Democrats want to copy Republican success by focusing on regions like the Midwest, the South, and the Iron Range. This is a losing strategy. If you haven’t read Steve Phillips’ “Brown is the New White,” he argues that Democrats’ obsession with appealing to white centrists in Flyover Country will doom them in the 2020 election as it did in 2016.
Candidates who have tried to push past this limited view of the centrality of the White American Middle Class have been accused of being too strident or unwilling to compromise. There was a debate in the Democratic Party about identity politics, and the party elite decided to focus on white voters, not minorities. It was no coincidence that Democrats announced their “Better Deal” campaign in a white suburb in the South. Corporate media friendly to Democrats (there is also corporate media friendly to Republicans) red-baits Progressives or calls them brownshirts — and centrist Democrats take the bait.
Ignoring the fact that Republicans won the 2016 election on radical change, Liberals are only prepared to accept an extremely narrow range of acceptable socio-economic values and reforms. This may explain the strangely familiar situation Progressives and Conservatives both value values. If there has ever been any affinity between Trump and Sanders supporters, it may center around values.
In the Liberal political landscape, where values are suspect and only “electability” has currency, it is no wonder that the DNC bent over backwards to accommodate a second billionaire candidate — Mayor “Stop and Frisk” Michael Bloomberg. It is alarming to me that Democrats who claim to hate an entitled, racist billionaire from New York have fallen in line behind another one of precisely the same species.
It is unlikely that the 40-45% of Democrats who identify as progressive will ever see their candidate on the ballot in November. The Democratic Party is a much smaller tent than previously thought. And it’s too bad. Because, until the Democratic Party sheds its hollow centrist poliicies, it can never hope to win the confidence of voters looking for a new vision for America.
Democracy did not die today with the Senate rubber-stamping the President’s “innocent.”
For a democracy to die, it must have first lived. There are many precedents for Trump’s sham impeachment trial which point an accusing finger at a nation that has never believed in the florid promises of democracy found in its own Declaration and Constitution.
Slavery, genocide, and subversion of democratic elections in other countries have been a steady feature of American “democracy.” Creating a society of equals with equal opportunity and equal representation has never been its object, as Jim Crow, voter suppression, mass-incarceration, censorship, and ever-new variations of McCarthyism show.
As central to our sick society as these are, I don’t want to talk about history, colonialism, capitalism, or white supremacy today. We know these are the root causes of so many of our ills. I would rather talk about the blatant impunity and injustice which occur daily in our courts and which have culminated with the rigged Senate trial of Donald John Trump on February 5th, 2020. And though there are four centuries of our history to consider, let me simply point to events that have occured in my own lifetime.
In 1955, Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was lynched and his body discovered three days later in the Tallahatchie River. The identities of his killers and the ringleaders of his lynching were never in doubt. Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam were arrested. But an all-white jury found them not guilty.
In 1963 Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1964 an all-white jury somehow could not reach a verdict. It took thirty years of fighting by Evers’ family, and finally his exhumation for additional evidence, to reopen the case against De La Beckwith.
In 1964 Ku Klux Klan “Kleagle” Edgar Ray Killen participated in the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. When Killen was finally arrested, an all-white jury refused to convict a “preacher.” Twenty years later Killen was again charged with murder, but a mostly-white jury again refused to hold him directly accountable for the murders, instead convicting him on lesser conspiracy charges.
The War in Vietnam slaughtered up to two million Vietnamese and left behind birth defects from Agent Orange and ruined bodies from land mines long after the U.S. beat a hasty exit from Saigon. But it was the My Lai massacre in 1968 that indicted the American justice system that failed to prosecute it and the government officials who covered it up. Hundreds of civilians — the US said 347, the Vietnamese government counted 504 — were raped, bayoneted, and shot execution-style, including children, and left in ditches full of blood. Only one platoon member was ever convicted. William Calley was sentenced to just three years of prison, but Richard Nixon ordered this commuted to house arrest. The matter was quietly closed. We have a long history of impunity for war crimes going back to the nation’s founding.
Tens of thousands of black people were lynched from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and one would have thought this gruesome chapter of our history was over. But it doesn’t take much to revert to barbarism in this country. A case in point was the lynchings of African Americans immediately following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2019 The Nation and ProPublica reported on a significant number of unsolved homicides of black people in Algiers Point and elsewhere, and of the emergence of white supremacist militias that had organized the killings. After the articles were published, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said he’d “look into” it.
Most of us will not forget the name Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who in 2012 was shot after punching George Zimmerman, who had been harrassing and following him. Zimmerman’s lawyers had planned to defend their client on the basis of so-called “stand your ground” laws, and the case was under intense public scrutiny. Alan Dershowitz — that Dershowitz — attacked Florida’s State Attorney Angela Corey for even daring to prosecute Zimmerman. In the end a Florida jury let Zimmerman walk.
In 2013, when rich white boy Ethan Couch crammed seven of his friends into his hot red pickup truck and then totaled it, killing four of them, Couch’s defense lawyer claimed he was a victim of “affluenza” — a word the lawyer said described the coddled teen’s irresponsibility resulting from his family wealth. Even though Couch had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and had killed four people, the defense strategy worked. Couch was released on probation — until he fled to Mexico with his mommy.
And who can forget former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown in 2014 and was never prosecuted? This was a case that launched the Black Lives Movement — a fight against precisely the sort of impunity I’ve been enumerating.
Or Stanford swimmer Brock Allen Turner, who in 2015 was discovered by two graduate students in the process of raping a woman behind a fraternity house dumpster. Turner’s lawyer wrote that “he is fundamentally a good young man” and Turner’s father argued it was unfair that he should go to prison for “20 minutes of action” by his rapist child. The Golden Boy was given six months in jail by Judge Aaron Persky.
Or the refusal to prosecute Baltimore police officers for the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who died an excruciating death in the back of a police van. Not even Obama’s Justice Department found sufficient grounds to charge any of the officers with civil rights violations. In fact, a 2016 national study which examined civil rights violations of 21,000 policemen found that only 3% were ever convicted of crimes against the public.
In 2018 Georgia white supremacist William Christopher Gibbs showed up at an emergency room afraid he had exposed himself to ricin, and he and his car tested positive for the deadly agent. But prosecutors refused to charge Gibbs with domestic terrorism, cititing “technical” reasons they couldn’t charge a white terrorist. To this day, the U.S. government is largely unwilling to admit any danger to society of white supremacists.
Each year roughly one thousand people are shot by police, most of them people of color and many of them unarmed. But 98% of the officers are never charged for murder and police frequently claim “reasonable” fear for their safety as a justification for killing an unarmed civilian. I find it ironic that police can claim “I feared for my life” — and White America believes them — while any refugee seeking asylum because “I feared for my life” is regarded as a liar.
When Brett Kavanaugh appeared before a Senate confirmation committee in 2018, witnesses cited his sexual predation as a teenager as a reason he was unfit for the Supreme Court. Yet the Senate — as it was when Anita Hill had made similar charges about Clarence Thomas — was not disturbed by any of the allegations. Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, “Boys will be Supreme Court Justices,” and she was right. Rebecca Solnit wrote that the old white men of America simply don’t want to know, and she was also right.
American Justice may be blind — but it is wilfully so. Our entire legal system, from top to bottom, is nothing more than concierge service for rich and powerful, mainly white, men.
And how is a system of impunity possible without pardons?
In 2019 Donald Trump pardoned SEAL commander “Eddie” Gallagher and promoted him. Members of Gallagher’s platoon, SEAL Team 7, claimed he had killed innocent civilians and murdered an unconscious prisoner, then posed for pictures with the corpse. One platoon member who testified said of Gallagher, “The guy is freaking evil.” According to testimony, when the SEALs captured an injured ISIS fighter Gallagher began stabbing him in the neck. Another platoon member turned off his helmet cam right before the fighter died. Besides Gallagher, Trump also pardoned convicted civil rights abuser Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted of federal campaign violations.
We say we are a “nation of laws” — for some — but in an oligarchy, a kleptocracy, or a kakistocracy the usual rules of law don’t apply to men with high-level connections. Whatever we call this system, let’s not call it a “democracy.”
The 2008 financial crisis was another example of the American justice system revealing itself as an agent of impunity for financial criminality. In 2014 — six years after the financial crash — ProPublica and the New York Times reported that the only Wall Street executive to ever be prosecuted as a result of the crisis was Kareem Serageldin. Meanwhile, there are people still serving life sentences for marijuania possession in prisons all over the United States. To add insult to injury, rather than hold Wall Street accountable for its losses, a bipartisan group of rich and powerful men decided to make citizens cough up the almost two trillion dollars necessary to bail them out.
Last week a friend sent me a piece by Andy Borowitz from the New Yorker — “El Chapo outraged that his trial included witnesses.” It was funny at the time. Or would have been if it hadn’t so painfully highlighted the hollowness of the culture of impunity we mistakenly call “democracy.”
So let us not weep. Democracy did not die today. We never had it in the first place.
Last June I wrote about legislation that had been filed to reconsider the racist Massachusetts state seal and flag, and another bill to prohibit the use of racist mascots by school sports teams.
Here in my home town of Dartmouth the “Dartmouth Indian” is hardly different from the Confederate flags and monuments to the legacy of slavery that MAGA America feels is their heritage and their birthright. Dartmouth teenagers in “green face” (as if the Wampanoag were some species of leprechaun) are seen at football and lacrosse games. Community members cry that they “bleed green” and claim their caricature of Native people somehow “honors” them. The Dartmouth Schools even have licensing agreements that have netted thousands of dollars from the “Indian” image. Not a cent was ever returned to Native Americans.
I am not the only one to find this exploitative and racist. A couple of local tribes of the Wampanoag, letter-writers and historians who have been complaining about this far longer than I, the NAACP New Bedford Branch, and others in the community joined in forming a small group to try to do something about it. We wrote letters, attended meetings, asked pretty please. But the Dartmouth Schools weren’t having any of it. The school committee shut down even a discussion of their racist caricature.
Two months after the dust settled a bit, one more tribe affiliated with the Wampanoag came out in support of at least talking about it. The committee again refused to even listen to them. As Superintendent Bonnie Gifford finishes up her career, one thing will have changed: the superintendent and her enablers on the school committee can no longer claim — with either straight or green face — that they are “honoring” Native Americans. Too many Native people have told them that this is a bald-faced lie.
In the process of going through this exercise, we met the Native advocacy organization Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda, which supports not only the two bills I mentioned above but three others related to education and other issues.
On January 24th a handful of white extremists appeared before the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security to lie about immigrants and about the provisions of the Safe Communities Act. This relatively small number of opponents is loud and extremely well-funded. Almost all are financed or fronted by two organizations identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center — the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Both were founded by white supremacist and Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton.
Indeed, it was Old Home Week at the State House for most of these people, who appear together repeatedly. And it’s time legislators knew precisely who they were listening to.
FAIR – Federation for American Immigration Reform
Tom Hodgson, who testified on January 24th in the Gardner auditorium, is not so much a county sheriff as he is a spokesman for FAIR. Hodgson serves on its National Advisory Board and sticks Massachusetts taxpayers with his travel expenses to FAIR events. Hodgson’s neglect of his day job in favor of his anti-immigrant crusade is costing incarcerated people their lives, health and rehabilitation.
Donald Rosenberg dropped in from Westlake Village, California to testify. Rosenberg is the president of AVIAC, Advocates For Illegal Alien Crime, a front group for FAIR whose events, such as the September 2019 “Angel Families” event in Washington DC, are organized by FAIR (whose legal arm, IRLI, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, provides legal services for AVIAC). Susan Tully, FAIR national field director and friend of Tom Hodgson, even admitted the connection to AVIAC in a Facebook post: “Working with our new group AVIAC.”
Maureen Maloney, AVIAC’s Vice President, also testified at the State House. Maloney told attendees at a 2017 event that the Catholic Church isn’t doing enough to turn its back on its own values: “The Catholic bishops make a fortune off of the refugees and the illegal aliens, and I’m a Catholic,” she claimed. When Maloney and Rosenberg (and FAIR) kicked off their organization at the National Press Club in Washington DC, their featured speaker was America’s white supremacist legislator Steve King, who was stripped of his committee assignments by Trump’s Tea Party GOP — no mean accomplishment in an age of concentration camps for Central American children and Stephen Miller’s brainstorm to ship DACA recipients out of the country in boxcars. Maloney herself is no slouch when it comes to unvarnished racism. Maloney was previously a member of The Remembrance Project, a group similar to AVIAC, also with substantial white supremacist connections.
CIS – Center for Immigration Studies
Jessica Vaughan fled Massachusetts for South Carolina’s more agreeable (to her) racial climate and is now the “Director of Policy Studies” for the Center for Immigration Studies. Vaughan testified for five minutes and answered questions for fourteen more before the Joint Committee. Rather than focus on the SPLC’s designation of CIS as a hate group, just consider Vaughan’s own words and deeds: “Vaughan haspreviously discussed her work with The American Free Press, a virulently anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Willis Carto, a Holocaust denier who was active on the radical right for over five decades before his death in 2015. She has also been a featured speaker at multiple extremist events including white nationalist publisher The Social Contract Press‘s annualWriter’s Workshop and the Federation for American Immigration Reform‘sSheriff Border Summit. At the Writer’s Workshop, white nationalist Peter Brimelow of the racist website VDARE also spoke. In 1996, Vaughan appeared on an episode of ‘Borderline,’ a show produced by FAIR, alongside Chilton Williamson, a longtime editor of Chronicles magazine, a publication with strong neo-Confederate ties that caters to the more intellectual wing of the white nationalist movement.”
Lou Murray, whose group Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities appears to be a front for CIS (with ties to FAIR), sat right next to Vaughan and yielded most of his time to her. Many of Murray’s public appearances feature Vaughan, Hodgson, and retired ICE agents. Murray’s group’s Facebook page is also littered with links to FAIR and CIS. When Michelle Malkin was disinvited from an appearance at Bentley College, Murray and Vaughan organized a private event for her. And as if to demonstrate how insular this little circle is, Murray and Vaughan hosted Maureen Maloney at one of their events in West Roxbury. Murray, who was a 2016 Republican National Convention delegate, hates Muslims just as much as he does Latinos. Murray serves on Trump’s Catholic Advisory Group and has “nothing but high praise” for Trump’s 2017 executive order to ban Muslims. Murray said the US government should help “those populations who are most vulnerable,” including “the Christian population who is most at risk from ISIS, Al Qaeda and other Islamic dangers.”
Steve Kropper of MCIR, the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform, also testified before the Joint Committee. Kropper, who in 2012 was arrested for violating a domestic violence restraining order, came to the microphone joking about his divorce. The rest of his testimony was equally unamusing. MCIR appears to be another CIS front group, but is also affiliated with another of white supremacist John Tanton’s groups, the Social Contract Press. MCIR’s president John Thompsonwrote in 2016 in the Social Contract Press that immigrants “are natural constituents for politicians desirous of expanding the welfare state. They could potentially provide career opportunities for social workers, ethnic militants, immigration lawyers, and poverty activists for generations to come.” Thompson goes on to quote Jason Richwine, a white supremacist known for his paper, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” which says, among other things:
“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
“the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ, but the extent of its impact is hard to determine.”
“The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”
Thompson also quotes Robert Rector, of both the Heritage Foundation and CIS, whose 2007 study of the costs of undocumented refugees was rejected by even conservative Republicans (and eventually the Heritage Foundation itself) and Rector was blasted for his report’s sloppiness and dishonesty.
In March 2005 MCIR member Robert Casimiro, a Weymouth resident, flew to Arizona to join up with an armed militia called the Minuteman Project. According to a press release, “the project’s participants will also be conducting auxiliary border patrols, ‘spotting’ people crossing illegally and reporting them to the border patrol and the local authorities.” The Anti-Defamation League reported that Minuteman “members belonging to active vigilante groups, including their leadership, have been arrested on weapons charges and white supremacist and anti-governments groups continue to express interest and take part in organized ‘patrols’ of the border.”
These are just a few of the liars, racists, and extremists that routinely testify against Safe Communities.
On January 18th, a little over a hundred people marched from William Street to the Ash Street Jail to protest the incompetence and abuses of Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson, and to call for his resignation.
“After careful consideration We invite your investigation We don’t need your fascist nation We don’t want your bloviation Down with prison exploitation You are always on vacation You turned in your Congregation Down with ICE participation You are Bristol’s humiliation…”
Accompanied by a New Bedford Police Department escort, marchers chanted and carried signs with messages like “Hodgson is a Failure as a Jailer,” “No 287g,” “Stay Home and Do Your Job,” “Resign!” and “$348,922” — the dollar amount Hodgson received from ICE and “forgot” to pay back to Massachusetts taxpayers. Others read “Programs not Walls!” or “Demasiados suicidios – que verguenza!!!” (Too many suicides – shame!!!).
At the Ash Street jail marchers were met by about a dozen Bristol County Sheriff’s officers who said nothing and for the most part simply stared at protestors. Standing outside the oldest jail in the country, Bristol County for Correctional Justice (BCCJ) members cited the neglect, abuses, and malfeasance that characterize Hodgson’s administration of the jail and called for the sheriff to resign.
Protestors then marched back to Grace Episcopal Church, where there was a short speaking program followed by an opportunity for people from over a dozen groups from Providence to the Cape to exchange contact information.
At the church BCCJ member Joe Quigley moderated the presentation. Betty Ussach talked about jail suicides, Kathy Williams about Hodgson’s financial corruption and abuse of taxpayer money. Susan Czernicka covered Hodgson’s medical neglect, while Marlene Pollock highlighted Hodgson’s extensive contacts with white supremacists. Bishop Filipe Teixeira spoke about the struggle to visit immigrants in Hodgson’s jail and Kerry Mahoney, a community member, spoke movingly about the needless death and suffering at the jail because of Hodgson’s refusal to provide medically-assisted opioid treatment and other types of health care.
Lindsay Aldworth from the Coalition for Social Justice, Richard Drolet from the New Bedford Democratic City Committee, Diane Hahn from 1199 United Health Care Workers East, Jim Pimental from the Bricklayers Union and the Labor Council all offered their organizations’ support. Sally Fehervari from the Mansfield Dems and Adrian Ventura from Centro Comunidade de Trabajadores also spoke in support of ridding the county of Hodgson. Several organizations were unable to attend but sent greetings: the NAACP New Bedford Branch, FANG, Freedom for Immigrants, and Barnstable County’s Safe Communities Coalition. Immigration Justice in Eastern MA (from Plymouth County) and several members of Marching Forward (Dartmouth) also attended both the march and followup meeting.
Despite the outpouring of broad community support, WBSM’s Chris McCarthy — where ACLU FOIA records show Hodgson was actually offered a regular time slot — tried to portray the marchers as “the illegal alien lobby” and “the radical left,” accusing them of trying to overturn the will of voters — voters who were never offered another option in 2016. This was all par for the course for the aptly-named McCarthy, whose Islamophobia and gay-bashing can be seen in his Tweets from the ACLU filing. The Standard Times did not send a reporter to cover either the march or the meeting that followed.
Regardless of how the local media chose to ignore or characterize the fight by BCCJ and other groups opposed to Hodgson’s abuses — the fight goes on.
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, and I followed columnist Esther Cepeda in reading King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But I’ve also been reading Cornel West’s “The Radical King,” which reprints many of Martin Luther King’s more “radical” essays and sermons. I’m not finished with it because you can’t read a book of thoughtful essays in one go.
But from what I have read, West sees no contradiction between the nonviolent King and the man he calls the Radical King. King’s nonviolence, for all the nods to Ghandi and other religious traditions, was rooted in his Christianity and specifically in the Black Church. Yet apparently there were also connections to the Jewish prophetic tradition — in which prophets rage against the evils of kings and tyrants. This may be one reason for King’s friendship with Abraham Joshua Heschel.
King’s most famous speech was part of a 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and when he was killed King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. King told his staff in 1966, “There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” King travelled across the country with his Poor People’s Campaign, a campaign that Rev. William Barber today is trying to revive. And though the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, four years later King still found himself fighting for civil and economic rights when he was assassinated in 1968.
America of 1968 was not only about to implode from racial injustice but also from economic injustices and wars of choice that were not only killing black, brown and poor white men but bankrupting America financially and morally. At quite a cost to his own political capital, and even putting himself at odds with other black leaders, King spoke out against American militarism and materialism.
King was regarded as the “most dangerous man in America” by J. Edgar Hoover, who also tried to brand King as a Soviet asset — not because he was a nonviolent advocate of racial equality (most certainly true), but because he represented a challenge to economic and political exploitation.
West points out in his introduction to the collection that King’s thoughts were constantly evolving. We are all familiar with the “long arc” optimism of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech but no one ever got to hear the more pessimistic sermon King had planned to deliver the Sunday after he was murdered, “Why America May Go To Hell.”
Toward the end, the radical King had grown disillusioned with white liberals whose deeds never matched their rhetoric. In one essay King discusses Stokely Carmichael’s rejection of both white allies and nonviolence. With increased physical represssion, Carmichael’s SNCC, CORE, and Deacons for Defense were all beginning to sense the limits of nonviolent strategy. In West’s “Black Power” excerpt from 1967, King never repudiates his nonviolence but clearly understands and even appreciates the reasons Black Power advocates gave for their willingness to use force if necessary:
“Black Power advocates contend that the Negro must develop his own sense of strength. No longer are ‘fear, awe, and obedience’ to rule. This accounts for, though it does not justify, some Black Power advocates who encourage contempt and even civil disobedience as alternatives to the old patterns of slavery. Black Power assumes that Negroes will be slaves unless there is a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determined to be masters rather than brothers.”
By coincidence, our book group’s selection this month was Colson Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys,” set in Tallahassee, Florida in 1962. The very first page begins with Elwood Curtis’s thoughts on a ten cent record of Martin Luther King’s speeches. King’s speeches could also serve other purposes than a moral call to action. For kids like Elwood, King’s speeches were educational and also an affirmation of black pride:
“In the third cut on side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. […] Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites — not all whites, but enough whites — that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that ‘Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, I want you to know that you are as good as anybody who goes into Fun Town.’ That was Elwood — as good as anyone.”
Elwood is well-read, naive, and a bit of a geek. And when his bicycle chain snaps, he ends up being arrested along with the driver of the stolen Plymouth he has hitched a ride with. Elwood’s grandmother Harriet, a great believer in doing things by the book, hires a white lawyer who absconds with the $200 intended to defend Elwood. Elwood ends up in Nickel Academy, a segregated prison camp for boys, where some go missing without explanation. Whitehead’s book deals with the boys’ attitudes toward resistance and compliance, particularly in a [still] Jim Crow prison setting. A boy name Turner “with an eerie sense of self” who knows that only he is ultimately responsible for his own safety is the foil for the tragically well-behaved and trusting Elwood.
In one passage which seems to illustrate the divide between Black Power and Respectability Politics, Elwood is still trying to make sense of Dr. King:
“He called upon his Negro audience to cultivate that pure love for their oppressors, that it might carry them to the other side of the struggle. Elwood tried to get his head around it, now that it was no longer the abstraction floating in his head last spring. It was real now:
Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win our freedom.
The capacity to suffer. Elwood — all the Nickel boys — existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.
Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.
Indeed. What an impossible thing.
As he stated somewhat prophetically in his last speech, King had been to the mountain top. And King had seen the Big Picture if not been given sacred insight. King’s early sermons were well-crafted moral calls to action, Christian in style and language, but he frequently tipped his hat to other traditions. King was often ecumenical and usually very accessible. For example, in 1956 King delivered a sermon to 12,000 people at an Episcopal cathedral in New York City on the second anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The talk was about evil. His sermon contained the seeds of the same argument that so perplexed young Elwood:
“Let us remember that as we struggle against Egypt, we must have love, compassion and understanding goodwill for those against whom we struggle, helping them to realize that as we seek to defeat the evils of Egypt we are not seeking to defeat them but to help them, as well as ourselves.”
Some will find King’s argument unconvincing (I am one), though most will admire the radical King’s ‘love of the oppressed. Some will admire the prophetic King for his speaking truth to power, while others will be surprised at his growing understanding of (and even sympathy for) those advocating change “by any means necessary” (King approached Malcolm X in 1966 about working together on a UN resolution).
Though King believed in ecumenism and frequently linked arms with men of different faiths, West cautions us to always remember that King’s
“radical love flows from an imitation of Christ, a response to an invitation of self-surrender in order to emerge fully equipped to fight for justice in a cold and cruel world of domination and exploitation. The scandal of the Cross is precisely the unstoppable and unsuffocatable love that keeps moving in a blood-soaked history, even in our catastrophic times. There is no radical King without his commitment to radical love.”
The ACLU’s FOIA request yielded communication between the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) and the Office of the State Auditor, which in 2018 conducted a performance audit that noted the BCSO’s (1) failure to reimburse the state $350K until it was caught; (2) failure to update its per-diem custody and care rate for ICE; (3) failure to file inmate total cost reports; and (4) failure to properly document travel records.
The Auditor was asked to look into suicide rates at the jail and her field auditors did. But they looked at only two years of suicide data — 2016 and 2017. It would have been better if the Auditor had used more thorough, accurate and statistically meaningful data, such as that collected by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which looked at Massachusetts jail suicides from 2006 to 2016.
The BCSO, in fact, had 20 years of data and offered numbers for 2013 forward, but it would have been work to compare it to other counties in the state because there is no formal mechanism in Massachusetts government (other than a FOIA request or an audit) to collect mortality data from state correctional facilities. Neither the Massachusetts Department of Correction nor the Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association collects, much less publishes, such data for public or research. So, for the first time ever by an agency of the state, it was up to bean counters to look at jail suicides while doing a financial audit.
In citing Bureau of Justice (BJS) statistics to Auditor James Moriarty, Jonathan Darling compared BCSO suicides with national averages. According to the BJS report Darling cited, “the suicide rate in local jails in 2014 was 50 per 100,000 local jail inmates. This is the highest suicide rate observed in local jails since 2000 (table 4).“
Having chosen the highest national rate to compare with his jail’s suicides, Darling wrote:
“As you can see, even when we had a spike in 2016, we were still well below the national average. The narrative in the media is how evil Sheriff Hodgson is, when it really should be how great Massachusetts Sheriffs are.”
But several of the families whose loved ones committed suicide on Hodgson’s watch didn’t think he was such a great sheriff. They have filed wrongful death lawsuits.
If you want to verify the BJS data Darling cited, it can’t be done. Bureau of Justice Statistics “Deaths in Custody Reporting Program” (DCRP) data is collected by RTI International, a research group originally founded by USAID. OpenSecrets shows 80% of RTI’s corporate principals are connected with a lobbying firm, Cornerstone Government Affairs, otherwise known as the Pentagon’s lobbyist. The data — even “sanitized” and stripped of personal identification — may simply not be accessed by the public:
Due to the sensitive nature of the data and to protect respondent confidentiality, the data are restricted from general dissemination. These data are enclave-only and may only be accessed at ICPSR’s location in Ann Arbor, MI. Users wishing to view these data must first contact NACJD, complete an Application for use of the ICPSR Data Enclave (available as part of the documentation for this study), and receive permission to analyze the files before traveling to Ann Arbor.
But it doesn’t matter now. DCRP data has not been updated since 2014 and it appears that the Justice Deparment under Trump has stopped collecting it.
Sheriffs love accountability — for everyone but themselves. But because of the secretive and undependable availability of federal jail death statistics and a lack of public reporting by the Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association or the state Department of Correction, the only way to get the data is for Massachusetts legislators to mandate the monthly collection and publication of detailed mortality statistics from DOC prisons and county jails.
As the United States continues to slide into fascism, I have been rereading Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” concerning the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of a war criminal who expressed himself in cliches, was an ambitious braggart, an egregious liar, an ignorant sociopath, someone attracted to and utterly at the service of men of power. We have many of these creatures living among us today. It could happen here. It is happening here.
In Arendt’s discussion of how ordinary Germans made themselves accomplices in something so monstrous as the Holocaust, she touches on the coup attempt that almost ended Hitler’s regime. Arendt quotes from German novelist Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, who himself died in a concentration camp on the eve of the collapse of the Third Reich. In his “Diary of a Man in Despair” Reck-Malleczewen writes of those who participated in the dictatorship who could have stopped Hitler early on — but only thought of it too late to save their nation.
I swear, he was talking to the Republican Senators of 2020:
“A little late, gentlemen, you who made this archdestroyer of [the nation] and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who […] without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal […] Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the house that went broke, in order to establish a political alibi for themselves — the same men who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power.”
The National Sheriff’s Association — the organization that represents rogue sheriffs like Sam Page, David Clarke, and Tom Hodgson and which celebrates the abuses of Customs and Border Patrol officers — has a soft spot for animals. Yes, the NSA actually endorsed legislation on animal cruelty, arguing that there is a link between animal cruelty and cruelty to humans. And we would not disagree.
But the sheriffs didn’t seem to appreciate the irony of defending puppies while torturing humans in the county jails they themselves operate.
Not to be out-done by the sheriffs’ hypocrisy, Donald Trump signed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT) last month, giving rights to animals that he refuses to extend to Central American children in his concentration camps.
But concern for animal rights while simultaneously showing indifference to human suffering is also a feature of Massachusetts law.
Massachusetts has animal cruelty statutes which provide for up to seven years in prison for the abuse of animals. In 2016 the Attorney General charged ten people with the mistreatment of over a thousand animals on a farm in Westport. All were allowed to plead guilty and serve probation, which outraged animal rights groups. When it comes to humans, the AG’s office has a civil rights division but has not similarly intervened in behalf of prisoners suffering and dying in the state’s jails.
The rights of dogs and cats in the Commonwealth have a leg up — actually four legs up — on the rights of their human counterparts. According to the Massachusetts General Laws, Part I, Title XX, Chapter 140, Section 137C:
“The mayor of a city, the selectmen of a town, the police commissioner in the city of Boston, a chief of police or an animal control officer may at any time inspect a kennel or cause the inspection of a kennel. If, in the judgment of such person or body, the kennel is not being maintained in a sanitary and humane manner or if records are not properly kept as required by law, such person or body shall, by order, revoke or suspend the license for the kennel.”
That’s right. Kennels may be freely inspected by public officials if conditions are believed to be unsanitary or inhumane. This is a right that not even state legislators have in Massachusetts “corrections” facilities.
For dogs, state law likewise regulates confinement:
“No person owning or keeping a dog shall chain or tether a dog for longer than 5 hours in a 24–hour period and outside from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., unless the tethering is for not more than 15 minutes and the dog is not left unattended by the owner, guardian or keeper.”
Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. “No excessive solitary” for dogs is written into Massachusetts law — while mentally-ill Bristol County prisoners are going to have to wait for the courts to decide if the overuse of solitary confinement is legal.
Under Massachusetts law a dog must be given adequate space to move, and environmental considerations (heat and cold) are strictly regulated. Specific types of inhumane treatment are prohibited:
“(1) filthy and dirty confinement conditions including, but not limited to, exposure to excessive animal waste, garbage, dirty water, noxious odors, dangerous objects that could injure or kill a dog upon contact or other circumstances that could cause harm to a dog’s physical or emotional health;
taunting, prodding, hitting, harassing, threatening or otherwise harming a tethered or confined dog; and
subjecting a dog to dangerous conditions, including attacks by other animals.”
No such protections exist for the safety and well-being of humans confined in Massachusetts jails and prisons.
Finally, it boggles the mind that “inhumane” is the word chosen by people to describe mistreatment of animals — but not of fellow humans who “deserve what they get” in prisons that “are not country clubs.”
But there is a solution. By simply re-designating jails as “kennels” — a name change prison rights advocates point out already describes the inhumane conditions in state prisons and jails — human prisoners in Massachusetts will finally receive the legal rights their four-legged friends already have.
The nation’s right-wing sheriffs flock to the White House for vanity photos of themselves, often captured in embarrassing thrall to the President.
Among the many White House emails returned from the ACLU FOIA request, there are at least fifty that include photos of Tom Hodgson in rapt attention to the stirring insights of Donald Trump, who is sometimes pictured holding a photo of his border wall.
These taxpayer-funded photo-ops are meat for the President and manna for the sheriffs. But sometimes even the dozens of photos offered by the White House are not enough. Here Hodgson’s media guy Jonathan Darling is found begging for more:
Emails were not the only product of the ACLU’s FOIA request to the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO). Eventually, the BCSO had to cough up travel documents and Tweets as well.
When the ACLU asked for Twitter records from accounts @Sheriff_Hodgson and @BCSO1, the Sheriff’s Office initially tried to avoid producing the documents by changing the account handles to @SheriffHodgson and @BristolSheriff. But ACLU counsel threatened to sue. So the BCSO responded like grownups with grainy, low-quality screenshots of a surprisingly small number of private communications.
But rather than discussing programs for rehabilitating his prisoners — surprise! — Hodgson’s private Tweets were almost all about scheduling media appearances to spread his anti-immigrant gospel and to market his own “brand.” And the many free media opportunities Hodgson was (and is) given to develop his “brand” represent nothing more than unreported “in-kind” campaign contributions.
The majority of Hodgson’s Tweets were to and from local radio station WBSM 1420, which features mainly right-wing bloviators like Barry Richard, Ken Pittman, Howie Carr, and Chris McCarthy. And they were all from radio host Chris McCarthy — whose job it is to feed Hodgson stories to comment on:
Tom should see this ASAP (23 Jan 2017)
McCarthy strokes Hodgson’s ego by comparing him to the president:
The Sheriff and you as his media person changed the national conversation in the way only a President can usually move an issue. Tremendous job. (28 Mar 2017)
McCarthy passes along an article by Howie Carr lambasting acting U.S. Atty. William Weinreb for Hodgson to read:
Jonathan- Howie wanted to make sure TH saw this column (4 May 2017)
McCarthy then directs Hodgson to an interview he did with Michele McPhee, who has just been a guest on his show — before he discusses it with Hodgson:
J – I interviewed Michele McPhee about her book on the Marathon Bombing yesterday. She discusses UMass Dartmouth and the bombing and I hope you can share this with Tom. She names a UMD professor. (15 May 2017)
We learn that, besides Jonathan Darling, BCSO legislative liaison Brock Cordeiro also handles Hodgson’s media work. Hodgson does not simply do radio interviews, he has a radio schedule:
Hi Chris, I’m out of the office this week. Brock is handling this stuff and has his radio schedule for the next few days. Give him a hollar at brockcordeiro@bcso-ma.org or send him a facebook message. Good luck — Jonathan (23 Jun 2017)
At Hodgson’s request, Darling suggests to McCarthy that he give Hodgson a regular spot on his show:
Hi Chris, Congrats on the new show. Sheriff asked me to get in touch. He mentioned you wanted him to come on sometime. Right now, our best bet is a call in tomorrow or an in-studio on Tuesday or Wednesday. Also, if you want to set something regular up, say every Friday or every other Wednesday or the first Thursday of the month or whatever, we’re open to that as well. — Jonathan (3 Jan 2018)
McCarthy acknowledges the amount of work they do together:
Jonathan – we do enough together to have you call or text me – my number is 781-308-5662 – send me a text when you have a moment so we can communicate rapidly when needed. Thanks
Remember those unreported “in-kind” campaign contributions.
Sometimes McCarthy tries to elicit information or get Hodgson to speculate on local politics:
Thanks – I’m hearing the same thing. I understand the Commies at the Coalition for Social Justice are going to run SEIU organizer Lisa Lemieux in the special. (2 Feb 2017)
and
Off the record: Have you heard anything about Jill Ussach running for the open NB Ward 3 CC seat? (2 Feb 2017)
Darling replies:
Hi Chris, Consensus of some of the clued-in folks around here is she’s no doubt interested, but if she actually pulls the papers and runs is another story.
In another Tweet Darling refers McCarthy to an order form for a t-shirt a local group produced for its visit to the governor to lobby for an investigation into Hodgson’s abuses:
Hey Chris. Tom wanted me to send this to you: He can’t wait to get a t-shirt: bccjustice.wordpress.com/2018/09/29/baker-is-the-new-orange (1 Oct 2018)
But Hodgson is a self-appointed expert on everything from Iran to marijuana. Darling offers Hodgson as an anti-marijuana spokesman:
Hi Chris. Sheriff was interviewed by the herald today about that stoned kid who hit the school bus in Gloucester. Just wanted to let you and the other radio guys know he’s available to take the anti-weed side if anyone’s interested. Thanks, and merry Christmas. — Jonathan (21 Dec 2016)
At one point McCarthy sends Hodgson a private text about New Bedford City Councilman Hugh Dunn’s letter to the state legislature on marijuana dispensaries — to feed Hodgson answers for a forthcoming interview:
I sent TH a text with the letter NB CC Hugh Dunn sent to the state legislature asking them to change the law on local control. This story is going to be big and I wanted Tom to have all the information in advance of the media. (1 Jun 2017)
Darling replies:
Awesome. Thx Chris. We will be ready for it when it hits. (1 Jun 2017)
Darling sends sheriff A. J. Louderback a photo of himself with Trump — under the assumption Louderback loves vanity photos as much as Hodgson:
Sheriff, I thought this was a nice picture. It’s from the Associated Press from Friday’s meeting. Catch up soon — Jonathan. (14 Jan)
Darling sends McCarthy a Tweet thanking him for Hodgson’s chance to vent on his favorite topics:
Hi Chris, just wanted to follow up and say thanks for having the Sheriff on this morning. Trump, immigration, Elizabeth Warren … he was in heaven. Anytime you want to chat again on Herald of BSM, just drop us a line …. thanks, Jonathan (1 Dec 2016)
McCarthy returns the compliment, sending Hodgson a link to a press release from Hamilton Strategies:
Jonathan, I just spoke with the Sheriff and scheduled him to call in to Boston Herald radio this Friday morning at 7:20am to discuss this press release: hamiltonstrategies.com/news/open-letter… (14 Dec 2016)
A word on Hamilton Strategies.
Hamilton Strategies advertises itself as a “mission-driven, full-service communications firm serving Christian non-profit organizations” which exists to: “connect ministries with media, engage Christians in the culture and inspire all to share the miracle of Jesus Christ throughout the world.”
McCarthy’s item for discussion is the interfaith celebration of an “Anti-Hate” event at the Islamic Society of Boston. Hamilton Strategies has issued a press release blasting liberal Jews and Christians who attended the event, including Marty Walsh and Elizabeth Warren, and has. accused the Islamic Center of being a “terror-linked, Saudi-funded radical mega-mosque.”
McCarthy also wants to link the Islamic Center with a terror attack [that never happened] on a mall in Attleboro. Once again McCarthy feeds an article to Hodgson like somebody fed SAT answers to Felicity Huffman’s daughter:
There is a section in the press release that mentions a planned machine gun attack on a “mall in Attleboro, MA” which we will be asking about. counterjihad.com/terror-experts… (14 Dec 2016)
The author of the article for discussion is Paul Sperry, part of a “Counter-Jihad” network with connections to every Islamophobic organization in America.
The people of Dartmouth have an important decision to make: approve a Prop 2 1/2 override to pay for increases in teachers’ pay — or continue short-changing teachers, especially those earning the least.
Dartmouth teachers are still working without contract while escalating healthcare costs are actually reducing their take-home pay. The town’s contract with the Dartmouth Education Association does not include steps or cost-of-living increases. And some of Dartmouth’s most economically vulnerable workers are teachers’ aides who not only have to worry about declining earnings — they’re already making sub-poverty wages.
According to the now-expired agreement between the school district and the Dartmouth Educators Association (DEA), a first-time aide without a bachelor’s degree earns $16,614 a year and the position pays a maximum of $24,206 for a six year aide with a bachelor’s degree. These salaries represent gross wages of between $9.89 and $14.30. The Massachusetts minimum wage is $12 an hour. The lowest-paid teachers’ aide — typically a woman — makes $16,614 a year in pre-tax earnings, and her estimated take home pay is $14,259.
To put this economic and gender wage inequality in perspective, a typically male county correctional officer with only a high-school degree earns between $56-$60,000 a year. And there is currently a bill in the legislature to give Massachusetts correctional officers (the fourth best paid in the country) a $100 million raise.
Even with the town picking up 52% of the cost of her HMO Network Blue family plan, our first-year teachers’ aide pays $6,407.73 a year for the mandatory town health insurance and she cannot choose a different provider. After paying almost one-half of her sub minimum-wage salary for healthcare, she ends up making only $7,851 a year. That’s $4.67 an hour.
According to Dartmouth Educators Association President Renee Vieira, healthcare costs rose in 2018 by 8.3% and again by 4.3% in 2019. Vieira says that the 52% contribution the school district pays is low compared to other communities.
One option for the union is to demand a higher town contribution for healthcare. Raising the town contribution from 52% to 60% would put another $1,068 in every teacher’s hands. With this adjustment, instead of living on just $7,851 a year, our first-time teachers’ aide would then be bringing home just $8,919 a year — for a family.
Addressing healthcare alone won’t help a teacher’s aide. What she really needs is better base pay. Dartmouth residents, then, are going to have to decide whether they want to save a few bucks or make their teachers work for declining — and in some cases — poverty wages. This is not only an economic but a moral choice.
Absent national healthcare, which would help town government and small business immeasurably, it’s clear to me that Dartmouth needs to approve a tax override and sign an agreement with teachers providing cost of living increases and more affordable healthcare. Especially if it hopes to retain quality educators.
Both the town and the union must also do something specifically to improve the situation for aides who skate on the edge of poverty helping children in our schools.
Today’s issue of the Standard Times featured an article about a New Bedford man, respected in his community, who has been accused of rape and kidnapping.
The Bristol County District Attorney immediately asked for a dangerousness hearing when the defendant was arraigned on Wednesday. Judge Jeffrey Clifford granted the request and ordered the man held without bail.
The defendant’s lawyer is quoted as saying, “After speaking with him, I honestly believe he is innocent. There is evidence that will exonerate him.”
Nevertheless, the man will likely be held in pre-trial detention for at least four months in Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s dismal hellhole of a jail — presumed guilty, unable to freely consult with his lawyer, and having never had his day in court.
Just last week Randy Gioia, deputy chief counsel of the Committee for the Public Counsel Service’s Public Defender Division, wrote a letter in the Standard Times decrying the practice of using dangerousness hearings to routinely deny bail to defendants in Bristol County. “During fiscal years 2017 and 2018, Quinn’s office had 368 dangerousness hearings in New Bedford alone. That’s more than Boston and all of Norfolk County, combined, during that same period of time.”
It is not a coincidence that Bristol County also has the highest rate of pre-trial detention deaths and the highest rate of jail suicides. Bristol County is a blood red stain on the entire state.
If this were not bad enough, DA Quinn has been lobbying for even more draconian dangerousness provisions in a bill Republican Governor Charlie Baker sponsored, H.66, “An Act to protect the Commonwealth from dangerous persons.” Quinn apparently wants even more blood on his hands.
Gioia was critical of New Bedford mayor and former prosecutor Jon Mitchell’s attacks on the judicial practice of granting bail as it was intended under the constitution. Mitchell, speaking more as prosecutor than mayor, told the Standard Times that the practice has “compromised the safety of our city, negated the hard work of our police officers, and undermined the public’s respect for the state judicial system.”
Baloney.
I’m not worried about judges who follow the Eighth Amendment — but I am extremely concerned about those who act as rubber stamps for prosecutors. When judges and prosecutors are too friendly, as they are in Bristol County, injustice and death is the result.
I don’t know enough about the facts of this specific case, neither does Jon Mitchell and — more importantly — neither does a jury of the man’s peers. Until the man is sentenced we are supposed to regard him as innocent. Let’s do that — and not deny him his Eighth Amendment rights.
If Bristol County keeps on denying civil rights to defendants, just itching to play vigilante, and rewarding abusive sheriffs and prosecutors, we just might have to rename the SouthCoast “the Deep South Coast.”
The U.S. Senate consists of 100 senators, 67 of whom must vote to convict Donald Trump in order to remove him from office. Of these, 53 are Republicans, 45 are Democrats, and 2 are independents. One may think that the greatest obstacle to fair proceedings in the Senate is political affiliation.
But like most things in America, it’s going to be about race.
While Republicans have a majority in the Senate, it’s thanks to a Constitution which gives a state like Wyoming with half a million people the same number of senators as California with almost 40 million.
Our nation’s founders not only feared black demographics but modeled the Senate after the British House of Lords. It wasn’t until the 20th Century that a citizen even got to vote for his senator, Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were appointed by the governor of each state and often the position was inherited. It wasn’t until 1920 until women could vote at all.
By design, then, the U.S. Senate has always been the Yankee version of the House of Lords. By design it was and remains undemocratic, and by design its purpose is to thwart the will of the people’s House of Representatives. It does this a little too well, and thus undermines democracy.
Also by design, the Senate remains an almost exclusively white club. Of the nation’s 100 senators, 91 are white — a statistical anomaly in a country where 76% of the people are white and the percentage has been in steady decline since 1950. There are four Hispanic senators, three Asian senators, and three Black senators. Kamala Harris is of Indian-Jamaican heritage, checking off two boxes.
All of which is to say — this is the lily white jury that’s going to consider Trump’s Articles of Impeachment.
Donald Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn’t lose a vote. A Department of Justice memorandum gives him a get-out-of-jail-free card for federal offenses. And the composition of the Senate makes it virtually certain that Trump’s impeachable offenses will result in acquittal.
But American deference to white billionaires is bipartisan.
Even the House’s Articles of Impeachment are watered-down charges consisting only of the president’s most recent attempts to extort Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 presidential election. So far, the charges don’t include anything from the Mueller report, Trump’s numerous emoluments clause violations, lying about illegal payments to porn stars and mistresses, or any of his many obstructions of justice.
As if all this kid glove treatment were not bad enough, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell intends to fast-track the Senate trial down to two weeks — three times shorter than Nixon’s. And for the sake of comparison, in 2016, when South Korea impeached president Park Geun-hye for corruption and influence-peddling, prosecutors charged her with 13 counts remarkably similar to Trump’s, and her trial in South Korea’s Constitutional Court lasted 10 weeks. Gun-hye’s refusal to appear before the court was never an impediment to her conviction.
No, the travesty of justice we are about to witness from an all-white jury in the U.S. Senate is one America has seen many times before:
In 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury after one hour of deliberation.
In 1963, after Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi, two all-white juries acquitted his killers in separate trials.
In 1998, when 13 white supremacists were charged with attempting to murder a federal judge and FBI agent, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
In 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin by a jury with only one juror of color.
In 2016, a group of armed sovereign citizens who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were acquitted by an all-white jury — while on the same day unarmed Native Americans protesting a pipeline on their own land were maced and beaten by police.
It’s not even possible to list the thousands of times that white police officers have murdered unarmed black men and been acquitted or simply not charged.
As Trump’s impeachment unfolds, Democrats may rightly fume about a partisan Senate subverting justice by speeding through a sham trial with the clear intention of acquitting the white guy president.
But it’s a travesty of justice that’s hardly unique — and it’s nothing new.
Republicans are incredibly on-message at all times, while it’s difficult to determine what the Democratic Party stands for. An example close to home is Margaret Monsell’s piece in Commonwealth which shows Massachusetts Dems led by House Speaker Bob DeLeo being more interested in safeguarding incumbent seats than with the professed values of the Democratic Party.
One may be inclined to ascribe the superiority of Republican messaging to that party’s penchant for authoritarianism and undemocratic dirty tricks — and you will get no argument from me. But Republicans actually believe in something — no matter that much of it is cruel and immoral — and they never miss an opportunity to hammer away at their message.
Despite professed values, in the presidential race this polling-based approach has led to candidates of color like Kamala Harris dropping out and to the short-changing of candidates like Cory Booker — the “other” Rhodes Scholar mayor (but the one with six years in the Senate).
Quentin James of the CollectivePAC, a black political action committee, called out liberal Democrats in 2016 for the “other” type of white supremacy: “I am talking about, […] ‘a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.'”
James may have predicted the 2020 presidential race in 2016.
But also in Democratic congressional races the strategy of discounting values and real constituents led to the DCCC backing Jeff Van Drew — the most conservative New Jersey white male Democrat with his 100% rating from the NRA — over Tanzie Youngblood, a progressive black woman with a #MeToo message.
And if the name “Van Drew” sounds familiar, it’s because this DCCC-financed virtual Republican just made it official and defected to the Republican Party, announcing he’s voting against impeachment.
Democrats need to start showing they believe in something besides polling, and they have to run with a consistent message and consistent values — regardless of the district and regardless of the futility of a particular race.
This is a tune that’s topped the Republican Hit Parade for years.
Tom Hodgson is not friend of the truth — even when it comes to stories of his own father.
On April 18, 2013, halfway through the Obama Administration, a group of eight senators known as the Gang of Eight stood before cameras in a Senate conference room, confident that their immigration reforms would shortly become a reality. At precisely the same moment in another room, Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (named for both a Confederate president and general) had organized a parade of county sheriffs, including Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson, to lobby against the reforms as a gratuitous “amnesty” for “criminal aliens.”
When it was his turn at the microphone (set up by Session’s aide, Stephen Miller), Hodgson painted a picture of five million people patiently waiting in lines outside American borders to become citizens — and another twelve million dangerous, criminal aliens living among us, “disrespecting” American laws. Hodgson invoked his Anglo-American heritage: “My father immigrated from England, and he raised thirteen children here.” Hodgson later told PRI: “My father didn’t walk around the streets hiding every time a police car came by, put his head down or what have you. My father came the right way.”
Hodgson went on to blast undocumented immigrants as filthy, disease-ridden burdens on their communities: “Illegal immigrants are creating public health hazards, public safety concerns,” Hodgson said, “living in homes, one-room apartments with three families, taking mattresses off the streets that are infested with bedbugs, filling our emergency rooms for lack of a better care and costing the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars.” The Gang of Eight’s immigration reforms were scuttled.
But Hodgson was not only lying about immigrants — but also about his “model immigrant” father.
Actress Tina Alexis Allen, Hodgson’s youngest sister, published a memoir in 2018. Her story of family trauma and recovery is hers alone to tell. But “Sir John” Hodgson, as he insisted on being called — the sheriff’s father, Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, Vatican courier, a man who carried four passports and racked up half a million miles a year in travel — is a central character in both Allen’s memoir and in Tom Hodgson’s mendacious narrative of immigration done the “right way.” Allen’s recounting of her father’s immigration to the United States and how a fourteenth Hodgson child immigrated to the United States reveal her brother the sheriff’s narrative as nothing but a tale woven out of whole cloth.
From Allen we learn that her father “Sir John” claimed to run the War Office in British-mandate Palestine as a 24 year-old and that he became an American citizen — not by waiting in line or immigrating the “right way” — but by courting and eventually marrying an American nurse two years older than himself and wrangling a transfer to Washington DC. That nurse, a native of New Bedford, MA, not only gave “Sir John” a sure path to citizenship as a male “war bride,” but her family connections in Bristol County helped pave the way for her son Tom to burrow his way into the county’s political establishment.
Matt Cameron, a Boston immigration attorney, disputes historical revisionists like Tom Hodgson who claim there is an equitable and orderly immigration line. “Where is this line? Where does it start? How long is it? Are there bathrooms?” Cameron points out that, thanks to overtly racist policies before 1965, Anglo-Saxons like Hodgson’s father were always preferred. “You can whitewash your own family history all you want, but it’s always been this way.”
It also helps if you’re a rich white man who can game the system with high-level connections.
In 1954 — when Tom Hodgson was three months old — “Sir” John Gerard Hodgson and Anne Marie Hodgson adopted a 10 year-old Anglo-Arab orphan named Victor Charles Joyce, the son of an Army comrade of Hodgson’s, and a child who did not qualify for naturalization under existing immigration quotas.
While the elder Hodgson could have made his adoptive child wait in line until it was his turn, “Sir John” instead used his connections with U.S. Maryland Senator John Marshall Butler, who like himself was a virulent anti-Communist, and whose campaign Joseph McCarthy managed. Butler officially notified Arthur V. Watkins, Chairman of the Senate Immigration and Naturalization Subcommittee on the Judiciary, that he had filed a private bill for Hodgson. From the Congressional Record:
Dear Arthur: on June 23 I introduced Senate bill 3652 at the request of Mr. and Mrs. John G. Hodgson, American citizens residing in Maryland at 5 East Irving, Chevy Chase, Md., for the purpose of bringing their adopted son, Frances Timothy Mary Hodgson, age 11 years, from the Franciscan Orphanage in Jerusalem, Jordan, to the United States of America.
“At the time of adoption, it was assumed that the adopted son be charged to the Jordan quota and could enter the United States under fourth preference of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which is at present open. When petition was filed, birth and baptismal records showed that the boy was born on June 13, 1943, in Nazareth, Palestine, which city is now in the State of Israel. The fourth preference for the State of Israel is oversubscribed and bill S.3654 has been introduced to permit Francis Timothy Mary Hodgson, adopted son of John Gerard and Anne Marie Hodgson to enter the United States under the fourth preference quota for the Jordan Kingdom as he has resided in Bethlehem and Jerusalem since shortly after birth in Nazareth. Records show the boy was baptized in Bethlehem (Jordan) July 5, 1944.”
The bill was not drafted to provide a non quota visa but it was felt that as the adopted child resided in Jordan all his life, that he could be charged to the Jordan quota.
On August 19, 1954 Hodgson’s private bill quickly moved from one express line to another in the U.S. House of Representatives (relevant portions of Congressional Record here) — a professional courtesy for a fellow “Anglo Saxon” immigrant.
Interestingly, Butler went out of his way to argue that this special legislation for Hodgson was not really an effort to bypass immigration quotas, but that the boy had lived in a formerly Jordanian part of Israel “all his life” — a kindness Tom Hodgson today is not prepared to extend to DACA recipients.
When asked to help place this maneuver in historical context, immigration attorney Matt Cameron noted that “today’s closest analogue might be the Special Immigrant Juvenile process, a fourth-preference visa available for minors who were abused, abandoned or neglected by one or more parents (many are orphans). As with the fourth-preference beneficiaries from Israel, SIJ from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (the countries which have benefited by far the most from the program) is seriously oversubscribed and wait times are now well over two years.”
“Given that this process is available for qualifying individuals up to the age of 21, I would guess that hundreds of SIJ-eligible people have been locked up in Hodgson’s disgrace of a jail over the years and deported either before they had a chance to apply or while waiting ‘in line’ for a visa in the same category as the one that his family had no problem manipulating to their benefit 65 years ago.”
Travel records the ACLU received from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office feature the same sloppy paperwork and potential abuses of taxpayer money that a State Audit warned of last February and which Bristol County for Correctional Justice (BCCJ) found in documents from its own FOIA request last year.
BCCJ has previously called for a forensic audit of the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office — not just because two of its officers were convicted of federal money laundering charges in the “Godfather” case — and not merely because the sheriff is now being sued for receiving kickbacks from a phone vendor.
Tom Hodgson has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant and forfeiture money that were intended to be used for opioid treatment — and now we learn that he has never written a single email relating to MAT treatment — and that he lied to the public about his communications with other sheriffs at a 287(g) hearing last April.
And we’ve said this before, too: the sheriff is using large sums of taxpayer money to fund a private war on immigrants — a war designed by and coordinated with white supremacists within and down the street from the White House. All while neglecting the rehabilitation of prisoners in his jail.
The ACLU’s information request proves it. Their FOIA request shows hundreds of Tweets and emails between White House and anti-immigration zealots, including 74 with the White House’s resident white supremacist, Stephen Miller — but nothing related to helping people with opioid use disorder.
If you believe in math, this is a ratio you can’t ignore.
And then there’s the sheriff’s travel — again. In 2017, shortly after the Trump inauguration, Hodgson spent almost two weeks in Washington, DC and in his hometown of Chevy Chase, Maryland. The hand-written cover sheet attached to his travel invoices states that the Sheriff was attending the PREA Conference (the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center Conference).
This sounds plausible enough — since no one ever really bothers to scrutinize sheriffs’ expenses — until you find that the Massachusetts Department of Corrections indeed convened a PREA Conference that month, but it was at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel — that’s Boston, not DC — and that Bristol County Sheriff’s Office CEO Lawrence Oliveira attended it, not Hodgson.
So what was Hodgson doing in Washington, DC for twelve days between January 30, 2017 and February 12, 2017? The Sheriff’s Bank of America statement shows him staying at some pretty swanky places in the nation’s capital. And he didn’t even send us a thank you.
Absent any oversight of the sheriff’s finances — and absent any thorough audits — this would have gone undetected if not for the ACLU’s FOIA request.
Was Hodgson visiting family, taking a winter vacation, huddling with his white supremacist buddies at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, meeting with the Trump administration, or what? And why were Massachusetts taxpayers once again footing the bill?
We just don’t know. And Hodgson’s deceptive record-keeping certainly doesn’t shed any light on the truth. It’s hard to imagine what sort of pressing county business requires a county sheriff to spend two weeks in luxury hotels in Washington, DC.
Two decades of friendly “performance” audits by the state have failed to improve Hodgson’s record-keeping habits or stop his abuses of taxpayer money. Once again we call for a forensic audit of the Bristol County House of Corrections.
For over two years Bristol County for Correctional Justice has been hammering away at a painfully obvious truth: Sheriff Tom Hodgson is neglecting the job voters elected him to do — caring for and rehabilitating prisoners — at the expense of his collaboration with white supremacists.
Recent disclosures of responsive documents from a FOIA request the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLU) made to the Bristol County Sheriffs Office (BCSO) last March prove just how true that contention is.
In the ACLU’s repository there are literally hundreds of communications between White House officials, including dozens from White Supremacist Stephen Miller and demonstrating coordination between Hodgson, the White House and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Hodgson’s real and only focus. Yet even though a majority of Hodgson’s prisoners have substance abuse disorders, his office could not provide a single email or Tweet documenting a shred of concern for helping prisoners with medically-assisted treatment (MAT).
The ACLU archives make for pretty interesting reading. Hodgson’s slavish, unctuous attempts to ingratiate himself with the White House are exposed in 74 emails to Stephen Miller. We find White House talking points that Hodgson receives, and we see Hodgson notifying Miller that he’s been a good boy and used them in various interviews. We see his pettiness in action as he blasts New Bedford representative Tony Cabral, the Immigrant Assistance Center, and — as Yvonne Abraham reported in the Globe — Hodgson even removes information cards on ICE from the back of his own church, St. Julie’s in Dartmouth, and dutifully reports it to Miller. And although the ACLU did not request Hodgson’s correspondence with FAIR, he CC’s fairus.org in emails with Miller and Britt Carter, Associate Director of the White House Office of lntergovernmental Affairs. The ACLU’s trove of documents follows the release by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of extensive correspondence between Stephen Miller and a number of white supremacists.
All Hodgson’s efforts paid off recently when he was rewarded with a White House doggy bone — honorary chair of Trump’s Massachusetts re-election campaign.
Last April members of BCCJ attended a so-called “public hearing” on ICE 287(g) agreements and the topic of medically-assisted opioid treatment came up.
Hodgson has received several large grants for opioid treatment, so the public is entitled to know what he’s doing with all the money — a question that still must be answered. In addition, under Section 98 of Chapter 208 of the Acts of 2018, five sheriff’s offices have started piloting MAT treatment of prisoners — Hodgson isn’t one of them.
At the 287(g) hearings Hodgson offered a number of excuses for not offering treatment. The worst was that his officers — now serving as state-paid, part-time ICE agents — can’t afford ten minutes to supervise the treatments.
Currently, prisoners now receive a spritz of Vivitrol — a drug Alkermes already gives National Sheriff’s Association members a “taste” of for free.
Needless to say, BCCJ was not satisfied with Hodgson’s response and on September 23, 2019 we began trying to get better answers to what kind of MAT treatments, if any, the BCSO and its medical contractor provided. We contacted Beth Cheney, the Chief Operating Officer of Correctional Psychiatric Services (CPS), to ask what sort of treatment CPS provides prisoners in Bristol County.
In response, Cheney sent us a link to an article about the sheriff’s pilot program — the very program Hodgson and CPS refuse to participate in. Cheney also directed us to Jonathan Darling, the Sheriff’s spokesperson, for authorization to speak to CPS. So we did — and Darling passed the buck back to CPS:
“If you feel that CPS is not answering your questions, that’s an issue between you and CPS.”
In October we tried again, telling Darling that the “public would be well-served by knowing what types of MAT treatment the BCSO currently offers its prisoners.”
“I agree, I think we can do a better job at sharing with the public about our Mat and substance abuse programs. I’ll be working to update our website with more information on this. I believe you’ll find your answers there in weeks ahead.”
But the ACLU was also interested. On March 18, 2019 the ACLU requested the following from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office:
All records of any request, decision, or recommendation by BCSO to participate in, or not to participate in, any pilot program for the delivery of medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder at county correctional facilities, including under Section 98 of Chapter 208 of the Acts of 2018.
All records concerning the formulation or preparation of any request, decision, or recommendation described in paragraph 8, above, including without limitation any discussion of the reasons for such request, decision, or recommendation
The responsive documents the ACLU received to the request show that — while Hodgson was emailing Stephen Miller and numerous White House and anti-immigrant organizations almost daily — there was absolutely no correspondence regarding medically assisted treatment. None. Zero.
On May 29, 2019 — more than two months past the required 10 day window for response to FOIA requests — Hodgson’s office replied to the question of MAT treatments:
“No records exist that are responsive to this request.”
So on August 20, 2019 the ACLU’s legal counsel at Foley Hoag LLP wrote back to the Sheriff’s Office to obtain information the sheriff refused to divulge.
Among the many non-responses to the ACLU’s FOIA request, the BCSO had refused to provide records from the sheriff’s supposedly “personal” Twitter account.
The ACLU also disputed the BCSO’s contention that no records existed on MAT treatment because the Sheriff had made a public statement about collaboration with other sheriffs at the aforementioned 287(g) hearing on April 10th:
At the BCSO’s annual 287(g) steering committee meeting held on April 10, 2019, Sheriff Hodgson publicly announced that the BCSO will not implement the pilot program established by Section 98 of Chapter 208 of the 2018 Acts, and will, instead, continue its current practices for treating inmates for opioid disorder. ‘ During this meeting, Sheriff Hodgson made a number of statements that suggest he and/or the BCSO have records concerning this decision. For example, he stated:
“The sheriffs all met not too long ago — a few months back — and collectively we decided, for those that were going to decide to use medically-assisted treatment, that there would be a sampling of four or five sheriffs who were going to do it to see how it goes. Medically-assisted treatment is very controversial with regards to the types of medication that have to be given. For example, when somebody is on a medically-assisted treatment program, there are certain medications where it takes ten minutes per person to have that medication dissolve in their mouth, and they have to watched by a person on our staff until it is done.”
“We have probably the most difficult county when it comes to detoxing people for drug use.”
“I am not going to institute a program that’s going to have people come to jail who want to get off drugs, be exposed to more drugs. Because if you can’t go to jail to get off drugs, I don’t know where you’re going to go to get off drugs.”
“We aren’t going to institute programs that we don’t know [are] working yet, as are a number of other Sheriffs, until we know it works.”
Accordingly, no later than September 10, 2019, please: (1) confirm whether records responsive to Requests 8 and 9 exist and produce any such records; (2) confirm whether any documents responsive to Requests 8 and 9 are being withheld on the basis of any assertion of privilege; and (3) provide a description of what, if any, searches the BCSO undertook to identify records responsive to these requests, including the sources and custodians BCSO searched and any date ranges and/or search terms that it applied.
The BCSO replied on September 20, 2019, offering the following explanations to Foley Hoag and the ACLU:
“… the Sheriff’s Office states that Sheriff Hodgson is referring to a Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association Meeting (‘MSA’). any records of decisions made, if any exist, would be records of the MSA.
“… Sheriff Hodgson’s statements refer to his decisions to not institute medically-assisted treatment in its entirety. The decision was not reduced to writing and, thus, no record exists …”
Apparently Hodgson didn’t have time to jot anything down. He was too busy being a White House errand boy.
I have forgotten precisely how Wendell Berry’s “The Hidden Wound” came to be on my reading list. At the time I ordered the book I did not know that Berry had written it in 1968 as a meditation on race relations, safe in a quiet research room in a library on the Stanford campus. I knew only that Berry was a respected “agrarian” poet from Kentucky and a thoughtful man. Maybe I was hoping for a little hope.
Despite its age and defects, Berry’s book was not a disappointment. Those reading the book a half a century after it was written will be put off by dozens of uses of the N-word to describe a certain type of labor thought to be menial. And today’s reader will likewise be bewildered or angered by his thesis that white supremacy has equally wounded both whites and blacks. As one unsympathetic reviewer put it, “This book looks at the cultural wound of racism from the perspective of the oppressor, implying that the abused and the abuser suffer equally.” Berry never even comes close to making that case.
Likewise, Berry’s depictions of his grandfather’s tenant farmer Nick and Aunt Georgie are cringe-worthy tales of noble serfs who found true happiness in honest work on someone else’s land. To reinforce this notion Berry recalls the tale of Eumaios, “the noble swineherd” who befriended Odysseus upon his return to Ithaka. Berry also places himself in the shoes of Dostoevsky’s landowner, Levin, who desires to know more about the serfs who work his vast estate.
And Wendell Berry, in 1968, was hardly ready or willing to indict Capitalism for the separation of white men from the actual stewardship of the land they instead stole and despoiled and had others work on. His arguments are diffuse and he is almost comically incapable of drawing the obvious links between the racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction he describes throughout his meditation. Instead of understanding the sources of this alienation politically — which he explicitly rejects — Berry seizes upon Southern Agrarianism as the cure for his and America’s wounds.
Yet, despite these many sins and omissions, Berry’s book is nevertheless filled with insight. In the book’s early pages, Berry writes of white self-delusion facilitated by conscious myth-making and propaganda:
“As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the ‘gentleman and soldier.’ However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism — an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of (my emphasis) Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves.”
As a Southerner familiar with slaveholder customs, Berry demolishes the lie that slavery did “no harm” to either party:
“First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own?”
Southern Christianity itself had to contend with this moral contradiction. It solved the problem by completely hollowing itself out. Murder, rape, slavery and exploitation were no longer to be regarded as sins and were replaced by prohibitions on trivial acts such as drinking, failing to attend church, or gambling.
“Detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion. The religious institutions became comfort stations for scribes and publicans and pharisees. Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage — a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.”
Fifty long years before Steve Bannon’s pan-European nationalism efforts, Berry indicted white American culture as a sterile, delusional imitation of Europeanism — while, on the other hand, he pointed to black culture’s richness and connection to the reality of its people, history and the land.
And Berry wanted some of that:
“And then in the spring of 1964 I turned back on the direction I had been going. I returned to Kentucky, and within a year bought and moved onto a little farm in my native part of the state. That return made me finally an exile from the ornamental Europeanism that still passes for culture with most Americans. What I had done caused my mind to be thrown back forcibly upon its source: my home countryside, my own people and history. And for the first time I felt my nakedness. I realized that the culture I needed was not to be found by visiting museums and libraries and auditoriums. It occurred to me that there was another measure for my life than the amount or even the quality of the writing I did; a man, I thought, must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world. I began to want desperately to learn to belong to my place.”
The Southern Agrarianism that Berry seized upon in 1968 may then have been a naive, nostalgic rejection of industrialization, but today it is a prominent feature of Neo-Confederacy and the Alt-Right. Berry’s meticulously-drawn links to the actual stewardship of land by black farmers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers belies the claims of the revisionist Neo-Confederates whose real or imagined ancestors simply owned the people who worked the plantations.
Most importantly, what Berry’s book tells us is that white people have understood racism for centuries and have passed down their own history as a self-indictment. “The Hidden Wound” was written at just about the same time the Kerner Report came out. White America has been able to read about this wound for at least a half century.
So now the real question is — what the hell are we going to do about it?
Both slavery and the genocide of Native Americans were committed as soon as colonists began arriving in the Americas. It has taken White America over 400 years to begin a process of self-examination for its crimes — and as a group we’re not accustomed to apology or introspection. As the Town of Dartmouth approaches its 400th anniversary, it is only now looking at two issues related to its depictions of Native Americans. One is historical signage now under review by the Historical Commission. The other is the town’s school mascot, the “Indian.” Jim Hijiya is an emeritus professor of history at UMass Dartmouth, lives in Dartmouth, and offers a thoughtful take on changing the mascot’s name.
by Jim Hijiya
Whether to keep an Indian as a school mascot is a hard question to answer — at least it has been for me. I’ve changed my mind twice already.
I was born and raised in Spokane, Washington, less than twenty miles down the highway from Eastern Washington State College. My sister went to Eastern in the late 1960s, and I rooted for the sports teams from her school. Those teams were called the Savages, and their logo featured a Native American who did not look friendly.
At the time I didn’t see anything wrong with that. It was what I grew up with. I was used to it, and so was everybody else, except maybe some Indians, and nobody cared what they thought. Go, Savages!
Then I went off to college, followed by graduate school. In the 1970s I heard that Eastern had changed its mascot. They weren’t the Savages anymore; they were now the Eagles. “Eastern Eagles” — kind of poetic.
Some of Eastern’s alumni complained thunderously about the treacherous and spineless abandonment of tradition; but I, having spent a few years away from home, now thought the change made sense. The word savages, when associated with Native Americans, did not reflect kindly on those Natives. It seemed unfair.
However, at about the same time, I heard about other name changes for which I had less sympathy. The Stanford University Indians had switched their name to the Cardinal (singular, with no S, indicating a shade of red, not a flock of birds). On the other side of the continent, the Dartmouth College Indians had changed their name to the Big Green. One red, one green, no Indian.
I thought that this was going too far: political correctness run amok. Sure, Savages was derogatory. Redskins was not much better. But Indians? What’s wrong with that? You insult somebody by calling her or him a “savage,” but there’s nothing wrong with being called an “Indian.”
That’s what I still thought when I came to teach history at Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1978. My neighbors had kids who went to Dartmouth High, so I tagged along with them to football games on Thanksgiving. With untempered enthusiasm I rooted for the Dartmouth Indians.
But then, over the years, I changed my mind again. I read more and thought more and came to a different conclusion.
Indians are a race of human beings, like whites or blacks or Asians or Hispanics. However, I don’t know of any sports team named after whites, blacks, Asians, or Hispanics. “The Orientals”? “The Fighting Caucasians”? I can’t even imagine giving a team a name like that. So why do we have “Indians”?
Then I got to thinking about who gets used as mascots. Most often they’re animals: Atlanta Falcons, Boston Bruins, Chicago Bulls, Detroit Tigers. Sometimes mascots are human beings but ones who aren’t around anymore: USC Trojans, Bishop Stang Spartans, Minnesota Vikings, Pittsburgh Pirates, New Bedford Whalers.
Some mascots are beings that never existed: Giants (from New York or San Francisco) or, closer to home, Blue Devils from Fairhaven. The Boston Celtics and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame both are represented by leprechauns.
We have, then, three common kinds of mascots: (1) animals, (2) people from vanished civilizations, and (3) creatures of fantasy. At first glance, the Dartmouth Indian may seem to belong to Category 2. He wears paint on his face and feathers in his hair, which not many people do any more, at least not at the office or the supermarket. He seems to belong to the past. The Dartmouth High School Student Handbook says that the mascot recognizes “the Native American Heritage of the South Coast,” and “heritage” comes from the past.
Actual Indians, however, exist abundantly in the present, which causes a problem for Dartmouth High. When your school mascot shares a name with living people, you need to be careful not to make that mascot look bad. The Student Handbook prohibits “dress, gestures and/or any other activities or characterizations that portray the Dartmouth Indians in a stereotypical, negative manner.” For example, students attending games are forbidden to do the Tomahawk Chop, which makes Indians look like bloodthirsty savages.
The image of the Dartmouth Indian is not explicitly “negative,” but it is “stereotypical.” It has to be. No one icon can accurately depict a group as numerous and various as Native Americans. The Dartmouth Indian has to stand in place of many people who don’t look much like him: women, for example. (I can’t think of any school mascots who are distinctively female.)
The Dartmouth Indian is a man in the prime of life, and he looks vigorous. Though he lacks armor and armament, he appears to be a worthy adversary for the Bishop Stang Spartan with his helmet or the New Bedford Whaler with his harpoon. This is why he symbolizes the Dartmouth High School sports teams: he embodies physical prowess.
This is also why he does not symbolize the school math team or debate team, who, whatever other strengths they possess, are not distinguished by their athleticism. Those teams don’t call themselves “the Indians.” They call themselves “Dartmouth.”
But why can’t the Dartmouth Indian smile? Why does he look so serious?
Because that’s his job. Like a Lion or a Tiger, he is supposed to scare you. He is the embodiment of a boast, saying, in effect, “I am strong, and I will beat you!” Consider the fact that Pirates, Corsairs, and Raiders are sports mascots. When they roamed the earth as actual people, they were loathed as robbers and murderers; but now that they’re safely deceased, we honor them as symbols of martial dexterity. Even the leprechaun is pugnacious: the Notre Dame mascot has his fists up, spoiling for a fight, and the Boston Celtics symbol has a hand resting on a cudgel. You don’t want to mess with these guys. And you don’t want to mess with the Dartmouth Indian.
But here’s the problem. The Dartmouth Indian exploits and reinforces an old stereotype of the Indian as a killer. He may not be called a “Brave” (like Atlanta) or a “Warrior” (like Golden State), but he sure looks like one, enough so that he makes some fans want to perform the Tomahawk Chop. He makes it easy for us to continue to believe that Indians are all about battle. We remember them mainly for the same reason we remember the Trojans and the Spartans: they fought wars.
For four hundred years, Indians seemed dangerous to Americans who weren’t Natives. As the whites pushed Natives off the land and subjected them to alien rule, Indians fought back, killed some of the invaders, terrified the rest, and created a lasting image of the Indian as a menace. That image was used to justify exterminating Natives and taking their land. Even after the Indians had been subdued, their threatening image was perpetuated in books and movies. This, then, is why Indians, unlike all the other human races, serve as mascots for athletic teams: because of their reputation for violence.
If the mascot of Dartmouth High sports teams were a Bear or a Viking or a Giant, there would be nothing wrong with his seeming to be a potential threat to public safety. However, he’s not. He’s an Indian. By reminding us that some Indians, sometimes, were fighters, he lets us forget that most Indians, most of the time, devoted themselves to peaceable pursuits like farming or hunting or caring for children — or playing sports.
Try to imagine a different kind of Indian mascot: say, one looking like the picture on the Sacajawea dollar (a coin, by the way, that you never see), which commemorates the guide and interpreter for Lewis and Clark. A woman would be just as typical of Native Americans as the current Dartmouth Indian. However, I don’t think she would be as inspiring to the football team. For that we want somebody rough and tough.
But does it have to be an Indian?
There are, of course, arguments for keeping the high school mascot. For example, some people insist that the Dartmouth Indian honors the original inhabitants of our region. The high school handbook says that the Dartmouth Schools “shall be responsible for educating Dartmouth students on the history and important role that the Apponagansett-Wampanoag” played in the history of Dartmouth, so perhaps the mascot is supposed to be part of a program teaching students about Native Americans.
But does that happen? Maybe at some point in the students’ education a teacher tells them something about the Apponagansetts. If it’s not an integral part of the curriculum, however, I doubt that students remember much. Are there courses for them to take in subjects like Native American History, Conversational Wampanoag, or Indians in Contemporary Society? I don’t think so.
Is there, then, any reason to believe that Dartmouth students know more about Indians than do students at New Bedford High or Bishop Stang? Probably not. What Dartmouth students know about Indians, I suspect, is what they have seen on their uniforms or green sweatshirts. But isn’t that granting “honor” to Indians on the cheap?
Before we make our judgment on the Dartmouth Indian, there is one very important question that we ought to ask: What do actual Indians think? I have read that some local Native people love the mascot (though they might not like having it called a “mascot”) and want to keep it. I can understand that. The Dartmouth Indian is a symbol of courage and strength, somebody who will not be pushed around, somebody to make you proud.
If you wrap yourself in the image of the warrior, however, you trap yourself in that same image. It’s hard to look like a warrior and also look like, say, a novelist or a nurse. Thus the symbol narrows our vision of what Native people are; every stereotype, even a positive one, carries a price tag. By perpetuating the idea that Indians are warriors, we give fans of the Atlanta Braves and Florida State Seminoles a stronger excuse for doing the Tomahawk Chop. Warriors and tomahawks go together.
This is probably why I have read about not only Native Americans who want to preserve the Dartmouth Indian but also about ones who want to get rid of Indian mascots altogether. The National Congress of American Indians, for example, has applauded Maine’s recent law banning all Indian mascots at public schools in the state. I don’t know whether the NCAI accurately represents Native opinion, but I suspect that it represents a significant chunk of it.
Now I would like to know what tribal councils and large numbers of individual Indians in southeastern Massachusetts believe. If there is a consensus or even a strong majority opinion among the people most affected by the existence of the Dartmouth Indian, then I think we ought to let their judgment weigh heavily on the scales. I hope that in its consideration of this issue, the Dartmouth School Committee will seek out several organizations and many individuals to find out what Native people want.
I think we all should do a cost/benefit analysis. The benefit of having an Indian as the symbol of Dartmouth sports is obvious: it associates Native Americans with courage and strength. The cost of having an Indian mascot, in contrast, is not obvious but hidden: you can’t see its effect right away, and you have to think about it before you can see it coming. Associating Indians with physical struggle perpetuates the notion that fighting is what Indians are all about. I think there’s more to them than that.
I can understand why many Dartmouth High School alumni don’t want to give up the Indian. He was part of their high school experience, they cherish that experience, and so they cherish the Indian. What I hope they realize now, however, is that he was not an essential part of that experience. If the mascot had been an Eagle or a Pirate, the students’ lives at Dartmouth High would have been pretty much the same. They would have learned math and history (or not), enjoyed the football and basketball games (or not). The mascot doesn’t make much difference. It’s the school itself that counts.
If Dartmouth High gets a new mascot, people will get used to it, though it may take a generation or two for everybody to come around. At Eastern Washington University nowadays, students cheer wholeheartedly for the Eagles. A few still wish the Savages were back on the warpath, but not many. A nephew of mine graduated from Stanford a year ago, and he didn’t even know that his university’s teams had once been called the Indians instead of the Cardinal.
On September 27th, the same day Tom Hodgson was giving the president an award in Washington, DC on the taxpayer dime, one of his prisoners died.
Scott Lajoie’s death set another gruesome record for a sheriff who seems to have no interest in his day job. Already leading the state in suicides and coming in a close second on both recidivism and assaults by correctional officers, Hodgson’s jail now comes in second with three times the state average for pre-trial detention deaths.
Since January 2019, 13 people have died in pre-trial custody. That’s an average of less than one per county.
MGM Resorts International just agreed to a $800 million settlement with victims of the October 2017 mass shooting at its Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. Stephen Paddock killed an unimaginable 58 people one block away at street level in a crowd of 22,000 enjoying an evening of country music.
Lawyers claimed the hotel was negligent in permitting the shooter to bring in twenty bags of luggage containing weapons and ammunition to a pair of rooms on the 32nd floor.
The hotel may very well have been negligent to a degree — though it could be argued that high rollers, entertainers and their retinue often roll into town with plenty of luggage.
But — in choosing a casino with deep pockets to pay off the victims — those who might have prevented the carnage (besides the shooter) once again eluded responsibility:
the National Rifle Association, which fights gun control tooth and nail;
Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt, a friend of the NRA, who nixed state gun control legislation
the Nevada legislature, which has created the most lax gun registration laws in the nation
and, finally, the people of the benighted state of Nevada:
Following two more suicides at the Bristol County House of Correction this summer, there has been another death at Tom Hodgson’s jail.
While we do not yet know if the cause of death was suicide or an untreated medical issue, it is important to remember that each of these deaths has a human face.
Scott LaJoie, 49, was the father of five children and a grandfather of seven. He was an Army veteran, a musician, and ran a concrete forms business in Westport. On September 27th LaJoie was transported from the jail to Saint Luke’s hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His family has asked that donations be sent to Disabled American Veterans.
LaJoie’s death occurred while Sheriff Thomas Hodgson was in Washington DC giving President Trump another award. A 2017 suicide at the jail also coincided with a flurry of anti-immigrant lobbying in Washington by Hodgson.
Following LaJoie’s death, his case in Fall River District Court (docket #1932CR002613) was dismissed by Judge Kevin J. Finnerty because LaJoie died while never having gotten his day in court. LaJoie had been locked up without even the possibility of bail pursuant to Mass General Laws Chapter 276, section 58A.
While Sheriff Tom Hodgson has the highest suicides and the second highest recidivism rate in the state, not to be out-done Bristol County District Attorney Tom Quinn has the highest per capita number of 58A hearings and the second (just behind Essex County) total number of 58A hearings in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, according to Massachusetts Trial Court data. Democrat Quinn has also lobbied for even more draconian provisions in the Dangerousness statutes in concert with Republican Governor Charlie Baker.
Court records tell us that LaJoie had been prescribed various medications. In an April 4th, 2019 entry in docket #1932CR001197, Judge Franco Gobourne allowed LaJoie’s motion to see a doctor to get a prescription refilled. It is unclear whether LaJoie ever received those medications. A physician from SouthCoast Health specializing in medical and pharmaceutical management offered condolences.
While it’s too early to say if LaJoie’s death resulted from jail conditions inducing despair, medical neglect, or the absence of medically-assisted substance abuse treatment, LaJoie’s death is the consequence of overuse of pretrial detention by District Attorney Thomas Quinn and Bristol County judges who rubber-stamp his motions, subjecting prisoners to abusive conditions in the Bristol County Jail.
Court records tell us that LaJoie was locked up in June 2019 when his bail status on an earlier case (docket #1932CR001197) was revoked and prosecutors asked the judge to keep him locked up pursuant to Mass General Laws Chapter 276, section 58A (“Dangerousness”) based on the argument that LaJoie was so “dangerous” that no conditions of release could ensure the safety of his girlfriend, Rebecca Campbell.
Campbell had accused LaJoie of threatening to burn down the apartment they shared. As a result, LaJoie was arrested and [incorrectly] charged with an assault on Campbell — and with violating a “no abuse” order issued by the court. The earlier case was dismissed on the trial date, July 16, 2019, when Quinn’s office was unprepared to go forward with a trial. Nevertheless, LaJoie remained locked up on the new case (docket #1932CR002613) as a “danger.”
Attorney Sean A. McDermott was then appointed to represent LaJoie. McDermott did not file a single motion in the case and on the pretrial conference report simply checked off a few boxes. So much for zealous legal representation.
LaJoie’s case was scheduled for trial on August 26, 2019 but was continued to September 24, 2019, and then again to October 25, 2019. One can only imagine the despair of a person repeatedly denied bail and kept in perpetual detention without a trial ever in sight.
On September 27th, 2019 Scott LaJoie died at the Bristol County Jail.
The Mass Bail Fund is looking for additional volunteers to post bail for prisoners at the Bristol County jail. There will be a meeting in Dartmouth in November for those with time to give. Posting bail is the perfect volunteer gig for people with some privilege to put to good use. Email us if you’re interested.
The Mass Bail Fund doesn’t post bail of more than $500. A substantial percentage of those in county jails have not been convicted of a crime but cannot meet even a small bail amount. Click here for more information on how the Bail Fund works — but here’s the short version. You’ll get a call at an inconvenient hour. And when you show up to bail out your client, the Bristol County Jail will make you jump through more hoops than most; you’ll have to wait, come back later, or go to a different location. You’ll front the money for the Bail Fund, drive the client off the jail premises, and get your money back from the Bail Fund in roughly a week.
Anybody is welcome to volunteer, but if you’re older, whiter and a member of a religious organization you will magically get better results for your client. You’ll be doing your part to reduce mass-incarceration right in your own community.
ABC News and Univision hosted the Democratic debate at Texas Southern University in Houston on September 12th. Those putting questions to the candidates were ABC News anchor George Stephanopolous, World New Tonight anchor David Muir, Univision’s anchor Jorge Ramos, and news correspondent Linsey Davis, who asked the toughest and brightest questions.
The ten candidates chosen by the DNC were: poll leaders Bernie Sanders; Joe Biden; and Elizabeth Warren, all of whom are 70 and older and white; Amy Klobuchar; Kamala Harris; Cory Booker; and Beto O’Rourke, ranging in age from 47 to 59; then Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom are 45 or younger.
A friend thought Castro’s going after Biden for “forgetting” what he had just said about his healthcare plan was a cheap shot — and I agreed. But it was a self-inflicted wound since Biden was caught either denying the truth or really had forgotten his own health plan’s buy-in requirements. They say that lying only makes it worse — and they’re right. Biden also proved himself incapable of apologizing for past mistakes.
Following the debate, the talking heads scored candidates as if it had been a boxing match: how many punches landed, how many punches suffered. The talking heads said that Castro had disqualified himself. Maybe, but the low punch he landed on Biden had been effective — and instructive. Voters now know that Biden can’t keep his composure debating the Liar-in-Chief.
Linsey Davis asked hard questions of Kamala Harris, and I’m not sure Harris stood up to the scrutiny of her own criminal justice record. Like Biden, she seemed incapable of apologizing for past mistakes. Buttigieg is eloquent but inexperienced. Much of the time he sounded like he was delivering an award-winning high schooler speech to the VFW. Bernie had lost his voice and never managed to explain his views to voters as well as Warren, and Booker neither gained nor lost traction but, for me, was unmemorable. Andrew Yang has always been the candidate to save Capitalism from the income inequality it produces — by giving people some crumbs to live on. That’s his whole shtick.
Beto O’Rourke is an earnest, decent guy with a mix of great and not-so-great positions. But his position on guns is what all Democrats should aim for — hell, yeah, we’re coming for your AR-15s. The talking heads said his quip was a gift to Republicans. Democrats practically wet themselves in shock. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who sponsored an assault weapon ban himself, took pains to say that O’Rourke’s comment “doesn’t help.” Pete Buttigieg, who knows the damage the weapons can do, agreed that O’Rourke’s remark was just too much truth for voters to handle. Apparently, for mainstream Democrats, an assault weapon ban doesn’t really mean owners have to part with their weapons of war.
Finally, there was Amy Klobuchar, with her polite Midwestern version of “screw it, here’s what I think,” talking about legislation that could be voted upon today. While Klobuchar is a Centrist and hardly a visionary or a reformer, I can well imagine her at Donald Trump’s empty Oval Office desk, plugging away in an earnest bipartisan fashion at issues and political realities the country faces. If Democrats really need a Centrist to win, perhaps this is one that the progressive wing of the party may learn to grudgingly respect.
Let us remember 9/11. Today we remember the victims who died in New York, Washington, and in Pennsylvania. In the years immediately following 9/11 we were told that as a nation we had come together, that we were stronger for our national trials — that our democracy had triumphed over terrorism. It was, unfortunately, a short-lived lie. Today we hardly remember the world that preceded 9/11.
The American economy has been ravaged by trillions spent on wars that have never ended. Newborns on September 11th, 2001 are now eligible to vote. The Bill of Rights has been shredded by wiretaps, ethnic and racial profiling, the Patriot Act, police militarization, the end of habeus corpus, torture, kidnapping, illegal detentions, secret courts, and assassination teams that have targeted even American citizens. We have declared war on millions of people in a dozen covert wars we fight by incinerating civilians with drones. Our wars of choice have destroyed half a dozen countries and made millions of refugees flee their homes.
The world we inhabit today is a twilight dream, a fantasy land in which evolution competes with creationism, multiculturalism clashes with nativism, and freedom challenges authoritarianism. We have for so long lived in denial of American slavery and imperialism — is it any wonder we are so good at denying science and verifiable fact?
Useful lessons will likely never be drawn from 9/11. Every print and video remembrance presents the saccharine, the patriotic, the triumphal. No one wants to know why so much of the world hates us. And if we did we couldn’t be bothered for an honest answer. No, they hate us for our democracy.
Let us remember 9/11. This is a day for candlelight memorials and somber speeches. We’ll trot out patriotic stories of death and sacrifice, ask each other where we were when the Twin Towers fell, mouth prayers invoking god and first responders, vow to never let it happen again, then cloak ourselves in the righteousness of martyrdom.
Let us remember 9/11. Next year there will be another anniversary. Another year of perpetual war, of drone attacks, meddling in the affairs of other nations, the squandering of national treasure on war, the loss of even more civil liberties.
Let us remember 9/11. But let us also regard with honest, open eyes the America we have created in its wake.
Whenever I encounter a story about police abuse it almost always involves white cops and black or brown citizens. If not the police, it’s courts, prisons, or immigration authorities. You don’t have to be particularly perceptive to recognize the dominant factor in all these stories; you just need a long memory and a filing system. Racism permeates every aspect of American life — especially the criminal justice system and, most especially, the police.
So it was no surprise last week, when Scott Hovsepian of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police (MassCOP) blasted Elizabeth Warren for referring to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri as a “murder.” With black men having a one in a thousand chance of being fatally shot by police in their lifetime — two times the rate for whites — there is really no other word that suits this extreme indifference to life but murder. We are in fact so indifferent to these killings that police shootings aren’t even tracked by a government agency.
Delicate ears may prefer the phrases “wrongful death” or “unauthorized use of force.” But who are we kidding? Even when the evidence is crystal-clear that a police shooting was completely unnecessary and violated any number of departmental policies or protocols, officials will rarely admit to a mistake and instead trot out a legal doctrine known as Qualified Immunity which effectively gives policemen a license to kill — even when they have previously exhibited bad judgment, have psychological problems or a history of violence toward the non-white public. Even when the officer lies. Even when there is a video.
Hovsepian’s angry letter to Warren went out on August 10th:
“I want to make this as clear as possible and every member of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police wants you to understand; your labeling of law enforcement as racist and violent is unacceptable and dangerous. Maybe I didn’t deliver the message strong enough the last time we spoke. YOUR POLITICAL PANDERING FOR PRESIDENTIAL VOTES IS GETTING POLICE OFFICERS AND CITIZENS HURT AND KILLED. […] Your inflammatory rhetoric results in the erosion of relationships that members of law enforcement have developed within our communities. […] Graham v. Connor 490 U.S. at 396-97 (1989), provides in part: The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene…”
Unacceptable and dangerous. For a moment, a reader might be excused for thinking Hovsepian meant the national epidemic of police officers slaughtering black men, two thirds of them unarmed. Hovsepian mentions Qualified Immunity as a police officer’s shield from charges of murder in the second degree — “acts that demonstrate extreme indifference to human life.” But it’s not police killings that we ought to be worried about, says Hovsepian — no, it’s public criticism of the police that is killing officers. Or so he says.
A year ago at Dillard University, Hovsepian took issue with Warren’s characterization of the entire U.S. criminal justice system. Warren said that “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist… I mean front to back.” Hovsepian labelled Warren’s characterization “cancerous rhetoric” and again charged that criticism of police was lethal: “Your statements put each and every one of us in danger. Your statement dehumanizes every officer who puts on a uniform…”
Playing the part of the wronged and “dehumanized” party may be nothing but a rhetorical ploy, but it is precisely the same argument as Tucker Carlson’s claim that White Supremacy is a hoax because white people are the real victims of the American legacy of slavery.
Last week the Washington Post reported that, “among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death, according to a study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University.” In 2018 police killed 1,164 people. The number of black people killed by police (215) exceeded all police officers who died in the line of duty (148), servicemen killed in action (2) and Americans killed by Islamic terrorists (0) combined. There were only 23 days in 2018 when police did not kill someone. Thirteen of the 100 largest police departments accounted for a large percentage of police murders that year. 99% of all police killings never resulted in officers being convicted of any charges. In 2018 Americans were ten times more likely to die from being shot by a cop than in a mass shooting.
So, if anyone has a legitimate and “reasonable fear,” it is civilians fearing police violence. Americans are also increasingly afraid of militarized policing that is morphing into something very like occupation. Following the protests of Michael Brown’s murder, police turned Ferguson’s Canfield Drive into Fallujah.
While no doubt there are many good police officers and police departments, from the 30,000 foot view Warren is absolutely right. The names of black victims of police abuse, from Rodney King to Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, and Michael Brown, just keep being etched on headstones. We know what skin colors predominate among America’s 2.5 million incarcerated people. The legacy of slavery is apparent to anyone who has studied criminal justice issues or simply reads the newspaper. The Central Park Five, whose story was recently portrayed in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” embody everything that is wrong with America’s racist criminal justice system — police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct and overreach, brutal prisons — even an ad from a future president that read like a call to lynch five young men of color.
MassCOP’s Scott Hovsepian has it completely backwards when he charges that criticism of police racism puts officers at risk and undermines their work. It is racist cops who undermine community confidence in police departments and contribute to a community’s fear of helping police reduce crime. No matter how many public relations campaigns, youth programs, listening sessions, or ride-alongs police departments use to blunt community criticism, nothing compensates for all the damage that racist officers inflict.
Take the case of 20 year Muskegon, Michigan police officer Charles Anderson. Anderson put his house on the market and apparently didn’t think to put his KKK application or his Confederate flags away. A black couple touring the home realized the officer was a racist and dug into Anderson’s history, discovering he had been cleared in the fatal shooting of a black man in 2009. It wasn’t a surprise. The killing or the exoneration.
Or a story from August 6th describing Galveston, Texas cops leading a black man, slave-style, between the mounted officers’ horses. Police chief Vernon Hale weakly explained, “Although this is a trained technique and best practice in some scenarios, I believe our officers showed poor judgement in this instance.” Poor judgment that went unpunished.
Sergeant Heather Taylor, a member of the St. Louis Metro police department, was interviewed recently by CBS News as part of its series on racial bias in American police departments. “Do you think that there are white supremacists on the police force?” CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues asked. “Yes” Taylor replied. “You didn’t even pause,” Pegues said. “Have you seen some of the Facebook posts of some of our suspended officers right now?” Taylor responded. “Yes.”
Taylor could have been referring to Facebook posts collected by the Plain View Project, which to date has permanently recorded over 5,000 racist posts — that’s from only eight cities. The Project’s homepage says that “our concern is not whether these posts and comments are protected by the First Amendment. Rather, we believe that because fairness, equal treatment, and integrity are essential to the legitimacy of policing, these posts and comments should be part of a national dialogue about police” — a dialog shut down by police officials who claim that such a discussions put their lives at risk.
Blue Lives matter to police officers, but the same concern doesn’t aways extend to civilians — especially the black lives. In 2016 an Oregon police officer posted an image of a Black Lives Matter protest with a comment, “When encountering such mobs remember, there are 3 pedals on your floor. Push the right one all the way down.”
The Facebook page of Santa Fe, New Mexico Sergeant Troy Baker, also the police union president and a police cadet instructor, was a veritable cesspool of racist and homophobic rants, violent threats, and Confederate flags. Baker survived an internal investigation when no violation of department policy was determined, and he was allowed to retire early, remaining on the city payroll for eight months to obtain his pension.
Springfield, Massachusetts cop Conrad Lariviere thought white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. running down Heather Heyer in Charlotteville was pretty funny. “Hahahaha love this, maybe people shouldn’t block roads,” Lariviere wrote on Facebook. When confronted with the post, Lariviere told MassLive.com, “I am not a racist and don’t believe in what any of those protesters are doing, I’m a good man who made a stupid comment and would just like to be left alone.”
Lariviere was eventually fired but the damage was already done. “It will take us months, if not years, to earn back the level of public trust we once had,” Police Commissioner John Barbieri said. “It’s never easy to terminate a fellow officer, and I take no comfort in doing so.” But Lariviere’s union, Local 364 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, issued a statement saying it was —
“extremely disappointed in the decision of Commissioner Barbieri to terminate the employment of Officer Conrad Lariviere. Officer Lariviere’s comments on Facebook were made in his capacity as a private citizen […] While some may find Off. Lariviere’s comments to have been insensitive, we do not believe that they rise to the level of misconduct, and certainly do not warrant termination, even if there was a clear policy involved […] We also believe that the subject of the Facebook posting was a matter of public concern, and protected speech. We believe that the termination is based on political considerations, not a fair, impartial assessment of the evidence…”
Racist conduct and exercising poor judgement are, for many police associations, insignificant matters for officers charged with serving the public fairly.
In Phoenix, Arizona, 75 cops were caught on Facebook bashing Muslims, African-Americans, gays, and feminists. When Trayvon Martin was murdered, Phoenix officer Joshua Ankert wrote, “CONGRATULATIONS GEORGE ZIMMERMAN!!! Thank you for cleaning up our community one thug at a time.” Officer Dave Swick posted a roadside sign that said, “Ferguson protestors ahead, speed up, aim well.” Police dispatcher Christina Begay shared a picture of two cops laughing with the caption: “They said, ‘F–k the police,’ so I said ‘F–k your 911 call, I’ll get to your dying home boy when I finish my coffee.” Officer David Pallas posted a meme showing the Quran, with a caption that read: “HOW ABOUT BANNING THIS. IT OFFENDS ME!!” The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association defended the posts. “People — including cops — say things they regret.”
Add to a climate of hate the many unfortunate interactions between police officers and young people. Stop and Frisk — violations of the Fourth Amendment — go by many names: “community engagement,” “meet and greet,” “youth liaison.” But they only add to the fear, distrust and hatred many people have of police officers. In New Bedford a young man, Malcolm Gracia, is dead because police officers decided to aggressively “engage” a group of young men at Temple Landing after seeing what they thought was a “gang handshake.”
After allegedly stabbing an officer, Gracia was shot three times in the back and once in the side of the head. But the entire interaction should never have happened. “Even on the [police] version of the facts, the stop would be unlawful,” Judge Thomas F. McGuire Jr. wrote in a memorandum on a civil lawsuit filed by the victim’s sister. The City of New Bedford for many years claimed that the incident had occurred because of insufficient policies on “engagement” with youth. After the ACLU filed several FOIA requests, the city’s argument collapsed. Police should have simply followed the law.
But it’s not just a few bad apples or the frequently-cited lack of clear policies. As we saw in the case of Santa Fe, New Mexico, departmental racism often reflects, and is even encouraged by, the leadership of police unions and associations who represent tens of thousands of officers.
Consider Hovsepian’s Brother in Blue, Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, New York City’s second largest police union. Only last week Mullins shared a video made by white supremacist Colin Flaherty (author of “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry”) that calls black people “welfare queens,” “scam artists” and “monsters.” The film uses Trump-styled language:
“When a suspect chooses to flee from police, it is never for anything good,” the narrator says. “When a suspect flees a car at night in the projects, it can only be for something incredibly bad. One of the most astonishing aspects of police work in an urban environment, is the fact that almost literally no one has a job. The section 8 scam artists and welfare queens have mastered the art of gaming the taxpayer. Bounce from baby mama to baby mama, impregnate as many women as possible. She gets the welfare benefits, and you get the flop house benefits. Symbiotic.”
Mullins, nose freshly rubbed in his own white supremacy, uttered “I have black friends, white friends, Asian friends. I wouldn’t want to insult anyone. I don’t think one incident defines who I am.”
Or consider the nation’s largest group of sheriffs, the National Sheriff’s Association, which once sponsored its own crowdfunded border wall donation site but has now outsourced it to the American Border Foundation (ABF), an organization managed by white supremacists and supported by armed militias. (After months, ABF has raised only $222K of its $450 million goal).
According to Political Research Associates, a group that tracks nationalist currents in the U.S., sheriff departments throughout the country are riddled with members of the Patriot movement, Constitutional Sheriffs, militia members, Christian Identitarians, and white supremacists. Right here at home, Bristol County Massachusetts sheriff Tom Hodgson sits on the board of a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group — FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, established by white supremacist John Tanton.
But combine police racism with hyper-patriotism, militarism and PTSD, and you’ve got a big problem.
Since 9-11 more than 2 million Americans have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Justice runs a program called COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) which provides grants to communities to turn “vets to cops.” In 2016 the DOJ handed out $119 million to help communities pay for approximately 900 policemen. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has created a recruitment guide for veterans, and veterans can use their GI Bill benefits while attending police academy. America increasingly says “thank you for your service” to its warriors by re-deploying them domestically.
But programs like these, and hiring practices that favor ex-military, have a serious downside. By prioritizing military experience over diversity, police departments put communities at risk. For example, the San Jose Police Department, a force with serious racism problems, sees veterans as naturals for the police “because we have a paramilitary structure, [and] military veterans often times can easily integrate.” What ever happened to community policing?
Then there are the after-effects of war. With an increasing percentage of veterans becoming police officers thanks to programs like COPS, many officers seem to think they are still fighting the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. Ellen Kirshman, a psychologist who works with police officers, says that between 19% and 34% of all officers show some sign of PTSD: “This is pretty alarming. An officer with PTSD cannot think clearly, is probably hyper vigilant, has a short fuse, may not be sleeping well because of nightmares, might be policing in a reckless manner…” And this is precisely what one frequently sees in videos of police encounters with black men. Legislation has been signed into law to help officers with PTSD, but what about the public? Aren’t there cops who are simply too traumatized to serve the public? Even when they are identified, it’s difficult to remove them from the force.
When Elizabeth Warren spoke about the criminal justice system, she was talking about much more than policing. Yet police unions have become powerful lobbies and relentless opponents of criminal justice and prison reform. Natasha Lennard reports in the Intercept on the savage negative campaign the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) waged against Governor Mario Cuomo’s criminal justice reforms. Likewise, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent over $10 million lobbying for the Three Strikes law, mandatory life sentences, and prison expansions. In Illinois, police unions waged a campaign to stop the closure of the brutal Tamms Supermax prison. And we have fifty states just like this.
But nothing shows how racist the criminal justice system is as clearly as the history of opposition to reforming it.
In 1991 Rep. William Edwards introduced H.R.2972, the Police Accountability Act of 1991. The bill made it “unlawful for any governmental authority to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives persons of their constitutional or statutory rights, privileges, or immunities.” The bill had only 10 co-sponsors and never made it out of committee.
In 2000 John Conyers Jr. sponsored H.R. 3927, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act of 2000, which sought to impose national standards on law enforcement as we currently do in education. It had only thirteen Democratic co-sponsors and never made it to a vote. In 2015 Conyers again filed H.R.2875, this time with 48 co-sponsors. But again it died.
In 2015 Rep. Henry Johnson Jr. sponsored H.R.1102, the Police Accountability Act of 2015, which had 15 co-sponsors and died. The bill amended “title 18, United States Code, to provide a penalty for assault or homicide committed by certain State or local law enforcement officers, and for other purposes.” Again in 2017 Johnson filed H.R.4331, with 8 lonely co-sponsors. Again, it died.
In 2017 Rep. Gwen Moore sponsored H.R. 3060, Preventing Tragedies between Police and Communities Act of 2017, which required that police departments receiving federal funding train officers in de-escalation techniques. The bill had only 24 co-sponsors and died in committee — having also failed in 2016.
In 2017 Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee sponsored H.R.47: Kalief’s Law, which sought to amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to provide for the humane treatment of youths in police custody. The bill had only one co-sponsor and there was never a roll call vote.
Whether a majority or minority in Congress, police accountability has never been a priority for Democrats or Republicans. E. Tammy Kim, in an excellent piece in the Nation (“What to Do About the Police”), writes that, “as it stands, the three branches of government are unwilling to regulate the police. Mayors and governors defer to police chiefs and union presidents; judges make cheesecloth of the Fourth and 14th Amendments; and legislators vote again and again to increase law-enforcement budgets.”
In a 2015 ruling the Supreme Court gave police broad latitude to shoot at citizens recklessly and with impunity, when it rejected a suit against a Texas police officer who fired into a car with a high power rifle from an overpass, paralyzing a driver. The officer joked: “How’s that for proactive?”
In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Kisela v. Hughes that police officers can not be sued for arbitrary and unnecessary shootings — effectively granting law enforcement a deluxe edition of Constitutional rights. In dissenting, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling another sign of “unflinching willingness” to protect rogue cops and wrote that the decision “transforms the doctrine [of qualified immunity] into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.” Cops in America today truly have a license to kill.
With one exception, every piece of reform legislation mentioned above was sponsored by an African-American. And that ought to tell you something — white people are just not stepping up in sufficent numbers to fix injustices involving police, the courts, prisons, parole and probation systems, or to provide adequate rehabilitation and treatment of those ensnared in the “system.”
To quote Warren’s again, “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist… I mean front to back.”
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas is not an academic tome, but that doesn’t prevent him from introducing us to some of the neoliberal swindlers who persistently argue that giving the masses a few crumbs of their billions is doing good in the world. And Giridharadas does it without any need for class analysis or labor theory of value. It’s a quick-paced, enjoyable, and very enlightening book.
In America, where at least 40% of the population believes that immigration has created a zero-sum game in which they are losers of jobs and benefits to immigrants, these same people wholeheartedly embrace the “win-win” logic of neoliberalism, which says that when the super-rich profit, everybody does. Worse, they tell us that only they, these technocratic gatekeepers, are qualified to make change in an increasingly complex, technological world. It’s the Liberal version of Trump telling his base, “only I can save the country.” No matter who’s saying it, it’s profoundly anti-democratic.
Giridharadas points out that the founders of the Gig Economy exploit workers while claiming to be innovative job creators by using their considerable P.R. machines and the razzle-dazzle of their pompous mission statements. It’s not exploitation, these hucksters wink — at least in the sense of stealing from the consumer or the working class — if consumers and workers willingly give up their rights and power and wealth and private information for someone else’s profit.
Giridharadas convincingly explains how and why it is that the so-called “philanthropy” of the super-rich never manages to solve real problems or help real people. Instead, everything becomes a feel-good campaign that looks great on a web page or on a balance sheet. Carbon credits? Pay someone to take responsibility for your pollution. Problem solved — on paper.
We meet people like Vinod Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist, who speak of schemes like 2020 “entrepreneur” Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s plan to give $1000 to every family. These people know the super-rich are creating a world in which perhaps 80% of all workers may eventually be redundant and the ramifications scare the hell out of them. The world of their creation represents an “entertainment” problem (“how would we occupy the minds of all those people?”) and a political one (“how would we keep them from revolting?”) Remarkably, Khosla tells us without shame the real purpose of Yang’s plan. “To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well enough off. Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system, okay?” And, to neoliberals, real change is anathema.
Young, intelligent, well-heeled Americans, just at the moment of launching a career, are deeply torn between the cardboard values their parents, priests and teachers mouthed to them during their childhoods. But now, here they are, suddenly adults and working for McKinsey & Co., selling their souls and swallowing the most egregious cognitive dissonance. Indeed, Capitalism and its evil twin, neoliberalism, are charades, as Giridharadas implies, and people in Latin America know all too well. Sadly, many young people discover the truth for themselves only a few short years into their professional lives — but six figures into debt. Their work is no longer just a charade but a prison.
Many Americans have become increasingly alarmed by Donald Trump’s white supremacy, his contempt for democratic institutions of courts and Congress, efforts to redefine and disconnect human rights from international norms, and his administration’s recent participation in a conference on white nationalism. While few would go so far as to say that history is repeating itself, the Trump administration sure seems to be hitting a lot of Nazi notes, if not some Lieder. Understanding how and how rapidly things devolved in Germany in 1933 is an important exercise — especially if we want to make sure that “Never Again” means precisely that.
Ethnonationalism had a dark and dismal history in Germany long before precursors of the Hitlerjugend and the SS arose — long before Hitler. As a political movement Nazism had slow and steady growth after the First World War, but it wasn’t until 1932 when the Nazi party won 37.4% of the vote that Hitler came to power. A year later, in 1933, Hitler became Kanzler. That same year Dachau was constructed and was used mainly for political prisoners. Germans of the day might have felt a bit uneasy about concentration camps, but for the moment they were mainly being used on Communists.
Richard E. Frankel, Associate Professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, notes that, just as Trump did recently, Hitler pardoned war criminals. “In August of 1932, in the town of Potempa, nine Nazi Stormtroopers murdered a supporter of the German Communist Party, kicking him to death in his own apartment as his family watched in horror. Six were convicted with five receiving the death penalty. After the verdict, Hitler sent them a telegram in which he declared to them his ‘boundless loyalty.’ Shortly after he came to power in 1933, he pardoned the killers.” This was just the beginning of many such pardons. Hitler’s telegram should have been a signal to Germans of Hitler’s contempt of democratic norms, just as pardoning Joe Arpaio should have warned Americans about what Trump would do later.
1933 was a particularly ominous year in Germany. As Kanzler, Hitler declared that German foreign policy demanded the expansion of its territory. Germany First. The staged Reichstag fire and the Ermächtigungsgesetz (“Enabling Act”) consolidated Hitler’s power and Congress — I’m sorry, I meant the Reichstag— soon ceased to have any real political power. The Kanzler was now a Führer and his party had transformed into a cult of personality in which the leader’s wishes superseded any law. Political parties other than the Nazi party were soon illegal, trade unions were banned, and the first book burnings took place that year. Echoing themes we see today, Nazi Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. Germany was above international norms. To make Germany great again, it literally had to beüber Alles.
Within short order there were more mass-pardons, and the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (“Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”) purged the civil service of Jews. It was called a “restoration” for reasons MAGA America would love — the Civil Service had to be made great, and completely Christian, again. The military was also strengthened, universal conscription ordered, and by 1935 the first Race Laws were enacted. The Trump administration’s threats to override the Fourteenth Amendment — by decree — would confer citizenship by race and not birthplace.
In 1938 mobs organized by the Nazis carried out Kristallnacht — a night of terrorization of German Jews — and the victims were actually charged with the offense. The pretext for Kristallnacht was the assassination of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-old German Jew in Paris who had been expelled from the country. German Jews were then collectively punished with a Judenvermögensabgabe, a fine of one billion Reichsmarks for vom Rath’s killing. In today’s dollars this was $5.5 billion, to be satisfied by the expropriation of 20% of all Jewish property in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. The Nazis were just getting warmed up.
Despite the human rights abuses that had been occurring for over a decade (1929-1939), it was only when Germany invaded Poland that Britain and France declared war. In 1940 Denmark and Norway were occupied by Nazi Germany, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Germany developed plans for blitz-bombing Britain. In 1941 Yugoslavia and Greece were occupied. Germany advanced on Stalingrad. In 1941 Nazi Einsatzgruppen were already coordinating the wholesale slaughter of Jews in European towns and cities where no concentration camps existed. Finally, after Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. In 1942 the Wannsee Conference approved plans for the mass extermination of Jews, but the slaughter had been going on for years.
Germany was regarded by many Americans as a model of power and technological superiority. And a number of American industrialists supported Nazism. Fred Koch, the grandfather of today’s Koch Brothers, and his company, Winkler-Koch Engineering, provided the Nazis with oil refining technology. George Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush did business with the Third Reich until 1942, when some of his assets were seized under the 1942 Trading with the Enemy Act. Ford, Coca-Cola, Kodak, GE, IBM, Standard Oil, and even Random House all did business with Hitler. In 1939 there was a massive pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden which demonstrated that many Americans regarded Nazi values as American values.
Today, while we are not necessarily on the same path to Nazism as Germany was in 1933, there are many lessons we should learn from the history.
Owing to Germany’s massive militarization, it presented an almost unstoppable threat to the rest of the world. By making adulation of the Führer an explicit operating principle, democracy was easily subverted by spineless politicians who prized power over democracy. By explicitly demonizing a minority, and through the codification of racist laws, democracy was further poisoned. A nation that relied on propaganda, repression and brutality was overwhelmed in every other aspect of civilization except for industrial production — which, like ours, included slave labor. Under Nazism Germany had a Constitution and ostensibly operated under rule of law. But the entire system was cruel and immoral. Today Germans admire dissidents like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The current Kanzler just celebrated the 75th anniversary of an attempt to assassinate Hitler. It is said that history is written by the victors. Apparently so is morality.
Finally, one cannot underestimate the psychology and manipulations of a leader on a receptive public, especially when properly conditioned by state propaganda. Hitler was a man who admired other dictators, notably Benito Mussolini who preceded him in authoritarian rule by more than a decade. Besides Hitler’s popular rallies, one of which was immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will, Hitler had enthusiastic help from a xenophobic mass media. Julius Streicher’sDer Stürmerwas the FOX News and Sinclair Media of the day.
Though there had been warning signs for years, in an eight year period from 1933 to 1941 one of the most “civilized” nations on earth completely lost its collective mind, becoming a nation of war criminals and mass murderers. Today, in MAGA America, the haters are not singing precisely the same Nazi Lieder — but they sure are hitting a lot of the same notes.
“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” — Daniel Boorstin, “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America” (1961).
* * *
Americans are exceptional people. Exceptionally credulous and exceptionally delusional. From homeopathy to Mormonism, Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland” is an exploration of home-grown American pathologies that, were they physical, would be pickling in formaldehyde in the Mutter Museum. Though Andersen’s book reads as though we were traveling down strange back roads of American life, the frightening thing is that — quite to the contrary — the odd paths he describes are actually superhighways of American culture.
Nobody emerges unscathed in Andersen’s book. Even Thoreau, the dropout who lived a couple of years in a cabin in the woods near Boston, then spent the rest of his life living with his parents, doesn’t come off smelling much like a flower. I knew that Cotton Mather was a religious fanatic, but I didn’t know he was a trailblazer for Harold Camping, the End Times preacher who (like Mather) repeatedly erred in predicting the date the world would end. Anne Hutchinson, we were taught in school, was an early feminist and the victim of Puritan oppression, and together with Roger Williams was an early champion of religious tolerance. There is even a monument on Beacon Hill naming her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” But the truth is, Hutchinson, who claimed to be a prophet, was even more extreme than the Puritan lunatics she followed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and they sent her packing. Ultimately, the mother of 15 ended up in what is now Rhode Island, only to be further hounded by Puritans into the wilds of New York (what is now the Bronx). After unwisely settling on Siwonoy land, and after repeated warnings by Siwonoy warriors, she and six of her children were killed in 1643. The Puritans celebrated her death as proper payment for a heretic.
I was unaware that the Southern “Lost Cause” memorialized on Stone Mountain, Georgia and elsewhere was largely inspired by British “chivalric” literature. Andersen quotes Mark Twain, who noted that “the change of character [in the South] can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter Scott’s influence than to that of any other thing or person. by his single might [he] checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; […] with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs […] and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote […]. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war. […] Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern characters, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”
The story of Joseph Smith’s home-brew religion is likewise something that could only happen in America. In many ways Mormonism was the predecessor of Scientology, also an American phenomenon. Andersen writes that Joseph Smith was originally a treasure hunter and huckster who eventually concocted a derivative (he uses the word “fan boy”) religion based on “revelations” given to him by the angel Moroni (nowhere to be found in Old or New Testament). Smith, who called himself a prophet and incentivized converts by encouraging men to take multiple wives, was told of golden plates buried, it just so happened, four miles from Smith’s house, containing mysterious scripture that Smith translated himself by sticking his face in a hat in which a “seer stone” had been placed. It is a testament to exceptional American credulity that there are now over six million Mormons in the United States. Protestant Evangelicals, who believe in virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, angels, demons, End Times, the Rapture, and a 6000 year-old world, think Mormons are the nutty ones.
As the 20th Century dawned, America’s fancy turned toward conspiracy. Henry Ford, publisher of the “Dearborn Independent,” printed millions of copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an anti-semitic screed that described a vast Jewish conspiracy to run the entire world. Anarchists and Communists were to be found under every rock and behind every hedgerow. The FBI was founded to root out Jewish Commies. The McCarthy show trials took this to a repressive new level. The Trump administration’s and the right wing media’s QAnon, Birther, immigration, racial and other conspiracies — they’ve all been around a long time. Perhaps it’s just simple rhyme, or maybe it’s poetic irony, but one of Trump’s mentors and lawyers, Roy Cohn, played an important role in the McCarthyite show trials.
Twain’s remarks on chivalric literature’s contribution to Southern myth-making identified one culprit, but the myth-making was just getting started. In 1895, “Wild Bill” Cody, a P.T. Barnum-like figure who had made a fortune putting on racist recreations of Indian massacres, staged a show In Brooklyn called “Black America” in which he hired 500 former slaves to recreate a Southern plantation complete with cotton gin and slave cabins. For two months, Cody’s employees “pretended to be enslaved, picking cotton bolls from a recently planted acre and processing them in a real cotton gin. Tens of thousands of white people watched ‘the labors that the Negroes of slavery days engaged in, and the happy, careless life that they lived in their cabins after work.'” A New York Times article wrote that “a fat black mammy, with a red handkerchief on her head, sits outside one of the little cabins, knitting.” Until prices plummeted in the 1920’s, New England’s wealth depended on the textile industry, and Big Textile’s economic power in turn depended on Southern cotton. North and South, everybody wanted to feel good about slavery.
While all this was going on, a former Tennessee governor was making the national lecture circuit describing the happy life of slaves. “I never shall forget the white-columned mansions rising in cool, spreading groves. And stretching away to the horizon were the cotton fields, alive with the toiling slaves, who, without a single care to burden their hearts, sang as they toiled from early morn till close of day.” As Anderson sums up, “nostalgia had been turned back into a pathology.” But the myth-making continued well into the present. Stone Mountain, D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” (which Woodrow Wilson screened at the White House), and monument building continued to push the tale of a noble South. This still resonates with a frightening percentage of Americans in 2019, including many who regard the decommissioning of Confederate monuments as something worth killing over.
Andersen goes on to describe the rise of Christian populism and hucksterism. From the Moody Bible Institute (founded by a former shoe salesman), to Cyrus Schofield (a morally corrupt politician who made a fortune marketing his own bible), to Billy Sunday (who attacked mainstream churches and evolution), the early 20th Century represented American Christianity’s strongest rejection of science and rationalism. In 1925 a quarter of a million people came to Memphis to hear Billy Sunday rail against evolution. Tennessee succumbed immediately and made it “unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities […] and all other public schools of the State […] to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Naturally, this was a slap in the face of the U.S. Constitution, but a slap coming from the “Bread Basket of the Confederacy.” That same year the Scopes “monkey” trial pitted Clarence Darrow (defending teacher John Scopes) against William Jennings Bryant (for the state). After nine whole minutes of deliberation the Tennessee jury found Scopes guilty. A few days later, after returning to Ohio, Jennings Bryant dropped dead. Everybody got something they liked out of the Scopes trial.
H.L. Mencken, while reporting on the trial, made several side-trips to revival meetings and described people speaking in tongues. “Tongues”, writes Andersen. “Mencken had witnessed the defining voodoo artifact of the newest species of fanatical Christianity.” “As grassroots Christian beliefs grew more implausible in opposition to the liberalizing mainstream, some of the grass roots yearned for more implausible and flamboyant Christian practice.” In Topeka, Kansas, bible college operator Charles Parham, who asked students to “forsake all, sell what they had, give it away,” to enter the school, “on the very first day of the twentieth century, this twenty-seven-year-old put his hands on a student, a thirty-year-old woman, and, according to him, ‘a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.'” Whatever Parham was pushing, one might not need to smoke it, but it was seriously strong.
The rise of Hollywood and American marketing and advertising was also uniquely American. Andersen writes that, “my argument here is that movies and then television, and then video-games and video of all kinds were a powerful and unprecedented solvent of the mental barriers between real and surreal — not that that was Hollywood’s explicit intent (although sometimes it was, as in the case of”The Birth of a Nation”).” And Americans love their fantasy.
On October 30, 1938 radio listeners heard the following broadcast, authored by Orson Welles and now known as the “War of the Worlds” — “At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and describes the phenomenon as — quote — like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun — unquote. We now return you to the music of Ramon Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.”
As the broadcast unfolds, the audience is not clear whether they are listening to a radio play with a musical selection — or a real emergency broadcast interrupting it. The announcer returns, interrupting the music once more. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, “I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just a moment. At least forty people, including six state troopers lie dead in a field east of the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey.”
Later — “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer cuts in. “I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray.”
The result of the “War of the Worlds” was mass hysteria conditioned by a plausible reality. Or, alternatively, it was propaganda to condition a patriotic response to a new political reality. Andersen writes: “In real life during the previous few weeks, the Munich Agreement had been signed and Germany had invaded the Sudetenland: some listeners that night figured the ‘Martians’ bombing and burning America were actually Nazi invaders.” Fantasy could be useful in molding public acceptance for joining a war.
The suburban pastoral fantasy is another uniquely American phenomenon. “Along with America’s extreme passions and knacks for religion and show business, the suburb became yet another fantasy-driven facet of the ‘divergence of the American experience,’ as [Kenneth T.] Jackson writes in”Crabgress Frontier,” ‘from the rest of the world.'” “In fact, the suburb was a twofer, fantasy-wise. Loathing cities had always been a defining American impulse, but as cities rapidly filled up with millions of blacks and Catholics and Jewish and otherwise not-quite-white immigrants, a lot of native-born people found cities even more loathsome. […] Suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, and preferably Protestant) people.” The result was White Flight and thousands of versions of Levittown.
Andersen touches on the theme of “nostalgia” over and over again: nostalgia for a lost South; nostalgia for days when slavery gave slaves “carefree” lives; and nostalgia for the days when America was White. If this sounds familiar, perhaps you were here for the 2016 Presidential campaign. But nostalgia leads to viewing the past with heavily tinted (or even fully opaque) glasses. As he recalls his Omaha childhood in the Fifties Andersen is at first tempted to say it was all so “normal.” Instead, he concludes that the Fifties were “freaky and fantastical.” His two reasons for this are television and suburbia. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty became a box office hit in 1947 by satirizing an American freak who fictionalized himself as a dashing hero, living in his own private dream-world. Yet the new normal — driving in and out of suburban pastoral fantasies, immersing in endless new televised fantasies — was turning all Americans into Walter Mittys without them realizing it.” Add to this the world of advertising that increasingly depended on television, and what Andersen describes is the world portrayed — the irony isn’t lost on me — in the television series “Mad Men.”
No doubt, if the Fifties were anything, they were “fantastical.” Las Vegas, Playboy magazine, Scientology, McCarthyism, newly revived Christian fundamentalism, Reich’s Orgone theory, Disneyland — even the Beat generation, Kerouac and company — all represented uniquely American flights into fantasy. Americans were also embracing drugs as never before. “Burroughs loved his junk, Kerouac his speed, Ginsberg his weed. Regular Americans also discovered and embraced new, legal psychotropic drugs in the 1950’s.” Benzedrine, Dexedrine, tranquilizers, miracle pills. Patent medicines, including heroin, cocaine, and morphene, had been with us all along. Now Americans were buying drugs like candy. Today, despite the “War on Drugs,” we seem to have endorsed the old DuPont motto: “better living through chemistry. Ask your doctor if mind bending drugs are right for you.
During the Fifties mainstream America embraced the Christian fundamentalism that H.L. Menken and secularists had once mocked. Twenty-five year-old Billy Graham started off as a radio preacher, then took his show — “Youth for Christ” — on the road. Soon the road became the Rose Bowl, and before long Graham was in Hollywood where “dreams could come true on streets of gold and a zillion corrupted sinners needed saving.” Signs at Graham’s L.A. Revival Meeting told the masses to “come and expect a miracle” in the Holy Ghost Miracle Tent. Before long Graham was praying with Harry Truman in the Oval Office and attending Eisenhower’s inauguration. Graham attended the first National Prayer Breakfast and Eisenhower’s “born again” baptism. In 1950 “In God We Trust” was added to America’s motto –the Founders had never thought to invite God into government while explicitly separating Church and State.
Besides Graham, Norman Vincent Peale was also an influential religious figure of the time, publishing books like “The Power of Positive Thinking.” “Peale mass-marketed two strains of though that had wormed their way into American Christianity since 1900: magical thinking about wealth and success […] and see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil as practical means of getting there. Lots of prominent Protestant theologians hated”The Power of Positive Thinking” — it was egocentric, materialistic, and escapist, a cult. Billy Graham loved it.” Fast forward to 2019 and Evangelicals have embraced “prosperity theology” while giving their leaders a “mulligan” on personal morality. In another rhyme of history, Billy Graham’s son Franklin now champions the cult of a corrupt and dissolute president who excels in being egocentric and materialistic.
Andersen also has much to say about New Agers, Back to Earth believers, New Medical Quackery, the Internet, Virtual Reality, AI, Eternal Youth, American Exceptionalism, Cryogenic life extension, the X-Files and people who believe it, hoaxes, urban myths, populism, anti-Vaxxers, gun nuts, survivalists, Flat Earthers, climate deniers, moon landing conspiracy believers, and the World Wrestling Federation.
Though the destinations are different, all of us seem to be traveling the same roads.
Last night’s installment of the July Democratic debates was a mess. With Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren standing at center stage, CNN’s questions seemed designed to invite attacks from the Center and the Right. A common theme was that the Democratic Progressives are far too radical for America and that “reasonable” and “pragmatic” people from the Heartland are America’s only hope. Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Klobuchar, Hickenlooper, Ryan, and Bullock had thus been chosen for this media-staged matchup. To their credit, Warren and Sanders defended their positions admirably. Particularly on Medicare for All.
Early in the debate, CNN host Jake Tapper asked Bernie Sanders to respond to a talking point by fellow candidate John Delaney: “You support Medicare for All, which would eventually take private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans in exchange for government-sponsored health care for everyone. Congressman Delaney just referred to it as bad policy, and previously he’s called the idea political suicide that will just get President Trump reelected. What do you say to Congressman Delaney?”
Delaney, an informed viewer would know, is a healthcare executive (and three-term Maryland Congressman) who made $230 million by first providing home health care services by using underpaid workers, and then founded a health care investment corporation to take a cut of your medical premiums. While in Congress, Delaney served on the Financial Services Committee. His top campaign donors were J.P. Morgan Chase, Alliance Partners, Capital One Financial, and several other insurance and investment companies. Delaney is the human personification of everything that is wrong with American healthcare — and, to some extent, the Democratic Party.
Objecting to the framing of the question, Bernie Sanders replied, “Jake, your question is a Republican talking point. And, by the way, the healthcare industry will be advertising tonight, on this program…” — before being cut off by Tapper.
And Sanders was exactly right. During the ad break, CNN broadcast a commercial for Otezla, which “partially clears skin at the cost of nausea, diarrhea and depression at a listed prices of $3,400 for a 30-day supply.”
The American Prospect‘s David Dayen wrote that, besides hearing from the pharmaceutical industry, debate viewers also heard from “the anti-single payer group Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), funded by hospitals and drug companies, and an Alzheimer’s disease patient advocacy group that takes major funding from drug companies.”
“The unfiltered 90 seconds of three of these commercials in succession comprised more screen time than anything in the debate about money in politics,” Dayen wrote. “The country cannot afford to have CNN creating the proscenium through which America gets informed.”
Unfortunately, half the Democrats on stage sounded exactly like Republicans when it comes to health care. Delaney, Ryan, Bullock, Hickenlooper, and to some extent also Klobuchar all said that Americans would fight tooth and nail to preserve their healthcare plans. All gravely warned that any talk of removing the private option would frighten voters into the hands of Republicans.
Certainly no one should ever underestimate the credulity of the American public, but it would help if the issue were not being improperly framed by corporate media like CNN (and its advertisers) and by Big Pharma’s and Big Healthcare’s friends in both parties.
“Don’t take my healthcare away!” is absolutely the wrong demand, and an abuse of the English language.
Like organized crime, insurance companies don’t provide healthcare. They take a cut of your payment to your doctor. These companies are in it for the money. For journalists and presidential candidates to associate “healthcare” with the insurance industry is professional and linguistic malfeasance. And little more than corporate propaganda.
These are companies that require customers to spend hours and hours trying to adjust rejected or screwed-up claims. Do consumers really want to preserve relationships with these companies? Maybe it’s just me, but the best relationship with the insurance companies would be none at all.
I’ve seen it myself in Germany and Canada. I simply pay my premiums (through taxes or other deductions) and I don’t get nickeled and dimed on copays, approved pharmaceuticals, or have to worry about scheduling treatment because I haven’t yet hit some arbitrary annual dollar amount. I simply go to the doctor or the hospital and everything’s been paid for. Without the possibility that some unusual condition or treatment will bankrupt me. That’s my definition of healthcare. And if I were a small businessman in America, I wouldn’t need to spend half my time negotiating deals with insurance companies.
“Healthcare” is provided by healthcare experts. Doctors, nurses, midwives, physician assistants. “Healthcare” has nothing to do with the corporate parasites who currently profit off human frailty and mortality. If there is a healthcare relationship I want to preserve, it is with my doctor, not an insurance company.
While Sanders was plainly frustrated with Democratic friends of Big Pharma and Big Finance — who refused to allow that a national healthcare plan is most certainly possible because every other Western nation in the world has already done it — Elizabeth Warren did a better job of explaining what the stakes are. Like Sanders, Warren was cut off by CNN while trying to recount the tragic story of Ady Barkan, who has ALS, and whose illness is bankrupting his family despite premium private medical insurance. Still, Warren made her point.
“We are not about trying to take away healthcare from anyone. That’s what the Republicans are trying to do,” said Warren, a co-sponsor of Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. “And we should stop using Republican talking points in order to talk with each other about how to best provide that healthcare.”
If you’ve been biting your fingernails while watching HBO’s Years and Years or Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale, don’t dismiss your Angst as the result of dystopian fiction. A lot of it is really happening. While the Imperial Presidency was tweeting White Supremacist attacks on enemies of all sorts, except (of course) whites and Christians, defying Congress and lying non-stop, members of his administration just served up a few more dishes in the endless buffet of Gleichschaltung Americans are being force-fed by Republicans working under the Führer principle.
This month Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched his Commission on Unalienable Rights — an end-run around internationally-recognized standards of human rights. Instead of international laws, Pompeo wants to privilege his friends in Riyadh, K Street, and Jerusalem who espouse religious freedom but are hostile to secular freedoms. Margaret Drew, a law professor posting to Human Rights at Home, writes that “to accomplish this weeding out of human rights, Commission members will examine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other documents, to determine what rights are fundamental and, among other questions, who has the power to grant rights. The likely answer is God, who no doubt will be whispering in the ears of commission members.”
Prosecuting people who leave water in the desert for asylum seekers, ending asylum in violation of international norms, and keeping asylum seekers in abysmal concentration camps all must be excused by redefining human rights. It’s something Orwell would appreciate.
Liberals justifiably don’t want to fund these assaults on human rights. Robin Wright, writing in the New Yorker, and noting Trump’s many friendships with dictators and dictatorial regimes (besides his own), cites the “unbelievable hypocrisy” of the commission. Serra Sippel, the president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, said in a statement, “It’s time to call the Commission on Unalienable Rights what it really is: a thinly veiled religious fundamentalist panel that aims to cut back the human rights of people all over the world.”
Columbia University’s Human Rights Law Review publishes the “Trump Human Rights Tracker,” which charts human rights abuses under the Trump administration: “It is difficult to keep up with all that the new administration is doing that threatens human rights.” Masha Gessen writes in TheNew Yorker that “the new commission will contemplate who is and isn’t human, and who, therefore, possesses inalienable rights.” Fetuses will be accorded rights, and the LGBT community stripped of them. The ACLU writes that “Pompeo’s commission is a dangerous initiative intended to redefine universal human rights and roll back decades of progress in achieving full rights for marginalized and historically oppressed communities. It is likely to use religion as grounding to deny human dignity and equality for all. It will undermine the existing State Department’s well respected and legally-mandated Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs. And it will be a waste of taxpayer dollars, which would be better spent on implementing U.S. human rights treaty obligations and putting an end to Trump’s era of human misery and assault on our humanity.”
In an administration that cares little for diplomacy and international norms, Pompeo has become less a Secretary of State and (in line with Gleichschaltung) more a Propaganda Minister. In late June Pompeo convened the “Second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom.” The event was organized, in part, by Thomas Farr of the Religious Freedom Institute, whose own website betrays its Islamophobia. Predictably, VP for Christian Citizens Only Mike Pence delivered the keynote address.
Apparently running concentration camps, winking at journalists being hacked to death by “friends,” supporting decade-long occupations, and cozying-up to the world’s dictators are no impediments to targeting the real problem afflicting our society — those pesky constitutional protections which prevent the government from championing a specific religion — Christianity. Breakout sessions were led by representatives from a number of countries where religion is used to persecute non-religious and sexual minorities. Parallel to Pompeo’s “Ministerial,” Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Campaign were looking into the question of whether religious liberty is being used as a tool to deny secular freedoms.
If all this were not bad enough, members of the Trump Administration and his FOX News Cabinet participated in the National Conservatism conference at the D.C. Ritz-Carlton. As billed, the emphasis was on “nationalism.” For three days you could hear renowned White Supremacists and Islamophobes — including Tucker Carlson, Daniel Pipes, John Bolton, Daniel McCarthy, Amy Wax, Peter Thiel and others — argue for a return to Anglo-Saxon traditions. Organized by the Edmund Burke Society, Israeli-American and Kahanist “political philosopher” Yoram Hazony took center stage to outline the ultra-nationalist ideology — with a twist — that he was selling.
The nationalist ideology he was selling has a name: Zionism. Hazony argues that the United States needs its own form of Zionism — as opposed to U.S. imperialism (though many would argue that Zionism too is imperialistic). Daniel Luban summarizes Hazony’s argument in a piece in the New Republic: “Hazony frames his theory around a conflict (‘as old as the West itself’) between two principles of international order: ‘an order of free and independent nations,’ and a universal empire striving to unite all nations under a single legal regime. The former ideal, he suggests, originates in the Hebrew Bible, with the biblical kingdom of Israel serving as the first national state, but reached its apotheosis in early modern Europe under the ‘Protestant construction of the West.’ The golden age of nation-states stretched from roughly the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until the end of World War II. But after Hitler discredited nationalism (wrongly, for he was actually an imperialist rather than a nationalist) the imperial principle made a comeback, at least among ‘educated elites who have, to one degree or another, become committed to a future under an imperial order.'”
Hazony’s take-away is that nation-states should not expand, invade and then have to embrace internationalism like the Roman empire. Instead, they need to build walls around themselves and expel those who don’t fit nationalist criteria of race and religion.
As Jeet Heer summarizes in the Nation, “Instead of the blunt jeers heard at Trump rallies, where the name of Ilhan Omar raised the chant of “send her back,” the attendees of the conference spoke in more genteel terms about the need for national cohesion and an immigration policy that respected the nation’s cultural traditions. Yet these more mellifluous words differed from the hooting of Trump rallies only in terms of tone, not intent.”
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley must have brought his bedside copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with him because he mentioned “cosmopolitans” a number of times. “They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community,” Hawley said of the “cosmopolitan elite.” “And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.”
Although Heer himself didn’t conclude Hawley’s speech was anti-Semitic, he noted: “Hawley’s use of the loaded word ‘cosmopolitan’ was combined with a denunciation of four academics, three of whom were Jewish. One of those was the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. When Hawley mentioned her, the crowd hissed. Hawley’s speech has been accused of containing anti-Semitic dog whistles.”
But Amy Wax didn’t need dog whistles; instead she had her weasel words. “Let us be candid,” she said. “Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white for now, and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of nonwhite people. Embracing cultural-distance nationalism means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites. Well, that is the result, anyway. So, even if our immigration philosophy is grounded firmly in cultural concerns, it doesn’t rely on race at all.”
Admittedly, these were people who can string two sentences together without a 280-character limitation or a Covfefe. But their racism is as crude as Trump’s or anything uttered at a Klan meeting.
The hyper-nationalism and racism we first glimpsed from Trump in 2015 was real. Trump is a racist. Trump is a nationalist. Trump is a neo-fascist. Trump is almost singularly obsessed with building a wall on the Mexican border, stopping even legal immigration, and disenfranchising voters of color. His 2016 campaign was based on white male privilege. His 2020 campaign is also likely to be about Whiteness, if not also Christian privilege. In fact, Trump has now doubled down on racist attacks on House members of color, and it seems calculated. Toluse Olorunnipa and Ashley Parker tried to make sense of these calculations in their Washington Post piece:
“Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former White House official, said that even if Trump’s rhetoric offends some suburban voters, they will still vote for him rather than siding with Democrats. ‘He can excite his base without alienating suburbia to the point where they’re not voting for him,’ he said. ‘That’s what a coalition is. Not everyone agrees with everything.'”
Note: Excite his base = appeal to white racism.
While Republicans are confident that racism will be a unifying strategy, Democrats aren’t so sure if it will succeed or backfire.
“Democrats are banking on the idea that even if Trump’s language excites his base, it is likely to offend a diverse coalition of voters who will turn out to defeat him. ‘I don’t think it’s going to depress Democrats. I think it’s going to make them angry,’ said Jennifer Palmieri, an adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at Tufts University, said a review of exit polling data from 2016 does not give a clear sense of what effect Trump’s amplified appeal to white working-class voters will have in 2020. ‘We can’t really know for sure from our data whether the white grievance rhetoric is going to mobilize more support for Trump in 2020,’ he said. ‘And it’s very possible that he may mobilize just as many — or maybe even more — opponents with this rhetoric.'”
Given how racist this country is, it’s a good bet it will win Trump the next election.
For White America, the accounting of history is all assets and no liabilities. Iowa’s Steve King never stops saying that the profits on America’s balance sheet all belong to white people because, over hundreds of years, it was white people who tamed a brown continent and brought “civilization” to it. Ask White America about Confederate history and you will hear that the Lost Cause is a crucial part of American history and American identity. To take down rebel monuments is to strike assets off White America’s ledgers.
The Western Canon, still taught in some universities, is a sort of Western/white supremacist version of world history and culture. It originally consisted of almost exclusively Greek, Roman, and Christian sources. Ask a white Evangelical Christian, who now only grudgingly acknowledges the “Judeo” part of our newly-reformulated “Judeo-Christian” culture, and you’ll hear that the biblical kingdoms of “Samaria” and “Judea” should be reserved for overwhelmingly European settlers under Israel’s Law of Return, and that Palestinians should remain under perpetual occupation. There’s a thick thread of racism running through all of Western history and culture.
But when it comes to reparations for slavery, White America has a completely different accounting scheme — a scheme in which all debts are automatically cancelled. In this scheme, since all contributions by non-whites are negligible, and their presence so unwanted, their claims on American history are nothing but petty annoyances. If someone wronged you, your parents, your grandparents — even every generation of your ancestors — well, too bad, it’s not our fault. Get over it. No debts were incurred. And no debts need be paid after such a long time.
For a people who don’t believe in a free lunch — not even for poor children — it is curious that White Americans so resolutely refuse to pay their debts. And as a nation we have some pretty big ones — colonialism, genocide, territorial expropriation, slavery, and centuries of racism. In the history of American Capitalism, it was slavery that set the Confederate economy in motion. And it was slavery that underpinned the cotton trade upon which the Northern textile industries were based. Thus, even New England cities — under Northern Capitalism — became rich from slavery. Today White America, South and North, wring their hands over the complexity of the accounting. But regardless of the unwillingness of the debtor to pay the debt, the interest on our Original Sin just keeps accruing.
In the orthodox [White] re-telling of American history, Our good fortune simply fell off a truck. We were lucky enough, and smart enough, to simply scoop it up for ourselves. The triumphalist says: I got mine; the hell with the rest of you. Yet, whether by lying to ourselves about our history or by the sociopathic glorification of it, White America knows full well what it has stolen. And for those who recognize the stolen merchandise as theirs, they know what crimes were committed and that payment is due. That payment must consist of not only a monetary value but a moral accounting.
As much as Republicans and Centrist Democrats would like race to simply go away, a national discussion about reparations — like racism itself — is long overdue. It is not surprising that we are hearing about reparations in the 2020 presidential campaign from both candidates of color and several white Democrats. Ta-Nihisi Coates recently penned a long “Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic, and in it he makes the case, mentioning H.R.40, a bill sponsored in the last legislative session by Michigan Democrat John Conyers, Jr., “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.”
Like a Truth and Reconciliation process, a reparations commission would require White America to come to grips with our real history. The questions are complex, the solutions even more so. How do we make amends for crimes committed by past generations that are repeated and still resonate today? Who would all the recipients of reparations be, and what forms would reparations consist of? Following the implementation of reparations, how could we determine if they were lifting up those who needed them the most?
But Coates sums up a reparations commission’s greatest good: “No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as — if not more than — the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”
Our fragile democracy cannot survive the shameful present reality of the two Americas the Kerner Commission predicted over fifty years ago. Apologies are due, and debts must be acknowledged and paid. Those who have suffered the most must be lifted up and made whole.
Judge Katie Rayburn sentenced FANG activist Amory Zhou-Kourvo to ten days in jail yesterday for blocking the entrance to the Bristol County House of Correction. On August 20, 2018 Zhou-Kourvo and Holly Stein were arrested after cementing their arms to a concrete filled tire and fastening bike locks around their necks to a fence. Zhou-Kourvo’s sentence will be shortened by two days already served and Judge Rayburn is considering a request to permit the sentence to be served in Norfolk instead of Bristol County because of the Bristol County House of Correction’s abysmal reputation, and because of its sheriff’s closeness to the case. A dozen FANG supporters, several local activists, and representatives of the NAACP New Bedford attended the hearings.
After learning of the epidemic of suicides at the jail, widely reported in the Boston Globe and elsewhere, the Attorney General passed the buck to the Department of Corrections and the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security — both headed by Baker appointees. The State Auditor, to her credit, conducted a friendly “performance audit” which, like a previous one, found financial and managerial irregularities at the Sheriff’s Office, but it fell short of a complete investigation that would have shed light on the neglect and deprivation of prisoners. The Office of the Inspector General — also headed by a Baker appointee — was given evidence of the sheriff’s financial abuses of taxpayer money, but again no action was taken. Legislation which would have stopped the sheriff’s giveaways of state money to ICE have been shelved in the Massachusetts House by Speaker DeLeo.
So — hats off to these young people for temporarily inconveniencing a sheriff at the scene of his own crimes.
Sitting through the hearings on Tuesday morning, it took a while to get to Zhou-Kourvo’s case. Right before the nineteen year-old was sentenced to jail, attendees in Katie Rayburn’s court watched her give probation to a fentanyl dealer who had beaten his wife and also been implicated in accessory-to-murder charges. For Rayburn, who insisted on handling the FANG cases herself following the initial arraignments, a message apparently needed to be sent — don’t mess with law enforcement, no matter how crooked it is.
If the name Katie Rayburn rings a bell, you probably just watched the HBO documentary on the Michelle Carter case. Rayburn was the ambitious Bristol County Assistant District Attorney who built a case around a story that a calculating 17 year-old ice princess convinced an adult “boyfriend” (who in reality she had met only a handful of times) to commit suicide by text message — from a 40 mile distance. The case raises so many questions that it is now headed for the Supreme Court.
The only expert witness in the case, psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who looked at the suite of medications both teens had been prescribed, came to a totally different conclusion about Carter’s culpability than in Rayburn’s tale. Even as Rayburn herself continued to try the case in front of the cameras, she slapped a gag order on Breggin. Rayburn was rewarded for her prosecutorial zeal (if not misconduct) with an appointment to the bench by Governor Charlie Baker.
Having seen the judge in action, it’s clear Rayburn still thinks she’s a prosecutor.
A year ago, on June 30, 2018, I attended a Families Belong Together rally in New Bedford, one of hundreds of similar events taking place nationwide. Between 400-500 people attended, overflowing into the balcony at the Bethel AME Church on County Street, to hear New Bedford’s expressions of solidarity and concern for families separated at the border.
Despite his actual history of voting for anti-immigrant legislation, one or more of the organizers invited U.S. Congressman Bill Keating to speak at the event. Keating shed his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and gave an energetic speech — all clenched fists and faux outrage at the Trump administration’s caging of six year-olds.
The only problem with this performance was not the dramatic oratory; it was the rank hypocrisy. Keating has voted repeatedly for GOP anti-immigrant bills. H.R.3009 punished Sanctuary Cities. H.R.4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, restricted absorption of Syrian refugees. H.R.3004, “Kate’s Law,” took a hard line against desperate people who re-enter the United States. And Keating’s “On the Issues” statement on immigration reads like it was written by Tom Hodgson:
“Bill Keating opposes amnesty. As a District Attorney, Bill Keating enforces our laws and believes that everyone must obey them. His office has prosecuted thousands of criminal cases that resulted in defendants being detained for immigration and deportation action. Bill believes that we must secure our borders, and wants to punish and stop corporations that hire workers here illegally. Bill does not support giving people who are here illegally access to state and federal benefits.”
On July 12th Keating was at it again. At a New Bedford rally called Lights for Liberty, some of the same organizers had again invited the Congressman, and there he was — delivering the same shtick in precisely the same way. This time he huffed and puffed at the concentration camps the Trump administration is running on the southern border.
But Keating himself just voted to expand them. The Washington Post reported “House passes $4.6 billion border bill as leaders cave to moderate Democrats and GOP.” Ninety-five Democrats opposed the legislation, which placed no constraints on how Trump could use the funding. House leader Nancy Pelosi even abandoned language to earmark funds specifically for humanitarian aid. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted the capitulation: “Well, too bad. This is our job. Cancel vacation, fly the Senate in. Pass a clean humanitarian bill and stop trying to squeeze crises for more pain.”
These appearances remind us how easily machine Democrats and their friends can so easily exploit and co-opt humanitarian issues they repeatedly refuse to fix. And Keating reminds me how little will change until these good buddies of the GOP are retired and replaced.
By coincidence, a day before Keating’s theatrical performance in New Bedford, Stephen Kinzer, a well-known historian of American Empire, wrote a blistering piece in the Globe excoriating the Congressman:
We clearly need a new Congressional Representative in the 9th District. And, as luck would have it, Kinzer even wrote the want ad:
“Urgently Needed: Dynamic activist from Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, the South Shore, New Bedford, or Fall River. Job entails a year of 16-hour days, knocking on doors, and organizing to defeat Representative Bill Keating in the Democratic primary in the fall of 2020. Benefits include the satisfaction of speaking every day about the need to defend human rights, build strong communities, combat climate change, and end foreign wars. No pay, but seat in Congress if campaign succeeds.”
NOTICE: The Democratic Party does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, or any other status protected by law or regulation. All qualified applicants will be given equal opportunity and selection decisions are based on job-related factors only.
Just kidding. It will be an uphill battle all the way. But Massachusetts needs another Ayanna Pressley and one less Blue Dog.
“America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” AIPAC, has long sponsored legislation to stifle the American public’s right to discuss or protest Israel’s abuses. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s founder Omar Barghouti, is prohibited from entering the US, while Israel’s lobbyists have successfully sponsored legislation in roughly 30 states and in both the US House and Senate to make BDS boycotts illegal. Amazingly, these lobbyists are not required to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). At the federal level, with AIPAC’s legislation opposed by numerous civil liberties groups, AIPAC is still trying to keep their foot in the door. Senate Resolution S.Res.120 and House resolution H.Res.246 still support criminalizing boycotts of Israel.
Perhaps the only silver lining in all this is that AIPAC just made it easier to decide the fitness of Democratic candidates in the coming election. Representatives Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell, and Senators Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar are all co-sponsors of the AIPAC-written resolution. For me, human rights, foreign policy, and free speech are all litmus test issues. These candidates apparently have no respect for any of these concerns. Other Democratic presidential candidates have had their flirtations with AIPAC as well. Only Bernie Sanders — ironically the only Jewish candidate in the bunch — has refused to attend AIPAC conventions.
In Massachusetts, half the Democratic delegation support AIPAC’s assault on free speech. No surprise from the usual Blue Dogs — Representatives Bill Keating, Joe Kennedy III, Richard Neal, and Lori Trahan — but a shock to see Senator Ed Markey joining them — by supporting the AIPAC resolution, all just displayed their contempt for both human rights for Palestinians and Americans’ right to do something about it peacefully.
Regardless of what some Republicans think, Israel is a secular nation like any other. As such, it has all the usual warts — traffic jams, corruption, poverty, and pollution. But Israel also imposes martial law and has occupied Palestinian territory for generations, closely resembling South Africa’s Apartheid system — separate courts, separate roads, the original Trumpianwall, imprisonment without charges for parents and children alike, and Israel has enacted ugly race laws that determine who is a citizen. Naturally, not everyone thinks this is such a great thing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a non-violent protest against Israel’s policies. AIPAC, which serves as Israel’s attack dog on BDS, does not even remotely represent any shared value with the United States. But it certainly is an effective, unregulated foreign agent for Israel.
While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) may be the best-known of BDS opponents, there are dozens of organizations that lobby for Israeli interests, foreign, military and economic aid — including changes to American laws. There are about three dozen pro-Israel political action committees that funnel millions of dollars to politicians of both parties. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CoP) consists of over fifty organizations that advocate on behalf of Israel, all of whom sit on AIPAC’s executive committee.
The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) is a branch of AIPAC that runs free junkets for congressmen to Israel to hear from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and provides funding to AIPAC. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) pushes hard-line, anti-Arab, anti-Iranian Middle Eastern policies. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) used to be a civil rights organization, but now primarily attacks critics of Israel and promotes Likudnik foreign policy. The Israel Project disseminates Israeli propaganda, while the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) raises funds for a foreign military [!!] and brings Israeli soldiers to the US as good-will “ambassadors.”
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) links 125 Zionist organizations to 17 umbrella groups for 4 main Jewish religious currents in the US. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) receives much of its funding from Sheldon Adelson and has embraced the American Far Right. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) describes its mission as “advocating for Israel and the Jewish people.” The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) — like many of the others — conflates Jewish life with Israeli interests and functions primarily as an extension of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
The Jewish People Policy Insitute (JPPI) is dedicated to “strengthening the attachment of young American Jews to Israel.” Its board of directors includes former US Ambassadors Dennis Ross and Stuart Eizenstat, Iran hawk Elliot Abrams, and other leading lights of US Zionist organizations such as Michael Steinhardt (Birthright Israel) and Steve Hoffman (Cleveland Jewish Federation). Interestingly, JPPI is critical of far-right politics — In Israel — but grateful for the help from the American far right.
And then there are the media watchdogs, which attack journalists critical of Israel. These include: the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which at times has provided questionable translations of news from the Middle East; the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) which often targets specific news sources as “antisemitic”; the Middle East Forum (MEF); and the Haym Salomon Center, which disseminates pro-Israel spin and Islamophobic content “in order to defend Western civilization.”
Campus organizations like Hillel used to provide a friendly place for Jewish students to come together. But, as right-wing benefactors have politicized and weaponized Jewish institutions, Hillel has now become a means of silencing Israel’s campus critics, including faculty. Hillel’s FAQ describes its mission: “Israel is at the heart of Hillel’s work. Our goal is to inspire every Jewish college student to develop a meaningful and enduring relationship to Israel and to Israelis.” Stand With Us and Israel on Campus Coalition likewise promote pro-Israel messaging on American college campuses.
In Congress itself we have the Republican Jewish Coalition — which, despite the word Jewish, does not study Torah but instead promotes pro-Israel policy. There is also the National Jewish Democratic Council, which “educates Democratic elected officials and candidates to increase support for Jewish domestic and foreign policy priorities” — as if all American Jews supported the Israeli occupation or its far right governments. American lawmakers frequently participate in all-expenses-paid economic missions to Israel courtesy of the Association of America-Israel Chambers of Commerce. Who, after all, would fault a politician for trying to drum up a little business back home?
Then there are the Christian Zionist groups — the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFC) — “be an advocate for Israel.” Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is run by Evangelical minister John Hagee, who is eagerly waiting for the Middle East to blow up to bring on the End Times. Passages “offers Christian college students with leadership potential a fresh and innovative approach to experiencing the Holy Land to make them “voices for Israel.” The Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) promotes “Judeo-Christian values” and, once again, is nothing but an unregulated foreign lobbying group.
In 2006. foreign policy scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were commissioned by the Atlantic to write about the Israel lobby — and they covered many of the groups mentioned above. But the Atlantic refused to publish their article and it was left to the London Review of Books instead, a foreign publication, to give the essay an audience. The essay was later fleshed out in a much-maligned book that was savaged by most liberal newspapers and magazines.
A decade later the tide is turning on the acceptability of criticizing Israel’s occupation and treatment of Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze. And some Israelis themselves are doing the same. As Americans come to terms with their own White Supremacy, many of the similarities between Israel and the United States have come into focus. After years of lying to ourselves about the meaning of words, some have refused to use “alt-Right” and instead write ‘fascist.” Journalists have begun to criticize their own timid use of “racially charged” and some opt for the more honest word “racist.”
Courageous legislators have become disgusted by the Orwellian term “detention facilities” and now simply call them what they really are — “concentration camps.” The freedom to use honest language has had a liberating effect on young Jews, who recently committed acts of civil disobedience in front of ICE facilities all over the country.
So it is long overdue that we had a long, hard look at Israel’s aggressive, unregulated “lobbying.” It’s time we confronted Israel’s relentless efforts to alter American law for its own benefit that it conducts in coordination with a sprawling network of American groups with ties to the American far right.
Let’s call it what it really is — foreign meddling.
I did not enjoy A Pigeon and a Boy in the least. I felt I was being beaten over the head with Biblical themes instead of pleasantly delighted by resonances of them. I did not appreciate the heaping helping of Zionist mishigas in the book, either.
And there were plenty of technical problems with the book. The author could not decide whether his main character was addressing his deceased mother or talking about her. The ramp-up to the merging of the book’s present and past threads was painfully long. And, almost as soon as the threads came together, I guessed the ending. Two chapters featured talking pigeons. Characters were wooden, except for perhaps Meshulam, who was the one character I liked the most despite his forced labor as a device for greasing plot points.
Yairi’s relationship with Tirza is told, not shown. Yaacov and Raya, and his ex-wife Liora, are two-dimensional yekkes. The one-week reconciliation with Liora had me scratching my head. Numerous chapters devoted far too much detail to incidental characters, such as the Dutch bird-watchers in the last chapters. And there was more pigeon lore and craft than anyone — with perhaps the exception of a pigeon handler — could ever stomach.
The climax of the story — pardon the pun — was a ridiculous travesty of medical probability, as a half-dead soldier, ripped apart by machine gun fire, channels his skill as a premature ejaculator to fill a vial with semen to be sent by carrier pigeon to his love. Sure, I comprehended that this was a metaphor for the triumph of life in Israel over death in European ghettos and Konzentrationslagern. I grasped that Yair’s house, built in part by Bedouins on Arab land, was a metaphor for the creation of Israel. I understood the repeated “and it was good” from Genesis when each new phase of Yair’s home was completed. Not to mention the sabbath bride and all of it.
But, all in all, I found the book ham-fisted and a horrible slog. I would have preferred a book that handled the themes of identity and belonging that Shalev was probabably aiming at with much more delicacy and literary skill.
New Bedford’s local paper, the Standard Times, reported another suicide of a young woman on July 3rd at the Bristol County jail. Her name is being withheld, but she was reportedly in the women’s’ behavioral unit inside the men’s facility at the jail’s Faunce Corner location. According to Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, “There was absolutely no indication to anyone. This was a shock.”
Like most of the many suicides that preceded it, it is being investigated by the sheriff’s own department. A year ago reporters from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) looked into the epidemic of suicides at the jail and the sheriff’s self-investigation. They described his process as essentially a whitewash, noting that “Hodgson’s report concluded that his jail staff did everything right in all cases.”
The Standard Times added a postscript to their suicide article with the phone number of the National Suicide Hotline. But this latest victim was not a member of the public with suicidal ideation. She was a prisoner at a notorious jail known for its extremely high rate of suicides, known for its deprivation of medical and psychiatric care, known for driving its prisoners to despair. The postscript should instead have been directed at the correct audience — prisoners — by adding the phone number of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division.
This was the second suicide in two months. On May 3rd, Mark Trafton was found in his cell at the Bristol County Sheriff’s Ash Street jail and pronounced dead by paramedics. Despite a social media discussion that described the man’s apparent suicidal intentions, a sheriff’s spokesman told a reporter from the New Bedford Guide that the man “didn’t give any indication […] to wanting to take his own life, nor did he have any prior history or exhibit any suicidal behaviors or statements since he arrived in custody.” The sheriff’s statement sounded scripted. “We offer our condolences to his family and we’re keeping not only them but everyone involved in this incident in our prayers.”
These latest suicides represent a return to Bristol County’s shameful record as the county jail with the worst suicide record in the Commonwealth. We renew our calls to place this facility in receivership. It is a failed correctional facility. The administrator shows more interest in making the talk show circuit to disparage asylum-seekers than in running a jail humanely and professionally. An interim warden should be appointed and a full, independent investigation of the facility should be conducted.
Legislators, the Attorney General, the State Auditor, the Inspector General, the Department of Corrections, the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, the Governor — we have appealed to all of them to stop these suicidesnegligent homicides and other abuses at the Bristol County jail. How many more are they going to ignore while paying lip-service to their public duties?
Today is not a day for tanks and flyovers and a would-be Caesar’s notion of American greatness. A nation in crisis cannot honestly celebrate its hollow promises of democracy when they actually pertain to so few, and when more of them disappear with every passing day. Rather than the hollow rhetoric of the nation’s founders, today is a day to listen to the words of someone who actually fought for independence but never fully received it.
On the day after Independence Day 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered the following speech in Rochester, New York. It is a fiery reproach of American independence — “your 4th of July” not “ours” — demanding that White America keep its unfulfilled promises. A century and a half later Douglass’s words still resonate, but White America’s only answer to them, so far, is tanks in the streets and concentration camps.
Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens:
He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country school houses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.
The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a Fourth of July Oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for me. It is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gauge I think I have of Corinthian Hall seems to free me from embarrassment.
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable-and the difficulties to he overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence I will proceed to lay them before you.
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, as what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. l am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young.-Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.
Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is, that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.
But your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would certainly prove nothing as to what part I might have taken had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.
Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated, by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.
As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.
The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present rulers.
Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.
Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.
These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.
Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.
On the 2nd of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day, whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it.
“Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”
Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, there fore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history-the very ringbolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.
Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day-cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.
The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness. The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime. The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too-great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final”; not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.
How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defence. Mark them! Fully appreciating the hardships to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep, the corner-stone of the national super-structure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.
Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interest-nation’s jubilee.
Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, un folded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national po etry and eloquence.
I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait-perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.
I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!
My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and His cause is the ever-living now.
Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchers of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men shout-“We have Washington to our father.”-Alas! that it should be so; yet it is.
The evil, that men do, lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fa thers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, “It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.” But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They ac knowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may con sent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding.-There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Take the American slave-trade, which we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave-trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words from the high places of the nation as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the Jaws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish them selves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon all those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass with out condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.
Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh jobbers, armed with pistol, whip, and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-curdling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of your soul The crack you heard was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shock ing gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.
I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming “hand-bills,” headed cash for Negroes. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners; ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.
The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number has been collected here, a ship is chartered for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.
In the deep, still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead, heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror.
Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.
Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in?
But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children, as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner, and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your law-makers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man’s liberty, to hear only his accusers!
In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and in diabolical intent this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.
I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.
At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cummin”-abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal!-And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to so licit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox to the beautiful, but treacherous, Queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country (with fractional exceptions) does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, im plies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love, and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”
But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.
For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”
The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in its connection with its ability to abolish slavery.
The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”
Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.
In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.
My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn; Samuel J. May, of Syracuse; and my esteemed friend (Rev. R. R. Raymond) on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that, upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.
One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in Eng land towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and re stored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high religious question. It was demanded in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, the Burchells, and the Knibbs were alike famous for their piety and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.
Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation-a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world, and are understood by the world to declare that you “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.
Fellow-citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad: it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. it fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!
But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that, the right to hold, and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic.
Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped
To palter with us in a double sense: And keep the word of promise to the ear, But break it to the heart.
And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest impostors that ever practised on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape; but I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length; nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq. by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerrit Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.
Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gate way? or is it in the temple? it is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can any where be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a tract of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, commonsense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality, or unconstitutionality of slavery, is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tells us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.
Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.
I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion.
Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.
“The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated.-Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.
The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee The wide world o’er! When from their galling chains set free, Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny Like brutes no more. That year will come, and freedom’s reign. To man his plundered rights again Restore.
God speed the day when human blood Shall cease to flow! In every clime be understood, The claims of human brotherhood, And each return for evil, good, Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end, And change into a faithful friend Each foe.
Last week’s debates featured a pack of twenty Democratic candidates for president. All these men and women deeply care about the United States and all would be an improvement over the incumbent. I can say with relative certainty that I will be canvassing door-to-door for whichever of these people ends up the Democratic nominee in 2020.
The debates were chaotic, with contenders interrupting and constantly talking over each other. Nevertheless, it was a valuable opportunity to see wits and bits of policy on display. To my thinking, only Julian Castro, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren survived the first night’s debate. And of the second night’s participants, only Kamala Harris and Pete Buttegieg came out relatively unscathed.
Neither of the two leaders in the polls — Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders — seemed up to the job. Biden is a gift to Republican voters with more baggage than an airport, and he deserved the thrashing he got from Kamala Harris. Twice Biden, outmatched or unprepared, saved himself by stammering — “my time is up” — a phrase that, more than any other, defines his fitness for the job.
And it breaks my heart to say this, but Bernie is who he has always been, with a message that does not change with the wind or with polls. His policy prescriptions are wise and bold. But as the oldest presidential candidate ever, and without the ability to connect with an electorate that craves charisma over substance, Bernie is probably unelectable in 2020. Like Moses, Bernie has brought millions of progressives to Canaan, but he himself will never step foot in the Promised Land.
I am left with the mental image of Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg or Julian Castro running circles around Trump in a debate — that is, if voters in 2020 still care about ideas. I can also picture Kamala Harris cleaning off the ice pick she just shoved into Biden’s neck — the one she used on Barr — and plunging it into Trump. I’m not alone in believing that the defense of what’s left of our democracy may have to be accomplished with considerable ruthlessness.
Now is not the time to abandon principles. Democrats can’t give in to the delusion that so-called “never-Trump” Republicans or swing voters will be swayed by watered-down policies. If these voters are truly worried by Trump — as they should be — then they’re just going to have to suck it up and vote for the lesser evil. Universal health care won’t be as painful as concentration camps and whatever follows that. Eugene Robinson, in his July 1st column in the Washington Post, writes:
“Anyone who watched last week’s two-night candidates’ debate should be confident that the eventual Democratic nominee is virtually certain to support universal health care, comprehensive and compassionate immigration reform, reasonable gun control, measures to address climate change and bold steps to address income inequality. No, this is not a Republican agenda. Outcasts from the GOP will have to decide whether to accept it, in the interest of ending our long national nightmare, or reject it and stick with a president who kowtows to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.”
This week a progressive Democratic Congressional delegation faced a snarling MAGA mob and aggressive Border Patrol agents in Texas when they went to visit a camp where there was no tap water and prisoners were being forced to drink out of toilets. In the midst of hostility that concerned even their security details, these mostly young progressive lawmakers stood up and denounced the abuses they had just seen.
Newly-elected Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who many Democrats initially believed was politically indistinguishable from the man she replaced, showed voters on Monday just what the difference was when she directly addressed the haters.
“I learned a long time ago that when change happens it’s either because people see the light or they feel the fire. We’re lifting up these stories in the hopes that you will see the light. And if you don’t, we will bring the fire.”
It’s going to take principle and courage and ruthlessness to win the next election. Everything depends on it.
We are on the brink of another American war — this time against Iran. After Iran shot down a U.S. drone in its own airspace, Donald Trump ordered a military strike which, by his administration’s own estimates, would have killed 150 Iranians. But then, as if scripted for Reality TV, Trump changed his mind with just minutes to spare. That’s how close we came to a war on Iran.
New Bedford Democrat Richard Drolet recently wrote an excellent overview of the history of Iranian-American relations, appealing for Congress to block any move to attack Iran. As Richard points out, U.S. claims of Iranian attacks on marine vessels in the Persian Gulf have precedent in other deceptions of the American public. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Remember the Maine?
It doesn’t take much to deceive a credulous and poorly-informed American public. Despite the administration’s claims of Iranian aggression, this will not be a war over drones and shipping channels. This will be a long-desired war to ensure Israel’s status as the only nuclear superpower in the region. And, if Trump’s neoconservatives John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Michael Pompeo get their way, it will also be another chance to effect regime change in the Middle East.
Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the US-Iranian nuclear agreement, placing the Iranian military on a terrorist watchlist, supporting violent Iranian exile groups like the MEK, hitting Iranian civilians with more crippling sanctions, and deploying the U.S. military force to the Persian Gulf have all brought us to this crisis.
Trump’s neoconservatives have convinced Republicans that invading Iran is one way to make America Great Again, and that an American invasion would be a “slam dunk.” Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton thinks it wouldn’t take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”
But an entire generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq, a much smaller country than Iran. After hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US is also still in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime.
Cooler and better-informed heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:
Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska.
Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million.
Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel.
While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran.
Many of Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go. Iran still has many regional friends.
Congress must reclaim its Constitutional authority and pass legislation to prevent an unauthorized conflict with Iran. 71 House Representatives have sponsored H.R.2354 — the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019. Shamefully, of the 9 Massachusetts Congressional Representatives, only Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley are co-sponsors.
So here we are, again, on the brink of another American invasion of a country in the Middle East. Call the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 and leave a message with your Representative. Remind them that, under the Constitution, it is up to Congress, not the President, to declare war. Demand that they hold Donald Trump accountable for any illegal military actions. And ask them to cosponsor H.R.2354 to stop what will surely be another disastrous war of choice.
For over a century Iran has experienced US meddling in its affairs and, for all our professed love of democracy, it was the US which ended Iranian democracy in 1955 when it installed a dictator. After Iran subsequently became an Islamic theocracy, the United States has spied on it, unleashed the Stuxnet computer virus on it (and half the world by accident), supported violent Iranian exile groups like the MEK, hit Iranian civilians with crippling sanctions, and parked aircraft carriers of Iran’s coastline at no greater a distance than from Falmouth to Oak Bluffs.
Most recently the United States unilaterially withdrew from the US-Iranian nuclear agreement, placed the Iranian military on a terrorist watchlist, and put economic sanctions on Iran’s Ayatollah. But let’s remember — Iran was not responsible for 911, nor has Iran been implicated in any act of terrorism in the United States. And yet American politicians of both parties file bill after bill, resolution after resolution, ratcheting up sanctions on Iranian civilians — all to stop supposed Iranian aggression. But who’s the aggressor here?
If there is a war — and it’s looking more likely every day — it won’t be over drones and shipping channels. It will be a long-desired war to ensure Israel’s status as the only nuclear superpower in the region, and a war to augment the power of the Saudi dictatorship. And, if Trump’s neoconservatives John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Michael Pompeo have their way, it will also be another war to effect regime change in the Middle East. Because the United States, always playing God more than policeman, seeks to make the world in its own image.
The War in Vietnam, the Iraq debacle, and the Spanish-American war were only possible because a credulous American public allowed itself to be deceived by nationalism, propaganda, and outright lies. U.S. claims of Iranian attacks on marine vessels in the Persian Gulf are the just the latest justifications for war.
Neoconservatives have convinced Republicans that invading Iran is one way to make America Great Again, and that an American invasion would be a “slam dunk.” Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton thinks it wouldn’t take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.” But an entire generation has grown up since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq, a much smaller country than Iran. After hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US is also still in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime.
Cooler and better-informed heads remind us that Iran is 3.7 times the size of Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska, with 3 times the population of Iraq — 81 million people. Iran can also mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty military. And while the Gulf War “coalition” could count on NATO allies, Europe is now skeptical of another American war and is still party to the nuclear agreement the U.S. unilaterally dropped out of.
Understanding the conflict with Iran is to understand the history of American Imperialism and military adventurism. While Native American genocide, slavery, colonialism, Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine all had roots of U.S. Imperialism, the United States embarked upon Imperialism with a vengeance during the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars. The American SouthWest, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam were all taken from Spain and Mexico. Several islands are still colonies after more than a century.
The modern period of American Imperialism began after the US emerged relatively unscathed by World War II. The United States regarded the Soviet Union as its enemy in the post-war period, and the profitable machinery of the military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned of, kept churning. The Cold War was the result of a combination of prudence, paranoia, ideological zealotry, and capitalist profit-taking.
1950
In 1950 the National Security Council circulated a document, NSC-68, which made its recommendations to President Harry Truman. NSC-68 lays out a view of a bi-polar world in which the U.S. and the USSR compete for power. It establishes “containment” of the Soviet Union as its primary goal, which requires fostering “the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system” and requires becoming a nuclear superpower “in dependable combination with other likeminded nations.”
1960
Starting in roughly 1960, Israeli nuclear technology was acquired by stealth and back-door help from Western nations, including the U.S., France, Norway, and Germany. Neither Israel nor its colonial allies has ever acknowledged its nuclear weapons program.
The first nuclear reactor in the Middle East was Israel’s Dimona reactor
“three successive U.S. administrations–under presidents Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon–would have to deal with it as well. Kennedy chose the toughest path of struggle and confrontation in his effort to check the program; Johnson realized that the U.S. had limited leverage on the issue and planted the seeds of compromise and looked the other way; finally, in a bargain with Prime Minister Golda Meir, Nixon accepted the Israel’s de facto nuclear status as long as it stayed secret–a controversial and unacknowledged deal that remains in place effectively through the current day.”
1965
In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a disgruntled worker with Israel’s nuclear program, blew the whistle on the program. In 2014, former member of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, blew the whistle on both Israel’s nukes and chemical weapons. When reporter Helen Thomas asked Barak Obama if Israel had nukes, he dodged the question and refused to “speculate.” Experts believe Israel now has between 80 to 100 nukes.
1981
One question not frequently asked is: what was the U.S. involvement in Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Israel’s 2007 bombing of Syria’s al-Kibar reactor? If past is prologue, then it might be useful to examine the history. A “senior US intelligence officer” testified to Congress in 2008 on American participation of the al-Kibar bombing:
“One of the things that I’m sure also people are wondering is whether there was any discussion between us and the Israelis about policy options and how to respond to these facts. We did discuss policy options with Israel. Israel considered a Syrian nuclear capability to be an existential threat to the state of Israel. After these discussions, at the end of the day Israel made its own decision to take action. It did so without any green light from us – so-called ‘green light’ from us; none was asked for, none was given. […] We understand the Israeli action. We believe this clandestine reactor was a threat to regional peace and security, and we have stated before that we cannot allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.”
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
The facility had been under watch by the United States since 2003. Without having to read between the lines too much, it is clear that the bombing of the al-Kibar reactor was done with the assistance, permission, advance knowledge, and blessings of the Bush administration, which saw the reactor as an effort by two of Bush’s “axes of evil” to threaten “regional peace and security.”
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius dismissed the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran. But, like a bad penny, it’s a story that keeps coming back.
2009 – February
In February Reuters reported that Israel claimed that time was running out and it had only about another year to attack Iran.
2009 – May
In May Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak offered to give up settlement outposts in exchange for the U.S. letting Israel “focus its attention on the Iranian nuclear threat”. Make your own inferences about what that means.
Israel offers to trade settlements for U.S. permission to bomb Iran
Pundit M. J. Rosenberg’s last posting on Talking Points warned that the Fall would bring renewed calls for liberals to support a military attack on Iran – not necessarily a U.S. attack, but one by Israel. Rosenberg pointed to hasbara efforts by Jewish organizations to soften up public acceptance of an Israeli military strike on Iran:
Anyway, this fall will be critical. While we’re sweating the health care issue, the usual suspects will be ignoring all that and trying hard to set us up for a third war in the Muslim world. And, I hear, that it will be a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans who will join in opposition to President Obama to sneak this one by us. Why not? Both parties want to please the pro-war crowd in advance of the 2010 elections. Watch your favorite liberal. I expect that if you pay attention, you will hear things that you haven’t heard come out of a Democrat’s mouth since the run-up to Iraq. […] If we go to war or give Israel a permission slip, it will be the Democrats who bear prime responsibility. Pay attention.
AIPAC statements, the view from Israel that contradicts the State Department’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear readiness, the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America, the World Jewish Congress, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and a poll commissioned by the Israel Project which purports to show a massive increase in public support for a specifically Jewish state and concern over Iran’s nuclear program. But not a peep about Israel’s own nuclear program.
Participating in, or permitting, an attack on Iran would have frightful consequences. The Christian Science Monitor ran an article last June entitled ‘How Iran would retaliate if it comes to war.’ The Atlantic Monthly ran one titled ‘What if the Israelis bomb Iran’ War colleges, foreign policy wonks, and even Fleet Street and Wall Street have begun speculating on the results of such an attack.
American Zionist organizations may resent the claim that Jews are being unfairly associated with neoconservative politics and Israel advocacy at odds with American interests. But if this were true, then they would stop wallowing in that swamp and dragging American Jews, whom they claim to represent, into the muck with them.
2009 – July
In July, the Jerusalem Post reported that a deal between European nations and Israel was evolving, which would permit Israel to attack Iran in exchange for unspecified “concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors.”
2009 – September
Neoconservatives and pro-Israel organizations and ideologues have been calling lately for military action against Iran. House Democrats with close ties to Israel have also been making the same noises. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations organized a call for rabbis to condemn Iran from the pulpit during the High Holy Days. And now Obama’s Defense Secretary is trying to sell war on Iran – to the Arab world.
It sure looks like we’re being prepped for another war.
The Jerusalem Post, in an article titled “Arab world should arm against Iran,” quotes US Defense Secretary Robert Gates calling for Arab nations to beef-up their militaries. The article is based on an interview with Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara, which can be viewed below. According to Gates, large weapons purchases are already being negotiated with the United States.
In the interview, Foukara asks Gates about the double-standard of asking Iran to give up nuclear research while never questioning Israel’s nuclear program. Gates responds:
First of all, it’s the Iranian leadership that has said it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Those threats have not been made in the other direction. It is the Iranian government that is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions with respect to these programmes, so focus needs to be on the country that is feuding the will of the international community and the United Nations.
There’s so much wrong in Gates’ response that it requires some comment. First, I am still looking for a credible translation of an actual threat by Iran against Israel. Neoconservative and pro-Israel warmongers apparently found what they were looking for in some flowery Farsi. But in terms of violations of UN resolutions, Israel is the clear winner. Then Gates has the threats backwards. Israel’s war games last year, this year’s demonstrations of Israeli naval force in the Suez Canal, and countless Israeli speculations of the “best time to bomb” all convey the impression that, if anyone is about to become an aggressor, it’s Israel.
This is a very troubling interview because it demonstrates that the Obama administration itself, as much as any lobbyist or group of pro-Israel House Democrats, is also starting the beat the drum of war.
FOUKARA: The issue of Iran and Israel is obviously rattling a lot of countries in the region, the Israelis, the Gulf states, who are thinking about buying more and more weapons, and indeed there has been some sales authorised by the United States. Some estimates put the weapons packages to the Gulf states and Israel at about $100bn. How much substance is there to that?
GATES: That figure sounds very high to me. But I think there’s a central question or a central point here to be made and it has to do both with our friends and allies in the region, our Arab allies, as well as the Iranian nuclear programme, and that is one of the pathways, to get the Iranians to change their approach on the nuclear issue, is to persuade them that moving down that path will actually jeopardise their security, not enhance it.
So the more that our Arab friends and allies can straighten their security capabilities, the more they can strengthen their co-operation, both with each other and with us, I think sends the signal to the Iranians that this path they’re on is not going to advance Iranian security but in fact could weaken it.
So that’s one of the reasons why I think our relationship with these countries and our security co-operation with them is so important.
FOUKARA: I mentioned $100bn and you said that doesn’t sound right to you. What does sound right to you as a figure?
GATES: I honestly don’t know.
FOUKARA: But there are a lot of weapons being asked for by the countries in the region?
GATES: We have a very broad foreign military sales programme and obviously with most of our friends and allies out there, but the arrangements that are being negotiated right now, I just honestly don’t know the accumulated total.
FOUKARA: You’re asking the Iranians to give up their intentions to build nuclear weapons. They are saying they’re not building nuclear weapons. On the other hand, a lot of people in the region feel that you know that the Israelis do have nuclear weapons and they say why doesn’t the West start with Israel, which is known to possess nuclear weapons rather than with the Iranians, who are suspected of having them. What do you say to that argument?
GATES: First of all, it’s the Iranian leadership that has said it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Those threats have not been made in the other direction. It is the Iranian government that is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions with respect to these programmes, so focus needs to be on the country that is feuding the will of the international community and the United Nations.
FOUKARA: But you decided that the rhetoric of the Iranians reflects the reality of what’s going on in Iran in terms of nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a leap of faith?
GATES: Well, we obviously have information in terms of what the Iranians are doing. We also have what the Iranians themselves have said, so we only are taking them at their word.
FOUKARA: So you know for sure that they are working on a nuclear bomb?
GATES: I would not go that far but clearly they have elements of their nuclear programme that are in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
We want them to adhere to these resolutions and we are willing to acknowledge the right of the Iranian government and the Iranian people to have a peaceful nuclear programme if it is intended for the production of electric power so on. What is central, then, is trying to persuade the Iranians to agree to that and then to verification procedures under the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].
That gives us confidence that it is indeed a peaceful nuclear programme and not a weaponisation programme.
The truth of the matter is that, if Iran proceeds with a nuclear weapons programme it may well spark and arms race, a real arms race, and potentially a nuclear arms race in the entire region.
So it is in the interest of all countries for Iran to agree to arrangements that allow a peaceful nuclear programme and give the international community confidence that’s all they’re doing.
FOUKARA: But the Obama administration seems to have a difficult circle to square because on one hand they’re saying that they want improved relations with the Muslim world. On the other hand, any pressure on Iran, is seen by people in the Muslim world as an indication the US is not genuine in wanting to improve those relations because many Muslims say Israel has nuclear weapons, and the US is not doing anything about it.
GATES: The focus is on which country is in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions. The pressure on Iran is simply to be a good member of the international community.
The neighbours around Iran, our Arab friends and allies, are concerned about what is going on in Iran, and not just the governments.
So the question is how does Iran become a member in good standing of the international community. That’s in the interest of everybody.
2009 – September – more
Zionist organizations in America are on the warpath. A war with Iran over nuclear exclusivity. The American Jewish Committee released a video on Youtube today entitled “This is the button,” inexplicably accompanied by lounge music, showing a toy truck followed by a terrorist explosion in Argentina attributed to Iran. Then the image of a child’s toy truck is followed by video footage of Iranian thugs on motorbikes terrorizing demonstrators in Teheran. Then videos of hangings of adulterers, and finally the words “This is the button” followed by another image “You don’t want to see what Iran does with the button.”
Clearly any nation that would murder civilians, suppress dissent, or make a mockery of its legal system cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapons. I certainly agree, but unfortunately these characteristics describe every nation that already possesses nukes, including Israel.
The AJC goes on to inform us in its online petition to Congress:
“With enough low-enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, and more centrifuges spinning each day, Iran is dangerously close to crossing the nuclear threshold. A nuclear Iran would particularly threaten Israel and our moderate Arab allies, and would destabilize the Middle East and threaten the security of the entire globe.”
“The security of the entire globe.” Why is hasbara so melodramatic? A nuclear Iran would indeed spell the last days of Israel’s nuclear hegemony but, according to Ehud Barak last week, “Israel is strong, I don’t see anyone who could pose an existential threat.” The Iran War will be all about Israel’s ability to remain the only nuclear power in the immediate region.
The nation’s synagogues have also apparently been enlisted in the Iran War by former American Michael Oren, now the Israeli Ambassador to the United States. Oren sent a letter to most American congregations, including mine, to be read during services at Rosh Hashanah. The instructions read:
“We are facing a critical juncture in our history. The Jewish community must confront this unprecedented threat before it is too late. I urge you as leaders of the Jewish community to impress this situation on your congregations. It is imperative to act now, at the start of a new year, and to join our voices in doing what [is] absolutely necessary to stop the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Meanwhile, hardly a peep from the mainstream media on Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which now has an estimated 150 to 400 nuclear weapons. The AJC letter sounds like we’d all be doing the Saudis and Egyptians a favor by defending Israeli nuclear hegemony. But those familiar with Israel’s history of violence are buying none of it. Egypt, for one, has categorically rejected this notion:
“The Middle East does not need any nuclear powers, be they Iran or Israel – what we need is peace, security, stability and development.”
What Israel is doing now in Congress and within the Jewish community is reckless: drumming up support for bombing Iran and laying the groundwork for American military and economic support for this needless piece of aggression. One thing the United States does not need right now, and cannot afford, is a third war in the Middle East. If Israel wants to initiate the Iran War, it should be prepared to accept all costs and all consequences itself.
If nuclear non-proliferation is truly an American goal, then a nuclear-free Middle East should be the objective. And that includes Israel. Selectively choosing countries for the nuclear club, particularly those with a history of violence in the region, is a bad idea. And going to war to defend a foreign nation’s exclusive nuclear capabilities is not only a bad idea, it’s a dangerous game that risks pulling us into a third war.
2009 – September – even more
Shimon Peres, in his letter to the Diaspora, asks Jews to:
seek peace, even as he insults Palestinians
fight for Israeli nuclear hegemony
oppose BDS by investing in Israel
keep indoctrinating your children
stand united with Israel, quoting scripture for political ends
This is all increasingly a tough sell from a state that consistently betrays Jewish values while appealing to them:
Hopefully, the coming New Year will be marked by the realization of our aspirations: attaining peace, increasing security, promoting economic growth, safeguarding the future of the Jewish people and strengthening the ties between Israel and our Jewish brothers in the Diaspora.
The opportunity to attain peace is beckoning, and must be seized, even at the cost of painful concessions. The Arab world’s intractable position to say “No” to negotiations, “No” to recognition of Israel and “No” to peace, has today been replaced by the three-fold “Yes” to the Saudi Initiative. The international community is keen to support endeavors to move the peace process forward, and I am confident that, with concerted efforts, the vision of a comprehensive peace can be realized. This will create stability, tranquility, security and prosperity for our children and their children after them.
Nuclear arms in the possession of extremist fundamentalist hands pose a danger to the whole of humanity and not only to Israel. A broad and consolidated stand by the international community against Iran is called for. I pray that this terrible threat be removed from all of humanity and that the world may enjoy a new era of peace and security.
Israel’s economy is showing the first sparks of recovery from the global economic crisis. The macro-economic signs are promising, and these indications are reflected in a growing scope of investments, the hi-tech industry is reviving and start-up companies are again sprouting. This is the time to seize the opportunity. This is the time to invest in Israel in fields such as alternative energy, water production, homeland security infrastructures, educational and learning-related tools, and in the stem-cell industry. This constitutes the future and it is in our hands.
It is vital to build with our brethren in the Diaspora ties based on solid foundations of partnership and education. Indeed, the role of Jewish education in the Diaspora cannot be overestimated. It serves as the very building-blocks of the bridges that connect the Jewish communities abroad and Israel. It serves as the terms of engagement between the young generation of Jewish youth and our nation and as the stepping stones to a greater awareness of the significance of Israel-Diaspora relations. It will serve to preserve our rich heritage and traditions.
The spirit of partnership must be enhanced in every area of Israel-Diaspora relations. We face dramatic challenges, which again underscore the necessity to stand united in moments of trial, responsible one for the other, as dictated by our Prophets. Indeed, a threat to the well-being of Jewish communities in the world equates a threat to Israel itself, and the fate of Diaspora Jewry is at the very core of Israel’s heart.
Dear Friends, as we embark on this New Year, I want to convey my heartfelt good wishes to all of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, in the hope that it will be a year of joy and good tidings to all.
And let us pray for the safe return home of the hostages and missing soldiers.
Shana Tova U’Metukah,
Shimon Peres
2009 – September – much more
The mainstream media and right-wing blogosphere is filled with strange theories about Iranian plans to destroy Jews in some variant of a nuclear “Final Solution.” What’s frightening is that the same people who spread this nonsense are the ones that got us into Iraq. And the ones who believe these lies are the same ones who claimed that the Iraqis were responsible for 9/11. And when we listen to a Khadafy or an Ahmadinejad at the UN, their words make no sense to Western diplomats — if they stay to listen to these speeches at all.
Lost amid the religious verbiage, hate of Israel’s Apartheid form of government, posturing for the rest of the Muslim world, and their downright quirkiness, both Khadafy and Ahmadinijad have nevertheless been delivering a consistent, coherent message to Western nations of the Security Council: Your time is up and we’re tired of playing by your rules. For its part, the West has also been delivering a message: Nothing has changed. The world is still ours. This was certainly the case in New York and Pittsburgh this week.
In his rambling, extemporaneous speech at the UN, Moammar Khadafy slammed the notion of privileged Western nations leading the Security Council:
[The Security Council] is political feudalism for those who have a permanent seat. […] It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the terror council. […] Permanent is something for God only. We are not fools to give the power of veto to great powers so they can use us and treat us as second-class citizens.
An even more reviled speaker in Western eyes, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, made the same points more lucidly in his speech:
It is not acceptable that the United Nations and the Security Council, whose decisions must represent all nations and governments by the application of the most democratic methods in their decision making processes, be dominated by a few governments and serve their interests. In a world where cultures, thoughts and public opinions should be the determining factors, the continuation of the present situation is impossible, and fundamental changes seem to be unavoidable.
[…] Marxism is gone. It is now history. The expansionist Capitalism will certainly have the same fate. […] We must all remain vigilant to prevent the pursuit of colonialist, discriminatory and inhuman goals under the cover of the slogans for change and in new formats. The world needs to undergo fundamental changes and all must engage collectively to make them happen in the right direction, and through such efforts no one and no government would consider itself an exception to change or superior to others and try to impose its will on others by proclaiming world leadership.
Ahmadinejad took aim at Israel, likening the slaughter of civilians in Gaza to “genocide”:
How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.
This was apparently too much for France and the United States to bear. “It is disappointing that Mr. Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Mark Kornblau, a spokesman to the US mission to the UN, said in a statement. Right on queue, 13 Western nations then walked out of a speech that covered much more ground than Israel.
Between New York and Pittsburgh, backroom meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria involving the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Israel, the Obama administration has been busy. Busy swatting down the Goldstone report, abandoning serious demands on settlements, and engaging in war frenzy to either impose more sanctions on Iran, or support bombing it, on behalf of Israel. When Obama came to the podium, he enumerated four main themes in a “new” American relationship to the rest of the world:
First, we must stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and seek the goal of a world without them. […] Because a world in which IAEA inspections are avoided and the United Nation’s demands are ignored will leave all people less safe, and all nations less secure.
That brings me to the second pillar for our future: the pursuit of peace. […] That effort must begin with an unshakeable determination that the murder of innocent men, women and children will never be tolerated.
Third, we must recognize that in the 21st century, there will be no peace unless we take responsibility for the preservation of our planet. […] We will press ahead with deep cuts in emissions to reach the goals that we set for 2020, and eventually 2050.
And this leads me to the final pillar that must fortify our future: a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. […] In Pittsburgh, we will work with the world’s largest economies to chart a course for growth that is balanced and sustained.
Yet when we parse the Obamaspeak and compare it to the President’s actual actions this week and this month, all the flowery speech rings hollow. Nothing has changed. The world order will remain the same.
Rather than the global or regional non-proliferation he spoke of, Obama’s actual non-proliferation consists of: No nukes for Iran. North Korea, a much more terrifying nuclear power ruled by an unhinged despot who has actually killed millions of his own citizens and whose nation has already tested nuclear weapons, merits a mere “tsk tsk” from the President. While Israel and the United States have staged simulated war exercises against Iran, Iran has not threatened Israel and no Iranian weapons testing has been detected. But Israel and/or the US are on the verge of attacking Iran militarily solely because Israel, our proxy in the region, fears losing its nuclear monopoly.
The pursuit of peace, particularly the claim that the murder of innocent civilians will never be tolerated, becomes another one of the President’s hollow high school valedictory speeches when measured against his own administration’s promise to torpedo the UN’s Goldstone report and prevent Israeli war crime charges from ever reaching the Hague. Of course, the United States could someday find itself in the same position as Israel, given Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, illegal renditions, assassinations, waterboarding, drone bombings, and the use of mercenaries in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. So perhaps avoiding the Hague is just American pragmatism. But for a country winding up one war in Iraq, escalating another in Afghanistan, and rattling drums for a third in Iran, the “pursuit of peace” is Orwellian Newspeak.
The last two themes, global warming and globalism, don’t inspire confidence either. Neither the President nor I will be around in 2050 when emission levels are low enough to do any good, and I wonder how much of the planet will be. As for global prosperity, Obama seems to offer a view that opportunity in the developing countries will be linked to sustained, balanced growth in the traditional industrialized nations. Did no one else hear anything new? Globalism and Capitalism have failed. Oratory won’t change the facts.
Even though we might not share the Libyan president’s taste in clothing or the Iranian president’s mock Holocaust denial, you’ve got to admit: the UN Security Council is an anachronistic body. It’s 1948 in a time warp. It still consists of the colonial powers who made such a mess of the Middle East right after WW2, and they’re still trying to set the rules, still reminding everyone that the Security Council is theirs, and that they control memberships in the nuclear club. And, with the exception of China, an old White Boy’s club at that.
But out with the old and in with the new. Two of the permanent members, France and Britain (each scarcely over 60 million) have insignificant populations compared to Indonesia or Pakistan (both Muslim states), India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, or Brazil — all of which have populations over 100 million and two of which are also nuclear states. At least two of these would be better candidates for permanent memberships on the Security Council.
So Khadafy and Ahmadinejad’s arguments really shouldn’t come as a surprise in a world that has changed greatly since 1948. These two leaders may not be the most accessible to Westerners, but they have been echoing the sentiments of many of the 187 other nations of the UN whose views are routinely ignored or vetoed by present members of the Security Council.
The Goldstone report is a case in point.
The report, commissioned by the UN, condemns Israeli and Hamas crimes against civilians during Operation Cast Lead last winter. Aside from various ad hominem attacks on Judge Goldstone, himself a Zionist Jew, no one has seriously attacked its actual findings. The only issue that the US, France, and Britain have with the report is that the investigation was not initiated with their blessings. Hence, in UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s words: no mandate. Apparently the rest of the world did not agree. Yet the US will very likely veto the transmission of the findings to the Hague.
Iran’s nuclear program also illustrates the same point.
In the Sixties a handful of Western nations were instrumental in providing Israel with nuclear weapons: the US, France, and Norway all played various parts. The United States has played a game for decades of pretending Israel has no nuclear weapons, and the other members of the Security Council have played along. When the Shah of Iran was in power, the United States and Germany actually helped Iran develop nuclear power. But now with an Iranian government that no longer takes orders from the West, the rules were simply changed.
When the world is yours, you can do what you want.
2009 – December
Michael Freund (American-born rightwing Israeli who supports expansionism and who worked as Netanyahu’s propagandist) calls for bombing Iran
J Street joined with AIPAC and broke with Americans for Peace Now in applauding new sanctions on Iran. To its credit, J Street made one distinction from AIPAC — in calling for continued diplomacy and warning against war:
We believe that a dual track approach that combines meaningful diplomatic engagement with broad-based sanctions is necessary to convince Iran to clarify its nuclear intentions. We commend the President for his efforts in strengthening the resolve of the international community on Iran. […]
We reiterate that nothing in this bill should be taken as authorizing or encouraging the use of military force against Iran. We are opposed to the use of military force by Israel or the United States against Iran.
While J Street joined with AIPAC in welcoming the sanctions, it broke with APN and Gush Shalom. Americans for Peace Now, on whose board J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami also sits, condemned the sanctions. APN’s Deborah Lee issued a statement which contained this critique of sanctions — any sanctions:
APN’s core concern about this bill remains unchanged: imposing sanctions the goal of which is to ‘cripple’ the civilian economy and inflict misery on the population — in the hopes that this population will rise up against its government — is a flawed and in all likelihood counterproductive approach. It is an approach that has failed for decades in Iran. It failed in Iraq and Haiti. It has failed in Cuba and North Korea. And it is an approach that only last week Israel abandoned in Gaza, recognizing that squeezing the population of Gaza with a blockade on civilian goods had not only failed to force Hamas out of power, but had enabled Hamas (and the world) to blame Israel for all the misery the people of Gaza were facing. It took Israel three years to recognize the error of this approach. It is regrettable that Congress did not draw the obvious lesson from these experiences.
While J Street has taken it on the chin from mainstream Jewish organizations and the Israeli Lobby for its unwavering support of a Two State solution, many of its recent positions — endorsing supplemental military aid for Israel and sanctions on Iran — seem designed to blunt right-wing criticisms and win supposedly “moderate” Jewish support.
J Street today applauded increased sanctions on Iran at the UN. An enrichment processing proposal brokered by Turkey and backed by Brazil, which had previously been acceptable to the United States, was rejected by the US in backing Israel’s demands for sanctions on Iran. A J Street press release supported the move:
J Street welcomes the passage of enhanced multilateral and broad-based sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council today.
This vote would not have been possible without the tireless diplomatic efforts of the Obama Administration. We commend President Obama and his team for their effort and this step in the right direction, and urge them to continue employing a dual track approach – meaningful engagement plus multilateral sanctions – to convince Iran to change course.
Today, the Government of Iran hears a clear message from the international community that there are real consequences to continued obfuscation, delay, and intransigence over its nuclear program, as well as real benefits should they fully address international concerns.
We expect the Iranian regime to immediately make clear it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, to submit to international inspections, and to end its support for groups that use violence and terror against Israel. Such action will put Iran on the road to reintegration into the international community.
These sanctions are particularly stupid because there was an opportunity to try a reprocessing scheme the US had once supported and to insist on monitoring access. Teheran had warned that the offer would be off the table if sanctions were imposed, and this now gives them a domestic popularity boost in standing up to the United States. There will also now be no monitoring, and Iran will have scored points for its home team.
The imposition of sanctions, however ineffective they are expected to be, coupled with the attack on the Mavi Marmara, is also a setback for NATO ally Turkey and a gain for Israel. A message certainly not lost on certain Middle Eastern and new European allies, these sanctions make it crystal clear that the United States is willing to betray NATO allies and friends when it comes to Israel. Stephen Walt calls it right when he cites Stephen Cook of the Council of Foreign Relations complaining about how Turkey needs to be “kept in its lane.” We can’t have just anybody running around being a regional power broker in the Middle East. There’s already a reserved seat.
This move is also exceptionally misguided because it further complicates the United States’ relations with other nations in the Middle East. But the president, the State Department, and apparently J Street, all continue to see the world as it was during the Bush administration. The US with the help of Israel will continue to try to project its power in the Middle East – at least for a few more years. Other regional players need not apply for the job.
2010 – August
In 2010 foreign policy wonks went into overdrive dissecting the musings of Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic Monthly on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran. Goldberg’s career has been notable as a shill for the IDF (he was also a former Israeli solder) and he was also a notorious proponent of the Iraq war, so Goldberg’s conclusions on the inevitability of such an attack were not surprising. But neither is the fact that so many of his sources were anonymous. The piece was a major piece of Israeli propaganda masquerading as a liberal essay in a liberal US publication. On page 63 of the magazine’s print edition there was an obligatory picture of IDF jets flying above Auschwitz as if to highlight the “reasons” for Israel’s posture.
It’s all about the U.S. interest in Israel’s nuclear hegemony.
Goldberg is correct only in his conclusion that the US will assist Israel with the attack – not for all the Israeli propaganda reasons he enumerates.
Israel’s reason is not to protect itself from an “existential threat” but to continue to amass armaments to delay the inevitable end of its Occupation of Palestine and create more “facts on the ground.”
The U.S. reason is not to preserve regional peace and security but to simply ensure continued nuclear hegemony by its proxy, Israel.
If and when the US becomes involved in the bombing of Iran – even if only by logistical support, looking the other way while Israeli F16s fly over Iraq, or providing the bunker-buster bombs Israel will use – it will not be an unwilling participant in the next war, its fourth and possibly a World War.
2010 – August – more/worse
While foreign policy junkies were busy parsing Jeffrey Goldberg’s overhyped article in the Atlantic on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran, another article in the same issue of the Atlantic by Robert D. Kaplan attempted to repurpose one of Henry Kissinger’s old Cold War theories for use with Iran – specifically, that the only way to deal with upstart revolutionary nations like Iran is to be willing to engage with them in limited nuclear war. Kaplan writes:
We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book of a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.
What is he saying? That, should Goldberg’s wet dream not come true and that Iran does get the bomb, the United States should be willing to use its own against it – regardless of preemptive use or massive civilian casualties. Kaplan reflects a little on the implications, but seems pretty happy with the war criminal’s approach anyway:
At the time of his writing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, some analysts took Kissinger to task for what one reviewer called “wishful thinking”- in particular, his insufficient consideration of civilian casualties in a limited nuclear exchange. Moreover, Kissinger himself later moved away from his advocacy of a NATO strategy that relied on short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance the might of the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. (The doctrinal willingness to suffer millions of West German civilian casualties to repel a Soviet attack seemed a poor way to demonstrate the American commitment to the security and freedom of its allies.) But that does not diminish the utility of Kissinger’s thinking the unthinkable.
This analysis is typical of Kaplan. In 2005 he tried to sell the same stinking Kissinger fish, this time for war with China.
Couldn’t the Atlantic have hired two writers with different views for these bookended articles? More to the point: couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of real Iran experts? And couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of writers who personally had NOT served in the Israeli army?
Kaplan, a stealth neocon armed with only a BA from UConn, seems to have the ear of ostensible Liberals. Unfortunately, his influence is all out of proportion to his scholarship or the quality of the goods he’s selling. Tom Bissell’s blistering review of Kaplan’s career and work shines light not only Kaplan’s errors of judgment – but that shown by those who peddle Kaplan’s work.
2011 – August
This morning’s editorial section contained a piece by Lawrence J. Haas advocating war on Iran. It was typical of ramped-up calls from neoconservatives inside and outside the Obama administration, many of whom have a misplaced preoccupation with Israel and who claim Iran has promised to incinerate half of the world’s Jews in a second nuclear holocaust. No matter that it is Israel which possesses the nukes and that no proof of Iranian nuclear weapons actually exists.
While this war-mongering is really all about who shall maintain a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and Central Asia — and in so doing preserve oil-dependent colonialism for a few more decades — the war mongers and their friends in the defense industry and pro-Israel lobby have stepped up the calls for U.S. military action, and they’ve added a few new justifications for it. Now in addition to threatening to nuke Israel with (non-existent) nuclear weapons, Iran is being blamed for attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and allying itself with Al Qaeda. And now that the U.S. has successfully assassinated bin Laden, we really need another bogeyman.
But since our country seems bound and determined to get into — frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of wars we’ve got going on now — let’s just call it another war, it might be good to understand precisely what the Iranians think of us. Simplistic formulations like “clash of civilizations” and “they hate us for what we have” don’t provide any insight. Apparently nobody wants to re-hash or even look at history: the U.S. coup which removed a secular, democratic Iranian government in the Fifties, American support for the Shah and his brutal secret police, or recent American and Israeli assassinations and sabotage. But in fact, the U.S. has been meddling in Iran since the beginning of the 20th century and the Iranians have a long list of gripes. Iran also has legitimate concerns for its security, as Ron Paul pointed out yesterday in a GOP candidate debate. It is virtually surrounded by the United States. Given all this, it is unlikely Iran presents much of a military threat to anyone, including Israel. And even Ehud Barak agrees.
So, if the real issue is not the bogus existential threat to Israel, and the real issue actually is the preservation of Israel’s nuclear monopoly, how do the Iranians feel about it?
One of the best documents to gauge Iran’s views is the transcript of a speech given in 2001 by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iranian presidents come and go, but the mullahocracy remains to guide not only domestic life in Iran but also foreign policy.
In this 2001 speech, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani discussed colonialism, capitalism, the world since 1948, and Israel’s nuclear advantage, which he sees as a colonial effort and not a Jewish conspiracy. A passage below on “US-British support for Israel” is often cited as a veiled threat to destroy Israel. But the speech discusses neutralizing Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons, not destroying the nation. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.
2011 – September
Once the Israel Lobby digests its meal of the remains of the Palestinian state, what’s next on the menu? Already the pro-Israel hawks are calling for war on Iran. Most of the Republican hopefuls are nodding in agreement with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon when he says: “All options are on the table.”
Whose table is that?
2011 – October
The Standard Times again is raising a cri de guerre from Lawrence J. Haas, a man who never met a war he didn’t want the taxpayers to fund. I will again make the observation that readers are being treated to more of this syndicated rightwing fare than ever before.
Haas is one of a number of neoconservatives who believe the answer to a failed policy of trying to remake the Middle East in America’s image is more of the same. The Kagans, Raymond Tanter, various Republican presidential candidate’s advisors, and others have been on the warpath lately, calling for military strikes, bunker busters, or – in the case of Haas – “surgical strikes” on Iran. Were it only true that surgeons, rather than butchers, conducted wars.
The cockamamie story of a Texan-Iranian used car salesman and his supposed contacts within the Iranian government plotting an assassination and attacks on multiple embassies, as sketched out by Attorney General Holder and Secretary of State Clinton, has never been properly explained. The Texan-Iranian is an habitual offender with a penchant for drugs and domestic abuse. The missing man, Gholam Shaakuri, whom Haas and others claim is a member of the Iranian government, actually turns out to be a member of the Mujahadeen e-Kalq, the MEK – a terrorist organization which opposes Iran from exile. I wouldn’t expect the administration to show any proof because there is none.
We’ve gone down this road many times before, with the Gulf of Tonkin, in Central America, with exiled Cubans (Bay of Pigs), exiled Iraqis (non-existent yellowcake, fabled WMDs, thanks to Chalabi and others). Pretexts for war are an American tradition. Remember the Maine?
We would do well to get a grip and not let the shrill voices of militarism dictate entry into another war – especially when the only justification is ideological. After decades of wars and drone attacks in Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and now even Kenya, the head spins, and the only thing certain is that we are bankrupting ourselves and making yesterday’s friends into tomorrow’s enemies.
2012 – August
When it comes to Israel, we seem to be continuously inundated with Israeli hardliner views. The August 21st piece (“Cooling off Israel: Five ways to avert a strike on Iran”) by former chief of Israeli intelligence Amos Yadlin, curiously labelled “National View” since it hardly reflects an American view on the subject, was no exception. The “five” views in his article basically boil down to one: Israel can’t go it alone, so the U.S. should see that it is in “our” interests to bomb Iran for Israel, or at least threaten it with war. But while Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak may bluster about unilaterally bombing Iran, they first need to drag the U.S. into such a war. Why? Because they can’t even sell their war domestically.
The Israeli public is justifiably wary of such go-it-alone threats. A recent poll by Israel’s Dahaf Institute showed 61 percent of Israelis believe Iran should not be attacked without U.S. consent. Yadlin’s article, and those like it, bear the fingerprints of a massive P.R. offensive – by AIPAC stalwarts; the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren in a recent WSJ article; frequent Standard Times contributors Richard Haas and Charles Krauthammer calling for war; a recent article in the NYT by Uzi Dayan, former IDF chief of staff; a recent barrage of Israeli government “leaks,” including a “shock and awe” style war plan; speculations in Israel’s English-language newspaper, and elsewhere.
And both House Democrats and Republicans, as well as every Republican candidate up to and including Mitt Romney, have eagerly parroted the Likudnik line: Iran has the bomb; Iran presents an existential threat to Israel; Israel’s interests are American interests.
None of this is true. This is about nuclear hegemony: Israel’s.
Despite the alarm an Iranian enrichment program provokes, Iran does not yet possess either a nuclear weapon or a missile capable of delivering it. In fact, “recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” (NYT article by James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, Feb 24, 2012).
America’s intelligence agencies say: baloney.
Hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties would result from an Iranian response to an Israeli (and/or American) first strike. If Americans still have a taste for reckless wars after our many adventures in the Middle East, we could delude ourselves that the mighty American military could make quick work of Iranian missile defenses (Iran has a military budget of only $6 billion a year), but no one can predict Iran’s non-military responses. Would the Straights of Hormuz stay open? How would the rest of the world respond? Even a brief (unlikely) war would cost at least $40 or $50 billion, to be paid for by either Israeli – or more likely American – taxpayers who already shell out $4 billion a year to the highly militarized state.
But here’s an even better idea for averting another unnecessary war.
Israeli nuclear scientist Uzi Even suggests that Israel shutter its nuclear plant in Dimona and dismantle its own (approximately 200) nuclear weapons in exchange for Iran dismantling its program. After all, if we are concerned with nuclear weapons presenting an existential threat to the 7 million people in Israel, we should also be at least somewhat concerned that Israel’s nukes present an existential threat to the other 350 million people in the Middle East.
If the U.S. goal is not simply to ensure Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the region, an approach other than beating the drums of war is necessary. On the other hand, if this kerfuffle indeed is about preserving the Zionist state’s nuclear advantage and thumbing our nose at the rest of the world, well, then we’d better be prepared to pay the price for this madness.
2015 – March
John Bolton writes Op Edi in NYT calling for bombing of Iran
Last year Democrats drafted a national party platform that some said was the most progressive platform of all time. And maybe it was – for the Democratic Party – and only when limited to certain domestic planks.
But when it came to foreign policy, the Democratic Party’s hawkish platform reflected its presidential candidate’s worldview. We would fight ISIS by giving taxpayer money to repressive and right-wing governments – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel – the Usual Suspects – though so far they’ve been useful only to Defense contractors. The DNC platform ignored Congress’s right and obligation to declare war while calling for the use of presidential AUMF statements – like the one Donald Trump used last week. The platform downplayed the use of ground forces while preferring technology – Tomahawks and drones – like the ones Donald Trump used last week. Nobody really has a different plan – just keep on using extrajudicial killing indefinitely, without ever declaring war, without ever clearing the endless war with Congress.
The DNC platform is full of jingoistic phrases such as “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” But many are beginning to question whether it just might be the United States that has inflicted the most damage on world peace and stability. We originally funded Islamists to fight the USSR, have given Israel $128 billion since 1948 while simultaneously turning our backs on Palestinians, created failed states in Iraq, Libya, and Syria – and then created millions of refugees Europe and Turkey have had to deal with.
2017 – June
In June 2017 the Senate voted on S.722, “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017,” a bill which slapped economic sanctions on both Russia and Iran. The vote passed almost unanimously except for two senators with fiercely independent streaks. One of them was Rand Paul. The other was Bernie Sanders.
On his website Sanders wrote that, if fashioned as a separate bill, he would have voted for Russian sanctions and noted he has previously voted for sanctions on Iran. But the bill, he wrote, “could endanger the very important nuclear agreement that was signed between the United States, its partners and Iran in 2015.”
Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey, however, both enthusiastically voted for the sanctions, as did every Democrat in the Senate. Warren had previously been opposed to Iran sanctions and supported the Iran deal. But on Thursday she voted with the herd to both jeopardize the work John Kerry had done and to wage economic war on Iran. In fact, Warren not only voted with the herd but was a co-sponsor.
Bernie Sanders was right. The vote by every Democratic senator jeopardizes the Iran nuclear deal and creates a more precarious world. Here in Massachusetts we just learned our so-called “progressive” senators just couldn’t resist waving the flag and voting for more American bullying.
Sanctions
Economic sanctions are acts of war. The Council on Foreign Relations characterizes them as alternatives to war, but the targets of sanctions understand quite well what they really are. When, in 2015, the EU slapped sanctions on Russia, one Russian banker called it “economic war.” And North Korea has never minced words: “We consider now any kind of economic sanctions to be taken by the Security Council as a declaration of war.”
As economic acts of war, sanctions can provoke military responses just as easily as bombing. Students of history may recall that reparations and economic sanctions against Germany following World War I fed both German nationalism and militarism leading up to World War II. Writing in Foreign Policy Journal, Gilles van Nederveen wrote:
Sanctions can lead to war “if the state is militarized and the central government is backed to the wall. Consider an example of pre-World War II Japan. American and Japanese militaries prepared for a confrontation throughout the twenties, but real tensions did not start until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. At the outset of U.S.-imposed oil blockade in 1940, Japan estimated that it had a fuel reserve of just under two years. The Imperial Japanese Navy drafted plans to seize the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia) in order to maintain steady supply of oil and its military strength. International organizations like the League of Nations were powerless in curtailing aggression during the thirties. After the initial oil blockade in 1940, each Japanese move was met with yet another U.S. embargo: scrap metal, access to the Panama Canal, and finally, the U.S. froze all Japanese accounts in the US, effectively putting Japan on the collision course with the U.S.”
Sanctions are an overused tool of both neoconservatives and neoliberals. The Heritage Foundation pointed out in 1997 that, during Bill Clinton’s administration, Clinton managed to slap sanctions on 42% of the world’s population. Of course, this was twenty years ago when Conservatives were out of power and posing as reasonable statesmen. Fast forward twenty years: they’re back in power and they’re leading the charge themselves.
Economic sanctions are often accompanied by physical blockades, embargoes, interdiction of shipments on the high seas, proxy wars, and covert warfare. All of these apply to Iran. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment, former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew described sanctions in the same terms as precision bombing:
“The sanctions we employ today are different. They are informed by financial intelligence, strategically designed, and implemented with our public and private partners to focus pressure on bad actors and create clear incentives to end malign behavior, while limiting collateral impact.”
But economic sanctions do not limit collateral impact. Sanctions are every bit as lethal as bunker-busters. On May 12, 1996 — long before Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal — Madeline Albright was asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from U.S. economic sanctions were worth it. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State didn’t shed a tear or miss a beat when she answered “yes.”
2017 – July
Keating was reluctant to support Obama’s and Kerry’s Iran deal and has courted the MEK, an exile group which until 2012 was designated a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow and replace the Iranian government with its own “government-in-exile.” Thanks to Republican and Democratic hawks the designation was lifted.
Keating is pro-Likud. He has fought international efforts to support a Two State Solution, advocated moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, opposed the use of the word “Palestine” and threatened to cut off U.S. contributions to the U.N. and funding for U.N. refugee efforts because of the international body’s criticism of Israel’s land theft and occupation.
2019 – May
Elliott Abrams is a war criminal convicted of lying to Congress, though he was subsequently pardoned. Mike Pompeo is fond of threatening enemies with US invasion. Like Pompeo, John Bolton has never met a war he didn’t love, pressing for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea, and Iran. With the selection of these three sociopaths, Trump is telegraphing plans for Venezuela and Iran. Like Iraq, both countries have long been in the crosshairs of American neoconservatives. The administration’s plans may be old but they’re reliable — coups, puppet regimes, and manufactured threats to the US and its allies. All depend on gullibility and attention deficit from the American public.
Of all the chaos that Trump has unleashed, the threat of an attack on Iran is the most terrifying. Neocons have never been happy with John Kerry’s Iran deal, in which Iran and the US agreed to an accord that would keep Iran from enriching weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for relief from US sanctions. Despite zero evidence of violations by Iran, Trump withdrew from the deal and is considering prosecuting Kerry for violating the Logan Act — for speaking with foreign diplomats, as most former American diplomats do even after leaving their diplomatic posts.
To escalate the provocations even further, Trump denoted the Iranian Guard a “terrorist” organization. And last week, following the deployment of a carrier strike force and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf, the US accused Iran of sabotaging tankers. Two Saudi, one Norwegian, and one Emirati ship were allegedly attacked with improvised limpet mines close to the Emirates. Trump threatened to send 120,000 troops to the region, telling the press, “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that. They’re not going to be happy.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested that the sabotaging of vessels was a “false flag” operation and ascribed war noises to the work of the “four Bs” — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, United Arab Emirates crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and White House national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 advocated bombing Iran. And if one looks at a map of US military bases surrounding Iran, it is hard to imagine why Iran would want to provoke the US.
Europeans, who remain party to the Iran agreement, are skeptical of Trump’s accusations. Norbert Röttgen, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the German parliament, downplayed American warnings of imminent Iranian attacks. He said that the BND (German intelligence) has not found any escalation in Iranian threats. In fact, Röttgen described the US warnings as mere “saber rattling, a show of force to demonstrate seriousness and to justify American foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran.”
But, after a generation of American wars in the Middle East, there is still an appetite for more. The Trump administration and its supporters believe invading Iran would be a “slam dunk,” as the Bush administration thought Iraq would be. Almost a generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq. And after a generation, hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US still remains in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime. Geniuses like Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton doubt it would take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”
Cooler heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:
Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska
Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million
Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel
While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran
Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go; Iran still has many regional friends
Even FOX News host Tucker Carlson was concerned about Bolton’s influence. “More than anything in the world, national security adviser John Bolton would love to have a war with Iran. It will be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday [all] wrapped into one,” Carlson said.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has introduced a petition to block Trump’s unilateral entry into a war with Iran, and Nancy Pelosi reminded everyone that “the responsibility in the Constitution is for Congress to declare war. So I hope that the president’s advisers recognize they have no authorization to go forward in any way. They cannot call the authorization, AUMF, the authorization for the use of military force that was passed in 2001, as any authorization to go forward in the Middle East now.”
Impeachment might be largely a formality in the almost certain absence of Senate prosecution of Trump’s crimes, but proceedings should be initiated anyway. Congress must insist on all its rights and powers, which include declaring war. As for Abrams and Bolton, they deserve tenures just as short as Anthony Scaramucci’s — if not cells at the Hague.
But if anyone should be getting regime change this month, please, let it be the American people.
With conditions for ICE prisoners deteriorating by the minute, Conservatives lost their minds when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called ICE’s facilities for caging children as young as 4 months of age by their proper name — concentration camps. “I don’t use those words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is,” she said. “A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks followed an announcement that ICE now has plans to use Fort Sill, a former Japanese “internment” camp in Oklahoma, to “detain” migrant children. ICE operates 168 camps in 23 states for migrant children alone. According to the Densho Encyclopedia which documents this shameful chapter of American history, Fort Sill housed Japanese-American prisoners who “sometimes lived in 100-degree weather with no escape from the hot temperatures. Guard towers “were equipped with 30-caliber machine guns, shotguns, and searchlights. […] On May 13, 1942, a mentally ill internee was shot dead by guards who claimed that he was trying to escape.” Even if it now has air-conditioning Fort Sill will still be a concentration camp, not an “internment” or “detention center” for a new batch of non-white prisoners.
Liz Cheney, daughter of war criminal Dick Cheney, tweeted: “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
Blue Dog Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer, piled on as well. In a press statement, Gottheimer said, “the comparison is cruel and disrespectful to the six million who were murdered in the Holocaust, including members of my own family. Concentration camps were places where Jews and others were enslaved, tortured, and then sent to gas chambers to be murdered.”
But not so fast. Sure, Republicans and their weak-kneed Democratic allies get a bit peeved when critics of immigration policy point to how many of Trump’s policies had precedents in the Third Reich. A convenient dismissal is that it “disrespects” Holocaust survivors. But the critics have a point — particularly when a neo-fascist, advised and adored by white supremacists, could so easily and quickly convert detention camps into death camps. It’s happened before.
The Jewish Virtual Library notes that the Nazis operated as many as 15,000 collection, labor, and transit camps, collection points, and ghettos. Of these only a fraction were extermination (or death) camps. Even Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died, was not technically an extermination camp — the Nazis called it a “displaced persons camp” — although its prisoners were housed in unspeakable conditions which led to tens of thousands of deaths. And Theresienstadt — where Nazi propagandists portrayed prisoners as practically on vacation — this too was a concentration camp.
Consider, too, the definition found in the Encyclopedia Brittanica: “concentration camp: internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order.” This definition fits precisely the hundreds of thousands of prisoners Trump, by “executive decree,” has placed in American concentration camps — just as the definition applies to the 1.5 million Uighurs in Chinese concentration camps or an unknown number of gay men in Chechen concentration camps.
A world in which facts are disputed and words no longer have any meaning is a dangerous, Orwellian nightmare. Language is important. If the use of “concentration camp” induces a collective meltdown from Trump defenders, then the use of euphemisms like “intern” and “detention” should as well. Guatemalan and Honduran child “interns” are not writing Python code for Google or collecting business contacts at hedge funds. No mentally competent person would say they have been “detained,” as in bad traffic or by a last-minute telephone call.
Let’s stop lying to ourselves. These children are prisoners in a rapidly-expanding network of cruelly-administered American concentration camps.
Massachusetts liberals like to think of our state as the home of Camelot and the heart of Abolition, all while smugly bashing Confederate monuments in the South. But our own history and our own flag are just as shameful as those in the former Confederate States of America.
If you haven’t looked closely, both the Massachusetts seal and the state flag feature a belt modeled after one worn by Wampanoag Chief Metacomet (beheaded by Puritans) and a white artist’s conception of Wampanoag Chief Ousamequin (Massasoit) standing in submission beneath the sword of Miles Standish. A shortened version of a Latin aphorism — manus haec inimica tyrannis ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (this hand, an enemy to tyrants, seeks with the sword a quiet peace under liberty) — accompanies the image, conflating Native Americans with tyranny.
The original version of the seal bears no trace of tyrants or Miles Standish, but instead depicts a naked man with a cartoon bubble saying “come over and help us.” For a few short years around the time of American Independence the seal depicted a white man holding the Magna Carta and a sword, after which both versions were combined into what is more-or-less today’s seal. The history of the seal thus charts an arc from a patronizing White Man’s Burden to triumphant White domination. The new seal is one of many images throughout the United States depicting the defeat and humiliation of Native Americans, such as this WPA-era mural by Victor Arnautoff at George Washington High School in San Francisco.
Victor Arnautoff’s mural at GW High School in SF
In order to better understand the seal and its symbols, it may help to review some of the Massachusetts history you never learned in school.
The Puritans, named for their intent to “purify” Protestantism of Catholic influences, arrived in Provincetown Harbor in 1620 in a ship owned by the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, the Mayflower, accompanied by an English-born Dutch mercenary named Miles Standish. Many regarded this group of religious zealots as quite extreme, even for England in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. Religion certainly played a part in the Puritan’s appearance in the New World; but colonial avarice was what brought them to it.
Upon their arrival, the Puritans swore allegiance to the English King, James (for whom a version of the Protestant bible is named) and signed the Mayflower Compact, “having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia [the Hudson Valley, now in New York].” With supplies running low and winter approaching, they never made it to the Hudson Valley and instead established the “Plimoth” colony.
Forget the communal First Thanksgiving potluck you learned about in school. It was war against brown people from the moment the Puritans arrived. Miles Standish had a well-earned reputation, even among some of the colonists, for brutality and slaughter of Native Americans. Hartman Deetz, of the Wampanoag Nation, notes that in 1623 Standish committed “one of the first recorded egregious murders of native people by colonists in north America. […] the murder of a man, Pecksuot, just south of Boston. Standish […] lured him into a house under the premise that they were going to conduct trade. And when he got into the house, they barred the doors, and he stabbed [Pecksuot] through the heart with his own knife.” Standish also killed and beheaded another warrior named Wituwamat, slaughtered his family, and brought Wituwamat’s head back to Plymouth and displayed it on a wooden pike.
In New England the genocide and enslavement of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans are bound together in a history that began almost simultaneously.
In 1633, European slave-hunters came to Southern New England to look for Native Americans to press into slavery. Two of them were killed by the Pequot and the Puritans demanded that the killers be turned over for colonial justice. The Pequots refused. In May of 1637 English troops set fire to a Pequot village near Mystic River in Connecticut killing 700 women, children, and elderly; the survivors were enslaved. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, reported, “It was a fearful sight to see them [Pequots] thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them […]”
In 1638, the Puritans began trafficking enslaved survivors of the decimated Pequot nation, trading them for African slaves from the West Indies. Historian James Drake notes that “the war produced hundreds of Indian refugees, who lived as vagabonds within or on the edges of New England towns.” Slavery “[…] helped satisfy the dilemma of what to”do” with them.”
It is understandable that a flag consisting of a subservient Native American, a colonial mercenary’s sword hanging over his head, and a Latin phrase insinuating that he is a tyrant would surely offend people in the 21st Century. More importantly, the sentiments on the seal and flag no longer represent the aspirations of a 21st Century democracy.
For this reason there are currently two resolutions in the Massachusetts legislature, both entitled “Resolve providing for the creation of a special commission relative to the seal and motto of the Commonwealth” — a House version, H.2776, sponsored by Reps. Lindsay N. Sabadosa and Nika C. Elugardo; and S.1877, sponsored by Senator Jason M. Lewis. Rep. Sabadosa told WGBH that “the legislation does not spell out what we want to change the seal and logo to, […] It just says that we need to put together a commission really composed of native voices so that we can find a symbol that represents the values of Massachusetts that’s true to our history but is also respectful at the same time.”
The current state seal was created in 1908 — eighteen years before the Wounded Knee Massacre and sixteen years before Native Americans were given American citizenship. 1908 was not a time of great sensitivity to Native Americans, who were not even regarded as fellow citizens when the “new” seal was created.
In parallel with calls to change the state flag, there is also a national movement to end the use of “Indian mascots” on school sports teams. Maine just became the first state in the nation to throw racist mascots into the dust bin of history. Nationally, over 2000 schools have mascots with names like Warriors (#1), Indians (#2), Raiders, Braves, Chiefs, Redskins, Redmen, Savages, Squaws, Shaman, or specific tribal names — like the Braintree Wamps (named for the Wampanoag).
As with the cigar store Indian, Native Americans have been frequently de-humanized and reduced to avatars and mascots for commercial products — on the same low level as the Geico gecko or the Aflac duck. And yet — here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century! — the Land o’ Lakes maiden still serves alongside Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima as a racist mascot for corporate America.
But corporate exploitation just echoes the widespread racism in society. Caricatures of Native Americans join the lawn jockey, the sleepy Mexican, Sambo, Chief Wahoo, mammies, Golliwogs, tar babies, pickaninnies, hooked-nosed Jews and Arabs, squinting Asians, and countless racist depictions of non-white people on White America’s lawns and curio shelves. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) created a poster to try to convey to White America how racist the Cleveland Indian mascot was — but the lesson was apparently too difficult, or too subtle, to comprehend.
On June 25th, 2019 the Massachusetts legislature will conduct joint hearings on two bills prohibiting the use of racist mascots. House bill H.443 sponsored by Reps. Nika C. Elugardo and Tami L. Gouveia joins Senate bill S.247 sponsored by Senator Joanne M. Comerford in charting a path for the phase-out of offensive mascots without imposing financial hardships on the schools that have them. Local schools include: the Barnstable Red Raiders; the Braintree Wamps; the Bristol Aggie Chieftains; the Dartmouth Indians; and the Middleborough Sachems.
Closer to home, the Dartmouth Schools don’t understand how redface and caricaturing Native Americans actually undermines their own anti-discrimination, anti-bullying and anti-harassment policies: “The school system shall establish and maintain an atmosphere in which all persons can develop attitudes and skills for effective cooperative living in our culturally diverse society.”
Unless you go on Twitter.
A frequent justification for not retiring Native Indian mascots is that schools are somehow honoring Native Americans rather than simply turning them into cartoons. Dartmouth High School’s mascot is the “Indian,” patterned after Dartmouth (NH) College’s. The nickname “Big Green” remains the same for both schools, and the green letter “D” is still exactly the same. But in 1974 the College decided it was time for their racist mascot to go. Not so for the eponymous high school.
A number of Native American groups, including the National Congress of American Indians, Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda, and the Nipmuc nation, reject mascots outright. In Oregon one school district negotiated with a tribal council to set parameters for the use of tribal imagery. In Utah a tribal council took to social media to slam a parody of a tribal dance done by cheerleaders with wigs on a basketball court. Tribes are being consulted, or at least being heard, in other states.
Why not Massachusetts?
In 2005, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) looked at offensive mascots, 14 schools decided to drop them altogether, 19 were cited for abusive names and imagery, and many were prohibited from participating in tournaments. Several schools which previously used the name “Indians” changed them to: the Arkansas Red Wolves, Indiana Crimson Hawks, McMurry War Hawks, Midwestern State Mustangs, Newberry College Wolves, and so on. Change can be easily, and quickly, accomplished.
It is not known if the Dartmouth High School Student Manual’s “respect” rationale for continuing to use the “Indian” mascot was based on approval from local tribal councils or if they were ever consulted. The School Committee controls the mascot logo as if they held a copyright on Native Americans. I emailed and then followed-up with a call to Dr. Bonnie Gifford, Dartmouth’s Superintendent of Schools, passing along several questions to her assistant. But as of publication time I have not received a reply. Likewise, emails to every member of the town School Committee have gone unanswered.
When it comes to respecting or honoring tribes, “honor” is not a verb white people get to define. Tim Giago, an Oglala-Lakota from South Dakota, has his own definition:
“If the white race wants to honor Native Americans, start by honoring our treaties.”
“And please, please keep in mind; there is no difference between wearing Blackface than there is in wearing “Redface.”
It’s 2019, people! Time’s up for lawn jockies, mammies, and blackface. Time’s also up for racist mascots and redface. Please call your representatives in both the House and Senate to support both Native American-related bills now in the Massachusetts legislature.
Yesterday I attended the Bristol County 3rd District Court sentencing of Holly Landowne-Stein, who was arrested for cementing herself to the gate of the Bristol County jail in August 2018. Landowne-Stein and several others were calling attention to abuses at the jail by Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, and protesting his 287(g) agreement with ICE. The activists were charged with not only trespassing, but inflated charges of disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.
When you enter the New Bedford courthouse, you may not bring with you any recording devices or personal electronics. Justice [such as it is] may not be blind — but in the American justice system the nasty business that goes on in courts and jails must be done in twilight.
Courtroom #4 has three banks of benches, the front row reserved for a parade of legal counsel that handles hearings on an industrial scale. Bristol County now uses a scheme most Americans imagine only exists in Cairo, Riyadh, Beijing, or Kazakhstan — the cases are heard by a judge on the other end of a wire, providing neither the accused’s defense lawyer nor the public any chance to see or hear the accused in person. While we waited, two public defenders commented on the difficulties of properly representing their clients this way, not the least of which is the ability to confer privately during the hearings.
This electronically-dispensed “justice” seemed to be far from efficient. In case after case, defense attorneys complained of not having received discovery materials from the District Attorney’s office; in all cases this meant that the accused would have to sit in jail several more weeks until the ADA shared their information with the defense. In a few cases the accused’s lawyer was either not present or could not be located when the prisoner was hauled before the cameras in the Ash Street jail. In one case the prisoner’s bail had already been paid and the judge was confused about why the prisoner was still incarcerated.
In another dispensing of one-minute justice, one defense lawyer wanted to enter a plea but could not — because his client was not physically present. Another prisoner seemed to be in a Catch-22 situation with the New York courts. Miles away, and trying to be heard over the clanking of bars and the din of voices at Ash Street, it was impossible to see whatever paperwork the man was waving — hoping — that the judge would consider.
I’ve been to court before, but this one morning illustrates the efficiencies of the prison-industrial complex and the lengths to which the courts will go to create a simulacrum of “justice.” Each hearing took approximately sixty seconds as incarcerated widgets were processed through a remote assembly line – each prisoner’s humanity reduced to a smudge of pixels on a screen.
In one hearing, that of Maria Carrion, who was charged as part of Operation Ghost with fentanyl trafficking, District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III himself showed up in court, presumably to send a get-tough message to the judge, Douglas J. Darnbrough, a Baker appointee. Or maybe Quinn was just grandstanding like his matching bookend, Tom Hodgson.
Finally, the case we had all come to hear was being called.
Holly Landowne-Stein’s supporters, four from New Bedford, and twenty from Providence — including her mother, Rabbi Ann Landowne — had to wait until around noon for her sentencing. After posing numerous questions to the activist, including asking her if she voluntarily waived a jury or bench trial, her right to question witnesses, and querying if she was happy with her representation and understood all charges against her, Judge Douglas J. Darnbrough sentenced Landowne-Stein to 10 days in the Ash Street jail, with a one day credit for time served. She was immediately cuffed and taken from the room.
As the father of thirty-something children myself, I felt great admiration for this young woman, who had put her values and her freedom on the line to protest a sheriff who has quite literally killed and injured people through willful neglect and cruelty. I could easily imagine the fear and pain a parent feels as cuffs are placed on his child’s wrists – and, in this case, the anger at state violence masquerading as justice.
Nine days should pass relatively quickly for this young woman. Unlike many (if not most) detainees at Tom Hodgson’s jails, Holly Landowne-Stein has her health, her sobriety, and dedicated friends and family on the “outside.” Her experience will be nothing like a thousand others, far less fortunate, who are victimized for up to two and a half years in his facilities – all because society doesn’t want to know what goes on inside those walls.
The fight against Hodgson’s abuses and his ICE collaboration will continue.
This week there were a couple of studies in the news which shine a little light into the darkness that is settling over America. One should be read by all Democrats. The other will almost certainly be ignored by reality- and reading-averse Republicans. But both call into question the existence of near-mythological creatures believed to be true.
The first study, released last week by the Pew Research Center, calls into question the importance of the mythological swing voter. It turns out that the 40% of voters who identify as “independents” are not really all that independent. 13%, in fact, are pretty much reliable Republicans, while 17% are fairly reliable Democrats. This leaves 7% — mostly young and male — who are politically unmoored. This is no great revelation in a polarized political landscape in which the “middle” has largely eroded.
What’s important, however, is that, of these 7% only a third actually vote, which reduces the actual number of “independents” to about 2.3% of the American electorate. Democrats might actually appeal to some of these disaffected young voters if they chose a progressive candidate under 70, yet many in the 2020 race think they can appeal to the unicorn by bashing the social safety net, going weak on abortion, or alienating minority voters by slamming “identity politics.” Rather than trying to lower themselves to GOP standards, Democrats ought to be doubling-down on what makes them stand out from Republicans. And redoubling their opposition to Trump’s Imperial Presidency.
On this last point, Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University who has correctly predicted the last nine presidential elections, warns that — unless Democrats “grow a spine” and risk alienating white swing voting unicorns by launching impeachment proceedings — we will see Donald Trump re-elected in 2020.
* * *
The last study, which was actually published a couple of years ago, reinforces a large body of research on immigration and criminality, showing (once again) that immigrants are actually less likely to engage in criminal behavior. The so-called “violent illegal” or Trump’s “Mexican rapist” are both unicorns, figments of the white supremacist imagination.
With the dry title, “Urban crime rates and the changing face of immigration: Evidence across four decades,” a study in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice concludes:
Research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime. Although classical criminological and neoclassical economic theories would predict immigration to increase crime, most empirical research shows quite the opposite. We investigate the immigration-crime relationship among metropolitan areas over a 40 year period from 1970 to 2010. Our goal is to describe the ongoing and changing association between immigration and a broad range of violent and property crimes. Our results indicate that immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period. […]
Despite continuing nativist arguments alleging a causal relationship between immigration and crime, individual-level research based on arrest and offense data of the foreign-born shows that they are overall less likely to offend than native-born Americans. Some argue, however, that regardless of immigrants’ relatively low involvement in crime at the individual level, immigration might nevertheless be tied to increases in crime through structural and macro-level mechanisms. […]
Our results indicate that, for property crimes, immigration has a consistently negative effect. For violent crimes, immigration has no effect on assault and a negative effect on robbery and murder. This is strong and stable evidence that, at the macro-level, immigration does not cause crime to increase in U.S. metropolitan areas, and may even help reduce it. The interpretation of our results gives us pause when considering the current cultural ethos in the United States. The variety of legislation at the state level aimed at immigrants, legal or not, is underscored by popular sentiments about how current immigration is detrimental to the U.S. economically and socially. But at least when it comes to crime — and in fact, on many other counts addressed in the literature — there is no evidence at a metropolitan level of these severe impacts. Our results are clear and overarching that immigration does not lead to increases in crime in American metropolitan areas.
All politics is personal. It’s impossible to look away from the mirror of history you’ve been part of. And it’s impossible not to have emotions about places that have been significant parts of your life. Our complicated feelings for the United States go without saying. For migrants and visitors to other lands, the same is true. They become part of us.
I sometimes start to say that I “grew up in” — but correct myself because I came into sentience in India in the 1950’s, a boy only a couple of years younger than India itself. My sister and I began our formal education at the Beldhi Church School in Jamshedpur, in the state of Jharkhand (Bihar when we lived there). Every day we’d pass through school gates, past the poor and the sick, to a little sandstone building where we received instruction from Indian Baptist nuns. Today the sandstone building is still there — it’s an administration building — but the school is now a secondary school with an impressive campus.
Our family was in India for several years because my father, an engineer, had been conscripted into an army of international contractors to build, at the time, the largest steel mill in Asia for Tisco, the steel division of the Tata family. The company’s (and town’s) founder, Jamsetji Tata, had taken to heart Thomas Carlyle’s quip that “the nation which gains control of iron soon acquires the control of gold.” Besides learning English and maths, we practiced writing our Sanskrit letters on lined paper. My classmates were all Americans, Brits, Germans, Russians, Icelanders, and Anglo-Indians. I grew up — rather, came into sentience — reading the wonderful Times of India comics section and devouring British children’s books left over from the last days of colonial rule.
My parents were in their late twenties and early thirties — both from small-town America that even today cares very little about the rest of the world. The one thing this mismatched couple had in common was the love they both had for India. We often drove into the countryside where my father’s Leica and my mother’s Roloflex recorded thousands of scenes of a country coming into its own after centuries of colonialism. We paid tolls to cross one-laned roads blocked by elephants. We sat on our roof and watched Divali lights twinkling below stars arrayed differently from those in the northern hemisphere.
My father’s hobby, if you can call it that, was to impersonate a Western journalist and crash Indian Congress Party events. In this way he met Jawaharlal Nehru, “covered” a reception for the Panchen Lama, and had a drink with Marshal Tito. My mother, enamored with India’s diversity, visited temples of every sort — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain — and snapped photos of Ashura parades. After requiring major surgery and a long convalescence, she bicycled from Shimla back to Jamshedpur on her own, recording people all along the route. When my son made a trip of his own to India a few years ago, we calculated that my mother’s trip had been just short of a thousand miles.
These are all recollections from a child’s charmed memories of a lost world — or, more likely, a world that never really existed, a white boy’s simplistic view of a complicated country where class, caste, and colonialism played out just as they have here in the United States. And yet, for all the gauze and distortion of these memories, my connection to India includes the beginnings of an understanding of a larger world beyond my own. My continuing love for India is enmeshed in all this, and that affection is as real as the country’s complicated history.
Scarcely a generation had passed since Jawaharlal Nehru served as the country’s first Prime Minister when the same sort of religious nationalism that killed Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1948 led to India’s war with Pakistan in 1971. In 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter) declared a two-year state of emergency which jailed political opponents, censored the press, and shut down opposition groups (future Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote a book about it). It surprised no one when Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguard in 1984 after conducting a raid on the [Sikh] Golden Temple in Amritsar in the Punjab.
In 1998 India became a nuclear power. The Tatas, the Parsi family that brought our family to India, continued to amass vast wealth and political power, spinning off ventures in Information Technology, automobiles, chemicals, beverages, ceramics, fashion, pharmaceuticals, energy, and investment. At some point after 2000, Bengaluru overtook Silicon Valley as the world’s leading Information Technology hub. But the caste system, poverty, xenophobia, violence against women, illiteracy, and lack of sanitation still exist alongside India’s new malls, gated industrial parks, and dot-com millionaires. Income inequality has thrived in India’s neoliberal “democracy.”
And neoliberalism breeds autocrats.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi came of age politically in the Seventies during Indira Gandhi’s “emergencies.” Modi got his political start in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), originally an anti-colonial group predating India’s founding but now a right-wing nationalist paramilitary organization. It was a former member of the RSS who killed Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1948 and it was RSS members who destroyed the 16th Century Babri Masjid in 1992.
Like Sinn Fein’s relationship to the IRA, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of a nationalist movement that includes a paramilitary wing, the RSS. As Prime Minister, Modi has filled many government posts with RSS members and has set about implementing RSS’s racist and nationalist prescriptions.
As a freshly-appointed Chief Minister of the state of Gujurat, Modi encouraged anti-Muslim riots in 2002 and promoted unvarnished Hindu nationalism — Hindutva. In 2014, when the BJP took control of India’s “lower” house, the Lok Sabha, for the first time, Modi became Prime Minister and he firmly entrenched Hindutva in his party’s policies.
On May 23rd, 2019, running even more overtly as a nationalist, using his old Twitter handle Chowkidar — watchman — Modi was re-elected for another five-year term amid widespread voter disenfranchisement of Muslim and Dalit (Untouchable) voters. Still, India has 900 million eligible voters and 67% turned out to give Modi 543 seats in the Lok Sabha (Congress), where only 272 seats are necessary for a majority.
During the last election BJP president Amit Shah promised to rid the country of “infiltrators” — meaning Muslims by specifically exempting every other group from this threat. Like the American Republican Party, the BJP has become safe haven for violent extremism. One BJP candidate, Pragya Thakur, stands accused of planning the bombing of a mosque in 2008.
In 2017, after Rahul Gandhi filed his candidacy papers for the 2019 elections, Modi took a swipe at Gandhi’s “anointment” by dubbing him “Aurangzeb Raj,” a Mughal king appointed by his father. Like Donald Trump’s digs at Hillary Clinton’s virtual coronation, there was a certain truth to the jibe.
Rahul Gandhi, who is also the current head of the Indian National Congress, is the son of Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; grandson of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister; and great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, the founder of the Indian National Congress. Mirroring Trump’s “birther” tactics, The BJP circulated the rumor that Rahul Gandhi was actually an Italian citizen. But there is no question that, throughout India’s entire history, the Congress Party has been the family business (or visa versa).
India is sometimes described as the “largest democracy in the world.” Yet Congress Party hegemony and corruption, and now the country’s extreme turn to the right, blatant Islamophobia, and violence against non-Hindu minorities all raise the question of what sort of democracy India really is. Accompanying Modi’s far-right turn is the move to turn India into an Orwellian surveillance state. Each of India’s billion citizens is now required to participate in a system that allows the government to track them by National ID.
I still remember India eight years after its Independence. Of course, those memories are colored by nostalgia and the ignorance of the child who preserved them. But what many Indians remember of that brief moment in history was an optimistic nation trying to turn centuries of colonialism into a democracy for all of its many people.
But those days are long gone. It’s Modi’s India now.
Massachusetts may sound like an odd state for Republican policies to be implemented by Democrats. Yet as I write this the “Democratic” Bristol County DA is lobbying for the Republican governor’s “Dangerousness” [mass incarceration] legislation. And the latest bipartisan attack on public education is from comrporate Democrats — Dartmouth state Rep. Christopher Markey and Westport Rep. Paul Schmid, whose pro-charter school bill, HD4174 turns state education law on its head to pay for Alma del Mar with public funds. As a charter, the school is less accountable to the public than to its trustees or its corporate board.
Though frequently described as an experiment, Alma del Mar’s charter is just another skirmish in a greater war for the privatization of American schools. Nationally, charter schools have already fleeced taxpayers to the tune of at least $1 billion. The Network for Public Education Action has documented the role of the super-rich in buying legislative approval for charter schools. Their ultimate goal is privatization. Now New Bedford in in their crosshairs.
HD4147 is opposed by numerous local community groups and organized labor, including NBCSOS (New Bedford Coalition to Save our Schools), the Greater New Bedford Labor Council and the NAACP. This corporate giveaway is the work of a couple of tony suburban Democrats working with the Republican governor and business interests to usher charter schools into Massachusetts through a back door.
In a recent op-ed co-signed by numerous corporate interests, Anthony Sapienza, who heads up the New Bedford Economic Development Council (NBEDC), assures us that the legislation is a “first-of-its-kind partnership” and “a solution that is critical to the stability of all other public schools and the city’s finances.” Sapienza gushes about “neighborhood schools,” arguing that giving Alma del Mar to a corporation is all part of “tangibly advancing strategies for sustainable and shared growth” in New Bedford. Alma del Mar will be a neighborhood school only in the narrowest sense — just as Stop and Shop is your neighborhood green grocer only in the narrowest sense. To echo the NBEDC‘s slogan, Alma del Mar will be “open for business.”
Sapienza rather disingenuously frames the question as a choice between the city raising $8 million to expand an existing school by 600 students — or giving away $4 million to a private corporation to outsource another 450 desks. Since Alma del Mar was built on city property at a cost of $16 million, the real question is whether any sane person thinks New Bedford will save $4 million — an amount less than 1% of the city’s FY2020 city budget — by giving away $16 million to a private entity.
HD4147 is plainly a raw deal for city residents — especially when you actually read the legislation yourself.
Section 2 of the bill says that — for purposes of all the expensive stuff — the school “shall be considered a public school.” But — to the great delight of the corporations pushing the bill — “for all other purposes, including but not limited to chapters 71A and 71B of the General Laws, Alma del Mar Charter School, including its second campus, shall be considered a Commonwealth Charter School.”
And Schmid and Markey are giving them both away.
Section 3 of the Markey-Schmid legislation gives the city permission to dispose of the physical buildings as it sees fit: “Notwithstanding any contrary provision in or interpretation of section 15A of chapter 40 of the General Laws, the School Committee may transfer custody of 135 Shawmut Avenue [the former Horatio A. Kempton School] to the City of New Bedford pursuant to a simple majority vote stating that said property is no longer needed by the New Bedford Public Schools.”
In what alternate reality does a school district give away $16 million of property because no further use is foreseen? The answer is — only in the world of corporatized education.
Section 4 provides the corporate school with guaranteed taxpayer-funded tuition payments. Section 5 cuts the public out of any review process for the transfers in the preceding sections.
We now have a proto-fascist in the White House, breaking everything he touches. Trump is at war with minorities, gays, women, non-Christians, science, education, the environment, the poor, Congress, the Constitution, Mexico, Central America, China, Russia, and even European allies. Americans are always willing to make regime change elsewhere — but we sure could use some here.
Even if we were not in the middle of a Constitutional crisis, distracted by Trump’s chaos and his intentional destabilization of government, most Americans wouldn’t pay much attention to militarism and foreign policy. The appointments of John Bolton, Michael Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams were no doubt less compelling than the Mueller Report, Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings or James Comey’s firing. But they were chosen to throw bloody red meat to Trump’s “base.”
Elliott Abrams is a war criminal convicted of lying to Congress, though he was subsequently pardoned. Mike Pompeo is fond of threatening enemies with US invasion. Like Pompeo, John Bolton has never met a war he didn’t love, pressing for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea, and Iran. With the selection of these three sociopaths, Trump is telegraphing plans for Venezuela and Iran. Like Iraq, both countries have long been in the crosshairs of American neoconservatives. The administration’s plans may be old but they’re reliable — coups, puppet regimes, and manufactured threats to the US and its allies. All depend on gullibility and attention deficit from the American public.
In March 2017, amid US sanctions and right-wing sabotage and violence which included ongoing assassination attempts, the Venezuelan Supreme Court granted Nicolás Maduro emergency powers and dissolved the National Assembly. The “old” legislature was replaced by the Constituent Assembly, which was originally formed to rewrite the Constitution. Since then Venezuela has been divided over the legitimacy of both the “new” and the “old” legislature. But this is what happens when a nation grants special powers to a leader, who then uses them to delegitimize the legislature. Since 2017 the “old” legislature has functioned as Venezuela’s opposition and — like it or not — the “new” legislature is now the people’s house. In 2018 Maduro was re-elected president of Venezuela, which — again, like it or not — should have answered the question of legitimacy.
But in January 2019, after receiving an OK from Vice President Pence, the chairman of the “old” legislature, Juan Guaidó, simply took microphone in hand and declared himself president of Venezuela. This was apparently enough legitimacy for the Trump Administration’s John Bolton, who then set about to create rebellion among the Venezuelan military. Guaidó follows a long history of US puppetry — the Pahlavis, the Somozas, Batista, Ngo Dinh Diem, Costillo Armas, Rios Montt, Chalabi, Micheletti, Karzai, to name a few. By recognizing Guaidó and then expelling Maduro appointees from their own embassy, the Trump administration is now trying to depose the head of a divided but democratically-elected government.
Yet, of all the chaos that Trump has unleashed, the threat of an attack on Iran is the most terrifying. Neocons have never been happy with John Kerry’s Iran deal, in which Iran and the US agreed to an accord that would keep Iran from enriching weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for relief from US sanctions. Despite zero evidence of violations by Iran, Trump withdrew from the deal and is considering prosecuting Kerry for violating the Logan Act — for speaking with foreign diplomats, as most former American diplomats do even after leaving their diplomatic posts.
To escalate the provocations even further, Trump denoted the Iranian Guard a “terrorist” organization. And last week, following the deployment of a carrier strike force and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf, the US accused Iran of sabotaging tankers. Two Saudi, one Norwegian, and one Emirati ship were allegedly attacked with improvised limpet mines close to the Emirates. Trump threatened to send 120,000 troops to the region, telling the press, “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that. They’re not going to be happy.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested that the sabotaging of vessels was a “false flag” operation and ascribed war noises to the work of the “four Bs” — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, United Arab Emirates crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and White House national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 advocated bombing Iran. And if one looks at a map of US military bases surrounding Iran, it is hard to imagine why Iran would want to provoke the US.
Europeans, who remain party to the Iran agreement, are skeptical of Trump’s accusations. Norbert Röttgen, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the German parliament, downplayed American warnings of imminent Iranian attacks. He said that the BND (German intelligence) has not found any escalation in Iranian threats. In fact, Röttgen described the US warnings as mere “saber rattling, a show of force to demonstrate seriousness and to justify American foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran.”
But, after a generation of American wars in the Middle East, there is still an appetite for more. The Trump administration and its supporters believe invading Iran would be a “slam dunk,” as the Bush administration thought Iraq would be. Almost a generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq. And after a generation, hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US still remains in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime. Geniuses like Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton doubt it would take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”
Cooler heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:
Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska
Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million
Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel
While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran
Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go; Iran still has many regional friends
Even FOX News host Tucker Carlson was concerned about Bolton’s influence. “More than anything in the world, national security adviser John Bolton would love to have a war with Iran. It will be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday [all] wrapped into one,” Carlson said.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has introduced a petition to block Trump’s unilateral entry into a war with Iran, and Nancy Pelosi reminded everyone that “the responsibility in the Constitution is for Congress to declare war. So I hope that the president’s advisers recognize they have no authorization to go forward in any way. They cannot call the authorization, AUMF, the authorization for the use of military force that was passed in 2001, as any authorization to go forward in the Middle East now.”
Impeachment might be largely a formality in the almost certain absence of Senate prosecution of Trump’s crimes, but proceedings should be initiated anyway. Congress must insist on all its rights and powers, which include declaring war. As for Abrams and Bolton, they deserve tenures just as short as Anthony Scaramucci’s — if not cells at the Hague.
But if anyone should be getting regime change this month, please, let it be the American people.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, faced with a corrupt proto-fascist, and not sure what it really stood for, the Democratic Party ran on a simplistic, fearful platform — “anybody but Trump.” Few remember now what else Hillary Clinton campaigned on — much less actually believed in, because her views on everything from abortion, gay rights, criminal justice, immigration, and trade had all “evolved” and it was difficult to untangle Clinton the Candidate from Clinton the Goldman-Sachs speaker — or Clinton the peddler of influence from her $2 billion family foundation.
After her stunning loss the corporate media began pushing the message that Democrats had been too focused on “identity politics” — that concern for gays, women, minorities, and immigrants had robbed the party of its rightful win.
Then, as now, Republicans whined about identity politics (knowing full-well that white privilege itself is the most toxic example), called Democratic safety-net programs “socialist,” railed against “political correctness” and lied about the basic science behind human gestation and environmental warming. And Democrats took the bait, wishing they had appealed more to the mythological unicorn — the fabled white swing voter.
Now, as the 2020 presidential campaign begins, faced with the same corrupt, and now much more dangerous proto-fascist — and still unsure of what they really stand for — Democrats have again trotted out the same simplistic platform — “anybody but Trump.” And this time around, it looks like it will be up to a white candidate to appeal to the white swing voter.
At least fifteen of the twenty Democratic contenders will never survive the primaries. As of May 13th, the leaders were Biden (39.8%), Sanders (16.3%), Warren (8.3%), Harris (7.7%), and Buttigieg (6.8%). Not one candidate of color is running in double digits. Two Democratic candidates (Sanders and Warren) are progressives — idea people who want to fix a long list of economic, social, and criminal justice wrongs. They and Tulsi Gabbard are also the only candidates to question American militarism. But this year the Democratic Party is not interested in grand ideas — not even those diametrically opposed to the President’s. “Anyone but Trump” is their only idea. Sadly, Sanders and Warren’s campaigns are dead out of the gate.
Instead, the Democratic Party leadership sees Biden and Buttigieg as the best shot to appeal to White Middle America — by turning their backs on progressive agendas Sanders and Warren and some of the newly-elected House representatives have championed. In Las Vegas this week Pete Buttigieg dropped the hammer on identity politics. This was a tip of the hat to MAGA America and a slap in the face to minorities. Polls show that Buttigieg has the support of 18% of South Carolina’s voters and 8% of the state’s Democratic voters. But among African-Americans that percent is a well-deserved zero.
Among millennials and young black voters Biden is doing relatively well in the polls for the moment. Unless the septuagenarian suffers a health crisis, he looks to become the next Anointed One. But young people are unreliable voters. And so are dispirited and disrespected voters. As Charles M. Blow pointed out in the New York Times, “there is part of the Biden enthusiasm, and to a lesser extent the energy around candidates like Bernie Sanders, that focuses too heavily on the fickle white, working-class swing voters and is not enough focused on the party’s faithful.”
For Blow the Anointing of Joe Biden is an insult to loyal black voters. “Democrats want to hold constant their support from women and minorities even as they chase the votes of people hostile to the interests of women and minorities. What does it say that the Democrats lust after disaffection rather than rewarding devotion? Democrats tell their base that this must be done, that the prodigal [white] children must be brought home, as if that is their only path to victory. It is not. That is a lie. And, it’s a lazy lie.”
Not only is it a lazy lie, it’s a crazy one as well. White swing voters, who in 2008 and 2012 voted for Obama and Biden and then flipped to Trump in 2016, just aren’t going back anytime soon. Not only are these voters unicorns; the fervent hope that Democrats can win them back is a delusion.
The other path to power, as Blow hinted, is Steve Phillips’ New American Majority, an idea he developed in his book Brown in the New White. The idea is neither new nor very difficult math. If you add up white progressives and progressives of color you’ve got a numerical majority that can beat Republicans — not in 2040, when whites will be a numerical minority, but right now. The gotcha, says Phillips, is that the Democratic Party needs to start offering better reasons for registered African-Americans voters to show up at the polls — like representation, support, and money. Anointing Biden, then, is just a prescription for another electoral loss.
So for the moment it looks like it’s going to be Biden in 2020, and if it is — then Democrats are going to lose. 2020 could have been about ideas and programs to truly make this country a better place. Instead, it seems to be contracting into a referendum on replacing one set of hair work and dental veneers with another.
This week Donald Trump tweeted that his administration was “looking into” the “banning” of conservatives on “liberal” social media. With a conservative stranglehold on talk radio and powerful news outlets like FOX and Sinclair effectively functioning as mouthpieces for Trump’s policies, on the face of it Trump’s charges seem ridiculous. But Trump’s criticism hit an unexpected nerve with friends of free speech. Censorship in social media may not exclusively target conservatives, but it’s a very real thing.
A while ago I taught a citizenship class. If you read though the one hundred official U.S. citizenship questions, only one amendment — the First — gets any love. Not one question mentions any of the other amendments to the Constitution — and for good reason. It would be tough to explain school prayer, bowing to Evangelicals on abortion and adoption, stop and frisk, illegal wiretapping, blanket surveillance, cruel prison punishments including death by mystery cocktail, violations of habeus corpus, excessive bail, the lack of speedy trials, voter suppression, systemic racism, Constitution-free borders, limited “free speech zones,” and prosecutorial practices that effectively deny an accused person the right to a jury trial.
And what would be the point? Many of my students came from places where American “democracy” has propped up dictators and taught genocide and torture to their militaries. Or maybe these prospective Americans just looked around and noticed that, around here, civil liberties don’t really apply to immigrants or people of color.
Nevertheless, the citizenship questions give star billing to the First Amendment, which “guarantees” freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and the right to petition the government. The First Amendment is clearly the beating heart of American democracy — for the writers of the citizenship test — and it’s almost an article of their faith that it grants us rights found nowhere else on earth.
Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Speech
But in truth the First Amendment is a completely toothless piece of text that does little to stop abuses arising from telling people what you think.
Read the fine print. The Constitution promises that the government won’t go after you for your views or interests — although it certainly has and does. Donald Trump, for example, tried to go after 1.3 million people who may have clicked on a website dedicated to disrupting his low-attendance inauguration. But besides attacking the First Amendment, the president’s sweeping demand for ISP data was also a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Reporters sans Frontieres ranks the United States 43rd in press freedom, a sign it’s pretty much on life support. And when Trump began targeting the Black Lives Matter movement, it was only the most recent example of a government that has always done expressly what the First Amendment forbids.
Now while the First Amendment theoretically keeps the government from silencing you, there’s absolutely nothing to stop an employer, a social or political organization, a business, or a school from censoring, expelling or punishing you. Adjunct professor Lisa Durden found this out when she was fired for defending Black Lives Matter on FOX News — not because the popular teacher had done anything wrong at her community college. White supremacist Richard Spencer lost his gym membership because of his views — not because of any specific behavior at the gym. Juli Briskman was canned by her employer for a third party photo showing her giving Donald Trump the middle finger as his motorcade sped past her while she was bicycling. The excuse given by Akima, a federal contractor — Briskman “violated” the company’s social media policy.
Americans regard China’s Great Firewall — which censors what Chinese citizens can view online — as a significant feature of authoritarian rule in that country. Yet the only difference between Chinese and American censorship is that here in the United States it’s been outsourced to corporations and employers — and, increasingly, internet service companies.
Twitter censored Politwoops, a group exposing backtracking and lying by politicians who delete or alter their ill-considered Twitter posts. Facebook censors content for both China and for the United States. When activist Mary Canty Merrill penned an open letter, “Dear White People,” she was censored by Facebook. Conservative Google employee James Damore wrote an internal memo criticizing his company’s diversity programs and was immediately terminated.
Some think the Internet is open and free. But remember — the Internet began its life as a defense industry (DARPA) project, and U.S., European, Chinese, Saudi, and other laws actually compel service providers to monitor and censor content while also delivering personal data (either lawfully or under secret programs like PRISM) to spy agencies. The U.S. government even forces ISPs to lie about it after the fact.
The internet, also as a consequence of the many lunatics who post on it, has become a gratuitously censored place. Social networks go out of their way to sanitize “offensive” or “upsetting” content. Google, Facebook, and Twitter — for all the hate speech they manage to monetize — feel obliged to protect us from beheadings, nursing mothers, the aftermath of terror attacks, radical manifestos, and “harmful” or “dangerous” hyperbole from both right and left. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are both sitting in jail now because they posted proof of U.S. war crimes, including a video of the 2007 murder of two Reuters reporters by the U.S. military.
A dangerous consequence of overt censorship is self-censorship. With enough positive or negative reinforcement people simply stop telling you what they really think. Or, if they persist, someone will censor them for simple lack of “civility.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election I observed this phenomenon as Bernie and Hillary people duked it out. One moderator of an Indivisible group decided to shut down debate by insisting on acceptable views, acceptable discussion, acceptable tone, and acceptable news sources.
In the preface to one edition of Animal Farm, George Orwell noted that popular opinion is often a greater threat to freedom of thought and expression than authoritarian government, and that anyone who chafes against prevailing orthodoxy often “finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness” by his own friends.
… the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
It’s debatable if county jails do much to turn peoples’ lives around. But they certainly excel as institutions of patronage. In communities where jobs are scarce, where else can a high school graduate with basic skills make $46K a year with benefits? The sheriff as patrón is in a position to hire a lot of employees and make a lot of friends. The Bristol County Sheriff, for example, is the top employer in New Bedford and the third largest employer in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Consider the staffing in Massachusetts jails. The statewide staff-to-prisoner ratio in county jails is 1:73 and Bristol County’s ratio is slightly less than that. In personnel costs alone, it takes 6,629 employees at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars to lock away 11,480 prisoners in the state’s 14 county jails. Most of the incarcerated — the majority who are simply awaiting trial — would be better-served by drug rehabilitation and vocational programs, which jails don’t even pretend to offer. And society would be better-served by actually doing “corrections” rather than simply warehousing human beings.
But jails are not in the business of rehabilitation. They seem to function mainly as job and pension factories.
Padding the Payroll
In 2015 Public Consulting Group (PCG) visited six Massachusetts jails and found “wide variance in key costs metrics amongst sheriffs, even when comparing counties of similar sizes and prisoner counts.” The study, “Sheriffs’ Funding Formula,” was issued in 2016 and notes:
“A review of 2013-2016 inmate counts found a decline in inmate populations over the last three years. Despite a population decrease of just over 14% during that period, state funding for sheriffs has increased by nearly 10% over those same three fiscal years.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Jail staffing and construction is actually increasing — even though fewer people are being incarcerated. Yet at this moment there is at least one bill in the state Legislature trying to expand the Middlesex County jail. The bill’s sponsor prefers to call her jail expansion project a “justice complex.”
PCG’s study noted that the Massachusetts sheriffs’ officer-to-prisoner ratio (1:2.48) is higher than that in New York state (1:2.53), New Hampshire (1:3.02), New Jersey (1:3.75), or Pennsylvania (1:4.49). According to PCG, the problem is bloat among the higher ranks at county jails:
“In reviewing the ratio of staff to supervisors in each of the facilities, we found that many sheriffs have a higher number of high ranking supervisors. While our research did not identify a consistent recommendation for correctional facilities, studies in the public safety, probation, and corrections field typically recommend a “span of control” for supervisors of between 5-7 subordinates. While the sheriffs fall very close to this range for the ratio of Correctional Officers to Sergeants, the top end of the chain of command shows ratios as low as 1.58 (Lieutenants to Sergeants) and 1.87 (Captains to Lieutenants).”
But without make-work jobs for corrections supervisors, how else is a patrón supposed to help his friends?
The 2018 Bristol County Sheriff’s Department salary data from the Office of the Comptroller includes 739 records representing 675 individuals and 64 promotions in rank. In the entire sample there are 34 Deputy Sheriff records, 46 Lieutenants, 27 Sergeants, 316 full-time Corrections Officers, 90 part-time Corrections Officers, and a variety of other professional roles. 54 were full or part-time contractors, many with the position of “Deputy” or “Instructor.” The sheriff’s top employees walk off with $3.9 million a year — 10% of the entire payroll. And they’re smart enough to thank their benefactor. Many of these same names are found in Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) reports as contributors to the Hodgson campaign.
But patronage is a hallowed Massachusetts tradition. As Shira Schoenberg wrote in MassLive, the “Massachusetts governor for a time had an ‘Office of Patronage’ dedicated to helping people apply for state jobs.” The office existed at least until 2002. Boston Mayor Curley’s administration ran on patronage, More recently, Paul Celluci’s patronage appointee to MassPort, Virginia Buckingham, was forced to resign after 9/11 hijackers commandeered two planes from her airport.
In Bristol County, Massachusetts, accusations of political patronage have long dogged Sheriff Tom Hodgson. When Hodgson ran for Sheriff the first time in 1998 after an interim appointment by William Weld, the Standard-Times endorsed his opponent, Rep. Joseph McIntyre. McIntyre accused Hodgson of running a “patronage bazaar” in the sheriff’s office, and the newspaper’s endorsement slammed Hodgson for practices ranging from “hiring of publicity agents to his fattening of the payroll with patronage employees, who repay him with campaign contributions that he encourages.”
Both of Hodgson’s challengers in 2010, John Quinn and Alan Garcia, charged Hodgson with trading jobs and pensions for political support. During one campaign debate, Quinn said, “the Sheriff has spent millions of dollars on unnecessary legal fees to three lawyers who are his personal friends and political contributors. He has hired dozens of high paid administrators in unnecessary patronage jobs. These people will retire on a hidden budget that will cost our communities millions of dollars in unseen pension payments for decades to come.” When announcing his candidacy, Alan Garcia took a similar swipe at Hodgson: “We will be promoting people inside the prisons based on performance and merit, not political maneuvering or political patronage.”
In 2008 the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct forced Judge Michael Livingstone off the bench for ethics violations. Almost immediately, Tom Hodgson snapped up Livingstone to run his jail’s medical program. Why? It was a simple case of political back-scratching. According to the Standard Times:
“The politically connected Livingstone was previously the legal counsel to the New Bedford City Council and a city solicitor. Hodgson has acknowledged that former state Sen. William Q. “Biff” MacLean Jr., New Bedford City Councilor John T. Saunders and former mayor Judge John Markey approached him seeking a job for Livingstone.”
In 2011 Livingstone, who had stopped coming to work, resigned amid accusations that his job had been nothing more than a scheme permitting him to extend his state pension benefits. When asked about the scheme on October 6, 2011, Hodgson claimed to have “no idea.” Of course he didn’t. On that particular day the sheriff was more focused on slamming Gov. Deval Patrick’s immigration policies on Lou Dobbs’ FOX News show.
Several of Hodgson’s lawyers are donors. $1.3 million of state money went to donor lawyer and “Special Deputy” Bruce Assad, who is now “Special Sheriff” Bruce Assad. According to Comptroller records, Craig Assad is Hodgson’s Assistant Supervisor of Training, and Steven Assad is a corrections officer. Another million dollars in legal fees went to attorney Ronald Lowenstein, whose family’s contributions in 2004 violated state campaign finance laws. Lowenstein’s former partner, Robert Novack — also a donor — was made a $70K a year part-time employee, qualifying him for a state pension and health benefits, and he now serves as one of Hodgson’s lawyers.
In 2013 Boston Globe reporters Peter Schworm and Matt Carroll looked at patronage among county sheriffs and District Attorneys. Offender #2 was Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald: “Over the past five years, McDonald has raised about $123,000 in contributions from his 525 employees, almost $50,000 over the past two years alone. That two-year total ranked as the highest among the state’s sheriffs and district attorneys, a Globe survey of campaign records from 2008 through 2012 found.”
But Tom Hodgson followed on McDonald’s heels in total contributions, with Bristol and Plymouth County District Attorneys right at the top of the pack as well.
Patronage damages morale, inhibits whistleblowing, and creates dysfunction. With the highest prisoner suicide rate in the state, the second-highest recidivism rate, the highest rate of complaints of excessive force, and multiple wrongful death and human rights lawsuits, one could argue that the Bristol County jail is the very definition of dysfunction.
A special commission investigating corruption at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in 2002 explains why:
“Further compounding the lack of leadership is patronage. Many of the staff at all levels owe their jobs to well-connected politicians. Because the Sheriff made promotions without clearly-defined criteria (or even an employee evaluation process), many staff members concluded that their own advancement depended on politics, rather than merit. In this environment, staff became cynical of policies introduced by top management without their input. Supervisors, a group of employees critical to the proper functioning of the facilities, abdicated their responsibilities and well-formulated policies were not uniformly or consistently implemented.”
In 2014, Republican candidate Jeff Perry lost his bid for the 10th Congressional District on the Cape. But patronage provided a soft landing. Perry was appointed “Special Sheriff,” a job that pays $100K a year, by political buddy, Barnstable Sheriff Jim Cummings — despite allegations Perry knew about improper strip searches of teenage girls when he was a Wareham police sergeant in the 90’s.
The Ware Inquiry
In 2010 the Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigated Rep. Tom “Tommy” Petrolati and Parole Commissioner John O’Brien. Petrolati apparently leaned on Hampden County Sheriff Michael Ashe to hire some of Petrolati’s friends and associates and, when Ashe balked, Petrolati retaliated. But the sheriff had his own turf to defend. In 2009 Ashe, known for his extravagant community clambakes and whose motto was “strength reinforced with decency; firmness dignified with fairness,” awarded his own brother a consulting contract, making him the highest paid public safety official in Massachusetts.
The Globe’s reporting eventually led to a Supreme Judicial Court inquiry headed up by Special Investigator Paul Ware. In 2010 the Ware Inquiry released its 337 page report, naming state Senators and Representatives, members of the Parole Commission, and county sheriffs’ employees who to this day offer patronage and violate campaign finance laws. When asked about the Parole Department, Governor Deval Patrick described it as an “unaccountable and to some extent rogue agency.” Many of the state’s law enforcement agencies have a culture of corruption, as Troopergate just demonstrated.
Page 197 of the Ware Inquiry identified Senator Mark Montigny as the top practitioner of patronage. Sal DeMasi, who went to jail for other types of corruption, appears third on Ware’s list. Montigny, in fact, accounted for 54 out of all 319 “sponsorships” investigated, one of which was a girlfriend poorly ranked by the hiring panel because of her lack of experience. Other than the girlfriend, Montigny’s friends had extraordinary success finding jobs. Page 38 of Ware’s report notes: “Of the 54 candidates sponsored by Senator Montigny, for example, at least 23, or 42.6%, were contributors to the Senator. Of the 23 contributors, 11 were successful in being hired or promoted within a year following the sponsorship (47.8%). By contrast, of the 31 non-contributors, only 1 (3%) was hired or promoted.”
In 2014 the Standard Times’ Jack Spillane asked, “… what are we to make of the fact federal prosecutors have painted a portrait of Montigny, now 21 years in office, as exactly like the man who is his unwanted political godfather?”
Spillane was referring to Montigny’s mentor, former state Senator William Q. “Biff” MacLean. The same MacLean who in 1993 pleaded guilty to conflict of interest violations involving state contracts, paid a half-million dollar fine and who ironically served a year of probation and was stripped of his pension. The same MacLean whose son Douglas was hired in 1999 by Bristol County District Attorney Paul Wash despite a history of heroin and cocaine abuse, and multiple criminal convictions. The same MacLean whose son again In 2004 — with help from Mark Montigny — was given a job in the probation system, which he lost five years later after being arrested for possession of crack cocaine.
The same “Biff” MacLean who leaned on Hodgson to hire disgraced judge Livingstone.
What can be done?
Tom Hodgson is one of the worst and doesn’t deserve a break. But neither do all the other state ethics violators out there. Hodgson’s corruption is part of a culture that spans political parties. His abuses persist because neither party has the political will to end patronage. Instead, each year criminal reforms include studies, oversight groups, and tweaks to Department of Corrections rules that shut out the public and make offending agencies accountable only to themselves.
Here are some other approaches we might try:
Ban employee political contributions. Worcester County Sheriff Lewis Evangelidis promised during his 2010 campaign to not accept campaign donations from employees. “The perception has been that this place was extremely political, and it seemed the morale of employees was low because of the perceived or real sense of politics being a part of the hiring process,” he said shortly after his campaign ended. Half the state’s sheriffs follow this example and do not accept contributions from their employees.
Professionalize corrections staff. Sheriff Evangelidis raised the bar to require correctional officers to hold either an Associate Degree or have military service. This was a start, but insufficient. Corrections officers should all have completed coursework in psychology and the social sciences supervisors should have master’s degrees in these areas.
Abolish make-work jobs. Remember Jeff Perry — the “Special Sheriff” hired by Barnstable County Sheriff Jim Cummings? This position had been vacant and was dusted-off just for him. Perry himself signalled that he would just be warming the seat until another political opportunity presented itself. Jails should not be a jobs program for politicians between gigs.
Professionalize the hiring. Perry’s hiring — his department under a cloud of sexual abuse — would not have been possible if an independent civil service were responsible for hiring.
Limit command structure. As the PCG study shows, left to their own devices sheriffs pad supervisory ranks. Supervisory jobs must be justified and reviewed by a public (non-DOC) oversight group and should never be directly filled by a sheriff.
Pay for treatment not jails. Treatment for substance abuse and psychological problems — the majority of people in county jail — should be delivered in a clinical setting by healthcare and treatment professionals. We must not spend a penny more for jails. Spend it on treatment; otherwise, it’s wasted tax money.
Abolish the position of sheriff. This is one way to deal with patronage havens. All county jails have been owned by the state since 2010. Bristol County has only an agricultural vocational high school and a county print shop. Place all jails under the Department of Corrections and have the state police handle process serving. Connecticut and Rhode Island do this already.
Prosecute. Corruption breeds impunity. As chief law-enforcer, the Attorney General is in the unenviable position of having to defend sheriffs. But who defends citizens’ interests? Change laws or set up a new non-partisan prosecutorial agency to deal with state corruption.
Vote wisely. Sheriffs are constrained by the Department of Corrections (DOC), the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS), and the Executive Office for Administration and Finance (EOAF). All are appointed by the [present] Republican governor. The current Democratic state auditor conducted only a cursory “performance” audit which only makes friendly recommendations to a sheriff, not holds him accountable. As Tom Hodgson repeatedly tells voters: if you don’t like him, vote him out.
Tom Hodgson is in bed with the extreme Right. There’s his seat on the National Board of Advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group founded by white supremacist John Tanton. Then there’s his membership in the Constitutional Sheriff’s and Police Officer’s Association, an extremist group of lawmen who claim to know the proper interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Then there are Hodgson’s flirtations with Muslim-bashers, gay-bashers, birthers, and all manner of conspiracy nuts — many of them members of FAIR.
And then, in a category all by himself, there’s Rick Wiles.
In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Wiles, who advocates locking up people whose politics he disagrees with — just like Hodgson. The sheriff managed to cram in many of FAIR’s talking points on Wiles’ show, repeating the lie that Mexico pays $300 per child to come into the United States, that 30,000 Americans have been murdered by illegal immigrants since 9/11, and that undocumented immigrants receive better treatment than citizens because — well — that’s just what America-hating Liberal elites want.
Wiles then turned his questions to the “historical role of the Constitutional sheriff,” giving Hodgson an opportunity to whine about Massachusetts mayors and other officials who support Safe Communities. The show ended with Wiles appealing to his audience to raise funds for local sheriffs to attend a FAIR-sponsored event. Hodgson, who in 2014 was already sticking taxpayers for his FAIR-related travel, never bothered to correct Wiles.
So it didn’t come as a surprise when Hodgson’s old buddy went on the air, warning that any opposition to Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall would result in the US military rounding up godless subversives and smiting them. Extreme, certainly. But that’s why people like Wiles and Hodgson are called extremists.
“They’d better wise up and stop what they’re doing because they’re pushing the republic to the brink of breaking,” Wiles warned. “They’d better count the cost. What happens if you push the country that far? You snap the bonds that hold this country together [and] you might be shocked at the reaction you get because there is a lot of fury built up inside millions of Americans who are just fed up with what the Left is doing.”
“It’s going to be lights out for the Democrats and the leftists,” Wiles said. “The conservative patriots will slam your slimy butts against the wall that you hate. It’s going to happen. They are not going to tolerate it. The American people want law and order in this country and the Democrats are a party of rebellion, of lawlessness. They better count the cost before they do something crazy because there’s a limit to how much patience the American people are going to show them.”
But speaking of locking people up — locking Tom Hodgson in his office on Faunce Corner Road might not be such a crazy idea.
Then maybe the immigration-obsessed sheriff could finally take care of the many messes he’s created by neglecting his day job — spending all his working hours with proto-fascists like Wiles and his white supremacist handlers at FAIR.
Despite Donald Trump’s initial celebratory Tweets, he has not been vindicated by the Mueller report. If anything, the stench of corruption is now even greater — now that the cover has been taken off the reeking dumpster that is his administration. As CNN pointed out, the “vindication” victory lap didn’t last long before Trump started calling the Mueller Report “total bullshit.”
But there was a vindication to be celebrated. It turns out, the press, doggedly following leads and the dozens of now-felons who once worked for Trump, and despite some notable screw-ups, had been generally pursuing the truth all along. Despite constant whining from the White House that it was all “fake news,” and despite the spin that Trump’s personal lawyer James Barr tried to give it, the press was largely vindicated.
After years of bald-face lies and embarrassingly transparent prevarication, few believe a word that comes out of Kellyanne Conway’s smirking mouth. But it was quite the revelation that spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders — whose religious hypocrisy was on full display — actually lied to the press about James Comey’s firing.
It was disappointing that Robert Mueller’s findings did not establish presidential criminal conduct, but Mueller left plenty of bread crumbs for Congress should it wish to pursue impeachment. Yet even if the House impeaches, the Senate must convict with a supermajority — an almost impossible hurdle to overcome for ridding the nation of a corrupt, mentally unfit, white supremacist president. Equally disappointing, centrist Democrats with short attention spans have apparently lost the nerve to pursue impeachment — time to move on, national healing, campaigns to run, money to raise.
But the House must begin impeachment proceedings. And here’s why.
For one thing, Mueller’s report did not uncover everything that will ever be known about Trump’s corrupt dealings and his obstruction of justice. There are at least a dozen ongoing investigations that will eventually yield more insight into Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice and commit (or have others commit) criminal acts. While Office of Legal Counsel rules gave a sitting president a prosecutorial pass like Jessie Smollett’s, declining to prosecute is not the same thing as finding no wrongdoing.
Second, the greatest casualty of Donald Trump’s administration has been the truth. Impeachment proceedings will make it difficult for Americans with even partially open eyes and ears to maintain that it’s all been “fake news.” Impeachment proceedings will keep the Mueller report from fading from public consciousness and will make it difficult for Trump to ride out his crimes and lies, even with his invention of new national “emergencies.”
Painful and stressful as impeachment proceedings may be, it will do the nation good to dwell in the truth for a year after steeping in Trump’s lies for two.
When something is too good to be true, it usually isn’t.
During Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s 287(g) hearings on April 10, 2019, citizens pushed back at Hodgson’s claims that his 287(g) agreement with ICE is a big money-maker. Hodgson claimed that since 2007 he has “earned” $61 million of ICE reimbursements for the Commonwealth. News sources have been parroting the sheriff’s numbers without really looking at the math.
Some of us, on the other hand, have reason to believe the sheriff is simply subsidizing ICE detentions at a loss to the taxpayer because of his well-known associations with far-right anti-immigrant groups. And recently obtained Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association figures support this suspicion.
The FY2017 Massachusetts Sheriff’ s Association’s “Spending per Inmate Report” for all counties shows that the average cost per prisoner per day in the Commonwealth’s 13 county jails is roughly $134 — well over the $98 that ICE reimburses Hodgson and the $90-$94 it reimburses other Massachusetts sheriffs. Hodgson’s incredible (as in “not credible”) figures are so low, and so anomalous, that only forensic accounting by a watchdog agency can ascertain if they are truthful.
Right before she was ejected from the hearings for arguing with Hodgson, local activist Marlene Pollock asked the sheriff if his suspicious figures were the result of (1) skimping on food, rehabilitation and medical care of prisoners, (2) if the sheriff was still using the shoddy financial management practices a recent state audit faulted him for; or (3) if Hodgson had found some magic formula no other sheriff could duplicate.
The sheriff chose the last option, calling the state audit a “joke” and trumpeting his SAMS system — a 20 year-old piece of homegrown management software and the data it tracks “right down to the cost of a cup of coffee” — as the key to his too-good-to-believe custody and care costs. When challenged to share his expertise with other sheriffs, Hodgson declined, claiming that House Speaker Robert DeLeo had all the numbers.
And now the public needs to see those numbers.
The Bristol County sheriff may not appreciate the scrutiny, but the Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association report calls into serious question Hodgson’s fabulous (as in “out of a fable”) per-diem rate. Only a complete and detailed accounting of Bristol County Sheriff’s Office income and expenses — right down to the cost of that cup of coffee — will prove whether the sheriff and his numbers can truly be trusted. Equally important, the question of whether the state’s ICE agreements are losing money can finally be answered.
Though short of a full accounting, Amendment 1250 to the FY2020 budget requires sheriffs participating in 287(g) agreements to document the real costs of caring for, and the proper reimbursement of, ICE detainees. This amendment was sponsored by representatives Cabral of New Bedford, Robinson of Framingham, Balser of Newton, Domb of Amherst, Hecht of Watertown, Vega of Holyoke, Provost of Somerville, Peake of Provincetown, Lewis of Framingham, Garballey of Arlington, Decker of Cambridge, Farley-Bouvier of Pittsfield and DuBois of Brockton.
Bristol County for Correctional Justice recently testified before the Ways and Means Committee in favor of the amendment, and we urge state representatives concerned with the abuse of taxpayer money to support its provisions.
When something is too good to be true, it usually isn’t.
But last night Bristol County residents got a little taste of it themselves at an ostensibly “public hearing” the sheriff is required to hold once a year as part of his 287(g) agreement with ICE.
In contrast to recent 287(g) hearings in Barnstable and Plymouth counties, Hodgson’s show was not a public event. And, unlike his award ceremonies which are often held at schools to maximize the number of community visitors, this one was designed to keep the public away from people asking tough questions.
In line with the xenophobe who relentlessly shills for “Fortress America,” getting into Hodgson’s hearings was almost as bad as going through airport security. Anyone who wanted to attend first had to RSVP by email, then get by the jail’s guard house, where “Special Sheriff” Bruce Assad checked their ID, permitting only those on the “list” to enter the jail complex. Visitors were then directed to a parking lot from which they had to walk about a thousand feet, past a phalanx of armed deputies, to the jail’s auditorium, where once again they had to show ID.
Nor could the spectacle really be called a hearing. Though the ICE panel included Sheriff’s Office Legal Counsel Robert Novack, “Special Sheriff” Bruce Assad, Superintendent of Security Steven Souza, ICE Boston Deputy Field Office Director Marcos Charles, ICE Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer Claudia English, Sheriff’s Director of Immigration Services Liunetty Couto, and Sheriff’s spokesman Jon Darling, Hodgson did all the talking. This was his show.
During the “hearings” the tone-deaf sheriff refused to truly listen to the roughly 50 attendees, most of whom disapprove of Hodgson’s abuses of prisoners and his unilateral decision to sign the 287(g) agreement. The sheriff treated his guest with contempt, evading questions, peddling falsehoods, frequently changed the subject, lashing out at his enemies, and it was clear the purpose was mainly to demonstrate that he was in control of the show.
At the beginning of the proceedings, two members of the FANG Collective, Arely Diaz and Max Grear, unfurled a banner and began to make a statement. They were immediately assaulted by a number of Bristol County deputies, arms twisted into submission, and were shoved out the door. They did not resist, nor did they refuse to leave. The two had RSVP’d and were on the sheriff’s “list.” Nevertheless, the two face multiple charges, including trespassing, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. FANG may have momentarily interrupted the sheriff’s staged event, but the disorderly conduct was entirely the sheriff’s by responding with violence to people who had irritated him by protesting in front of his house last winter.
The thin-skinned sheriff also ejected New Bedford activist Marlene Pollock, who had the temerity to challenge him during one exchange on former inmate claims of brutality and neglect. Hodgson delivered personal insults to Pollock and referred to her long history of opposing him before ejecting her as well from “his” hearings. Through both these authoritarian acts of force Hodgson made it clear he was delivering personal payback to his political enemies.
There was a contingent of deputies inside and out who managed to create an intimidating environment for attendees. A conspicuous display of weapons was a new touch this year, and it seemed hardly coincidental. Everyone was packing a sidearm, including the sheriff, and ICE Boston Deputy Field Office Director Marcos Charles was wearing an ankle holster.
The arrests and ejection of the sheriff’s enemies were the only aspect of the hearings that the press generally thought to cover. Among issues of substance raised by Bristol County voters last night were Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association’s figures showing that ICE agreements are actually costing the state millions — not raking in the profits that Hodgson claims and the press parrots. Citizen questions also revealed that the number of deputized ICE agents at the jail has not increased and that in the last year only 18 Bristol County ICE detainees were arrested on criminal charges. Bristol County Jail and ICE statistics both refute the sheriff’s claims that “criminal aliens” are overwhelming the Commonwealth.
Community members also questioned whether all the money lost to ICE could not be better spent on medically assisted drug treatment, prisoner rehabilitation and education programs, and better food and health care. But the sheriff retreated to his single preoccupation — immigration — claiming that immigrants account for most of America’s crime, that MS-13 is taking over the state, and that 90% of the opioids in the US are coming across the border. Community pushback on these lies and misinformation accomplished nothing. The sheriff’s heart and mind are black holes admitting no light.
It was a complete waste of time for everyone. But for Hodgson it may have been a great audition for one of those empty Homeland Security jobs now available with the Trump administration.
On March 24th Trump’s Attorney General — and we should take the phrase literally, since William Barr has even less integrity and closer ties to Trump than Jeff Sessions — issued a four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. In it, Barr quotes Mueller: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Barr also writes: “The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, consired or coordinated with the Russian government [to influence the election].” Trump took a victory lap, claiming “complete and total exoneration.
Did not establish. Did not find. Despite the fact that a large number of close Trump associates — including Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo, Roger Stone, and Alex van der Zwaan — were convicted (or in Stone’s case, indicted) for crimes related to collusion with over 30 Russians and 3 corporations that meddled in the 2016 election.
From the kid gloves applied to the president, one must conclude that ours is a broken legal system designed primarily to incarcerate and kill brown people with broken tail lights — but one that provides concierge service to rich white men — to the point that even treason can be overlooked.
I am always a bit suspicious of other people’s summaries, preferring to read an original myself. If you have ever read a Yelp review, you know what I’m talking about. If you have ever read an Amazon review, you recognize a fake when you see one — for example, as this Fakespot analysis of Trump’s “Art of the Deal” shows. Or, if you have actually read American history, you would be surprised to learn that the Cliff Notes version of American slavery says that “slaves sometimes had better physical living conditions than poor whites.” Or you might have seen James Agee’s gushing review of D.W. Griffith’s KKK film “Birth of a Nation.”
And we should be especially suspicious of any summary from an underling of Donald Trump, a pathological liar who will shortly celebrate his 10,000th lie.
But William Barr’s summary also notes that “the Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted collusion.”
In fact, Barr adds: “For each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. the Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.'”
For this reason I am patiently waiting for the actual 380-page Mueller report — though I hope it doesn’t look like Michael Flynn’s sentencing document:
In the end, it will be up to the House of Representatives, with its slim centrist Democrat majority, to decide whether to rake the president over well-deserved coals and, if necessary, to compel Robert Mueller to discuss his findings and explain any redactions. I am not hopeful Pelosi will rise to the occasion.
Last week Margaret Kimberley, writing in Black Agenda Report, called out colonialism, the American police and carceral state, and militarism for what it all has in common — a license to kill people of color. Kimberley also sat down with KPFA to discuss her piece. I was taken with the scope and brevity of Kimberley’s piece, reprinted with her kind permission.
by Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report
Zionism, manifest destiny, wars on terror, humanitarian interventions, and the Monroe and other doctrines always boil down to a license to kill.
Discussions about white supremacy should amount to more than kumbaya moments of interpersonal harmony or hand wringing when lone gunmen go on the periodic racist rampage. Self-identified white people have always posed dangers to every other group. Most of them living today haven’t carried out murder with their own hands but that does not mean that they or their countrymen and women can’t be held to account.
Donald Trump’s presidency complicates this discussion. The threats presented by his appeals to racists cannot be overstated. There is no dispute about his impact. Shortly after he was inaugurated a white supremacist shot and killed six people at a Montreal, Quebec mosque. The killer of 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand referred to Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”
But Trump isn’t the only white supremacist leader. White supremacy is the guiding force behind many atrocities committed around the world. Zionism is an example of white supremacy in action. But many of those who expressed shock after the New Zealand killings don’t question Israel’s apartheid system that could not be carried out absent the support of the United States and its allies.
White supremacy explains the willingness of many Americans to support the bipartisan project to carry out regime change in Venezuela and other nations. It is expressed as as positive, a humanitarian gesture meant to save the colored peoples of the world from themselves. The notion of a white man’s burden still exists in the 21st century.
The individuals who carry out these acts usually elicit greater scorn than the presidents and prime ministers who do the same thing. A televised speech claiming that a war is “humanitarian” gets support from the corporate media, conservatives, and liberals too. The unanimity of opinion is based on all the precepts that say white makes right. Zionism, manifest destiny, wars on terror, humanitarian interventions, and the Monroe and other doctrines always boil down to a license to kill. The victims are usually people from the global south and there is little objection when the perpetrator is the state itself.
The Australian killer who flashed the white power gang sign even as he appeared in court should not be seen as the only face of racism. Pointing fingers at him and others of his ilk lets too many people off the hook of responsibility.
His homeland of Australia is the embodiment of the ethno-nationalism that the shooter referred to in his manifesto. Europeans invaded Australia and nearly eradicated the aboriginal inhabitants. The entire indigenous population of Tasmania was wiped out by the settler population. The bigger shock is that there aren’t more mass killers from Australia and other nations that owe their existence to genocide.
The mosque killer regards the non-white immigrant as an invader when he is the one descended from the invading people. Candle light vigils may expiate guilt and bring momentary relief but they are a poor substitute for telling the truth about genocides carried out by European descended people around the world.
That is the white supremacy which must be always be discussed. That evil decimated the Iroquois and Lakota and Maori and Tasmanians and maintained a 300-year long slave trade. In a perverse twist the descendants of the genocidaires see themselves as the victims. Whenever a tipping point of color is surpassed the racists react with segregation, gentrification and outright murder.
This point may be the hardest to discuss. Trump is president precisely because he expressed the belief that this colonial settler state is for white people and they should do all they can to keep others out or under their control.
It is easy to express dismay when racist killers attack churches in Charleston, South Carolina or mosques in Quebec or New Zealand. It is harder for self-identified whites who think themselves enlightened to ponder difficult questions about wars and mass incarceration that are carried out in their names.
The maniac killers who use their own firearms are a symptom of a much bigger problem. White supremacy is normalized so much that is becomes like background music. It is ever present and subliminal.
The British tabloid newspaper Daily Mirror had a front page photo of the New Zealand killer as a toddler. The headline read, “Angelic boy who grew into evil, far right mass killer.” Angelic is an apt description for most small children. Every terrorist was once an angelic tot. But only the white ones are given humanity even after they kill. There should be no surprise when racism pushes the unhinged over the edge. They are given legitimacy long before they pick up a gun.
— Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report
Note from David —
After the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, Liberal talking heads and mainstream editorial pages pushed a message that violent White Supremacy and Christian Identity were aberrations set in motion by America’s racist president. Liberals walked back a previous characterization of American Main Street racists as “Deplorables,” casting them instead as innocents struggling with economic anxieties — nothing like the Lone Wolves who carry out mass murders. White Liberals could breathe a sigh of relief — we ourselves could not possibly be culpable.
But when a Muslim Congresswoman had the temerity to express criticism of Israel’s Apartheid-flavored “democracy”– one that killed more unarmed Palestinian demonstrators again this week — and questioned the role of AIPAC and the duplicity of politicians doing a better of job of representing Israel than their own country — the GOP and centrist Democrats attacked her. Yet the very first piece of legislation considered by the Senate, Bill S.1, includes what is in essence a loyalty oath to Israel and violates the First Amendment rights of Americans to boycott. After much waffling, House and Senate Democrats only half-heartedly defended fellow Democrat Ilhan Omar. Apparently crushing bipartisan economic sanctions on Venezuela and Iran are acceptable, while a consumer boycott of Israel must be regarded as nothing but anti-Semitism.
The current war on Venezuela is likewise part of the American imperial enterprise — one that began long ago, and was codified in the Monroe Doctrine. If you believe American aggression happens only under GOP administrations, review the history.
Finally, long before Trump was elected I noticed that mainstream Conservative publications are, in theme and message, virtually indistinguishable from those which directly call for genocide, race war, and ethnic cleansing. The spelling in mainstream Conservative publications may be better and the violent rhetoric may have been replaced with coded messaging, but the message is still the same. Since FOX is the #1 news channel in America, this is apparently what White American likes to hear, what it believes.
It ought to be pretty clear that all this is a white people problem — a problem created by the demographic that wrote our laws and is determined to preserve its political and economic advantages at all cost. And this is a mess we white people are responsible for cleaning up. It is nothing but hypocrisy to claim we support human and civil rights while actually supporting colonial invasions, occupations and repressive “law and order” measures that include police killings and mass incarceration.
Like the Anglo-American position of “High Sheriff” the word “lickspittle” is a relic of the 17th century. The phrase “lick the spittle” as a repulsive act dates back to the 1640s.
Pronunciation
lick·spit·tle | \ ˈlik-ˌspi-tᵊl \
Definition
lickspittle(noun): a fawning subordinate, sycophant, abject toady, one who will do any repulsive thing
Last August Democratic District Attorney Thomas Quinn penned an editorial in the Boston Globe supporting “get tough” bail revocation. It was part of a coordinated effort with Republican Governor Charles Baker to modify the Commonwealth’s Section 58A “Dangerousness” statutes. On September 10, 2018 the governor introduced legislation to keep people not yet convicted of any crime behind bars for up to a year without trial if deemed “dangerous” by police or District Attorneys. And this year, again, Baker’s bill H.66 currently awaits a vote in the legislature.
The governor’s legislation follows several high-profile cases of people out on bail committing serious crimes. In one case, a Weymouth police officer was allegedly killed by a man with a history of run-ins with local police who was out on $500 bail for a pending drug charge. In another case, a Fall River man who was charged in 2015 but never convicted of armed robbery reportedly killed two people, including a veteran and new father, after losing control of his vehicle in a high-speed police chase. The press has been generous with photo-ops of DAs, the governor, and police captains all calling for “Blue Lives Matter” policies. The Sun-Chronicle showed its bias running with “Bristol County DA pleads for bail reform to keep criminals off streets” while NECN cast the legislation as an effort to “Keep Dangerous Criminals Behind Bars.” Forgotten is the fact that you’re only a criminal if you’ve actually been convicted of a crime.
Last Summer the Massachusetts legislature passed an omnibus criminal law reform bill which was signed by the governor and includes bail reform. As Senator Will Brownsberger explained, the reform bill codified the State Judicial Court’s Brangan decision, which ruled that “in setting the amount of bail, whether under G.L. c.276, §57 or §58, a judge must consider a defendant’s financial resources, but is not required to set bail in an amount the defendant can afford if other relevant considerations weigh more heavily than the defendant’s ability to provide the necessary security for his appearance at trial.” The SCJ ruling balanced public safety with concern for America’s habit of criminalizing poverty.
Habitually hostile to civil liberties, Massachusetts district attorneys have destroyed lives, in many cases defending tainted convictions with tainted evidence, and nine out of eleven Massachusetts DAs staunchly opposed the recent criminal justice reform legislation. Nationwide, district attorneys have discovered that running on a “law and order” platform — going after the weakest and most vulnerable in society by labeling them “superpredators” — is always a winning election strategy. So it’s no surprise that both Republican and Democratic DA’s are joining in an assault on Brangan.
Jahmal Brangan, for whom the ruling is named, had been sitting in a Massachusetts jail for three and a half years simply because he couldn’t meet bail. After Brangan’s case was finally heard, now-retired Supreme Judicial Court Judge Geraldine S. Hines wrote, “A bail that is set without any regard to whether a defendant is a pauper or a plutocrat runs the risk of being excessive and unfair.”Hines also added: “A $250 cash bail will have little impact on the well-to-do, for whom it is less than the cost of a night’s stay in a downtown Boston hotel, but it will probably result in detention for a homeless person whose entire earthly belongings can be carried in a cart.”
There is an old truism: “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Indeed, Brangan’s case was just one of almost a million nationwide. On any given day in 2015 roughly 700,000 people were locked up in local jails. The ACLU notes that the bail system disproportionately affects poorer Americans and people of color. Lost in the hysteria over isolated tragedies involving policemen and veterans, the victimization of poor and brown and black people merits barely a statistical footnote.
If you don’t think there’s a racial double-standard in setting bail and letting people participate effectively in their own defense, consider the case of Paul Manafort. When he was first charged with the mountain of offenses Robert Mueller threw at him, Manafort was able to post $10 million bond, allowing him to live, as the Intercept described it, “with a monitoring device around his ankle, in various luxury residences he owns in northern Virginia; Palm Beach, Florida; and the Hamptons, a tony New York beach area.” Even after Manafort’s flight risk became troubling and he was sent to jail, it was nothing like Jahmal Brangan’s experience. New York Magazine reported: “Manafort has everything he needs to prepare for the trial, including his own phone and computer. He is allowed to write emails and make an unlimited number of 15-minute calls to his lawyers. He’s even got his own ‘private, self-contained living unit, which is larger than other inmates’ units,’ the filing says. The unit includes a work space and a private shower. Manafort doesn’t even have to wear a prison jumpsuit.”
District Attorney Quinn, doing the governor’s heavy lifting by misrepresenting the Brangan decision, wrote that “the decision emphasized that judges must consider a defendant’s financial resources when setting cash bail and reiterated that dangerousness was not a reason for setting high cash bail.” Quinn’s (or was it Baker’s) solution is “to hold dangerous criminals without bail after a hearing, REGARDLESS OF THEIR FINANCIAL MEANS. Whether rich or poor, defendants should be held without bail if they are determined to be a danger to the community. The cash bail system can be reserved for defendants who are not dangerous, but still pose a default risk based on their criminal history.”
Denying bail and locking people up for a year completely violates “the principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.” Commonwealth v. Healy, 15 Mass. App. Ct. 134, 136-137 (1983) citing Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432, 453 (1895); In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 363 (1970); Estelle v. Williams, 425 U.S. 501, 503 (1976); Commonwealth v. Drayton, 386 Mass. 39, 46 (1982).
In 1996, when the Supreme Judicial Court considered whether 58A was constitutional, and whether the government could constitutionally lock someone up without access to bail before they have been found guilty at a trial, one of the prime reasons that the Court allowed this practice was the time limits on 58A, and “that detention under § 58A is temporary and provisional.” Mendonza v. Com., 423 Mass. 771, 790 (1996).
Now DA Quinn wants to remove that protection. His goal appears to be to simply lock up people without having to prove them guilty at trial.
Quinn admits that prosecutors’ “traditional approach to bail on serious cases was to ask the court to set a high cash bail that most defendants could not make.” In other words, “the imposition of very high bail, which cannot be explained simply by the need to assure the accused’s presence at trial and his noninterference with the pretrial process,” was used by prosecutors to lock up poor people accused of serious crimes. Mendonza v. Com., 423 Mass. 771, 781 (1996). Rather than following the law and requesting bail to ensure the defendant’s appearance in court, prosecutors asked for bail to keep people locked up. Now that they can no longer perpetrate that fraud, they need another mechanism to accomplish the same goal.
Replacing high bails with pretrial detention per 58A is just a more modern method of locking up people without ever having to prove them guilty at trial.
Prosecutors know that convincing a jury of a person’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is much more difficult than convincing a judge that the person is “dangerous” by clear and convincing evidence. So if they can convince a judge to lock someone up as a “danger,” they can incarcerate people without having to go before a jury.
Prosecutors also know that when people are locked up they are more likely to plead guilty. A recent study in American Economic Review found that people who are locked up are 24.5 more likely to plead guilty. See The Effects of Pre Trial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges by Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal Yang. American Economic Review 2018, 108(2): 201–240 (https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20161503).
Moreover, Quinn’s call to lock up “dangerous” people indefinitely is especially appalling in Bristol County, where his political ally, Sheriff Hodgson, runs two brutal jails where people are denied medical care, subjected to solitary confinement more than any other county jails in Massachusetts, and which account for more than 25 percent of county jail suicides in Massachusetts — despite only having 13 percent of county inmates. This combination of prosecutorial zeal and carceral sadism leads to a high rate of people desperate — virtually compelled — to accept unfavorable plea deals.
Quinn also seems to be unperturbed that the lack of a speedy trial combined with the presumption of guilt until trial results in unconstitutional jail sentences for those never convicted of a crime. Quinn writes, “the time frame must be increased to one year in both the district and superior courts. Yet any rational attorney would agree that cases in superior court, where the most dangerous defendants are prosecuted, cannot be tried within six months. Unless this unrealistic time limit is expanded beyond the current 180 days in superior court and 120 days in district court, we will continue to see dangerous defendants released back into our communities.”
Several of Quinn’s claims can only be made if he is truly ignorant of what happens in Massachusetts courts or cynically misrepresents judicial reality. Time limits of 120 and 180 days for pretrial detention under dangerousness statutes are illusory. Those time limits are extended based on events such as the defendant filing pretrial motions. Any rational attorney would agree that motions to dismiss or suppress must be litigated in the types of cases where pretrial detention is sought — firearms cases, drug trafficking, and sexual assault. Yet the time that elapses between the filing of those motions and their resolution extends the 120/180 limit. If that takes 60 days (good luck getting such quick turnaround), the defendant is held for an additional 60 days.
And the right of the Commonwealth to seek pretrial detention renews after indictment. If a prosecutor seeks detention in District Court and the person is held, that person may wait 30-90 days to be indicted and arraigned in Superior Court. Once there, the prosecutor may seek a new order of pretrial detention. If granted, the 180 limit starts all over again. Virtually every public defender in Massachusetts knows that imprisonment without trial under dangerousness statutes is considerably worse than Quinn describes.
Hearings required before someone can be detained before trial provide practically no due process protections. Hearsay is almost always permitted, which means that a defendant is deprived of their right to question witnesses. Evidence is often admitted without determining authenticity. Offenses that a defendant has never been convicted of, such as dismissals, are used against them. These are the proceedings that Quinn wants to use to hold defendants indefinitely.
At any given time between 60 to 70% of all prisoners are unconvicted and in pretrial detention. In the February 2018 issue of the American Economic Review cited above, Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal S. Yang demonstrated that “pretrial detention significantly increases the probability of conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. Pretrial detention has no net effect on future crime, but decreases formal sector employment and the receipt of employment- and tax-related government benefits. These results are consistent with (i) pretrial detention weakening defendants’ bargaining positions during plea negotiations and (ii) a criminal conviction lowering defendants’ prospects in the formal labor market.”
In other words, pretrial detention is not just unfair and unjust — it’s extremely costly to society.
The same research also shows that reducing pretrial detention actually reduces crime. “Pretrial release may decrease future crime following case disposition through two main channels. First, pretrial release may decrease crime if pretrial detention is criminogenic because of harsh prison conditions and negative peer effects. Second, pretrial release can reduce future crime through an increased likelihood of employment, which subsequently discourages further criminal activity.”
The study estimated the economic cost of needless incarceration to be between $50,000 and $100,000 per detainee: “While a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, we consider a partial back-of-the-envelope calculation that takes into account the administrative costs of jail, the costs of apprehending individuals who fail to appear, the costs of future criminality, and the economic impact on defendants. […] Based on these tentative calculations, we estimate that the total net benefit of pretrial release for the marginal defendant is anywhere between $55,143 and $99,124. Intuitively, pretrial release on the margin increases social welfare because of the significant long-term costs associated with having a criminal conviction, the criminogenic effect of detention which offsets the incapacitation benefit, and the relatively low costs associated with apprehending defendants who miss court appearances.”
* * *
Tom Quinn bears considerable responsibility for the miserable overcrowding in the county jails he has filled, whose inmates are subjected to abusive conditions by the sheriff. Just like Hodgson, Quinn was first appointed by the governor after his predecessor’s resignation and then ran unopposed in primary and general elections in 2016. DA Quinn ran unopposed in 2018 and is already promoting a Republican Governor’s bill to claw back gains made in reforming abuses in our “Criminal Justice” system. But Quinn is typical of many DA’s and the public had better start paying attention.
Yesterday the Massachusetts House voted overwhelmingly against three House rules amendments which would have required legislators to actually read bills before voting on them, and which would have published roll call votes and testimony so the public knows how representatives vote. While it all sounded sensible and democratic, the votes were a bitter reminder of one lobbyist’s remark: “Don’t mistake what happens in [the Massachusetts State House] for democracy.”
The lobbyist quoted was Phil Sego, who penned a piece in Commonwealth Magazine last month deeply critical of a loyalty-based spoils system in Blue State Massachusetts that could just as easily be run by Mitch McConnell as Robert DeLeo. The amendment votes were strikes against transparency, to be sure, but they were mainly strikes against threats to Robert DeLeo’s grip on the House.
Another Commonwealth article that appeared on the 30th pointed out that Democrats with cherished committee assignments voted to keep things as-is, while freshman legislators were put in the awkward position of having to vote with Republicans for a change in The Way Things Work.
In addition to the transparency votes, the House voted 43-113 against a proposal to impose term limits on Speaker Robert Deleo.
Today Progressive Massachusetts (PM) published the results of the votes on three of the amendments:
72 hours to read the final language of any bill the House is voting on;
30 minutes for the House to read any amendment submitted on the floor to be voted on;
publication of hearing testimony and roll call votes
Check the votes below to see how your representative voted — and feel free to give him or her an earful:
https://malegislature.gov/Search/FindMyLegislator
Amendment #1 – 72 hours to read text of a new bill
Amendment #2 – 30 minutes to read floor amendments
Amendment #3 – publication of testimony and roll-calls
Americans love invasions. Trump and his Republicans are on the warpath this week against Venezuela. We’ve heard precious little criticism from either party of Donald Trump’s recognition of “self-declared” president Juan Guaido. Democrats generally remained silent in 2009 when Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported a coup in Honduras. And today the “liberal” press still loves US interventions. The New York Times is all but calling for a US coup in Venezuela (“That Mr. Maduro must go has been obvious for some time.”) and the Washington Post ran an editorial by Guaido calling Maduro a “usurper.”
So it was really only a minor, and extremely temporary, aberration in 2013 when Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States (OAS) that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” As the UPI reported: “Kerry’s declaration of the end of the Monroe Doctrine era was greeted with hesitant applause among the OAS delegates.”
“We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
Students are taught that the Monroe Doctrine declared that American interests in the Western Hemisphere consisted mainly of the benevolent protection of smaller countries from aggression by the world’s colonial superpowers — France, England, and Spain. Monroe’s assertion that “we have not interfered and shall not interfere” was as quickly abandoned as it was declared. Scarcely twenty years later the United States invaded Mexico. Monroe’s Doctrine, seen in historical light, was actually a declaration that the US fully intended to get into the superpower business itself.
Since then the Doctrine has been interpreted to mean that the US has every right to interfere in its neighbor’s affairs — and the protection of neighbors has nothing to do with it. As the list below shows, there hasn’t been a decade in which the United States didn’t interfere by invasion or imposition of dictatorships.
And we wonder why we have so many refugees at our southern border.
Still not convinced the US is a malevolent imperialist nation? Stephen Kinzer’s book The True Flag is an account of the moment the United States fully embraced Imperialism and never looked back.
One scholar has documented exactly how we have lived up to Monroe’s promise that “we have not interfered and shall not interfere.” I’ll bet you didn’t learn this in Social Studies class:
Period
Location
Intervention
Comments on U.S. Role
1823
Monroe Doctrine – “shall not interfere”
1846
Mexico
War
Mexican-American War – US takes a third of Mexico
1890
Argentina
Troops
Buenos Aires interests protected
1891
Chile
Troops
Marines clash with nationalist rebels
1891
Haiti
Troops
Black workers revolt on U.S.-claimed Navassa Island defeated
1894
Nicaragua
Troops
Month-long occupation of Bluefields
1895
Panama
Naval, troops
Marines land in Colombian province
1896
Nicaragua
Troops
Marines land in port of Corinto
1898
Cuba
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, U.S. still holds Navy base at Guantanamo
1898
Puerto Rico
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, occupation continues
1898
Nicaragua
Troops
Marines land at port of San Juan del Sur
1899
Nicaragua
Troops
Marines land at port of Bluefields
1903
Honduras
Troops
Marines intervene in revolution
1903
Dominican Republic
Troops
U.S. interests protected in Revolution
1906
Cuba
Troops
Marines land in democratic election
1907
Nicaragua
Troops
“Dollar Diplomacy” protectorate set up
1907
Honduras
Troops
Marines land during war with Nicaragua
1908
Panama
Troops
Marines intervene in election contest
1910
Nicaragua
Troops
Marines land in Bluefields and Corinto
1911
Honduras
Troops
U.S. interests protected in civil war
1912
Cuba
Troops
U.S. interests protected in Havana
1912
Panama
Troops
Marines land during heated election
1912
Honduras
Troops
Marines protect U.S. economic interests
1912
Nicaragua
Troops, bombing
20-year occupation, fought guerrillas
1913
Mexico
Naval
Americans evacuated during revolution
1914
Dominican Republic
Naval
Fight with rebels over Santo Domingo
1914
Mexico
Naval, troops
Series of interventions against nationalists
1914
Haiti
Troops, bombing
19-year occupation after revolts
1916
Dominican Republic
Troops
8-year Marine occupation
1917
Cuba
Troops
Military occupation, economic protectorate
1918
Panama
Troops
“Police duty” during unrest after elections
1919
Honduras
Troops
Marines land during election campaign
1920
Guatemala
Troops
2-week intervention against unionists
1921
Costa Rica
Troops
1921
Panama
Troops
1924
Honduras
Troops
Landed twice during election strife
1925
Panama
Troops
Marines suppress general strike
1932
El Salvador
Naval
Warships sent during Faribundo Marti revolt
1947
Uruguay
Nuclear threat
Bombers deployed as show of strength
1950
Puerto Rico
Command operation
Independence rebellion crushed in Ponce
1954
Guatemala
Command operation, bombing, nuclear threat
CIA directs exile invasion and coup d’etat after newly elected government nationalizes unused U.S.’s United Fruit Company lands; bombers based in Nicaragua; long-term result: 200,000 murdered
1958
Panama
Troops
Flag protests erupt into confrontation
1961
Cuba
Command operation
CIA-directed exile invasion fails
1962
Cuba
Nuclear threat, naval
Blockade during missile crisis; near-war with Soviet Union
1964
Panama
Troops
Panamanians shot for urging canal’s return
1965
Dominican Republic
Troops, bombing
Marines land during election campaign
1966
Guatemala
Command operation
Green Berets intervene against rebels
1973
Chile
Command operation
CIA-backed coup ousts democratically elected Marxist president
1981
El Salvador
Command operation, troops
Advisors, overflights aid anti-rebel war, soldiers briefly involved in hostage clash; long-term result: 75,000 murdered and destruction of popular movement
1981
Nicaragua
Command operation, naval
CIA directs exile (Contra) invasions, plants harbor mines against revolution; result: 50,000 murdered
1982
Honduras
Troops
Maneuvers help build bases near borders
1983
Grenada
Troops, bombing
Invasion four years after revolution
1987
Bolivia
Troops
Army assists raids on cocaine region
1989
Panama
Troops, bombing
Nationalist government ousted by 27,000 soldiers, leaders arrested, 2000+ killed
1994
Haiti
Troops, naval
Blockade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup
2002
Venezuela
Command operation
Failed coup attempt to remove left-populist president Hugo Chavez
2004
Haiti
Troops
Removal of democratically elected President Aristide; troops occupy country
2009
Honduras
Command operation
Support for coup that removed president Manuel Zelaya
The Massachusetts Senate is open for business and a whopping 2,202 pieces of Senate legislation await co-sponsorship, dismissal, or eventual votes.
You can’t claim to live in a democracy if it doesn’t have strong and widely-observed civil liberties. What we have instead is overwhelmingly a police and prison state sitting atop a playground for Capitalists. Many of the bills before the Legislature concern criminal “justice” reforms, including decarceration, treating substance abuse in jail, parole and probation reforms, and more accountability for guards and police. Not everybody behind bars is an animal, and not everybody with a badge is a saint. With a shocking 50% of all American families affected by prison, probation, parole, or the cruel stigma of prior incarceration, this and white supremacy are the top crises now afflicting America — not the lack of a border wall.
Speaking of which. Civil liberties don’t stop at the border. Over decades American “interventions” have created the human rights abuses, the collapse of democratic governments, and the economic and political chaos that asylum-seekers from Central America are now fleeing. We’ve had racist immigration and border patrol polices for generations and, to be honest, I’d much prefer to throw Trump and his tax-cheating, wife-cheating, white supremacist buddies out of the country — instead keeping hard-working Central Americans who may be here “illegally” but actually pay taxes and contribute to the Social Security system I depend on. And I don’t want to pay for my racist county sheriff to get to play ICE agent on the state dime. It turns out that by supporting the re-filed Safe Communities Act we also strengthen everyone’s Constitutional rights.
Over time I’ve noticed that the police and military seem to be the only constituency of importance to some legislators — mostly Republican, but some Democrats as well. These guys file bill after bill that scream — Blue Lives Matter! Khaki Lives Matter! To hell with teachers, garbage men, and anyone else who provides an essential service. This year’s Senate bills include legislation to make harming one of them a more serious offense than harming any other citizen. Some bills unfairly move vets to the front of the hiring line or eliminate training and age requirements for them. Or they give away state tax money for awards and allowances for federal military service.
Well, I’ve had it with the veneration of all things militaristic. It’s time to say no to all this legislation. The phrase “thank you for your service” has become a completely hollow slogan. Do we ever ask about the nature of the actual service rendered by a mercenary army or its true value? Does an unemployed or aimless guy who heads over to the local Army recruiter bear any responsibility for war crimes he wittingly or unwittingly participates in? Did he ever question what he was signing up to do? Does anyone really believe that a generation of wars and invasions has kept us safe? Are we not in fact guilty of destabilizing much of the Middle East and creating much of Europe’s refugee crisis? In the face of such weighty questions, these giveaways must be seen for what they really are — blood money.
The Massachusetts House has not published the text of any of its legislation, though only a week remains during which you can urge your representative to co-sponsor the mystery bills. As with so much that is wrong with the Massachusetts House, I’m inclined to blame it all on Bob DeLeo.
A border wall may be a stupid idea (“show me a fifty foot wall and I’ll show you a fifty-one foot ladder”), but that doesn’t matter to a monomaniacal constituency holding the nation hostage to its white supremacist agenda.
Trump and his FOX News cheerleaders claim that America is being invaded. Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks compared the “invasion” of asylum seekers to 9/11: “Let’s look at 9/11 by way of example. We lost 3,000 people more or lesson 9/11. That justified going to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and our troops are still there to varying degrees.”
But the desperation of Central American refugees is a problem decades of American “interventions” caused. And when desperate people show up at your door it’s not a home invasion but the result of economic and political instability we created in places like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
The Libertarian CATO Institute disputes Trump’s claim that the situation on the border is any worse than in previous years. During both Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, Border Patrol agents actually turned away more immigrants than today. It’s also clear that Trump’s wall-inspired shutdown has nothing to do with national security. If it were, “non-essential” TSA employees, air traffic controllers, and the Coast Guard would all be drawing paychecks. Besides the insane wall, Trump’s immigration policies include deportation of people who never committed a crime (DACA and TPS recipients), increased de-naturalization of citizens, and political attacks on the U.S. Constitution’s conferral of citizenship to anyone born here.
It’s clearly not about safety. It’s about keeping America as White as possible for as long as possible.
Republicans never liked Presidential orders when a Black president was writing them. But now, with a white supremacist in the Oval Office, they sure have changed their tune. For the last two years Donald Trump has displayed his signature on many an order — and that’s just fine with the GOP.
With the longest-ever national shutdown still in progress, Trump has decided to take autocracy to a new level — threatening to declare a National Emergency if he can’t get his wall through political negotiations. This move is one more milestone in the erosion of American democracy but it is also troubling that the president’s base would support such a declaration without any credible evidence of a real emergency. They don’t want a president. They want a caudillo.
But Republicans should really ask themselves if they want to go down this road of government by decree. If so — and with Trump’s precedent — the next Democratic president will be able to use the same new powers to declare national emergencies to solve a long list of serious, neglected crises:
grant permanent residency to DACA and TPS recipients;
re-open abortion clinics across the country;
stop the epidemic of gun deaths in the United States;
fix poisoned water systems in Flint, Newark, and elsewhere;
end poverty and homelessness by expanding the social safety net;
raise minimum and set maximum wages;
order the implementation of Medicare for All;
establish a comprehensive jobs program to provide 100% employment;
end voter suppression;
relieve Puerto Rico of its crushing debt;
take immediate steps to reduce CO2 emissions; and
declare invalid the DOJ memorandum sparing sitting presidents from prosecution.
Tom Hodgson just got back from another Massachusetts taxpayer-funded trip to Washington, DC which (once again) had nothing to do with his official duties. On January 11th Hodgson met with the Trump administration to (once again) try to sell Trump’s Wall.
Things may be going to hell in Hodgson’s own backyard — he has the highest prisoner suicide rate in the state, the second-highest recidivism rate, the highest rate of complaints of excessive force, and he is the subject of multiple wrongful death and human rights lawsuits — but when it comes to selling Trump’s Wall, Hodgson and the far-right groups he represents are nothing if not persistent.
On December 21, 2018 Hodgson posted a statement on Facebook condemning Congress for not funding Trump’s wall. A week later Hodgson posted a swipe at an assortment of Democrats for opposing the wall, blaming them for the death of California police officer Ronil Singh. On January 2nd Hodgson again blasted Congress for resisting the wall, and on January 4th he singled out Nancy Pelosi for her characterization of the wall as immoral. All this was done on official letterhead, likely in violation of state ethics regulations.
Hodgson watchers took note when the grandstanding sheriff announced that his right-wing rogue sheriff outfit, the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA), would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgon’s project folded after raising less than $100K — despite dishonest claims of overwhelming traffic — and it now redirects donors to a group called the American Border Foundation.
Hodgon’s new group should not be confused with the GoFundMe campaign that fell short of its goal but doesn’t want to return donations. That one was started by Brian Kolfage, a conspiracy nut and scamster who once duped donors eager to help wounded military vets. Kolfage’s organization is directed by a toxic crew of Islamophobes, racists and loose cannons — including Erik Prince, disgraced Sheriff David Clarke, and Kris Kobach.
In some ways, the Sheriff’s fundraising group is even worse.
Hodgson’s new fundraising outfit, now run by the American Border Foundation, is not anywhere close to its $450 million goal. Its less-than 4,000 donors have raised barely over $200K. The founder, Gary Dolan, tried wall-building before with a FundRazr campaign that raised only $12K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer has appeared on the bible show Southern Sense and on a talk show which often invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”). “Invasion” is a central theme of both the Trump administration and the Constitutional Sheriff’s Association (cspoa), which Hodgson joined in 2014.
The Director of Communications for the American Border Foundation is Jeremy Messina, who really ought to clean up the racist rants on his Facebook page. Messina might also want to redact his YouTube profile. Turns out, the young Trumpian is a self-identified Identitarian White Supremacist. But then Hodgson himself sits on the National Advisory committee of FAIR, which was founded by White Supremacist John Tanton. Birds of a feather. Or, as Proverbs 13:20 puts it: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.”
If these pathetic donation efforts are any indication, the American public hasn’t really embraced Trump’s wall. For all the fear-mongering and hype, most people know it’s a stupid waste of billions (“show me a ten foot wall and I’ll show you an eleven foot ladder”). But the nation’s racists and miscreants love the idea, it’s become their organizing principle, and they don’t care if the whole country has to suffer for them to get it.
As for Hodgson, it’s time the Massachusetts state auditor, the Office of the Inspector General, the Attorney General, the legislature, and the various state Ethics boards began looking at Sheriff Hodgson’s abuses of his job as county jail superintendent — the letterhead, the inappropriate travel, the waste of taxpayer money — all to further a White Supremacist agenda.
I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, and it may even ring true if you were born white — in which case you can also get presidential pardons or concierge service in the courts. But this is a lie we tell ourselves. And by “we” I mean white people.
But if you were born poor, brown, black, or without American citizenship, the “nation of laws” claim often rings as hollow as a November pumpkin.
Just ask Cyntoia Brown, who was enslaved into sex work and had to shoot her rapist to escape. Brown was sentenced to 51 years in prison for the killing and, despite wide support for clemency, was not on Tennessee governor Bill Haslam’s list of 11 people granted clemency on Thursday.
On the flip slide, Jeffrey Epstein — a friend of Donald Trump’s — received a relatively light sentence of 13 months in jail for raping dozens of underaged girls. One of his victims was even recruited at Trump’s Mar Lago resort. Epstein’s prosecutor, Alexander Acosta — also a friend of Trump’s — worked out the gentlemanly plea deal entre blancs and went on to become Trump’s Secretary of Labor.
If you think Epstein, Trump, and Brett Kavanaugh are exceptions to how society winks at white sexual predators, consider this case from last week. In Louisiana a white Baylor University frat boy convicted of rape got a $400 fine and probation — and that was it. Jacob Walter Anderson walked away after paying a fine, his life and freedom intact. No jump suit, no 51 year sentence.
“These people need to get in line for citizenship.”
When it comes to refugee status, asylum, work visas, and citizenship, we white people cloak ourselves in the same sorts of lies.
From the beginnings of the nation until 1924, only white people were allowed to legally immigrate. The Chinese Exclusion Act was based on claims that Chinese were immoral, criminal, brought smallpox, opium, and could not be culturally absorbed — virtually every lie that today’s FOX News commentators repeat about Central American refugees.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that a Japanese businessman named Takao Ozawa was not a Caucasian and therefore did not qualify for citizenship. A case three months later involving an Indian, Bhagat Singh Thind, ruled that Indians were not Caucausians and Thind actually had his citizenship stripped. If you’ve been paying attention to Trump’s immigration policies, renewed threats of denaturalization and the movement to abolish the 14th Amendment are revived assaults on people of color in a long, continuous, racist history.
So let’s be clear. For almost all of our history there was no immigration line for anyone except white people. And a story from this week’s news illustrates a related fact — that, besides demonizing people of color, the “system” has continuously provided legal advantages for white immigrants — even to this day.
Outgoing “moderate” House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has persistently blocked help for DACA recipients and reforms which would benefit Latinos and other brown people, submitted bill H.R. 7164, written to let Irish nationals use some of the 10,500 annual Australian visas — thus ensuring that white people are directed to the head of the immigration line.
We’ve entered a dangerous era in the United States. Many of our nominal constitutional protections have been officially suspended for a generation, the USA now runs a vast network of concentration camps for asylum seekers, whose simple arrival at “our” borders has been criminalized. The president uses racist invective without shame and calls himself a nationalist. The liberal-ish press sees itself primarily as a purveyor of entertainment and strives for “balance” while their right-wing colleagues practice sycophancy and promote the most extreme propaganda.
Why is Western “democracy” so vulnerable to fascism and nationalism? Why does fascism come back with a vengeance every three or four generations? It is a mistake to ascribe this to unique economic and historical conditions that produce monsters like Trump, Duterte, MBS, Orban, and Bolsonaro. And although expressions of xenophobia and white supremacy include Capitalism and colonialism, Marx can’t adequately explain it.
There is something dark and perverse in human nature. The fascists we ought to fear the most are not always the demagogues who show up on election years — sometimes they live right next door.
In 1929 Freud saw something frightening approaching as he wrote Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which has been translated as Civilization and its Discontents. It’s one of Freud’s best and most pessimistic essays. Whatever you may think of psychoanalysis, mommy issues or cigars, Freud offers insight into the clash — not of civilizations — but between “civilization” and the individual. His work, alongside that of anarchists like Emma Goldman, tries to explain why “democracies” never manage to rise above human frailty. More often, in fact, they enshrine our worst human impulses in law and hand over power to hyper-aggressive miscreants and monsters.
This week’s ongoing deterioration of Western democracy includes Australia’s new surveillance legislation which neuters encryption standards so that security services can read citizens’ encrypted communications. This joins New Zealand’s digital strip-search legislation, which fines people $5,000 if they won’t allow their phones and laptops to be searched without a warrant.
China is rolling out its “social credit” system, which makes the Stasi’s files look benign in comparison. And the Philippine president has called for the murder of Catholic clergy critical of him. Domestically, a FWD.us and Cornell University study released this week revealed the extent of America’s police state — one half of all Americans have a family member currently or once incarcerated. And as I write this the American president still continues to defend a Saudi prince who US spy agencies say was complicit in a horrific assassination.
For all the fascist preoccupation with refugees, we have little to fear from people crossing our borders. As always, the real danger lies within.
Sheriff Tom Hodgson is routinely criticized for having the highest suicide rate among inmates of any county jail in the state. He has the second highest rate of recidivism in the state. He spends the least on inmate care in the state. His corrections officers have the highest rate of complaints of excessive force in the state. Hodgson has been faulted for excessive absences, for political grandstanding instead of doing his job, and for accepting kickbacks from a phone vendor. He’s fighting four wrongful death suits, a lawsuit for abusing mentally ill inmates, and one for illegal detention and deprivation of Constitutional rights. The Attorney General wrote a letter calling for an investigation of his facilities, but otherwise there has been absolutely no effort from any branch or office of Massachusetts government to hold the sheriff accountable.
Hodgson doesn’t care for public scrutiny. Whenever he is accused of abuse, neglect, or mismanagement at his jail, Hodgson whines that political opponents are out to get him and cites his 100% A+ perfect score from the American Corrections Association. The sheriff recently penned an editorial in the New Bedford Standard Times, trotting out the claim that “the BCSO is nationally accredited by the American Corrections Association, which gave us a perfect 100 percent score on our most recent inspection that looked at everything from security procedures to health care and everything in between.”
Public officials who refuse to do anything about Hodgson’s abuses may want to believe that his loudly-proclaimed accreditations are an indication that all is well in his facilities. But, like the sham award Hodgson received at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting last summer, his ACA accreditation is equally laughable — or would be if taxpayers were not paying for it.
In 2004 Prison Legal News published an article about the ACA entitled “The American Correctional Association — A Fraud on Texas Taxpayers.” The author described the ACA as:
“a non-governmental private agency that offers a veneer of respectability to those client correctional institutions that comply with the association’s volumes of published standards. After payment of the obligatory and substantial fees, the ACA’s audit teams visit client prisons and, finding at least the appearance of compliance, the ACA declares the prison to be ‘accredited.’ Prison officials hope that ACA accreditation will thwart lawsuits over conditions of confinement by prisoners. That some of the worst, most brutal, violent and decrepit prisons are ‘accredited’ by the ACA should cast doubt on whether the accreditation has any real world meaning. The ACA will not disclose if any prison or jail, after having paid the requisite fees, has failed to be accredited.”
The article goes on to fault ACA “accreditations” for secret audits, audits which ignore prisoner complaints, and questionable and improper payments in exchange for 100% A+ “perfect” ratings like Hodgson’s.
Besides offering cover for disinterested politicians, ACA audits also function as a legal shield. States which rely on the ACA to set “best practices” cannot be sued for neglect if they are making a “good faith” effort to follow some sort of standards. This has led to cases like one in South Dakota in 2007. Prisoners complained that “cells lacked adequate ventilation, lacked running hot water, the electrical wiring was substandard, the fire standards were inadequate, the kitchen conditions were unsanitary and unsafe, and the medical and dental care was grossly inadequate. Moreover, the prison was understaffed. The court held these conditions support a finding the double-celling was unconstitutional, but the defendants could move for an evidentiary hearing to seek double celling upon improving the confinement conditions.” But the Eighth Circuit Court of Appealsalso ruled that the ACA — a private entity — could determine prison capacity. This then undermined many of the prisoners’ complaints and hampered remediation of the horrific prison conditions.
In 2001 the Suffolk County sheriff’s department in Boston faced charges of abusing inmates and mismanagement at the facilities. The ACA director, James Gondles, was asked to participate in an inspection but declined to do so because the ACA had previously given “glowing” reviews in a previous inspection. Gondles’ refusal to revisit the Suffolk jail raised some alarms.
The Boston Globe reported that “a closer look at the accreditation program of the American Correctional Association — the trade group chosen by Suffolk County Sheriff Richard J. Rouse to investigate reports of systemic abuse and mismanagement in his department — shows that it has routinely accredited facilities beset by charges of abuse or poor conditions. The facilities include one that was put into receivership following a federal lawsuit, and another set to close this year, and others found by courts to be operating in violation of the constitution.”
Worse, the ACA-led inspection of the Suffolk jail was led by a Nebraska auditor from a corrections department under investigation by Nebraska state officials for failure to meet minimum standards of health care at his own institution.
In a 2006 academic study of ACA accreditations, the researcher reviewed criticisms of the ACA’s “standards” — “badly borrowed principles from outdated, never tested, academic theories.” Some facilities, as one cited study noted, do not adopt ACA “standards” until right before the ACA audit. Another observed that some facilities concoct policies and procedures consistent with ACA “standards” just prior to the audit, which were referred to as the “one-day shine.”
The study found that ACA accreditation did not necessarily signify a professionally managed jail. In fact, “with respect to levels of violence, riots, and fires, ACA accredited facilities are more violent than non-accredited facilities. The data showed a significant positive relationship between ACA accreditation and higher rates of assaults on staff and riots. Although inmate assaults on other inmates and assaults on staff decreased from 1995 to 2000, assaults on staff remained the same. Similarly, the ratio of riots increased between 1995 and 2000, and the ratio of fires remained higher in ACA accredited facilities than in non-accredited facilities.” The study also found the suicide rate much higher and noted that Hepatitis C, HIV, and TB testing was performed less often in ACA-accredited jails.
The Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College reports that in 2015 Tennessee’s prisons were being routinely accredited by the ACA — at an annual cost of $40,000 — but something didn’t smell right to Tennessee Congressman Mike Stewart. Stewart had heard [eventually substantiated] rumors that a Nashville facility had brought in extra staff for the ACA’s inspection, and he called the ACA accreditations “a sham” and a “rubber stamp,” citing similar problems with ACA inspections in Boston.
The Tennessee certifications came under fire for the state’s human rights abuses — and also for highlighting the cozy relationship between the ACA and the private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America. According to a piece in PRWeb:
“ACA accreditation is based largely on documentation provided by the correctional agency being examined, and whether it has certain policies in place — not necessarily whether it follows those policies in practice. Thus, some ACA-accredited CCA facilities have experienced significant problems despite being accredited. For example, earlier this year two prisoners were murdered at CCA’s Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, which is ACA accredited; CCA’s ACA-accredited Idaho Correctional Center is presently the subject of an ACLU class-action lawsuit that describes systemic violence condoned by CCA staff; and both Hawaii and Kentucky prison officials removed their female prisoners from the CCA-operated Otter Creek Correctional Center in Kentucky, which is also ACA accredited, following a sex abuse scandal in which six CCA employees were charged with sexually abusing or raping prisoners.”
As in the Arizona correctional facility above, where prisoner deaths were covered up by Corrections Corporation of America, ACA accreditations are frequently obtained or preserved by falsifying or destroying records — a by-product of the conflicts of interest that beset the ACA. “One former CCA employee [in Nevada], Donna Como, who served as an accreditation manager, candidly admitted that she helped falsify documents for an ACA audit. ‘I was the person who doctored the ACA accreditation reports for this company,’ she stated in December 2008, referring to her employment at the CCA-operated Southern Nevada Women’s Correctional Facility.”
And the rot goes all the way to the top of the ACA.
In 2013 former Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps was sworn in as the 102nd president of the American Correctional Association. Epps had been an ACA auditor for at least a decade. Only a year later the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi indicted Epps on corruption charges stemming from his receiving kickbacks from prison contracts worth over $800 million. Epps will be spending two decades in one of the facilities he ran — and audited.
Like Hodgson, the ACA doesn’t care much for public scrutiny. Prison Legal News reported that “in August 1982, David L. Bazelon, Senior Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, resigned his position as an ACA board member. In a lengthy article entitled ‘The Accreditation,’ published in Corrections Magazine, the ACA’s own periodical, Bazelon accused the organization of multiple unethical practices. The ACA, he wrote, ‘has repeatedly refused to open the accreditation process to public scrutiny and participation; the commission’s audit techniques and deliberative procedures are inherently unreliable; the commission is unwilling to accommodate constructive criticism and the possibility of meaningful change; the commission’s priorities are fundamentally flawed; [and] the commission has pervasive conflicts of interest with the facilities it is charged with monitoring.'”
In addition to corruption, conflicts-of-interest, and the secretiveness of the ACA, its accreditations are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. You can practically print them yourself. Prison Legal News noted:
“Tennessee is one of only a few states in which the entire prison system is accredited by the ACA, and as a result the TDOC holds the American Correctional Association’s Golden Eagle Award. That honor is somewhat tarnished by the fact that for two of every three years that state prisons are accredited, they self-report data to maintain their accreditation; that the TDOC makes large payments to an ACA affiliate; and that despite the TDOC being fully accredited, when conducting its technical review the ACA found Tennessee prison officials were not correctly reporting violent incidents — something that presumably should have been discovered during the regular accreditation process but was not.”
Conflicts of interest include the revolving door between the ACA, the prison industrial complex, and state agencies. The Massachusetts ACA chapter is called the Correctional Association of Massachusetts (CAM) and CAM’s executive board is virtually a Who’s Who of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, EOPS, Parole Board, and county sheriff’s departments. As state officials they authorize and sign off on ACA certifications with their right hand. But as ACA members their organization receives public funds with the left.
You, the Massachusetts taxpayer, on the other hand, are expected to simply pay the bill and pretend that the conflict of interest is nothing serious. You, the citizen, are expected to pass much more rigorous certifications in your own professional life. Whether cardiologist, lawyer, long-haul trucker, or daycare worker, the bar for you is much higher than a self-audit. And you’d lose your job if a payoff were involved.
So the next time Tom Hodgson waves his 100% A+ perfect score in your face, remember — an ACA accreditation isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
The rights to share an opinion, peacefully assemble, and protest are all protected in the Bill of Rights. They’re non-negotiable.
Yet Tom Hodgson has called for leaders of so-called “Sanctuary cities” to be arrested. One of them thought Hodgson was a “jack-booted thug” and dared him to “come and get me.” But Hodgson has also flouted a Supreme Judicial Court ruling protecting 14th Amendment rights and is being sued for everything from wrongful deaths to accepting kickbacks to abusing mentally-ill inmates. This is one bad hombre.
So it’s not surprising that someone like Hodgson, with so little regard for the law, wants to stop people from exercising their right to protest — him.
On Thanksgiving morning Hodgson got a home visit from Rhode Island immigration activists of the FANG Collective. FANG was there to protest Hodgson’s 287(g) agreement in Dartmouth, which is the nearest ICE facility for Rhode Island detainees. FANG spokesman Nick Katkevich told the Boston Herald, “I think to interrupt his holiday for 30 minutes is definitely appropriate because he is disrupting people’s lives every day.” We completely agree.
According to FANG, Hodgson called the New Bedford Police on the protesters but they were clearly observing the law and continued to deliver their message, leaving after about a half an hour in the unseasonable 16 degree weather.
Hodgson wasn’t happy with the protest, but neither he nor his talk radio buddies could manage to offer a coherent counter-narrative.
Playing the victim, and sounding an imaginary alarm — Hodgson’s great talent — he told WBSM talk show host Chris McCarthy that he felt the group was there to try to intimidate him. Speaking with the Boston Herald Hodgson said, “Any time you get groups of people together things can quickly shift into a mob mentality.” The Boston Herald (“Protests taking dangerous turn“) ignored the [actual] peaceful nature of the protest and instead imagined all the mischief that citizens who confront public officials outside working business hours could make. Constitutionally-protected mischief.
WBSM’s Ken Pittman showed his customary detachment from reality. Pittman blamed the protests on “grey haired” New Bedford “Leftist Parrots,” actually accusing them of being paid actors. Pittman was so unmoored he couldn’t even get his activist groups straight, calling the fairly youthful protestors “anarchist Bolsheviks” and making an unhinged remark about helping Ugandan children — which in retrospect can only be interpreted as a desperate plea for help with his mental health.
Two days later Hodgson was back on the Adriana Cohen show at Boston Herald Radio, this time playing less the quaking victim and more the brave gunslinger. “The minute you violate the law, we’re going to lock you up,” Hodgson told Boston Herald Radio, which rather unprofessionally reported that the Sheriff’s family had been eating their Thanksgiving meal at 9:00 in the morning when the protestors appeared across the street. Hodgson said it “wouldn’t surprise” him if protestors show up again, but he boasted he’s prepared to take them on all by himself. “I have some security of my own, through my own training.”
But protests against Hodgson and his well-documented hatred for immigrants are nothing new.
In 2011 protesters interrupted a news conference in Boston at which Worcester Country Sheriff Lew Evangelidis, Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, and Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald announced they were applying to participate in ICE 287(g) agreements.
In July 2017 protesters interrupted Massachusetts House Republicans, including Sheriff Hodgson, with chants of “Keep hate out of our state” during their news conference to promote anti-immigrant legislation.
But Hodgson is right about one thing — the protests are only going to continue.
In January 2017 Hodgson himself kicked off the first in a series of protests, and triggered a movement to rein in his abuses, after offering to let Donald Trump use local prison labor for his Mexico wall.
Within weeks Bristol County for Correctional Justice (BCCJustice) had been launched.
In July prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest conditions at the Dartmouth facility. In solidarity, BCCJustice organized a protest in front of the jail, calling for an end to abuses, which include the highest suicide rate in the state, second-highest recidivism rate, horrendous food, filthy conditions, lack of medical care, denial of prescribed medications, and the lack of accountability for the many abuses.
In August several members of the FANG Collective staged a protest in front of the jail on Faunce Corner Road and blocked both entrances.
In September the Boston group FIRE — Fight for Immigrants and Refugees Everywhere — protested Hodgson’s history of abusing ICE detainees at the jail, toward the tail end of a national prison strike.
In October 40 members of BCCJustice visited the governor to demand the investigation of Hodgson’s facilities that the Attorney General had asked two Baker appointees to do.
And on November 1st, BCCJustice peacefully picketed Tom Hodgson’s fundraiser at White’s of Westport. Again Hodgson called the police.
Again the police refused to interfere with a peaceful, orderly protest protected by the Constitution.
Join Bristol County for Correctional Justice at Governor Charlie Baker’s office in the State House to again ask him to investigate abuses at the Bristol County House of Correction. Governor Baker has not responded to our certified letter delivered on Aug. 24th, so now we’ll plead our case in person! We are asking the governor to compel his appointed officials to investigate Sheriff Hodgson.
We’ve chartered a FREE bus on Thursday, October 18th:
Pick up in New Bedford at 9 AM from Park & Ride (Mt. Pleasant St.)
Pick up in Fall River at NY Bagel at 9:30 AM
Return to Fall River by 4:10 PM
Return to New Bedford by 5:00 PM
Make sure to bring your own lunch and beverages. Check for rain.
Reserve your spot on our FREE bus to the State House on October 18th. Call 508-415-8385 or 508-982-8751.
Bristol County House of Correction (BCHOC) facilities are notorious for:
We reported previously that BCCJ requested the sheriff’s travel documents from 2014 through 2018. We are concerned about the amount of time Tom Hodgson spends running around the country promoting himself and his anti-immigrant agenda while neglecting horrific conditions in his own jail.
In light of this we do not believe that the sheriff can be expected to provide humane treatment and necessary services either to the routine prison population or to ICE detainees. There have been multiple reports of abuses of ICE detainees (here and here and here) and violations of their civil and Constitutional rights. In addition the sheriff is also connected to far right hate groups, including one founded by a white supremacist.
We have informed state officials of our concerns, with no results. So in May 2018 we filed an information request with BCSO. You can obtain what we have received to-date here.
There are glaring gaps in the records, with obvious omissions. The documents we did receive paint a picture of a sheriff spending weeks every year pursuing his private agenda on the state’s dime.
We need your help going through the 574 pages of information we currently have. We are asking independent journalists and investigative reporters, the local press, the state auditor, and anyone interested, to go through the data, supplement it with your own information requests, cross-check it with actual media appearances Hodgson has made (which don’t appear in the collection), and calculate a total dollar amount that taxpayers have been stuck with for the sheriff’s many ex-curricular activities. Please contact us with anything you discover. Thank you!
Meet E. Michael Janson, New Bedford’s perrennial mayoral candidate.
Janson is 69 years old, a graduate of New Bedford High and, according to his Ballotpedia profile, has worked at some 50-odd jobs and run for mayor nine times.
In 2011 Janson ran for mayor of New Bedford, largely on an anti-immigration platform. In 2013 he ran for New Bedford School Board. In his candidate questionnaire he offered to sacrifice his winters in Florida for the greater good of the citizenry, proposed tracking students, eliminating student “distractions” in classrooms, and fining the parents of students who skipped school.
Janson came in dead last in a pack of seven candidates.
In 2015 Janson ran for an At-Large City Council seat. In a campaign video demonstrating his talent for free-association, Janson objects that New Bedford is a sanctuary city where “illegals” take thousands of jobs away from graduating high school seniors, which in turn causes a dreaded psychological condition: “I call it SSI. Shitty Self Image.” This in turn, he goes on, leads to heroin, and heroin can only be fought by letting the police hire dozens of informants. Again blaming “ousiders,” Janson slams Section 8 housing because it’s filled with “undesirables” who “come into our city, they become lousy tenants, and they’re not preparing their kids for an education, so consequently our schools are suffering because these — they’re not doing a good job of preparing their kids. And it’s not the teacher’s job to do that. My mother used to work with me with flashcards. I doubt anyone here in New Bedford is working with their kids with flashcards.” In 2017 Janson lost another bid for the At-Large City Council seat. Again.
Since about 2007 Janson has had a running battle with the Standard-Times, which infuriated him by calling him a “perennial mayoral candidate” — which (to be fair) his Ballotpedia profile proves that he is. A piece by Jack Spillane in the Standard Times pointed out that Janson was running for his “at-large” seat from an address which was actually a New Bedford garage on Rockdale Avenue without running water. Listing a series of lies and half-truths Janson spouted in the 2007 mayoral race, the Standard Times concluded: “Mike Janson, you’re full of baloney.”
For a long time Janson repaired to the one sanctuary where all whackadoodles go to lick their wounds — talk radio. I won’t mention any names or call numbers, but this New Bedford station (like the White House) is where people full of baloney go to be treated like royalty and inflict their ignorance on the rest of us. Here Janson has found his peeps. A man without any public policy skills, little education, and who could never teach in a public school himself, Janson nevertheless has a talk-radio opinion on everything — immigration, austerity, schools, economic priorities, public housing, foreign trade zones, taxes.
But it’s 2018. Janson may still be full of baloney but it’s time for another campaign. This time he’s challenging Tony Cabral for the Massachusetts House 13th Bristol District. Cabral should have nothing to worry about, but in today’s political climate, no one should ever be complacent.
Rep. Tony Cabral is putting out a call for volunteers to help #TeamCabral on his re-election campaign.
Team Cabral is hosting a Volunteer Organizational Meeting this coming Monday, September 24th, at 6pm, at the GSM Labor Council, 560 Pleasant Street, New Bedford. They will have coffee and doughnuts and will be talking about all the different ways people can get involved.
If you can’t make it to the meeting, but would like to help, please reach out to Team Cabral at reptonycabral@gmail.com and they will figure out how to plug you in!
Take nothing for granted. Elections always matter.
Massachusetts is not happy with incumbent State Auditor Suzanne Bump.
Three candidates are challenging her this year, and all for the same reason — Bump is just not doing her job. Even many Democrats would agree that the Auditor loves to scrutinize the state’s social service agencies but has done little to investigate corruption in the state police and at least one Massachusetts county jail.
At the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO), for example, illegal detentions and human rights abuses inside the facilities have been widely reported. The BCSO receives state and federal money for opioid treatment programs, yet inmates report little or no actual treatment — in fact having all medications, including blood pressure meds, HIV treatments, insulin, and methadone, withheld upon incarceration. Suzanne Bump was first informed of this last February but has not completed an audit of the BCSO.
The Bristol County Sheriff circumvents the State Judicial Court’s prohibition of daily inmate fees by forcing inmates to purchase goods at a canteen from which the BCSO collects a percentage. The Auditor did a cursory review of sheriff’s departments in 2010 when the state assumed responsibility for county jails, and it enumerated a number of discretionary funds the Bristol County Sheriff is permitted to manage apart from the state. But attempts to discover how these funds are actually managed, and for what purposes and to whom payments are made, have been stymied by the sheriff’s omissions and obfuscatory reporting.
In 2016 Suzanne Bump faulted the Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association for failure to deliver state-mandated reports to her, but these reports still have never been published. After the Auditor’s failure to look into Troopergate, it’s fair to say that Suzanne Bump has been far too deferential to law enforcement agencies.
In the Bristol County Sheriff’s office there have been persistent charges of: pension abuses related to cronyism; money laundering related to the federal “Codfather” case; profiteering related to the sheriff’s use of the canteen, phone and video visitation; and pocketing of food, healthcare and drug treatment funds. A lawsuit was recently filed against the sheriff for receiving millions in kickbacks from Securus, a phone vendor. But with an Auditor asleep on the job, there’s no accountability for the sheriff.
Of the approximately 1300 published audits done by the Auditor’s office since 2000, only 22 involve sheriff’s departments, and of these a third were “checkpoints” of the departments during transition to state control in 2010. Only 8 of 14 sheriff’s departments have ever been separately audited in the last 19 years.
The Berkshire County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 2011
The Essex County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 20102018
The Franklin County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 2010
The Hampden County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 201020152016
The Hampshire County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 201020142018
The Middlesex County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 2011
The Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 2005
The Worcester County Sheriff’s Department was audited in 200520102012
The Bristol County Sheriff’s office just keeps racking up the questionable practices. Any one of them ought to be enough to trigger an investigation of what’s going on in Bristol County.
And it gets worse.
After filing a public information request, I learned that the Bristol County Sheriff has been using state funds for registration, accommodation, and travel to far-right political events that have nothing to do with his job of running a jail and ought to be billed to the sheriff’s political campaign. The documents I’ve seen are ripe with the stink of corruption. There is plenty of information in the collection to determine whether the sheriff has finally crossed the line from impropriety to lawbreaking. But so far — nothing from Suzanne Bump.
So it’s time for a change.
Bump’s challengers are: Libertarian Daniel Fishman, a software entrepreneur who ran twice for federal office and once for municipal election in the span of 10 months; Helen Brady, a Concord socialite who ran for state office in 2016 as a moderate Republican but who recently has begun a love affair with the Tea Party; and Green Party candidate Jed Stamas, a progressive public school teacher who actually seems to care how citizens are treated and is prepared to hold public officials accountable.
So I’m casting my vote for The Green Party guy, Jed Stamas. Brady has campaigned with Keiko Orrall, Bristol County’s version of Michelle Bachmann. And a corporate-friendly, regulation-averse Libertarian would never be my first choice for a watchdog. The Green Party’s Jed Stamas has promised to hold public officials accountable, regardless of party affiliation. And Stamas certainly can’t do any worse than the snoozing incumbent.
Vote for Jed Stamas for Massachusetts State Auditor on November 6th.
Two Hate Conferences Came to Washington, D.C. Last Week
Here’s Who Attended
by Zachary Mueller on September 10, 2018, re-posted with permission
Last week the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and ACT for America, both listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and both with ties to the Trump Administration, held overlapping conferences in Washington D.C. Despite advocates’ efforts to warn members of Congress away from participating, both featured a number of GOP House members, proving once again that bigotry has unfortunately become a hallmark of today’s Republican Party.
FAIR is an anti-immigrant hate group that was founded by white nationalist John Tanton, who helped create a network of anti-immigrant organizations — many of which are also hate groups. For this year’s “Hold Their Feet to the Fire”, an annual event, FAIR brought in anti-immigrant activists and far-right talk radio hosts from across the country to amplify their anti-immigrant messages. The conference also attracted a number of elected and appointed officials.
At least ten Republican members of Congress participated in the conference, including Republican Senate candidate and Congressman Lou Barletta (PA – 11), Steve King (IA – 04), Andrew Biggs, (AZ – 05), Clay Higgins (LA -03), Mo Brooks (AL – 05), Louie Gohmert (TX-01), Bill Johnson (OH -06), Bradley Byrne (AL – 01), Raúl R. Labrador (ID – 01), Jim Renacci (OH – 16), as well as the candidate for Alabama’s 6th Congressional district Gary Palmer.
FAIR also helped facilitate a gathering of 49 sheriffs from across the country, including known anti-immigrant Sheriff Tom Hodgson of Bristol County, Massachusetts and Sheriff Andy Louderback of Jackson County, Texas. All the sheriffs met with Reps. King, Biggs, Higgins, and Brooks before heading to the White House for an event with both President Trump and Vince President Pence.
Louderback, at the White House roundtable discussion with Pence, called for greater law enforcement participation in immigration crackdowns. Hodgson, who sits on FAIR’s board of directors, appeared on the Two Way Radio Show to brag about how he built a immigration detention facility to detain immigrants for ICE and how his deputies would drive immigrants three and a half hours to the JFK airport for ICE. He even encouraged the White House to turn the DMV into a tool for immigration enforcement, and called for the arrest of any elected official that supports safe city policies.
Meanwhile, the ACT for America conference featured speeches from Republican Reps. Jeff Duncan, (SC-03), Louie Gohmert (TX-01), and Doug Lamborn (CO-05). Former director of ICE Thomas Homanand Texas Senator Ted Cruz both attended and accepted awards.
ACT for America is an anti-Muslim hate group whose founder, Brigitte Gabriel, stated that “every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim” and wrote in her 2006 book that Muslims are a “natural threat to civilized people of the world, particularly Western society.” ACT has continually promoted “anti-Sharia laws” and Islamophobic conspiracy theories. They also organized nationwide anti-Muslim rallies in June 2017, which attracted the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups which attended the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that following August.
On September 5th Tom Hodgson was in Washington DC giving Donald Trump an award. How does Hodgson ever find the time with so many work problems unsolved back home in Massachusetts?
With Bristol County leading the state in suicides, second-place in recidivism, receiving non-stop complaints of abuse and neglect in his facilities, and Hodgson himself spending so much time on talk radio or before the press cameras, we wondered how much time and taxpayer money the Sheriff was wasting.
Last May we requested the Sheriff’s travel records, including dates and sponsoring agencies. At the end of August we finally received a thumb drive with 574 pages in PDF format.
Much of the mundane paperwork is meal vouchers, rent-a-car bills, airfare, and hotel bills — the sheriff spends a lot of time at the Hotel Omni Shoreham in Washington DC, the Willard Intercontinental in DC, the Grand Hyatt in DC, the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in DC, The Old Town Crowne Plaza in Alexandria Virginia, and others. Hodgson’s official job may be to run the county jail, but he seems to spend most of his time on activities taxpayers are footing the bill for but know very little about.
Many of the documents we received were not responsive — that is, did not answer the question of who sponsored the trip or for what purpose the sheriff left town. Many of the travel cover sheets noted only “Sheriff’s DC trip” or contained no reference at all. Almost none of the documents received documented the hundreds of talk show radio and television appearances he has made.
Some of the documents we received had little or nothing to do with travel and simply make going through the trove more difficult. For example, we were given bills for locks, transmissions, and a floor scraper. Somebody at the Sheriff’s Office has a sense of humor.
Some of the receipts were for National Sheriff’s Association meetings — weeklong affairs in vacation locales like Mackinac Island and New Orleans. These are not quite the professional meetings the rest of us attend since they almost always feature celebrities like TrumpistaJeanine Pirro or events some taxpayers might object to, like prayer breakfasts. The NSA is more right-wing advocacy group than professional association and attendance at events like this ought to come out of the Sheriff’s campaign coffers.
Massachusetts taxpayers are also being stuck with the bill for the sheriff’s attendance at AIPAC conferences. AIPAC is a lobbying group which promotes Israeli, particularly extreme right-wing pro-Likud, interests. Again, this is something some taxpayers find abhorrent. We again ask Suzanne Bump and the State Auditor’s office to investigate the sheriff’s use of taxpayer money for no other purpose than to help Hodgson curry favor with the far-right.
One of the most sickening use of the Sheriff’s time and our tax money is his association with the far-right anti-immigrant group FAIR, the Federation for American Immigrant Reform. Started by John Tanton, a Michigan white supremacist, FAIR (along with its sister organization CIS) is at the forefront of shaping Trump’s immigration policy. Tom Hodgson sits on FAIR’s National Advisory Board along with John Tanton.
FAIR coordinates many of Tom Hodgson’s appearances. For example, the trove we received documents communications from FAIR President Dan Stein, who once said that non-white immigrants are challenging white supremacy with “competitive breeding.” GOP-connected BCSO employees coordinated Hodgson’s appearance at FAIR’s direction on on the Daily Ledger show on the conspiracy theory network One America News.
There were only a couple of FAIR events included in the returned travel documents. Hodgson has been involved with FAIR since 2011, has appeared at many FAIR and FAIR-sponsored events, and there ought to have been many more communications with groups affiliated with the Tanton network, a network of approximately a dozen anti-immigrant and white supremacist sister organizations.
One lonely little receipt showed that Hodgson met for dinner with Rockingham County, North Carolina Sheriff Sam Page, who regularly collaborates with the ultra-far-right, anti-government Constitutional Sheriff’s Association (Tom Hodgson joined in 2013 according to OCPF campaig filings). Like Hodgson, Sam Page is often found flirting with white supremacists. Here he is (above) with Michael Peroutka, board member of mass-murderer Dylan Roof’s favorite racist group, the Confederate League of the South.
We think there’s probably a lot more where this came from, but we believe the attorney general, the legislature, and the state auditor should all take a little more interest in the sheriff’s use of taxpayer money for questionable travel – and the staggering number of days each year he is nowhere to be found at the facilities he mismanages.
Diana Johnstone’s 2016 book Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton is not an election year hit piece like Dinesh D’Souza’s “Hillary’s America.” It is not a book about Hillary’s character flaws or her political flip-flopping. It is a book about foreign policy. More importantly, it is a book that deals with Clinton’s metamorphosis into a war hawk within an already hawkish Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of military aggression within the wider arc of the Cold War and Realpolitik. In 2018, as Russiagate consumes the minds of Centrist Democrats nostalgic for John McCain’s brand of militarism and American Exceptionalism, it’s an important book to revisit.
Johnstone begins with the U.S.-approved, if not engineered, coup which deposed Honduran President Manuel Zalaya. We immediately get a sense of how Hillary Clinton operates, her back-channel deals with old Cold War warriors who supported the Contras, friends in the Honduran military trained at the School of the Americas, and her stonewalling on returning Zalaya to power, even as half of Central and Latin America refused to recognize the eventual “winners” of the putsch.
Johnstone takes the reader through the beginnings of neoconservatism, originating in NSC-68, a 1968 Cold War document that still influences the foreign policy of Republicans and Democrats. She spends some time on the Israeli-American lobbyists who have hijacked American foreign policy and focused it on destroying the Middle East in order to “save” Israel – the only nation in the region to actually possess nuclear weapons. Johnstone goes on to examine the history of American foreign policy, particularly as driven by an interesting rogue’s gallery of female war hawks: Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, and Samantha Power, all Democrats.
Describing Clinton’s disconnect from feminism, Johnstone writes at length about the strange cases of PussyRiot and Femen, whose antics were used to full advantage by Clinton and the American media to attack Vladimir Putin and present their actions as “exercises in democracy” while their inevitable arrests were presented as an assault on civil liberties. Though we recoil from the Russian expression for disorderly conduct – “hooliganism” – we have no such compunctions about pepper-spraying and handcuffing peaceful demonstrators here at home. Johnstone also notes the right-wing Ukrainian connections to both groups as well as the co-optation of Amnesty International in serving the State Department.
Two chapters of Johnstone’s book deal with how NATO was expanded in violation of agreements with the former Soviet Union, and on the war that Bill Clinton waged in Yugoslavia. The war was sold as a “humanitarian intervention” to prevent genocide, which set the stage for future expansions of NATO and for more “humanitarian” wars. This particular war, as you may recall, resulted in the dissolution of Yugoslavia into pieces aligned with the West and a Slavic chunk aligned with Russia. Johnstone describes the process by which the West demonized Serbia’s leaders, applied sanctions, supported local proxies, sabotaged international diplomacy, cynically used international courts (which the US refuses to be bound by itself) to prosecute parties it didn’t like, manipulated the media, and bombed the hell out of its enemies. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, rejected diplomacy while telling reporters, “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” This is the same Albright who thought killing half a million Iraqi children through sanctions on medicines was “worth it” to get Iraq to rid itself of imaginary WMD’s.
Then we fast forward into Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, with her own war in Libya. Though her Republican adversaries shamefully exploited the loss of four lives in Benghazi, Clinton herself made a joke about the sodomization and murder of its leader and the transformation of an entire country into a failed state. Clinton famously mocked Obama’s dictum: “don’t do stupid shit,” claiming the United States needed a more sophisticated organizing principle. But “stupid shit” is precisely what Clinton did. She wrecked Libya.
In a long — and today a particularly relevant — chapter entitled “Not Understanding Russia” Johnstone makes the case that Clinton was armed only with an ancient Cold War mindset. Not that much has changed since NSC-68. Russia is still Reagan’s Evil Empire, and Putin is Stalin. “Soviet aggression” has been replaced with “Russian aggression” and NATO must be expanded to envelop Russia. Meanwhile, Poland and the Ukraine have developed strong fascist tendencies, which the United States either ignores or encourages (think Manafort), and Russia’s seizure of Crimea (which had been a gift to Ukraine in the first place) is portrayed in the press like Hitler’s Drang nach Osten. Where Bush expressed an amusing appreciation for Putin’s “soul” Clinton took a harsher view: “he was a KGB agent, by definition he doesn’t have a soul.” Under Secretary Clinton, the United States spent millions on Kremlinologists who, at one point, were trying to analyze Putin’s cowboy gait to see if he had Asperger’s Syndrome.
In June of 2016, the United States led the rest of NATO in war games in Poland, now governed by a far-right administration. In “Operation Anakonda 2016” 31,000 troops from 24 countries practiced for a Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion. The commander of U.S. Army Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, explained what the games were all about: “History shows that Russians only respect strength,” he told NPR.
In 1997 former Carter administration advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (and midwife to Al Qaeda) joined Henry Kissinger as one more anti-Russian ideologue dispensing not only anti-Soviet “tough love” but developing a strategy for American domination and hardening of its superpower status in his book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostratic Imperatives.” Brzezinski, whose son Ian was involved in the Ukrainian “Orange revolution,” has a low opinion of democracy, of the intelligence of citizens, of privacy, and of Europe or Asia or the Middle East. It is all a vast field to be plowed by Americans. Only after remaking the new world in the American image can there be peace. “But in the meantime it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.” Russia is therefore as much an enemy as Iran or ISIS. A reviewer in “Foreign Affairs,” David C. Hendrickson, warned in 1997 that the anti-Russian prescriptions in Brzezinski’s book were so severe that even a democratic Russia would resist them and there would be unpredictable blow-back.
The United States was looking for ways to mire the Soviets in their own Viet Nam. Afghanistan was the stroke of evil genius emanating from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s twisted mind. In the last days of the Carter Administration Brzezinski recognized that Central Asia was the “soft underbelly” of the Russian bear, a source of conflict that, if exploited, could destabilize Moscow and mire it in war. Brzezinski was no Israel hawk like the neoconservatives. His goal was not to merge US and Israeli interests but to weaken the Soviets. But they shared many goals: a unipolar world, massive increases in the U.S. military, nuclear hegemony, regime change, punishing enemies, rewarding friends.
By rewarding our Islamist friends who opposed the Soviet Union in the 80’s and 90’s, the United States actually created terrorists like bin Laden, who at one point was on both U.S. and Saudi payrolls. The antagonism between the United States and Russia became so great that when Russia tried to warn the U.S. of the elder Tsarnaev brother its help was ignored. Putin brokered the surrender of Syria’s last remaining chemical weapons, but it was an unappreciated gesture because it delayed a U.S. attack on Syria. And when Putin took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to explain why the West must exercise caution in Syria, that Assad was also fighting terrorists, the United States paid him back by threatening the Russian-Ukrainian trade pact and building up NATO even more. The U.S. feigned shock when, faced with uncertain southern naval access, Russia took back the gift Khrushchev had given to the Ukraine in 1954 – Crimea, a peninsula the size of Maryland.
Johnstone concludes her book with “The War Party” — amoral neoliberals neither strictly Republicans nor strictly Democrat, but technocrats with political ambitions and wealthy friends from America’s many defense industries. From philanthropists who give money to Islamophobia, to think tanks, PAC donors, owners of the “free” press, opinion-shapers, oligarchs and despots. How is it, Johnstone asks, that Clinton and her ilk can curry favor of the Saudi family, Egyptian military dictators, Wall Street, Nigerian dictators, the Israeli occupation, and Ukrainian fascists? And what about all those wars? It’s bi-partisan. It’s just business.
Johnstone suggests that wars are nothing we need worry our pretty little heads over. Leave wars to the true professionals — contractors, mercenaries — and pay for it by simply adding to the national debt. Thanks to drones there are now very few American casualties, so why should we worry? If children die in a drone strike in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq, who is to say their terrorist parents weren’t responsible for putting them in harm’s way? And if the war hawks do get caught with blood on their hands, we accept at face value the lie that this is simply the cost of keeping us safe.
Hillary Clinton may be long gone, but the foreign policy and neoliberalism Clinton created and stands for still poisons the Democratic Party.
Spike Lee’s new film, BlacKkKlansman, opens with an unhinged racist, Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard, standing in front of a screen as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is projected onto his face. Beauregard laments the glory days when Anglo-Saxons were unchallenged masters of the nation, repeating several times, “We had a great way of life.” Today that lost “great way of life” has become a dog whistle for white supremacists and anti-immigrant groups alike.
Beauregard may be a fictional character, but John Tanton is not. Tanton is a retired Michigan opthalmologist who single-handedly created about a dozen white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes most of them as hate groups because they demonize non-whites and immigrants as inferior races and cultures.
One of Tanton’s white supremacist creations is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and one of its most vocal advocates is Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson, who sits with Tanton on FAIR’s national advisory board.
On August 20th Tom Hodgson was at the White House to celebrate Donald Trump’s “Salute to the Heroes of ICE and CPB.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protecton (CBP) have been in the news a lot — for anything but heroic acts.
But they are Donald Trump’s private deportation army, and heroes to anti-immigrant groups like FAIR and CIS, whose policies both Trump and Hodgson support.
Abolish ICE
When Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. Senator, has to walk back remarks critical of institutional racism in the nation’s police and criminal justice system, it’s another sign that we live in something uncomfortably close to a police state.
If criticizing the police is off-limits, imagine the response to calling for the shutdown of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Though Republicans have long called for shutdowns of agencies they don’t like — the IRS, DEA, EPA, OSHA, for starters — shutting down an abusive law-enforcement agency that functions like the president’s personal paramilitary force is a step too far for most Republicans.
And, predictably, centrist Democrats agree with them.
With progressive Democrats like Randy Bryce, Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and progressiv-ish Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Kirstin Gillibrand calling for an ICE shutdown and possibly a reboot, party strategist Tad Devine sees opportunity for Centrists. For Devine, candidates like Mikie Sherrill and Andy Kim, and kinda-sorta-Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp, ought to distance themselves from, and bash whenever possible, what the New York Times calls “far left” critics of ICE. Heidi Heitkamp rolled her eyes and said “It’s crazy town,” echoing a 33-word Boston Herald article, “Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley crosses border into crazy territory.”
While it is generally frowned upon to speak ill of the dead, this rule of etiquette cannot be observed for someone who exerted as much power in Washington for over three decades as John McCain. As I.F. Stone once observed, “funerals are always occasions for pious lying, A deep vein of superstition and a sudden touch of kindness always leads people to give the departed credit for more virtues than he possessed.” Conversely, sentimentality at funerals sometimes reveals deeper truths about those expressing condolences.
When John McCain died last week, his Senate desk was draped in black crepe and it was announced that his body would lie in state in the Rotunda and be interred at Arlington Cemetery. Writers from both Right and Left seized upon McCain to idolize both the man he was and the man he was not, pointing at his work across the aisle, his self-deprecatory humor, and his status as an honest-to-god American hero. Even Democratic Socialist Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez was smitten by McCain’s “decency.” McCain was Audie Murphy, Jack Armstrong, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington all rolled into a single myth. And he got a lot of mileage from it over a long career.
There is no question the nation has been traumatized by Donald Trump. Some of the effusive praise of McCain seems at first glance to be nostalgia for the days when not all Republicans were white supremacists or proto-fascists. There are plenty of journalists who remember McCain as he was — warmonger, friend of the super-rich, the man who made the Tea Party “respectable” with his Vice Presidential pick — and not as some want him to be (see this and this and this and this and this and this for examples). But much of the praise we’re hearing reveals a bipartisan appetite for McCain’s militarism and love of American Exceptionalism. Numerous Democratic pundits removed their veils this week, revealing that McCain’s values were really their own.
In John McCain’s farewell statement, read by a former campaign manager, he wrote that Americans “never hide from history. We make history.” McCain was wrong. We may know our history but it is precisely the American penchant for hiding from history which allows us to repeat our mistakes over and over again. McCain certainly hadn’t forgotten the history of Viet Nam when he voted to invade Iraq. But he hid from it. Democrats know their history too, but hiding from it permits the strange posthumous embrace of a man who represented everything they claim to oppose.
The Far Right — that is, today’s Republican Party — has little to lose by valorizing McCain even if they did bash him for the occasional clash with Dear Leader Trump. But the effusive praise by Centrist Democrats (examples here and here and here and here) is egregious and focuses on McCain’s better personal qualities, and not on an honest reckoning with his — or their — politics.
When it comes to immigration, defense spending, and economic policy, Centrist Democrats aren’t really as distant or distinct from Republicans as they claim to be. Despite McCain’s swipe at Trump “hiding behind walls” in his farewell statement, in 2008 McCain went to Mexico to argue that America needed moreborder walls — a view both Clintons and Barak Obama shared. In 2013 McCain went to Syria to drum up support for American intervention and regime change, but it was the Obama administration which actually initiated the war. In 2018 the massive “John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act” was passed overwhelmingly by both Republicans and Democrats, stealing much from the poor and giving it instead to defense contractors.
Another recent preoccupation of Centrist Democrats has been the defense of the American security establishment. FBI head James Comey and CIA head John Brennan have become national heroes for many liberal Democrats. Conveniently forgetting history has led to liberals like Stephen Colbert forgetting James Comey’s spying on Black Lives Matter and American Muslims, or Bill Maher forgetting John Brennan’s long history of war crimes, including torture and rendition, dating back to the Bush administration (Obama kept Brennan on at the CIA). As an institution, Comey’s FBI has a long history of repression of Afro-Americans and Leftists.
Since Hillary Clinton’s accusations at the 2016 DNC Convention of political meddling by Vladimir Putin, there has been a Russian lurking under every bush. Suspicion, calls for additional sanctions, and even red-baiting have led to a new Cold War mentality, with some Democrats even demanding Internet censorship of news outlets not hard enough on Russia. NATO, a relic of the Cold War, now has more flag-waving Democratic boosters than ever.
If Russia is the foreign nation Centrist Democrats obsess over the most, Israel is the one they won’t even talk about. Since the 2016 election, Donald Trump has cozied up to the Israeli settler movement. The American ambassador to Israel is, in fact, a settler himself. The US has cut UN contributions for Palestinian refugees and given Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to annex East Jerusalem and roll out more settlements in the West Bank. Israeli snipers recently murdered dozens of “Land Day” protesters in Gaza, and there was scarcely a peep from Centrist Democrats. And when it comes to all-too real “foreign interference,” Israel’s domestic lobbying partners have successfully passed legislation in dozens of states making it illegal to criticize or boycott Israel. And all with Democratic Party help.
I.F. Stone was right about lies at funerals, but sentimentality sometimes reveals its own truths. No one for a second believes history can be conveniently forgotten, but we can and do hide from it — and who we really are. This week’s outpouring of love for America’s most recognizable nationalist and American Exceptionalist tells a disturbing truth about both our country and the Democratic Party.
A recent article by Jennette Barnes in the Standard Times reports that Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson is refusing to participate in a pilot Department of Corrections medically-assisted [opioid] treatment (MAT) program that five other Massachusetts sheriffs have already signed on to. The program would offer methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone to people leaving prison within 30 days. As usual, the sheriff ignores best practices by denying these treatments. Hodgson’s denial of opioid treatment to prisoners is going to get people killed — if it hasn’t already.
Currently, prisoners at the Bristol County House of Correction are pulled off drug therapy medications and must endure painful withdrawal. Upon release, prisoners may be given a single shot of Vivitrol to block opioid receptors for a month. Because of sweetheart deals with departments of correction and the National Sheriff’s Association, Vivitrol (naltrexone) has become the only treatment currently offered at $1000 a pop in Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Hamphire, and Massachusetts. There are only a few states and a handful of corrections facilities where a full range of MAT options are being used.
STAT News reports that those without treatment in jail are at extreme risk of overdosing on the “outside” because their tolerance to drugs has dropped and they reenter the world with the same triggers for their drug use. A 2013 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that, in the two weeks after release, former inmates overdose at rates nearly 130 times as high as the general population.
According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “opioid agonist therapy with methadone hydrochloride, a full opioid agonist, or buprenorphine hydrochloride, a partial agonist, effectively treats opioid use disorder and reduces mortality.” The JAMA study found “no evidence” that Vivitrol reduced mortality. Despite the advantages of MAT treatment, the JAMA authors lamented, “opioid agonist treatment is used infrequently in correctional facilities. What steps must be taken to change the situation?”
Dionna King, policy coordinator with the Drug Policy Alliance, makes a distinction between MAT and a shot of Vivitrol upon release from prison. Vivitrol blocks the effects of opioids while methadone and buprenorphine eliminate pain, reduce cravings, often improve the health of the patient, and are strongly correlated with continuing drug treatment on the “outside.”
According to Holly Alexandre, medical director of addiction services at SouthCoast Health, medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is a recommended method of opioid treatment used by hospitals, and those with this medical disorder should receive the same care in jail. With MAT, incarcerated people receive drugs like methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone, which ideally are combined with counseling and other therapies.
MAT is considered a corrections “best practice” around the world. The World Health Organization recommends MAT treatment, and a National Institutes of Health review of fourteen MAT studies found only one that did not conclusively demonstrate better post-release participation in community drug treatment programs.
And if Sheriff Hodgson could tear himself away from the microphones and cameras and make the short trip to Providence, Rhode Island, he’d see the advantages of a well-conceived MAT program.
Through an innovative partnership with actual health professionals, Rhode Island’s prisons offer MAT with buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone. The treatment program, which launched in 2016, has resulted in a 61% reduction in post-release overdose deaths. What makes the Rhode Island program so effective, according to Science Daily, is that “the treatment is administered to inmates by […] a nonprofit provider of medications for addiction treatment contracted by RIDOC to provide MAT inside correctional facilities. Upon release, former inmates can continue their treatment without interruption […] in MAT locations around the state. Patients are also assisted with enrolling or re-enrolling in health insurance to make sure they are covered when they return to the community.” Rhode Island’s program is the only one to make the full suite of MAT available to everyone entering or leaving prison. “Medications are continued if they are on them when they arrive and started if they need them upon arrival or prior to release.”
The American Medical Association says it’s unethical to deny opioid agonist treatment to patients. Ross MacDonald, medical director of New York City’s correctional health program, says that every person who enters New York City’s main jail with an opioid addiction problem represents an opportunity for treatment and the possibility of saving a life. The ACLU of Washington State is suing Whatcom County for denying MAT treatment to prisoners with opioid addictions on medical grounds.
Even Donald Trump’sPresident’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis recommends medically-assisted treatment: “Multiple studies have shown that individuals receiving MAT during and after incarceration have lower mortality risk, remain in treatment longer, have fewer positive drug screens, and have lower rates of recidivism than other individuals with [opioid use disorders] that do not receive MAT.”
While the Rhode Island program represents a more level-headed and compassionate approach toward opioid treatment, rehabilitation is still being delivered in the state’s prisons (there are no county jails in the Ocean State). Most of these patients belong in a clinical or rehabilitation setting, not behind bars. Despite this structural defect, Rhode Island is light years ahead of our Bristol County, Massachusetts jail where Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson starves, abuses, and neglects the medical care and treatment of those who face death by overdose upon release.
If you hadn’t noticed it before, the 2016 presidential election only sharpened our awareness of America’s festering race problem. White liberals may be repulsed by Donald Trump’s Tweets and his unapologetic racism, but White Supremacy in America is not simply foul-mouthed malice. Once you realize that White Supremacy is mainly about creating a system of privilege for White people, it’s like noticing cars exactly like yours on the road — you start recognizing its insidious presence in almost every institution — the courts, schools, jobs, police, housing — and politics. And, like much in this country, the debate over the Democratic Party’s soul often overlooks the importance of African-Americans.
Congress is 90% White and 80% male. The Senate has only three African-American Senators — and only one is a woman. If the Senate looked like the rest of America, we’d have thirteen African-American Senators and seven of them would be women. But. because of demographics and the disproportionate Senate representation that states like Vermont and Wyoming receive, the Senate is one more structural element of White Supremacy. And in a nation with a median age of 37, Congress looks more like a retirement community than Main Street. The average age of the top three House Democrats is 76, and most are millionaires. The people who represent us are nothing like us — and I’m talking about Democrats.
Emily’s List is the second largest Democratic political action committee (PAC) after ActBlue. Its mission is simply to get pro-Choice Democratic women elected, and it’s been pretty successful at it. But when it comes to race, the Democratic Party isn’t ceding power to a younger, browner America. In addition, Democratic political action committees aren’t recognizing candidates of color as “viable” as readily as they do White contenders and they haven’t historically provided much funding. With both representation and funding of African-American candidates lacking by both centrist Democrats and progressives, political consultant and CollectivePAC founder Quentin James wasn’t sugarcoating it when he titled his Medium piece, “The Left Has A White Supremacy Problem, Too.”
Last year the Democratic Party sent its leadership to Berryville, Virginia to woo White voters with its “Better Deal” economic campaign. In a New York Times editorial Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White, warned of a midterm disaster for Democrats in 2018 if they insisted on repeating the mistakes of 2016, specifically “prioritizing the pursuit of wavering whites over investing in and inspiring African-American voters, who made up 24 percent of Barack Obama’s winning coalition in 2012.” In Brown is the New White Phillips offers postmortems of the 2010 and 2014 midterms. And guess what? Democrats still haven’t learned their lesson — they’re still pursuing the White swing vote in 2018.
In its first iteration, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” candidate list — campaigns designed to take back the House — did not include a single Black candidate. Now, less than a hundred days before midterms, there may be a few more people of color on the roster, but the DCCC’s candidates are still overwhelmingly White and Centrist — technocrats and gatekeepers selected mainly for “viability.” Democrats aren’t listening to Phillips and they aren’t listening to Thomas Frank either. Frank’s book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People, takes Democrats to task for abandoning the working class and embracing a technocratic caste located somewhere between upper-middle and the ruling class. Call it what you want, but it’s not the party of the people.
As elections have unfolded this year, the special Senate race in Alabama (in which a Democrat narrowly beat an alleged pedophile) focused attention on Black women in the party. All of a sudden Black women were receiving thanks and praise, but not feeling enough love to propel them into positions of power. And political power is to politics what air is to breathing. Black women were sick and tired of being sick and tired of being asked to support White candidates without the favor being returned.
Michelle Laws, who challenged incumbent David Price in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional district, said it best during her campaign, “There are many black women around this country who are no longer willing to be the mules of the party, doing the hard work on the ground, and receiving very little in return in terms of support and endorsement of the party to serve in key leadership positions.” With the DCCC’s strategy of defending (White) incumbents, Laws received only 16% in the Democratic primary. Political consultant Jessica Byrd expressed her frustration with the dearth of Senate seats for Black women when she wrote — “how about you get out of my chair?'”
Candidates of color endorsed and financed by PACs like CollectivePAC, PowerPAC+, Color of Change PAC, and BlackPAC have made it possible for younger and browner candidates to throw their hats into political races. Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez in New York are both running campaigns with wide progressive support, which involve hundreds of operatives and canvassers — both adding to a pipeline of future candidates of color and energizing White progressives. And these are the sort of campaigns the Democratic Party should be fiercely supporting.
Steve Phillips’ New American Majority is neither a new idea nor complex math. His thesis is that if you add up white progressives and progressives of color you’ve got a numerical majority that can beat Conservatives — not in 2040, when Whites will be a numerical minority, but right now. Phillips grumbles that he’d rather Greens and Libertarians vote with their Democratic friends than split the vote, but he’d really prefer that the Democratic Party offer better reasons for registered African-Americans voters to show up at the polls — like representation, support, and money. But this requires real change, not rhetoric.
Uniting progressives of different colors will require the blindingly White Democratic Party establishment to loosen its death-grip on power, while candidates of color receive more support to fundraise, train political operatives, and run candidates who reflect who they are and the values they care about. It is no coincidence that the Democratic Party has done so little for national criminal justice reform, police accountability, or immigration. Our most serious problems — racism, xenophobia, income inequality, criminal (in)justice, police abuse, healthcare, education, housing, jobs, militarism, civil liberties, political representation — all have been the concerns of Black America since the very beginning. If African-American and Latinx politicians actually held proportionate political and economic power within the Democratic Party, we might actually see some change.
In July Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez went before both the NAACP Convention in San Antonio and Black voters in Atlanta to apologize for the party’s turning its back on African-Americans. At this late date there’s little hope of changing the party’s orientation to White swing voters. But if the direction is ever to be changed, it will come from the grassroots, not from the leadership.
Last month I had the opportunity to attend CollectivePAC’s Black Campaign School in Atlanta, Georgia. I met Quentin and Stephanie James, lead trainer Jessica Byrd, and numerous candidates (and sitting politicians) of color who shared their campaign experiences with a largely millennial audience of first-time candidates and volunteer staffers. I was not the only White person in attendance; several others were working on campaigns for African-American candidates, mainly in the South.
I came away believing more than ever that Steve Phillips is on to something. The rescue of the country depends on whatever political power the Democratic Party can still muster. But the Democratic Party has a vision problem, a values problem, and a representation problem. When it comes to social and political reforms, the overwhelmingly White Democratic Party leadership just doesn’t have enough skin in the game. Does Chuck Schumer have an incarcerated brother? Stacey Abrams does.
The best way forward, I firmly believe, is by working with, and following the lead, of those who truly, personally, know the value of fixing America.
We received the following letter from a prisoner at the Bristol County House of Correction in Dartmouth.
July 26, 2018
Dear [omitted],
At this time I am incarcerated at the Dartmouth House of Corrections of the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office. The whole jail has been on a hunger strike due to the injustices we are faced with on a daily basis here. Today is day two of the hunger strike and there is still no change. I am here to give you an account of what is actually going on in this jail.
I’ve witnessed inmates with severe medical issues such as epilepsy get violently assaulted by Corrections Officers. What was said by AG Maura Healey is true. They are giving inhumane amounts of time in segregation (the hole). I personally have been to the segregation unit. They took my food, all of it, and said I was running a “store.” They coerced me into taking 20 days in segregation with threats, saying I will remain there for the remainder of my time in the jail. I had receipts for all my food and they still took it. As inmates, we have few liberties, such as: food; health care; and earned good time. We don’t get any of those things.
The food we get is not enough to feed a five year old child. We get nothing but soy products with either rice or mashed/scalloped potatoes every day. Never mind breakfast: it’s either one of three things — grits, oatmeal, or tasty-ohs. Some meats that they give have hundreds of tiny little bones that break your teeth. We all put in grievances bu they said it’s just fat and it’s healthy.
To see the doctor or dentist you must put in a medical slip. By the time you are seen it is approximately 4-6 months after you put in said medical slip. This is exactly why this county jail has the highest amount of suicides. There is no health care. We inmates are supposed to be allowed to get good time, yet there are very few programs that you can actually earn good time. All of the programs that are stated online that are here haven’t been in this jail for over ten years.
For god’s sake, we sat in our rooms without electricity for two days. I don’t make commissary so when they took my few belongings it really hurt. We are humans and we are not being treated as such. Something has to change. Sheriff Hodgson is not doing his job. He is focused on building a wall at the border. Where are our programs? Where is our healthcare, and where is our food?
The injustice we face every day is inhumane and it has to be against the law. This is my testimony on the inside of DHOC. I don’t mind if you quote any of this but make it anonymous because time is hard here with constant threats by Corrections Officers.
I am due to be released on [omitted] and I am willing to do what I can to make sure no one has to endure what I’ve had to endure for over a year. Make copies of this and send it to whoever can help our cause. I hope [omitted] because reform needs to be made because DHOC is not a House of Correction. That’s why the recidivism rate is beyond compared to every other county jail in MA.
Sincerely,
[prisoner’s name withheld]
P.S.: So far the jail said they will lower the cost of commissary and make the food better because of the article in the Standard Times this morning, but only time will tell.
Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here — written in 1935 when America had seen the likes of Father Coughlin and Huey Long, and when Lewis could see the Third Reich barreling down on Europe — features a protagonist who was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected… He was an actor of genius.”
Spoiler alert: fascism comes to America. The back cover says it all.
Today Marion Davis of MIRA issued a press release announcing that the Democratic-majority legislature had abdicated moral leadership by stripping four immigrant protection provisions from the 2019 budget. It echoed U.S. Congressional Democrats doing much the same thing last January. Sacrificing immigrants for budgets is becoming a Democratic habit.
In MIRA’s press release, Eva A. Millona, executive director of the MIRA Coalition, was quoted:
“We are deeply disappointed. The Massachusetts Legislature had a prime opportunity to stand up for civil rights and human decency, and under political pressure from Governor Baker and conservative Democrats, it backed down. The safety and well-being of tens of thousands of immigrant families will suffer as a result.”
Democrats did this.
“It is particularly disturbing that the Legislature succumbed to fear-mongering about ‘sanctuary’ policies. Though nothing in the four provisions approved by the Senate actually met the definition of ‘sanctuary’ used by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, prominent House members embraced nativist propaganda misrepresenting those provisions, using the falsehoods as political cover for their inaction.”
Democrats did this.
“We find it shocking that, with this agreement, the Legislature has tacitly accepted the notion that police should be able to ask people who ‘look foreign’ to show their papers before they can report a crime, and that immigrants should be kept in the dark about their legal rights, so it’s easier to deport them. The Legislature couldn’t even agree that Massachusetts should never contribute to a Muslim registry. That is stunning and embarrassing.”
Democrats did this.
“Our country faces an existential crisis, and in the face of horrific abuses by the federal government, it is morally imperative for states to act to protect their most vulnerable residents. By failing to pass the Safe Communities Act, and now failing to pass even basic legal protections, the Legislature has abdicated its moral leadership, and failed a large share of its constituents.”
Instead, the Massachusetts House chose expediency and making a Republican governor happy.
On June 2nd Tom Hodgson, along with 69 others chosen from 365 nominations, received the National Sheriff’s Association’s (NSA’s) “National Command & Staff College” Magnus award for “building and maintaining trusting community relationships.” Hodgson’s award leaves many of us scratching our heads wondering how high suicide rates, recidivism, and abuse of inmates merit an award with a description like this.
But a quick look at a few of the numerous recipients hints at the National Sheriff’s Association’s increasingly Trump-oriented and racist political agenda — which has nothing to do with public safety, respect for campaign law, treating inmates and the public fairly, or earning the public trust. While citizens keep asking — Why are there so many bad sheriffs? — the National Sheriff’s Association doles out sham awards to scofflaws and bigots — claiming that such men are the “best of law enforcement.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions selling Anglo-Saxon white supremacy at the 2018 National Sheriff’s Association winter meeting
We don’t think misconduct like the following should have earned any of these “award-winners” anything but scorn or jail time.
Ron Abernathy, from Alabama’s Tuscaloosa County, had a wrongful death problem at his jail and wants to deal with it by suing his critics.
The County Commission was not happy with overcrowding at the jail run by Jefferson County Alabama Sheriff (and NSA Board and Executive Committee member) Mike Hale and suggested that 300-500 low-level offenders might have to be released. Hale said he didn’t care: overcrowding be damned, inmates weren’t going anywhere.
Grady Judd, Sheriff in Polk County, Florida, is an open-carry, arm-every-teacher advocate known for his fondness for grandstanding. Judd was sued last year for conducting unconstitutional identity checks at emergency evacuation shelters during Hurricane Irma.
John Layton, Marion County, Indiana sheriff, is no stranger to controversy. The Indianapolis City Council authorized a quarter million dollar audit of the Sheriff’s Office by KPMG. His son, also a veteran Indianapolis police officer, was arrested for dealing cocaine in 2016. Citizens Against Marion County Sheriff John Layton has compiled a long list of questions and grievances. Apparently Sheriff Layton is not doing such a great job “building and maintaining trusting community relationships.”
In Hendricks County, Indiana, Sheriff Brett Clark replaced in-person jail visits with HomeWav, a video visitation service like Securus. Even when family members visit inmates at Clark’s jail, they can see one another only through a video screen, not directly.
We were relieved that Louis Ackal, head of Louisiana’s Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and subject of a Fault Lines documentary (along with Hodgson) on jail abuses, didn’t go home with a Magnus Award. Ackal, who piled up civil rights and wrongful death lawsuits, charges of killing a handcuffed man, using excessive force on pregnant women, planting evidence, racism, corruption, calling a federal prosecutor a “son-of-a-bitch Jew bastard,” famously opined that black people “needed to be treated like animals.” What a relief the National Sheriff’s Association has some standards, albeit low ones.
Charles Parish, Louisiana Sheriff Greg Champagne, president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, pictured above at the 2018 NSA convention with FOX News Jeanine Pirro
But elsewhere in Louisiana the Magnum award winners were at it — abusing their communities’ trust and pocketbooks.
In Charles Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff Greg Champagne, and National Sheriffs’ Association president (pictured above at the 2018 NSA convention with FOX News’ Jeanine Pirro), took some of his deputies to Standing Rock in North Dakota to “observe” the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, allegedly on the public dime and ostensibly to curry favor with the petrochemical industry. The Center for Constitutional Rights sued for travel documents after filing public information requests and not getting them.
In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff Joseph P. Lopinto III‘s deputies were accused of excessive force in the death of Keveen Robinson in May. Lopinto, handpicked by Newell Normand to succeed him in July 2017, made it clear there would be few changes from Normand, including ongoing friction with the Latino community.
Continuing around the country, the Magnus awards reflected more of the same:
Hennepin County, Minnesota Sheriff Richard Stanek served on the National Sheriff’s Association board of directors and in 2012 was the chair of Minnesota’s Homeland Security Committee. In 2012 Stanek testified before Congress about Somali gangshe claimed had an astounding 125,000 members in Minnesota, the majority in Hennepin county. Stanek was one of 10 anti-immigrant sheriffs to meet with Trump last month at the White House.
Anoka County, Minnesota Sheriff (and NSA Board member) James Stuart is being sued by the ACLU for violating the rights of an undocumented woman who was illegally detained for ICE. Just like Tom Hodgson.
Dechutes County, Oregon Sheriff Shane Nelson‘s employees are the focus of several external investigations of misconduct by a public servant and firearms violations. One of his captains was indicted for embezzling public funds, and Nelson himself is the subject of two additional complaints. Nelson also allegedly harassed deputy Eric Kozowski, an employee who announced he was challenging Nelson in the sheriff’s race.
In Texas, Rockwall County Sheriff Harold Eavenson recently signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE, and met with Trump to complain about state legislation he claimed would help Mexican cartels. Eavenson was angry when the U.S. Sentencing Commission reduced the sentences for 6,000 lower-level drug offenses, and both he and the National Sheriff’s Association blamed it on “the Obama administration’s attitude toward law enforcement.”
Michael D. Chapman, Magnus winner from Loudoun County, Virginia, was investigated in 2015 because he had allegedly “illegally obtained and published private e-mails of his Republican primary opponent and that he has illegally concealed the true source of campaign donations in his run for reelection.” In what Bristol County residents will recognize as a familiar defense, Chapman called the allegations politically-motivated “nonsense.” A fired detective sued Chapman for intimidation, Chapman also made a video for FAIR, an anti-immigrant hate group.
Like Tom Hodgson, Spokane County, Washington’s Ozzie Knezovich is a man drawn to simple answers for complex problems. In 2017 he blamed school shootings on the media, bad child-rearing — everything but the ease with which guns can be acquired. Knezovich was charged with violations of campaign laws for using his employees as props in campaign ads. Knezovich, like Hodgson, blamed Barak Obama for a supposed “war on cops.”
Sheriff Eric Severson, Waukesha County, Wisconsin, signed onto a 287(g) program with ICE, despite calls from over 10,000 members of his community to refrain from doing so. So much for “building and maintaining trusting community relationships.”
At the national level Democrats may be forgiven for doing little for DACA and TPS recipients or for immigration reform in general. But, in a majority Democratic state like Massachusetts, there is no excuse for the legislature dragging its heels on reasonable immigrant protections called for by the party’s own platform. House Speaker Robert DeLeo has repeatedly manipulated and maneuvered to shelve bills and limit votes on immigration, and now he’s trying to strip immigrant protection provisions from the FY2019 budget.
Of course we can’t blame it all on DeLeo — who now has exhausted every last cent of his political capital with progressives. House Democrats can’t — and shouldn’t — hide behind the Speaker forever. Ultimately they will be held to personal account. Too many members of the State House sound like Republicans in their willingness to “go along to get along” with cruel attacks on undocumented families. It’s simply hypocrisy for Massachusetts Democrats to chastise Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for their lack of spine when they themselves are guilty of the same.
Last year I attended the Massachusetts Democratic convention in Worcester, at which a new party platform was drafted. Among the hollow declarations of resistance and highfalutin but ultimately meaningless verbiage added to the platform were planks calling for a living wage and sensible immigration polices.
It was left to groups like RaiseUp to fight to get living wages on the November ballot because Democrats themselves didn’t find it important enough. And even though the state party’s platform calls for immigrant protections, these proved to be hollow promises as well:
“Becoming a sanctuary state, where all immigrants and refugees feel welcome and safe in all communities of the Commonwealth.”
“Eliminating policies that make local and state officials responsible for the enforcement of national immigration laws.”
For many of us the MassDems platform has no value other than to document the hollowness of a party whose real-life politicians have no intention of standing by the party’s professed values.
Representatives, start acting like Democrats. Ultimately voters are going to look at your positions and voting record, not Speaker DeLeo’s. Do the right thing. Stand up for the principles we voted for last year. Stand up for some of the state’s most vulnerable people. Show some backbone. Defy the Speaker. Keep immigration protections in the budget.
Here in Massachusetts we have 38 days to register for the Massachusetts primaries, 58 days until we vote in them, 100 days to register for midterm elections, and 121 days until the fate of nation is sealed. But it’s been over a year and a half since the 2016 presidential election and we feel only the faintest of pulses from a Democratic Party led nationally by septuagenarians older on average than Brezhnev’s Politburo, with few new ideas and little backbone. This is a party desperately in need of major rehabilitation, not the slow-moving suicide in progress.
Despite a progressive insurgency, the DNC and DCCC still can’t bring themselves to give up the Big Money donors and slick top-down campaign machinery they’ve always counted on. Their direction hasn’t changed — today it’s even further to the right with campaigns featuring more veterans, more members of the security establishment, more prosecutors, and more tech wizards and hedge fund managers. Capitalism may not be working for most of the country, but it sure is for these Democrats. When Tammy Duckworth quipped that Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez represents only the Bronx, it spoke volumes about a party unwilling to confront the future, much less the present.
Our last president left the Democratic Party in virtual receivership, according to Donna Brazile. And the losing presidential candidate called in the DNC’s chits to literally turn it into her own presidential campaign. Today the very existence of the Poor People’s Campaign is a symptom of how badly Democrats have represented the working poor — or anyone a paycheck or two from sliding out of the middle class. Yet, while Democrats do little for the average American, Republicans are doing their worst.
In November we again have a choice between truly evil or lesser evil, oligarch or technocrat. We’ve been properly conditioned to always vote for the lesser evil. And the Democratic Party can always count on us. Liberals smugly argue that Conservatives vote against their own interests, but that’s not entirely true. In 2016 White America got exactly what it always wanted — Reconstruction 2.0. Whether trade, taxes, budget, infrastructure, medical care, or even their children’s lives or their own retirement, White America was willing to take any hit to unroll and unwind everything the Black Guy had tried to accomplish. Last year the Democratic Party leadership traveled down to Berryville, Virginia to specifically court the white middle class. We should all be watching midterm results in Berryville to see how this works out for them.
Liberals won’t admit that they also vote against their own interests by supporting massive military budgets, corporate bailouts, and helping dismantle the social safety net. And centrist Democrats apparently love trickle-down economics every bit as much as their kleptocratic Republican brethren. The “Better Deal” that Democrats announced in Berryville focuses on “pocketbook” issues and, just like Republicans, claims that what’s good for America’s corporations is also good for America’s workers. But progressives take issue with this neoliberal fable, increasingly questioning not only income inequality but the Capitalism behind it.
Each year, those of us who recall — that the Democratic Party was the party of the Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam, the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates in American history. carte blanche for the Patriot Act, Libya, Syria, Drone Tuesdays, and the biggest corporate bailout since the Great Depression — each year we remind centrist Democrats they’ve been hoodwinked. And each year they call us irresponsible dogmatists. But history and newspaper clippings don’t do them any favors.
Some things simply have to be abandoned and created anew. In software refactoring only gets you so far: sometimes you need a complete rewrite of the code. With a dumpy old house, add-ons and endless tinkering with electrical and structural problems often turn out to be more costly than bulldozing and rebuilding. Now, because of widespread dysfunction and corruption, many Democrats have begun to recognize that ICE must be abolished and rebuilt from the ground up. What they don’t see is that the same applies to their own party.
“He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.” — Proverbs 13:20
Sheriff Tom Hodgson often claims that everything he does is to keep us safe, but Hodgson’s job description is to run the county jail. Instead, the sheriff frequently steps outside his areas of responsibility and competence, neglecting official duties and leaving chaos, conflict, and mismanagement in his wake.
Hodgson is less interested in being a county sheriff than a xenophobic mouthpiece for far-right views. With his continual attacks on immigrants, that a Boston Globe editorial characterized as crossing the “line of decency,” Bristol County’s own Joe Arpaio wannabe frequently makes the Trump-like claim that more immigrants equals more crime.
At a state committee hearing last month State Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz challenged Hodgson to prove it. For a moment the sheriff looked like a deer in the headlights, mumbling that he’d have to get back to her. And when he finally did, his numbers were not scientific studies but talking points from an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group.
But this is an old story. In 2011, Duval Patrick opposed the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to turn local lawmen into federal immigration officers. Hodgson thumbed his nose at the governor’s “moronic” stance and signed onto the DHS program anyway. Patrick then vetoed budget earmarks for Hodgson, and Hodgson responded by echoing right-wing conspiracy sites that Patrick (and Obama) were flying in plane-loads of illegal immigrants (and Muslim terrorists) into Massachusetts. And he threatened to shut down the Ash Street jail.
This is classic Hodgson – a martinet who once tried to shame prisoners on work release by literally placing them in chains. Who illegally charged them housing and medical fees. Who puts “his” inmates on food restrictions and limits contact to family members. Who presides over the county lockup with the worst suicide rate in the state. Who oversees a prison population three times the size the facility was designed to hold. Who advocates putting political adversaries like Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone in jail. Who, in his inauguration speech, promised to send inmates to build Donald J. Trump’s Great Wall.
Tom Hodgson was appointed Bristol County Sheriff by William Weld in 1997 to fill a retirement vacancy, and he’s been the incumbent ever since. Hodgson is the Massachusetts county sheriff with the greatest share of suicides at his jail, the Trump Wall sheriff, the chain gang sheriff, the Joe Arpaio wannabe who wants to arrest mayors of sanctuary cities. Hodgson has been accused of flouting a Massachusetts SJC ruling on ICE detentions, of political patronage schemes, and of abusing prisoners. Hodgson spends so much of his time on talk radio flogging dubious anti-immigration “facts” and conspiracy theories that it’s a miracle he ever clocks in at his day job. But most galling, the sheriff claims to speak for the people of Bristol County — when in fact much of the time Hodgson is out of the office representing a hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
And it seems everybody’s got a Tom Hodgson story.
A retired Fall River cop recalls in a recent editorial that the sheriff wanted to patrol the streets of Fall River. That was a no-go. Fall River mayor Jasiel Correia tried an end-run around his own police department, inviting Hodgson to run the city jail and involving Rep. Paul Schmid in funding it. That too was a no-go.
In 2015 the sheriff deputized thirteen military recruiters. But as soon as they had been sworn-in, the Department of Defense launched an inquiry, sending a Naval petty officer to investigate. There were obvious questions about members of the armed forces performing law enforcement functions – since the Constitution specifically prohibits it. Hodgson’s reasoning: “We’re doing these things for the right reasons, certainly for the public’s protection and for our national security.” Great. But what about running the jail?
Recently the publicity hound sheriff played Dr. Phil when he offered up his deep psychological insights into Aaron Hernandez on TMZ, WLNE, WBZ and others. Viewers learned that Hodgson regarded himself as a “fatherly influence,” recommending the Bible and “Tuesdays with Morrie” to Hernandez.
Hodgon spends so much time out of the office, providing psychological counseling to celebrity prisoners, or trying to become one himself, that he is apparently unable to keep up with the paperwork. The Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice had to file a lawsuit to obtain records related to the BCSO’s participation in federal ICE programs, but Hodgson violated the state’s public records law by failing to produce the documents. “Sheriff Hodgson appears to think he is above the law,” said Sophia Hall, Staff Attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee. “But as President Trump has learned, that is why we have courts.”
Since 2012 inmates in county lockups in Massachusetts are twice as likely to commit suicide as prisoners in state facilities. Of the 14 county lockups the worst offender is the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) facility. Since 2008 there have been 14 suicides at the BCSO jail, 50% more than Suffolk County and twice the number at Essex and Worcester facilities. The BCSO jail represents almost a quarter of all 65 county prison suicides from 2006 to 2016 but only 13% percent of the total county prison population. The BCSO lockup also spends the least amount of money per inmate of any facility in the state.
For all the bibles and the tough talk, the sheriff’s management style isn’t working – and it’s cruel. In 2013, when Aaron Brito committed suicide in Hodgson’s lockup, his mother received a call from an anonymous BCSO employee: “Your son died today. If you want more information today, call St. Luke’s Hospital.”
Tom Hodgson has had a contentious relationship with his corrections officers. Five officers were punished for speaking about labor negotiations with the sheriff and by 2008 Hodgson had spent $1 million on a losing case he took all the way to the Supreme Court. Hodgson also spent $3.7 million on other legal cases, making him far and away the most profligate legal spender of all county sheriffs. Before a new round of lawsuits in 2018, Hodgson had already flushed $4.7 million of taxpayer money down the drain. $1.3 million of that was handed over to “Special Deputy” attorney Bruce Assad and $1.3 million to attorney Ronald Lowenstein, another donor whose family was flagged in 2004 for giving more than the legally permitted campaign maximum.
Many of the sheriff’s employees or contractors are also donors. Filings with the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance show a current quarter million dollar war chest and a history of $1.3 million in donations. Occupations from hundreds of entries in donor records include: corrections officer, canine officer, captain, warrant apprehension officer, internal affairs officer, deputy, chief, contractor, investigator, or simply BCSO. An audit of these records might lay to rest persistent accusations of patronage.
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FAIR is probably the most influential anti-immigrant hate group in the United States. It was founded in 1979 by a Michigan ophthalmologist, John Tanton, functions as a lobbying group, and is deeply embedded in the Trump administration. MediaMatters notes that the mainstream media often uses FAIR’s “statistics” without realizing that it’s a hate group. The CATO Institute has slammed FAIR’s studies and statistics as “fatally flawed” and “sloppy.” The Southern Poverty Law Center lists FAIR and a number of other groups in the Tanton Network as hate groups. Yet many journalists just keep quoting FAIR’s “facts.”
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In 2015 Tom Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at an Islamophobic venue in Stoughton which had previously hosted Dutch neo-fascist Geert Wilders. Lynch is an Islamophobe, a white supremacist, a supporter of the Constitutional Sheriff Movement and of sovereign citizen Cliven Bundy, about whom he made a film.
That same year Hodgson appeared with a representative of the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford. Despite the name, FAIR has little to do with reform. Instead, its goal is assuring White Anglo-Saxon dominance. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, FAIR has links to white supremacists and eugenicists. Its founder, John Tanton, wrote to one eugenicist: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
In 2016 the Sheriff was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan, of the nativist organization Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Like FAIR, CIS was founded by John Tanton and publishes dubious statistics on immigration. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, CIS also maintains links to white supremacist and anti-semitic groups. CIS executive director Mark Krikorian quipped after the deadly 2010 Haitian earthquake: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” The third speaker was Raymond Hanna with the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America, which also has white supremacist ties. In Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront.
In June this year the Sheriff appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold their feet to the fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Stein is executive director of FAIR, and characterizes America’s immigration laws as an effort “to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.” Stein describes Central American immigrants as engaged in “competitive breeding” and asks: “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?” Malkin too has links to white supremacist groups, including VDARE, and to Islamophobic groups. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves.
On October 19, 2017 the SouthCoast Chamber of Commerce hosted Bristol County sheriff Tom Hodgson and Helena DaSilva Hughes at the Wamsutta Club to discuss immigration. During his presentation the sheriff cited questionable statistics from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), claiming that illegal immigration costs taxpayers $116 billion a year. The CATO Institute calls FAIR’s new study “fatally flawed” and “even more sloppy” than their previous one.
According to FAIR’s 2011 annual report, that was the year the organization began cultivating sheriffs like Hodgson. “In 2011, we identified sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.” FAIR staff “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences, and invited them to come to Washington to meet with FAIR’s senior staff.” Since roughly that time Hodgson’s main job has been as a FAIR spokesman.
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Not so focused on law and order as it claims to be, FAIR sees its true mission as the preservation of Anglo-Saxon civilization from rapacious hordes of brown non-English speakers. FAIR peddles white supremacy, eugenics, and dubious statistics on immigration. The following quotes from John Tanton — Hodgson’s colleague on the advisory board — betray FAIR’s chief preoccupations:
“As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?” (October 1986)
and
“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” (December 1993)
FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein — with whom Tom Hodgson appeared at an event last June — likes to add a dash of anti-Irish conspiracy theory to his white supremacy:
“I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism…” (August 1994)
In an interview with “Alt-Right” darling Tucker Carlson, Stein maintains that Latinx immigrants coming to the U.S. are godless, low-IQ haters:
“Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans. […] Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?” (October 1997)
For FAIR it’s not just about white culture, church, and the English language. As Stein’s quote above shows, like their goose-stepping cousins FAIR sees America threatened by inferior races. But here’s Tanton again:
“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?” (September 1996)
How, indeed, does FAIR want to see it implemented?
FAIR’s “final solution” is the preservation of “Anglo-Saxon dominance” by privileging white people through overtly racist immigration policies and the use of mass deportation and eugenics for ethnic cleansing.
Schemes like this didn’t work out so great for the Third Reich. And they’re not going to work for Tom Hodgson and his brownshirted buddies at FAIR.
* * *
Tom Hodgson has spent the majority of his life in law enforcement and took only a few criminal justice classes in college before dropping out. But by the frequency with which he offers up his views, he is an expert on everything — 911, Criminal Justice reform, the second amendment, the Constitution, the psychology of Aaron Hernandez, the Iran deal, Islam, drug abuse, Obama, the military, religion as therapy — and Immigration.
Among members of the Hodgson’s right-wing echo chamber: Howie Carr, Chris Resendes (a former employee of the Sheriff), John Keller, NRATV, Fox and Friends, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham, and Lou Dobbs.
Some of Hodgson’s like-minded friends: Dan Rea, Rick Wiles, Robert Spencer, Sandy Rios, Tom Roten, Jessica Vaughan, Dennis Michael Lynch, ACT America, FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA, VDARE.
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Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s passion is badmouthing immigrants, though his day job is running a county jail. But Hodgson is less interested in being a county sheriff than a mouthpiece for far-right views. His continual attacks on immigrants prompted the Boston Globe to accuse him of crossing the “line of decency,”
Last year Hodgson joined the national advisory board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). This formalized a long relationship with the organization. FAIR, CIS, and several sisters organizations were founded by fellow advisory council member John Tanton, a white supremacist who believes in applying eugenics to controlling non-white population.
In July 2017 the Center for New Community published a report, “Crossing the Line: U.S. Sheriffs Colluding with Anti-Immigrant Movement,” which described Hodgson’s relationship with FAIR starting around 2011.
FAIR’s 2011 Annual Report describes a strategy of identifying “sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.” FAIR “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences, and invited them to come to Washington to meet with FAIR’s senior staff.”
New Community reported that FAIR seemed to capitalize upon blurry lines between sheriffs’ official duties and their work for FAIR:
“Despite Hodgson’s endorsement, FAIR’s recruitment event did draw some scrutiny. When inviting sheriffs, FAIR used materials suggesting the event was sanctioned by the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program (HIDTA), a U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) program. FAIR’s flyer for the event featured HIDTA’s official logo and stated that participants’ travel and lodging costs “may be covered by your agency’s HIDTA funding.’ ONDCP officials sternly rebuked that claim. ‘In no way is the ‘border school’ sanctioned, co-hosted, or endorsed by the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program,’ Rafael Lemaitre, ONDCP’s associate director for public affairs, told the Southern Poverty Law Center. ‘Any use of the program’s logo to imply support for this conference is unacceptable, and the local HIDTA director has asked for this to be corrected as soon as possible,’ Lemaitre added. ‘Additionally, at no time have any HIDTA training funds been requested or been approved for use in association with this conference.”
In 2014 Hodgson, Brock Cordeiro, and Linda Ross used Bristol County Sheriff’s Office letterhead and email addresses to organize a meeting in Washington, DC, to support Senators Jeff Sessions and David Vitter in promoting anti-immigrant policies.
It is not known whether Hodgson himself spent Massachusetts taxpayer money on these activities or on travel to Washington. Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) data shows no travel expenses paid by his campaign, and public information requests for the Sheriff’s travel records have been ignored since May 23, 2018.
In recent weeks it has become clear that the Sheriff’s views on immigration deeply influence how the Bristol County House of Correction operates.
In May 2018, an ICE detainee described in detail the medical neglect he received at the Bristol County House of Correction. In June 2018 Tom Hodgson was sued by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice and Latham and Watkins LLP for violating the rights of an ICE detainee and thumbing his nose at the Supreme Judicial Court’s Lunn Ruling. That same month Freedom for Immigrants released its National Report on Abuse Motivated by Hate, which focuses on bias- and hate-motivated abuse in ICE detention facilities. Bristol County was mentioned in the report several times. Aída Chávez reported on the Bristol County abuses in the Intercept. According to the report, detainees were abused physically and verbally, prodded to battle in gladiator-style fights and were called “gorillas” and “baboons.”
In 2017 the New Bedford Standard Times reported that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies FAIR as a hate group, and that the Anti-Defamation League considers it an “extreme anti-immigrant group.” The Standard-Times asked Sheriff Hodgson for comment and he waved the notion of racism away: “I’ve never run into anybody that’s even hinted at that kind of thing.” The newspaper asked FAIR executive director Bob Danes for comment and quoted a statement from the organization’s website: “immigration policy should not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, religion, gender, or nationality.”
Besides Tom Hodgson’s amateur psychoanalysis of Aaron Hernandez, no other topic interests him as much as immigration. Hodgson has left quite the trail of commentary. Anyone interested can view these videos featuring Hodgson’s “expert” views on immigrants or these videos demonstrating the sort of racist propaganda FAIR disseminates.
* * *
Hodgson’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance filings show he is a member of the Constitutional Sheriff’s Association:
Here, then, is the assortment of racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, birthers, gay-bashers, conspiracy nuts, and white supremacists who serve on the national advisory board with Tom Hodgson.
* * *
Lou Barletta – as mayor of Hazelton, PA, signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later
Sharon Barnes – apparently no DACA supporter, who wrote recently: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts.”
Gerda Bikales – who shudders at bilingual education and regards Spanish as a ghetto language: ”I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto.”
William Chip – who would like to repeal the 14th Amendment
Donald A. Collins – who has published a number of recent articles on the extremist white national VDARE website
Dino Drudi – another Massachusetts zealot Mr. Hodgson probably knows; they sound alike
Bob Eggle – whose son Kris, a park ranger, was killed by drug dealers on the US-Mexico border
Robert Gillespie – a proponent of population control in developing countries
Otis Graham – the first director of John Tanton’s Center for Immigration Studies, and a man the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says has extensive contacts with American white supremacists
But documents stored in George Washington University’s Gelman Library by Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who currently serves as a board member at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), make the point about Tanton’s interest in race one more time. Most instructive is a Tanton plan in the files to create what he called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research” or, to use Tanton’s acronym, LEADERs. In a 1993 cover memo attached to his LEADERs plan, Tanton, who is white, wrote to Graham: “For a decade or more, I have been musing about the drift in our society back toward organization along group lines, all the while realizing that there was no group for me – no legitimate group that I could join to further or defend my own particular social, cultural or linguistic interests.”
A serial creator of organizations, Tanton, who by then had already funded and founded an array of anti-immigration groups that included FAIR and CIS, added that “with the establishment of several national organizations behind me, I need to pick my targets carefully and in a way that reinforces what has gone before.” The plan makes clear that Tanton saw LEADERs as bolstering his anti-immigration work.
The document offers an argument as to why LEADERs, which is clearly a “European-American” (read: white) version of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is needed: “[T[here is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests. Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… . For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.”
Joseph Guzzardi – listed as a member of white nationalist group VDARE’s “editorial collective”
Carol Joyal – a frightened suburbanite with odd notions of how immigrants parent their children and whose review of The Camp of the Saints terms it a “prophecy” of the Third World destruction of the West; everyone else just called the book racist
Richard Lamm – former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are.”
Once again, here’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about Lamb, FAIR, and their connections to the Pioneer Fund:
Probably the best-known evidence of FAIR’s extremism is its acceptance of funds from a notorious, New York City-based hate group, the Pioneer Fund. In the mid-1980s, when FAIR’s budgets were still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the group reached out to Pioneer Fund, which was established in 1937 to promote the racial stock of the original colonists, finance studies of race and intelligence, and foster policies of “racial betterment.” […]
The Pioneer Fund liked what it saw and, between 1985 and 1994, disbursed about $1.2 million to FAIR. In 1997, when the Phoenix New Times confronted Tanton about the matter, he “claimed ignorance about the Pioneer Fund’s connection to numerous researchers seemingly intent on proving the inferiority of blacks, as well as its unsavory ties to Nazism.” […]
One of FAIR’s long-time leaders, and a personal hero to Tanton, is the late Garrett Hardin, a committed eugenicist and for years a professor of human ecology at the University of California. Hardin, who died in 2003, was himself a Pioneer Fund grantee, using the fund’s money to expand his 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In it, Hardin wrote, “Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” […]
Hardin wasn’t alone. A current FAIR board member, three-time Democratic governor of Colorado Richard Lamm, sounded a similar theme in 1984, while still governor, saying “terminally ill people have a duty to die and get out of the way.”
K.C. McAlpin – an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different.”
Robert D. Park – formerly with the Border Patrol, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that a Constitutional provision provides justification for defending the U.S. from “invasion”
Randy Pullen – former chairman of the Arizona GOP and old white expert on Black Lives Matter: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers.”
Alan Simpson – Reagan-era immigration bill sponsor
John Philip Sousa IV – great grandson of the famous Sousa, nutty birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio
John Tanton – read this and this and this profile of this prolific white nationalist, racist, and eugenicist
Alan N. Weeden – member of the family who owns the Weeden Foundation, a major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID schemes
In some not-so-distant dystopia Americans will educate their children like Elon Musk, abandoning the language arts to make more time for robotic flamethrowers. Or they will live in a state like West Virginia, where the Department of Education was just abolished. It’s safe to say that most Americans will spend more time checking their messages than reading poetry — especially the old classics.
One of my favorite bloggers — himself an old classic — is the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff. Besides his many political and philosophical writings, Wolff knows and loves poetry. He recently quoted Dylan Thomas to echo his thoughts about our receding democracy. I confess I hadn’t read “Do not go gentle into that good night” for more than thirty years, but it echoed my own feelings as well. The poem expresses the sadness that most of us “of an age” will fail to achieve what we so dearly hoped for in our youth.
For me, Thomas’ poem both forgives and curses the wise men who couldn’t figure life out, the good men who didn’t do enough good in it, the wild men who tried vainly to hang on its fleeting joys, and the serious men blind to its realities. Thomas asks his dying father, who has come to a point where he can survey the landscape of his own life, to “curse, bless” him with his fierce tears as he passes into “that good night.”
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Despite the compassionate end of an old man’s unrealized dreams and days, there is no other way to live than by refusing to abandon his dreams. Although we are now witnessing the dimming of our own democratic ideals, what choice do we have but to rage and fight?
Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas (1952)
Ceri Richards, Twelve Lithographs for Six Poems by Dylan Thomas
Hundreds of Democratic primary winners are waiting for November. Many are first-timers, younger and browner, offering the party new ideas, a different future, and inspiring forgotten constituencies and new voters. They include gubernatorial, congressional, senatorial, and state candidates. Many of them have very little national exposure.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump keeps staging campaign rallies throughout the country. The other day he made a stop in Duluth, Minnesota — a state where he only narrowly lost in 2016, and a city where he received an old fashioned ass-whupping, where the StarTribune summarized Trump’s visit as a “potent mix of hubris, divisiveness and victimhood that has come to mark his rallies, energizing his supporters and appalling his opponents.” Trump had come to improve his odds in 2020 — and to troll Democrats.
Sometimes being appalled is enough to generate an idea. So here’s one that occurred to me:
From this second until November Democrats must dog Trump’s rallies. Every city he visits. Every cheeseburger stand. While Trump goes about selling his personal brand at the expense of his own party, Democrats should start selling the Democratic Party at rallies visually similar to Trump’s. A changing roster of Democratic primary winners would appear at rallies delivering a simple, consistent message to the American public — “America, you have a choice!” Or “This is the real face of America!”
To be sure, Democratic midterm winners represent different political views. The point of a campaign like this would be to slam Trump’s policies and to celebrate a party that actually cares about people. It could combine candidate appearances with voter registration, fundraising, and local interviews. It would be simple, celebratory, and unabashedly confrontational. A campaign like this could potentially bring progressive and centrist Democrats together without papering over our very real differences. And it would signal that the Democratic Party has finally gotten up off its behind to take their messsage directly to the people.
Midterm elections are in 128 days. Democrats can’t send their own autocrat on tour, but they sure could start reminding voters of the stark choices before us right now — and the diverse roster of Democratic candidates who stand ready to make all the difference in November.
Yesterday I attended a “Families Belong Together” rally in New Bedford, one of hundreds of similar events taking place nationwide. Between 400-500 people attended, overflowing into the balcony at the Bethel AME Chuch on County Street. It was good to see friends, neighbors, my sister-in-law, and to hear heartfelt expressions of concern for detained children and famillies. It was a tangible reminder that we — our undocumented friends included — are all members of a single community. It was also an affirmation of our responsibility for one another.
Over the years I’ve been to a number of events like this, often following something horrible — mass shootings, acts of hate, threats to civil liberties. Now it’s the Federal government caging children. Over the years I’ve noticed the same concerned citizens meeting as one, praying as one, the same clergy bowing their heads in unity, making the same reassurances, hearing the same exhortations from politicians and community leaders. There’s a “feel good” aspect to it all that disturbs me. Why aren’t people marching in the streets? Why aren’t there fewer bowed heads and more raised fists?
To be sure, the good friends of immigrants showed up and were counted. Community, union and faith leaders were in the pews. New Bedford House Representative Tony Cabral brought a daughter with every reason to be proud of her dad. New Bedford City Council member Dana Ribeiro spoke warmly to her city, and Brockton Council member Jean Bradley Derenoncourt delivered a moving appeal for America to keep faith with those who arrive here just looking to survive. The Coalition for Social Justice’s Maria Fortes pressed for House adoption of Senate Amendment #1147 — immigrant protections being now considered in conference by the House.
But the event did not reflect well on an overwhelmingly blue Massachusetts House that refused to vote on the Safe Communities Act and on Congressional Democrats who have done little for TPS and DACA recipients (both of whom were present yesterday). With the exception of Tony Cabral, not one other state representative bothered to show up at the New Bedford rally. And the lone U.S. Congressman who spoke should never have been invited.
Bill Keating (MA-09) gave an energetic shirtsleeve speech — all clenched fists and outrage at the Trump administration’s caging of six year-olds. The problem with Keating’s performance was not its dramatic fist-pumping; it was the hypocrisy. Keating has voted repeatedly for GOP anti-immigrant bills. H.R.3009 punished Sanctuary Cities. H.R.4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, restricted absorption of Syrian refugees. H.R.3004, “Kate’s Law,” took a hard line against desperate people who re-enter the United States. And Keating’s “On the Issues” statement on immigration reads like it was written by Jeff Sessions himself:
“Bill Keating opposes amnesty. As a District Attorney, Bill Keating enforces our laws and believes that everyone must obey them. His office has prosecuted thousands of criminal cases that resulted in defendants being detained for immigration and deportation action. Bill believes that we must secure our borders, and wants to punish and stop corporations that hire workers here illegally. Bill does not support giving people who are here illegally access to state and federal benefits.”
Toward the end of the rally a group of local children recited ‘families deserve to stay together” in multiple languages, sweetly honoring children now sitting in ICE and CPB cages. With the event ending, clergy lined up awkwardly, a long interfaith blessing was delivered, and attendees filed outside into the hot summer air.
A recent set of Gorsuch-weighted Supreme Court rulings have finally given Republicans something to crow about. The court’s approval of Trump’s Muslim Ban seemed like a blast from the German Vergangenheit but recent labor and reproductive rights rulings have been equally disturbing. Mitch McConnell and Neil Gorsuch met for a photo-op to troll Democrats. Their meeting demonstrated just how badly “checks and balances” work in this country and how shattered American democracy really is.
But while the extreme right exults in the belief that their Crusaders have finally pulled off a Reconquista, let’s remember the Dred Scott decision. Then, as now, the case reflected a Supreme Court that had totally lost its way — and the irreconcilable differences between Americans’ views of what sort of nation we want to be.
Dred Scott was a slave who sued for his and his family’s freedom in a state where slavery was illegal. In 1846 Scott filed suit from St. Louis, Missouri, where since 1824 there had been legal precedent for recognizing the freedom of escaped slaves: “Once free, always free.” Scott’s wife Harriet was friendly with Abolitionists who championed the family’s legal case. Scott lost the suit, re-filed and appealed, and lost again. In 1857 his case was again heard by the United States Supreme Court.
On March 6th, 1857 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 against Scott. Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion, which was that Africans, free or not, could not be citizens of the United States. “The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” Furthermore, African-Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Consequently, freedom and citizenship could not be conferred upon non-whites and, since by the court’s criteria Scott was not a citizen, Scott had lacked “standing” to bring the suit in the first place.
The South did a victory lap. The Richmond Enquirer wrote, “A prize, for which the athletes of the nation have often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it. The nation has achieved a triumph, sectionalism has been rebuked, and abolitionism has been staggered and stunned.”
But the Charleston, South Carolina Mercury speculated that this was just the beginning of a greater conflict between North and South: “In the final conflict between Slavery and Abolitionism, which this very decision will precipitate rather than retard, the principles of the judgment in the Dred Scott case may be of some avail to the South in giving an appearance of justice and moderation to its position.”
The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of White Supremacy and slavery but now it was the law. Abolitionists mocked the reckless, immoral ruling and doubled their efforts to end slavery. Ultimately Dred Scott, just as the Mercury had predicted, ignited a national conflagration that overturned slavery and destroyed the South.
Modern-day slavers and reconquistadores want to return us to 1857. America is as deeply divided now as it was then, and the prospects of a Trump Court for decades is deeply unsettling. But the fight for America’s soul is far from over. The arc of justice is frustratingly long but it will arrive. Whether in 2018, 2022, or later — Congress will pass into younger, browner, more progressive hands. Laws will be written to make legally explicit our liberties, protecting them from capricious, partisan rulings. The Trump Court will shuffle around in their robes, dreaming of Dred Scott.
The other day I noticed that the liberal-ish press had suddenly become obsessed with civility and had begun hectoring us to listen to our better angels — to “play nice” with the Deplorables. Someone denied a cheeseburger to a White House spokeswoman who lies for a living, defending the cruelest of policies. And you’d have thought the end of civilization was near.
On the importance of maintaining “good form” both CNN and FOX News were in total agreement: “Fox Business host Trish Regan defended CNN’s Jim Acosta on Tuesday, calling verbal attacks on the reporter at a Trump rally are ‘not only bad manners, it’s bad form,’ while calling out both sides for a total lack of civility.”
Lots of people noticed the break from reality and bizarre lack of perspective. Philosopher Robert Paul Wolff (author of “The Poverty of Liberalism”) wrote, “The norms of public political discourse vary considerably from country to country, and even from neighborhood to neighborhood within a country. The British Parliament is much more raucous than the American Congress, and I will not even talk about the Israeli Knesset. Only in the world of the Washington elite does being denied service at a restaurant appear to be a violation of sacred norms calling for serious discussion of the foundations of democratic society. […] But whatever the local norms of civility may be, it can always be asked under what conditions it is right, even required, to violate them as part of a political protest.”
On December 12th, 1964 Malcom X spoke at the Oxford Union Club in England and talked about “the necessity, sometimes, of extremism, in defense of liberty, why it is no vice, and why moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. […] I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism, in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being, is a value. Anytime anyone is enslaved, or in any way deprived of his liberty, if that person is a human being, as far as I am concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.” Earlier that year Malcom X gave his Ballot or the Bullet speech at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, reminding listeners of the incivility and extremism of the American Revolution. Turns out, for much of American history dissent usually trumps decorum.
Media Matters observed that the “right-wing media are criticizing Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) after she encouraged people to publicly protest Trump administration officials who are complicit in the atrocious family separation policy at the U.S border. But the ‘civility’ these outlets are touting has been absent in their many vicious past attacks on Waters.”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting took the liberal-ish press to task for its preoccupation with manners and distaste for speaking truth to power. FAIR pointed out that the Washington Post had run “three articles between Sunday, June 24, and Monday, June 25, calling for ‘civility’ and criticizing those who interfered with the dining experiences of Trump administration officials.”
In a Bloomberg News editorial, Jonathan Bernstein wrote, “Civility Is Important in a Democracy. So Is Dissent.” Bernstein observed: “In these times, however, it’s a joke to focus on incivility by Democrats even as the Republican president routinely says things that are as bad as or worse than the attacks of the most irresponsible Democratic no-name precinct chair.” In an unusual footnote, Bernstein reminded readers that when it comes to civility in a democracy, “of course incivility wasn’t the most important problem with U.S. democracy; indeed, restrictions on the franchise and full citizenship were so severe that there’s a good case to be made that it wasn’t a real democracy until at least 1965.” Whatever temporary gains we’ve made were made in the street.
Finally, Nation writer Sarah Leonard spoke my mind with her article, “Against Civility: You can’t fight injustice with decorum.” Among Leonard’s excellent points: “Throughout history, activists have seldom won battles against injustice by asking politely. […] The people being targeted [for protest] are adults living and working in a democratic society; facing consequences for their actions, as conservatives would agree, is what grown-ups should all do. […] To cling to civility is to allow the powerful to commit crimes, as long as they do so with a smile and a handshake.”
If we are truly listening to our better angels, they’ve been whispering — “#resist.”
This my last appeal for citizens to advocate for protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget. Originally proposed as Budget Amendment #1147 by Senator James Eldridge, these protections have been incorporated into Senate Bill S.2530 and are now in conference with the House. Call your State House Representative to ask them to support immigrant family protections. What’s happening in Washington should terrify and motivate state House Democrats to support such protections. This should be our answer to hate.
Here’s why the protections are so important
The Supreme Court just ruled in favor of Trump’s Muslim Ban. An ACLU petition asks Congress to pass legislation to block racist exclusions like this. While a ban is not the same thing as a registry, we don’t yet know how Trump’s Muslim Ban will affect citizens of the Muslim-majority countries who live in Massachusetts, whether CPB, ICE, or DHS will ask the Commonwealth to help track these Muslim neighbors — or if the occasional law enforcement official might have personal motivations to share data with ICE without authorization.
Protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget bar the Commonwealth from cooperating with such registries.
Trump’s deportation machine is abusing families and children in shockingly cruel ways. Elizabeth Warren has a lengthy report on her visit to a McAllen, Texas Border Patrol facility where she was horrified by the treatment of incarcerated children. A report issued recently describes racially-motivated abuses of detainees in ICE facilities, including the Bristol County House of Correction. Last week it was reported that the Boston Public Schools took it upon themselves to share data with ICE, and on the Cape high school students were reported to ICE by guidance counselors for supposed gang affiliations simply because they spoke Spanish. This insanity must end. Let police deal with real criminals and end vigilantism.
Protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget prevent state officials from being used as federal agents. Only the Massachusetts Department of Corrections will be able to fulfill some of these federal immigration functions.
Customs and Border Patrol is stopping vehicles on parts of I-93 and demanding that passengers produce proof of citizenship. Warrantless stops with requests for “papers!” is creepy and totalitarian enough without state and local police being enlisted in violations of the Fourth Amendment. Even with the 100-mile border “loophole,” many of these stops are unconstitutional. Let’s affirm that, at least in Massachusetts, a “nation of laws” requires warrants and probable cause to stop people.
Protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget define strict rules under which police officers can ask about immigration status and require training on the law for all officers.
Read about these provisions yourself. Despite malicious misinformation, these provisions do not prevent police from arresting real criminals. They do make Massachusetts a lot safer for everyone and strengthen Constitutional protections many of us can still remember once having.
Call your State House Representative to ask them to support protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget.
As we rapidly slide into authoritarianism led by a racist vulgarian, the press has oddly become fixated on not the danger to our democracy but on civility and balance. To hear some tell it, we have too much democracy. No, we hear a lot lately, the threat to America is bad manners.
The mainstream media considers it “uncivil” to lob hardballs at a politician or shout “non-responsive!” at his evasive answers. Instead, it steers a safe, middle course, avoiding “controversial” phrases and judgments. The “split-screen” showing both sides of an issue is a fixture of the media, whether in the Op-Ed section of a newspaper or on your favorite cable news show.
Civility is why “nationalist” is the style guide’s choice for Richard Spencer — instead of the more accurate “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi.” If a Congressman uses the N-word it will be reported as a “racially-charged remark” and not as a “racist” epithet. When reporting climate change there must be “balance” to the 99% of scientists who regard it as fact. Civility means fairness and fairness requires false balance. So readers are obliged to hear from petrochemical lobbyists to provide indispensable new insights into a nonexistent “debate.”
Recently the press began worrying that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied a cheeseburger at a Virginia restaurant. The liberal press fretted — is this the end of civility? The Washington Post warned in its best Mom voice, “Let the Trump team eat in peace.” Al Jazeera worried that liberal vexation at a mendacious fundamentalist White House spokeswoman reflected “growing concern about political tribalism” in the United States.
When U.S. Representative Maxine Waters suggested challenging Trump administration figures in public, Politico headed for the bomb shelter: “Waters scares Democrats with call for all-out war on Trump.” House minority leader Nancy Pelosi rebuked Waters, calling for “unity” — even though a recent CNN poll showed that 42 percent of Americans want Trump to be impeached — including a very unified 77 percent of Democrats.
The liberal reticence to vigorously challenge Trump seems based on fears of ridiculous things Trumpistas might say. In a piece entitled “The Left Loses its Cool,” Politico quoted Florida’s GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi: “When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,” she said. “The next people are going to come with guns. That’s what’s going to happen.” For Trump supporters having an unpleasant lunch is worse than ICE throwing children into cages or dying because somebody took your healthcare away. Nonsense like this often goes unchallenged.
While the president was busy signing, un-signing, and re-signing executive orders on family separations, the press seemed far less intererested in discovering why sitting U.S. Senators were denied entry to DHS detention facilities. When immigration attorney David Leopold appeared on CNN and pointed the finger for the White House’s inhuman family separation policies at “white nationalist, Stephen Miller,” host Kate Bolduan cut him off: “I don’t know if you want to go as far as to — I mean, let’s not — I just did an entire segment about civility here. I don’t know if you want to call Stephen Miller a white nationalist.”
Thus “civility” ended what could have shed some light on the issue of family separations. Leopold was on the right track: to really understand White House immigration policies you first have to understand its White Supremacists. Yet while the mainstream media pulls its punches, censors guests, and cuts off lines of inquiry, FOX and Sinclair, right-wing radio and conservative papers throughout the country dispense with such niceties and play hardball.
“When they go low, we go high,” Michelle Obama told Democrats shortly before the 2016 election. This was a sweet sentiment. But during that same campaign Donald Trump mocked a disabled journalist and called Mexicans rapists and criminals. This became the new standard of civility. Last March Trump tweeted that Maxine Waters was a “very low IQ individual.” The Tweet was reported but Waters largely had to defend herself in the press.
The stakes have never been higher. We ought to worry less about civility and more about democracy. If we really want to salvage what’s left of it we need to take the gloves off and aggressively confront injustice and untruth.
That goes for both liberals and for a very timid and diminished Fourth Estate.
Last week Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson went before the cameras to demand an apology from the Attorney General. He should have instead taken the opportunity to apologize to the people of the Commonwealth.
Maura Healey heard the growing complaints about abuses at Hodgson’s facilities — the highest suicide rate in the state, high recidivism, abuses of the mentally ill, overuse of solitary confinement, chronically overcrowded and dirty facilities, inadequate food and denial of medication and medical care, kickbacks from a phone vendor, civil rights violations of inmates, and violation of the Supreme Judaical Court’s ruling on ICE detentions. Hodgson is knee deep in lawsuits. The Attorney General was duty-bound to address the worst of the abuses so she sent a letter to Executive Office of Public Safety and Security’s Daniel Bennett asking him to investigate.
But to hear Tom Hodgson tell it, it’s all a big Democratic witch hunt. “It smacks of partisan politics, given my work on immigration.” His “work,” as he puts it, consists of relentless shilling for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group. On any given day Tom Hodgson can be heard on talk radio conflating immigrant children with MS-13 gang members, suggesting that Massachusetts mosques are Al Qaeda recruiting stations, or that immigrants are disease vectors. You probably heard him grandstanding from the Rio Grande or testifying for anti-immigrant legislation in Washington. Hodgson fancies himself an immigration expert but he can’t even handle the job he was actually hired to do — competently running a county jail.
Hodgson has only himself to blame for his jail’s suicide rate. “If something happens to me, I want people to know that I’ve been getting no help, no matter how many mental health slips I’ve put in,” Michael Ray wrote shortly before his suicide. Only weeks before, an article in the Globe asked, “Why Is The Suicide Rate In Bristol County Jails So High?” If Hodgson’s’ talk radio schedule hadn’t been so full he might have rolled up his sleeves and done something about it.
But on June 1, 2017 Tom Hodgson was having brunch with the Mass Fiscal Alliance, a group that promotes anti-immigrant rhetoric just like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, where Hodgson sits on the advisory board with its white supremacist founder, John Tanton. Nine days later Michael Ray was dead. Two weeks after Ray’s death, on June 28th, Hodgson was back flogging anti-immigrant talking points at a far-right event called “Hold Their Feet to the Fire.” Hodgson appeared with gay-basher Sandy Rios, FAIR president Dan Stein, VDARE contributor Michelle Malkin, white nationalist Congressman Steve King, Muslim-basher Robert Spencer, and Sebastian Gorka, another self-styled “Muslim expert” whose ties to a Hungarian Nazi group were too much for even the White House. Rather than dealing with the suicides Hodgson had better things to do.
So hats off to Maura Healey. She has nothing to apologize for. Unlike Hodgson, she’s actually doing her job — which includes seeking justice for those abused, neglected, and left to die by callous disregard for their human rights. The Sheriff must be held accountable. There is such a level of willful neglect and poor leadership at the Bristol County House of Correction that it is an insult to hear the Sheriff demanding an apology for the many lawsuits he has brought upon himself and his staff.
Suddenly a few Republicans are demonstrating that they actually have souls. Franklin Graham, Laura Bush and even Melania Trump are among those who have recently spoken out against separating children from their parents at the border.
Another insidious form of child abuse has taken place for decades in Palestinian occupied territories, where Israel routinely rounds up and imprisons hundreds of children each year. I am forwarding an appeal from Jeff Klein, of Mass Peace Action, asking Congress to support the McCollum Bill, which so far has only two Massachusetts Congressional sponsors. I have written about Betty McCollum’s legislation before. Please read Jeff’s letter and then contact Congressional Reps. Richard Neal, Niki Tsongas, Joseph Kennedy III, Katherine Clark, Michael Capuano, Stephen Lynch, and Bill Keating, to let them know they need to be on the right side of this issue. They need to be better friends to children than to a government that just last month slaughtered hundreds of demonstrators.
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STAND UP AGAINST THE ABUSE OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN
Dear Activist,
When many Americans and their elected officials are protesting the mistreatment of immigrant minors at our southern border, it is time to renew our demand that Members of Congress also speak up to protect Palestinian children.
When we sent out our earlier alert on the McCollum Bill, Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, H.R. 4391, only one member of the Massachusetts delegation, Rep. Jim McGovern CD2), had co-sponsored the resolution. Since then, CD6 Rep Seth Moulton has joined him in supporting the bill. But other members of our delegation have not yet taken a stand against the abuse of Palestinian children. This is unacceptable.
There are two things you can do.
CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS to ask that they co-sponsor the McCollum Bill. Do it again even if you have called before. (And please thank Reps. McGovern and Moulton for their co-sponsorship.)
This is Rep. McCollum’s explanation of the bill:
“Given that the Israeli government receives billions of dollars in assistance from the United States, Congress must work to ensure that American taxpayer dollars never support the Israeli military’s detention or abuse of Palestinian children. Congresswoman McCollum’s legislation, the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, requires that the Secretary of State certify that American funds do not support Israel’s military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”
ASK THAT THEIR OFFICES ATTEND A BRIEFING JUNE 25 on H.R. 4391 and the situation for Palestinian children after the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem. You can use the No Way To Treat a Child campaign tool to send an email asking Members of Congress to send a representative to the briefing. If you are in contact with a relevant Congressional staffer, also please phone them directly.
Each year the Israeli military arrests and prosecutes around 700 Palestinian children. Last year alone, more than fourteen Palestinian boys and girls under the age of 18 were shot dead by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — and many more were wounded – using resources provided by our own government. We cannot allow this situation to continue.
For Massachusetts Peace Action and its New Day for Israel and Palestine organizing project.
Jeff Klein, Convener, MAPA Palestine/Israel Working Group
A NEW DAY is a network sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action.
PLEASE SIGN UP for regular “A NEW DAY” Action Alerts if you have not already done so and please reach out to your contacts to have them sign up for by emailing A-NEW-DAY@masspeaceaction.org (and please note your Congressional District).
(NEW DAY members will receive a limited number of action-oriented emails)
Both Conservatives and Liberals are awash in nostalgia for days long gone. Trump Republicans long for the good old days when men were men and women and Blacks and Hispanics and gays and foreigners knew their place. Centrist Democrats dream of the glory days of Obama and Camelot. Or what might have been with Hillary.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is pouring money into entrepreneurs, ex-prosecutors, ex-security establishment, and ex-military for Congressional races that don’t challenge Democratic incumbents. Even in “safe” Congressional races, Democratic candidates still like to play up their national security bona fides, for example as Alexandra Chandler is doing in MA-03, or incumbent Bill Keating does at every opportunity in MA-09.
In a recent piece in Blue Mass Group, Chandler penned an essay that spelled out her vision for the proper use of American power. She didn’t challenge the misuse of that power, only that more of it should be in Congressional hands. Otherwise, Chandler argued for a return to a “rules-based international order,” return of a Cold War footing regarding Russia, strengthening of military and intelligence alliances, and defending spy agencies (even after learning of rogue torture, surveillance and rendition programs).
Like many Democrats, Chandler makes excuses for Israel’s murders of Gazan demonstrators while still managing to blame Hamas (“I am confident that given different orders and rules of engagement — for instance, not to use live ammunition and to use numerous specialized riot and border control tools at their disposal — they could have protected themselves, and the security of the Israeli-Gaza border, notwithstanding Hamas-directed provocateurs among the protestors.”) Chandler strongly touts her national security resume but has little to say about criminal justice or immigration reform. And not a shred of criticism of the super-predatory capitalism we experience in the 21st Century.
Chandler is the perfect example of Democratic nostalgia for the good old days when NATO and the G7, the IMF, the World Bank, and Western institutions and alliances could put the screws to Russia while still pursuing their own colonial interests. The good old days when America (together with allies who couldn’t say “no”) would throw around their weight with a higher class of people running the show. In this nostalgic Democratic daydream, as long as well-spoken men and women (not reincarnated P. T. Barnums like Trump) have the codes to nuclear footballs and are the ones spying on the citizenry for their own good, the world is in good hands. But Democrats forget that the Kennedys, Johnsons, Clintons, and Obamas were also frightening stewards of American military, surveillance, nuclear, and economic power.
Someone sent me a link to a piece from the Cato Institute perfectly titled “A World Imagined.” Libertarians are not clear-eyed critics of Capitalism but they do seem to have 20-20 vision when it comes to the defects of Neoliberalism. In this piece the author shows why we should not be so quick to embrace a lopsided world order long loved by Republicans and Democrats alike. The author argues convincingly that Trump’s polices and authoritarian inclinations are simple-minded exaggerations of the old realpolitik long practiced by Kissinger, Albright, Cheney, Bush, Kerry, Clinton, and their friends in the national security establishment. They embrace a world order based on American Exceptionalism, a world run by white men of privilege, with foreign and domestic policies ultimately resting on authoritarianism, austerity, and privilege. Trump’s only innovation is exulting in a widespread view that a master race deserves to run the world and make the country great again.
The other night I was watching “The Good Shepherd.” You might say it’s a movie about privileged white men keeping each other’s secrets — until they decide to betray one another. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a Yale undergraduate inducted into the “Skull and Bones” society, who then becomes an OSS operative and later a CIA director. Wilson has a lot of blood on his hands — and not just for the Bay of Pigs but for sins much closer to home. Make some popcorn. The movie’s decent, if perhaps a bit too long.
At one point Wilson visits a mobster named Joseph Palmi (played by Joe Pesci), who controls criminal enterprises in Cuba. His character is based loosely on Sam Giancana and Santo Traficante, who Kennedy enlisted for the Bay of Pigs. Palmi agrees to help Wilson. At one point there is this exchange:
Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland; the Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
The movie, of course, is fiction. But the scene nevertheless holds a very real truth. We shouldn’t become too nostalgic for the Kennedy years or the post-war “rules-based international order” and its domestic reflection in a segregated nation. The America of 1961 and an administration some still wistfully call “Camelot” bore all too many similarities to Trump’s America of 2018.
When Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896, anti-Semitism was the raison d’etre for a Jewish state. “Die Welt widerhallt vom Geschrei gegen die Juden, und das weckt den eingeschlummerten Gedanken auf.” (The world resonates with screams against the Jews, and that wakes long-slumbering thoughts.)”
Herzl had in mind either a Jewish state in what is now Argentina or in the “ever-memorable historic home” of Palestine, which was clearly his his preference. Herzl saw the poorest European Jews emigrating first to the new state — the most desperate, those of “mediocre intellects” who would do the rough work of establishing a foothold. They would then be followed later by “those of a higher grade.”
Herzl thought it would be necessary to entreat the Sultan [Turkish emperor] to give European Jews some of the land Turkey was then occupying. In exchange, Herzl daydreamed, Jews would get the Ottoman Empire’s finances back in order. The new Jewish state would be neutral, form a bulwark against Asian “barbarism,” and would be a Eurocentric state “in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.” In exchange, the Jewish state would guard the extra-territorial sanctuaries of Christendom and Christians would be grateful to a people they once hated.
It may irk today’s Zionists to hear Israel referred to as a “colonial enterprise,” but this is precisely what Herzl imagined it to be in its infancy. Israel was to be created by two separate organizations — the Society of the Jews, and by the Jewish Company. Like the Hudson Bay Company which explored Canada, and the London Company, which founded the American colonies, Herzl’s Jewish Company (later the Jewish National Fund, and later still national offshoots like the American and Canadian Jewish Federations) were set up to create a pipeline of colonists to a new land. The Jewish Company was to be based in London.
The chapter, “The Jewish Company,” describes how the company acquires land and builds housing for its first wave of poor Russian and Romanian workmen. There would have to be inducements to work for their homes, to stay out of trouble — and the seven hour day was one such inducement. No man was to be idle, for development of a moral citizenry was one of Herzl’s goals. A tenth of the citizenry was to be tasked with military defense. The Jewish Company would provide housing, set up bank accounts, provide loans, create employment by creating industries, purchase a family’s assets when they emigrated, and help them as soon as they arrived in the Jewish state. What Herzl described was — without irony or exaggeration — a vast “colonial enterprise.”
Herzl anticipated the use of indigenous, non-Jewish labor. This was the 19th Century, slavery was not an alien concept, and Herzl worried about the misuse of local slave labor instead of well-compensated seven-hour-a-day workers, which he regarded as a morally repugnant shortcut. The Jewish Company would, therefore, prevent the abuse and enslavement of non-Jewish labor by using boycotts (the irony!), roadblocks, or “various other methods.”
In “Local Groups: Our Transmigration,” Herzl describes the process of resettlement. No one would have to migrate in steerage, though luxury travelers would have plenty of travel options. Each travel group would have a rabbi, who would be enlisted in the nation-building project. “Our rabbis, on whom we especially call, will devote their energies to the service of our idea, and will inspire the congregations by preaching it from the pulpit.” The long history of Zionist co-optation of Judaism seems to begin with this.
The Middle Classes — and by such Herzl was not referring to sad-sack “mediocre intellects” from Russia and Romania, but German-speaking Austro-Hungarian elites of whom he was a member — would lead this new society. What Herzl described sounds very much like the world of English colonials in India: “The middle classes will involuntarily be drawn into the outgoing current, for their sons will be officials of the Society or employees of the Company ‘over there.’ Lawyers, doctors, technicians of every description, young business people — in fact, all Jews who are in search of opportunities, who now escape from oppression in their native country to earn a living in foreign lands — will assemble on a soil so full of fair promise. The daughters of the middle classes will marry these ambitious men. One of them will send for his wife or fiancee to come out to him, another for his parents, brothers and sisters. Members of a new civilization marry young. This will promote general morality and ensure sturdiness in the new generation; and thus we shall have no delicate offspring of late marriages, children of fathers who spent their strength in the struggle for life. Every middle-class emigrant will draw more of his kind after him. The bravest will naturally get the best out of the new world.”
Herzl’s theory of the state is simplistic. He rejects Rousseau’s Social Contract out of hand, instead grasping at the Roman Empire’s concept of “gestor” — advocate. The role of “gestor” is played by the Society of the Jews. “This organ of the national movement, the nature and functions of which we are at last dealing with, will, in fact, be created before everything else. Its formation is perfectly simple. It will take shape among those energetic Jews to whom I imparted my scheme in London.” The “energetic Jews” Herzl was referring to were members of the Maccabean Club in London, with whom he met in 1895.
In describing how the land would be occupied by the new settlers, Herzl writes, “In America the occupation of newly opened territory is set about in naive fashion. The settlers assemble on the frontier, and at the appointed time make a simultaneous and violent rush for their portions. We shall not proceed thus to the new land of the Jews.” Herzl, the cultured Viennese idealist, would never have imagined today’s hilltop settlers of the West Bank.
Herzl did not have a democracy in mind, nor would differences of opinion be permitted in the new state: “I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit in our people, which has now degenerated into petty vanity. Many of the institutions of Venice pass through my mind; but all that which caused the ruin of Venice must be carefully avoided. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others, in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation, and wish to be the most modern in the world. Our people, who are receiving the new country from the Society, will also thankfully accept the new constitution it offers them. Should any opposition manifest itself, the Society will suppress it. The Society cannot permit the exercise of its functions to be interpreted by short-sighted or ill-disposed individuals.” It seems he got his wish.
Today the state that Herzl envisioned still operates without a constitution. Its borders remain in dispute. Its citizens argue whether they are Jews or Israelis. Israel has greater religious diversity than the United States owing to large Palestinian, Bedouin, and non-Jewish European groups. And a million of its citizens live abroad.
Book Review: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. ISBN: 9781620972250
This is a frustrating, disappointing book. It is a book that will make no one happy. Carlos Lozada’s review in the Washington Post, for example, accuses Hochschild of condescension and preconceived notions about the Tea Party. The former is partly true. I don’t think the author successfully manages to disprove the view many have of the Southern Far Right — that they’ll believe any stupid damned thing and will stubbornly vote against their own self-interest. But some Tea Partiers actually liked her book. Ralph Benko, writing in Forbes, called it a “delight” — which might be going a bit overboard.
I found myself wondering where Hochschild was headed in her “exploratory” and “hypothesis generating” study. It took over a hundred pages to lay out her thesis, finally described in Chapter 9, “The Deep Story.” From time to time Hochschild acknowledges the racism of the South, but there is really only one page (146-147 in the hardcover edition) devoted to it. Instead, environmental protection is the lens through which she timidly chooses to look at values of Louisianans. In Chapter 14 (“the Fires of History”) Hochschild discusses the shocks to poor whites following the Civil War that might account for so many today still holding racist views and repressed class antagonisms (think Faulkner’s “Abner Snopes”). But, again, it’s only mentioned in passing.
Ultimately, Hochshild’s book is a fool’s errand. It’s impossible to bridge the empathy gap with people who themselves have no empathy for anyone but White Christians. And, though her efforts to empathize with people who reject science, fact, and blame all their problems on others, may be praiseworthy, I just can’t bring myself to do it. These are seriously delusional people who have given up on remediating their fracked bayous because they think the Rapture is the proper solution for environmental problems.
There is some truth in right-wing critiques of the book, like Lozada’s, that the book paints cartoon characters. In order to explain her subjects’ irrational, dangerous, delusional, anti-social, and self-destructive views and behaviors, Hochschild concocts several two-dimensional archetypes — the Team Player, the Worshipper, and the Cowboy. A better analysis would have looked at the effects of generational racism coupled with the toxic effects of propaganda from FOX News and right-wing pastors. And it would have included a critique of Capitalism, a topic Hochschild won’t touch any more than her subjects. But Hochschild’s goal was to befriend them, not to truly explain the pathology.
I’m sorry, but it’s hard to feel sorry for people who home-school their children or indoctrinate them in Christian madrassas, vote to bring cancer-producing industries into their communities, to kill themselves and their children — and then pay the petrochemical companies for the privilege. It’s hard to feel much pity for people who believe every stupid lie they hear on FOX News or from the pulpit and uncritically support the most rapacious version of Capitalism — while blaming every brown face in the world for the failures of their verkakte worldview.
Rather than bridging the compassion gap, Hochschild’s book convinced me that we need to let these people go. Let them secede and form their own Kingdom of Gilead, where they can spend their money on guns, church tithes, and petrochemicals. Let them live with self-inflicted poor health, poverty, superstition, and ignorance until the Rapture vacuums them up.
There are huge and irreconcilable differences between the two Americas. Half of us believe in democracy, the other half in Adam and Eve romping with Ayn Rand around a Deepwater Horizon platform.
Would you let your county sheriff fix your teeth or provide home health visits for a parent? Would you permit him to perform surgery on you or provide psychiatric services? Of course not. Your county sheriff is a man with a badge and a gun. So why on earth would you expect him to provide expert treatment and rehabilitation to those with substance abuse problems? Unfortunately, this is exactly what’s happening right now in Massachusetts.
The Legislature just passed long-awaited criminal justice reforms. An important objective was to keep people with substance abuse disorder out of jail and provide needed treatment. Yet several recent jail projects are already undermining the intent of these reforms. And they show just how inclined we are, as a punitive society, to always look to incarceration as the solution to a social problem.
In Hampden County, MassLive reports, Sheriff Nick Cocchi is rolling out an 86-bed “treatment facility” for opioid abusers in his jail. Cocchi says it’s conceivable another 100 beds will be needed. Within the next 60 days people with substance abuse disorder will be civilly committed under Section 35 and incarcerated in either the Hampden County jail or in the Hampden County Sheriff’s WMRWC Mill Street facility.
Sheriff Cocchi, like many sheriffs in Massachusetts, is now left with “empty beds” in his jail because of drug courts and other diversion programs. In some jails these “beds” are now being filled by ICE detainees and civil commitment is seen as a mechanism for filling others. Cocchi says “he anticipates seeking additional funding from the legislature during next year’s budget” and that “the new programs are for now carved out through savings and reallocations from within the annual Sheriff’s Department budget.”
A new report in MassInc by Ben Forman and Michael Widmer (“Revisiting Correctional Expenditure Trends in Massachusetts”) documents the cost of incarcerating someone at the Hampden County jail at almost $80,000 per year. A 90-day Section 35 commitment would cost almost $20,000. Certainly, more comprehensive and cost effective treatment can be provided outside of jail.
Civil commitment can either be a part of a criminal sentence or (more and more likely) a process initiated by a “spouse, blood relative, guardian, a police officer, physician, or court official.” But if sheriffs and legislators believe addiction is a disease, why then is prison the cure? In Massachusetts there have been a number of lawsuits challenging the incarceration of substance abusers precisely because prisons are not even close to being treatment centers.
In Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins wants to “partner” with AdCare to run a Vivitrol program at his South Bay jail. The Suffolk County program will target “pre-trial detainees” — those not convicted of any crime. The ultimate responsibility for the safety and effectiveness of a client’s rehabilitation program will rest with a law enforcement official, not a psychological or medical professional. And by outsourcing services to a private corporation — what could possibly go wrong?
Vivitrol is both controversial and currently the the go-to treatment for sheriffs. Vivitrol blocks the “high” from opioids for up to a month. Other Medically Assisted Treatments (MAT) with buprenorphine or methadone are not favored by sheriffs, although Vivitrol is problematic in many ways and may result in fatal overdoses. The drug made news recently because the Trump administration’s opioid treatment plan is typical of his style of crony capitalism — “a single drug, manufactured by a single company, with mixed views on the evidence regarding its use.” Vivitrol will be the only drug treatment given federal prisoners. Through an “Inspiration Grant” Alkermes gave to the National Sheriff’s Association, prison staff and contractors all over the country get a “taste” of the drug, then are allowed to buy more with taxpayer money. No wonder that Vivitrol CEO Richard Pops says “the best days of Vivitrol are still ahead of it.”
Over in Worcester County Sheriff Lewis Evangelidis is building a $20 million “intake” section for his jail, he says, for people with substance abuse disorder. The intake process will also screen for gang affiliation, prior offenses, and determine if those about to be incarcerated are detoxing or need psychological services. But, given the suicide epidemic among county jail prisoners in Massachusetts, legislators ought to be asking why medical issues are not being treated in medical facilities run by real medical professionals.
Some feel the brand-new criminal reform bill is a good start. But Massachusetts could learn something from Portugal, where medical, not carceral, treatment is used for drug addiction. Under Portugal’s 2001 decriminalization law, “anyone caught with less than a 10-day supply of any drug — including heroin — gets mandatory medical treatment. No judge, no courtroom, no jail.”
Prison is an inhumane and ineffective solution for dealing with drug addiction. So why, in a state with some of the best medical care in the nation, can’t we can do better than turning over drug treatment to sheriffs? Why should a sheriff — having no clinical expertise and possibly even unethical relationships to vendors— be permitted to determine treatments for drug rehabilitation? Why not invest in community-based treatment on demand instead of arresting and incarcerating people for low-level crimes committed and driven by their addiction? And why aren’t we taking the tens of millions of dollars used to civilly commit people and instead investing it in health and mental care in our communities?
If we believe substance abuse disorder is a medical problem, let’s put our money where our mouth is — in treatment rather than more investment in jails.
It does not surprise me that the tagline for the Poor People’s Campaign is “a national call for moral revival.” In politics, given a choice between money and morality, you know which will win. It’s also no surprise that the demands of this campaign are not strictly economic but target racism, the environment, criminal justice, voter disenfranchisement, healthcare, foreign policy, militarism, budget priorities, and democratic institutions. The very existence of this movement is a clue that, for all their lofty platform planks, Democrats simply haven’t been listening to America’s most vulnerable people.
Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local. Perhaps. But local politics are now national. Dozens of Congressional primary races highlight the ideological wars being fought within the Democratic Party — viciously and with considerable help from out of state donors.
UMass Amherst political science professor Raymond LaRaja writes that, for all the Democratic Party’s disagreements, “if there is one thread that links party adherents today, it is a view of themselves as outsiders trying to gain for themselves and others a share of the fruits of American democracy and capitalism, which have been denied to them by social status.” But there any agreement ends.
In this authoritarian age a lot is at stake. Democratic Party centrists think they can tinker with and improve Capitalism, while progressives and socialists know that only radical change — and a stronger defense of democracy — will make life better for working families. These are irreconcilable philosophies that must eventually end in divorce. But for the moment — here we are together in a very odd bed.
No surprise, then, that the “moneyed and highly organized factions” run their political races differently too. Since their objective is to win and not necessarily fight for principles (either during or after an election), Democratic centrists run campaigns based on “viable candidates” while progressives are more interested in principles. Centrist Democrats won’t waste a dime on a candidate who can’t win, and they will look for one who can — even if he is barely distinguishable from a Republican.
Progressives, on the other hand, are willing to see their candidate go down in flames — if only for the chance to have her issues heard by voters or to keep the party from sliding even farther to the right. And progressives often have to fight the good fight with little or no support from Democratic Party institutions like the DNC or DCCC. This too is an irreconcileable difference that must eventually end in divorce.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) doesn’t yet have a Fifty State strategy but is trying to get there. It previously conceded elections in some states and put all its chips on “sure things” in others. The DCCC’s “Majority Makers” program is targeting dozens of Red districts thought to be winnable. The special Alabama Senate election of Doug Jones provided the party with new energy — but lowered the bar for its candidates. The DCCC doesn’t even conceal its bias toward Blue Dogs like Henry Cuellar over progressives and has even gone out of its way to sabotage the campaigns of progressives like Laura Moser. In the New York primary DNC Chair Tom Perez endorsed Andrew Cuomo, breaking a promise that the DNC would never again interfere in a primary election.
Last April I attended a meeting of Marching Forward in Dartmouth. The group was recruiting campaign volunteers after deciding to support four swing state Congressional candidates in the midterm elections. Three of their four candidates were DCCC “Majority Makers” — Andy Kim (NJ-03); Mikie Sherill (NJ-11); and Perry Gershon (NY-01). Volunteers would travel to these swing states and essentially take their marching orders from the DCCC.
It’s difficult to begrudge Marching Forward’s efforts. After all, each of their candidates is challenging an especially noxious Trump Republican. Each was chosen, like genes for therapeutic treatment, to target a specific defect in a specific Congressional district with precisely calibrated politics and personal attributes. Andy Kim, for example, is a former Defense Department analyst; Mikie Sherill is a decorated Navy helicopter pilot and “get-tough” federal prosecutor; and Perry Gershon is the Chief Investment Officer at Jefferies LoanCore Capital Markets LLC. None is what anyone would call a progressive. And the number of DCCC candidates waving military and national security resumes should worry everyone in post-911 America.
These candidates, to use LaRaja’s words, all want “peace, protecting the environment, separation of church and state, guarding the right to an abortion, and quality of life issues like eating locally-grown food.” But generally absent from the campaigns of these genetically-engineered DCCC candidates are issues important to brown, black, and poor people. Each represents the Clintonite wing of a Democratic Party that Thomas Frank describes in “Listen, Liberal” — gatekeepers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, prosecutors, the security establishment, technocrats.
Of course, the U.S. Congress is not the only battlefield. Republicans must be fought in state houses too. EveryDistrict has an approach similar to the DCCC’s, but aims to put more Democrats in state government, neglected for decades by the DNC. And who in their right mind would wish for EveryDistrict to fail? In 26 of 50 states Republicans have a trifecta — total control of both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office. In contrast, Democrats have only 8. EveryDistrict’s strategy is to pick horseraces it thinks it can win, and Democratic winners twill then make the state more liberal. At least that’s the theory.
The Bernie wing of the Democratic Party consists of idealists, progressives, and socialists. Funding their candidates are various PACs that endorse and support progressive campaigns and/or candidates of color — people with a serious personal stake in making real change. They include: Color of Change, Democracy for America, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, and The Collective PAC. They don’t take corporate money, they don’t have much support from the Democratic Party, and their campaigns are funded by individual donations. Sometimes even their campaign videos are self-produced, as in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is challenging Blue Dog Democrat Joe Crowley in the NY-14 Congressional primary.
Massachusetts primaries will be here in roughly 90 days. The primaries and the general election will provide more clues about the future and the soul of the Democratic Party. Last September I pondered where Democrats were headed:
It’s still a bit early to definitively answer the question of what kind of Democrat represents the future of the party, but we should know by the time the Democratic primaries come around. If Reagan Democrats like Keating remain unchallenged, and a slew of Baby Keatings appear on ballots, then we’ll know the party’s true character — regardless of whatever lofty language is written into the platform.
We are indeed knee deep in Manchins, Joneses, Heitkamps, Moultons, and Baby Keatings. But I no longer think the future of the Democratic Party can be divined so quickly or easily. The fight for the party’s soul could take a decade — after all, it took the Tea Party twelve years to turn the GOP into a bunch of goose-stepping kleptocrats. This fight will continue as America becomes browner and poorer — and as our democratic institutions struggle to recover from the shocks of years of authoritarianism.
If you compare the two videos in this post there are obvious differences between Democrats. The America I want to live in will not be led by PAC-reliant, flag-waving technocrats but by courageous working people with moral centers and very personal stakes in an inclusive democracy. But for now we may need the technocrats — and they us — to keep the Republic from sliding even further into the abyss.
It turns out that Hillary Clinton was right about one thing — Trump’s supporters are Deplorables.
It was a fleeting, and uncharacteristically harsh, judgment from a party now running its own right-to-lifers, gun-toters, and militarists, lip-syncing the GOP’s lyrics that White America was somehow “left behind.” Taking a cue from the GOP, the Clintons’ DNC and DCCC is now downplaying racial injustice in order to court Deplorables with their Better Deal – which Dems announced last Summer from the Heart of Dixie. But their midterm strategy – sending people of color to the back of the bus if not throwing them under it – neglects the stinking rot at the root of our so-called American “democracy.”
A new study by Diana Mutz from the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, debunks the theory that White America voted for Trump because they were afraid of losing their jobs. They were simply afraid of losing their privilege.
“This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. First, using unique representative probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes). Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past. Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012. Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”
Another study by Steven V. Miller at Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis at Texas A&M confirms Mutz’s “loss of privilege” theory, and also refutes the notion that democratic traditions inoculate Americans from fascist leanings. In “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy,” Miller and Davis write:
“Democracy has been durable in the United States – so durable, in fact, that serious inquiry into Americans’ attitudes toward it has been uncommon. No more.”
Working from World Values Survey data from 1995 to 2011, Miller and Davis discovered that:
“White Americans who would not want an immigrant/foreign worker, someone who spoke a different language, or someone from a different race as a neighbor are more likely to support strongman rule in the United States, rule of the U.S. government by the army, and are more likely to outright reject having a democracy for the United States. These findings are robust across multiple model specifications we analyze and report in the appendix as well.”
Their study documents the strong correlation between White America’s bigotry and proto-fascist leanings. Once White America perceives that the benefits of democracy are being extended to “others” their commitment to democracy is quickly abandoned. Like a child playing a board game, if they can’t win, they won’t play.
But this hardly comes as a surprise to the rest of America:
“[White] American citizens have not historically exhibited the sort of lofty, normative commitments to things like equality and tolerance that we might expect from one of the richest and longest-running continuous electoral democracies in the world. As Sullivan and Transue (1999) note, most citizens were willing to apply double standards that afforded one set of rights to popular groups while denying rights to more extreme or less popular groups.”
Tinkering with Capitalism may sound like a plan, but Democrats need to do a better of job of defending democracy. The surest way to do this is by defending the rights of all citizens and opposing every institution of an authoritarian, surveillance, and police state America. Once Democrats are back in power – unless they roll back the Patriot Act, stop the endless wars, pare back the military budget, dismantle FISA courts and institute sweeping reforms of the criminal justice system and ensure police accountability – they will have done nothing to rescue what’s left of our shredded democracy.
The day after is a good time to reflect on what you’ve done. Whether it’s drinking, casual sex, or Memorial Day.
On Memorial Day American newspapers, both conservative and liberal, are littered with variants of “thank you for your service.” The jingoistic lie that seventeen years of endless war has somehow kept us safe grates on me every time I read it. In fact, the opposite is true. Destroying Iraq, Libya, and Syria has not made us safer. It has made the world a more frightening place and invited retaliation by those radicalized by our militarism. Creating a ring around Iran and supporting ruthless regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, the Philippines, and elsewhere has not strengthened our democracy. It has hastened the appearance of our own Orange Mussolini.
The military today is a mercenary force. People enlist for money and the many benefits we refuse to give other citizens – among them free college education, healthcare, and preferential hiring. Some serve because they have no qualms about traveling halfway around the world to kill those doing no harm to us. Please, let’s not paint them with the same brush as the Greatest Generation.
Instead of saying “thank you for your service” I would ask our warriors what, in fact, they have done to protect me. Did killing an entire Iraqi family at a roadside checkpoint make me safer? Did killing thousands of innocent civilians by drone make me safer? What enduring signs of success in Iraq and Afghanistan can you point to with pride and say — “I did that!”
There are no satisfactory answers to any of these questions. There is only the objective truth that the endless wars go on, benefiting no one but defense contractors, destroying lives and nations. No matter how many parades and flags and speeches we throw at this reality, the truth remains – the blood on the hands of American warriors has served no purpose, and our national veneration serves only to protect them from the remorse that any other man would be expected to show when accounting for his sins.
Scaremongers are busy trying to convince House legislators that one of the FY2019 budget amendments will end life as we know it and plunge the Commonwealth into lawlessness and anarchy. So I have an idea — let’s actually read it ourselves. But first, some context.
The Massachusetts Senate just approved its version of the FY2019 budget, adding several key provisions of the Safe Communities Act as Amendment #1147. These provisions prevent officers of the Commonwealth from being used as federal immigration agents. Police cooperation with federal agencies, including tracking residents in a federal “Muslim” (or other) registry, will be regulated and standardized. Police officers can’t simply go rogue and become junior G-men on the state’s dime. They, like the rest of us, will be subject to Massachusetts law.
Almost one half of Amendment #1147 concerns the establishment of registries. The heart of the budget amendment is the same heart found in the Bill of Rights — everyone, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to know the charges against them, see them in writing, and have a lawyer present during interrogation. Equally important, there is nothing in this legislation barring police from investigating or detaining anyone associated with a crime.
But Charlie Baker has threatened to veto the amendments. Anti-immigrant groups and the extreme right misrepresent them as a threat to public safety. Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson — like Trump, never one to worry about truth — goes so far as to accuse the Senate super-majority which passed the budget amendments of siding with criminals: “This is a case of the lawmakers protecting lawbreakers at the expense of people whose safety they were sworn to uphold.”
In the language of Hodgson’s own immigrant father — this is pure bollocks. Hodgson especially dislikes one of the provisions because it’s going to negatively impact his career as a mouthpiece for FAIR, a white supremacist anti-immigrant organization. He just might have to get back to addressing his own prison suicides, recidivism rates among the highest in the state, the Securus kickback scandal, and five current lawsuits for mal- and misfeasance.
But I digress. So, without further ado, let’s read the budget amendment.
Messrs. Eldridge and Lewis, Ms. L’Italien, Mr. Brownsberger, Ms. Friedman, Ms. Jehlen, Messrs. Hinds and Barrett, Ms. Chang-Diaz, Mr. Crighton, Ms. Creem, Messrs. DiDomenico, Boncore, Welch, Cyr and Lesser, Ms. O’Connor Ives and Mr. Collins moved that the proposed new text be amended by adding the following:
SECTION XX. Chapter 147 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:-
Section 63. (a) As used in this section, the following words shall have the following meanings, unless the context clearly requires otherwise:
“Civil immigration detainer request”, any request by a federal immigration officer authorized under 8 C.F.R. section 287.7 or by any other authorized party, including any request made using federal form I-247A, I-247D or I-247N, asking a non-federal law enforcement agency, officer or employee to maintain custody of a person once that person is released from local custody or to notify the United States Department of Homeland Security of the person’s release.
“Law enforcement agency”, any state, municipal, college or university police department, sheriff’s department, correctional facility, prosecutorial office, court, or program of one or more of the foregoing entities, or any other non-federal entity in the commonwealth charged with the enforcement of laws or the custody of detained persons.
“United States Department of Homeland Security”, the United States Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs and Border Protection, and any other federal agency charged with the enforcement of immigration laws.
Police only inquire about immigration status when the law requires it
No officer or employee of a law enforcement agency, while acting under color of law, shall inquire about the immigration status of an individual unless such inquiry is required by federal or state law; provided that a judge or magistrate may make such inquiries as are necessary to adjudicate matters within their jurisdiction.
Police will be trained on the requirements of this law
All law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth shall, within 12 months of passage of this act, incorporate information regarding lawful and unlawful inquiries about immigration status into their regular introductory and in-service training programs. If a law enforcement agency receives a complaint or report that an officer or employee has inquired about an individual’s immigration status when such inquiry is not required by law, the agency shall investigate and take appropriate disciplinary or other action.
A detained person must be provided a copy of his detainer
If a law enforcement agency has in its custody a person who is the subject of a civil immigration detainer request or a non-judicial warrant, the agency shall promptly provide the person, and his or her attorney if the person is represented by an attorney, with a copy of such detainer request or non-judicial warrant, and any other documentation the agency possesses pertaining to the person’s immigration case.
DHS interviews require consent and preserve the right to an attorney
An interview between a United States Department of Homeland Security agent and a person in the custody of a law enforcement agency conducted for immigration enforcement purposes shall take place only if the person in custody has given consent to the interview by signing a consent form that explains the purpose of the interview, that the interview is voluntary, and that the person may decline to be interviewed or may choose to be interviewed only with an attorney present. The consent form shall be prepared by the office of the attorney general and made available to law enforcement agencies in English and other languages commonly spoken in Massachusetts. The office of the attorney general may work with interested not-for-profit organizations to prepare translations of the written consent form. The law enforcement agency shall make best efforts to provide a consent form that is in a language that the person understands, and to provide interpretation if needed, to obtain the person’s informed consent.
If the person in custody indicates that he or she wishes to have an attorney present for the interview, the law enforcement agency shall allow him or her to contact such attorney, and in the case that no attorney can be present, the interview shall not take place; provided, however, that the law enforcement agency shall not be responsible for the payment of the person’s attorney’s fees and expenses.
State employees may not be used as federal immigration officers
SECTION XX. Chapter 126 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:-
Section 40. Agreements to Enforce Federal Law.
No officer or employee of any agency, executive office, department, board, commission, bureau, division or authority of the commonwealth or any political subdivision thereof, with the exception of the department of correction, shall perform the functions of an immigration officer, whether pursuant to 8 U.S.C. section 1357(g) or any other law, regulation, or policy, whether formal or informal. Any agreements inconsistent with this section are null and void.
No cooperation with a federal “Muslim” or other registry
SECTION XX. Chapter 30 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:-
Section 66. (a) Under no circumstances shall the commonwealth, any political subdivision thereof, or any employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions, establish any operation or program that requires, or has the effect of causing, persons to register or check in based in whole or in part on their religion, national origin, nationality, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or age, or maintain any records system, government file or database for the purpose of registering persons based in whole or in part on those categories.
In the event that any federal government operation or program requires, or has the effect of causing, persons to register or check in based in whole or in part on their religion, national origin, nationality, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or age, including but not limited to any such operation or program created pursuant to 8 United States Code, sections 1302(a) and 1303(a):
no resources of the commonwealth or any political subdivision thereof shall be expended in the enforcement or implementation of such registry or check-in program;
no employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions shall access, or seek to access, any information maintained pursuant to such registry or check-in program; and
no employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions shall provide or disclose or offer to provide or disclose information to, or respond to a request for information from, such registry or check-in program.
This section shall not apply to any government operation or program that: (1) merely collects and compiles data about nationals of a foreign country entering or exiting the United States; or (2) issues visas, grants United States citizenship, confers an immigration benefit, or temporarily or permanently protects noncitizens from removal.
Nothing in this section shall prohibit or restrain the commonwealth, any political subdivision thereof, or any employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions, from sending to, or receiving from, any local, state, or federal agency, information regarding citizenship or immigration status, consistent with Section 1373 of Title 8 of the United States Code.
The wording of Montigny’s bill was similar to Massachusetts House bill H.825, filed only two days earlier by state Representative Carlos Gonzalez, and co-sponsored by Carole Fiola, Russell Holmes, and Bud Williams. The House version had more teeth — it required that “the cost of local and long distance telephone service provided to prisoners in department of correction facilities and county houses of correction shall be the same as the rates charged for comparable residential telephone service.” Like the Senate version, Gonzalez’s bill also sought to put an end to kickbacks.
A second House bill, H.966, with identical wording, was filed not long after by Representative Chyna Tyler, and co-sponsored by Mike Connolly, Tricia Farley-Bouvier, Paul Heroux, Mary Keefe, Kay Khan, Elizabeth Malia, Juana Matias, Timothy Whelan, Bud Williams, and Senator James Eldridge.
These two House bills were identical to H.1614, which had been filed two years earlier by Benjamin Swan, and co-sponsored by Gloria Fox, Elizabeth Malia, Ellen Story, Carolos Gonzalez, and Mary Keefe. This 2015 version was placed on the back-burner until October 2016, when House Speaker Bob DeLeo scuttled it by sending it off for “study.”
Despite impressive work by the Legislature, the price-gouging and anti-corruption provisions in all these inmate phone service bills never made it into the Criminal Justice Omnibus bill, S.2371, passed recently and signed into law. Instead, legislators decided to punt these matters to a Department of Corrections “study”:
“The department of correction, in consultation with the department of telecommunications and cable, shall study and report on: (i) the cost of local and long-distance telephone service provided to prisoners in department of correction facilities and houses of correction; (ii) a comparison of the rates with comparable residential telephone service; and (iii) information relative to commissions and revenue collected as part of telephone services provided to prisoners in department of correction facilities and houses of correction. The report shall be filed with the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on the judiciary, the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on public safety and security and the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on telecommunications, utilities and energy not later than December 31. 2018.”
Unfortunately, the Department of Corrections has a glaring conflict of interest. The DOC itself profits from prison phone contract kickbacks, so it will be interesting to see what sorts of justifications they cook up for maintaining their own cushy deal with Securus.
It’s shameful and jaw-dropping but, despite commendable individual efforts, the Legislature has shown that it is unwilling to end the sleazy practices of price-gouging a mainly indigent prison population and permitting public officials to acccept kickbacks.
As promised, I’m sending you the Action Alert I promised last week.
With hope fading for protections for our immigrant neighbors, sitting around doing nothing is not an option. There are several key pieces of Safe Communities legislation that can still make it into the 2019 state budget as amendments. These provisions have broad public support and give critical protections to all immigrants, regardless of status.
Sen. Jamie Eldridge, sponsor of the Safe Communities Act, has filed an amendment advancing four key protections from the bill. His amendment has a good chance of succeeding but we need to get as many Senators as possible to endorse it — and be ready to fight for it.
The “ask” from Senators is simple — take a stand for immigrant families in the Commonwealth by co-sponsoring Senator Eldridge’s amendment #1147. We also want Senators to oppose Senator Fattman’s amendment #1136, which would allow police to detain people for federal immigration authorities.
We are also asking for support for Senator Eldridge’s amendment #176, to boost funding for adult basic education and English classes from $31 million to $34.5 million, and Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr’s amendment #658, to boost funding for the Citizenship for New Americans (CNAP) program from $400,000 to $500,000. Not only should we encourage eligible immigrants to become U.S. citizens — we should provide adequate program funding.
Hello, my name is __________ and I live in [city or town]. I am calling to urge Senator [name] to take a stand for immigrant families by co-sponsoring Senator Eldridge’s amendment #1147. I urge the Senator to advocate with Senate leadership, and vote for the amendment when it comes to the floor. I also support amendment #176 to boost funding for ESL programs, and amendment #658 to boost funding for the CNAP program. In addition, the Senator should OPPOSE Sen. Fattman’s amendment #1136, which would end protections gained under the Lunn decision. Massachusetts should be taking the lead in protecting immigrant families. Anything less in the Trump era is unacceptable. Thank you for taking my call!
Call the Senate Leadership:
You can reach Senate President Harriette Chandler at 617-722-1500 and Senate Ways & Means Chairwoman Karen Spilka at 617-722-1640. The message for them:
Hello, my name is __________ and I live in [city or town]. I am calling to urge President Chandler / Chairwoman Spilka to take a stand for immigrant families by supporting Senator Eldridge’s amendment #1147 and OPPOSING Sen. Fattman’s amendment #1136, which would end the protections we won under the Lunn decision. I also urge support for amendment #176 to boost funding for ESL programs, and amendment #658 to boost funding for the CNAP program. Massachusetts should be taking the lead in protecting immigrant families. Anything less in the Trump era is unacceptable. Thank you for taking my call!
Want to make things really easy? Use MIRA’s Phone2Action tool, which automatically connects you — no need to look up names or phone numbers! Keep your call short and sweet. Call volume matters: we want to demonstrate overwhelming support for Senator Eldridge’s amendment. If you get a voicemail, make sure to leave your name, address and phone number!
What else can I do?
Call your Senator and Senate leaders today! Then forward this message to everyone you know. And for the greatest impact, sign up to phone bank with the ACLU on May 17, 22 and/or 23!
American democracy begins with the word “we.” We the People. It’s a tiny word with a Napoleon complex: a third person pronoun appropriate to any group to which the speaker belongs. It seems so obvious yet the meaning of “we” has always been a bit dishonest, and the groups to which “we” belong equally so.
David Swanson’s book Curing Exceptionalism makes this point. In an interview discussing the book Swanson says that, if there is any hope of ending American Exceptionalism, citizens need to be very clear about what is meant when the word is invoked. “‘We just bombed Syria.’ — I didn’t bomb Syria. Did you?” he asks. “At least part of the time, try to see if you can make ‘we’ mean a smaller or larger group than a nation.”
When a white supremacist says “we are a nation of laws” while advocating for the deportation of brown people, what he really means is that current laws apply to brown people, not the colonists who took the land from them. That’s a whole different “we.”
Or when a liberal repudiates torture because “this is not who we are,” he’s speaking only for himself and not about the torture long practiced by police, the military, or foreign despots trained at American institutions like the School of the Americas. Torturers are most certainly who we are.
Sometimes the problem is that state propaganda uses “we” when referring to government policies it wants citizens to rally around. Dissidents, such as young Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation, say “not in my name” to make it clear that their views differ from what are assumed to be mainstream Jewish views about Israel.
Sometimes the problem is that “we” are ignorant of belonging to a group or even knowing much about that group. Most White Americans, for example, don’t really think of ourselves as a separate racial category. We don’t recognize white privilege and we don’t question its generational benefits. After all, we’re the “default.” Everyone else is a category — at least until you start trying to see through another man’s eyes.
And this brings us back to American Exceptionalism, nationalism, and overt racism. All are founded on the notion that “we” have some God-given right to privileged status — whether it be a white man in the boardroom or the American ambassador at the UN Security Council. It matters little that White America spans different European (and non-European) cultures, languages, socioeconomic and educational levels. Like an AMEX card, membership has its privileges. When an individual chooses membership in a “we” based on a ridiculous proposition — that skin color, religion or nationality say more about us than common struggles and interests — that choice is clearly all about the privilege.
The more you ponder the word, the less “we’ makes much sense. Though long banished from polite conversation, Americans having an honest reckoning with race and class would do the most to transform a scatter of unhappy, divided individuals into a truer version of the word”we.”
And only after we have sorted out our common domestic identity will we be able to sit down at the UN as just one nation among many others.
Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” has little to do with greatness — and his supporters damn well know it. In word and deed the GOP has become the party of white racism and xenophobia. You’d think Democrats would want to do a better job of standing up for multiculturalism and human decency.
That’s what you’d think.
So it’s difficult to understand why, nationally, so little has been done to help DACA recipients as they twist in the wind. Or why Massachusetts House Speaker Bob DeLeo has done everything he can to shelve the Safe Communities Act (SCA) — not to mention most progressive pieces of legislation. Even a compromise SCA bill, which gave assurances to law enforcement, has gone nowhere.
With hope fading for protections for our immigrant neighbors, sitting around doing nothing is not an option. There are several key pieces of Safe Communities legislation that can still make it into the state budget as amendments. These provisions have broad public support and give critical protections to all immigrants, regardless of status.
Stay tuned. Next week the Massachusetts Safe Communities Coalition will be calling upon everyone to take to the phone banks and call up state legislators to approve these amendments. I will be forwarding details.
Say yes to multiculturalism. Say yes to human decency.
Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” has little to do with greatness — and his supporters damn well know it. In word and deed the GOP has become the party of white racism and xenophobia. You’d think Democrats would want to do a better job of standing up for multiculturalism and human decency.
That’s what you’d think.
So it’s difficult to understand why, nationally, so little has been done to help DACA recipients as they twist in the wind. Or why Massachusetts House Speaker Bob DeLeo has done everything he can to shelve the Safe Communities Act (SCA) — not to mention most progressive pieces of legislation. Even a compromise SCA bill, which gave assurances to law enforcement, has gone nowhere.
With hope fading for protections for our immigrant neighbors, sitting around doing nothing is not an option. There are several key pieces of Safe Communities legislation that can still make it into the state budget as amendments. These provisions have broad public support and give critical protections to all immigrants, regardless of status.
Stay tuned. Next week the Massachusetts Safe Communities Coalition will be calling upon everyone to take to the phone banks and call up state legislators to approve these amendments. I will be forwarding details.
Say yes to multiculturalism. Say yes to human decency.
This is a story that could have been predicted in 2010.
On April 4th, Diante Yarber was gunned down in a hail of bullets in a Wal*Mart parking lot by four Barstow policemen. Yarber was killed and two others who were sitting in the car were seriously injured. The Washington Post added Diante to its growing list of police victims for 2018, noting that we are already ahead of last year’s figures by 26 fatalities.
Police claimed Yarber had stolen the car he was driving; it turned out to be his cousin’s. Police claimed he rammed two of their cruisers; but Yarber’s car was not found to have been in a collision, though it was destroyed by a fusillade of bullets. Police offered no reason for trying to kill four black passengers for a supposed property crime. But then nothing about the police account of the story makes much sense.
As an elected official with the sworn duty to pursue justice, DA Ramos must indict Jose Barrientos, Vincent Carrillo, Matthew Allen Helms – and Jimmie Alfred Walker, who screamed racial slurs and threatened Diante’s life just before murdering him.
Walker has a history of racially motivated violence. In 2010 sheriffs were called to the scene for a disturbance in Hesperia, San Bernardino County, and after their arrival Walker used racial slurs in their presence. After an initial plea deal, Walker was charged with assault and a hate crime, and then fired.
And that should have been the end of Walker’s license to kill. But following arbitration the racist officer was rehired and paid nearly $200,000 in back pay — only to escalate his hate into murder eight years later.
Dartmouth (MA) Rep. Chris Markey’s Amendment #1174 to H4400 (the FY2019 budget) was written to broaden wiretapping in the Commonwealth because — he claims — rising crime rates make it necessary:
“The general court further finds that within the commonwealth there has been an increase in violence, with and without weapons, that has taken the lives of many. Such acts are not the product of highly organized and disciplined groups. […] Therefore, the general court finds that the use of [modern electronic surveillance devices] devices by law enforcement officials, as it relates to investigations of violent offenses, must be conducted under strict judicial supervision and without the need to prove that a highly organized and disciplined group committed such violent acts.”
But Markey’s amendment is based on fiction. Crime in Massachusetts is not increasing. It is actually falling and has been since about 1992. Last September the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety released figures from the FBI showing that, once again, Massachusetts crime had fallen by 6.3%. The MetroWest Daily News dug into the FBI’s figures and showed that, while violent crime has risen nationally, it remains static in Massachusetts with rates significantly lower than national averages. For example, the national murder rate is 5.3 per 100,000. In Massachusetts that number is 2.0. In 2016 the Commonwealth (with a population of almost 7 million) had 134 murders compared with 486 in Tennessee, a state with roughly the same population.
But worse than being dishonest with the public about crime rates, Markey’s amendment lowers the bar on legal requirements for wiretaps and electronic surveillance. Surveillance today rarely target only the suspected offender. Cell tower dumps, for example, compromise the privacy of everyone who has connected to the tower. Stingrays, WiFi and packet sniffing are also pretty indiscriminate.
Markey’s amendment, and Republican Bradley Jones’ companion amendment #515, are efforts to sneak bad legislation into the budget — legislation that police and district attorneys have long wanted. The ACLU notes that “prosecutors in Massachusetts can [ALREADY] obtain all of this information and more without any judicial oversight. And a recent ACLU investigation shows they’re using this power extensively, and largely in the dark.” Markey’s legislation does nothing to improve judicial oversight. But it makes surveillance much easier for prosecutors to abuse.
In filing his amendment, Markey reveals that his old law enforcement buddies are his true constituents — not the average citizen who is getting damn tired of having everyone from spy agencies to socal networks violating his privacy every minute of the day.
Progressive Massachusetts is asking voters to call or email state representatives to preserve the best — and reject the worst — of a lengthy list of proposed amendments to the FY2019 House Budget.
Most of the amendments are quite positive — funding for recently-passed criminal justice reforms, education, environment, and for the state’s most vulnerable citizens. Many amendments reflect policy changes needed in education, immigration, policing, transportation, the environment, and public assistance. You can find a full list of the amendments here.
But Republicans — and one Dartmouth state representative — have sneaked in policy amendments which either gut or damage civil rights and civil liberties protections:
Amendments 113 (Lombardo), 227 (Diehl), and 347 (Lyons), which would would create even broader authority for police to detain immigrants or punish the 31 cities and towns that have adopted measures to limit police participation in immigration enforcement.
Amendment 508 (Jones), which would attempt to pass Governor Baker’s unconstitutional proposal to overturn the Lunn decision via the budget.
Amendments 515 (Jones) and 1174 (Markey), which would expand state wiretap powers to “listen in” on a wider range of personal communication.
Amendment 979 (Howitt), which would curtail the right to free expression, namely the use of economic boycotts against foreign governments (recall the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa). This legislation was originally co-sponsored by several local state representatives who should be asked to repudiate their previous support for it.
Unfortunately Dartmouth Democratic Rep. Christopher Markey uniquely joins Republicans Diehl, Howitt, Jones, Lombardo, and Lyons in Progressive Massachusetts’ rogue’s gallery.
The House votes on the amendments next week — so it’s critical you call or email your representatives ASAP:
If Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, add it to a long list of atrocities and injustices perpetrated daily on this planet. To this same list we should also add Israel’s Passover massacre of civilians in Gaza, the genocide of the Rohingya, and dictatorships at work in Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt and dozens of other countries. To crimes against humanity we should also add our own “surgical strikes” by drones and missiles which have killed thousands of Syrians in our never-ending “War on Terror.”
But America is focused on Assad — not because we really care about Syrians or any of the other victims of brutality around the world — but because “regime change” is part and parcel of bending the Middle East toward American interests. It’s the height of hubris — playing god by remaking the world in our own image.
I have rarely known a year when the United States was not throwing its weight around, invading another country, murdering its citizens — sometimes by the hundreds of thousands or millions in the case of Viet Nam. If Americans really want to stamp out malign evil I suggest we start by looking in the mirror.
Start with the Boltons who advocate for war, the Hampels who torture in secret prisons and conceal the evidence from even Congress, the Trumps who use American military power for political dog-wagging, the Mattises who manage slaughter like a CEO rolling out a new product, and the many sociopaths in Congress who funnel national wealth away from the care of citizens into a vast war machine. We delude ourselves if we think the United States is the greatest force for good in the world. Quite the opposite. We are the most homicidal nation on the planet.
Which is why no one in their right mind would give one man — especially a volatile racist with dementia — sole power to wage war. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is quite clear that it is the responsibility of Congress to do the dirty work of waging wars:
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
Our unhinged president is sufficient example of why Congress must take back this grave responsibility from the Executive Office and must wield it responsibly and only with great reluctance.
Today Susan Tordella at End Mass Incarceration Together (EMIT) wrote about putting prison employees to work implementing rehabilitation programs for inmates. Tordella reminded us that more rehabilitation correlates strongly with less recidivism and wrote that European prisons have markedly lower rates than the United States because they focus on change, not punishment. Only about 2% of the governor’s $640 million Department of Corrections budget is earmarked for programs for incarcerated people — and much of this is outsourced.
So as long as the state has money for guards, Tordella asks, why not utilize all the skills of corrections officers? She suggests CO’s could “serve as [rehabilitation] program officers who share a skill and/or knowledge with the people in their care. The program can be practically anything — culinary, GED preparation/tutoring, plumbing, carpentry, writing, running a small business, yoga/mindfulness, college or high school classes, computer repair/programming, job skills, trauma awareness/healing, or sales and communication skills…”
What a great idea. And why couldn’t the same thing be done at the county level? We looked at pay stubs for all county prisons from the Comptroller of the Commonwealth for the first quarter of 2018, determined the number of employees, and extrapolated annual costs for each county. The state only publishes prison capacity figures for DOC facilities but someone pointed us toward county overcrowding reports from 2015 — the last year reported — so we at least had a reasonable snapshot of inmate counts for each county as well.
The table below does not represent all the costs of running a prison — technology, infrastructure, vehicles, power, maintenance, food, medical, education, or rehabilitation — much of it outsourced. But the table paints a good picture of how expensive just the corrections officers are. Looking only at salaries, the price tag is $42,474 per year (in jailer costs) to throw someone in a Massachusetts county jail. Far more if you include the rest. With this obscene amount of money being spent, shouldn’t taxpayers be trying to have fewer repeat offenders, more education, and effective rehabilitation?
Here in Massachusetts we spend half a BILLION dollars on just the jailers for our county jails. There are 6,629 men and women who put handcuffs on another 11,480 men and women in 14 county facilities and leave education and rehabilitation to others. There are very close to 2 prisoners for each staff person — or 6 per shift — which makes one wonder why more of these employees couldn’t be put to work implementing rehabilitation program services.
Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson spends a lot of time out of the office, organizing anti-immigration rallies on the Rio Grande, making appearances on right-wing talk shows — so frequently that he’s dropping the ball on keeping his inmates safe. Hodgson has the highest suicide rate in the Commonwealth and is now swimming in wrongful death and abuse suits. But that’s not the sheriff’s only problem. He also has some of the highest rates of recidivism — former inmates returning to prison. In fact, twice in the last five years Bristol County’s recidivism rates have topped all other counties.
The sheriff likes to tell voters his “get tough” prison policies discourage repeat offenders and keep the public safe: “Our firm, demanding approach to corrections works well,” he promised in one 2010 campaign ad. “Jail is not a country club. That’s why once you’ve done time in the Bristol County House of Corrections you won’t want to come back.”
Except for one problem — it’s completely untrue.
The Massachusetts Department of Corrections began compiling comparative statistics on 3-year recidivism rates for each county prison in 2012 — right about the time the sheriff made his dubious claims. Twice in the last five years Tom Hodgson has actually had the highest recidivism rates in the Commonwealth and when he’s not leading the pack he’s never far behind.
In 2009 the DOC began adding county data to prison releases. In 2012 it was ready to issue its first 3-year recidivism report. Of those released from county jails in 2009, after 3 years Bristol County had the highest recidivism rate of all counties (49%). Of those released in 2010 the county was 4th highest (of 13) with a rate of 44%. Hodgson maintained his 4th-highest ranking again with 2011 releases, scoring a 3-year recidivism rate of 38%. For 2012 releases Bristol County again had the highest recidivism rate in the state — 43%. The last figures we have from the Massachusetts Department of Corrections are for releases from Bristol County jails in 2013, showing a 3-year rate of 34% — Hodgson’s lowest in the last five years but still higher than the state average of 32%. You can view the reports yourself at https://www.mass.gov/lists/research-yearly-reports#three-year-recidivism-rates.
While recidivism surely involves individual choices, high and persistent recidivism is also typical of inadequate rehabilitation programs, bad prison policies, neglect, and abuse of inmates. Tom Hodgson’s punitive approach consists of overcrowding, deprivation, starvation, overuse of solitary confinement, denial of effective drug treatment programs and family visitation, and gouging inmates for canteen and phone calls. Unfortunately this abuse actually ensures that offenders leave prison without ever acquiring the necessary skills and treatment to stay out for good. And the number of hours the sheriff spends weekly promoting his racist immigration views — while shirking his real duties — seem to distract him from running his facilities humanely and efficiently.
Somebody needs to chain the sheriff to his desk so he can get prison suicides and recidivism under control. Hodgson’s abuse of prisoners isn’t doing anybody any good — neither the inmates nor their families, nor taxpayers footing the bill for legal expenses and award settlements resulting from his incompetent and cruel practices.
September 4th seems a long way off, but the Massachusetts Democratic primary will be here before we know it. Voters have a choice between three decent Democratic challengers and a Republican governor whose positions on taxes, criminal justice and immigration are squarely, and terribly, Republican.
From the sound of it the Democratic Governors Association has already conceded the November election to Baker, as an article by Joshua Miller at the Globe suggests. It also appears likely that the DGA will close its purse to whomever wins the Democratic gubernatorial primary. As if that were not bad enough, a recent statement from one of the challengers now threatens the criminal justice omnibus bill just passed by the legislature.
Last week former Newton Mayor Setti Warren wrote a piece in Blue Mass Group spelling out his objections to the omnibus bill now awaiting governor Baker’s signature: “I had to tell my friends in the legislature, many of whom I admire greatly, that I would have vetoed their bill if I were governor. I could not in good conscience sign any bill that creates new mandatory minimum sentences. They are discriminatory, ineffective, and lead to mass incarceration.”
Blogger “Hester Prynne” replied to Warren, “how would you intend that your veto be received by the overwhelming majorities who voted in its favor (including every member of the Democratic party) and who would say your veto throws the baby out with the bathwater?” — to which Warren replied, “I want people to know that there are some lines I just won’t cross in the name of ‘compromise.’ We know that mandatory minimums target black and brown people. Even though we are only ~20% of the population of Mass, black and brown people make up 73% of those sentenced to mandatory minimum sentences.”
Other responses to Warren’s posting included:
“I have to admire the instinct that says, no. Really no more at all.”
“No user is going to be selling 10 grams of fentanyl to other users, given the strength of fentanyl. This undermines Mayor Warren’s position that this mandatory minimum targets communities of color, as the person being targeted for this crime is selling a substance that, when cut, could kill hundreds of people suffering from a substance abuse disorder.”
“It really does sound like you are getting the perfect in the way of the good. […] I fear more people will suffer under current mandatory minimum laws than [under] the proposed changes.”
A single dose of pure fentanyl is less than 2 milligrams and costs between $20 and $30. Ten grams represents 5,000 doses or $100,000. Even cut 10-to-1 or more, the number of doses would still be in the hundreds.
My own view of the controversy is that Warren is right about the evils of mandatory minimums — but he’s wrong to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Even with new minimums for a limited subset of fentanyl trafficking, the legislature’s criminal justice reforms address many current problems with sentencing, prisons, probation, young offenders, decriminalize offenses and raise the threshold for others, create diversion programs, and should result in a substantial net reduction in mass incarceration. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater was not just a bad call, but irresponsible, because Warren sent the Republican governor a message of support for a veto of long-awaited and much-needed reforms. And Baker is now signalling that he wants more law-and-order changes.
After meeting Warren last year, I really wanted to like the guy. But his positions, or rather, his “adaptability” in changing and holding conflicting positions, really makes it difficult. Warren has had consistently progressive views on civil rights, abortion, energy, education, immigration, and revenue. But raising revenue shouldn’t involve corporate giveaways — and in 2011 he supported permanent R&D tax credits and reductions in business taxes. Now, in 2017, he’s singing a different tune. In 2011 Warren, who never misses a chance to talk about his family’s relationship to the military, was all for throwing anything and everything at terrorism; in 2017 he’s in favor of drawing down the many U.S. wars of choice.
Warren endorsed 5 of 8 pieces of Our Revolution’s “People’s Platform” — single payer, free college, $15 minimum wage (minus the cost of living increases), abortion, and automatic voter registration — but Keith Ellison’s “Inclusive Prosperity Act,” a revenue tool which taxes Wall Street transactions and would raise $300 billion in revenue — that was a bridge too far. Likewise, Warren refused to support Jeff Merkley’s “Keep it in the Ground Act,” which prohibits coal and oil field giveaways. Most telling, Setti Warren refused to support Bernie Sanders’ “Justice is Not for Sale Act of 2015,” which would have disentangled the U.S. government from the private prison industry.
After all this, it’s only fair to ask — does Warren really support criminal justice reform or not?
For me, this latest kerfuffle is a symptom of the bad judgment that comes of trying to hold inconsistent views simultaneously. You can’t be a centrist and a progressive at the same time. Setti Warren is a case in point.
On April 4th both houses of the Massachusetts legislature passed long-overdue criminal justice reforms. A huge omnibus bill now awaits Charlie Baker’s signature and Democrats will soon learn how moderate a Republican the governor really is. If the bill is signed and reforms make it into law, then next steps in fixing abuses of the criminal justice system should include police accountability and prison reform.
American courts are filled with brown and black and poor people guilty of relatively minor economic and drug offenses. Offenders are processed by zealous DA’s and the courts move them efficiently along a carceral assembly line greased by plea deals. Following often long and severe jail time devoid of any rehabilitation, a prisoner’s remaining rights and dignity are stolen. Former inmates can’t vote, they can’t find jobs, and they frequently have nowhere to live. The Pell Center described this irrational and costly mean-spiritedness:
“Americans are imprisoned for crimes that may not lead to prison sentences in other countries such as passing bad checks, minor drug offenses, and other non-violent crimes. Also, prisoners in the United States are often incarcerated for a lot longer than in other countries. For instance, burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England. [And] with an emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation, U.S. prisoners are often released with no better skills to cope in society and are offered little support after their release, increasing the chances of re- offending.”
On April 3rd WGBH’s Greater Boston ran a segment on one prison reform measure that could return a little rationality to the American criminal justice system. Investigator Cristina Quinn looked at Middlesex Sheriff Peter Koutoujian’s program for youthful offenders focused on rehabilitation, based on German practices recommended by the Vera Institute, and first pioneered at Connecticut’s Cheshire Correctional Institution.
According to Quinn, German prison reforms are based on a post-Holocaust Constitution which affirms human dignity. In addition, Germany’s 1976 Prison Act specifically defines prison as rehabilitation and tries to make the experience useful for both prisoner and society. The Prison Act’s first principles state:
By serving his prison sentence the prisoner shall be enabled in future to lead a life in social responsibility without committing criminal offences (objective of treatment).
Life in penal institutions should be approximated as far as possible to general living conditions.
Any detrimental effects of imprisonment shall be counteracted.
Imprisonment shall be so designed as to help the prisoner to reintegrate himself into life at liberty.
Cruel and pointless punishments are expressly prohibited.
Even municipal laws in Germany protect prisoners. In 2008 Berlin passed a Juvenile Detention Act which gives special protection to young offenders. Berlin’s 2010 Remand Centre Act protects those in detention who have not [yet] been convicted of a crime. A 2011 Berlin ordinance governs how prisoner data can be used. A 2013 Preventive Detention Act rules that inmates kept in preventive detention beyond their sentences (such as sex or violent offenders with psychiatric problems) have the right to extra housing and treatment options.
The incarceration rate in the USA is 8-9 times higher than in Western Europe. At present ours is 666 per 100,000 citizens. In contrast, Canada’s is 114; Germany’s 77. Berlin, with a population of 3.5 million, has 2,800 inmates in its 8 prisons (a rate of 80 / 100,000). In Bristol County, with a population of 561,000, the county jail has 1,400 prisoners in 3 facilities — an incarceration rate of 250 / 100,000. Bristol County has a recidivism rate of 34% in a state with an average recidivism rate of 32% over 3 years.
A 2005 study conducted by the Justice Department tracked 400,000 offenders throughout 30 states and calculated a national recidivism rate of 76% over 5 years. A 2005 U.S. Sentencing Commission study found that almost half of all federal offenders were re-arrested within 8 years. One way to look at it is that 2.5 million incarcerated Americans form a small nation of hopeless savages. Or so the law-and-order types tell us.
But a contrarian view held by William Rhodes argues that the reverse is true — that, nationally, two-thirds of all offenders never return to prison and only 11% return to prison more than once. The problem with the Justice Department statistics, Rhodes writes, is that “offenders who repeatedly return to prison are like frequent mall visitors — they are overrepresented in samples used to estimate the rate at which offenders return to prison.”
“Locking up the same people over and over points to failures in the American penal system,” as one study noted. But whatever the precise percentage of recidivists, the fact remains — American prisons don’t spend much effort on rehabilitation. Norway, with an incarceration rate of 75 per 100,000, invests in rehabilitation and socialization and does not torment its offenders for life. As a result Norway has one of the world’s lowest recidivism rates — 20% compared with 52% in the United States. It is not surprising to discover that one of Norway’s maximum security prisons, Bastoy, with a recidivism rate of 16%, is run by a clinical psychologist and its guards receive three years of training.
Even in more traditional European prison settings one does not find the deprivation, starvation, isolation, and brutality of American institutions. An English-language brochure from Berlin’s Department for Justice and Consumer Protection describes their focus on helping inmates: “Taken as a whole, the Berlin prison system views itself as a system of enforcing therapy and treatment designed to address both the deficits of prisoners and their competences.”
Since 1980 a massive prison services industry has developed in the U.S. and segments of it serve even states without private prisons. Inmates are gouged at prison stores or for usurious telephone and video conferencing schemes. Outsourced medical, drug, and psychological services of questionable quality may be provided or denied at whim. Food throughout U.S. prisons is often substandard or insufficient. Abusive corrections officers, arbitrary solitary confinement, and overcrowded facilities are all too common hallmarks of American prisons. In some institutions prisoners are denied family visits.
In a German Justizvollzugsanstalt (prison), or JVA, cells are open during the day, inmates cook for themselves, and the law guarantees family visits. Inmates wear their own clothes, live in dorm-like clusters with other inmates, may receive gifts from their families, and obtain outside psychological and drug treatment services. Of course, prisoners are still locked up — but they don’t forget, or they learn, the importance of getting along in society.
Programs like this — and corresponding legal protections for the incarcerated — are necessary so long as we deprive shocking numbers of our fellow citizens of their liberty.
In The House of the Dead Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If Dostoevsky was right, then the jailers — and not our incarcerated neighbors — may be the true nation of savages.
Math and language are both quite clear what “all” means. If some parts of a whole are missing, overlooked, undervalued, forgotten — or routinely shot by police — then it’s nonsense to say that “all lives matter.” The hundreds of black people — many unarmed — whose lives are ended by police each year is a testament to how little black lives really do seem to matter — and the severity of a national crisis that demands comprehensive police reform and accountability.
Tanisha Anderson, Sandra Bland, Rumain Brisbon, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Akai Gurley, Eric Harris, Laquan McDonald, Dante Parker, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling. And now, most recently: Saheed Vassell.
The names just keep adding up. In 2015 a Guardian headline reported the scope of this carnage: “Young black men killed by US police at highest rate in year of 1,134 deaths.” The Guardian found that young black men are nine times more likely than any other American to be killed by police. Brittany Packnett, a member of Obama’s White House task force on policing, called the killings an “epidemic.”
Fast forward to 2017 and we now have a very different White House. When fielding a question about the 2016 killing of Alton Sterling by two Baton Rouge policemen, Trump’s spokeswoman called the killing a “local matter.” When pressed on the president’s responsibility to deal with an epidemic of police murders, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president’s role was to keep Americans safe from immigrants, to “grow the economy” and to avoid divisive issues. Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department, led by an unrepentant segregationist, wants to return to failed “broken windows” policing.
But we can’t blame everything on Trump and the Republican Party. For decades Americans have had better things to do than deal with police abuse.
In 1956 J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI set up the COINTELPRO program which, among other victims, targeted black dissident groups. It was inconceivable to White America that African-American unrest could be a response to second-class citizenship. Instead, dissidence was seen as a product of “outside agitation” by Communists and COINTELPRO was intended to “disrupt” and “neutralize” the agitators. In 1969 the FBI and Chicago police took “neutralization” to extremes when they murdered two Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clay, in their sleep during a pre-dawn raid. Besides African-American groups, the Justice Department and FBI also launched attacks on indigenous rights groups, the peace movement, and numerous organizations on the left.
In 1967 Lyndon Johnson commissioned the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, otherwise known as the Kerner Commission. The 1968 Kerner Report chastised White America for its racism, though the word “racism” only appeared in a summary of the full report. Its dismal prediction was: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The Kerner Report was attacked from both right and left and its recommendations were generally ignored.
Chapter 11 of the Kerner Report (“Police and the Community”) looked at the toxic relationship between police and African-American communities and offered a number of recommendations including: reviewing police operations and eliminating “abrasive” practices; improving security in black communities; countering “dual standards” in law enforcement; establishing avenues for grievances and police accountability; adopting policy guidelines for community policing; developing community outreach programs; recruiting more African-American police officers and ensuring equal promotion; and funding “junior police officer” programs for young people in the community. It never happened.
In 1998 the Heritage Foundation re-examined the Kerner Commission’s recommendations and concluded it was hogwash concocted by a “Who’s Who of liberal elites.” The real problem, the foundation’s white Conservatives decided, was that poverty, drugs, and crime were symptoms of liberal coddling: “The greatest barrier that the poor face is not racism; it is elitism.” And, specifically, the second-class citizenship of Blacks was the result of their own moral failure: “The crisis we face as a country is fundamentally spiritual, and its answer lies in supporting the moral centers of influence that exist in our communities.”
Fifty years later White America still won’t face reality. If Rodney King didn’t show us that something was seriously wrong with the LAPD in 1991 — or if Amadou Diallo didn’t demonstrate how savage the NYPD’s racism was in 1999 — or if revelations of the existence of racist torture centers run by the Chicago police didn’t shock us — then Michael Brown’s murder in 2014 couldn’t possibly faze us either. None of the shockingly routine murders of black and brown men and children we see on YouTube ever seem to prick our consciences or lead to meaningful police reform.
The United States is swimming in badges and guns. To whites the nation increasingly feels like a police state, though it has long been such to African-Americans. New York City, with a population of 8.5 million, has 35,000 officers — down from 40,000 in 2000. The U.S. has between 200 and 241 police officers for every 100,000 people. That’s about three quarters of a million officers. Many these policemen are armed with unprecedented military and surveillance gear. SWAT teams regularly deliver simple warrants or conduct raids for small amounts of marijuana. We’ve seen armed personnel carriers and tanks in city streets. And when police show up at a demonstration nowadays, they’re dressed and armed to kill.
Since 9-11 more than 2 million Americans have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Justice runs a program called COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) which provides grants to communities to turn “vets to cops.” In 2016 the DOJ handed out $119 million to help pay for approximately 900 policemen. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has created a recruitment guide for veterans, and veterans can use their GI Bill benefits while attending police academy. America increasingly says “thank you for your service” to its warriors by re-deploying them domestically.
But programs like these, and hiring practices that favor ex-military, have a serious downside. By prioritizing military experience over diversity, police departments put communities at risk. For example, the San Jose Police Department, a force with serious racism problems, sees veterans as naturals for the police “because we have a paramilitary structure, [and] military veterans often times can easily integrate.”
Then there is the residue of war. Ellen Kirshman, a psychologist who works with police officers, says that between 19% and 34% of all officers show some sign of PTSD: “This is pretty alarming. An officer with PTSD cannot think clearly. Is probably hyper vigilant, has a short fuse, may not be sleeping well because of nightmares, might be policing in a reckless manner…” And this is precisely what one frequently sees in videos of police encounters with black citizens.
One of the recommendations of the Kerner Report was what we might today call “community policing.” But this is a vague phrase that often translates to “public relations.” Citizen ride-alongs, walk-alongs, Police Athletic Leagues, toy drives, and pretty blue coffee mugs (like mine) are substitutes for real citizen oversight of hiring, management, and holding sworn peace officers to account.
But community policing has always been a vague buzzword — from the 1968 Kerner Commission to the 1970 Knapp Commission. Vague or not, last year Senator Jeanne Shaheen sponsored unanimously-adopted resolution S.288 recognizing “National Community Policing Week.” America may be a little hazy on what community policing actually entails — but we’re crystal clear that it shouldn’t involve oversight or accountability.
In 1991 Rep. William Edwards introduced H.R.2972, the Police Accountability Act of 1991. The bill made it “unlawful for any governmental authority to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives persons of their constitutional or statutory rights, privileges, or immunities.” The bill had only 10 co-sponsors and never made it out of committee.
In 2000 John Conyers Jr. sponsored H.R. 3927, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act of 2000, which sought to impose national standards on law enforcement as we currently do in education. It had only thirteen Democratic co-sponsors and never made it to a vote. In 2015 Conyers again filed H.R.2875, this time with 48 co-sponsors. But again it died.
In 2015 Rep. Henry Johnson Jr. sponsored H.R.1102, the Police Accountability Act of 2015, which had 15 co-sponsors and died. The bill amended “title 18, United States Code, to provide a penalty for assault or homicide committed by certain State or local law enforcement officers, and for other purposes.” Again in 2017 Johnson filed H.R.4331, with 8 lonely co-sponsors. Again, it died.
In 2017 Rep. Gwen Moore sponsored H.R. 3060, Preventing Tragedies between Police and Communities Act of 2017, which required that police departments receiving federal funding train officers in de-escalation techniques. The bill had only 24 co-sponsors and died in committee — having also failed in 2016.
In 2017 Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee sponsored H.R.47: Kalief’s Law, which sought to amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to provide for the humane treatment of youths in police custody. The bill had only one co-sponsor and there was never a roll call vote.
Whether a majority or minority in Congress, police accountability has never been a priority for Democrats or Republicans. E. Tammy Kim, in an excellent piece in the Nation (“What to Do About the Police”), writes that, “as it stands, the three branches of government are unwilling to regulate the police. Mayors and governors defer to police chiefs and union presidents; judges make cheesecloth of the Fourth and 14th Amendments; and legislators vote again and again to increase law-enforcement budgets.”
In a 2015 ruling the Supreme Court gave police broad latitude to shoot at citizens recklessly and with impunity, when it rejected a suit against a Texas police officer who fired into a car with a high power rifle from an overpass, paralyzing a driver. The officer joked: “How’s that for proactive?” Just this week the Supreme Court again ruled 7-2 in Kisela v. Hughes that police officers can not be sued for arbitrary and unnecessary shootings — effectively granting law enforcement a different set of Constitutional rights than the average citizen enjoys. In dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling another sign of “unflinching willingness” to protect rogue cops and wrote that the decision “transforms the doctrine [of qualified immunity] into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.”
White America may have no appetite for dealing with the racism at the heart of so much police abuse, but we could still hire cops who better represent communities and hold the bad apples accountable. The National Urban League has proposed ten Police Reform and Accountability Recommendations and the ACLU and NAACP have proposed reforms as well.
If the Supreme Court sees police as above the law, then it is incumbent upon Congress to clarify the responsibilities of, and punishments for, sworn officers of the law. But this may be a long way off — or even impossible to achieve in many states. For this reason it is up to municipal voters to select district attorneys and mayors willing to investigate and prosecute police misconduct. It is up to municipalities to create oversight boards with real powers to conduct independent investigations. It is up to state attorneys general to conduct automatic investigations into any police killing. Citizens must know that they can observe and film officers doing their work and not be arrested for exercising their Constitutional right to do so. And yet some states have actually passed laws that limit police accountability.
America needs to begin taking its epidemic of police murders seriously and pass tough reform legislation. Voters need to start choosing politicians willing to take on the root causes of this epidemic. With one exception, every piece of reform legislation mentioned above was sponsored by an African-American. And that ought to tell you something — that if citizens really want police reform with teeth, then maybe we ought to vote for more candidates who have a personal stake in actually making it happen.
Felice Freyer at the Globe reports that the US Department of Justice is investigating violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act in Massachusetts jails. But Freyer adds that the investigation does not extend to county jails. Prisoners in county lockup basically undergo forced withdrawal (“cold turkey” treatment) because prisons “do not provide the two main medications to treat addiction — buprenorphine and methadone.”
Instead, “Massachusetts prisoners nearing discharge are offered a shot of Vivitrol, a drug that blocks the high from opioids for up to a month.” And that’s it. Vivitrol made news recently because the Trump administration’s opioid treatment plan is typical of his style of crony capitalism — “a single drug, manufactured by a single company, with mixed views on the evidence regarding its use.” Vivitrol will be the only drug treatment given federal prisoners.
Alkermes, the manufacturer of Vivitrol, works just like a real drug dealer. Through an “Inspiration Grant” Alkermes gave to the National Sheriff’s Association, prison staff and contractors get a “taste” of the drug, then are allowed to buy more with taxpayer money. No wonder that Vivitrol CEO Richard Pops says “the best days of Vivitrol are still ahead of it.”
It is unconscionable that our criminal justice system incarcerates people with drug addictions and then — instead of offering real treatment — administers a questionable drug upon leaving prison for the benefit of a single-source vendor. The Globe’s piece only confirms what ex-inmates have told BCCJ. Despite a quarter of a million dollar grant from the Feds for drug treatment, Bristol County is either squandering or simply pocketing the money. The main occupants of our county prisons are substance abusers — and their time spent in these harsh facilities always ends without meaningful drug rehabilitation.
Again, we implore state investigators — the Attorney General, the State Auditor, the governor, anyone who will listen — investigate the mis-treatment and non-treatment of people in our county prisons. Prison should be a place for rehabilitation, not abuse.
This is a night for celebrating Jewish liberation from slavery with friends and family. Jews first came to Egypt during a famine and lived as guests a short while, but then in a bitter turn became slaves under Pharaoh. Only after generations of suffering, and only by miracles and plagues demonstrated to Pharaoh and his sorcerers and military, were the Israelites able to gain their freedom. A final miracle — clearing a path for the Israelites across a dry sea bed — brought forty years of wandering in the desert before the establishment of their own kingdom.
This, in a nutshell, is the story told at Passover. It is both a story of liberation and persecution (“In every generation they rise up against us)”. For many liberal Jews there’s far too much of the supernatural and too much about one peoples’ story. For this reason many of us prefer to see our story as the universal struggle for freedom. In our family we sing “Go Down Moses” as poorly as we do “Dayenu.” In years past we’ve had an orange to signify gay liberation. We’ve had an olive for Palestinian freedom. When conducting a seder, in fact, innovation is a requirement. What always brings life to Passover is the truth that — in every generation they rise up against someone.
Dayenu — literally “enough” — is a song with fifteen questions that begins by asking if it would have been enough for god to bring us out of Egypt, to part the sea, to provide manna, and it ends with the building of the temple. The grateful answer to each question in turn is — yes, this would surely have been enough even without all the other gifts.
But one question Dayenu doesn’t ask is what would have happened if the Israelites had met immigration agents in the desert. What would the arc of history have been if we were sent back into Egyptian slavery?
Dayenu doesn’t ask what the descendants of the Israelites would be expected to do with 40,000 African refugees who — just like their own ancestors — travelled thousands of miles across deserts to Israel and now sit in detention centers awaiting deportation. Or Palestinians, who have lived under martial law almost twice as long as the Israelites wandered the desert.
Dayenu doesn’t ask what kind of society we are obliged to create to treat fellow human beings better than we were treated by Pharaoh — an especially relevant question this year as the number of police murders of black men is exploding. And at a time white Americans still continue to rise up against African-Americans, even after centuries.
Dayenu never asks, but the seder certainly points at, the seemingly endless procession of new Pharaohs emerging on the world stage — strutting dictators surrounded by their modern-day sorcerers and charioteers. A plague on all of them; they certainly do rise in every generation.
Dayenu doesn’t ask, but the implication seems clear to me, that those who have found their freedom are now obligated to help others realize their own liberation. After all, didn’t the Israelites take the mixed multitudes with them out of slavery?
For some it is enough to recognize persecution and victimization. Dayenu. For others it’s enough to recognize persecution and demand liberation. Dayenu. But for liberation to be truly realized, as the Passover story reminds us, injustice and cruelty must be directly challenged and crushed.
Unfortunately, your home town doesn’t make it easy to participate in local elections. Did you know that your town election is in about a week? Can you find it listed prominently on your town’s website? Did a town clerk post a sample ballot? Do you even know who or what is on the ballot?
I can’t help you with much more than the dates, unfortunately. Call your town clerk for the rest.
We Boomers lament our waning powers if not the short time left to us. Many of us also shed tears for what might have been — changes that could have truly made the world a different place. But history won’t be kind to us for our failures and omissions. Today the world we’ve savaged is in worse shape than ever.
Of course, numerous impediments to change have always stood in the way — money, power, law, religion, capitalism, ignorance, apathy — for starters. Yet all of us either jumped whole-heartedly or dipped a reluctant toe into the system, inevitably playing our part in preserving injustices that have afflicted the nation right from the start. When we are finally gone I suspect we won’t be greatly missed.
Whether it’s just a fleeting hashtag or something greater, something like a movement is growing following the slaughter of seventeen high school students in Florida — a movement some have called a Children’s Crusade, one the religiously-inclined see echoing the words of Isaiah 11:6 — “and a small child shall lead them.” The sentiment has its appeal — a pure, new beginning.
But the children of the March for Our Lives movement — these sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters — are no ordinary children. These young victims of school shootings have acknowledged gun violence throughout our society. They seem to recognize intersectionality that never occurred to many of us. These young people are well-informed and fierce, and they promise to be a political force to be reckoned with. At least one hopes.
Yesterday our group of mostly older activists piled into a school bus headed for March for Our Lives in Boston. There was a distinct feeling we were there to support their efforts. It was clearly their movement, their moment, their debut. For me it was a poignant, bittersweet moment — one generation passing into irrelevance as another took up its challenges.
I also felt that these were no longer simply children to be protected. These were newly-forged Brothers and Sisters in one of a number of long-simmering national struggles.
Better than a hashtag, a moment, or a movement, I hope this represents a generational reset. As these young folks grasp political power they will need to consider all the insidious institutions they have inherited, recognize the links between violence in our communities and the violence American militarism wreaks throughout the world, and the racism and violence inherent in growing American authoritarianism.
These young Brothers and Sisters — and all who come after them — must not merely hold politicians accountable but reform the political and economic systems at the root of so many problems. And as these younger activists fill the ranks of political institutions the aging leadership must also gracefully, and rapidly, make way for them.
Our generation may not be finished yet. But our time is up.
Bristol County Massachusetts is in the midst of a prison suicide epidemic. At this point nobody is doing anything about it although there is mounting alarm at the growing body count.
Yesterday WGBH News ran the first of two reports on prison suicides in the Commonwealth. The report, written by New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) reporters Jenifer McKim and Chris Burrell, took Bristol County sheriff Tom Hodgson to account for fudging details of his self-investigation into the death of Michael Ray on June 10, 2017. According to the sheriff, who deflected blame for failing to monitor Ray, “we have very high standards here and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve.”
Hodgson blames his suicides on the opioid epidemic — though Ray had been in custody for almost two years and drugs should not have figured into the death. The fact is, Michael Ray was not getting the help he needed for depression. “If something happens to me, I want people to know that I’ve been getting no help, no matter how many mental health slips I’ve put in,” Ray wrote shortly before his death.
A month before Ray’s suicide, the same NECIR reporters ran an article in the Globe asking, Why Is The Suicide Rate In Bristol County Jails So High? Scarcely a month later Ray was dead. Even if Hodgson was preoccupied by his busy talk show schedule, the Globe article should have sent a signal that things needed to change at his facilities.
But on June 1, 2017 Tom Hodgson was having brunch with the Mass Fiscal Alliance, a group that promotes anti-immigrant rhetoric like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, where Hodgson sits on the advisory board with its white supremacist founder, John Tanton. Nine days later Michael Ray was dead.
Two weeks after Ray’s death, on June 28th, Tom Hodgson was back selling anti-immigrant xenophobia at a far-right hate group event called “Hold Their Feet to the Fire.” Hodgson appeared with gay-basher Sandy Rios, xenophobe Dan Stein, conspiracy theorist Michelle Malkin, white supremacist Tom Roten, white supremacist congressman Steve King, Muslim-basher Robert Spencer, and real-life fascist and anti-semite Sebastian Gorka. Rather than running jails humanely and competently, Hodgson had better things to do.
Despite Tom Hodgson’s denials of responsibility for a suicide rate twice the state average, we tend to agree with Governor Charlie Baker: “Look, any time anybody kills themselves in a prison, something clearly went wrong.”
Something clearly is going wrong, and it’s time public officials hold Hodgson’s feet to the fire.
I’ve written about this before and it is now closer to becoming law. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S.720) is a piece of legislation promoted by a foreign nation that will violate the civil liberties of Americans. It joins recent laws in Turkey and Poland criminalizing “insults” to a nation. But it is fundamentally a form of thought control that has no place in a democracy.
S.720 is co-sponsored by 51 U.S. Senators. To their shame, thirteen are Democrats: Michael Bennet (CO); Richard Blumenthal (CT); Maria Cantwell (WA); Christopher Coons (DE); Joe Donnelly (IN); Margaret Hassan (NH); Joe Manchin (WV); Claire McCaskill (MO); Robert Menendez (NJ); Bill Nelson (FL); Gary Peters (MI); Charles Schumer (NY); and Ron Wyden (OR).
S.720 criminalizes speech and forbids political expression. The Anti-Israel Boycott Act is basically a Sedition Act in disguise which punishes any American joining a boycott to oppose the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestinians with a fine of up to $1 million or imprisonment up to 20 years.
S.720 wants to have it both ways — doing the bidding of a foreign nation (Israel) while punishing Americans from following boycotts suggested by a foreign entity (the UN and the still-stateless Palestinian people).
Whether the bill is eventually successful or not, the ACLU notes the harm it has already done:
“On its face, the bill appears to directly prohibit boycott activity that is protected under the First Amendment. Even if the bill could be interpreted more narrowly, as some of its supporters claim, its broad language could still chill protected expression by scaring people into self-censorship. Either way, the bill would impose serious First Amendment harms.”
According to S.720’s subsection (a)(1) the bill criminalizes even gathering information about companies doing business in Israel or in occupied Palestinian territories. You post an inquiry on Facebook — for example, does Sodastream manufacture its products in the West Bank? The next thing you know, you face arrest or a fine.
Besides violating the rights of Americans, S.720 is a perfect example of the sort of foreign meddling that Democrats claim to hate. S.720 is promoted by numerous pro-Israel groups like AIPAC whose single focus on promoting Israeli interests should require it to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Even Canada is obliged to register its lobbyists but no such limitations apply to AIPAC, which literally pays American legislators to work for Israel’s interests.
Imagine if Russian lobbyists did the same — worked through a group we’ll call ARPAC — the American Russian Political Action Committee — to create legislation to criminalize sanctions against Russia and its oligarchs. Or imagine ATPAC — the American Turkish Political Action Committee — buying support to keep Americans from mentioning the Armenian Genocide or protesting Turkey’s treatment of Kurdish people.
What’s especially galling to Americans is that the Senate is telling us we can’t take political action against a foreign country knee deep in corruption — a country with a prime minister about to be indicted for criminal conspiracy. A country in which the former prime minister went to jail for bribery and influence-peddling. The Senate needs to be reminded: Israel is not our 51st state.
S.720 echoes laws in Israel which have already criminalized the BDS movement in “the Middle East’s only democracy.” The Senate bill also joins a growing list of American “gag” legislation written for agribusiness, anti-abortion zealots, and pipeline companies. The Trump administration now seems eager to join its authoritarian counterparts in China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Poland, the Philippines, and elsewhere in policing the views of its citizens.
And thirteen Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, are just fine with that.
Images of policemen shepherding children to safety
It’s not the fault of the FBI
It’s not even the fault of local police, who were notifed over 20 times
Those same policemen who tighten a perimeter aroudn the school, show up in APCs, in SWAT teams, are sometmes the ones to train children in using weapons
In 2015 Brandon St. Pierre committed suicide while in custody at Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s Bristol County prison. St. Pierre’s suicide was one of a growing number of suicides at the facility — one of fourteen county jails in the state that accounts for a quarter of all suicides. St. Pierre’s name was mentioned in a number of articles published by the New Bedford Standard Times, the Boston Globe, WGBH, the Huffington Post, and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which won an award last fall for its reporting.
On February 28th Tom Hodgson bent the ear of a reporter at Dartmouth Week, patting himself on the back for all the positive changes that have supposedly been made at his facilities. But the Dartmouth Week piece was mainly a report on Hodgson’s own investigation of himself — in which the sheriff cast blame on the inmates’ mental health and drug issues for their own deaths.
It was another piece of a pre-emptive public relations campaign from the wily politician — pre-emptive because, once again, Tom Hodgson is being sued for violating prisoners’ Constitutional rights. A new lawsuit against the Bristol County sheriff joins two others within the last year.
On February 21st Barbara Kice, Brendan St. Pierre’s mother, filed suit in Massachusetts Superior Court [docket number 18CV00189]. Kice’s lawsuit alleges that Sheriff Hodgson, Corrections Officer Dylan Bedard, and an unspecified “Jane Doe” violated St. Pierre’s Fourteenth Amendment rights by improperly caring for a person known to be suicidal.
We especially appreciate the ongonig reporting from the Globe and NECIR. And there is a lot more for journalists to cover than a whiskered personality who thinks xenophobia is his day job. It is more critical than ever that the public is informed about the ongoing suicides in our community and the systemic abuses behind them.
What would you do if immigration agents came for you and separated you from your children? Breaking apart families was never a central mission of previous Republican and Democratic administrations, but with Trump many parents are now faced with having to plan for unimaginable cruelties of a racist deportation machine. It may not be 1935 but, if you are someone sleeping with a packed suitcase under the bed, it sure feels like it.
On Thursday Helena daSilva Hughes of the Immigrants Assistance Center and Corinn Williams of the Community Economic Development Center, both in New Bedford, hosted a workshop given by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute’s (MLRI) Emily Leung. Roughly 40 attendees represented a spectrum of local social service, academic, health care, and legal organizations and they had come to learn about legal tools immigrants can use to protect the welfare of their children if they face deportation.
Leung discussed the Trump administration’s “shift in enforcement,” which was a diplomatic way of describing ICE’s shift from deporting dangerous individuals to going after the easiest people to round up. The MLRI attorney discussed adaptations to, and the function of, the Caregiver Authorization Affidavit and Temporary Agent Appointment documents, both already in use within the Commonwealth. Neither of these legal documents grants guardianship of a child to another adult — a last resort if a child is young and the deportation is irreversible — but they permit a caregiver to make important decisions for a parent who can no longer advocate for her own children.
It was a lively meeting with many questions asked and answered. Leung dispensed practical advice on storing and collecting identity and travel documents — and ending by stressing the importance of committting important phone numbers to memory. By the time you need to make that phone call you’re already in ICE custody — and they’ve got your phone.
For more information go to the MLRI website or to Mass Legal Help. You can find workshop resources in English and Spanish — and more translations would be welcomed.
Check out the Benefit Concert for the IAC at the Greasy Luck Brewpub, 791 Purchase St., New Bedford, MA 02740, on Saturday, February 24th, from 5-8pm. Buy your tickets here.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you by the court…” — Miranda warning
Everyone’s heard the Miranda warning and the promise of public counsel. But few know how precarious the system is, how overworked public defenders are, or that the funding of public defenders is really just an afterthought — in even the most liberal of states.
In Massachusetts the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) provides legal representation to indigent people in criminal and civil cases and administrative proceedings in which there is a right to counsel. CPCS attorneys, social service advocates, investigators, secretaries and other professionals, also known as MassDefenders, work on behalf of poor people on criminal, juvenile, child and family, mental health and other civil commitment cases.
MassDefenders work hard for the most disadvantaged people in the Commonwealth. But CPCS staff have been working for years without a voice in the terms and conditions of their employment. Although public defenders receive some of the benefits provided other state employees (pensions and healthcare), they do not currently have the right to collective bargaining.
In 2004 the Supreme Judicial Court addressed a shortage of lawyers due to stagnant rates of compensation that hadn’t changed since 1986, noting the rates were “among the lowest in the nation.” Today there are signs that Massachusetts is again approaching another crisis.
On Monday, March 6th, starting with an early morning rally outside Superior Court in Fall River (186 S. Main St.) at 8:15am, Massachusetts public defenders will again demand their collective bargaining rights.
Later in the day, at 4:30pm, MassDefenders will attend a public hearing at Superior Court in Taunton (9 Court St.) organized by CPCS management to hear from the public on rate increases for bar advocates and other appointed lawyers. Like CPCS lawyers, bar advocates are attorneys contracted to represent poor people and do similar work as public defenders.
Public defenders and bar advocates are often the first to hear about injustices visited upon those in county and state prisons. Strengthening public defenders’ rights strengthens opposition to prison abuses, mass incarceration, solitary confinement and the systemic racism in the “justice” system. Defenders with the protections collective bargaining confers can also be powerful advocates for the lawful and humane treatment of people detained in immigration cases.
Last week social networks were buzzing with reports that UMASS Dartmouth had rescinded the 2017 acceptance of a black student who had been honest about prior gang affiliations. Right after Martin Luther King day, and right in the middle of Black History month, a young black man had new options snatched away by nervous administrators at a campus in a lily-white community. At a campus meeting on Monday angry students voiced concerns about racism and fairness.
The university for its part shed absolutely no light on the issue. According to a campus spokesman, “We’re just not going to be engaged in a conversation about an admissions case about an individual student.” Whatever the actual facts, the university’s ham-handed refusal to discuss circumstances or safety concerns — or to engage in a “conversation” with students or the wider community — will with good reason be interpreted as a coverup of some good-old-fashioned racism, and less as the well-intentioned effort to keep students safe. The university might as well have invoked “national security.”
UMASS Dartmouth is a public university. Many of us studied there. Many of us know students, employees, faculty, ex-faculty, and regularly attend campus events. Before it joined the UMASS system it was very much a local university, and it still is. In every way it is our university. And the public is entitled to some answers. The administration must open up about the circumstances and reasoning behind changing its mind about this student. And it must publicly and transparently deal with concerns that this was racism again rearing its ugly head in the age of Trump.
Universities are full of people with all sorts of baggage. The UMASS university system was once run by Whitey Bulger’s brother. Despite suspicions he knew where his fugitive brother was hiding, it never seemed to keep William Bulger off a campus or prevent him from becoming president of the Massachusetts Senate. Plenty of white students have had offenses expunged from their records. But this particular student never had the same courtesy extended to him. Despite his best efforts to take a different path in life, this young black man has now been barred from the university for a past that men like him are never permitted to escape.
We are distracted by so many simultaneous assaults on human and civil rights today that it’s easy to forget those caught up in America’s massive prison population — the largest in the world. This includes people who need to stay away from the rest of us for a long, long time. But most of those languishing in American prisons today are guilty of lesser offenses — usually drugs and theft to support their addictions. Once they enter the “system” America’s Puritanical instincts kick in and we brand them with a scarlet letter for the rest of their lives. And if we don’t forget them completely, we banish all thought of how prison abuse will scar them — and society — for decades to come. Lock ’em up and throw away the key.
Unfortunately, the criminal “justice” system runs without oversight by elected officials who have the thinnest of mandates.
In September Massachusetts voters will select primary candidates. Forget gerrymandering, forget voter suppression, forget Russian hackers. Massachusetts itself inflicts the most damage on its own democracy through apathy and patronage. In the last state election only 34 of 160 state House races had challengers from more than one party — an uncontested rate of 79%. With this level of apathy, voters truly get the democracy they deserve — patronage, careerists or grandstanding politicians. And a substandard, inhuman, expensive prison system.
Southeastern Massachusetts has three Trump Republican sheriffs who participate in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 287(g) programs. Bristol County’s sheriff sits on the advisory board of a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group. County Democrats elected a Republican, Thomas Hodgson, over a Democrat in the 2010 sheriff’s race. Hodgson’s facilities are known for horrific conditions, health and safety violations, abuse of solitary confinement, and abnormally high suicide rates. Yet Bristol Country voters haven’t tried to hold the sheriff accountable, nor have state and local agencies. It will be up to voters to replace him in 2022.
But Hodgson ran unopposed in 2016 — like a majority of sheriffs that year.
If the school-to-prison pipeline ends in overcrowded, unsanitary cells or solitary confinement, a critical junction on that line is the DA’s office. Nationwide, elected district attorneys have enormous latitude to prosecute (or not), lay on trumped-up charges (or not), send the accused to lockup (or not), set bail (reasonable or not), negotiate plea deals, and seek jail time or diversion programs.
Often outright enemies of civil liberties, Massachusetts district attorneys have destroyed lives, in many cases defending tainted convictions with tainted evidence, and nine out of eleven state DAs staunchly opposed criminal justice reform legislation. Nationwide, district attorneys have discovered that running on a “law and order” platform — going after the weakest and most vulnerable in society by labeling them “superpredators” — is a winning election strategy.
In Bristol County, for example, DA Thomas Quinn used the full force of his office to come down with vengeance on a troubled teenager who encouraged an equally troubled friend to end his life. Mercifully, a judge gave the defendant a fraction of the 12-20 year sentence the DA wanted. Though Quinn says he likes the idea of drug courts, he wants to extend incarceration without bail for super “dangerous” individuals from 120 days to one year. Quinn already bears considerable responsibility for the miserable overcrowding in the Bristol County jails he has filled, whose inmates are subjected to abusive conditions by the sheriff.
Very few voters know who their county DA is — much less anything about his handiwork. The ACLU recently announced an initiative called What a difference a DA makes. Since a district attorney is an elected official who can potentially do a lot of damage, the ACLU’s message is — “buyer beware!” By late summer voters should have a scorecard on their district attorneys. But this still won’t solve the problem of uncontested races. And it’s a little late for this election cycle.
In Massachusetts judges are selected, not elected. Selection is the responsibility of the governor and the Governor’s Council, a body composed of representatives from the state’s eight Senatorial districts and chaired by the Lieutenant Governor. Besides selecting judges, notaries, and justices of the peace, the Council considers pardons and commutations. In Bristol County the previous Councillor for the First District seemed to alternate between two brothers — Democrat Oliver Cipollini and Republican Charles Cipollini. Voters didn’t seem to notice which brother stood for election or care that the race was uncontested.
Today, representing the First District (Bristol, Plymouth, Barnstable, and Duke counties), we have Joseph C. Ferreira, former police chief in Somerset, a former Assistant DA, and now a lawyer at Lynch & Lynch. At the Democratic caucuses on February 11th Ferreira and his signature collectors signaled he was running on a “law and order” platform — tougher judges, tougher sentences. In a 2015 interview with the Fall River Herald, Ferreira spelled out one of his rules for selecting judges: “You never want to see someone lean to the left too much.” Whether you like Ferreira or not, this is what the Democratic Party is currently offering.
If 2018 is anything like 2016, Joe Ferreira will run another uncontested race in both the primary and general election.
Massachusetts Democrats are getting ready for the 2018 convention in Worcester. The following information might be useful if you are thinking of jumping into the Blue pool.
The MassDems Convention
The 2018 Massachusetts Democratic convention is an Endorsing Convention — which means that state primary candidates will be vetted at the convention. To appear on the Democratic primary ballot on September 4th, candidates need 15% of the convention delegate vote, so you may have noticed that candidates are scrambling to contact party activists. This year’s convention is also considering charter amendments — changing the rules by which the state party operates. Action Together has a good writeup on what will go on at the convention:
Start by attending your Democratic town caucus. You can’t be a delegate if you’re not attached to a local committee. Today was the first day of the caucuses. Check to see when yours is being held:
The rules for delegates, alternates and “add-on” delegate selections will leave you with heartburn and a headache. In general, there are an equal number of male and female delegates and alternates. There are also a number of “add-on” delegates, also gender-balanced, who represent various identities: minority, gender, sexuality, disabled, etc.
You must be registered as a Democrat at the time of your town caucus to be elected as a delegate or alternate. Add-on delegates can register as Democrats at the caucuses. Delegates must be present at the caucuses unless they are serving in the military, and they must not have publicly supported non-Democrats within the last 2-4 years. There may be some exceptions for absences at the caucuses if prior notice has been given in writing to the local chair. Consult your local chair and familiarize yourself with the Convention documents and the various forms and registration deadlines. And don’t show up late for your caucus!
Richard Drolet is a good guy to know if you’re a SouthCoast Democrat. He is the Chairperson of the New Bedford Democratic City Committee, which arranges a bus to the convention for Democrats from New Bedford and neighboring towns. Get on Richard’s email list to be advised of City committee meetings (which are open to members of neighboring towns) and plans for travel to the 2018 Convention in Worcester.
Few people who listened to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union speech could fail to miss his remarks on minorities and immigrants. This is a demagogue playing to a far-right base by expanding a deportation machine. This is an unrepentant racist who now makes it clear he doesn’t want even legal immigration if it involves brown people.
In New Hampshire since last summer American citizens on I-93 have been stopped at roadblocks in Thornton, forced to show their ids, and had their cars searched in violation of what’s left of the Fourth Amendment. In Fort Lauderdale last week, agents stopped and boarded a Greyhound bus and again demanded to see everyone’s id. A video of the spectacle provoked widespread condemnation.
This is not a sign of a healthy democracy, nor is it an America most of us want to live in. It’s a little too reminiscent of the pogroms of Germany of 1935. And this is why we need the Safe Communities Act, now before the Massachusetts legislature.
State legislators want to protect the public, and they also want to provide law enforcement officials with the tools to do it. Anti-immigrant organizations like FAIR, and spokesmen for FAIR like Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson, would have us believe Trump’s claim that an overwhelming number of immigrants from Latin America are rapists and cartel members. Those who know the immigrant community know that this is complete hogwash. But some legislators fear making the wrong call.
Hodgson and his former segregationist friend Jeff Sessions claim the Safe Communities Act is a “sanctuary” bill that prevents immigration agents from doing their job. Sessions, like Hodgson, even wants to arrest mayors of cities who won’t deputize their police as ICE agents.
But nobody’s stopping ICE from doing its work. The Safe Communities Act now moving through committee simply says that Massachusetts taxpayers aren’t picking up the tab for federal policing, and we’re not going to go out of our way to deputize our police and prison officials as ICE agents. The bill also says “no” to registries of Muslims, Latinos — or anyone else on the wrong side of the president.
Fear merchants like Tom Hodgson are hoping you won’t read the legislation and will believe whatever they tell you about it. But the Safe Communities Act is 154 lines double spaced, and it’s not difficult to read or understand.
An important calculation the legislature must make when voting on “Safe Communities” is whether the risks to democracy of expanding the president’s deportation machine outweigh any benefits of getting rid of what the president calls “bad hombres.” Most of the deportees we’ve been hearing about recently are guilty of 20 year-old DUI’s and other low level offenses. Expanding a police state to go after them will have only negative consequences.
Let’s leave the determination of dangerousness to local cops and DA’s — and not willingly join the president’s pogrom against brown people. Encourage your legislator to pass the Safe Communities Act. The quality of our democracy literally depends on more states passing courageous legislation like this.
There is a great piece in the Massachusetts political blog HesterPrynne about the Trumpian evil lurking beneath Charlie Baker’s popularity with the legislature. For starters Baker funnels money to the national GOP, hardly a troop of Boy Scouts. And now there’s Baker’s ICE bill, entitled “An Act empowering law enforcement to cooperate with the United States to transfer custody of convicted criminals.”
As anyone familiar with 287(g) agreements knows, prisons participating in ICE agreements do not exclusively transfer custody of “convicted criminals” but instead any undocumented person who ends up in jail for even minor offenses. Baker’s bill capitalizes on his bizarre popularity with Democratic legislators to sell Jeff Sessions’ and Donald Trump’s racist immigration policies.
HesterPrynne points out that ICE handovers should already have been settled with the Supreme Judicial Court’s Lunn decision. Baker’s bill is an attempt to neuter its provisions:
On Tuesday, the Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the immigration bill the Governor filed in August in response to a decision by the Supreme Judicial Court. That decision, which held that no authority exists to allow Massachusetts law enforcement officials to detain persons who are wanted only because of civil immigration violations, has barred police in the state from assisting with the President’s deportation agenda by holding such persons until ICE can come pick them up.
She also notes that if Baker’s “bill were to become law, he’d be the one to enlist our State Police in Trump’s reprehensible cause.”
The Joint Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled hearings in Boston on Tuesday, January 30, from 1:00-5:00 PM in Room A-2, to consider the governor’s bill. Written testimony can be submitted at the hearing, to the Committee on the Judiciary in Room 136, by mail, or by email sent to Philip McLaughlin. If you would like to travel to the State House for the hearings, let us know. Maybe we can organize something.
Reminder:
On January 29thBristol County for Correctional Justice is holding a meeting at 105 William Street, Suite 26, at 6:30pm. Please try to make it. We have several important issues to discuss.
You will be voting in Massachusetts primaries in 223 days and midterm elections in 286. If the Democratic Party really wants to win back the House and Senate, local Democratic town committees need to get up out of their recliners. Registering new voters, introducing primary candidates, getting out the vote, and giving the electorate a reason to show up on Election Day are what you do if you want to win. Just ask Alabamians.
Elections coming up this year include: U.S. Senator (Warren); U.S. Representative (9 Districts); Governor (challengers to Baker); Secretary of the Commonwealth (Galvin); Attorney General (Healey); Treasurer (Goldberg); Auditor (Bump); Governor’s Council (Ferreira); State Senator (Montigny); State Representative (Markey); County Commissioners (Kitchen, Mitchell); District Attorney (Quinn); Register of Deeds (Treadup); and Clerk of Courts (Santos).
The gubernatorial race and five of nine Congressional District races will actually have primary challengers this year. But so far only a handful of candidates have actually visited Southeastern Massachusetts.
Each Spring the Massachusetts Democratic Party holds its caucuses. This year’s have already been announced, among them the following towns and cities:
Saturday, February 3 – Wareham & Brockton
Wednesday, February 7 – Barnstable
Saturday, February 10 – Fairhaven, Fall River, Taunton, Bridgewater, Somerset, Dartmouth
In Bristol County Democrats didn’t even bother to challenge a Joe Arpaio wannabe sheriff in the last election. For that matter, neither MassDems party chair Gus Bickford nor the huge Democratic State Committee seem worried by the trend toward pro-Trump sheriffs — in Bristol, Plymouth and (most recently) Barnstable counties — that signals the vulnerability of local Democratic Party institutions.
So, Democrats — show up for your town caucuses and get involved. Committees especially need younger, more diverse, and more progressive members willing and able to get things done.
We often forget that we live 30 miles from an aging nuclear reactor that isn’t doing so well. Pilgrim Power Station has long been slated for decommissioning but was recently re-fueled. There is a highly radioactive dumpsite onsite. The ultimate costs and procedures for decommissioning the plant and disposing of radioactive materials should be decided by taxpayers and overseen by the state. Many Cape residents worry that the company’s Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel (NDCAP) will stick taxpayers with the bill and they worry about safe decommissioning.
Even if you don’t live on the Cape, consider this. In case of an emergency, everyone in a 50-mile radius of the Pilgrim plant will have to evacuate — that’s close to 5 million of us. And that almost certainly includes you. So please send an email in support of Senator Julian Cyr’s bill “An Act to Improve Oversight of the Closure of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station,” S.2206.
The Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy needs to hear from you ASAP (preferably today, but definitely before 2/7) asking them to report S.2206 favorably out of committee.
The Pilgrim Legislative Advisory Coalition has made it super easy to compose an email message to get Cyr’s bill out of committee. Click on this link. You can then customize or simply send the message, which will look something like this:
[SUBJECT:] I respectfully request your support for S.2206 [BODY:] As presently constituted, I believe that the Nuclear Decommissioning Advisory Panel is unlikely to achieve it’s goal. For the long-term well-being of the Town of Plymouth and the surrounding region, and for the economic interest of the Commonwealth and it’s taxpayers, please report S.2206 favorably out of committee. Thank you.
Additional details for your information or to help customize your message…
It will add the MA Attorney General to the Panel to provide expertise on some of the legal issues arising in the decommissioning process.
It will add the Inspector General to provide oversight of the financial aspects of decommissioning.
It will add a representative from Barnstable County with responsibility for emergency planning to help ensure that our interests are addressed.
Specifically, it will task the Panel with annually examining and making recommendations on the totality of the impacts of the decommissioning and closure of Pilgrim, including on issues such as workforce impacts, economic development, decreased or lost revenues to state agencies, emergency response, public safety, environmental impacts, municipal finance, job retraining and placement, land use, transport of spent fuel, the storage of hazardous waste and the duration of environmental monitoring activities.
Currently the Panel has no funding for hiring experts to help perform its highly technical work. This bill would provide a mechanism for funding the Panel from sources such as grants, Federal funds, donations or bequests; it does not provide any direct funding from the Commonwealth.
Whatever the issue, Congressman William R. Keating is sure to disappoint. The most conservative of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation, Keating is a product of Democratic complacency and Boston-centric politics which frequently neglects the rest of the state. Let’s take a close look at one of Massachusetts’ worst Democrats. Can’t we do better?
Democracy and Transparency
Despite the tremendous amount of money now being spent on elections at all levels and ballot questions from 2012 and 2014 showing over 70% of Massachusetts voters supporting a Constitutional amendment to restrict rights to natural persons and to take money out of elections, Keating was not a co-sponsor of H.J.Res.48, which would address “Citizens United.”
Other members of the Massachusetts Congressional Delegation — JIm McGovern and even Seth Moulton — co-signed Representatives Bill Pascrell and Debbie Dingell’s letter urging the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to ensure that the NAFTA renegotiation process remains open and transparent. Bill Keating did not.
Health Care
One hundred and sixteen Democrats co-sponsored H.R.676, John Conyers’ Medicare for All Act. Keating was not one of them.
Keating has not endorsed any other public healthcare option.
Worker’s Rights
Keating did not support Worker Rights: H.R.15 – Raise the Wage Act.
Women’s Rights
The Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH Woman) Act of 2017, H.R.771, defends a woman’s right to choose. Keating did not support this.
DNC chair Tom Perez and DCCC chair Ray Lujan, as well as some in the New Democrat Coalition, of which Keating and Seth Moulton are members, argue for “flexibility” on abortion and against abortion as a litmus test. But shouldn’t a woman’s most personal right to control her own body be a non-negotiable plank for Democrats?
Education
Twenty-seven Democrats co-sponsored H.R.1880, the College for All Act. Keating was not one of them.
Taxation
The Inclusive Prosperity Act, H.R. 1144, a Wall Street Speculation fee, is a fraction of a percent tax on stocks, bonds, and financial derivatives that can be used to fund public university tuition and would be offset by tax credits. Keating did not support this.
Consumer
Keating voted YEA with Blue Dog Democrats on H.R. 3192, a Republican bill which reduces transparency for mortgage lending institutions. This bill was a hit with the American Bankers Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Home Builders lobby, but it prohibited consumers from suing mortgage lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau disclosure requirements under the Truth in Lending Act. Keating doesn’t believe in amnesty for immigrants. Why an amnesty for mortgage lenders?
Keating also voted YEA with conservative Democrats on H.R. 1737, a Republican bill which neutered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s oversight of Indirect Auto Lending and Compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Keating and a minority of House Democrats broke with his own party to vote for Republican sponsored H.R.1737, the Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act. This bill prohibited consumers – particularly minorities – from suing auto lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules against discrimination in lending. The bill takes the unusual step of preventing disclosures of violations with Freedom of Information Act requests. The NAACP, the Urban League, La Raza, the Consumers Union, and many others, were opposed.
Immigration
Keating is a hard-liner on immigration. From “On the Issues”: “Bill Keating opposes amnesty. As a District Attorney, Bill Keating enforces our laws and believes that everyone must obey them. His office has prosecuted thousands of criminal cases that resulted in defendants being detained for immigration and deportation action. Bill believes that we must secure our borders, and wants to punish and stop corporations that hire workers here illegally. Bill does not support giving people who are here illegally access to state and federal benefits.”
Keating and five other Democrats voted for H.R. 3009, the “Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act,” a Republican bill to withhold funding for states and municipalities with “sanctuary” policies.
Keating and Blue Dog Democrats voted for H.R. 4038, the “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015.” The Republican bill adds additional obstacles to the already-onerous screening and vetting of Syrian refugees.
Keating voted YEA on H.R. 3004, “Kate’s Law,” a Republican bill which expands indefinite detention of migrants who repeatedly cross the border. The bill will do nothing to prevent future actions by desperate people but it will increase the number of private prisons in the United States.
During the January Shutdown, only Keating and Stephen Lynch voted for a stopgap spending bill that kept the military happy but threw Dreamers under the bus. The other seven Massachusetts congressman and both U.S. senators voted against it.
Civil Liberties
Keating is no friend of the Fourth Amendment and gets only middling ratings: “Keating supported ‘cybersecurity’ legislation, and opposed defunding the government’s Section 702 surveillance programs (PRISM and Upstream); however, he supports banning backdoor searches on US persons.
Keating voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which reformed the small amount of government surveillance that occurs under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and continued to support it even after its reforms were watered down to the point where there was much debate about whether it would do more harm than good to pass it.”
The Justice is Not for Sale Act, H.R.3227, places restrictions on private prisons. At a time Republicans are trying to re-institute discredited justice and prison practices, and pushing privatization, including prisons, schools, and even the war in Afghanistan, Keating did not support this.
Voting Rights
The Automatic Voter Registration Act, H.R. 2840, would make voter registration easier and automatic. Keating did not support this.
Militarism and Foreign Policy
Keating voted NAY on a resolution to bar President Obama from using an AUMF to invade Libya. The resolution would have required Congress to declare war — per the U.S. Constitution. Keating did, however, vote YEA on ending the war in Afghanistan.
Keating was reluctant to support Obama’s and Kerry’s Iran deal and has courted the MEK, an exile group which until 2012 was designated a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow and replace the Iranian government with its own “government-in-exile.” Thanks to Republican and Democratic hawks the designation was lifted.
Keating is pro-Likud. He has fought international efforts to support a Two State Solution, advocated moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, opposed the use of the word “Palestine” and threatened to cut off U.S. contributions to the U.N. and funding for U.N. refugee efforts because of the international body’s criticism of Israel’s land theft and occupation.
Keating, along with Democratic hawks, sent a letter to Rex Tillerson affirming their support for Trump’s policies on NATO and for Tillerson’s office. Keating shares Republicans’ view that NATO needs to be stronger to oppose Russia.
Keating cheered Donald Trump’s deployment of tomahawk missiles, which were in violation of both AUMF statements and the U.S. Constitution.
Weak Candidate
Aside from the fact that the Democratic Party didn’t offer primary voters alternatives in 2014 or 2016, Keating is not a particularly strong candidate. Even relatively unknown challengers have done reasonably well against him in both primaries and general elections:
2010 Democratic Primary – Robert O’Leary got 48.7% of the vote
2010 General Election – Jeffrey Perry (R) got 42.4% of the vote
2012 Democratic Primary – Sam Sutter got 40.8% of the vote
2012 General Election – Christopher Sheldon (R) got 32.2% of the vote
2014 Democratic Primary – unopposed
2014 General Election – John Chapman (R) got 43.5% of the vote
2016 Democratic Primary – unopposed
2016 General Election – Mark Alliegro (R) got 38% of the vote
The Bigger Problem
Here in Massachusetts democracy has been in trouble for some time. Our state ranks last in competitiveness in political races. In the 2016 Democratic Primary there was not one challenger in all nine U.S. Congressional districts. At the state level half the candidates for the Governor’s Council ran unchallenged. In County Sheriff Democratic primary elections, six out of fourteen ran unopposed and two slots were never filled, including Bristol County where Joe-Arpaio-wannabe, Republican Tom Hodgson, won by default because of Democratic complacency. In almost half the state legislature primaries and in 29 out of 42 state senate races there was no challenger.
All three counties in our forgotten corner of the state — Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable — have anti-immigrant sheriffs who signed 287(g) agreements with the Trump administration. This should be a wake-up call to Democratic town and city committees — people, your counties are in danger of becoming Republican.
Researcher John Cass did a little digging and discovered that, while Rome burns, only 41% of Democratic Town Committees were spending any money. If you’re not spending anything on postage, flyers or web hosting, it’s a good sign that you’re not doing much. And if you’re not doing much, your town committee deserves the adjective “defunct.”
On January 20, a conference entitled “Mass Incarceration as a New Jim Crow” was held at All Souls Church of Braintree, Massachusetts, on a topic that concerns everyone — mass incarceration and its implications. Well organized and attended, the conference featured a panel of five guests.
The conference began with an historical overview of the “Old Jim Crow” presented by Dr. Elizabeth Herbin-Triant from UMass Lowell, dealing primarily with the period following the Civil War and Reconstruction. Dr. Jon Huibregtse from Framingham University followed Dr. Herbin-Triant with an overview of historical changes and context through the post World War II period.
The speakers focused on the idea that the implementation of Jim Crow laws and lynchings served a larger purpose of maintaining a powerless work force, preventing growth of an independent economy beyond control by the white ruling class, and suppressing dissent. At the same time, the widespread popularity of spectacle lynchings and retribution indicates the depth of a culture of racism that goes beyond the upper classes.
With the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed for “separate but equal” institutions, systemic racism was fully established. Lynchings and extra-judicial executions continued, but grew less as other institutions assumed these functions, most notably an explosion in incarceration and legalized racism, combined with political disenfranchisement. One of the most shocking statistics was that of registered black men in Louisiana, which declined from 130,000 in 1896 to 1,232 in 1904!
Following the historical overview, the panel spoke and took questions from the audience. Franklin Baxley from the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition spoke to the human toll and incredible inequities of the current system. Rahsaan Hall, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, spoke eloquently of the economic and social mechanisms by which systemic racism enables the “pipeline” from schools to prison. Susan Tordella, of E.M.I.T. (End Mass Incarceration Today) spoke of the need to include incarcerated people as participants in the discussion.
Several members of the audience then jumped into the discussion, asking questions about the economics and politics of mass incarceration, the possibilities of change, and methods of organizing. This led directly to the discussion after the break as to what the situation is today in Massachusetts and what is to be done. Several organizations were mentioned in addition to the speakers’ own groups.
Susan Tordella discussed the status of the CJ Omnibus Bill, which, though far from perfect, contains some positive pieces of legislation. The Massachusetts Bail Fund was mentioned as a very effective way of helping people post bail who would otherwise be thrown into the penal system before they are even convicted.
One key aspect in the discussion was raised by Rahsaan Hall, who pointed to the incredibly important roles played by District Attorneys in determining whom to charge and what charges to bring. He also pointed to a lack of accountability for these same DA’s, suggesting that bringing political pressure on them is a powerful way of changing the way the system operates. He asserted that accountability of District Attorneys (and county sheriffs in Massachusetts as well) to external oversight and control of any kind is nearly non-existent.
The conference ended with a plea to everyone to become more involved in shining a light on these dark areas of accountability, working with incarcerated people, and demanding more structures of accountability.
Most of those we spoke with agreed that it was a worthwhile conference, and though much of the material was familiar, it was presented in a context that really helped clarify issues. Strategies on what can be done were a little less fully explored since panel participants were already involved in their projects. Some of the audience wanted to learn about concrete steps they could take, and the panel was helpful in that regard. For BCCJ, the comment on District Attorneys by Rahsaan Hall made it clear that Correctional Justice issues in Bristol County must also address the roles of the District Attorneys and their accountability.
Speaking at a hearing earlier this month to discuss the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office’s (BCSO) collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the arrest and detention of undocumented immigrants, Sheriff Tom Hodgson described his targets as criminals responsible for the most heinous crimes — murder, rape, narcotics trafficking. But, as usual, the sheriff could offer no evidence to support the charge. Instead, he ridiculed and humiliated citizens who challenged him.
About 25 people, local activists, public defenders and lawyers, and some from the Cape and Providence, attended. Sheriff Hodgson who had invited citizens to discuss his department’s participation with ICE under a program known as 287(g), was flanked by Todd Lyons, Deputy Field Office Director, ICE Boston; William Sullivan, 287(g) Program Director, ICE Boston; Steven Souza, Superintendent of Security, BCSO; and Liunetty Couto, Director of Deportation Services, BCSO.
Five minutes into the hearings Sheriff Hodgson launched into his customary scary talking points about dangerous immigrants, asserting, “I took an oath to protect you,” claiming that inmates in his jails are there “because they committed a crime,” though fewer than half the prisoners have been convicted. Most inmates are there simply because they cannot post bail.
The sheriff asserted that 95 percent of violent crimes, the drug trade, and sex trafficking were committed by illegal aliens. When challenged for evidence, he attacked the questioner personally, declaring the man couldn’t possibly know the “real story” because he was not in law enforcement. Another questioner, a lawyer, received a similar condescending response.
Even the ICE officers acknowledged that Hodgson’s “detainees” were often guilty of lesser offenses such as operating a vehicle without a license.
Attendees objected to the panel’s claims that, before 287(g), dangerous criminals were frequently released from jail. Exactly what type of criminals had been released? Neither the sheriff nor the ICE officers could provide a substantive answer. One questioner complained about the panel’s use of anecdotes and misleading statistics, and that no data actually substantiated claims that a majority of detainees had been picked up for violent crimes. An ICE officer promised to get back to her with some data.
While the sheriff gave the impression he had sweeping powers to deploy local resources to help ICE, one ICE officer cautioned that, with the abandonment of the 287(g) Task Force model, local law enforcement can no longer conduct raids but is limited to investigating and holding prison inmates.
Of particular concern was that Massachusetts taxpayers pay for the sheriff’s decision to work for the Trump administration. Hodgson dug in, telling attendees he was not going to apologize for protecting the public. He said being elected justified his personal decision to partner with ICE. He rejected the notion that voters elected him to do a specific job — running the county jails. And the sheriff tried to downplay 287(g) costs. Both Hodgson and ICE insisted that ICE paid for all training, lodging and travel for personnel from BCSO during training. But this is simply not true.
The BCSO’s Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with ICE states that Massachusetts taxpayers pay for “personnel expenses, […] local transportation, […] salaries and benefits, including overtime, of all of its personnel being trained […] and of those personnel performing the regular functions of the participating BCSO personnel while they are receiving training. The BCSO will cover the costs of all BCSO personnel’s travel, housing, and per diem affiliated with the training required for participation in this MOA.”
Several questioned whether ICE knew about various abuses at the prisons. Attendees challenged Hodgson’s claim that his facilities were rated in the top ten percent of American prisons when so many complaints have been filed against them. The sheriff refused to acknowledge the highest prison suicide rates in the Commonwealth, class-action lawsuits for human rights abuses, and repeated citations for violations of health and safety regulations.
Hodgson denounced a recent lawsuit by Prisoner’s Legal Services over abuse of solitary confinement and made derogatory comments about the plaintiffs. He insisted that those accusing him of mismanaging his jail, treating inmates cruelly, failing to properly oversee psychological treatment of prisoners, or dealing with the suicide rate, were either “politically motivated” or acting out of venality or pecuniary interest.
When asked about violations of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Lunn ruling, which constrains ICE detentions, Hodgson feigned ignorance. One attendee refreshed the sheriff’s memory, mentioning an illegally-detained inmate’s name. But Hodgson waved that one away as well. It was surprising to hear a Republican, from the party of state rights, claim, “federal law supersedes state law.”
Hodgson says he took an oath to “protect” us all. But he seems more dedicated to protecting himself and the extrajudicial activities he has undertaken in service to a personal agenda. The question citizens of Bristol County might reasonably ask is — who will protect us from Sheriff Hodgson and the cost of his misfeasance?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. — The Fourth Amendment
Democrats have their Munsingwear all in a knot about Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook — his attacks on a free press, directing Jeff Sessions to act as his personal lawyer, the firing of Jonathan Comey, and the possibility he may do the same with Robert Mueller.
But recently, when it came time to walk the walk for Democracy instead of just talk the talk, it turned out that Democrats were mostly talk. Sixty-five Democratic U.S. Representatives and twenty-one Democratic Senators handed Trump and the Republican Party an easy victory by extending warrantless spying on Americans. It was a needless and spineless capitulation by Democratic Party centrists, but it was also nothing new from a party that traditionally votes like Republicans on military and security issues. Dammit, Democrats!
Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act extends and expands the ability of spy agencies to monitor your digital communications without a warrant. With Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelation, the public now knows that Section 702 has been used illegally. Millions of communications are vacuumed up and stored annually. The hundreds of thousands of foreign targets have never been approved individually by a court but are essentially retroactive dragnets that frequently involve wiretapping American citizens. This could have been fixed because even Tea Party Republicans wanted the change.
But on January 11th sixty-five House Democrats — including Massachusetts stealth Republicans Bill Keating and Seth Moulton — voted “Yea” on the bill. They were the “usual suspects”: Aguilar (CA), Bera (CA), Bishop (GA), Blunt Rochester (DE), Boyle (PA), Brown (MD), Brownley (CA), Bustos (IL), Carson (IN), Cartwright (PA), Castor (FL), Clyburn (SC), Cooper (TN), Costa (CA), Crist (FL), Cuellar (TX), Delaney (MD), Demings (FL), Deutch (FL), Foster (IL), Frankel (FL), Garamendi (CA), Gottheimer (NJ), Grisham (NM), Higgins (NY), Himes (CT), Hoyer (MD), Keating (MA), Krishnamoorthi (IL), Kuster (NH), Langevin (RI), Lawson (FL), Lipinski (IL), Loebsack (IA), Lowey (NY), Maloney (NY), McEachin (VA), Meeks (NY), Moulton (MA), Murphy (FL), Norcross (NJ), O’Halleran (AZ), Panetta (CA), Pelosi (CA), Perlmutter (CO), Peters (CA), Peterson (MN), Quigley (IL), Rice (NY), Rosen (NV), Ruiz (CA), Ruppersberger (MD), Schiff (CA), Schneider (IL), Scott (GA), Sewell (AL), Sinema (AZ), Sires (NJ), Slaughter (NY), Suozzi (NY), Swalwell (CA), Thompson (CA), Torres (CA), Veasey (TX), and Wasserman-Schultz (FL).
On January 18th twenty-one Senate Democrats voted “Yea” on the Senate version: Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Cortez Masto (NV), Donnelly (IN), Duckworth (IL), Feinstein (CA), Hassan (NH), Heitkamp (ND), Jones (AL), Kaine (VA), Klobuchar (MN), Manchin (WV), McCaskill (MO), Nelson (FL), Peters (MI), Reed (RI), Schumer (NY), Shaheen (NH), Stabenow (MI), Warner (VA), and Whitehouse (RI).
Both members of the Democratic leadership and the former head of the Democratic Party all approved the blanket surveillance. And New Guy Doug Jones. No doubt it’s a good thing the new Alabama Senator is on the job instead of an alleged pedophile. But Jones, who was supported by Democrats of all flavors — I even sent him $50 — just voted away the privacy of 330 million Americans in one of his first official acts. This was not exactly what I was hoping for.
So, while the president bribes porn stars and deals with Russian mafiosi, re-tweets fascists and spits out racist invective, we’re ignoring Congressional and Senate abuses by both parties — one of the worst the dismantling of our democracy.
When I was a boy one of the great crimes of the Soviet Union and Germany of then-recent memory was the practice of arbitrary stops and requiring the papers of citizens: “Papiere!” some thug would demand. Nothing like that could ever happen in the USA — or so we thought. But with the so-called “border exception” to the Fourth Amendment — sometimes known as the Constitution-free zone — The U.S. has snuggled up closer to authoritarian rule. Citizens in Arizona are now accustomed to being stopped by border agents demanding: “Papiere!” But now “Papiere!” has come to New England.
If some day you happen to be driving up to New Hampshire you just might run into the Customs and Border Protection service. Last Fall the New Hampshire Union Leader reported roadblocks on I-93 near Thornton, during which travelers were stopped, asked about their citizenship, and sometimes hauled off to unknown detention centers. In addition, drug-sniffing dogs netted arrests for marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs. All without a warrant.
Likewise, the growing practice of demanding access to a traveler’s computer equipment is also a new feature of our gradual abandonment of the Fourth Amendment. The CATO Institute notes: “thanks to the ‘border exception’ to the Fourth Amendment, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers do not need reasonable suspicion or probable cause to search electronic devices at airports.” The Customs and Border Protection service reports that last year over 30,000 travelers had to fork over laptops, tablets, cellphones, and the passwords to everything in them. As the same statistics show, this practice was in full swing during the Obama administration.
At a time of daily revelations of corruption, incompetence and venality by a sitting president, the bar is admittedly pretty low for the rest of the political establishment. But it’s still worth prodding them to live up to expectations. I’m going to call both my U.S. Senators and thank them for opposing the FISA extension.
And then I’m going to have a long, loud conversation with one of Bill Keating’s staffers.
On September 24, 2009, Suffolk Superior Court Judge John C. Cratsley ruled in a class-action lawsuit that Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson was housing prisoners under cruel and unusual conditions. According to Prison Legal News, “originally filed in 1998, the suit alleged that Hodgson was improperly triple-bunking prisoners at the Ash Street Jail, a pre-Civil War-era facility. The lawsuit also claimed that prisoners were being forced to sleep on the floor in ‘boats’ — portable bunks — and in common areas. The lawsuit was amended in 2004 to add a claim concerning Hodgson’s practice of ‘dry-celling’ prisoners at the Dartmouth House of Correction. ‘Dry-celled’ prisoners did not have access to a toilet.” Nevertheless, the prison capacity in Bristol County has fluctuated between 300% and 384% of the capacity the prisons were designed for.
Over the years, Tom Hodgson has been involved in numerous lawsuits, but conditions rarely seem to improve at facilities under his control. Among the frequent allegations — abuse of prisoners, violations of a State Judicial Court ruling barring unconstitutional ICE detentions, starving and denial of medical treatment, and filthy conditions in both the Dartmouth and New Bedford lockups.
In the last two years, inspections of the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office ICE Facility conducted by Nicholas Gale, a Massachusetts Environmental Health Inspector, have turned up repeat violations of health and safety standards: see reports on April 19, 2016 and November 21, 2016 and April 25, 2017. Likewise, the Women’s Center in North Dartmouth is not in compliance either: see this report on November 16, 2015. Conditions are the worst at the Ash Street Jail: see reports on June 5, 2013 and June 12, 2015 and January 12, 2016. You can download all these reports as a single PDF.
Each includes the following warning:
“This facility does not comply with the Department’s Regulations cited above. In accordance with 105 CMR 451.404, please submit a plan of correction within 10 working days of receipt of this notice, indicating the specific corrective steps to be taken, a timetable for such steps, and the date by which correction will be achieved. The plan should be signed by the Superintendent or Administrator and submitted to my attention, at the address listed above.”
Still, not one federal, state, or municipal agency has ever made the sheriff account for these violations. And it’s not for lack of reporting. Each is dutifully reported to a slew of bureaucrats — Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and New Bedford Departments of Health, both the Commissioner and Director of the Department of Corrections, various policy units within the state government, the governor, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office itself, and clerks of both the Massachusetts House and Senate.
But nothing.
Countless newspaper articles have been written about the dungeon-like environment at the Ash Street Jail, the epidemic of suicides in Bristol County jails, and the cruelty of the sheriff.
Still nothing.
Human beings are being warehoused in inhuman, unsanitary conditions.
“No mans person shall be restrained or imprisoned by any Authority whatsoever, before the law hath sentenced him thereto, If he can put in sufficient securitie, bayle or mainprise, for his appearance, and good behaviour in the meane time, unlesse it be in Crimes Capital, and Contempts in open Court, and in such cases where some expresse act of Court doth allow it.” — Body of Liberties (1641), the oldest codification of Massachusetts Colonial law.
Yesterday two members of BCCJ attended an informational meeting on the Massachusetts Bail Fund at the UMASS Law School in Dartmouth. The meeting was organized by Jesse Purvis, National Lawyers Guild, UMASS Law Chapter.
Jessica Thrall, a federal public defender and member of the Massachusetts Bail Fund’s Steering Committee, spoke first. She outlined one stark injustice of the criminal justice system — that a poor person unable to post bail is locked away in miserable conditions and lacks the ability to consult and communicate freely with lawyers and family.
Prisoners under these circumstances are often needlessly warehoused for months in jail at considerable cost. When finally offered a plea for “time served,” they will often accept the plea deal simply to escape the abusive conditions — even though they are innocent. Thus, for the poor, and particularly for people of color, the criminal justice system creates a grinding conveyor belt from poverty to “criminality” — even when the accused is actually innocent. And once the indigent accused has been systemically transformed into a “criminal” more injustice awaits him/her in the workplace and in a probation system that can hound him/her for decades.
Thrall mentioned the recent case of Jahmal Brangan, who sat in the Hampden County jail for three and a half years because he could not post bail. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled last August in the case of Brangan v. Commonwealth, 082517 MASC, SJC-12232, in which Brangan’s “bail order violated his right to due process because the judge failed to give adequate consideration to his financial resources, and set bail in an amount so far beyond his financial means that it resulted in his long-term detention pending resolution of his case.”
The justices ruled that “In setting the amount of bail for a defendant, a judge must consider the defendant’s financial resources but is not required to set bail in an amount the defendant can afford if other relevant considerations weigh more heavily than the defendant’s ability to prove the necessary security for his appearance at trial.” It was a small victory, but now the door is open to more reasonable bail amounts.
Massachusetts has a system in which defendants post cash bail in court (and pay a clerk a nonrefundable $40 fee for the privilege). Bail bondsmen cannot legally operate in the Commonwealth.
The Massachusetts Bail Fund began in Suffolk and Middlesex counties, but has been expanded to Essex, Norfolk, Worcester, Plymouth and Bristol. The Fund provides up to $500 in bail to defendants who are already represented by a public defender and can prove indigence. To date the Fund has bailed out about 700 defendants, and of those about 60% of the cases were immediately dismissed. When asked about defaults — defendants running and causing the Fund to forfeit its $500 — Thrall noted that this has only happened six times — 6 out of 700 — a statistic Thrall says should make the Commonwealth think twice about requiring any amount of bail for minor offenses.
Attendees wanted to know how the process works — and it works only because of the thirty or so volunteers who do the thankless work of actually bailing out indigent people. Attendees had a chance to hear from a remarkable couple about the process.
Jan and Chuck Bichsel are two of four volunteers in Bristol County. They have been volunteering for about seven months with the Mass Bail Fund and have handled about a dozen “releases,” which play out something like this: (1) volunteer(s) receive an email from the Bail Fund coordinator informing them of the release and the jail (Ash Street or BCSO), contact information, telephone numbers, and public defender; (2) the volunteers post the $500 (or lesser amount) personally at the prison, which may entail appearing in the evening, spending up to six hours waiting for prison staff to respond; (3) coordinating with family to pick up the released individual, or even driving him home if the family has no transportation; (4) appearing at a court hearing many months (or years) later in order to recover the bail money for the Fund.
Volunteers are not personally responsible for bail funds. Money “up-fronted” by volunteers is quickly reimbursed by the Fund. Releases, at least in Bristol County, are handled only during the first two weeks of every month (which means that the earliest release for many follows two weeks of incarceration).
It takes a thoughtful, patient person to do this work. Jan Bichsel joked that she might look like the “crocheting type” but that it took every bit of patience and focus to work with a prison system designed to crush people (maybe she is the crocheting type after all). The couple invited prospective volunteers to “ride along” with them before deciding if this work was for them.
To contribute to the bail fund, go to https://www.massbailfund.org/donate.html
We haven’t read Michelle Alexander’s powerful book yet, but it was recently in the news for being censored in New Jersey prisons. The INTERCEPT noted the irony: “Michelle Alexander’s book chronicles how people of color are not just locked in, but locked out of civic life, and New Jersey has exiled them even further by banning this text specifically for them,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha in a statement. “The ratios and percentages of mass incarceration play out in terms of human lives. Keeping a book that examines a national tragedy out of the hands of the people mired within it adds insult to injury.”
All Souls Church, 196 Elm Street, Braintree, MA 02185
A panel of five people will present views and discuss issues we face regarding mass incarceration as, in the words of Michelle Alexander, a racial caste system that requires a great social movement to effectively deal with it. Her argument is that today’s criminal justice system functions as a framework of social oppression and political suppression, comparable to those of Jim Crow and Slavery, and requires serious consideration.
FEATURING: Elizabeth Herbin-Triant of UMass Lowell, and Jon Huibregtse of Framingham State University to talk about what our society faced under Jim Crow and relate that to what we face today. Franklin Baxley, Director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, Rahsaan Hall, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, and Susan Tordella, from End Mass Incarceration Today, will talk about the issues we face and initiatives under way to build democracy and oppose racial injustice.
In a front-page piece by Curt Brown (“Mentally ill inmates sue Sheriff Hodgson”) in today’s print version of the Standard Times, Bristol County Sheriff Hodgson disputes charges in a lawsuit brought against him — allegations similar to those BCCJ heard from former inmates whom we interviewed:
“It’s a frivolous lawsuit,” Hodgson told the Standard-Times. The sheriff also questioned the timing of the suit since the state legislature is now considering a sweeping criminal justice reform package.
Hodgson claims his facility has “never received a deficiency on any inspection of its mental or physical health care” and that “the Bristol County House of Corrections ranks in the top 10 percent of all correctional facilities in the nation.”
That’s not for quality — but it’s certainly in the top 10 percent of county prison suicides.
But Tom Hodgson didn’t acknowledge that he’s lost a number of suits for abusive treatment of prisoners. In 2009, for instance, the sheriff was accused of housing prisoners in cruel and unusual conditions — and he lost the case.
If Hodgson’s weasel words are true — that inspections do not reveal deficiencies related to abuse — then the state had better start conducting thorough inspections.
For the sheriff a good defense requires dispensing with facts of public record. “The lawsuit is full of misinformation and flat-out lies,” spokesman Jonathan Darling told the Standard Times. “Shame on Prisoner Legal Services for filing such a ridiculous lawsuit and wasting taxpayer resources.”
Yet it’s hardly “ridiculous” when Hodgson has a history of abusing prisoners. And the sheriff wasn’t worrying about waste when he squandered millions of dollars in taxpayer resources pursuing a losing case all the way to the Supreme Court. In fact, wasting taxpayer money — like the suicides in his jails — stand out among Massachusetts county jails. Which is why we are asking for thorough investigations.
With the help of more than 6,000 lobbyists the 1% of the 1% — America’s super-rich — managed to ram through a new tax code in the U.S. Congress designed entirely for themselves. Here in the Commonwealth similar looters are unhappy the “little people” have been fighting back.
The RaiseUp Coalition — a broad coalition of workers and social justice groups in Massachusetts — succeeded in getting the so-called “Millionaire’s Tax” on the 2018 state ballot. It took thousands of hours of ordinary people standing in the freezing cold or drizzle, and being chased from supermarket parking lots, to gather the signatures. Now, however, the richest of the rich are trying to have the ballot initiative blocked — by taking away our right to vote on it.
A complaint before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court claims Attorney General Maura Healey and State Secretary William Galvin overstepped their authority by permitting what is essentially a progressive income tax to be added to the ballot.
Healy and Galvin are being sued by Christopher Anderson, Westford, President of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, Inc. (“MHTC”); Christopher Carlozzi, Malden, State Director of the National Federation of Independent Business (“NFIB”); Richard C. Lord, Peabody, President and Chief Executive Officer of Associated Industries of Massachusetts (“AIM”); Eileen McAnneny, Melrose, President of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (“Foundation”); and Daniel O’Connell, Boston, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership (“MACP”).
When these lobbying groups were pocketing massive tax breaks not one of them one was screaming “Class Warfare!” But now when called upon to pay their fair share, well, things are quite different. Fourteen members of the Mass High Tech Council alone have managed to extort $144.7 million in tax breaks from the state — and the $150 million in salaries of the executives who run these companies were paid for almost entirely by taxpayers. Nevertheless, taxpayer largesse was never enough for these parasites.
If you are a voter, please sign the RaiseUp petition to demand that the tax initiative stays on the ballot.
And if you are a legislator — just pass the Millionaire’s Tax! If the people’s house were really doing the people’s work we wouldn’t need ballot initiatives like this.
Three neighboring counties in the bottom right quadrant of the Commonwealth have Republican sheriffs in otherwise Democratic districts. It could have something to do with demographics — or maybe just neglect and Boston-centric politics. But it is surely a sign that not all is well with a party that habitually runs weak sheriff candidates — or none at all.
Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings recently joined fellow Republicans, Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson and Plymouth County Sheriff Joe McDonald, in signing a 287(g) agreement with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Under such agreements ICE permits prison officials to volunteer as federal immigration agents. The Trump administration, which strongly promotes the program, sees 287(g) as a tool in its larger mass-deportation strategy. And the Republican sheriffs know it. “The president said our role is probably the most critical because we know the players in our communities and we know how to find them,” Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson said.
You wouldn’t know it from Hodgson’s many statements on right-wing talk radio, but 287(g) is not very popular — by any stretch of the imagination. At present ICE has agreements in only 18 states, and with only 60 law enforcement agencies. Massachusetts joins Arizona, California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Ohio — and the entire South — as participants. Now generally limited to a “jails” model because of previous abuses in the older “task force” and “hybrid” models, 287(g) agreements have a long history of civil rights abuses. For instance, in 2011 Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s agreement with ICE was terminated for civil rights abuses.
These ICE agreements impose costs of running a federal law enforcement program on state government and redeploy state corrections employees as federal agents. Sheriffs who enter into the agreements do so out of personal politics — not as part of their job description. And many local police forces find 287(g) programs undermine community trust.
According to the American Immigration Council, ICE agreements with local sheriffs are not properly supervised by ICE. Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times have featured articles on the lack of local accountability for county sheriffs — sheriffs who often operate as spokesmen for the Trump administration and anti-immigrant groups like FAIR and CIS. Understandably, there is growing resistance to 287(g) programs and a desire to slap some limits on them. And a lot is happening recently.
On January 3rd the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates ratified a resolution opposing the 287(g) program in Barnstable County — although voters had no choice in entering into the agreement in the first place.
On January 8th at 7PM at the Falmouth Public Library county residents will have a chance to discuss 287(g) agreements and learn about the Safe Communities Act — state legislation which puts some limits on a sheriff’s discretionary powers regarding ICE.
And at the Bristol County prison on January 11th at 6PM county residents will have a similar opportunity to express concerns about the 287(g) program — see http://www.bcso-ma.us/ for details of the public hearing. And do your homework if you plan on attending.
Barnstable County’s Sheriff has the dubious distinction of recently joining Bristol and Plymouth county sheriffs in signing 287(g) agreements with ICE. Dartmouth’s Sheriff Tom Hodgson will be hosting an annual 287(g) Steering Committee meeting on January 11th at 6PM. The meeting is open to the public and feedback is requested.
Along these same lines — on January 3, 2018 the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates held a public hearing to vote on a proposal by Provincetown Delegate Brian O’Malley (County Resolution 17-10) to not support the County Sheriff’s pursuit of an ICE 287(g) agreement, though the agreement is already in place. Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings answered questions on the 287(g) program he just signed with ICE, then left before listening to the community he supposedly serves. County Delegate Christopher Kanaga (Orleans) asked that two members of the press be permitted to report on the testimony but the request was denied for “fire code” reasons. Fortunately there was a recording of the meeting:
While you might find our testimony interesting, even more interesting to me are the questions asked by the delegates after the sheriff’s initial presentation and the comments the delegates made after the hearing was adjourned and the business meeting convened to consider Brian [O’Malley’s] proposal. Although the weighted vote was against the proposal, the majority of the delegates voted in favor of it. Their reactions were serious and thoughtful — we have many allies who share our reservations about the sheriff’s intentions. My impression was that he left immediately after his portion of the hearing was done. If that’s true, I think that not staying to listen to the comments of the public or the delegates was arrogant and disrespectful, not the behavior I expect from a public servant.
The first two hours of the Assembly hearings featured the sheriff first presenting his case, followed by questions from the delegates. (There’s one delegate from each of the fifteen towns, but their votes are weighted depending on population.) This all started because, before the sheriff’s 287(g) application was approved, Brian O’Malley, the delegate from P’town, presented a proposal on December 6 asking the Assembly to vote not to support the application. Somewhere between 20-30 of us showed up, some just to show support by our presence for Brian’s resolution but some of us to talk. The Speaker freaked out, adjourned the meeting, and then put together this public hearing. Over 100 people showed up last night. Out of the 23 speakers, only three spoke in favor of the sheriff’s new powers.
The question now is: What can we do to help move the Safe Communities Act out of committee and make this issue disappear? There will be a meeting on January 8th in Falmouth to discuss precisely that:
Last night’s special Senate election in Alabama was balm for weary Liberals — and possibly even held a silver lining for Conservatives. With the repudiation of a xenophobic bible-thumping bigot with multiple accusations of child molestation, Alabamians can almost look themselves in the mirror this morning. Together, Democrats and Republicans breathed a sigh of relief that a man so foul would not be taking a seat in the Senate.
Tennessee GOP Senator Bob Corker called Moore’s defeat “a great night for America.” Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio tweeted: “For their good sense people are praised, but the perverse of heart are despised. Proverbs 12:8,” But these were exceptions from a party that generally stands for everything Moore represents.
For Americans the closely-watched election had everything in it — race, sex, religion, authoritarianism. It was at once a referendum on the role of religion in government and America’s search for its soul. Although America may have dodged a bullet, the slim margin said a lot about the country’s tenuous relationship to democracy, equality and civil liberties. Ezra Klein put the narrow Democratic “win” in perspective:
“If Moore had merely been a candidate who believed Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress, that the laws of the United States of America should be superseded by his interpretation of the Bible, that homosexuality should be illegal, he would have won in a landslide. Even multiple credible reports that Moore serially preyed on teenage girls were barely enough to lose him the election. […] Like Donald Trump before him, Moore is proof that there is no depravity so unforgivable, no behavior so immoral, that it assures a candidate will lose his party’s voters.”
Mark Galli, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, in a piece yesterday, had plenty of criticism for Christian liberals but saved his harshest words for conservative Evangelicals:
“The race between Republican candidate Roy Moore and Democratic candidate Doug Jones has only put an exclamation point on a problem that has been festering for a year and a half — ever since a core of strident conservative Christians began to cheer for Donald Trump without qualification and a chorus of other believers decried that support as immoral. The Christian leaders who have excused, ignored, or justified his unscrupulous behavior and his indecent rhetoric have only given credence to their critics who accuse them of hypocrisy. Meanwhile the easy willingness of moderate and progressive Christians to cast aspersions on their conservative brothers and sisters has made many wonder about our claim that Jesus Christ can bring diverse people together as no other can.”
Aspersions aside, the facts are these: White Alabamians, in their perversity, overwhelmingly chose a racist multiply-accused of pedophilia who doesn’t really believe in the U.S. Constitution over a Democrat who successfully prosecuted the Klan. And it was black Alabamians — black women, especially — whom the nation can thank for their display of the “good sense” mentioned in Proverbs 12:8.
The Alabama election should dispel any notion that Democrats must abandon so-called “identity politics” and throw their efforts instead into chasing “angry white voters.” Angry white voters don’t vote for them. When Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democratic luminaries announced their “Better Deal” in Berryville, Virginia, it was a harebrained effort to appeal to white populism. But the Democratic Party is a party of diversity, the working class is much broader than the DNC seems to understand — and that’s where the party’s power must come from. Last night black Alabamians wanted the DNC to remember that.
Before the election, when asked if black Alabama voters would turn out in sufficient numbers, Birmingham City Councillor Sheila Tyson replied, “The problem isn’t going to be with the black voters. If Jones doesn’t win, it’s not our problem.” But black voters delivered. After the votes were in, Democratic strategist Symone D. Sanders told a Newsweek reporter, “Doug Jones would not have won today without the turnout we saw from African-American voters. […] Black women have been absolutely clear in their support for Democratic policies and Democratic candidates. It’s high time for Democrats … to invest in that effort.”
Which was a polite way of telling the Democratic Party to stop focusing on big donors, and losing battles with racists, to democratize and start showing some respect for voters of color who just saved their asses.
But bringing real democracy to the Democratic Party won’t happen easily. In the Monday New York Times Julia Azari and Seth Masket penned an opinion piece, “Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?” In it they object to the DNC Unity Commission’s moves to reduce the number of superdelegates and open up the party to [shudder] Sanders supporters. They write that “part of the problem for parties is our insistence that they be run democratically. That turns out not to be a very realistic concept […] party leaders will always have vastly more information about candidates — their strengths and flaws, their ability to govern and work with Congress, their backing among various interest groups and coalitions — than voters and caucusgoers do. That information is useful, even vital, to the task of picking a good nominee.”
Richard Eskow in his dissection, “Democrats Need More Democracy, Not Less” does a great job of refuting Azari and Masket’s argument, pointing out that — repeatedly — party insiders have either championed candidates who were doomed the moment their names appeared on the ballot — or sabotaged candidates who were objectively more “realistic” than the poor choices insiders made. The 2016 Presidential election was no exception.
If the Alabama election teaches us anything, it’s that the Republican Party has completely lost whatever soul it ever had. Democrats, on the other hand, still have theirs. It’s right underfoot, but they’re knocking around in the dark trying to figure out where the hell they left it.
A politician’s legacy is not his alone. He often builds on policies and practices of previous administrations. While Trump’s mendacity and incompetence (and dementia) are his and his alone, many of his most noxious initiatives have been bipartisan projects all along. Trump’s recklessness simply airs America’s dirty little secrets and turns already bad policies into unbearable ones. Forget the “kinder, gentler” versions. Now the worst of militarism, racism, and predatory capitalism are simply official.
If we tremble at the recklessness with which Trump toys with American nukes, we forget that Obama authorized a $1 trillion upgrade to them. If we abhor Trump’s new Mexican wall, we forget that Democrats helped build them. Twice. If we despise the racism of the GOP, we willfully forget that Democrats had a hand in drug, crime and prison policies that disproportionately harmed people of color. If we detest Trump’s shady friends in high places, we forget that these were the guys Democrats bailed out in 2008. If we mouth concern about Trump’s affinity for dictators, we forget that the Obama administration kept them in power in Honduras and Egypt and the Ukraine. If we wring our hands over Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran, we forget that Democrats destabilized Libya and Syria.
None of this would be so offensive if Democrats had changed their ways or said their mea culpas for, say, wrecking Iraq or Vietnam or creating a carceral state. Yet for all the crocodile tears and hypocritical indignation over Trump’s policies, Democrats have some very selective memory.
This week it was Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Democrats responded immediately and harshly. Nancy LeTourneau, in her piece “Trump’s Dangerous Pandering to White Evangelicals on Jerusalem” in the Clinton-friendly Washington Monthly, wrote:
“the announcement from Trump today that the U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and begin the process of moving our embassy there is a key ingredient to this president’s support among white evangelicals.” [… and ] “this is a perfect example of what happens when we tear down the wall separating church and state. Having a foreign policy that panders to people who welcome war in the Middle East as a sign that we are approaching the climax of history is as nutty as it is dangerous.”
That was the year that Barak Obama added a plank in the party platform at the behest of the Israeli lobby group AIPAC to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It was a plank that had somehow been omitted. But a majority of delegates opposed the restoration. Convention Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa kept calling for voice votes to affirm the adoption of the plank, and it kept failing. Finally, Villaraigosa simply ignored the “nays” and declared that it had passed — a moment that revealed how democracy really works in the DNC.
“Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel.” This has been the DNC position since at least 2008. LeTourneu’s complaint that Trump’s foreign policy panders to people who welcome war in the Middle East is certainly true — but it applies equally to her own party. The rest of the language in the plank — completely disregarded by Democrats — called for an open city, not for gifting the Al Aqsa mosque to Israel:
“The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain a divided city accessible to people of all faiths.”
Yet for the last fifty years of Israel’s martial law over Palestinians only the United States has defended the occupation and the settlements. The U.S. has consistently shut its eyes to Israeli abuses and Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes and businesses in East Jerusalem without a peep of protest or without the U.S. using its considerable supply of sticks and carrots. The U.S. could easily cut off military and economic aid or vetos at the Security Council. Or it could sanction Israel’s nukes.
Democrats now fume at settler donors Jared Kushner and David Friedman working so transparently in behalf of Israel, but it was former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller who first coined the phrase “Israel’s attorney” in 2005, referring to the United States.
Whether out of gutlessness, lack of empathy for those whom Israelis displaced, craven political opportunism, or maybe just the cash, Democrats have presided over an irreversible buildout of Israeli settlements and half a century of oppression of Palestinians. By being “Israel’s attorney” Democrats have neglected the peace process so long that there is no longer any hope of a Two State solution and so-called U.S. “leadership” is a cruel sham.
The New Bedford Branch of the NAACP is celebrating its 100th Anniversary!
On December 10, 1917, the National Board of the NAACP chartered the New Bedford Branch, joining a long history of struggle for civil rights and social justice across the nation. Recently a UMASS Dartmouth branch was formed to work with the city chapter. The New Bedford chapter was formed only eight years after the NAACP itself was established.
To commemorate its centennial, the New Bedford NAACP Branch is holding a 100th Anniversary Gala on (Saturday) December 16, 2017 at White’s of Westport, 66 State Road in Westport, Massachusetts.
The keynote speaker for this event will be Ms. Clayola Brown, President of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in Washington D.C. and former National NAACP Board Member. The event will feature a cocktail hour, dinner, music and dancing, an awards presentation, and a historical review of the New Bedford NAACP Branch. The occasion promises to be a memorable event to mark the anniversary of the chartering of a branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.
Mark your calendars and please support this tremendous milestone in both national and local history. Tickets for the semi-formal event are $75.00 each and may be purchased by contacting Mr. Peter Silva via e-mail at degbor.silva2@comcast.net. If you can’t attend, buy a ticket anyway and earmark it for a student.
Before the light of brotherly love totally flickers out in this country, it might be a good time to support those fighting for civil liberties and the rights of all of us.
Well, we have a new tax plan. Despite the trillion dollar deficit it will add, Trump’s super-rich cronies and their cronies are delirious with joy. Like the imagined revival of Kentucky coal, trickle-down economics is going to save us. Or so the purveyors of snake oil tell us.
Reaganomics, Voodoo Economics, Supply-Side Economics, or Trickle-Down Economics. Like Satan it’s known by many names. But even if “trickle down” economics don’t quite work in practice, the description is surely apt if not unseemly. In fact, the meaning was not lost on New Zealand Labor Party MP Damien O’Connor who referred to it as “the rich pissing on the poor.”
Almost immediately after Reagan revived “trickle down” economics David Stockman, the chief architect of Reagan’s economic policies, disavowed it. Reagan’s eventual vice president George H.W. Bush called it voodoo economics. Countless economists have explained why the theory is (1) just plain wrong; (2) actually results in more misery for workers; or (3) is dishonest and deceptive. But facts haven’t stopped the GOP from trying to promote the scam. Repeatedly.
We are supposed to believe that when the super-rich stockpile cake we’ll get some crumbs. Most people know this fake economic theory from the 20th and 21st centuries but it actually had its origins in the 19th when it was called “horse and sparrow” theory. John Kenneth Galbraith explained delicately:
“If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
The GOP has been shoveling horsepucky ever since. In an 1896 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago William Jennings Bryan alluded to the fundamental difference between the major political parties:
“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”
So take your choice of metaphorical excreta. This is what the GOP successfully unloaded on America last Friday at midnight, giving Senators only a hour to read 400+ pages of last-minute changes with scribbles.
At this very moment the Democratic Party should be rolling up their sleeves. Maybe even with Jennings Bryan in mind, the DNC needs to publish an economic policy ready to be implemented the second they regain the House and Senate. Everyone remembers Paul Ryan distributing copies of his “Better Way.” Well, Democrats, where’s your Better Better Way?
I’ll wager almost anything will be better than the GOP’s horsepucky.
After Thanksgiving I was looking for something in my bookshelf when I found a book I’d never bought. It was Glenn Beck’s Broke. When I opened the cover it contained an effusive recommendation — from me! — and a cryptic note: “15 of 16.” It dawned on me that I’d been pranked.
This set me looking for the rest. Of course the principal conspirators — my brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and son — were messing with my head. There were actually only 14 more. If I didn’t have the right number, they certainly had mine.
And what a collection it was!
America by Heart by Sarah Palin, a dunce who can now be forgiven somewhat when compared to her male counterpart running the country
Broke by Glenn Beck, two parts conspiracy theory and one part crackpot economics exploration
Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, by Glenn Beck (again) — a guy who thinks he’s Thomas Paine but is really just a pain without any common sense
Decision Points by hapless Decider-in-Chief, George W. Bush, a dishonest, sanitized memoir of his many failures and weaknesses masquerading as success and strength
Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America by white supremacist Ann Coulter, who picked a book that describes her to a tee
Godless by VDARE and Aryan Nation darling Ann Coulter, sins of liberal atheists from Willie Horton to the Walkman
More than Money by Neil Cavuto, uplifting stories of CEOs who triumphed despite their white privilege
One Nation by narcoleptic fundamentalist surgeon Ben Carson, a meditation on what really enslaves and plagues America — and, surprise! — it’s nothing that would occur to any rational human being
Slouching Towards Gomorrah by Robert Bork, which puts a cold white finger on what’s really wrong with America — pestilential strivings for democracy and equality
The Case Against Barak Obama by David Freddoso, a hatchet job on Obama (prior to his other racist book, Gangster Government: Barak Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy)
The Death of Outrage by William Bennett, a hit piece on Bill Clinton that reminds us that there really is a vast right wing conspiracy
The Tyranny of Gun Control by conspiracy theorist and gun nut Jacob Hornberger and lover of all things Austrian Richard Ebeling
The Way Things Ought to Be by oxycodone connoisseur Rush Limbaugh, unhinged rants on blacks, gays, women, law and order, and Hollywood liberals
To Renew America by serial adulterer and well-educated “deplorable” Newt Gingrich, on “reasserting the values of American civilization” — code for beefing up American hyper-capitalism and racism
Who’s Looking Out for You? by Bill O’Reilly (with a dedication to Roger Ailes), which attacks people who don’t take responsibility for their actions or the ill that befalls them– like, for instance, black people and women [including those he personally sexually abused]
My new collection had been repurposed from a library book sale that had no buyers for them. My sister-in-law’s wicked sense of humor provided an alternative to the town dump.
I related this experience to friends who thought it was pretty funny — something they’d love to do to bleeding hearts of their own.
Well. I just happened to have a box of books they could use.
I confess, I bought Reni Eddo-Lodge’s “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” for its provocative title. As American democracy unravels and the ugly white supremacy it was all built on emerges like Dorian Gray’s portrait, I have noticed many black Americans simply giving up on white Americans. Sadly, that includes me. Fortunately, and despite the title of her book, Eddo-Lodge has kept talking about race — to whites and blacks alike.
The book offers reader a great overview of British race problems — which are, not surprisingly, much like our own in America. Police killings, redlining, civil rights abuses, organized racists and nationalists, disappointing liberals — race in Britain could be a parallel universe, though it has its own features. Second, this is a book by a black British feminist, which offers us a view of the intersection between race and gender. And as a second-generation Briton, Eddo-Lodge also discusses how class and wealth intersect as well.
Eddo-Lodge has a wonderful chapter that differentiates structural racism from raw bigotry, and she takes an effective stab at white privilege and the notion of so-called “reverse racism.” In another chapter she interviews far-right BNP leader Nick Griffin. In another she describes how feminism was a gateway to her understanding of race. And she has much to say about white feminists.
One of the best lines in the book comes from the ending of the chapter “Fear of a Black Planet”:
“The paradox, of course, is that those who oppose anti-racism have worked themselves into quite the double-bind. It’s a bit of a Schroedinger’s cat situation. If, as they say, racism doesn’t exist, and black people have nothing to complain about, why are they so afraid of white people becoming the new minority?”
“Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” is filled with statistics, polls, case studies, and individual stories; and it ends with thirteen pages of footnotes. But not before offering readers suggestions on fighting racism — or staying sane while surviving it.
Even a hundred years ago White America had seen the writing on the wall. It knew its power was about to peak and would eventually decline. It also knew that culture war would be a potent brake on the process.
And so the Western canon — a curriculum exalting Western empire — was developed. In 1909 Harvard University’s 51-volume “Harvard Classics” was published. It represented what any well-educated man of the time should know. The Classics were overwhelmingly those of ancient Greek and Roman empires and the rising colonial empires of Europe and America who saw themselves as rightful inheritors. Three non-Western texts were included — the Sayings of Confucius, the Bhagavad-Gita, and several surahs from the Qu’ran. But it was largely a white, Christian — and overwhelmingly male — curriculum.
In 1952 Great Books of the Western World was published by Encyclopedia Britannica. This time the volumes targeted not an academic audience but businessmen who wanted to fill in educational gaps — and put some nice-looking books on their mahogony shelves. Robert Hutchins, a founder of the project along with Mortimer Adler, announced the books at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria, saying: “This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.” One meaning the selection made crystal clear — only the West was of importance to a well-educated man. Confucius, the Hindus, and Muhammad had been banished from even token appearances this time around.
In 1994 academic Harold Bloom — no WASP but another old white male who called himself a “Jewish Gnostic” — came up with another reading list promoting Western civilization: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Bloom’s list focused on 26 authors and now represented what some were calling the Judeo-Christian tradition, although he had added a smattering — and a strangely idiosyncratic selection — of “international” writers. Despite being an update for a post-war America that had received undeniable contributions from Jews, Bloom’s “canon” remained one more reading list of largely dead white men written by a member of a slightly, and only reluctantly, enlarged club.
Around this time another Bloom — University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom — published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that abandoning the Western canon would dumb down students, plunge them into moral relativism, and that modern (and international) culture was bereft of civilizing influences. The book became required reading for neoconservatives like Dinesh D’Souza who himself published one with a similar theme. But what disturbed conservatives the most was that students and academics questioned whether the Western canon actually represented all that was best about the “democratic” Western world — or whether its main purpose was to defend reactionary, colonial, and elitist traditions. Even the other Bloom — Harold — chimed in: “We are destroying all intellectual and esthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice.”
Social justice. God forbid.
The Civil Rights movement had been a shock, and the Sixties were bad enough for conservatives. But now students at Ivy League institutions were turning their backs on the Western world — or at least looking occasionally in other directions. These students were painted as lazy, spoiled children of privilege or angry, ungrateful, minority upstarts spitting on what democracy, consumer culture, and affirmative action had graciously afforded them. They wanted to read post-Colonial literature — Black Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Latin Americans, and Asians. Conservatives saw college students under the sway of Svengali academics attacking all that European civilization had done for those they had colonized.
For decades Joseph Campbell was known for books on mythology, comparative religion, and literature. Even today Campbell’s studies of the folk tale and, specifically, the “Hero’s Journey,” are known by just about every working screenwriter — and now even ISIS. But while the Western canon’s treatment of mythology was limited to Europe — mainly Greece, Germany, and Scandinavia — as early as 1952 Campbell slammed the omission of other cultures in his introduction to the Viking Press Portable Edition of Arabian Nights. Campbell took specific aim at the Great Books:
“… it is remarkable how little is admitted of the Muslim contribution to our culture by those histories (hundreds appear every year) that rehearse the outdated schoolbook story about the Greeks and the Renaissance. In a recent list of”Great Books” not a single volume (save the Bible) is named from east of Suez: Calvin is there, but not Mohammed; Hobbes, but not Confucius; the Iliad (which for the past twenty-five hundred years has had no influence whatsoever on civilization, save as an unmastered model for the litterateurs), but not the Mahabharata (which, during the same period, has been the spiritual sustenance of billions of the world’s living people). One searches in vain for a single Buddhist text (the dominant faith of about one-third the world’s population), a single Oriental philosopher, a single poet or novelist of the great Chinese, Japanese, Arabian, or Hindu traditions. Such a list, in the present century, is ridiculous, and would be incredible were our Occidental megalomania not one of the most conspicuous of the world’s present ills.”
Occidental megalomania, indeed.
Fast forward seventy years and most would acknowledge that the old white men lost the Canon wars. But they do keep trying. In 2008 Americans elected a black president who had spent considerable time as a youngster in Asia — and white America didn’t like it. In 2010, former MIT literature professor, playwright, and old white man A.R. Gurney — best known for a play about a dog — wrote Office Hours, a contrived swipe at lazy plagiarizing students preoccupied with social justice and political correctness — and nasty academic feminists griping about old dead white men. Office Hours was a passionate defense — and among the last I can recall — of the Great Books, and the play had a mercifully short run.
Having lost the Canon wars, Conservatives now have abandoned their traditional role of defending tradition. Nowadays when it comes to higher education, their new strategy seems to be gutting the humanities, focusing on STEM education, licensing fly-by-night for-profit universities, embracing flat earth anti-intellectualism, rejecting science, and embracing creationism.
By the time the 2016 election rolled around, the old white men were in full panic. As always, the deck they had stacked and the bizarre election rules they had written guaranteed their presidency — even while losing by three million popular votes. But the gnarled white knuckles of these men are still clenched in a death grip on the levers of government, commerce, and culture.
But they can’t hold on forever. The known world today is no longer quite so flat, quite so white, quite so male, or quite as Western as it was in 1909.
Over 435,000 people – over 12,000 in Massachusetts alone – depend on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to live and work legally in the U.S. TPS provides safe harbor for people from countries affected by violence or disasters, and it can be renewed for as long as it is unsafe to return.
But the Trump administration is ending TPS for people from Sudan, Nicaragua, and Haiti, and it is likely to do the same for Salvadorans and Hondurans.
If TPS is not extended, those — from all these countries — will lose work permits and be subject to deportation. And they’ll have to choose between splitting up their families or placing their children in danger.
We can’t let this happen.
Massachusetts’ entire Congressional delegation supports extending TPS, as does even Republican Governor Baker. But that’s not enough. We need them to actively fight both to save TPS, and to enable TPS holders to seek permanent residency.
TPS recipients are our friends, neighbors — even members of our families.
Please act now. Call Homeland Security at (202) 282-8495 and urge them to extend TPS for Honduras and El Salvador, and to reinstate protections for those it has terminated.
Then use this tool to email your elected officials.
Finally. For the first time ever someone in Congress is doing something about Israel’s systematic abuse of Palestinian children — abuses that include torture and incarceration of kids as young as eight.
As Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary of land theft, martial law, and human rights abuses on Palestinians, Democratic Minnesota Congresswoman Betty McCollum quietly filed H.R.4391, the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, which prevents U.S. tax dollars from supporting the “Israeli military’s ongoing detention and mistreatment of Palestinian children.” The bill has twelve cosponsors, all of them progressive Democrats.
H.R.4391 has been endorsed by the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International USA, Center for Constitutional Rights, Churches for Middle East Peace, Defense for Children International – Palestine, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Global Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ, Jewish Voice for Peace, Mennonite Central Committee, Presbyterian Church (USA), the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR), and United Methodist General Board of Church and Society.
Years ago I was leaving the supermarket with my daughter, then in kindergarten. I breezed past someone asking for money for a dog rescue — and she looked up at me, shocked and incensed: “Daddy, you’re mean!”
It really made me think. In short order I also stopped worrying about all the ways a panhandler could misuse the money I gave him. I stopped offering to buy him lunch when what he really wanted from me was cash. I had a pretty good idea where the money was going. But patronizing charity never seemed like a completely human gesture. Finally I took a page from the Talmud: when someone asks you for money, reach into your pocket and don’t even ask.
Of course, this makes you a compassionate chump. But it’s pretty liberating to give out of habit and not have to run through all the permutations like a tightly-wound investor. The reason for this, as I learned, is to avoid having your heart grow hard — to not permit yourself to become cruel.
And isn’t this what a human society and its justice system should be founded on? Compassion that errs on the side of — yes — even foolishness? We congratulate ourselves on our high standards for prosecution — beyond the shadow of a doubt. Our Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishments, even for savage crimes. And once upon a time generosity and benefit of the doubt were even intended to be part of the justice system. But compassion has long dried up as we become increasingly the severe, judgmental Puritans who founded this country.
Justice tempered with compassion was also a feature of ancient Jewish halakha. A violent crime had to have two witnesses who saw it committed with their own eyes. Even when there was absolutely no doubt of guilt, if all twenty-three judges of the sanhedrin voted to convict the accused it was assumed that something had gone terribly wrong with the ruling — that some measure of compassion had been overlooked — and the man was acquitted.
But truth be told, we angry citizens are little more today than a mob hiding behind the respectable but vengeful face of the courts. We as individuals easily pronounce harsh online sentences on each other after taking only a moment to read a post. Lumped together as a jury, we vote to convict after obscenely short deliberations. The judges we appoint follow minimum sentencing guidelines to explicitly eliminate human compassion. For all our moral posturing, the mechanized justice we dispense is no wiser or kinder than a Taliban stoning or a Puritan witch burning. We have, in fact, perfected cruelty by putting it on an assembly line.
Ninety-five percent of violent crimes are never heard in court because most defendants in America today are pressured into plea deals by terrifying, inflated charges and poverty that eliminates any chance of an adequate defense. Prosecutors will convict on the basis of faulty evidence or bias, or community anger, or suppressed exculpatory evidence. In prison inmates can spend years behind bars for nonviolent crimes, or serve sentences largely in solitary. Our prison system is the largest in the world and it has become just another piece of a corrosive and exploitative capitalist economy.
Once a prisoner completes his sentence, society marks him with a scarlet “F” for felon and he becomes unemployable, disenfranchised, and a pariah for life. He is turned out onto the street with little more than cab fare, years of probation ahead, and few skills to feed himself or his family — once back in the world of upright, moral, angry men.
And when a death is involved the angry men demand blood that can only be appeased by the state’s own murder of the guilty. It sounds almost like the sick satanic ritual it is: the condemned is injected with concoctions of poisonous drugs, whose provenance and composition are kept secret, while onlookers peer through curtains as the man gasps and chokes and suffers on a gurney overseen by a physician who has renounced his promise to, first, do no harm.
Without reforms long recognized but never implemented because they might make us all compassionate chumps, the judicial system continues to tilt toward injustice, the twisted, and the cruel. The very notion of mercy has been completely excised from the courts. Rehabilitation may have once been a fleeting ideal, but it can no longer be found in prisons operated increasingly by get-tough political grandstanders.
All that remains of the justice system today is the angry, vengeful state doing the work of its angry, vengeful citizens, demanding blood and usually getting it.
American history is not simply the tales of presidents, generals and explorers — or of the many wars to which the U.S. has sent its children. History is not some abstract account of other people. Our own families and communities have created traces that demand to be viewed in the mirror of history. American history, then — our history — is both a personal story and a personal reckoning.
Almost twenty years ago I became interested in genealogy. My mother’s ancestors lived in the United States long before it became a republic. They can be traced back five or six centuries to little Welsh and English villages, and somebody somewhere has a book with all the dry details of begats, property transfers, and manumissions of slaves. Slave ownership among white families, even by Northerners, is a dirty little secret some would rather forget.
In among all the yellowing photo albums is a picture of my mother as a two month old, cradled in the arms of an old black woman. Below the photo, in my mother’s scrawl: Louisa was born a slave.
Louisa was born a slave
Of course, this was 1930, it was the South, and much has changed since then.
But, as Charlottesville reminded us not that long ago, a lot has not changed. Slavery may be gone, but it ended recently enough that we still find reminders in our family albums. For Louisa, the Jim Crow South kept her living in poverty, taking care of someone else’s children, her sons farming for someone else, and it placed incalculable obstacles before her grandchildren. For all the recent talk of flags and monuments and legacy, it is not so much Confederate (or Union) symbols but racist institutions that represent our true heritage. And like our family albums, these institutions persist to this day.
Many view white supremacy as dead and cold as Confederate statues. Yet the white supremacy on which slavery was based is hot and pulsing, alive and malign. White supremacy is such a major part of the national DNA that it has shaped our justice and economic systems, healthcare, immigration, foreign policy, policing, the prison system — every aspect of American life, North and South. It is the source of America’s great wealth, our expeditionary militarism, and a daily contributor to income inequality. White supremacy lies behind the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism. White supremacy has justified most of our wars of choice, not just the Civil War. And just like actual DNA, white supremacy seems to be transmitted across generations like a deadly gene.
My mother once told me an unflattering story about her own mother. It was 1940 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been president for eight years. Like Obama, Roosevelt was despised throughout the South and was accused of being a race traitor and a Communist. For all the epithets hurled at FDR by my grandmother and those like her, the New Deal had improved the lives of poor people of every race and America was changing — and for the better. On one particular day in April that year, a black census lady came to my grandmother’s front door. My grandmother told her crisply to go to the back. The census worker replied, “I can do it here, or not at all.”
She didn’t know it at the time, but my grandmother’s world had already changed — into something she would never accept. A genteel Sunday school teacher with Southern breeding, my grandmother would have despised today’s racists as so much “white trash” for mixing Southern “heritage” with the Nazism America was then fighting. But on matters of race my grandmother held exactly the same views as today’s white supremacists.
Tea Party Republicans now own the party and the presidency — and they warn us the gloves are off and the bare knuckles out. But so too are the white satin sheets and coarse brown shirts out of the closet. We now know exactly what these men and women are — and we shouldn’t hesitate to use the proper terms: fascists and white supremacists. A frighteningly large segment of white America no longer feels any shame about public expressions of their hate. Racism without consequence has become re-enshrined in law and Jim Crow is making a comeback. Worse, “mere” racism seems to be making the transition to fascism.
Adolf Hitler may never have been a member of the Confederacy but today’s white supremacists just as easily sieg Heil to a Nazi Hakenkreuz as they salute a Confederate flag or monument. Today it’s almost impossible to distinguish racism from fascism because, in the end, what’s the difference when dehumanization, deportation, ethnic cleansing and murder are shared objectives?
But the silver lining — if there is one — is that Charlottesville released a flood of essays, meditations and documentaries on our Original Sin, on the magnitude of our problem with white supremacy — and I must agree with Jamelle Bouie and others who identify it as a white problem.
Among the best pieces I read immediately after Charlottesville, in no particular order:
If all this is overwhelming and heartbreaking, it should be. We should be overwhelmed with shame and remorse and anger. We should be crying and we should be screaming. We can never fix what’s wrong with this country without acknowledging the deepest foundational injustice that almost every other injustice is based on.
And we can never change society without changing ourselves. It is not enough for Liberals to champion civil rights at home and deny them to others abroad. It is not enough for Liberals to ask for a minimum wage and family leave domestically, while ensuring that workers overseas work in horrific sweat shops to build iPhones and sew designer jeans. Besides white supremacy, liberal white America must firmly reject colonialism and militarism. Justice must be universal, equality must know no borders. No deity confers special blessings on the United States. We are simply one nation among two hundred and some others.
The baby in the picture was born into a narrow, racist world. Things she’d say would provoke tears and winces. Until the day she died it was obvious where she had grown up, and in what kind of world. But like all of us my mother was a work in progress and she ended up a kinder and more compassionate person than the generations that preceded her.
I must believe we all are works in progress — and so is the country each of us loves and hates with alternating passion and despondency. But if we really mean to repair it in earnest — it means not fearing to look squarely into that mirror of history.
While the 45th president of the United States has been busy trying to wreck the country, you probably missed what happened this week in the Democratic Party.
This week Donna Brazile published an explosive piece in POLITICO titled “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.” In her article Brazile recounts how the DNC, sinking under $24 million of debt bequeathed by the Obama campaign, was bailed out by the Clinton machine’s financial backers. Not only that, but the party was literally turned over to Clinton to a degree that DNC officers like Brazile didn’t even know what was going on. The deal with the devil was this — the DNC would receive an “allowance” from Clinton’s Wall Street cronies and in return Clinton would control the party.
Speaking of Wall Street and Clinton, Douglas Schoen, a former Clinton advisor, penned a piece in the New York Times recently, arguing that the Democrats need Wall Street. And while it may be true that Clinton and her billionaire friends on Wall Street need each other, others would beg to differ.
Robert Borosage writes in the Nation that “the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party will always be with us. Its policies–on financial deregulation, trade, fiscal austerity, mass incarceration, and military intervention–have been ruinous. Its political aversion to populist appeals has been self-defeating. But Wall Street has the money, so it will always enjoy upholstered think tanks, perches on op-ed pages, and gaggles of politicians eager to peddle its proposals.” Borosage points to centrist Democrats’ latest project — New Democracy — as an effort designed to convince Americans that Wall Street’s interests are their own.
And if you’ve been wondering which way the Democratic Party is headed, look no further than our own state. Seth Moulton has apparently been identified as its new face. As a Slate article points out, “the Massachusetts congressman is a white, centrist, Harvard-educated war hero who wants to remake the Democratic Party. Too bad no one wants that.” The Democrats and their “Better Deal” are intended to appeal to white, monied voters. To hell with everyone else.
While Clinton — to this day — still blames everyone but herself for her 2016 loss, this week a group of progressive Democrats issued their own report discussing what happened and what needs to change: AUTOPSY: The Democratic Party in Crisis. If you want to skip to the bottom line, read the executive summary. But several important important takeaways must be mentioned:
The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.
After suffering from a falloff of turnout among people of color in the 2016 general election, the party appears to be losing ground with its most reliable voting bloc, African-American women. “The Democratic Party has experienced an 11 percent drop in support from black women according to one survey, while the percentage of black women who said neither party represents them went from 13 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2017.”
One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, “who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of Democrats.”
“Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”
Finally, if you are a progressive and still harbor the delusional hope that the Democratic “big tent” is big and broad enough to accommodate you, think again.
On Thursday morning the SouthCoast Chamber of Commerce had Bristol County sheriff Tom Hodgson and Helena DaSilva Hughes to breakfast at the Wamsutta Club to discuss immigration. During his presentation the sheriff cited questionable statistics from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), claiming that illegal immigration costs taxpayers $116 billion a year. The CATO Institute calls FAIR’s new study “fatally flawed” and “even more sloppy” than their previous one.
It would have more appropriate for Hodgson to speak about opioids, recidivism, or suicides. He actually knows something about the latter since his own jail accounts for a quarter of all county prison suicides. But there he was – again – acting as a spokesman for FAIR’s white supremacist immigration policies and conveniently avoiding trouble in his own backyard.
In 2015 Tom Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at an Islamophobic venue in Stoughton which had previously hosted Dutch neo-fascist Geert Wilders. Lynch is an Islamophobe, a white supremacist, a supporter of the Constitutional Sheriff Movement and of sovereign citizen Cliven Bundy, about whom he made a film.
That same year Hodgson appeared with a representative of the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford. Despite the name, FAIR has little to do with reform. Instead, its goal is assuring White Anglo-Saxon dominance. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, FAIR has links to white supremacists and eugenicists. Its founder, John Tanton, wrote to one eugenicist: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
In 2016 the Sheriff was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan, of the nativist organization Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Like FAIR, CIS was founded by John Tanton and publishes dubious statistics on immigration. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, CIS also maintains links to white supremacist and anti-semitic groups. CIS executive director Mark Krikorian quipped after the deadly 2010 Haitian earthquake: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” The third speaker was Raymond Hanna with the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America, which also has white supremacist ties. In Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront.
In June this year the Sheriff appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold their feet to the fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Stein is executive director of FAIR, and characterizes America’s immigration laws as an effort “to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.” Stein describes Central American immigrants as engaged in “competitive breeding” and asks: “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?” Malkin too has links to white supremacist groups, including VDARE, and to Islamophobic groups. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves.
According to FAIR’s 2011 annual report, that was the year the organization began cultivating sheriffs like Hodgson. “In 2011, we identified sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.” FAIR staff “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences, and invited them to come to Washington to meet with FAIR’s senior staff.” Since roughly that time Hodgson’s main job has been as a FAIR spokesman.
It’s hard to believe that the avuncular fellow who sends Thanksgiving turkeys to deportees in the Azores could really have such horrific views. But when the sheriff keeps consorting with white supremacists, singing and quoting their lyrics in the original German – well – it’s hard to reach any other conclusion. Tom Hodgson is a white supremacist.
It was disappointing that the Chamber of Commerce gave this hater a mainstream platform, and worse, an opportunity to skip another day of work – taking care of the business Bristol County voters actually elected him to do.
On Saturday, October 7th, from 5-6:30pm the City of New Bedford’s Department of Community Services and the Asian Pacific Law Students Association at UMASS Law will present a roundtable discussion on community building. The disussion will center around the story of Vincent Chin, whose case sparked the Asian-American civil rights movement depicted in the film Vincent Who?
Speakers include Martin Bentz from the Islamic Society of Southeastern MA, and Thomas Curnalia and Jared Picchi from Human Rights Clinic.
Unrelated to Vincent Chin – except perhaps for our national dedication to violence – was Sunday night’s massacre in Las Vegas. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that it was a resident of Mesquite, Nevada – the state with the most lax gun laws in the country – who could assemble enough paramilitary firepower to create this kind of carnage.
In 2013 I snapped this photo in the Las Vegas airport. In Nevada, apparently, machine guns are just a part of the culture – a culture of violence.
Two consecutive hurricanes have demolished much of the infrastructure in the Caribbean. The president’s response has been slow, callous, inept, but predictable: another general has been dispatched to solve a humanitarian crisis.
Americans have a special obligation to our brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico who have been especially hard hit. Puerto Ricans have also been saddled for decades with crushing, colonial debt and now by bipartisan austerity programs. Hedge funds and bankers are circling the wounded island like sharks, and it occurs to no one in Congress to take hundreds of billions in military aid to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel and instead deploy it for neighbors and fellow citizens.
So, for the time being, it’s up to us. Below is a partial list of organizations responding to the crisis, most with Charity Navigator ratings you can check out if you are a nervous donor.
Puerto Rico is rapidly turning into another Katrina, and North Korea may have justifiably construed Donald Trump’s reckless threats to “totally destroy” its 25 million citizens as an act of war. But as Rome burns the president is doubling down on his favorite pastime: race-baiting.
While chaos swirls all around, the White Supremacist-in-Chief seems unusually miffed this week by insufficient displays of patriotic fervor at NFL games. Oh, one more trifling detail – it’s insufficient patriotism by black players.
Trump called NFL players who “take a knee” to protest systemic racism in the United States “sons of bitches” and wants them to be fired for exercising their First Amendment rights. Teresa Kaepernick, the mother of former San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick, who started taking the “knee,” quipped, “I guess that makes me a proud bitch.” But when pressed on why black athletes were protesting Trump denied it had anything to do with race; it was all about patriotism and respect, he said.
Meanwhile, Trump World echoed their Dear Leader. Any criticisms of the country were fireable and deportable offenses. Former NASCAR champion Richard Petty told the Associated Press that anyone on his team protesting during the national anthem would be fired. “Anybody that don’t stand up for the anthem oughta be out of the country. Period. What got ’em where they’re at? The United States.”
But regardless of how Trump chooses to frame the controversy, protests in the NFL – and now also basketball and baseball league – most certainly are about race. Especially under the presidency of a president ESPN anchor Jemele Hill unapologetically labeled a “white supremacist.” While approximately 75% of both NFL and NBA players are black, NASCAR fans are 80% white – and apparently unfamiliar with the First Amendment.
Politics: not for those with grievances
Former NFL player John Elway, now head of operations for the Denver Broncos and a Trump supporter, attempted a more conciliatory tone: “Hopefully as we go forward we can start concentrating on football a little bit more. Take the politics out of football. But I think that last week was a good show of unity by the NFL and hopefully this week we can move forward.”
Elway’s lament was widely echoed by many in White America: sports are sports and players have no business taking political positions on or off the field. Football is just a game.
But players lead lives off the field. Just ask Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett, who “just happens to be black.” Three weeks ago, in Las Vegas for the McGregor-Mayweather fight, Bennett was walking back to his hotel when he fled from the sounds of gunfire – along with a stampede of other pedestrians. But the Las Vegas police singled out Bennett, threatened to “blow [his] f*cking head off” and used excessive force. Bennett was lucky. He wasn’t killed.
And the sordid tale of Donald Sterling reminds basketball players and their fans how inseparable sports can be from real life.
CBS commentator Rob Long expressed a typical sentiment when he wrote: “Recently political topics have invaded sports. Athletes have used their celebrity to voice their political agendas. They’ve used the sports forum to speak out against political and social issues as well as race. This is a growing trend that isn’t losing momentum. The networks are looking for content and as long as athletes provide them with it, they will use it. It’s the gift and the curse.”
But Long (and Elway) are way off the mark. Since the Olympics were first celebrated 2600 years ago, sports have always been political. Ancient Sparta and Nazi Germany certainly approached competitions seriously. National pride and dominance is always at stake. And anything that drowns out the nationalist narrative – for example, a player making his own statement – is unacceptable. Recall the 1968 Summer Olympics, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in black gloves, wearing black socks.
The two were ejected from the games for protesting institutional racism, and they were booed by American fans and fellow Olympians: “It is very discouraging to be in a team with white athletes. On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.”
Not much has changed since then.
The unforgivable sin that Smith and Carlos committed was eclipsing a nationalistic show of the Stars and Stripes and the playing of the American national anthem. And nationalism can’t tolerate even quiet criticism.
Sports, nationalism and militarism
We often talk about the police being militarized, but since 9/11, especially, professional sports teams and Hollywood have lined up to serve the U.S. military in unexpected ways.
Two years ago Arizona senators McCain and Flake published a report on how the Pentagon pays sports teams tens of millions of dollars for patriotic displays. Stadium-sized flags, military flyovers, parachuting into the stadium, color guards, anthems, and jumbotron reunions with servicemen have become the norm for the NFL.
You’d be hard-pressed to describe the difference between one of these hyper-patriotic events and a similar North Korean spectacle. But these are engineered by the Pentagon and not simple acts of patriotism by franchise owners. As Jeff Flake explained, “What we take issue with is the average fan thinking teams are doing this on behalf of the military.”
McCain’s and Flake’s 145-page report lists contributions to 18 NFL teams, 10 MLB teams, eight NBA teams, six NHL teams, eight soccer teams, as well as NASCAR, Iron Dog and several college football programs. The Atlanta Falcons pocketed $879,000, Trump Donor Robert Kraft’s New England Patriots received $700,000 and the Buffalo Bills $650,000. And all this represents only a fraction of the amount the DOD has spent on sports marketing. “In all, the military services reported $53 million in spending on marketing and advertising contracts with sports teams between 2012 and 2015.” The Army alone spends $10 million on the NFL.
Is it patriotism when you’ve been manipulated?
But NASCAR took in the biggest haul, $1,560,000 in 2015. This included personal appearances by Aric Almirola and [the aforementioned] Richard Petty, as well as 20 Richard Petty Driving Experience ride-alongs. In 2011 NASCAR presented the largest USO “Military Village” Expo ever in Dover, Delaware – incidentally (or perhaps appropriately) home to the largest military mortuary in the country.
Who says that the U.S. government can’t do anything right? When it comes to militarism and jingoistic propaganda, no one does it better. Andrew Bacevich describes how all the moving parts of an “authentic” patriotic experience come together – and it’s enough to make anyone take a knee:
Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011. On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays. First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion. The ensuing spectacle – a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and society – expresses the distilled essence of present-day American patriotism. A masterpiece of contrived spontaneity, the event leaves spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves – precisely as it was meant to do.
In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props. In military parlance, it is a joint operation. In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention. To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites. The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem. As the anthem’s final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead. The sellout crowd roars its approval.
But there is more to come. “On this Independence Day,” the voice of the Red Sox booms over the public address system, “we pay a debt of gratitude to the families whose sons and daughters are serving our country.” On this particular occasion the designated recipients of that gratitude are members of the Lydon family, hailing from Squantum, Massachusetts. Young Bridget Lydon is a sailor – Aviation Ordnanceman Airman is her official title – serving aboard the carrier USS Ronald Reagan, currently deployed in support of the Afghanistan War, now in its 10th year.
Democrats have been unreliable peace brokers in the Middle East, and – just like Republicans – censor any criticisms of Israel. Democrats pretend that Israel’s nuclear weapons don’t exist, while other countries are sanctioned or threatened with fire and fury if they so much as spin up a centrifuge. When Israel kills American citizens our own government does little or nothing. Every politician from Susan Rice to John Kerry, to Mitt Romney, and now Donald Trump, has used the tired old phrase “no daylight between Israel and the U.S.” to imply that the interests of both countries are identical.
The Democratic Party has wrestled with “Israel as Foreign Policy” in each of its last two conventions. Actually, the party has a serious AIPAC problem and its wrestling is mainly with AIPAC’s power. Now, with Donald Trump in office, some Democrats say they are worried that the president’s settler-ambassador David Friedman will move the American embassy to Jerusalem.
But in 2012 the DNC itself tried to push through a motion to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. An undemocratic roll was called by Antonio Villaraigosa and an unexpectedly loud “no” vote caught the DNC offguard. AIPAC had “vetted” the motion – had actually written the text – and Obama was counting on its passing. The “no” vote was finally overturned after multiple attempts in a clearly undemocratic maneuver, and the incident remains an ugly stain on the party’s ethics and democratic practices.
In 2016 the issue of the occupation of Palestine came up again. Clinton supporter Robert Wexler insisted that Democrats could not afford to mention the “O” word if a Two State Solution could be salvaged. Sanders supporter James Zogby pushed back, pointing out that everyone knows the occupation exists. Both sides disagreed whether Democrats should support or condemn the BDS movement. At the end of the day, the DNC adopted wording that made AIPAC and Clinton happy. And the Democratic Party has since chosen to tar the BDS Movement with the Israel lobby’s “anti-Semitic” brush.
So in December 2016, when the UN Security Council took a vote on a motion to condemn Israeli settlements, the US abstention was remarkable, something that had rarely been done before. Obama was again denounced by Republicans and the Israel lobby as an Islamist-Leftist who loved Shariah and hated Jews.
But what had happened was that a tiny crack of daylight had opened up between the United States and Israel. Because Israel’s interests are not identical to ours. Not even close.
Obama’s abstention was a Hail Mary to save the Two State solution. America’s extreme right white ultrationalists in their brown shirts and white hoods, and uncompromising Zionists like David Friedman, are now singing a triumphant tune: there will never be a Two State solution.
But, really, what is the alternative?
Between Gaza and the West Bank there are 4.5 Palestinians living under continuing Israeli military occupation. There are another 1.7 million Arab Israelis. There are almost 6 million stateless Palestinian refugees waiting for a homeland. There are 8 million Jewish Israelis in Israel, some of whom live most of the time in Europe or the U.S. Demographics are not on Israel’s side. By 2035 Jews will be a minority in Israel-Palestine.
Israel can either (1) work with the international community to create a contiguous Palestinian state that would accommodate some number of the Palestinian diaspora; (2) continue the occupation indefinitely; or (3) turn Israel into a multicultural democracy under secular law.
Democrats had better figure out if they prefer option (1) or option (3) because option (2) is barbaric and cannot be sustained. And Democrats will need to develop muscle and guts to push back against AIPAC and the boatload of Israel lobby groups that work tirelessly to keep the occupation in place – to steal more land and build more settlements.
And, frankly, it’s hard to understand why Democrats have such a problem with a secular, multicultural democracy. If that’s what they truly believe in.
As he was leaving office, George Washington offered a few pieces of advice. One was a warning about permitting double standards that favor a particular nation:
“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter… It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions … and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity…”
Israel’s influence is all out of proportion to its objective strategic importance to the United States. Yet because of American religious sentiment and a strong Israel lobby, any attempt to end its occupation or alter its settlement policies are rebuffed, while conversely the tiny nation seems to constantly intrude into our domestic politics.
Israel is an insignificant trading partner, although every state governor travels there on a trade mission during his term. The state of Israel is not part of NATO, though NATO has provided it with an office in Brussels. No Israeli troops have ever assisted in any US-led military “coalitions” in the Middle East. Israel serves as a check to Hezbollah and Syrian power, tests American military equipment, assists in intelligence gathering, and its nuclear weapons can more easily reach Asia and Eastern Europe. Still, not even NATO allies during the height of the Cold War ever received the level of military aid Israel has.
Since its founding Israel has received more foreign and military aid than any other nation – $124 billion as of 2015, plus another $40 billion this year. An analysis by the Congressional Research Service describes Israel’s unique benefits:
“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance, although in the past Israel also received significant economic assistance. Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel receiving benefits not available to any other countries… In addition to receiving U.S. State Department-administered foreign assistance, Israel also receives funds from annual defense appropriations bills for rocket and missile defense programs. Israel pursues some of those programs jointly with the United States.”
Negotiations over Israel’s aid package last summer were a lopsided and distasteful affair, with Israel demanding more money from the United States and Congress hammering the American president in Israel’s behalf.
Although often described as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” Israel’s “democracy” extends many rights only to its Jewish majority and punishes Arabs – from a right to immigrate only for Jews and sixty years of occupation for Arabs; to civil law for Jews but martial law for Palestinians. On land that has been expropriated from Palestinians separate roads and services exist only for Jewish settlers. There is also widespread segregation of Jews and Arabs within Israel’s own disputed borders and numerous instances of racism and Islamophobia. This has led many to compare Israel with the old South African Apartheid system, which never qualified as a democracy, though in 1985 Ronald Reagan tried to sell it as such:
“They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country — the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated — that has all been eliminated.”
Of course, Reagan also said that ketchup was a vegetable.
One of the most disturbing realizations of the past election was how many of Donald Trump’s supporters are racists, anti-Semites and white supremacists. A majority are Islamophobes as well, supporting Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and – here’s the strange part – they’re also enthusiastic Zionists.
How can anti-Semism and Zionism manage to coexist? This was the question Naomi Zeveloff asked in a piece in the Forward, a lefty Jewish magazine.
Zeveloff found that many white supremacists admire Israel for “fighting the ‘good fight'” with Muslims. They admire a society which privileges a single ethnicity and religion and actively discourages multiculturalism. For white supremacists Israel is a “model for white nationalism and/or Christianism.”
Israel’s own Apartheid Wall
Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin put it less charitably:
“Anti-Semitism and right-wing Zionism are varieties of ultra nationalism, or, to put it more pejoratively (as it deserves to be put) tribalism. They both presume that the embattled righteous ones need to bristle at, wall off, and punish the damned outsiders. They hate and fear cosmopolitan mixtures. They make a fetish of purity. They have the same soul. They rhyme.”
Weeks after the election white supremacist and anti-Semite Richard Spencer gave a talk at Texas A&M University. Security was provided by Houston’s Aryan Renaissance Society and WhiteLivesMatter. Some came to listen, others to protest. But Texas A&M Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg came to engage. After Spencer’s talk Rosenberg asked Spencer, somewhat naively, to join in a “loving and radically inclusive” act of studying Torah together. Spencer scoffed at the idea that he needed some loving to counterbalance all the hating, and instead used the rabbi’s invitation to point out Zionism’s uncanny similarity to white supremacy:
“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? […] Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate to the gentiles […] I respect that about you. I want my people to have that same sense of themselves.”
On August 30th Bill Keating came to the UMASS Law School for a meet and greet he didn’t want to call a Town Hall. In a previous post I suggested that Democrats like Keating are either the future of the Democratic Party or relics of its past. So on the 30th I was especially interested in how the audience responded to him.
The Democratic Representative from the Massachusetts 9th Congressional district answered a few questions, choosing instead to run out the clock on potentially tough ones and he ended by telling the crowd that he had to run: he had a dinner reservation with his mother-in law. Several people remarked that the entire performance was a waste of time and Keating was condescending and disrespectful – an opinion I shared.
But others were more generous to the congressman, a war hawk who has sided with extreme GOP positions on immigration, voted to neuter provisions in the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and who supports almost none of the progressive legislation now before Congress – legislation aligned with the new Massachusetts Democratic Party platform but legislation Democrats nevertheless seem conflicted about actually passing.
After the meet and greet I contacted several people chosen to put questions to the congressman and asked them how well he had done. I received four replies:
“Although I wasn’t impressed with all Rep. Keating’s answers the other night, I was satisfied with what he said to mine. He even thanked me for it as I passed him by.”
“My question was whether the congressman supported legislation to counter religious profiling, religious litmus tests and religious profiling of immigrants. I appreciate Representative Keating’s empathy and his referral to his own family’s encounter with discrimination as immigrant Irish Catholics. He noted that an attack on the civil rights of any minority is an attack on the civil rights of all of us.”
“I asked Bill Keating whether he thought, given the partisan politics in Washington today, the Republicans would join Democrats in seeking articles of impeachment if the evidence was strong enough. I think he ran with the question and spoke at length about his thoughts. I was happy with his answer. I think he answered my question, and expanded on it quite a bit. What I came away with was that, at the moment, he doesn’t think that we are quite there for a bipartisan effort.”
“As a general comment, I felt he didn’t directly address the question. He talked for 6 or 7 minutes about how he supports bills pushing for transparency in political donations, i.e. from whom donations are received. This, I feel, is a tepid and timid position which does not address the real problem…unregulated and unlimited amounts of money being funneled into the election process. Transparency will help, but will not do the job. I was quite disappointed in his response and it explains why he isn’t a co-sponsor.”
It’s still a bit early to definitively answer the question of what kind of Democrat represents the future of the party, but we should know by the time the Democratic primaries come around. If Reagan Democrats like Keating remain unchallenged, and a slew of Baby Keatings appear on ballots, then we’ll know the party’s true character – regardless of whatever lofty language is written into the platform.
Ultimately, though, it is voters who must push candidates to better positions, expect more, demand more, probe more. Keating’s meet and greet left me feeling discouraged that, for many Democrats, the bar is all too low. And that the party’s past is likely to be its future.
Yesterday was a dark day for everyone except the white supremacist regime that currently runs this country. Almost a million young Dreamers – Americans in every sense except documentation – will be expelled with the stroke of a presidential pen unless Congress throws them a lifeline. While 2017 is certainly not 1933, it probably feels like it if you’re a Dreamer.
Maybe we should be looking at German history to see how quickly a country can run off the rails. The same history tells us how deeply expulsion hurt Jewish refugees, how painfully friendships, love, and social bonds between Jews and non-Jews were destroyed when an entire people was legislated out of existence. German history also reminds us of the enduring national trauma that white supremacist policies caused – now going on a century later.
We should remember what happened.
In 1933 Hitler’s National Socialists passed a law for the restoration of German jobs. The whole purpose of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums was to make Germany great again for white protestant civil servants.
The gesetz protected German jobs from “foreigners” – non-Aryans. How easily economically-insecure lower and middle class Germans turned on Jews who had lived among them – centuries before Germany was even a nation. German Jews were Germans in every sense – but how easily and arbitrarily they were re-defined as aliens, separated from friends and family and German society with the stroke of a pen.
The president of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, a military man with the gravitas of John McCain, was offended that Jews who had served at the front during WWI were included in the bans, and he wrung a concession from the Nazis. But Hindenburg died the following year and with him so did the concession. Dismissals from the civil service were swift and severe, and expulsions began. People like Albert Einstein, for example, saw the writing on the wall and fled.
In total, 340,000 Jews of lesser fame and resources than Einstein were forced to flee as refugees, often with little time to uproot an entire lifetime in Germany. After all, they were Germans with few connections to any of the foreign lands to which they had to escape. These were among the first victims of Nazi policies and almost a third of them perished in the Holocaust.
Then in 1938 the night known as Kristallnacht occurred. It was a nightmare of shattered glass and shattered lives. It was the beginning of the end for German Jews. The gloves were off. Germany would be a nation for Germans. Germans didn’t know it at the time, but it was also the beginning of the end for Germany.
And the nightmare had started only five years earler with the expulsions.
By now most people know that Donald Trump announced (via Jeff Sessions) that the DACA program will end in six months. Trump’s decision overturns one by Barak Obama to provide temporary protections for “childhood arrivals” in the absence of a permanent legislative solution. Since 2001 the DREAM Act has foundered in Congress, and today’s
After he was elected Donald Trump crowed, “this is the day we take our country back.” The Orange One’s supporters knew what his dog whistle meant. White supremacist Richard Spencer announced: “We won. America belongs to white men.” His buddy Jared Taylor told ABC News journalist Amna Nawaz: “we built a wonderful country that your ancestors could not have [built]. That is why people like you come here.” Taylor put into words what many white Americans believe – that the nation is the crowning achievement of Christian white people and that it’s their country.
But history professor Joe Krulder isn’t buying the myth of America as a lily white nation. In “America was never White” Krulder provides numerous examples of the diversity that actually built America, and of a much more complex history – not simply white settlement – that made the nation.
The founding myths of America that white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor are flogging almost seem to have been taken from Nazi and Soviet era propaganda. White farmers braving cold Dakota winters in sod houses, nobly attacking the land with scythes, or pictures of muscular white tradesmen hammering iron or forging the beams of American skyscrapers. It’s quite romantic.
And it’s also a crock. Historians can tell you that the real America was conquered by genocide, ethnic cleansing, and violence. Much of our national wealth was accumulated by stealing the lives and labor of those regarded as less than human and pressing them into slavery. White supremacy had to be invented to justify slavery, but white supremacy has proven to be both versatile and extensible in justifying America’s many wars of choice on brown and yellow people around the world.
White supremacy, in fact, is such a major strand of our national DNA that it leads many to believe that we are something grander than a nation among other nations, that we have a divine mission to minister to our benighted brown brethren in other countries, guide them, murder them if necessary, deliver to them our great institutions of democracy and capitalism through the barrel of a gun. Every aspect of our society – from economic inequality to the prison system – is based on white supremacist myths that people like Spencer and Taylor have long been selling. Even our first black president, a man who lived in other cultures, considered himself an advocate of American Exceptionalism.
Charlottesville reminded us again of this when racists and Nazis mobilized to defend Southern “heritage” in the form of a Confederate statue. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center there are at least 1,500 monuments to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, many of them built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).
The Daughters of the Confederacy describes itself as a patriotic organization. But like Spencer and Taylor the UDC promotes a revisionist history. It is “an organization which has for its purpose the continuance and furtherance of the true history of the South and the ideals of southern womanhood.” The “true history” the UDC is selling is “a heritage so rich in honor and glory that it far surpasses any material wealth.”
Likewise the Sons of Confederate Veterans is committed to “the vindication of the cause for which we fought. […] the perpetuation of those principles […] and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.” Glorious slavery.
But don’t believe me. Believe the slavemasters themselves. The Constitution of the Confederate States spells out the Confederate glories in detail. Slavery is mentioned no less than a dozen times in the document, and it was such a central, glorious “ideal” that the Confederate Constitution contained a clause which prevented slavery from ever being abolished.
But if we really want to look at Southern heritage, let’s begin where the Civil War began – in South Carolina.
The first settlements in the Carolinas date from 1640 to 1650. A second wave of colonists, slave traders from Barbados, arrived in 1665, and a third wave came in 1670 to what is now Charleston, South Carolina. They were a quarrelsome, violent bunch. Authoritarian government, political intrigue, dissension, murder and insurrection were the rule rather than the exception. Brotherly love among white colonists might have been a Christian notion but it was nowhere to be found. British Anglicans prohibited French Protestants from owning land in the colony, for example.
For this, after all, was colonialism. Competitors had to be fought and killed, natives had to be “repealed and replaced.” In 1713 Carolina’s colonists forced Tuscorara, Westoe and Coree Indians to flee north where they were eventually assimilated by the Iroquois. Despite colonial treaties many Indians were pressed into slavery and shipped to the West Indies to serve on plantations. It seems triply obscene that Jeff Sessions won’t let them back in their country.
The French, English, and Spanish were all in the New World to conquer it. And they hated each other. It is laughable to think of Spencer’s and Taylor’s fairytale notion of a monolithic European culture at America’s founding. Queen Anne’s War was a colonial dispute over conquered Spanish territory that played out all over the North American continent. Indians in the Carolinas – when they were not being whipped and shipped into slavery – were pressed into the ranks of militias on both the French and English sides.
But then there are the demographics. If, as white supremacists argue, America was always a white Christian nation, then the early American population should have been demonstrably white.
Throughout the Deep South, for much of our early history, slaves outnumbered whites. It was slaves who farmed the land. In cities many slaves were skilled tradesmen and artisans. Besides white brethren who refused to see them as such, it was also slaves – and the children of slaves – who were hammering on American iron. Go to Charleston, South Carolina and you can see hundreds of pieces of the enduring iron work of Philip Simmons, who learned his craft from a former slave.
During World War I the 371st Infantry Regiment numbered many black Americans from South Carolina. Pershing didn’t see much use for them and he actually handed over the regiment to French command. But numerous members of the 371st received the Croix de Guerre and the Order of Légion d’Honneur. Then they returned to a nation they had just defended but never heard the phrase: “thank you for your service.”
Census figures from the early 1700’s show a consistent non-white majority in South Carolina until 1920 – that was the year that white people finally edged past 50.38%. The nation was 150 years old; whites could finally claim South Carolina was white.
White supremacist myths can’t hold up to history and fact. It may be true that the reins of the economy have always been in white hands, but the work of building and defending America was done – and always has been done – by those rarely given their rightful credit.
On August 30th at 6PM at the UMASS Law School in Dartmouth voters from the 9th Congressional District will have a chance to meet Congressman Bill Keating. As I have noted previously, Keating is not much of a Liberal and his views on immigration, healthcare, consumer protection, and foreign policy are substantially at odds with many Democrats and completely at odds with the new Massachusetts Democratic Party platform. In fact, on immigration especially, Bill Keating seems to go out of his way to vote with Republicans.
Yes, our Congressman has some explaining to do – not only his own voting record, but also the positions of the New Democrat Coalition, of which he is a member. This is one more new Democratic grouping resisting progressive legislation that has some membership overlap with the openly conservative Blue Dog Coalition.
Keating is either a relic of the Democratic Party’s past, or a symbol of its unchanged, and doomed, future.
The PDF in this link might be useful for anyone in the audience on August 30th with an opportunity to jump in line and ask Mr. Keating a question.
Voters need answers on:
Immigration You have broken with Democrats to vote for several GOP anti-immigrant bills. H.R.3009 punishes Sanctuary Cities. H.R.4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, restricts absorption of Syrian refugees. Most recently you voted for H.R.3004, “Kate’s Law,” which takes a harsh but largely symbolic stand against desperate people who re-enter the United States. The candidate statement on immigration you provided “On the Issues” sounds like it was written by Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions. Can you explain why your positions are so divergent from mainstream Democrats?
Discriminatory Auto Financing You and a minority of House Democrats broke with your own party to vote for Republican sponsored H.R.1737, the Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act. This bill prohibited consumers – particularly minorities – from suing auto lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules against discrimination in lending. The bill takes the unusual step of preventing disclosures of violations with Freedom of Information Act requests. The NAACP, the Urban League, La Raza, the Consumers Union, and many others, were opposed. Why did you vote to preserve and protect discrimination? And why did you vote against consumers?
Medicare for All One hundred and sixteen Democrats, including your colleagues in the Massachusetts Congressional delegation, Katherine Clark, Jim McGovern, and Michael Capuano, have co-sponsored H.R.676, John Conyers’ Medicare for All Act. Why are you not a co-sponsor of this bill? And is there another plan to expand care to Americans that you WOULD support?
College Tuition Twenty-seven Democrats, including your Rhode Island colleagues in the House, David Cicilline and Jim Langevin, have co-sponsored H.R.1880, Pramila Jaypal’s College for All Act. Why are you not a co-sponsor of this bill, one which puts into action what Massachusetts Democrats just voted into our platform last June?
Private Prisons Two members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation – McGovern and Clark – support H.R.3227, Raul Grijalva’s Justice is Not for Sale Act. At a time Republicans are trying to re-institute discredited justice and prison practices, and pushing privatization, including prisons, schools, and even the war in Afghanistan, why won’t you support this bill – one that places restrictions on private prisons?
Mortgage Lending You and 63 Democrats broke with your own party to vote for Republican sponsored H.R.3192, the Homebuyers Assistance Act. This bill was a hit with the American Bankers Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Home Builders lobby, but it prohibited consumers from suing mortgage lenders who violated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau disclosure requirements under the Truth in Lending Act. You don’t believe in amnesty for immigrants. Why an amnesty for mortgage lenders?
Abortion One hundred and twenty-one Democrats, including you, support H.R.771, the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage. Thank you for that. However, DNC chair Tom Perez and DCCC chair Ray Lujan, as well as some in the New Democrat Coalition, of which you and Seth Moulton are members, argue for “flexibility” on abortion and against abortion as a litmus test. But shouldn’t abortion rights be a non-negotiable plank for Democrats? A litmus test, if you will?
Citizens United In light of the tremendous amount of money now being spent on elections at all levels and ballot questions from 2012 and 2014 showing over 70% of Massachusetts voters supporting a Constitutional amendment to restrict rights to natural persons and to take money out of elections – why are you not a co-sponsor of H.J.Res.48, which would do precisely that?
Automatic Voter Registration One hundred and sixteen Democrats, including four Massachusetts Representatives – McGovern, Tsongas, Neal, and Clark – support H.R.2840, David Cicilline’s Automatic Voter Registration Act. At a time when Republicans are making it more difficult, not easier to vote, what’s stopping you from supporting this bill?
Taxing Wall Street Speculation Two members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation – McGovern and Clark – already support H.R.1144, Keith Ellison’s Inclusive Prosperity Act. This Wall Street Speculation fee is a fraction of a percent tax on stocks, bonds, and financial derivatives, will be used to fund public university tuition, and is offset by tax credits. Can we get you on record tonight as supporting this bill?
NAFTA Two members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation – McGovern and Moulton – have co-signed Representatives Bill Pascrell and Debbie Dingell’s letter urging the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to ensure that the NAFTA renegotiation process remains open and transparent. – Why not you?
The nation can’t take much more of this. This week alone Donald Trump has edged us uncomfortably closer to both nuclear and civil war.
Anyone disappointed by Trump’s unwillingness to condemn white supremacists and fascists should hardly be surprised. Anyone who believes the GOP’s repudiations of white supremacy should remember how hard Republicans fought for Trump’s cabinet picks and national security appointments (below). And anyone who would like to give the 45th president of the United State the benefit of the doubt on his recent comments should remember that white supremacy is a tradition in the Trump family.
Trump has got to go. Either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment, either is fine by me. And those in the following gallery of haters – half of whom are Trump-appointed white supremacists – should all be shown the door.
Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist and Senior advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
Lou Barletta, Immigration Policy advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
John Bolton, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Islamophobe
David Clarke, Dept. of Homeland Security – Islamophobe
Kellyanne Conway, Senior advisor and former campaign manager – Islamophobe
Monica Crowley, Director of Communications at the National Security Council – Islamophobe
Jon Feere, Dept. of Homeland Security – white nationalist and anti-Semite
Michael Flynn, Former National Security advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
Frank Gaffney, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
Yesterday’s terror attack in Charlottesville reminds us how openly America’s white sheets and brown shirts have been displayed for years, and how dangerous they’ve always been – especially since Donald Trump’s embrace. White supremacists and neo-Nazis were in Charlottesville this week as part of white supremacist Richard Spencer’s “Unite the Right” rally. They were in town to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, a lingering symbol of slavery. Yesterday former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke was out singing Trump’s praises, while the night before Spencer was carrying Klan torches.
And then James Fields, a member of Vanguard America with a Hitler haircut, tore through a pedestrian mall in his Dodge Challenger, mowing down dozens of people and killing one. Most media outlets reported the terror attack as part of a “clash” that occurred at a protest, but after years and dozens of right-wing attacks, the attack illustrated the need to start taking American fascism seriously.
The Great new America Trump promises is founded on toxic, racist and authoritarian politics we haven’t seen since 1925. That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan. Now racists and fascists feel emboldened to march in public. After all, they’re in the White House.
The Trump campaign finally found its winning ticket with a third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis who tapped into the American cesspool of racism and authoritarianism. Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is an unrepentant segregationist. Three of his advisors, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, have ties to neo-Nazi groups. America’s white supremacist in chief himself receives daily cabinet briefings. And, as the NAACP pointed out seven years ago, the House’s Tea Party members are riddled with racist and neo-Nazi elements.
After the Charlottesville attack Republicans issued a series of insincere repudiations of white terror, but took pains not to alienate their base. Paul Ryan, for example, called white supremacy a “scourge.” But scourge or not, racists comprise a majority of Trump’s supporters. David Duke reacted to Trump’s not-quite-a-condemnation of the terror attack, warning: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror and remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”
And the GOP knows it. They courted it. They count on it.
Unfortunately Democrats have little inclination to fight back. Whether by denial, PTSD, or Stockholm Syndrome, the DNC seems to be moving toward the right along with the Republicans. Rather than convincing DNC leaders that political centrism is an empty husk, the shellacking the party took in 2016 appears to have made it even less willing to be the party to defend Americans from institutionalized racism and bigotry.
When Democrats unveiled their Better Deal marketing strategy, they did so only a hundred miles from Charlottesville, focusing strictly on economic issues – making it clear their purpose was to attract Southern white voters. This appeared to be a repudiation of the “identity politics” some hold responsible for the loss of the 2016 Presidential election. Jamil Smith wrote in Vanity Fair that the Democrat’s new campaign is wrapped in Red, White, and Blue and doesn’t dare tread on issues of social justice: “Party leadership seems to want a divorce from identity politics. Or a trial separation, at least.”
A piece in the New York Times right after the election by Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigated liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla advised liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.” But it wasn’t just bathrooms. As Lilla observed, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans.
In retrospect, the DNC seems to have listened to Lilla and those like him. Besides backing away from “identity politics” the DNC now won’t even unequivocally support abortion rights. Secularism and multiculturalism, it seems, are not to be major efforts of the new Democratic Party.
Steve Phillips, columnist, civil rights lawyer and author, hammers the DNC’s “Better Deal” as not only a repudiation of America’s true majority but as a case of moral delinquency:
“Rather than draw a line in the sand, speak out against that, summon people to their highest and best selves to actually embrace a multi-racial country that we have, the Democrats are putting their head in the sand and ignoring that and simply trying to go after this economic message, which is both mathematically unfounded as well as morally delinquent in terms of speaking up to the outrages and the attacks on the various communities of color and the other marginalized groups in this society that this administration is doing.”
The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been up to the Democratic Party to defend civil rights of all types – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.
But now the DNC has handed in its resignation at the worst possible time.
While Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi think their Better Deal will be a tasty voter treat, it’s basically leftover Democratic meat loaf warmed up in the microwave – with an extra splosh of Worcester Sauce. It is the underwhelming work of a timid party trying to crawl back into a nonexistent center.
A Better Better Deal
Meanwhile, the Summer for Progress is a substantial portfolio of seven progressive bills covering wages, health care, education, taxation, voting rights, environmental protection and reproductive choice. The seven bills are supported by two dozen progressive organizations and represent a bold vision for the country.
More importantly, this is not a hodge-podge of neo-Liberal gimmicks but a comprehensive vision for what America could become. And it’s a vision of what kind of America we’ll need after the Trump administration finishes with their wrecking ball.
Think of the Summer for Progress as a better Better Deal.
But the legislation could use a lot more Congressional love. Despite a very progressive state Democratic Party platform that affirms almost everything in the Summer for Progress platform, very few Massachusetts Democrats actually support any of the legislation.
Well, this is their big chance to show that there’s more to Democrats than just empty rhetoric. Call your Democratic legislators and ask them why have not co-sponsored any of the seven bills.
If Democrats won’t even support their own platforms and are only prepared to serve voters unappetizing leftovers, how do you think the midterm elections are going to end?
Despite plenty of evidence Donald Trump has a thing for Russian mobsters and Kremlin operatives, we still don’t know if he actually conspired with Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election.
But last week I wrote about some indisputable foreign meddling – AIPAC’s attempts to take away political rights of Americans to protest Israel’s domestic policies with economic boycotts.
And Israel is trying the same thing right here in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts House bill H.1685 and Senate bill S.1689sound harmless enough (“An Act prohibiting discrimination in State Contracts”). No one would ever admit liking discrimination. And one would hope that any legislator co-sponsoring bills like these would have only the best of intentions.
But these two bills do much more harm than good.
Like cookie-cutter legislation crafted by ALEC, these were pushed by a pro-Israel organization, the JCRC, which regards them as tools to block the BDS Movement. Lobbyists for Israel have introduced similar legislation in 35 states and they have been enacted in 19.
Seekonk Rep. Steven Howitt was crystal clear about the bill’s intent: “This bill clarifies to businesses that either support BDS or who boycott Israeli-owned businesses and products that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will not engage in commerce with them.”
In short, this is an attack on the exercise of the Constitutionally-protected right to boycott a foreign nation on political grounds. Not surprisingly, the Massachusetts ACLU opposes H.1685.
The bills’ supporters claim that any criticism of Israel’s occupation and settlements is tantamount to anti-semitism. But the international BDS Movement has specific political goals. And Israel’s domestic policies as well as American foreign policy toward it are political issues. Both bills are opposed by a number of Jewish organizations, including the Boston Workmen’s Circle, Jewish Voice for Peace, over 100 progressive organizations, and also the National Council of Churches.
In 1982 the Supreme Court affirmed the right of Americans to use boycotts for political purposes. After fifty years of occupation and creeping settlements Israel just might need a little economic incentive to stop. But no matter how you feel about Middle Eastern politics, Israel’s problems can not be solved by violating the civil liberties of Americans.
Contact House and Senate sponsors from your district and ask them to kill these bills and withdraw their co-sponsorship.
Lately there’s a Russian under every rock if not every bed. We’ve also been seeing some new bipartisan frenzy over Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Senators keep heaping sanction after sanction on America’s many enemies, including Russia, and there is revived interest in the registration of foreign agents. “People should know if foreign governments, political parties or other foreign interests are trying to influence U.S. policy or public opinion,” says Iowa Republican and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley.
Indeed, people should know who is trying to influence U.S. policy and public opinion.
And they should also know who the worst offender is.
AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, is unique in bending U.S. policy and public opinion to a foreign government’s will. Try to imagine a ChinaPAC, a SaudiPAC, or a RusskyPAC operating with as much impunity, introducing whatever federal legislation it wants on a regular basis, sending hundreds of congressmen on junkets to Moscow every summer recess, establishing Russian trade delegations in every state, letting Russians decide how we interrogate terrorists, giving a major voice to Russia on our foreign policy in Eastern Europe. It’s shocking when our relationship with Israel is described like this, but It’s especially shocking that Israel gets away with it because neither political party objects.
AIPAC is only a slice of an Israel lobby that spans dozens of organizations, but it is the largest of the Israel attack dogs, and it has teeth. As FORTUNE magazine put it, “if a congressman from Kansas gets a call from an AIPAC lobbyist, he and his constituents may not think much about about Israeli affairs, but voting with the lobby is politically beneficial. Voting against them, meanwhile, gives that congressman a powerful enemy.” Plus, the money and junkets are great.
Unlike lobbyists who represent China, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Russia, the Ukraine or other foreign interests, AIPAC seems free to flaunt FARA, the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. Indeed, this week, in the middle of discussions on Russia, Senator Lindsay Graham asked [rhetorically] whether AIPAC should be required to register: “They come up here in droves: lobbying Congress to do things, in their view good for the U.S.-Israel relationship. I know they have a lot of contacts in Israel. Should somebody like that be a foreign agent?”
If they’re not representing Israel, who does AIPAC really represent? Although it frequently claims to speak for American Jews, Jewish Voice for Peace rabbi Joseph Berman would beg to disagree: “they don’t speak for the Jewish community.” Poll after poll shows that American Jews are, first and foremost, Americans who believe in religious plurality, do not believe in ethno-religious government, and support diplomacy with Iran rather than reckless provocation. There are already plenty of lobbyists for a strong defense and muscular foreign policy so, once again, who does AIPAC really represent? In the words of Middle East expert Juan Cole, “the only logical possibility is that AIPAC is acting on behalf of the Likud government of Israel.”
In 2005 AIPAC Policy Director Steve Rosen and AIPAC Senior Iran Analyst Keith Weissman were fired after the FBI became suspicious the two had passed classified information to Israel. The stolen information was provided by Larry Franklin, who served a 12 year sentence for espionage. And though the two AIPAC employees were plainly operating in Israel’s behalf, because of the belief that American and Israeli interests are synonymous the prosecution claimed it could not prove that passing stolen information to Israel had actually harmed the United States.
AIPAC is involved with many linked organizations, including the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) – which operates out of the same building and sent almost all freshmen Congressmen to Israel in 2015 – and Islamophobic groups like Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran (CNFI). As the INTERCEPT reported, AIPAC’s political beneficiaries are bi-partisan. Four ostensibly “liberal” Democrats, for example, advise CNFI, which in turn finances some of Frank Gaffney‘s work. AIPAC has gotten Democrats to suppress the BDS movement at both legislative and executive levels. New York governor Andrew Cuomo wrote an executive memo to establish an anti-BDS blacklist. And Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC speech made it clear that her party would fight BDS for Israel in the halls of Congress. And AIPAC was grateful when Republican David Friedman became the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
But the only party AIPAC really cares about is the Likud.
For the moment, however, AIPAC continues to pretend that it represents a domestic constituency and not a foreign government. But, like ALEC, it has numerous legislators willing to sponsor its Israel-friendly bills. And the legislation just keeps on coming.
Back in March AIPAC sponsored Senate bill S.722, “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017,” designed to promote Israel’s foreign policy goals regarding Iran.
In May the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed H.R.672, “Combating European Anti-Semitism Act of 2017,” which makes the United States responsible for Israel’s interests in Europe. The bill accused European leaders who have voiced even tepid criticisms of Israel, including Angela Merkel, of anti-semitism.
More recently the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, also sponsored by AIPAC, appeared in both House and Senate flavors and has been roundly denounced by civil liberties and progressive organizations.
The “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” joins the federal Combating BDS Act of 2017 and last year’s Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in trying to outlaw the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in the United States. It also joins legislation filed by Israel’s lobbyists in 35 states, and enacted in 19, which outlaw the use of anti-Israel boycotts, a First Amendment right affirmed by the Supreme Court’s 1982 ruling in “NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware” that tested the legality of peaceful advocacy of a politically-motivated boycott.
Despite its dubious constitutionality, the proposed law would make support of the BDS movement a felony, slapping $1 million dollar fines and imposing 20 year prison sentences on critics of Israel. It specifically goes after BDS supporters by suppressing political opposition to the Israeli government. The text of the bill reads: “The term ‘politically motivated’ means actions to impede or constrain commerce with Israel that are intended to coerce political action from or impose policy positions on Israel.”
And this is what the 46 Senate and 249 House co-sponsors really oppose – the political right of their constituents to pressure for change in Israel.
Because the “Israeli Anti-Boycott Act” is so vaguely-worded, it could be interpreted quite extremely. For example, suppose a consumer, before deciding to boycott an individual Israeli product, wanted to know if SodaStream machines, Naot shoes, or Ahava cosmetics are made in Israel proper or in the occupied West Bank. According to the ACLU, posting even an inquiry on social media could theoretically cost a citizen 20 years of freedom or $1 million for his exercise of free speech. Moveon.org defends the right to use boycotts, “regardless how you feel about BDS,” as a Free Speech issue. As well it is.
Another defect of the bill is that, while it was clearly written specifically for Israel’s benefit, it contains ambiguous language punishing anyone who boycotts any “country friendly to” the United States, or who joins, supports, or echoes support for a foreign boycott of that country. This could also have unintended consequences because the United States has many dubious friends – including the Saudi dictatorship, Egypt’s dictator, Philippine dictator Duterte, Pakistan, Afghanistan’s kleptocracy, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Honduras, Qatar, Kyrgyzstan, Djibouti, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and many others.
“Friends” of the United States also include several new European members of NATO that are in the process of shedding their democracies, including Poland and Hungary. And Thailand, a SEATO member, is a government currently under dictatorship. No citizen should feel safe criticizing a repressive foreign regime with a toxic combination of vague, anti-democratic legislation and our present authoritarian president.
Brand Israel has successfully sold itself as the “only Democracy in the Middle East.” Yet the government’s public relations campaign rings as hollow as anything to come out of the Trump administration. Israel has much in common with South Africa’s Apartheid regime in maintaining a cruel, repressive occupation over a people denied their civil rights. And Israel just celebrated its fiftieth year of occupation. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it, Israel is not a democracy, nor with an occupation could it ever be. “What we must challenge here, therefore, is not only Israel’s claim to be maintaining an enlightened occupation but also its pretense to being a democracy. Such behavior towards millions of people under its rule gives the lie to such political chicanery.”
Israel is no longer recognizable as the spunky little nation of friendly kibbutzniks. Over the years it has transformed into an extreme right-wing settler state and has instituted a series of anti-democratic laws of its own. Israel has cracked down on domestic human rights advocates like B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. Like our own president, Israel treats its own press as enemies. Journalism is frequently censored in Israel and, like Saudi Arabia, the government is now trying to shut down the Jerusalem office of Al Jazeera. Despite wide support for so-called “shared values,” the more Americans learn about Israel the more its reputation in the United States suffers. Shutting down the BDS movement is not a shared value but a desperate attempt to shut down criticism within a nation that is Israel’s most useful enabler.
A few weeks ago, on a tour of Eastern Europe, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu was caught lecturing leaders of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech republic – xenophobic nations that oppose resettlement of refugees – that Israel was a bulwark in the defense of “Judeo-Christian” values against Muslim hordes and that European concern for Palestinians was “crazy.” Netanyahu sounded precisely like American white supremacist Richard Spencer and an awful lot like Donald Trump in Poland last week. “Don’t undermine that one European, Western country that defends European values and European interests and prevents another mass migration to Europe,” Netanyahu told his fellow right-wing Islamophobes.
BDS activists say that a boycott is a legal, peaceful way to keep pressure on Israel so long as its Palestinian occupation continues and land thefts persist. Only a few days ago 100 armed settlers invaded the home of the Abu Rajab family in Hebron and forcibly ejected them into the street. Speaking for the government, Israel’s Agriculture Minister, Uri Ariel, defended the home invasion: “The entry into the home is another step in strengthening the natural connection of the Jewish people to its land. In the last few days in which Jerusalem has been under incessant incitement, I am glad that the people of Israel continue to establish themselves in the City of the Patriarchs.” Another government minister, Tzachi Hanegbi, threatened Palestinians with a “third Nakba” (more ethnic cleansing).
These were voices of the government speaking and, curiously, Ariel used the word incitement, which is frequently deployed when talking about BDS or making any appeal for Palestinian rights.
Sponsors of the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” should have known a backlash was coming. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland says now that his bill was misinterpreted by the ACLU. But the ACLU’s David Cole and Faiz Shakir stood by their reading in a Washington Post editorial:
“Whether one approves or disapproves of the BDS movement itself, people should have a right to make up their own minds about it. Americans engage in boycotts every day when they decide not to buy from companies whose practices they oppose. Students have boycotted companies that sold clothing manufactured in sweatshops abroad. Environmentalists have boycotted Nestlé for its deforestation practices. By using their power in the marketplace, consumers can act collectively to express their political points of view. There is nothing illegal about such collective action; indeed, it is constitutionally protected.”
Cardin has since offered to tinker with the bill’s wording. But regardless of how it is phrased or re-phrased, the bill ultimately has only one purpose – to make political action by Americans illegal if it offends Israel.
This practically defines the phrase “un-American.”
Voters must let Senate co-sponsors and House co-sponsors of this bill know in no uncertain terms that this bill must die. Here in Massachusetts that includes Reps. Richard Neal and Joe Kennedy who once again sullies the family name.
In addition, Congress must ensure that the AIPAC lobbyists at 251 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C. all follow what their colleagues Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Monica Farley, John Podesta, and thousands of others have been forced to do – register with the Justice Department under the 1938 FARA Act as agents of a foreign country.
In 1905, disgusted by U.S. militarism and jingoism, and American war crimes committed in the Spanish-American and Phillipine-American wars, Mark Twain penned a short story. It was never published in his lifetime – he realized it would never be accepted and feared it would end his career. So the “War Prayer” remained buried in his papers for almost twenty years.
The story is simple: a nation goes to war, as most do, invoking God and flag. There is a church service for soldiers going off to battle. A stranger appears and offers up the ultimate benediction, one that fully expresses the dark side of the nation’s militarism and the demonization of its enemies. All couched in the Word of God.
But, as today, an honest expression of a nation’s primitive and bloody views is a step too far. Twain’s story ends: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”
This is the stranger’s prayer:
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
The newly-announced Democratic strategy for 2018 will be neither good for progressives nor for centrist Democrats. A terminally ill party has chosen to forego a direction that might save it. It has chosen a strategy that justifiably skeptical voters will reject in the midterms, one sure to alienate progressives and Republicans alike, in the earnest conviction that walking straight down the middle of the road at midnight is the safest way to move forward. The new strategy also demonstrates that a marriage between party centrists and progressives is untenable.
Yesterday Senate minority leader Charles Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi stood in the sun in rural Virginia and announced the Democratic Party’s “Better Deal” for Americans. Their message was completely economic: “First, we’re going to increase people’s pay. Second, we’re going to reduce their everyday expenses. And third, we’re going to provide workers with the tools they need for the 21st-century economy.”
The Democratic campaign was crafted by Madison Avenue but symbolically launched in Berryville, Virginia, population 4,185, 85% white, a Southern town where Hillary Clinton led in the 2016 election. The slogan actually reads: “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future” but GOP hecklers noted similarities with the Papa John’s slogan “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza” and brought their own pizza boxes ridiculing the Democrats. THEWEEK echoed skepticism of the campaign’s ham-handedness: “Congrats on getting a new slogan, Democrats. It might just be dumb enough to work.”
The Democrats’ new strategy seems to embrace the ideas of Clinton strategists Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, whose piece in the July 6th New York Times advised “Back to the Center, Democrats.” POLITICO noted that the new strategy “sidesteps” social issues, appearing to further reject so-called “identity politics,” a direction recommended to the DNC in a November 2016 op-ed in the New York Times by Mark Lilla, a Libertarian. Furthermore, the DNC now seems to be chasing rural white voters, a strategy Amanda Marcotte sees as doomed.
But the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune saw the launch as a smashing success, calming a “restive left” in the party’s ranks. David Atkins at Washington Monthly sounded a “mission accomplished” note by declaring that the party had learned its lessons and now the “healing” could begin. John Stoehr saw the party learning how to be “populists” again. McClatchy News claimed the announcement made progressives delirious with joy at the “left-leaning” agenda. Centrists, wrote the friendly pundits, had moved as far to the left as possible, and now love was in the air.
But when one parses the new economic strategy, it reads exactly like the old economic strategy: economic and wage adjustments, public-private partnerships, and training for the New Economy du jour. But, this time, with tax credits for employers doing the training. The New Republic argues that the DNC emphasis on worker retraining will resonate as poorly with those like the Carrier worker in Elkhart whom Obama lectured during a town hall last June. CUNY Political Scientist Corey Robin points out that public-private worker training schemes are rarely successes and observes that, if this is the best the DNC can come up with, it must have a death wish:
“It’s true that Schumer offers other proposals, including a $15 minimum wage, but for anyone with a memory, the devotion of one sentence, much less a paragraph, of precious column space to this synecdoche of the bipartisan political economy of the last four decades–well, it’s enough to make you think this is a party that wants to die but can’t pull the plug.”
Liberal WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson sees the new Democratic strategy as timid and uninspiring. “I’m still waiting to hear the”bold solutions” that Democrats promise. I can think of one possibility: Why not propose some version of truly universal single-payer health care?”
Writing on Bill Moyers & Company, UC Berkeley law professor Ian Haney Lopez wrote that the new Democratic strategy is everything that’s wrong with the party: Wall Street connections; an over-emphasis on marketing; a party turning its back on minorities by focusing now on whites; and a “boring party with limited ambitions.”
A list of twenty organizations including Our Revolution, Democracy for America, and Progressive Democrats of America wants Democrats to support seven pieces of progressive legislation. It’s been a remarkable litmus test for the party’s willingness to actually move in a progressive direction. Not surprisingly, Democrats have rejected the progressive agenda. Forget the Blue Dogs and Red State Democrats for a moment and look at the Massachusetts Congressional delegation.
Not one in the entire delegation supports the Massachusetts Democratic platform’s call for free college education. Only two are willing to tax investment income. Only two are willing to get rid of private prisons. Only three support healthcare as a human need and not a profit center. Only three support automatic voter registration (Democratic Secretary of State William F. Galvin is even appealing a State Judicial Court ruling that bars the state from forbidding people from voting unless they registered 20 days prior to an election).
It seems clear where all this is headed. Does anyone really expect hundreds of midnight conversions to progressive politics from Bay State Democrats? This is a party that has learned nothing from its loss in 2016. Democrats, both centrist and progressive, need to admit that efforts to reform the DNC have failed. There will be no new direction, no recalibration – only a further slide to the right as Democrats try even harder to play the Republican game.
Midterm elections will be here in fifteen months. Every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and a third of all Senate seats will be up for grabs. The state Democratic primaries will be here long before that, but nobody seems to be worried – except maybe the worry-warts and Cassandras who see disaster unfolding.
Democrats are divided on moving right or moving left, so instead the party has chosen “we’re against Trump” as its anthem. Massachusetts Democrats heard a five-hour preview of this song at the June 3rd convention in Worcester. But merely opposing Trump has limited appeal to Republicans, unenrolled voters, and progressives. Instead, voters are asking: What have you done for me lately? And: What do you really stand for?
Democratic leaders say they are working on something great (sounds like Trump) but they’re in no rush to let American voters in on their secret. When Democrats finally do come up with a new platform, as POLITICO points out, even if it is progressive, centrist Democrats say they’ll chart their own political course. Words are cheap. Platforms apparently are even cheaper.
Democrats face not only apathy and division but a demographic crisis. According to the non-partisan Voter Participation Center at Lake Research, the “Rising American Electorate” (millennials, unmarried women, and people of color) are more likely to stay home for 2018 midterm elections or remain unenrolled than in 2012. In Massachusetts the net loss is expected to be 12.7%, while in states like New Mexico it may be as high as 29.6%. A total of 40 million Americans will drop out of the electoral process. And unfortunately they won’t be Trump voters.
If Democrats cannot agree on a platform, they should at least make voting rights and voter registration a major effort. But so far it’s been radio silence from both the DNC and MassDems.
Among the races coming up in Massachusetts and our slice of the SouthCoast:
Elizabeth Warren is up for re-election but her victory is far from assured.
All nine U.S. Congressmen seem likely to run unopposed in the primaries as they did two years ago, although in 2012 Sam Sutter challenged Bill Keating (9th Congressional district) in the Democratic primary and got a surprising 40% of the vote.
Republican Governor Charlie Baker is up for re-election and any Democrat who wants to take on the telegenic and personable (but nevertheless Republican) governor really needs to emerge as a strong challenger long before the March primaries.
William Francis Galvin ran unopposed for Secretary of the Commonwealth in the 2014 primaries, and we’ll probably see a repeat of this in 2018.
Popular Attorney General Maura Healey is clearly running an aggressive re-election campaign, taking no chances.
Treasurer Deb Goldberg had two primary challengers in 2014 and squeaked by with 55% of the vote in the 2014 general election. Republicans will be gunning for her job again this year.
Auditor Suzanne Bump won with 57% in the 2014 general election and ran unopposed in the primaries.
Governor’s Council member Joseph C. Ferreira (1st district), who ran unopposed in both the 2014 and 2016 primaries and also unopposed in both general elections, will likely run for his campaigning-free $36K a year job.
State Representative Christopher Markey (9th Bristol) is up for re-election. Markey has had periodic challengers (Alan Garcia, Patrick Curran, Joe Michaud, Russel Protentis, Robert Tavares, Raymond Medeiros) but the conservative Democrat has somehow clung to his $75K part-time job.
In 2014 Bristol County Commissioner John Saunders was challenged in the primaries by Daniel Dermody but ran unopposed in the general election.
In 2014 Sam Sutter ran for Bristol County District Attorney and had no challengers in either the primary or the general election.
In 2016 Thomas M. Quinn ran for Bristol County District Attorney and had no challengers in either the primary or the general election.
A couple of bland part-time positions offer six-year terms, nice salaries, and generally few challengers:
Mark J. Santos has run unopposed for the last 18 years as Bristol County Clerk of Courts. There have been no primary or general election challengers in all this time for his $110K job.
In announcing his retirement last March, Mark Treadup, a former school board member, former city councilman, former state representative, former county treasurer, former county commissioner, and former member of the Governor’s Council, bequeathed his most recent job as Career Democrat to Susan A. Morris, but it was given instead to fomer New Bedford mayor Fred Kalisz to finish out Treadup’s term.
At this late date Democrats are unlikely to get their act together. Careerism, apathy, and division can’t be cured overnight. And voter trust remains the critical issue. A party’s actions will always speak louder than platforms and promises.
No doubt Donald J. Trump’s antics consume a lot of your attention. But the Trump administration isn’t alone in trying to dismantle American democracy. While you weren’t looking – or maybe you were just looking the other way – Republicans and Democrats were trying to take your rights away from you.
ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group funded by the Koch brothers and devoted to taking your rights away from you, has really done it this time.
Today ALEC will be considering the following:
Originally, the U.S. Constitution provided for U.S. Senators to be selected by state legislatures however the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1914 upended 124 years of precedent calling for direct election of U.S. Senators. This change heralded many unintended consequences including greater federal overreach and Senate campaigns that are so costly that U.S. Senators become unduly beholden to special interests. This model policy urges the U.S. Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to overturn the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Yes, that’s right. You’re not hallucinating. ALEC wants to take away your right to directly elect your U.S. Senator by overturning the 17th Amendment of the United States Constitution. And if it succeeds, well, why not the 15th and the 19th too? Gilead plus the Confederacy would really make a lot of Republicans happy.
* * *
It pains me to say this, but there are a bunch of Democrats trying to destroy democracy with a different wrecking ball.
43 Senators – 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats – want to criminalize free speech by making criticism of Israel a felony punishable by a $250,000 fine or 20 years in prison.
The bill, S. 720, called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, is co-sponsored by the following Democratic senators: Michael F. Bennet (CO), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Maria Cantwell (WA), Christopher A. Coons (DE), Joe Donnelly (IN), Kirsten E. Gillibrand (NY), Margaret Wood Hassan (NH), Joe Manchin III (WV), Claire McCaskill (MO), Robert Menendez (NJ), Bill Nelson (FL), Gary C. Peters (MI), Charles E. Schumer (NY) and Ron Wyden (OR).
The House version, H. 1697, has 237 co-sponsors, but 63 Democratic representatives decided to trash the First Amendment too: Pete Aguilar (CA), Nanette Diaz Barragan (CA), Joyce Beatty (OH), Sanford D. Bishop (GA), Robert A. Brady (PA), Anthony G. Brown (MD), Tony Cardenas (CA), Kathy Castor (FL), J. Luis Correa (CA), Joe Courtney (CT), John K. Delaney (MD), Theodore E. Deutch (FL), Eliot L. Engel (NY), Ruben Gallego (AZ), Vicente Gonzalez (TX), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Gene Green (TX), Colleen Hanabusa (HI), Alcee L. Hastings (FL), Brian Higgins (NY), Steny H. Hoyer (MD), Hakeem S. Jeffries (NY), Joseph P. Kennedy (MA), Derek Kilmer (WA), Rick Larsen (WA), John B. Larson (CT), Sander M. Levin (MI), Ted Lieu (CA), Daniel Lipinski (IL), Nita M. Lowey (NY), Carolyn B. Maloney (NY), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), A. Donald McEachin (VA), Grace Meng (NY), Grace F. Napolitano (CA), Richard E. Neal (MA), Donald Norcross (NJ), Tom O’Halleran (AZ), Frank Pallone (NJ), Jimmy Panetta (CA), Collin C. Peterson (MN), Kathleen M. Rice (NY), Jacky Rosen (NV), Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA), C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger (MD), John P. Sarbanes (MD), Adam B. Schiff (CA), Bradley Scott Schneider (IL), Kurt Schrader (OR), David Scott (GA), Brad Sherman (CA), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Albio Sires (NJ), Adam Smith (WA), Darren Soto (FL), Thomas R. Suozzi (NY), Eric Swalwell (CA), Dina Titus (NV), Juan Vargas (CA), Marc A. Veasey (TX), Filemon Vela (TX), Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (FL), and Frederica S. Wilson (FL).
Section 5 of the bill specifically identifies Israel boycotts as political acts to be criminalized.
If this passes, what sorts of political acts and opinion will be criminalized next?
Many of the Democratic senators supporting the bill often cross the aisle to vote for extreme Republican legislation, but it was shocking that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer chose to join them. And Ron Wyden, for all his great work defending the Fourth Amendment, turned his back on the First. Among the Massachusetts congressional delegation, Joseph Kennedy III (4th Congressional district) won’t be winning his family’s “profiles in courage” award for his betrayal of the Constitution, nor will Richard Neal (1st). I suppose I should be grateful that Bill Keating (9th) – at least for the moment – hasn’t co-sponsored the House version.
Democrats. I’m really trying to like you, but why do you make it so damned hard?
Keating voted YEA with Blue Dog Democrats on H.R. 3192, a Republican bill which reduces transparency for mortgage lending institutions.
Keating also voted YEA with conservative Democrats on H.R. 1737, a Republican bill which neutered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s oversight of Indirect Auto Lending and Compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
Keating and five other Democrats voted for H.R. 3009, the “Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act,” a Republican bill to withhold funding for states and municipalities with “sanctuary” policies.
Keating and Blue Dog Democrats voted for H.R. 4038, the “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015.” The Republican bill adds additional obstacles to the already-onerous screening and vetting of Syrian refugees.
Keating voted YEA on H.R. 3004, “Kate’s Law,” a Republican bill which expands indefinite detention of migrants who repeatedly cross the border. The bill will do nothing to prevent future actions by desperate people but it will increase the number of private prisons in the United States.
Civil Liberties
Keating gets good grades on civil liberties for women’s and LGBTQ issues. However, when it comes to surveillance and Fourth Amendment issues, Keating is no friend and he gets only middling ones: “Keating supported ‘cybersecurity’ legislation, and opposed defunding the government’s Section 702 surveillance programs (PRISM and Upstream); however, he supports banning backdoor searches on US persons. He voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which purportedly reformed the small amount of government surveillance that occurs under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and continued to support it even after its reforms were watered down to the point where there was much debate about whether it would do more harm than good to pass it.” Keating also refused to let PATRIOT Act extensions expire under “sunset” provisions, including this and this one.
Militarism and Foreign Policy
Keating voted NAY on a resolution to bar President Obama from using an AUMF to invade Libya. The resolution would have required Congress to declare war — per the U.S. Constitution. Keating did, however, vote YEA on ending the war in Afghanistan.
Keating was reluctant to support Obama’s and Kerry’s Iran deal and has courted the MEK, an exile group which until 2012 was designated a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow and replace the Iranian government with its own “government-in-exile.” Thanks to Republican and Democratic hawks the designation was lifted.
Keating is pro-Likud. He has fought international efforts to support a Two State Solution, advocated moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, opposed the use of the word “Palestine” and threatened to cut off U.S. contributions to the U.N. and funding for U.N. refugee efforts because of the international body’s criticism of Israel’s land theft and occupation.
Keating, along with Democratic hawks, sent a letter to Rex Tillerson affirming their support for Trump’s policies on NATO and for Tillerson’s office. Keating shares Republicans’ view that NATO needs to be stronger to oppose Russia.
Keating cheered Donald Trump’s deployment of tomahawk missiles, which were in violation of both AUMF statements and the U.S. Constitution.
Review of “The True Flag” by Stephen Kinzer (ISBN 9781627792165)
Stephen Kinzer’s The True Flag is an account of the moment the United States embraced Empire and never again looked back. The U.S. had already taken Native American and Mexican land by force and tasted victory in Cuba. Now it was contemplating making the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam – and Hawaii – permanent colonies. Powerful business and political interests, including Theodore Roosevelt, who had made a name for himself on San Juan Hill in Cuba, were unapologetic advocates of empire.
For the Imperialists there was little difference between taking Texas or the Philippines. From the moment the U.S. became a nation, Thomas Jefferson described America as a new empire and set forth the goal of taking Spanish territory when “our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.”
But in 1898 there was a powerful, national “Anti-Imperialist League” – founded in Massachusetts, with at least a hundred chapters. It was led by former Senator and Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, magnate Andrew Carnegie, labor chief Samuel Gompers, civil rights advocate Booker T. Washington, Democratic Party leader William Jennings Bryant, co-founder of the Republican Party George Bouthwell, former presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison – all opposed the Treaty of Paris advanced by President William McKinley that would foist “Christian” rule over the “niggers” and savages of the Philippines.
For over a month the issue was debated in the Senate and the true soul of American Imperialism was bared and permanently read into the Congressional Record. Kinzer makes use of the Record, as well as contemporary newspaper accounts in his excellent book.
Behind the scenes were the Imperialists – Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and Senators from mainly what we would now call the red states. American industry wanted to expand beyond its limited trade with Europe, the states of the North had tasted victory in the Civil War, and suddenly there were new enemies and new markets to conquer. Finally, the crumbs of Spain’s disintegrating empire were simply too tempting to resist, and the Philippines were seen as a stepping-stone to China. Nationalistic, “jingoistic” fervor gripped the nation, and it was not merely industry and commerce itching for war – it was also the average American who was aching for conquest.
While debate over America’s soul was raging in the Senate – and this is how serious the moral risks of Imperialism were seen at the time – the Philippines had already been occupied. In what even at that time had become standard operating procedure, President McKinley instructed General Arthur MacArthur (father of General Douglas MacArthur) to provoke a military response from the Philippine military. The resulting massacre claimed 3,000 Filipino and 60 American lives and galvanized public opinion in favor of possession of the islands.
On the same day that the battle in Manila occurred, three American newspapers published a new poem by Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s Burden: the United States and the Philippine Islands.” Kipling’s work was everything Americans wanted to hear, and had been specifically written for the occasion:
Take up the White Man’s burden– Send forth the best ye breed– Go send your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild– Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child Take up the White Man’s burden In patience to abide To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride;
This was an anthem for Christian warriors. This was a rationale for conquest. Moreover, it was a glorification of a better race performing its Christian duty to serve their captives’ needs, these “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child,” and – curiously – to “veil the threat of terror.”
Since the beginnings of Imperial America, the threat of terror from non-Christians and non-white has always been a rationale for occupation.
The final nail in the coffin of American anti-Imperialism was the betrayal by William Jennings Bryan, head of the Democratic Party, who decided to play along with the Republican Imperialists, supporting the Treaty of Paris, and then begging for Philippine independence. That was his shockingly naive strategy. Bryan, who saw himself as a “pragmatic progressive,” managed to shake the resolve of at least a dozen Democrats, who ended up voting with the Republicans.
Senator Eugene Hale of Maine, a fundamentalist who cheered the U.S. acquisition of Hawaii because of his state’s many missionaries, was nevertheless shocked by the bloody Filipino insurgency and the brutal manner in which is was suppressed: “More Filipinos have been killed by the guns of our army and navy than were patriots killed in any six battles of the Revolutionary War. […] The slaughter of people in no way equal to us […] has stupefied the American mind. No one has said that our mission of commerce and of the gospel was to be preceded by the slaughter of thousands of persons.”
But senators like Hale had been deceiving themselves all along. McKinley and his generals certainly anticipated the slaughter. They planned it.
The Imperialists ran their victory lap and boasted that the United States was now the most fearsome military in the world. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge felt no need to address the East Coast elites or their swishy European friends. After the U.S. victory over the Filipinos, Beveridge did what today’s chickenhawk Congressmen do – traveled to the Philippines on a “fact-finding mission” and met with the American occupation commander, General Elwell Otis, who was fighting an insurgency with 30,000 troops. Like today’s Senators who strap on the kevlar and pose for patriotic constituents, Beveridge did all that and thanked the troops for their service. American troops, he said, were “Saxon types” with “racial virtue in their veins.” They were “manifest destiny personified.”
“We are the most militant nation on earth,” Beveridge crowed. “We have more of the world, we know more of the world, we are better prepared to bless the world and thus to bless ourselves. The great people of the American Republic, from whom flow all our large and elemental movements, feel that the day of our empire, as a soverign force of earth, is in its first grey dawn.”
And Beveridge had nailed it. This, the theme of Kinzer’s book, was indeed the grey dawn in which the American empire was born. Or at least its paternity acknowledged.
The story ends, as we know, with the United States committing war crimes in the Philippines, including mass slaughter of civilians and the use of an early form of waterboarding, carving out what is now an American gulag in Guantanamo, Cuba, and making the other seized territories permanent gifts to pineapple barons and American sweatshops. Eventually Hawaii became a state. Puerto Rico was plundered by Congress, victimized by investment schemes created for industry that financially bankrupted the island for generations to come.
Now, over a century later, the only thing that’s changed is that a modern-day “Anti-Imperialist League” is all but unimaginable in a nation at permanent war for generations. And Democrats and Republicans are still unanimous in continuing to take up the “White Man’s Burden” – invading any land they fancy and preempting any threat of terror from sullen brown devils with their childish, savage ways.
Last month I signed a change.org petition demanding the reinstatement of Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in New Jersey. Durden is also a well-known media commentator who in that capacity crossed swords with Tucker Carlson on FOX News, only to lose her part-time teaching job two days later. On the surface it seemed like just another case of an American discovering the limits of the First Amendment.
But as I read more, the story had components that touched on issues of race, gender, corporatism, worker protections for part-timers, and censorship of all types:
A Black Lives Matter chapter in New York City wanted to celebrate the black roots of Memorial Day — the roots of which most Americans are ignorant.
The American Right is always looking for an opportunity to smear Black Lives Matter.
Durden came to BLM’s defense and was censored and insulted as both a black person and as a woman.
Two days later the “senior management executive” of her community college fired her because free speech and academic freedom are inconvenient luxuries for an institution in crisis — and also because adjuncts are a cheap, disposable resource — just the way corporate America likes it.
Durden’s experience encapsulates a lot that’s wrong with America.
FOX News and Friends
On June 6, 2017 Lisa Durden, who had previously appeared on the Kelly File at FOX News, appeared on the Tucker Carlson show, also on FOX. Carlson began his segment by showing viewers selected quotes from a Black Lives Matter invitation to a blacks-only Memorial Day Party in New York City. FOX News viewers knew where this was going: demonization of Black Lives Matter, best known for raising hell about the American epidemic of police murders.
But Carlson omitted two key facts in his “set-up”: first, the party was a single event in a single city; and second, the organizers wanted to celebrate the black origins of Memorial Day [more on this in a minute]. Carlson also conflated a single celebration with the entire Black Lives Matter movement — which is actually an umbrella organization with many different tendencies and numerous white allies — and then he asked Durden to respond:
“… I thought the whole point of Black Lives Matter, one of the points would be to speak out against singling people out on the basis of their race and punishing them for that, because you can’t control what your race is, and yet, they seem to be doing that. Explain that to me.”
This was supposed to be an easy score against BLM’s supposed hypocrisy but Durden insisted on putting it in context — something ill-suited for FOX viewers.
The reality of White Privilege
Now, Lisa Durden is no shrinking violet. She is equal parts public intellectual and showman. And there is a very good reason FOX kept asking her back, particularly to debate FOX’s black reactionary Kevin Jackson on police violence — conflict sells. Durden also has a tendency to tune her BS-detector right up to the max. On this particular evening, when Carlson asked her if it wasn’t racist to have a black-only party Durden responded:
“Boo hoo hoo, you white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter, all-black Memorial Day celebration. Wow! Let me contextualize that for you –“
And that was enough. Carlson had heard “White Privilege” and it effectively short-circuited portions of the brain related to high-level executive function. He was seeing White and he was seeing Red. In addition, a woman was challenging him. And not only that, Carlson had heard a strong black woman refuse to play along with his patronizing attempt to catch her in a transparent trap. Carlson interrupted Durden, going so far as to cut off her microphone. She had actually dared to offer viewers an explanation for a black celebration of Memorial Day — to “contextualize” it, as she put it. But Carlson just wasn’t having any.
“No, you don’t need to contextualize anything for anyone considering your logic is nonexistent and your racism abundant.”
Durden’s unsympathetic “Boo hoo hoo” was probably the trigger. But now there would be no opportunity to hear Durden’s reasoning, though she tried unsuccessfully to be heard, to explain to viewers that Memorial Day was a commemoration first celebrated by South Carolina slaves. But the FOX segment only went downhill from there.
Nevertheless she persisted
“A man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man” (Corinthians). “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (Ephesians). Today’s white male Republicans love to drag their conveniently medieval theology into the public sphere — whether it’s government or a broadcasting studio.
When Elizabeth Warren argued against Jeff Sessions’ racist history during confirmation hearings, Mitch McConnell invoked an arcane Senate rule barring “insults” to former members of the Senate. When Warren argued Sessions’ record was germane to his confirmation, McConnell angrily defended her harsh censure: “Nevertheless she persisted.” Because once a Good Ole Boy tells you to shut up, you’d better do it immediately.
But if persistence is an offense, derision is a capital offense.
During the same confirmation hearings Desiree Fairooz, a 61-year-old member of Code Pink, was forcibly removed and arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions. Fairooz chuckled when Republican Senator Richard Shelby praised Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans fairly under the law,” adding it “is clear and well-documented.” It is remarkable that there wasn’t even more laughter. For more on this topic, see Maggie Hennefeld’s excellent piece in LA Progressive, “On the Criminalization of Female Laughter.”
Five years ago, when Megan Kelly was still at FOX, she hosted a segment with the express purpose of attacking Elizabeth Warren’s mention of distant Cherokee ancestry. Kelly asked both Tucker Carlson and black feminist Jehmu Greene whether this was laughable. Greene defended Warren, pointing out that even the Chief of the Cherokee Nation was only 3% Cherokee and calling out Carlson’s racist and sexist dog-whistles: “You see Scott Brown really questioning her qualifications because he has to appeal to white, working-class voters who feel marginalized because of affirmative action. This smells real stank to women who do not like being called on their qualifications.”
Typically, Carlson made it patronizing and personal with Greene, again challenging a black woman’s reasoning: “It’s so offensive and dumb. But leaving that aside, it does provide a window into a system that is fundamentally corrupt that awards people based on their DNA.” Greene then called him out on both the misogyny and racism: “[Your attitude] “is going to appeal to folks like you, voters like you: bow-tying white boys.”
With this past as prolog, Durden’s persistence and derision didn’t go over well with Carlson, or at FOX, the 24 hour racism and sexism channel.
Freedom of What?
Durden’s firing is not unique. People are dismissed, censored, or punished all the time for views employers, schools, advertisers, lobby groups, internet service providers, and even foreign governments don’t like. People can be fired whether they are speaking on or off the clock, as representatives of a group, or simply for themselves. They can be fired for saying nothing but simply being who they are — and that includes being gay or pregnant. They can be fired for being whistle-blowers — even when they are exposing criminal acts.
It’s actually quite distressing how little the First Amendment actually protects freedom of expression.
And it’s not just liberals who run afoul of censorship and retaliation. Bill O’Reilly was fired by FOX by his advertisers, though not because of his chronic sexual harassment. Richard Spencer lost a gym membership expressly because he’s noxious white supremacist scum. Tech entrepreneur Brendan Eich lost his seat on the board of Mozilla for his homophobic views.
Right or Left, in America social and political “norms” must be enforced and outliers punished. On the Left it’s frequently gay-bashers and neo-Nazis. On FOX it’s simply progressive black women.
Academic Freedom
But the First Amendment says that government cannot censor you in word or print. This is commonly understood as applying to public or government entities like community colleges and universities. Durden’s firing should certainly trigger a lawsuit for violation of her First Amendment rights.
And there is also a long tradition in colleges and universities of giving faculty members freedom to say what they want without censorship. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) notes that academic freedom as “common law” has existed since 1940. Many of the rights extended to faculty depend on tenure and teaching status, though there are disagreements among Federal Courts about what rights apply to whom.
Still, the Collective Bargaining Agreement under which Durden was hired “declares its commitment to sustain the principles of academic freedom” as well as “retention of all the adjunct faculty members’ rights as a citizen to free speech and publication. Such rights are not, as such, subject to institutional censorship or discipline.” The only caveat in the contract pertains to “the adjunct faculty member’s unusual influence on the opinions and values of the students with whom the adjunct faculty member works.”
But Lisa Durden never identified herself as an Essex faculty member and was attempting only to influence Tucker Carlson’s viewers, not a room full of impressionable undergrads.
Adjuncts
Community Colleges may be called “colleges” but there is a caste system when it comes to teaching in America’s institutions of higher learning. To put it indelicately, adjuncts like Durden are the fast-food workers of the academic world. The AAUP has attempted to show some solidarity with adjuncts but this has never been translated into anything substantial. Instead, it has been up to advocates like Robin Meade, a union organizer for Moraine Valley Community College, to add rights for adjuncts into contracts.
Yet when Meade spoke out about adjuncts being treated as “disposable resources” at her college she had much the same experience as Durden: The “chief of campus police hand-delivered a letter of termination to Meade at her home. Her college email was immediately cut off and locks were changed on the union office at the college.” Meade appealed to the Illinois Department of Labor Relations and she won. Though this was a labor rights case, it also touched on her rights as an academic.
Seventy-five percent of faculty members in American colleges are adjuncts and, shockingly, they earn less than poverty wages. A majority of adjunct faculty members are women — those facing the most discrimination with tenure track positions. And while 60% of adjuncts in Colorado, for example, are women, they earn significantly less than their male counterparts. And the percentage of adjuncts is increasing nationally, just as part-time workers are increasing in the general labor market.
A typical adjunct can expect to earn $3-$5K for a single semester course. Her union will often — as in Durden’s case — be able to do little for her both in terms of wages or representation. Like Meade, after being fired Durden was denied union representation and treated like a criminal.
Because in the end Durden — like all American workers — was just another disposable resource.
College or Corporation?
While its adjuncts earn $7 to $8 an hour, Essex County College’s president, Anthony E. Monroe, a former healthcare consultant, earns $215,000 every year. Monroe was hired in May to deal with a stream of crises that have plagued the predominantly black college.
In May 2017 the former president and former university attorney were fired for pursuing an investigation of financial misconduct and coverup by the same administrators who terminated them. Both women are now pursuing wrongful termination lawsuits against the college. Essex is also at risk of losing its accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education for “enrollment” and “leadership” issues.
Enter Anthony E. Monroe, Ed.D, MBA, MPH, FACHE.
Monroe’s resume describes him as a “Senior Management Executive” and his own effusive description of his abilities oozes like a jelly donut with corporate flummery:
“Dynamic, energetic, and experienced visionary and strategic executive with 28 year career in complex, world-class institutions that is showcased by an impressive record of leadership and management performance. Significant track record and achievements in delivering strong market, financial, and operational results in very complex and large systems. Recognized for innovative leadership in transitioning underperforming organizations into top producers and guiding others through growth and expansion; skilled in negotiations, changing culture, board relations, creating systemness, improving operations efficiency and project management, driving revenues and market shares, improving productivity and quality, generating savings, enhancing customer satisfaction, managing multi-site operations and integrating systems. Expertise in public health systems operations, physician relations, network development, strategy execution, clinical excellence, financial management, and market growth.”
Monroe came from City Colleges of Chicago, Malcolm X College, where he was president for seven years. He revamped a $251 million dollar campus, put his fingerprints on a $524 million capital plan, oversaw an 80% increase in degrees, saw graduation rates increase by 3%, and so on. Numbers. Widgets. Percentages. And “systemness.”
But Monroe’s other talent was making controversies go away. While president of Malcom X College, Dr. Micah Young, Dean of Medical Sciences, informed Monroe that there were four boxes of rotting cadavers stored in an unrefrigerated closet in the James Craig Lab, and that they represented a slew of health and workplace safety violations. Within a week Young was out of a job.
Young’s lawyer, Dennis Stefanowicz, said, “He tried to do the right thing for the families and for the individuals who gave their bodies to science. When he tried to do the right thing, he ran into a brick wall, and when he brought the issue to light, instead of taking the time to figure out how the problem occurred and figure out how to right the wrong, they just terminated the person who brought the issue to light. It was the easy way out.”
Mission Creep
Monroe’s talent for taking “the easy way out” certainly came in handy within weeks of assuming the presidency at Essex County College. Monroe posted a long-winded justification for Durden’s firing — one sounding like it had been concocted in a corporate H.R. department but not an institution of higher learning:
“While the adjunct who expressed her personal views in a very public setting was in no way claiming to represent the views and beliefs of the College, and does not represent the College, her employment with us and potential impact on students required our immediate review into what seemed to have become a very contentious and divisive issue. […] In consideration of the College’s mission, and the impact that this matter has had on the College’s fulfillment of its mission, we cannot maintain an employment relationship with the adjunct. The College affirms its right to select employees who represent the institution appropriately and are aligned with our mission.”
When Durden’s case finally goes to court Monroe will have to explain precisely why violating an adjunct’s employment contract was necessary, what he thinks the college’s “mission” is, and precisely how Durden’s private opinions were incompatible with that mission. Or was it simply that Durden’s views clashed with Monroe’s corporatist views?
Black Lives Matter
But let’s not forget where this journey began — with Durden defending Black Lives Matter.
Four years ago George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. Many on the jury believed Zimmerman was guilty of murder but they were instructed that Florida’s “stand your ground” laws prevented a finding of guilt. Black Lives Matter was born out of this injustice. The murdering of black people is an important part of the BLM movement, but BLM’s statement describes it as a liberation movement with broader goals:
“Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organize. It started out as a Black-centered political will and movement building project turned chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene when violence is inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.
In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.
Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.”
The BLM movement foresaw that, especially after the election of Donald Trump, things were going to get ugly — and fast:
“What is true today — and has been true since the seizure of this land — is that when black people and women build power, white people become resentful. Last week, that resentment manifested itself in the election of a white supremacist to the highest office in American government.”
Newsweek cited the Trump administration’s threats:
“The president has targeted the organization, especially protesters who have taken to the streets. The White House website went live after inauguration and promised to end the ‘anti-police atmosphere’ while noting ‘our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.’ Slate wrote about this shift with the headline ‘In One of His First Acts as President, Donald Trump Put Black Lives Matter on Notice.'”
Ignorance of American History
The history lesson Durden hoped to remind America of was lost the moment Tucker Carlson heard the words “white privilege.” But the history is quite relevant to this entire story.
In 2011 historian David Blight looked at the history of Memorial Day in a New York Times piece, “Forgetting Why We Remember.”
“By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. […] Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. […] The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. […] After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway… […] The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”
Though the impulse to honor the half-million Union and Confederate dead was expressed in many such commemorations, black Americans are very likely to have been the first to do so.
This is what Lisa Durden never got to explain to White America.
The great patriotic displays on July 4th typically echo our great love of war. Bombs bursting in air, fireworks, rockets red glare. Tomahawks and drones. The new president even wanted a Soviet-style inauguration with rows of missile launchers driving down Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Americans would have loved it.
Today’s editorial sections were predictably full of appeals to American Exceptionalism – the Promise of America, the Dream of America, the Founding Fathers’ Challenge to Us All. They all fell flat because Americans are generally sick of promises and the Great America Again is just about all dreamed-out. People are working two and three jobs and still can’t afford medical care or a mortgage. Police are still murdering black people after centuries. We just won’t stop invading other countries, changing regimes, and slaughtering civilians.
But mainly, these patriotic invocations failed because we can no longer appeal to the America of Yesterday. All its sins and errors – and all the old worn narratives about the country – all have got to go.
Those who care to reckon with our history know just what kind of country it is. And there were plenty of reminders today as some commentators wrote about the country’s warts, even as others were celebrating our Exceptionalism. The late Howard Zinn reminded us ours is a country grown fat from conquest. Frederick Douglass, whom our commander-in-chief pretended to know personally, blasted the hollow democracy of slaveholders as an insult to black Americans. Michael Brenner wondered today whether it was time to finally pronounce dead America’s promises to the common man.
With economic insecurity, the very real possibility of dying without medical insurance, and rampant abuses of civil liberties, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness has become nothing but an empty slogan.
American democracy has certainly failed to live up to the hype, the anthems, the slogans, the appeals to raw nationalism – even the founding principles. More anthems and more nationalism haven’t helped. The day was always coming when we’d have to see that we’re just like every other people. Our democracy is just as imperfect and just as fragile. Nothing exceptional about that.
Love for a country has nothing to do with its clumsy symbols. The flag’s growing constellation is literally a record of territorial conquest. The national anthem has an ugly melody – just as it did when it was a British drinking song. The lyrics were penned by a slave holder. The White House, built with slave labor, is both a symbol of imperial power and a still-unresolved national sin.
Yet despite all this, this is where we live. It’s where we make our homes, make plans for the future, raise our families, drink the water, and involve ourselves in our communities. Progressives may not be out in the streets waving flags and setting off firecrackers, but there are other ways to love this country. And I think we’ve been out every night since January trying to demonstrate, and earn, that love.
Jon Schwarz has a thoughtful piece entitled “How to Love this Freaky Country” and it’s worth the read. Peter Laarman writes about how we need to re-frame the tired old “promise of America” narrative into something more constructive and, yes, more revolutionary. Lyz Lenz, editor of the Rumpus, kicked off a series of essays on patriotism that run throughout the month. These are views that look forward without trying to sanitize the past.
But then there is America itself. There is something mysterious and beckoning about our country. Or perhaps it’s the challenge of understanding the essence of something so vast, as Alexis de Tocqueville tried to do when touring the young nation. The old Simon and Garfunkel song “America” captures this idea so well that the Sanders campaign got permission to use it, repeating the refrain:
All come to look for America.
When interviewed, Art Garfunkel understood the song’s appeal: “We’ve come to look for the country and we don’t really know who we are. We never knew who we were. We’re still working out what Alexander Hamilton was working out: how do we fuse and become a united States of America…”
It is indeed a wonder to walk down the street of a major American city and see so many diverse faces. It is a miracle to drive across the country and see some of the most beautiful geography on the planet. It is astonishing that so much conflict can be packed together with so much amity, and that we have managed to stick together all this time. There is much to hate, much that needs change, but also much to love.
I wish everyone a Happy Independence Day, as we all continue to look for America.
At every turn Bill Keating is a huge disappointment – healthcare, foreign policy, cheerleading Trump’s Tomahawk missile attack on Syria. The list of betrayals by the Massachusetts 9th Congressional District representative grows daily.
“H.R. 3004 would expand grounds for indefinite detention and decrease legal opportunities for certain migrants challenging their removal. […] Criminalizing entire immigrant communities based on the senseless actions of a few individuals tears at the moral fabric of our society and will not make our communities safer. H.R. 3004 could prevent migrants from adequately accessing asylum and would increase family hardship through separation by offering no meaningful opportunity for family members to pursue a legal route when seeking reunification across borders. These provisions will only fuel the brokenness of our system, which is already heavy-handed on indefinite detention and dangerous deportations at great expense to U.S. taxpayers and our collective moral conscience.”
As the FCNL points out, slapping even longer detentions and a felony label on desperate people crossing the border accomplishes nothing except to show how cruel Americans can be and drives up prison costs.
But this is not the first time that Keating has supported Republican anti-immigration legislation. In the last Congressional session, Keating again joined with Democratic traitors in supporting H.R.4038, the Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act of 2015. The bill, written by Republican Michael McCaul (TX), now keeps Syrian refugees out of the United States – many of whom the United States made homeless by its thinly-disguised war to depose Bashar al-Assad.
If Democrats act and vote like Republicans, American voters must be forgiven for wondering just what the Democratic Party actually stands for – and what logic there is in voting for a mean-spirited Democrat when Republicans can do it so much better. And the DNC had better get it through their thick, thick skulls that voting with the enemy deprives voters of a choice.
I hope a progressive Democrat will emerge to challenge this DINO representative. The Greens, and even Libertarian foreign policy critics, could offer voters in the Massachusetts 9th Congressional District a needed alternative to bi-partisan warmongering and immigrant bashing. Win or lose, split vote or not, no third party could “spoil” this Congressional seat any more than Keating has already soiled it himself.
According to an article in the New York Times, the president summoned his aides to the Oval Office to discuss his reasons for asking Congress for permission to wage war on Syria – not that American presidents feel obliged to follow the Constitutionally-mandated procedure: “He had several reasons, he told them, including a sense of isolation after the terrible setback in the British Parliament. But the most compelling one may have been that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.”
If this sounds familiar it’s because it happened four years ago, just barely into Obama’s second term, when Syria looked every bit like the target it is today and Iran, too, was squarely within American crosshairs. Obama had drawn a moral “red line” in the sand warning Assad against the use of chemical weapons. The U.S. seemed to be on the brink of another war.
Bush had gotten Saddam. Obama had already dispatched Ghadafy and was now weighing going after Assad. And why not? The Middle East is America’s playground and American presidents murder foreign leaders at whim. Accusing foreign leaders of atrocities has always been common and self-serving – but it’s especially hypocritical in light of our own practices.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the nation’s first biological weapons program in 1941. From 1943 to 1969, the U.S. developed weaponized anthrax, Q fever, Malta fever, botulinum, cholera, dengue fever, and various dysentery agents.
The American chemical weapons program began even earlier, in 1918, with mustard and phosgene gases, Lewisite, hydrogen cyanide, and cyanogen chloride. After WWII, the U.S. developed sarin, VX nerve agents, and Agent Orange. When it signed the Geneva Protocol, the U.S. specifically exempted itself from defoliants like Agent Orange and gases for riot control. In 1997, the U.S. signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, committing to destroy its 30,000 tons of such weapons. But then it dragged its heels for decades.
A chemical weapons depot in Tooele, Utah once hosted the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. Tooele stored 14 million tons of chemical agents, blistering agents, and nerve gas – almost half the U.S. total – and was closed only five years ago. Depots in Alabama and Maryland are still operational. A facility in Colorado is not expected to complete destruction of its stockpiles before 2019. Another one in Kentucky won’t be done before 2023.
The United States is the world’s leading arms dealer. Not individuals or corporations – but the government itself. 78% of the world’s arms come from U.S. government sales to foreign nations. In 2008 Israel committed a war crime by using white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza. The weapon, which melts human flesh, came from a U.S. stockpile stored in Israel. When Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurds, they were stamped “Made in the USA.” As old archives are opened and foreign policy documents leaked, U.S. culpability in historical atrocities is revealed. The German press recently reported that Chile’s dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, had stockpiles of U.S. botulinum toxins.
All the moral “red lines” regarding chemical weapons seem to converge in the United States.
From Havana harbor (“Remember the Maine!”), Laos and Cambodia, to fake yellowcake and invented WMD’s in Iraq, the U.S. has seized on many pretexts to bomb, blast, incinerate, and shoot people in faraway lands – as always, the majority civilians.
At this point, no one knows whether Trump’s claims that Assad is using chemical weapons are true or whether they’re simply a welcome distraction from his many corruption probes. But if history is a guide, “red lines” are never used as moral guideposts. They are usually just cynical pretexts to justify another war.
On Monday, June 26th Mardee Xifaras graciously hosted a Meet and Greet for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Setti Warren at her law offices in New Bedford. Warren spoke to a group of roughly twenty-five visitors about his two terms as mayor of Newton, his military service, Newton’s budget surplus, its improved AAA bond rating, and educational improvements under his administration. Warren referred to two of his governing principles several times: transparency and outcomes-based decision-making.
Warren identified Income Inequality as the #1 challenge for Massachusetts. He supports a number of economic justice issues: Single-Payer Healthcare; Free Public College; the Fair Share Amendment; Paid Family Leave; and a $15/hour minimum wage. In short order Warren managed to check off a few boxes from Progressive Massachusetts 2017 Legislative Priorities, though many were not discussed.
Warren is an unapologetic advocate of raising revenue. He talked about setting reasonable goals and then backing into the funding. It requires considerable guts nowadays to argue that government has a function, that the function is to help people, and that these functions require adequate budgets. But after the Meet and Greet I stood out on the sidewalk comparing notes with two other visitors and they expressed concern that, if not handled cautiously, this could easily sink a candidate.
The economic and budget questioning went on for a while. Neither community policing, judicial reform, decriminalization of poverty, immigration, civil liberties, regional transportation, nor the governor’s relationship with the House leader ever came up in conversation. It was a friendly first meeting and Warren didn’t really get any hardball questions.
Sitting as we were in an office in New Bedford, I asked Warren what he as governor would do about rogue sheriffs. At first he wanted to talk about Safe Communities, which he as mayor brought to Newton. I clarified that I was interested in the discretion a governor had over the fourteen county sheriffs in the Commonwealth. I reminded Warren that Duval Patrick had once curtailed Tom Hodgson’s budget and cited the June 25th Boston Globe editorial on Hodgson’s recklessness in Bristol County. Warren acknowledged that it’s an important issue to local voters, promised to look into what a governor could do, and an aide said he’d follow up with me.
I would have liked to ask Warren – who campaigns on his service in Iraq, on his father’s service in Korea, and his grandfather’s service during the Battle of the Bulge – what he thinks of our perpetual wars or what he thinks of Clinton’s and Kerry’s records on militarism and foreign policy. If this ambitious politician is on his way up the food chain, I’d like to know now – not when he runs for U.S. Senate or a higher office – what he thinks of the U.S. military budget, our foreign policy, or the DHS Fusion centers that operate in the Commonwealth. Would Warren crack down on state police spying on citizens? Would Warren as governor follow New York Democratic governor Cuomo’s example and impose a blacklist on the BDS movement or continue leading trade delegations to Israel, as Charlie Baker does? What kind of relationship would Warren have with Massachusetts defense contractors? The ACLU? Black Lives Matter?
For that matter I’d like all the Democratic contenders to weigh in on these issues. Despite what the Massachusetts Democratic Party thinks, there is no artificial division between foreign policy and domestic policy. Not when 68% of our discretionary budget goes for war. Not when state Democrats regularly wade into national issues.
Setti Warren’s resume follows a familiar pattern: high school class president; university; politics; law school; political appointments; fundraising; political consulting; military intelligence; a failed bid for the Senate; a successful run as mayor; and now the governor’s office. Warren’s father Joseph was a Dukakis advisor and Warren himself has held positions on political campaigns and in government under Bill Clinton and John Kerry.
If there is one thing that nags at me it’s that his is the profile of an ambitious career Democrat. Contrast Warren’s resume with Paul Feeney’s background, for example. Everything about Setti Warren’s speech at the June convention in Worcester came across as well-engineered, maybe even a tad slick. After three decades of non-stop war I find appeals to military patriotism distasteful, but this is apparently a national strategy designed to make the Democratic Party more appealing to the Right. But, in an informal setting where visitors sat around a law office conference table and fielded questions, Warren came off as genuine and answered credibly.
A few visitors have already praised Warren, but love doesn’t normally happen on a first date. Democrats ought to be cautious: an affable, telegenic Republican already owns the governor’s office and Massachusetts Democrats are notoriously complacent. The Democrat to beat Baker had better be damned good and they’d better be a progressive. And progressives should be wary: this race in the Blue Heart of America may say a lot about where the Democratic Party is really headed.
Warren, Gonzalez, and Massey each will have an opportunity to present their vision for the state, answer tough questions, and convince us of their sincerity and electability.
But it’s early. It’s one down and two more candidates to go.
The Intercept has an excellent tour down Bad Memory Lane in an interview with Ralph Nader. Nader outlines the series of missteps and betrayals that disgraced the Democratic Party and brought it to its present state of abject powerlessness. The Israelites had nothing on the Democratic Party; they were only lost in the desert for 40 years. Nader makes the case that it’s been downhill for Democrats considerably longer.
With Democrats flip-flopping on single-payer, holding undemocratic elections, proving to be able lobbyists for Republican interests, and ready to throw Pelosi under the bus for someone more palatable to the Right, nobody has any idea where the DNC is headed. Tom Perez hasn’t been much of a Moses to guide the DNC to the Promised Land. But, truth be told, Keith Ellison would have been just as ineffective. A party that has disgraced itself for decades doesn’t earn the electorate’s trust again in just a year. Ask any ex-con.
I’ve been telling people – mostly myself – that the Democratic Party is the only thing standing between total destruction of the United States and the Republicans. But by doing what? And using what power? In the case of the AHCA it’s now five freaked-out Republicans who block the way of Republican Senate colleagues acting as a death panel for their own constituents, not a totally emasculated Democratic Party. And it was Republican corruption, not Democratic opposition, that led to the downfall of several cabinet appointments.
It’s a year and a half from midterm elections and the same Democrats who presided over disaster and disgrace are still running the show. We still don’t have any idea where the Democratic Party is headed on internal democracy, donors, PACs, centrism, globalism, or if the party even has a 50 state strategy for backing and funding candidates – and what kind they’ll run. I see a proliferation of progressive platform planks but, really, not much else is changing.
Even a change of faces may accomplish nothing if the Democratic Party has ultimately lost the confidence of American working people and has no clear path back to power. Nader again:
“There are some people who think the Democratic Party can be reformed from within by changing the personnel. I say good luck to that. What’s happened in the last twenty years? They’ve gotten more entrenched. Get rid of Pelosi, you get Steny Hoyer. You get rid of Harry Reid, you get [Charles] Schumer. Good luck.
Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history.
End of lecture.”
And those new faces Nader mentions – the “new personnel” – that includes even those of us who have stepped into empty local political committees, pledged to work in and revive the party, and fought for platform amendments. But in many ways it feels like a fool’s errand.
For all the new energy, the fresh new faces and good intentions, it may well be that the empty vessel we thought we could fill is just too riddled with chips and cracks. The moment is truly only months away when we may have to face the bitter reality – that it may be time to start from scratch and create a new, credible, and genuine, party of the people.
White House apparatchik/ consiglieri/ mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway doesn’t think Trump’s famous economic “carnage” is bad enough to throw a Medicaid lifeline to the working poor.
Sounding as out-of-touch and cruel as Marie Antoinette, Conway appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and said that jobless Medicaid recipients should just go out and get a job. “If they are able-bodied and they want to work, then they’ll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do.”
Yeah, you lazy slackers. Why didn’t you think of that? Go get a job with her benefits.
For a political party that has so aggressively courted the poor white vote, this is a slap in the face to the very people who tipped the election in Trump’s favor. Of course, the working poor includes both Trump and non-Trump voters alike, and millions of minorities, but very few get medical and retirement benefits. Just ask Walmart workers who quality for food stamps and Medicaid because they work for unlivable wages. Kellyanne Conway’s suggestion would be laughable if it were not so callous.
Conway, who once ran a SuperPAC for billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and recently bought an $8 million mansion in suburban Washington D.C., spins steer manure for a living. But she doesn’t even have to believe it. For every lie she tells Conway is paid handsomely. And the medical benefits are great.
* * *
Now certainly the Democratic Party is guilty of turning its back on American workers. But out in the woodshed Democrats are taking a much more savage beating than the GOP, which is now doing the cruelest damage to the working class. And yet Trump & Company continue to receive applause for “promises kept” from this base.
It may take four years for Trump voters to realize the severity of their mistake – some people only learn things the hard way. But when American voters finally realize what the GOP has done to them, and to whom Trump’s promises were actually made, they’re not going to like Marie Antoinette and her boss at all.
Since January 20th we’ve lived in a very different country, one where raw power is everything, character is nothing, and concern for others is seen only when cameras are rolling. But yesterday I saw some quiet, unrehearsed kindness. I saw a politician being a mensch. It surprised me. And then it surprised me that I’d been surprised. It made me see how cynical I’ve become. In some things I’m a pretty slow learner. But yesterday I realized that politics is not only local but has to be personal.
I had occasion to be in District Court yesterday where I ran into my state representative, Chris Markey, whose politics I have slammed previously. Mr. Markey had stopped and was patiently helping several confused people find their courtrooms, including someone I was there to assist.
Since Inauguration Day it’s been all too easy to lose sight of the fact that most of our politicians – even those we find most frustrating – are basically decent men and women. Like Chris Markey, like most of the Democrats with whom I have political differences, each is more than merely his office, each is not simply an agenda. For each, their politics are formed by values I may not fully understand or ultimately accept– but this is all the more reason to listen with respect and seek out opportunities to talk.
So, Chris, let’s talk.
Carrier Jobs off to Mexico after all
I am not the only slow learner in America. That honor also belongs to Trump voters.
Donald Trump made a big show of saying he’d crack down on US-bound Mexican criminals by building a big, beautiful wall. But this was always a one-way street for gringos. Mexico-bound corporate crooks don’t get a protectionist wall but receive instead big, beautiful tax breaks. Trump and Pence claimed they’d save thousands of Indiana jobs at the Carrier subsidiary of defense contractor United Technologies Corporation (UTC). But in typical Trumpian fashion, the real number turned out to be closer to 700. And now, in spite of millions of dollars of corporate incentives, Carrier is chopping 600 of those jobs anyway. Off to Mexico! Adios, ladrones!
Eventually reality will slowly dawn on Trump’s supporters. Instead of Making America Great Again, the Billionaire-in-Chief is actually presiding over the complete opposite. The Ford Focus assembly line is off to China. Saudi Arabia just took control of America’s largest refinery. And, as for the 33,000 coal mining jobs Trump claims he created, well, it turns out the number is actually about 1,000. Where is Trump’s infrastructure plan? Where are the real jobs? Even Trump’s most vehement supporters have got to eventually start asking some tough questions. Lincoln was right: You can fool some of the people some of the time…
And if Mr. Bigshot Deal Maker had really wanted to save the Carrier jobs, one option might have been to make United Technologies an offer they couldn’t refuse – to hold defense contracts hostage to American jobs. But that’s not how it works in Trumplandia. UTC will get even greater corporate welfare thanks to the biggest military budget since the Big Bang. And unemployed Carrier workers – many of them Trump voters – will get to pay triple premiums for the worst healthcare in the Western world. That is, if they don’t have any preexisting conditions.
And that’s how it really works in Trump’s Great New America.
Pareidolia is the human ability to see shapes or recognize images, particularly faces, from random sensory stimulus. Common examples are “seeing” people in an inkblot test, canals on Mars, a man in the moon, rabbits in the clouds, an old man’s profile in a rock face, or hearing hidden messages in music. Pareidolia taps into the oldest, most primal, parts of our brain.
Then there is our tendency to see images we want to see. For centuries people have been seeing the faces of religious figures on everything from walls to their own food. A Virgin Mary on a slice of toast sold for $28,000 on eBay. A Michigan woman discovered the face of Jesus on a pierogi at a church fundraiser. An Ontario man found Jesus in a burnt fish stick.
Tom Miller, a California Lutheran minister, thinks he knows why it is so common. In a sermon he observed:
“It has to do with our faith and a need to know that God steps across time and space to touch my life and be involved in my life. It has to do with looking for Jesus. […] We somehow think that we have to look for the dramatic, for the unusual, for the extraordinary. We’ve gotten the notion from somewhere that if God is at work it has to be in a way that no one would ever believe if we told them.“
These sightings pop up out of nowhere, have to be truly offbeat, dramatic, and personal. And they are a matter of faith from people so desperate that they are willing to suspend rational thought.
You probably know where this is headed.
The claim that Donald Trump’s presidency is checking off wins and keeping promises seems delusional to anyone actually looking at the evidence. But Trump partisanship is not strictly a matter of evidence, nor even of reality. It’s a matter of faith from desperate people.
I’m not sure the Democratic National Committee has a strategy to counter any of this. When it comes to religion, science, or even acknowledging observable phenomena like Tweets and climate change, many Republicans live in a completely different world. We can ask all day: “What promises did Trump really keep?” Or we can ask what part of climate change (or evolution, or the moon landing, or Sandy Hook) they dispute. But there is never a rational answer.
Most rational people see the world like the California minister. More importantly, even the California minister prefers to see a world that includes god rationally.
Americans don’t need to swallow Trump’s blatant lies or pretend there is substance in his extravagant promises. We don’t need to look for dramatic and cruel solutions to national problems that speak only to self-interest or primate instincts. We don’t need the showmanship of a latter-day P. T. Barnum to sell us on an alternate reality. We can glimpse the reality all around us and take notice of our brothers and sisters on our shared planet. And then we can think about it.
In Miller’s sermon he tells his congregants they can find God anywhere by seeing, not imagining, opening up themselves to the world, not shutting it out:
“Try looking into the eyes of the person next to you. Try looking at the face of the person at the next desk, or behind the counter. Try looking into the eyes of the people with whom you rub elbows every day. Try looking into the eyes of the person you don’t really want to deal with tomorrow morning, or tomorrow night, or even this afternoon.”
Miller seems to be saying that there is an observable, collective reality in this world and compassion and solidarity derive from it. Conversely, compassion and solidarity allow us to perceive the world from many different perspectives, opening up an even greater reality to us. But many Americans, blinding themselves to a connection with the wider world, see only themselves, alone, in a hostile world of “carnage.”
A world of imagination where reality is only as firm as the fish sticks.
Democrats often complain that Bernie Sanders should either join the Democratic Party or knock off the criticism. I even hear this from people who admire the direction Sanders is trying to move the party.
But they forget that the Democratic Party includes many Senators much less reliable on liberal and progressive issues. In the House the party even winks at a faction known as the Blue Dog Coalition which proudly votes conservative. Call them mavericks or traitors, the Democratic Party never knows whether any of these “wildcards” are going to be assets or liabilities. But it’s had a reliable friend in Sanders.
The Senate has 52 Republicans, 46 Democrats, and 2 Independents. Of the 46 Democrats, 8 are conservatives and most are centrists. Though it often invokes the memory of the New Deal, the Civil Rights and Labor movements, and Camelot, this is a party that has put a lot of distance between itself and its most cherished values. The corporate-friendly entity that exists today is little more than a fundraising machine. And Democrats, though the memories are sweet, may never be able to come home.
Dartmouth voters live in a pretty blue corner of a pretty blue state. With the ICE crackdown Trump unleashed on immigrants, many of us appealed to our state representatives only to discover they were not as blue as we thought. In fact, some are a surprising shade of red. And nobody likes an unpleasant surprise.
Dear Dartmouth Voters,
Many of us have expressed concern about Rep. Chris Markey’s poor record of voting for progressive causes. He recently added his support to the Massachusetts Family Leave Act, which may have been in response to recent lobbying by constituents. And for that we thank you, Rep. Markey!
But this presents us with a great opportunity to keep the pressure on by calling (1) to thank him for his support of the Family Leave Act, (2) to urge him to support H.3033, Tony Cabral’s bill, which in effect prevents Sheriff Hodgson from using his staff to assist ICE, and (3) to ask Rep. Markey to support more than a dozen other pieces of progressive legislation which to date he has failed to co-sponsor and seems unlikely to vote for:
Last night Jon Ossoff lost the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election to Good ol’ Gal Karen Handel. There was, predictably, some crying and finger-pointing but it was generally acknowledged that Democrats need to find a winning strategy. A piece in Washington Monthly advised Dems to stop chasing Romney voters, pointing out just how wrong Chuck Schumer was when he said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
A McClatchy piece and an article in TPM both reminded readers that Ossoff’s upscale district is nevertheless in the Heart of Dixie and Ossoff’s centrist Democratic “supporters, even when combined with politically moderate independents, couldn’t outnumber Republican partisans.” Demographics, not progressives, and not the DNC, are what defeated Ossoff. However, the loss does not signify the impotence or the end of the Democratic Party. But we seem to be missing opportunities to reach out with an honest economic message to people who might actually be receptive.
Make China Great Again
Donald Trump hasn’t said much about Ford’s plans to move its Ford Focus assembly to China although he will almost certainly blame the move on insufficient tax breaks for billionaires. But will the Billionaire-in-Chief slap huge tariffs on Ford when they begin re-importing the cars? …. Don’t hold your breath.
Make Saudi Arabia Great Again
Another American reversal-of-fortune has occurred on Donald Trump’s watch: Saudi Arabia just assumed total control of America’s largest refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. When asked how the purchase squared with Trump’s protectionist promises, Saudi ARAMCO CEO Amin Nasser smiled and sounded grateful for ARAMCO’s cozy relationship with the administration: “We don’t like to see any kind of protectionist measures…” It’s doubtful that the Saudi billionaires will ever see any.
The Family Business
Speaking of Saudi Arabia, this is a country with no Emoluments Clause. For that matter there aren’t many legal protections for anyone in what is essentially a family-owned business (slash nation) governed by a dictatorship and greased by nepotism. No wonder Trump loves the Saudis so much. Today the Saudi king announced a big shakeup, replacing most of what in a democracy would be cabinet or portfolio members with – what else – members of the Saudi royal family. The dictator also named his 31 year-old son to be the new heir. I thought this was the sort of thing that really disturbs us when Syria and North Korea do it… but guess not. We should probably count our blessings that Trump has run out of children and in-laws to stick in the White House.
You remember it sliding off your lunch tray. They said it was a Sloppy Joe but it could have just as easily been the dead raccoon you saw from the school bus window that morning. Sometimes there was a drumstick shaped thing that might have once been attached to a species of fowl, but it was confusing because there were also pieces of ham and beef gristle attached like Frankenstein’s forehead.
I’m talking about Mystery Meat.
But I’m also talking about the GOP’s new healthcare plan, the AHCA. Trumpcare. Because in both cases nobody really knows for sure what’s in the unsavory concoction.
Mitch McConnell seems intent on forcing a vote on the AHCA by June 30th, though there is still no written draft to examine.
No Democrats have been invited to discuss the bill’s provisions. The Congressional Budget Office has had no opportunity to score the legislation. There will be no committee hearings, and no public input will be allowed. No one has any idea what’s in the GOP’s vat of salmonella and they are deeply shamed by the AHCA. They fear letting the public know how bad it really is.
Like a magician’s trick, this secret bill will be unveiled just moments before a vote. More secret even than the Patriot Act, Congress will be caught totally off guard, will have no time to study it or get feedback from constituents. The Senate majority intends to force this noxious sludge down Americans’ throats by using a process called “reconciliation” – allowing the AHCA (Trumpcare) to be passed by 51 votes instead of the customary 60.
But with grit, testicles (and ovaries), Democrats could slow down the adoption of this gurgling, sulphurous roadkill stew by using Senate rules to object to “unanimous consent” requests, also proposing and arguing for a stream of amendments to the bill. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has indicated his willingness to pursue this tougher strategy to press for scrutiny of the legislation:
“Republicans are drafting this bill in secret because they’re ashamed of it, plain and simple. These are merely the first steps we’re prepared to take in order to shine a light on this shameful Trumpcare bill and reveal to the public the GOP’s true intentions: to give the uber-wealthy a tax break while making middle class Americans pay more for less health care coverage. If Republicans won’t relent and debate their health care bill in the open for the American people to see, then they shouldn’t expect business as usual in the Senate.”
And I hope he means it. Please call your senators and tell them to stay strong, have another coffee, and argue into the wee hours to fight this heinous attempt to betray the public.
Americans deserve to know exactly what’s in the mystery meat they’re being told they have to swallow.
There was a vote last Thursday on S.722, “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017,” a bill which slaps economic sanctions on both Russia and Iran. The vote passed almost unanimously in the Senate, except for two senators with fiercely independent streaks. One of them was Rand Paul. The other was Bernie Sanders.
On his website Sanders wrote that, if fashioned as a separate bill, he would have voted for Russian sanctions and noted he has previously voted for sanctions on Iran. But the bill, he wrote, “could endanger the very important nuclear agreement that was signed between the United States, its partners and Iran in 2015.”
Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey, however, both enthusiastically voted for the sanctions, as did every Democrat in the Senate. Warren had previously been opposed to Iran sanctions and supported the Iran deal. But on Thursday she voted with the herd to both jeopardize the work John Kerry had done and to wage economic war on Iran. In fact, Warren not only voted with the herd but was a co-sponsor.
Economic sanctions are acts of war. The Council on Foreign Relations characterizes them as alternatives to war, but the targets of sanctions understand quite well what they really are. When, in 2015, the EU slapped sanctions on Russia, one Russian banker called it “economic war.” And North Korea has never minced words: “We consider now any kind of economic sanctions to be taken by the Security Council as a declaration of war.”
As economic acts of war, sanctions can provoke military responses just as easily as bombing. Students of history may recall that reparations and economic sanctions against Germany following World War I fed both German nationalism and militarism leading up to World War II. Writing in Foreign Policy Journal, Gilles van Nederveen wrote:
Sanctions can lead to war “if the state is militarized and the central government is backed to the wall. Consider an example of pre-World War II Japan. American and Japanese militaries prepared for a confrontation throughout the twenties, but real tensions did not start until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. At the outset of U.S.-imposed oil blockade in 1940, Japan estimated that it had a fuel reserve of just under two years. The Imperial Japanese Navy drafted plans to seize the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia) in order to maintain steady supply of oil and its military strength. International organizations like the League of Nations were powerless in curtailing aggression during the thirties. After the initial oil blockade in 1940, each Japanese move was met with yet another U.S. embargo: scrap metal, access to the Panama Canal, and finally, the U.S. froze all Japanese accounts in the US, effectively putting Japan on the collision course with the U.S.”
Sanctions are an overused tool of both neoconservatives and neoliberals. The Heritage Foundation pointed out in 1997 that, during Bill Clinton’s administration, Clinton managed to slap sanctions on 42% of the world’s population. Of course, this was twenty years ago when Conservatives were out of power and posing as reasonable statesmen. Fast forward twenty years: they’re back in power and they’re leading the charge themselves.
Economic sanctions are often accompanied by physical blockades, embargoes, interdiction of shipments on the high seas, proxy wars, and covert warfare. All of these apply to Iran. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment, former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew described sanctions in the same terms as precision bombing:
“The sanctions we employ today are different. They are informed by financial intelligence, strategically designed, and implemented with our public and private partners to focus pressure on bad actors and create clear incentives to end malign behavior, while limiting collateral impact.”
But economic sanctions do not limit collateral impact. Sanctions are every bit as lethal as bunker-busters. On May 12, 1996 — long before Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal — Madeline Albright was asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from U.S. economic sanctions were worth it. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State didn’t shed a tear or miss a beat when she answered “yes.”
Van Nederveen points out that during the Cold War — a time when there was no single superpower — economic sanctions had no teeth. But now that the U.S. is the biggest, meanest dog in the kennel it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Returning to the Carnegie’s black-tie event, Obama’s Treasury Secretary went on to describe the restraint that the U.S. must show once it forces other nations to submit to its sanctions:
“To preserve the effectiveness of sanctions over the long term, we must use them wisely. We must clearly articulate our goals, and we must provide relief when those goals are met.”
But no such restraint was ever exercised with Iran following the nuclear deal. Virtually the moment the ink had dried on the deal, the United States began undermining it. Last year Roger Cohen, writing in the New York Times, described the Obama administrations sabotage of its own accord:
“But today America is undermining that balance, reinforcing Iranian hawks and putting the hard-won deal that reversed Iran’s steady advance to the nuclear threshold at risk. It’s a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot policy after a major diplomatic achievement.”
The professed American love of democracy and diplomacy now only provokes derision throughout most of the world. American power is out of control and neither Conservatives nor Liberals have any great urge to rein it in. American Exceptionalism, AIPAC, and tantalizing Saudi defense dollars are the real hammers that forge our foreign and military policy. It is in moments like Thursday’s vote that we see how bi-partisan American imperialism and aggression really is.
Bernie Sanders was right. The vote by every Democratic senator jeopardizes the Iran nuclear deal and creates a more precarious world. Here in Massachusetts we just learned our so-called “progressive” senators just couldn’t resist waving the flag and voting for more American bullying.
Americans might want to imagine the day when China slaps economic sanctions on the United States. And it is coming. Our global militarism has made us a “bad actor” that must be taught a lesson by the next superpower. Like Germany a century ago, when that day comes there is no doubt that Americans will regard those sanctions as an act of war.
We were there to show support for Paid Family and Medical Leave. Several women in our group offered personal stories explaining why the legislation is so important. Many families in this state are already only a single paycheck away from financial ruin. Family Leave holds out a lifeline to families in the impossible situation of having to choose between keeping their job (and their home) – or taking care of a sick parent, a new child, or even themselves. For most of us this is a matter of economic and social justice.
The Joint Committee conducting hearings was patient and thoughtful and often gave speakers a minute or two more than their allotted time to speak. The committee heard from mothers holding infants and restless toddlers. It listened to testimony from fathers, gay parents, economists, healthcare experts, people who had experienced catastrophic medical crises, or had retired early or sacrificed to care for a sick parent. Present also were members of the business community holding both supporting and opposing views.
One group of business people offering testimony in support of Family Leave made a special impression on the committee. They were there to lobby for the bill as a perk to offer their high-tech employees. The committee showered them with disproportionate interest, praise, and questions. It seemed a bit odd – even just plain wrong – that offering Family Leave as another fringe benefit for Route 128 employers might be what actually sells the bill to the Democratic legislature. Forget the cute babies.
Then testimony was heard from Massachusetts Teachers Association president Barbara Madeloni, who told the Committee how important Family Leave was for her union’s 100,000 members, many of them women. Madeloni expressed a little surprise at the inordinate interest in a benefit program for entrepreneurs, reminding the Committee Family Leave was really a matter of economic and social justice. And so it is.
This example illustrates that there are significant differences between progressive and mainstream Democrats. Often our goals align – but we view the world from very different perspectives.
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Nathan J. Robinson, in Current Affairs, writes that these differences are often downplayed as misguided tactics, dogmatism, impatience, mendacity or immaturity – while, In fact, they are simply different ways of looking at the world:
“The core divergence in these worldviews is in their beliefs about the nature of contemporary political and economic institutions. The difference here is not “how quickly these institutions should change,” but whether changes to them should be fundamental structural changes or not. The leftist sees capitalism as a horror, and believes that so long as money and profit rule the earth, human beings will be made miserable and will destroy themselves. The liberal does not actually believe this. Rather, the liberal believes that while there are problems with capitalism, it can be salvaged if given a few tweaks here and there.”
But we are in the fight of our lives to protect a democracy and a functioning government. Progressives and liberals both recognize that, whatever the differences, we share more than enough common values to work together. And we can’t lose sight of that.
A recent piece in the New York Times by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin deceptively paints Jon Ossoff’s congressional bid in Georgia as a fight between the Liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party, one that “realist” Democrats are waging instead of progressives:
“Outside Atlanta on Friday, Jon Ossoff offered a decidedly un-Sanders-like vision of the future in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, a conservative-leaning patchwork of office plazas and upscale malls, where voters attended his campaign events wearing golf shirts and designer eyewear.”
Ossoff’s campaign style indeed reflects the blue-red sensibilities of his Congressional district. Drilling into Ossoff’s positions he looks like any other liberal Democrat – entrepreneur, Zionist, pro-choice, not explicitly in favor of single-payer healthcare, vague on foreign policy positions but eager to strengthen the military and support an undeclared war against ISIS. Ossoff is a baby Bill Keating.
Yet despite the New York Times’ mis-characterization of Ossoff as a DNC project, his campaign was in fact first supported by progressive organizations Democracy for America and Our Revolution. Only after the first round Georgia “jungle” primary did the Democratic National Committee offer Ossoff any help.
But let’s fast-forward past the finger-pointing right to the good news:
Far from adopting a dogmatic strategy, progressives embraced a guy who represented enough of their values that they could live with him, gave generously to his campaign, and stepped into a vacuum created by the DNC. And to the DNC’s credit they ultimately joined the fight and are now doing the same in other races.
In Washington Monthly David Atkins also took issue with the New York Times piece:
“As usual, the intramural battle on the left is being framed as one between intelligent pragmatists who want to win, and unrealistic ideologues who want to make themselves feel good.
Like me, Atkins sees hope. Progressives have a winning perspective and pragmatists have institutional memory and experience running campaigns. He writes that “the populist left’s premises have proven themselves over time. Clinton’s own SuperPAC did the research and discovered that the Obama-Trump switchers who made the difference in the election were driven by economic anxiety and a loss of faith in the Democratic Party…” Then Atkins argues:
“But establishment pragmatists also have points that cannot be ignored. First and foremost is the reality that the path to retaking the House lies less in rural economically ravaged districts full of angry voters, than in bourgeois suburban neighborhoods uncomfortable with Trump’s lack of seriousness and gentility.”
Keep in mind that this is not a progressive disagreeing with a liberal, but a liberal Democratic political consultant splitting hairs with fellow liberals. I don’t agree with Atkins that avoiding races in places like Montana and Idaho is wise. After all, the Democratic Party is barely hanging on in its urban archipelagos. Democrats need to return to a Fifty State strategy and only grassroots activism can make that a reality. Progressive Arizona Democrats point out that, in Tucson alone, 44,000 seniors live in trailer parks and only Republicans are talking to them. The future for these older Americans looks increasingly bleak as healthcare becomes unaffordable and the social safety net is deconstructed.
Failure to engage is insane and irresponsible.
Atkins himself demonstrates that there is a legion of Democratic political experts who can be repurposed for progressive campaigns. Bernie Sander’s media guy, Tad Devine, gave a talk in Westport, Massachusetts just last night delivering much the same message. And at the same talk former New Bedford mayor Scott Lang provided historical context for the party’s missteps and his own views for getting it back on track. Institutional memory and experience.
But whatever the outcome of this relationship, eventually the Democratic Party must unequivocally choose between a progressive and a centrist message. And this is already starting to happen. Young voters have not been well-served by crushing student debt, endless war, and dim prospects for good jobs and their own homes. Senior citizens also face an uncertain future. Call it neoliberalism, globalism, or any euphemism you like, but Capitalism’s warts are showing and progressivism is on the rise.
Global economic injustice and insecurity is as real and terrifying as global warning. Democrats should remember – and with considerable pride – how the New Deal met the challenges of a global economic crisis head-on 85 years ago, literally saving the lives of millions of Americans.
We can do it again but it’s going to requires a completely different perspective.
Four years ago the Massachusetts legislature considered the Massachusetts Trust Act – H.1613 and S.1135 – twin bills which placed limits on ICE but had only a handful of co-sponsors. The bill was not sent directly to hell, but it landed not that far away. This is how spineless state Democrats deal with controversy.
In the last legislative session S.1258 once again tried to protect Massachusetts refugees – and once again the bill was sent to the purgatory known as the House Rules committee. This time it had 25 Senate co-sponsors.
In the current legislative session, S.1305, the Senate version of the Safe Communities Act, has 53 co-sponsors and H.3269, the House version, has 80. Political tides are turning and many Democrats have lost patience with spineless do-nothing representatives like mine and autocratic House speakers. And to those of you (Chris Markey and Robert DeLeo) effectively collaborating with the enemy’s ICE roundups – you have turned yourselves into a list of hacks who ought to be primaried.
MIRA has a great write-up on the Safe Communities Act but in a nutshell this is it:
Massachusetts has its own laws, which must be respected. Police departments, officers, and prisons may not be federalized. The Fourth Amendment must be applied equally to all residents of the Commonwealth, regardless of status. State resources and monies are not to be used for federal purposes. Constitutionally- guaranteed rights are to apply equally to everyone in the Commonwealth. The state will not make its databases available to ICE or Homeland Security. This is the Safe Communities Act.
Progressive Massachusetts has a great script for calling your legislator.
Flood the State House with calls. Remind your representative that sending Safe Communities to purgatory will result in similar political consequences for himself.
Forget the fake news for a second. It’s real enough but the most insidious assaults on democracy come in the form of endless “opinion shapers” and legislation from right-wing think tanks and lobbyists doing the bidding of an American oligarchy.
I just finished reading a piece in CommonWealth which argues that the Fair Share Amendment is liberal-elitist. The author, Josh McCabe of Wellesley College’s Freedom Project, says that by increasing taxes on multi-millionaires the federal SALT (state and local tax) exemption will be triggered, permitting gazillionaires to pay lower federal taxes. McCabe goes on to say that SALT has cost the feds about $100 billion in revenues and states will have to scramble to pay for their own services out of pocket. He asks:
“The amendment means residents of poor states such as Mississippi (ranked 50th in per capita income) will partially subsidize residents of wealthy Massachusetts (ranked third in per capita income). In what sense is it fair to place some of the burden on Mississippi to pay for schools in Wellesley or roads in Andover?
If this sounds almost reasonable on the surface, consider for a moment that the super-rich already pay lower tax rates than wage earners and have many opportunities and legions of tax lawyers helping them to avoid paying their fair share. States like Massachusetts that want to raise taxes to pay for services are simply being smarter and more responsible to their citizens than, say, Mississippi. And Mississippi is already a drain on the rest of the nation, particularly Blue States, receiving $2.02 in federal money for every $1 their citizens pay in taxes. Nice try, though, Mr. McCabe.
Besides following the money it’s always a good idea to see who’s advocating for tax breaks for the super-rich. Predictably, the Freedom Project (as in “freedom” from paying taxes) is dedicated to the free market fundamentalism of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Friedrich August von Hayek.
So nice of CommonWealth to give them a free platform.
* * *
And, while we’re still talking about oligarchs: if you were watching the British election and envied the Brits their chance to call an election and throw out the government, you’re not alone.
Impeachment right now seems like the only option open to citizens, but Paul Street’s article Impeach the U.S. Constitution points out that the real problem is our system of government – not factionalism, not Donald Trump.
Yes, the Founding Fathers were either high on crack when they came up with this insane system – or the founding slavemasters were intent on building an oligarchy. Turns out, it was the latter:
I am always darkly amused when I hear one of my fellow Americans call for a return from our current “deep state” plutocracy and empire to the supposedly benevolent and democratic rules and values of the nation’s sacred founders and Constitution. Democracy was the last thing the nation’s founders wanted to see break out in the new republic. Drawn from the elite propertied segments in the new republic, most of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”
As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his classic 1948 text, “The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It”: “In their minds, liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of liberty.”
Britain was still in the grip of the May 23rd suicide bombing in Manchester which claimed twenty-two lives. Tory Prime Minister Theresa May was running on a “fear and crackdown” platform in the last days of her collapsing campaign, even promising to curtail civil liberties “if they get in the way” of cracking down on terror.
Not to be out-done American Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” James Mattis was promising a policy of annihilation toward ISIS, telling West Point cadets, “Manchester’s tragic loss underscores the purpose of your years of study and training at this elite school. […] We must never permit murderers to define our time or warp our sense of normal. This is not normal.”
It was a perfectly normal day in the War on Terror. Where killing civilians has become the new normal. Not only for ISIS but for the United States and its allies.
Although the U.S. admits killing only 352 civilians, human rights groups that track the civilian slaughter put the number closer to 4,000. But for Mattis civilian deaths are just too damned bad when one is waging just war (the West’s word for jihad) against ISIS. Appearing on Face the Nation Mattis commented, “Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation.”
The “sort of situation” Mattis means is the permanent war the United States has been waging in the Middle East for going on 30 years.
The savagery of ISIS-encouraged suicide bombings, drivers plowing through pedestrians on crowded bridges and, in one case, three attackers setting upon one woman with knives, is enough to sicken anyone. But if we look at ISIS attacks somewhat dispassionately, this is simply asymmetric warfare.
This is how people fight when they don’t have an air force or SEAL teams to slaughter civilians the “proper” way.
Two weeks ago the Pentagon admitted it had killed two ISIS snipers in the al Jadidah district of Mosul, Iraq – with “collateral damage” of 100 civilians. In Yemen, the U.S. military killed five civilians, including a blind seventy year-old man. This followed another disaster in Yemen last January in which SEALs killed twenty-five civilians, including fleeing children. Regardless of which news outlet covered it, the civilian deaths were downplayed. If it’s not on TV, it’s not real.
Most Americans think that the war in Yemen is just another fight against ISIS but it is in fact a civil war, and it involves a Shi’a insurgency in the south being put down by a Saudi-allied dictator in the north. It is fair to call it a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran – one into which we have poked our noses.
After all these screw-ups CENTCOM was recently forced to undertake some damage control, so it released figures claiming that, regretfully, 484 civilians have been killed. But regardless of the number – whether 484 or 4,000 – U.S.-led wars have displaced, killed, and terrorized millions of people throughout the Middle East. In Mosul alone 200,000 people were driven from their homes. In Syria, half the population are refugees.
In Syria, the U.S. has stepped up indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Raqaa. In Tabqa, a nearby town, eleven people – “including eight members of the al-Aish family: three women between the ages of 23 and 40, and five children, the youngest one just 6 months old” – packed themselves into a vehicle to flee from U.S. bombing. They didn’t make it. They were hit with heavy machine gun fire by a U.S.-led coalition forces. It was a tragedy local reports called a “massacre.”
Or, as Mad Dog Mattis might call it, Annihilation.
But if you really want to do repression and terror right, there’s nothing like State Terror. And the United States and its “allies” throughout the region are the undisputed experts. The Saud family, which owns and runs Saudi Arabia as a family-owned and operated kleptocracy, is barely distinguishable from ISIS in its repressive version of Wahhabism. Shortly after Donald Trump visited the country, the kingdom announced it would expand the use of the death penalty for peaceful protest.
Appearing with Donald Trump and Saudi King Salman in Riyadh, all touching a curious glowing orb together, was Egyptian dictator Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who is cracking down on protests and journalists. In Egypt, where Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein is now beginning his seventh month of prison, el-Sisi has also severely restricted the ability of NGOs, particularly those focused on human rights, to operate.
I could go on about Erdogan and Duterte, two of Donald Trump’s favorite thugs, but what’s the point? America’s commitment to human rights is hypocritical. The same Trump who was wined and dined by the Saudis – where no one dares challenge the royal family – criticizes Venezuela for repression and calls for free elections. The same U.S. government, outraged by Cuba’s treatment of political prisoners, has looked the other way at Israel’s imprisonment of almost a million people since 1967, where 40% of all Palestinian men have been in jail.
* * *
While Conservative PM Theresa May was campaigning on fear and xenophobia, crackdowns and ditching civil liberties, Jeremy Corbyn was campaigning on fresh ideas and offering unpleasant truths.
One of Corbyn’s truths was that the War on Terror is a failure. And that only a new foreign policy can solve the problem:
“Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services pointed out the connections between wars that we’ve been involved in or supported … in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home.”
And how can anyone really refute his argument? Killing civilians, propping up dictators, wrecking entire countries, and creating millions of refugees doesn’t make you any friends.
This is why they hate us. This is why they fight us.
If we really want to end terrorism, we’d better stop terrorizing other people ourselves.
The convention is barely over and we’ll be meeting again on Monday, June 12th.
In February there were 7,609 registered Democrats in Dartmouth. The percentage of town Democrats (like the rest of the state) is roughly 33%, while for Republicans it is about 11%. Raw numbers of both Republicans and Democrats have been constant (and therefore stagnant) since about 2000, while the share of unenrolled voters has risen sharply to the 55% it is today. People are not happy with either party in this state.
party-enrollment
And we Massachusetts Democrats need to do something about it.
It’s not just Trump. Here in Massachusetts democracy has been in trouble for some time. Our state ranks last in competitiveness in political races. In the 2016 Democratic Primary there was not one challenger in all nine U.S. Congressional districts. At the state level half the candidates for the Governor’s Council ran unchallenged. In County Sheriff Democratic primary elections, six out of fourteen ran unopposed and two slots were never filled, including Bristol County where Republican Tom Hodgson won by default because of Democratic complacency. In almost half the state legislature primaries and in 29 out of 42 state senate races there was no challenger.
We need to do something about this, and soon.
There are a number of elections coming up in 2018: U.S. Senator (Warren); U.S. Representative (Keating); Governor (Gonzalez, Massie, Warren); Secretary of the Commonwealth (Galvin); Attorney General (Healey); Treasurer (Goldberg); Auditor (Bump); Governor’s Council (Ferreira); State Senator (Montigny); State Representative (Markey); County Commissioners (Kitchen, Mitchell); District Attorney (Quinn); Register of Deeds (Treadup); and Clerk of Courts (Santos).
We’re going to have to have to debate the merits of some of these candidates. At least a couple of them need to find new jobs.
For campaigning and voter outreach, Dartmouth Democrats should look into using the VoteBuilder system that MassDems makes available to towns and wards. The DTC Chair will need to sign a VoteBuilder contract and several people must sign up for one of the weekly training classes that the party’s Operations Center offers or will be offering shortly.
According to the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s Field Manual for City, Ward, and Town Committee Chairs, a Local Committee:
“shall conduct, according to duly established and recorded local by-laws, such activities as are suitable for a political organization; among which (without limitation) are:
“Endorsement of enrolled Democratic candidates; Financial Support of the State Committee; Adoption of resolutions and platforms; Raising and disbursing of funds for political purposes; Voter registration campaigns, and Calling of caucuses for the purpose of endorsing candidates, adopting resolutions, or Conducting other Party business as provided for in the Call to Convention.”
Other ideas might include scholarships or essay contests to involve students and their families, voter registration, phone banking, a speakers series, or candidate nights.
According to the MassDems Town Committee Bylaws, there is a formal Affirmative Action and Outreach Advisor position. Dartmouth may be demographically 89 to 95 percent white but we still need to make sure the committee is more diverse.
According to Article V of the bylaws, the Town Chair presides over all meetings and supervises all subcomittees. In addition, the Chair sets meeting dates and frequency “subject only to the vote of the Committee in fixing the number of regular meetings to be held during the course of the year.”
With all we have to accomplish, I will make a formal motion at our first meeting on the 12th that we hold 12 monthly meetings thereafter. And I hope some of these ideas find their way onto the agenda for this meeting.
Before I get to it, I want to thank Eli and Green Mass Group for the opportunity to contribute to this dialog on Which way Left? – something that should really be taking place face-to-face. After all, it’s not as if we are creatures from different planets. As my username suggests, I was once a member of the Green-Rainbow Party but am presently a Democrat. During the 2016 election I was impressed by Bernie Sanders and still am. But I also appreciate how carefully Greens think about issues and how often they are miles ahead of even progressive Democrats. But I’ve nevertheless decided to stick with this #DemEnter experiment – at least until the midterm elections.
There have been numerous, and well-documented, failures to reform the Democratic Party but in the 45 years I’ve been voting I can’t recall a moment in our history that has been so dangerous. Like it or not – and like them or not – Democrats are the only serious force standing between Republicans and their kleptocratic version of Gilead.
Eli’s comment on my previous post also deserves a reply. For many Greens Elizabeth Warren is the poster child for the failure of so-called progressive Democrats to be a real party of the people. To some extent I agree – though perhaps for different reasons. Eli’s example is the Dakota pipeline and Native American rights, which Warren has not particularly gone out of her way to defend. For the sake of argument I’ll concede his point immediately – although, to be fair, Warren had plenty of other things to do during post-election Senate confirmation hearings.
But then – to be absolutely fair – one also must ask why Green Party senators and congressmen from North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois failed to intervene and defend environmental and indigenous interests. Not just craft progressive platform planks – but duke it out every day in Congress and face political realities. This is neither a rhetorical question nor an intended cheap shot. The question really boils down to this: how do progressives [of any sort] get elected, and what do they do in office once elected? A case in point is die Grünen, Germany’s Green Party. In coalitions with the SPD they have periodically represented austerity programs and militarism, and in recent years have been the eco-friendly European business party – but their platform is great.
Words are cheap and politics is complicated.
This was pretty clear at the Massachusetts Democratic Convention on June 3rd. Many of the progressive planks that Our Revolution Massachusetts (ORMA), PDA and Progressive Massachusetts called for were shockingly adopted with little objection and almost no discussion. There was an endless, and exhausting, four hour procession of machine Democrats proclaiming themselves the party of the resistance – Democrats who next week will be back to fundraising at $2500 a plate dinners. In fact, the speechifying went on so long that it was generally agreed that the purpose was to prevent discussion, promote an illusion of “unity” by masking disagreement, and to kill pesky, embarrassing non-platform resolutions. ORMA summarized their losses:
“Its push for new housing policies to end displacement was defeated by delegates who favor building more market-rate housing. ORMA’s proposals to make the party structure more democratic, by adding more state committee members who are elected by grassroots members and by reducing the number of signatures required to propose amendments to the charter, were also rejected. The convention chair ruled that ORMA-backed proposals on military and foreign policy, and on peace in the Middle East, were ruled out of order although they clearly had substantial support. The chair likewise ruled out of order a proposal that Democratic candidates must support the majority of the party platform or face loss of support by the party organization.”
This last one tells us something — that uplifting language in a platform is meaningless when there are no consequences for candidates who fail to uphold platform principles. Look at Ninth Congressional District Congressman Bill Keating – Iran hawk, cheerleader for Trump’s Tomahawk missile attack, and opponent of single-payer healthcare. Extreme disappointments like Keating were no-shows at the convention – my guess is because they would have reminded everyone of what the Massachusetts Democratic Party really is.
Likewise, the arbitrary elimination of foreign policy planks — even as the state party weighed in on Trump, climate change, veterans, and immigration — revealed once again the Democratic Party’s deathly fear of tackling militarism and the Israel-Palestine issue, and its fundamental lack of democracy. Only 80 of 413 party committee members are elected and the next charter convention is in 2019, after the midterms. These professional Democrats make the old Soviet Politburo look like a bunch of amateurs. In my heart of hearts I know that the party is more likely to be reformed by an earth-bound asteroid than entryism.
Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts had a great piece in Commonwealth reminding readers that the Massachusetts Democratic Party has historically talked big and delivered little. And this was precisely the thesis that Thomas Frank elaborated in Listen, Liberal. But in “talking big” and delivering little, Democrats, Greens and Democratic Socialists are all tragically similar. The common thread is our self-delusion.
Democrats like to think they are more progressive than they really are. Progressive Democrats like to think they’re more influential than they are. Greens seem to think that correct positions alone can pave the road forward. Democratic Socialists think the conditions for socialism are ripe. Unfortunately, the only thing that’s ripe is our fevered imaginations. But, besides self-delusion, our biggest enemy is lack of democracy and the failure to build grass-roots parties. And I include my friends in the Green Party: you expend a lot of effort and money running presidential and gubernatorial candidates – but where is your congressman from North Dakota?
As for us – either the Democratic party will become little-d democratic or it will fail spectacularly. Reform is extremely unlikely – but wandering through this political desert is an attempt and a shared experience that Democrats will have to go through together. I think we’ll eventually see the formation of a third – or more accurately a replacement – for the Democratic party without so much of the baggage of its predecessor. But this is going to require progressives of every color – Green, Blue, and Red – to have been working together in coalitions and to have created a progressive ecosystem from which a new movement can emerge. And the moment that happens progressives are going to start learning the old lesson in a new context. Precisely how it’s going to happen none of us can imagine now.
Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank has a lot to say to Massachusetts Democrats specifically. We — and I now reveal myself to be a #DemEnter Democrat — often regard ourselves as the most liberal of the liberal, the most progressive Democrats of all Democrats. An elite, if you will. This was certainly the self-congratulatory message we all heard last Saturday at the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform convention. Yet that’s not quite the reality, is it? In a post to follow I will write about the convention itself. But Frank’s book puts on paper many of the criticisms that progressives of every stripe — Greens, PDA, DSA, Working Families, Progressive Massachusetts, Our Revolution — have with the party. Some of us are now trying a little experiment — seeing for ourselves how far we can at least move it back to a democratic (small “d”) party of the people. But, like pharmaceutical research, these clinical trials may take some time.
Frank marks the moment that the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace a professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. Frank explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. He explains why — even in bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. Frank takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. He looks at the record of Deval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital. With Mitt Romney.
But Democrats just can’t help it. This is who they — we — are now. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats deserve Frank’s tough love. Their friends — the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs — are their idols and rock stars. Their “shared values” are with pharmaceutical and software developers, hedge fund managers, and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or teachers. Half the time Democrats are at war with Labor — think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers. These new Democrats are nothing like FDR’s friends of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries — “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as Democrats of their fathers’ generation, all while betraying their professed constituency.
Frank’s conclusions speak for themselves:
“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.
Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.
What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity — to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest — once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”
The motto of the Massachusetts Democratic Party is, was – or should be – Ideas in Action. And if it is we should really mean it.
Replying to my first-timer’s impressions of the party’s convention in Worcester last Saturday, I heard from Jonathan Cohn, co-chair of the Issues Committee at Progressive Massachusetts, who asked the cheeky question:
If a platform is adopted and no legislators are there to enact it, did it make a sound?
– which was precisely my concern about a convention that put so many progressive ideas down on paper. But while Massachusetts Democrats have plenty of good ideas, and no doubt many have good intentions and good hearts, the follow-through is always lacking, and has been for some time.
Cohn recently devoted an entire piece in Commonwealth to the discussion of the 80% Democratic majority in the Massachusetts Legislature that is, somehow, and chronically, unable to enact progressive legislation. Thomas Frank made many of the same points in his book, Listen Liberal, and in a Nation article entitled “Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed?”
Cohn’s piece is worth your time and he has graciously given me permission to reprint it with attribution.
And while you’re online, check out Progressive Massachusetts’ Legislator Scorecard.
IN THE YEAR FOLLOWING a presidential election, the Massachusetts Democratic Party updates its platform. A party platform can stand as a defiant statement of goals and ideals, and a roadmap for a legislative agenda and priorities. In today’s national political climate, such aspirational declarations are especially important as they offer voters something to fight for and something to vote for.
The platform released just last week contains new planks on paid family and medical leave, a $15 minimum wage, automatic voter registration, and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, bolstering what was already, by and large, a progressive document.
On Saturday, June 3, delegates from across the state will convene in Worcester to approve the platform, perhaps with a few amendments to make it stronger.
On Monday, June 5, if the past is any guide, our overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature will proceed to completely ignore it.
But a supermajority has value only to the extent that it stands for something, and to the extent that it is put to work. When one looks back at the party’s 2013 platform, the contrast between the aspirational document and actual policymaking can be quite stark, perhaps most so in the realm of health care.
For years, the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform has called for a single-payer health care system, one that would truly enshrine health care as a right. The momentum that exists behind single payer in other parts of the country does not seem to have yet reached Beacon Hill. Single-payer legislation recently advanced out of committee in the California Senate and was passed by the New York Assembly. On the national level, the majority of the House Democratic Caucus in Congress now supports single-payer, an all-time high. But only about a third of Democrats in either branch of the Massachusetts Legislature have taken heed of their own party’s platform.
Or take another hot topic: immigration. The 2017 platform, like the 2013 one, calls for “the elimination of policies that make state and local police responsible for the enforcement of national immigration laws.” The Trust Act, which would have done just that, died in the Legislature without ever getting a vote in the past two sessions, and House Speaker Robert DeLeo seems inclined to let the Safe Communities Act, its new, expanded incarnation, see the same fate.
Or take a look at public transit. The MBTA has a $7.3 billion – and growing – repair backlog and is the victim of years of disinvestment. The 2013 platform recognized the importance of increased investment in public transportation to economic prosperity, to equity, and to climate mitigation. But the Democrats in the Legislature have preferred to side with Gov. Charlie Baker’s misguided mantra of “reform, not revenue,” authorizing the creation of a control board that has mainly sought to cut and privatize basic services. The Fair Share amendment, broadly supported by Democrats, will help bring in some more money for public transit, but it’s only a start, and a late one at that.
Sometimes it isn’t just inaction; at times, the Legislature has done the exact opposite of what the platform calls for. The Massachusetts Democratic Party platform advocates for allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, a move backed by sound public safety logic. However, the Legislature voted to ban them from doing so at the end of last session.
It would be unfair to blame both branches equally when it comes to the inertia characteristic of Beacon Hill. Several of the new planks of the 2017 platform, such as paid family and medical leave and more aggressive enforcement of wage theft laws, did make it through the Senate last session, only to languish in the House. Platform mainstays like Election Day registration have passed the Senate in the past as well.
The divide between the two branches is reflected in the scorecard that Progressive Massachusetts releases each session, in which one can see a Senate where members are more willing to vote – on record – for progressive policies and a House where voting in lockstep with the Speaker is the norm.
With full Republican control in Washington, we are already seeing attacks on workers’ rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, and vital social and environmental protections. It is up to states to serve as laboratories of democracy, to use Louis Brandeis’s apt phrase.
Massachusetts Democrats could make our Commonwealth a beacon of progressive policymaking. If they aren’t interested, it’s up to activists and voters to make them.
# # #
Jonathan Cohn is an editor and activist in Boston and the co-chair of the issues committee at Progressive Massachusetts.
Yesterday I attended the Massachusetts Democratic Convention in Worcester with a busload of delegates from the SouthCoast. In Worcester there were over 4,500 of us, many alternates and guests, and it was quite likely the largest in the state party’s history. This was a platform convention, and the job was to vote on a new direction for the party.
My personal interest was to see if the #DemEnter strategy (joining the party to try to change it) was sensible. In all honesty it’s too early to tell, but the advantages of getting out on the field outweigh those of sitting on the sidelines and not having to make painful trade-offs. And – disappointments aside – this was democracy in action. You don’t always get what you want.
In Worcester there were 1,500 new delegates, of which I was one. And there were 800 Our Revolution delegates, of which I was one as well. There were many fresh young faces, including my niece’s. Many of the speakers were introduced by young people, including a ten year-old who had reverentially saved the candy bar he had collected one Halloween from Elizabeth Warren. Fast forward a few years – the same kid, now a teenager, was introducing the incredibly beloved Senator at the podium.
SouthCoast delegates piled onto our school bus at 6:30 in the morning. We arrived in Worcester early enough to join the breakfasts that various organizations had organized. I had a breakfast ticket from the Mass Teacher’s Association (to which I belonged about 10 years ago) but the room was mobbed. By luck I wandered into the ORMA (Our Revolution MA) breakfast next door and got a bagel. I signed amendment petitions from ORMA (Our Revolution MA), then it was time to return to the convention floor.
For almost six hours delegates sat listening to speaker after speaker. One U.S. Congressman, both U.S. Senators, the state Attorney General, each of the three gubernatorial wannabes – and at least one speaker to introduce each of them. By almost three o’clock the light at the end of the tunnel was getting dimmer and delegates began chanting “Vote! Vote!” Several more speakers tried to keep it short – but finally delegates had had enough of all the words, no matter how uplifting or strident.
Much has been made of the 2017 platform being the most progressive – ever. And this is not an exaggeration. But words are cheap so no expense was spared in adding progressive planks that – one hopes – a few Democratic legislators may actually create legislation to turn into reality.
Our Revolution Massachusetts, which had an incredibly well-organized contingent from Somerville and Cambridge, was able to successfully advance a number of amendments to an already much-improved platform:
“The party declared its support for a ranked choice voting system; making Election Day a state holiday; ensuring incarceration does not impact an individual’s right to vote; the abolition of Massachusetts super delegates; and a nonpartisan commission to draw voting district boundaries. On criminal justice, the party called for accountability and clear consequences for the use of excessive force and brutality by law enforcement officers; an end to for-profit prisons; and for shifting funds from policing and incarceration to long-term safety strategies such as education, restorative justice, and employment programs. Democrats declared that Democratic candidates and the party will no longer accept contributions from fossil fuel industry and infrastructure companies, for putting a price on carbon, and for more renewable energy and faster phaseout of carbon emissions. They also called for forgiveness of student loan debt.”
Nevertheless, the Democratic leadership firmly rejected several human rights amendments and efforts to democratize the party:
“Its push for new housing policies to end displacement was defeated by delegates who favor building more market-rate housing. ORMA’s proposals to make the party structure more democratic, by adding more state committee members who are elected by grassroots members and by reducing the number of signatures required to propose amendments to the charter, were also rejected. The convention chair ruled that ORMA-backed proposals on military and foreign policy, and on peace in the Middle East, were ruled out of order although they clearly had substantial support. The chair likewise ruled out of order a proposal that Democratic candidates must support the majority of the party platform or face loss of support by the party organization.”
This last rejected charter amendment should tell us something – that all the flowery language in a platform is meaningless unless there are consequences for candidates who fail to uphold platform principles.
And the arbitrary elimination of foreign policy planks – even as the state party weighed in on Trump, climate change, veterans, and immigration – seemed designed to avoid drying up the money tree which many state Democrats enjoy shaking. The Democratic Party is deathly afraid of tackling the Israel-Palestine issue – and this convention was no exception.
In reality there is no clear division between many Massachusetts state government and federal functions. As Safe Communities illustrates, states often need to take a keen interest in “federal” issues. Besides, the Massachusetts legislature Committee Book has standing committees on Climate Change, Intergovernmental Affairs, Redistricting, Election Laws, Healthcare Financing (which includes Medicare and Medicaid), Public Safety and Homeland Security, Telecommunications, and Veterans and FEDERAL AFFAIRS. Massachusetts officials regularly participate in trade delegations to nations where human rights abuses occur. Especially to Israel. The ban on certain topics is inconsistent, arbitrary, and manifestly hypocritical.
Censoring debate on foreign policy and Middle East issues is as arbitrary as if the party chose immigration issues to censor. One delegate challenged the party chair to cite the rule which specifically bans certain topics from being debated. Neither Gus Bickford nor the parliamentarian could cite any rule, only their “prerogative” to shut down the debate. But in a truly democratic organization no topic can be off-limits.
And I would still like to see the MassDems answer that delegate’s question? Where in the rules is such censorship permitted?
The press correctly observed that the focus of the convention was for the state party to portray themselves as the Resistance to Trump’s national (and nationalist) policies. But, again, this highlights the insanity of having a state convention with a national focus – and then shutting down debate of arbitrary national issues.
I was disappointed that a few passengers of our very own yellow schoolbus agreed with the Democratic leadership that both the party’s charter and platform should be almost impossible to change. If the party did not already have acute democracy problems this might be a different story. But only 80 out of 413 state committee members are democratically elected. The national party has credibility problems arising from the DNC leadership, including Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Donna Brazile, and John Podesta, and superdelegates are a sore point with at least half the party membership.
I was also disappointed that, even within ORMA, apparently two faction leaders voted against their own amendments. Mel Poindexter and Lesley Phillips opposed the ORMA-supported charter amendment, Toward a More Democratic State Committee.
* * *
Ultimately the platform added many great-sounding goodies. But the party is still littered with disappointments like my local state representative, Chris Markey, who didn’t even bother to attend, and my U.S. 9th Congressional District Congressman, Bill Keating, who also was a no-show. This is a party that just gave a thumbs-up to single-payer healthcare (which Keating doesn’t support), debt-free college education, defending immigrants (which Markey won’t), a $15/hour minimum wage, family leave (again, Markey won’t), and abandoning superdelegates.
But the exhausting pile of words we were subjected to yesterday means nothing if Democrats won’t clean house and replace the Markeys and Keatings with people who are truly on board with these newly-affirmed values. And these words will mean nothing if we don’t see progressive legislation and changes to party fund-raising practices.
Democratic midterms occur late next year. The Massachusetts Democratic Party will have a charter convention in 2019, during which the gears and levers of the party can be changed. Only after all this happens will any of us really know what kind of party it is, or if it can be reformed.
In the meantime, I would like to encourage progressive SouthCoast Democrats (and others) to join me in starting an ORMA local in the New Bedford area.
The Massachusetts Democratic convention is two weeks away, and there is now a working version that will be discussed in Worcester on June 3rd. Some have applauded the new draft – including three progressive groups that contributed amendments – for being the “most progressive” Massachusetts Democratic platform in history.
Good Stuff
To its credit, the 2013 draft includes calls for
single-payer healthcare – although it’s not clear why it also propose a hodgepodge of other healthcare programs
making the Commonwealth a sanctuary state
public funding of elections – but will the state’s Democrats really give up their PACs?
paid family leave
free college education – well, maybe, because it also calls for “exploring” debt-free models of higher education
a “decent living wage” – though a specific amount is not given
infrastructure development, including broadband – though no mention of regulating monopolies like Comcast or ensuring net neutrality within the state
a “millionaire’s tax” – along with tax breaks for “job creators”
universal background checks for guns –”balanced” by more money for law-enforcement
more money for veterans – which irks me for the same reason as the Commonwealth subsidizing ICE
And, to be fair, there are many good things in the platform. But some caution.
Their hearts weren’t in it
Massachusetts Democrats have been pushed to embrace many progressive positions they would normally have rejected – and they have been translated into ambiguities and weasel-words. Some positions are just a road too far for Democrats in a state that thinks it’s much more liberal than it actually is. The hearts of those who had to draft this “progressive” platform just weren’t in it.
In a previous post I looked at what was missing in the 2013 MassDems platform – and some things have indeed been fixed in a 2017 draft. At the time I observed that “the 2013 platform isn’t bad as a statement of liberal values – and the 2017 Progressives’ changes aren’t so radical as to give Democrats much heartburn.”
I was wrong. Apparently there was heartburn.
For example, the platform committee deleted the following plank from the 2013 final version:
“We want strong diplomacy and support nonviolent conflict resolution as a first resort in our domestic and foreign relations and call for a reduced military budget that allows for investment in human needs”
Attempts by progressive delegates to insert anti-militarism and foreign policy language into the platform were flatly rejected. The word “military” only appears in the Veterans section. Thank you for your service. Here, have some state money.
What’s still missing
Foreign Policy and Militarism – stop supporting autocratic and undemocratic regimes – no more weaponry for Saudi Arabia – slash the military budget – end undeclared wars – insist on Congress’ right to declare wars – no more aid to Israel until they end settlements – no more aid for Egypt’s dictatorship
Democratization of the Democratic Party – will we ever be rid of superdelegates?
End the Surveillance State – enhance citizen privacy (a word that doesn’t appear even once in the document) – get rid of the Patriot Act – eliminate FISA courts – get rid of or make No Fly lists transparent – breathe life back into the 4th Amendment
End useless tax breaks – remove vague language guaranteeing favorable tax rates for “businesses that generate community growth and participation” – Wal*Mart? really?
Environment – now that EPA and Superfund money has been slashed, Massachusetts should sue for remediation (for example, Aerovox dumped PCBs in New Bedford’s harbor and then moved to Mexico) – strengthen our own MA Dept of Environmental Protection
Healthcare backup plan – create with other Blue States a Single-Payer Healthcare system
Restore Net Neutrality to the FCC
Create a Citizen’s Data Bill of Rights guaranteeing that your personal and online data belongs to you and not to Comcast (Europeans have had this for years)
The platform is really the side-show
While the platform appears to be the main attraction, anything ironed out like this amounts to so much word salad. Modifying the party’s charter may appear to be a side-show, but it is arguably the more important objective. It turns out the platform is really the side-show.
Though there will be thousands of delegates and guests at the convention, the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee is the body that actually makes the decisions – think of it as your friendly Politburo. It’s also a fund-raising machine, so whatever values the platform holds are completely separate from those of the candidates the Committee funds.
The MassDems State Committee is the nation’s largest, weighing in at 418 members. Of this number only 80 members are actually voted upon by town delegates. Over 120 have permanent status and cannot be unseated as long as their bodies continue to twitch. Every year the number of these functionaries grows larger.
So let there be no confusion: the platform we are voting upon in two weeks is theirs, not ours. And in the long term, it’s changing the party charter that will actually make the difference.
What’s the difference between a pragmatist and a sell-out? When do you defend your line in the sand and when do you move away from it in compromise or for pragmatic reasons? What happens when others don’t see things your way? Do you take your marbles and go home? Invoke the nuclear option?
These questions confront us all the time when we consider how parliamentary democracies, our own Congress, our own party, and factions within it struggle with issues. We need not return to the 2016 Primary to see a Democratic party still licking its wounds and hashing out differences. Many of those differences are significant and painful ones that will require balancing principles and pragmatism.
As the Massachusetts Democratic Party convention approaches, two issues in particular have generated some heat. The first is abortion rights as a litmus test for Democrats, and the second is condemnation of Israeli settlements as a taboo for Democrats.
Choice as a Litmus Test
The first controversy was triggered by the endorsement of Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello by Bernie Sanders. Mello was an opponent of abortion whose views on the subject, like both Hillary Clinton’s and Tim Kaine’s, have supposedly “evolved.” Sanders made the case for “pragmatism” in endorsing Mello but many, including Ilyse Hogue of NARAL, pushed back. In a party without much tolerance for disagreement the issue is seen as “divisive.”
But compromising reproductive rights should be controversial – and painful. After all, these rights are written into not only the national party platform but the state party platform. It’s no trifling matter.
In an online discussion among “Our Revolution Massachusetts” (ORMA) members, which was a miniature of the national debate, one man drew a line in the sand, writing that support for abortion should be a litmus test for any Democratic candidate. But Betsy Smith, who signs off as a revolutionary grandma, answered him by suggesting that a constellation of progressive views might be more appropriate:
You wrote: “Even though I am a diehard Sanders supporter I wouldn’t vote for an anti-abortion candidate regardless of his otherwise progressive views. It’s one issue and one compromise I’m not willing to make.” So are you saying that if a candidate supported funding for science and the arts, proposed or signed onto legislation for single payer health insurance, was in favor of free college for all and a living wage, rather than just $15/hour, which is not always a living wage – are you saying that if a candidate who supported all these and other progressive ideas but was not pro-choice, you wouldn’t vote for them? What would you do? I’m assuming that it wouldn’t be to vote for the Republican. Would you write in your own name (or mine) as a protest or just not vote? I cannot understand, even as a woman who has seen friends damaged and unable to have children subsequent to an illegal abortion, being willing to throw everything else positive in the trash because of this one issue.
Israeli Settlements
The second controversy concerns an amendment to the Massachusetts Democratic platform to condemn Israeli settlements. It’s an issue that pits peace and human rights advocates against a party with strong links to AIPAC, including former AIPAC lobbyist Steve Grossman. Once again the party hopes to censor the debate by sticking a “divisive” label on it, pronouncing it toxic.
But settlements and, more broadly, the Israeli occupation, are human rights issues every bit as important as a woman’s right to choose. In a video seen this week a group of armed settlers descends on a group of Palestinian shepherds accompanied by a rabbi. They club and wound the rabbi. An Israeli helicopter immediately appears after the attack, reminding viewers that Israel’s government is complicit in settler violence and uses American “defense” gear to perpetuate an occupation and secure settlements.
Despite the reality seen in the video, the Democratic national party platform is filled with references to defending Israeli “democracy,” protecting it from Iran, assuring its military superiority, even insisting it be called a “Jewish” and “democratic” state – quite a departure from the usual separation of church and state the party and the nation stand for. Surely with all this love a little constructive criticism might be in order. But apparently it’s a bridge too far for some Democrats, particularly those receiving lobbyist cash.
Principles and Pragmatism
These two issues illustrate two very different ways of balancing principles and pragmatism.
In the case of reproductive choice the Democratic Party has a progressive principle some are willing to bend (or even abandon under the right circumstances) to win an election. Those who cry “divisive” the loudest are not willing to abandon that principle – and they’re right to cling to it tightly. Moreover, every one of us knows a woman, has a daughter or a niece. The issue has a personal dimension.
In the case of Israel, the party hold a deficient, even reactionary, principle that promotes militarism, occupation, and betrays the principle of separation of church and state. Those who cry “divisive” the loudest are not willing to abandon that principle – but it’s one that needs fixing. What’s different about this issue is that many Americans – and this includes Democrats – have little idea or much interest in knowing what really goes on in the rest of the world. Only about five or six percent of Americans care about foreign policy, and most don’t see the connection between foreign policy and our domestic reality. But just this week Democrats signed off on a $1.1 trillion spending package that sacrifices many domestic programs, and more than 60% of that package is money for war. There’s a connection.
Bernie Sanders took considerable flak for endorsing Heath Mello, particularly by party centrists. But if Democrats want to take back the cities, states, governors’ offices, and Congress, many argue it requires a 50-state strategy. As long as the candidate does not actively oppose a central principle (and Mello is not), the party can endorse him or her. But what if the candidate strongly opposes reproductive rights? Or marriage equality? Or some other Democratic constituency. What then?
Such a “pragmatic” approach includes the issue of Israeli settlements as well. If, for example, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Bill Keating have deficient views on Israel – and they do – progressives might nevertheless support them because their good deeds outweigh their sins. Bernie Sanders’ positions on Israel anger some progressives, for example. Just last week Sanders voted with the entire US Senate to defend Israeli settlements from UN censure. Is it pragmatism or selling out? When it comes to resolutions and not legislation, can’t the party at least defend principles worth defending?
A party platform must be a document that serves not as a litmus test but as a set of principles representing our best values. A platform embraces principles that should never be compromised – or only compromised in the most extreme and critical of situations. Was the Omaha mayoral race critical? Doubtful. The Democratic Party must never espouse principles opposed to fundamental American values – and certainly none that violate human or civil rights. Which is why the party’s positions on Israel are so shameful. And if Mello had still been staunchly anti-abortion, Sanders’ endorsement would also have been shameful.
I hope we will have forthright and uncensored discussions about matters of principle at the MassDems convention on June 3rd. Those of you who are fellow delegates, please support the settlements amendment proposed by peace activist Carol Coakley. Alternatively I have proposed that the Massachusetts Democratic Party adopt the Washington State Democratic Party’s foreign policy planks. There are many more planks relating to economic and social justice issues worthy of support.
The Democratic party not only requires new and better management, it needs some new and better principles as well.
Poor Heather Mac Donald. She didn’t get quite the reception she wanted at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) outside Los Angeles. She had come to speak on “The War on Police,” another of her frequent attacks on Black Lives Matter (BLM), and the students weren’t having it. A FOX News video shows what appear to be white allies locking arms and peacefully blocking access to the school’s Athenaeum. Mac Donald’s talk had to continue with whomever had already entered. President Hiram Chodosh live-streamed the talk and put it online. Ironically, as the media and two organizations which sponsored her talk pointed out, more people heard Mac Donald than if no protest had taken place.
Sarah Sanbar, a student fellow, introduced Mac Donald, apologized for the almost empty room, and placed the talk in its proper context. She said that Black Lives Matter opposes systemic racism and that Mac Donald was there to deny it and to paint BLM as dangerous. And that turned out to be a fairly accurate introduction.
Although Heather MacDonald is ostensibly a conservative intellectual and a “fellow” of the Manhattan Institute, she spends a lot of time on the talk show and cable television circuit. Here is Mac Donald being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh. There she is with Dennis Prager. Here she is visiting Frontpage Magazine. Mac Donald is a regular on FOX News and in virtually every far right publication. Her book on Black crime is a recommended read of the John Birch Society and the white supremacist group VDARE.
Mac Donald, who studied English and law and who is not actually a social scientist or criminologist, frequently veers into white supremacy. She believes Black communities need to be aggressively policed (occupied) to keep them safe (the White Man’s burden), and Mac Donald calls affirmative action programs “racist.” On FOX News Mac Donald and host Laura Ingraham held a pity party for white student “victims,” with Mac Donald going so far as to claim that “underprepared” blacks don’t actually want to be on these college campuses “when in fact the only reason they’re there is because the campuses want so-called diversity so much that they lower their standards.”
Such rhetoric might have had more to do with the protest at Claremont McKenna than with the pseudoscience Mac Donald tossed into her book “The War on Cops,” which Newsweek dismissed as “flawed logic and fantasy.” The Libertarian magazine Reason found Mac Donald’s logic “deficient” and took her central thesis to task: “America does not have an incarceration problem; it has a [Black] crime problem.” Police reform, prison reform, legal reform, and social reform are therefore all unnecessary because – when Mac Donald drills right down to root causes – well, the root cause is Black people.
I found it ironic that Mac Donald claims to revere the Bill of Rights while finding nothing wrong with police depriving Black teenagers of Fourth Amendment rights. She richly deserves the monicker that Black Lives Matter has given her – racist and fascist. But interfering with someone’s First Amendment rights is a problem and it’s also become an unfortunate trend. And liberal publications from the Atlantic to the LA Times and the New York Times, as well as civil liberties groups like the ACLU, have condemned such liberal intolerance.
Yet if the American Right are the true friends of the First Amendment, as they claim to be, let us see a flurry of Conservative letters to the editor defending protections for whistleblowers, journalists, rights for those boycotting Israeli occupation, support for net neutrality, and ending press bans in the White House. Let us hear fevered calls to stop restricting the right of people to demonstrate except in “free speech zones.” Let the Great Right wing rise up and repeal their own laws permitting vehicular murder of protesters (google it!). Let there be a torrent of letters demanding an end to gag orders on physicians providing women’s health services.
And let us see the nation’s editorial pages flooded with defenses of Kashiya Nwanguma, a Black woman who protested at a Trump rally and was assaulted by a white supremacist at the behest of the white supremacist candidate.
For this is what it’s really about. There’s more here than Heather Mac Donald’s First Amendment right to heap insult and advocate repression on an entire race.
While Democrats argue whether a woman’s choice really is a “core Democratic value” they remain pretty comfortable ignoring the human rights of non-Americans. This week Human Rights Watch documented extra-judicial killings by Egypt’s army – let’s ditch the euphemism and call them what they really are – death squads. HRW is calling on the United States to cut off funding to Egypt’s dictator (and Trump Rat Pack bro) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But Democrats are in an awkward position because, while they were running the circus, Clinton and Obama coddled Egyptian dictators as much as Trump. A GAO report written during Obama’s administration alluded to Egyptian human rights abuses. And they are worse now under Trump.
Last Month Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin proposed legislation that would violate First Amendment rights of those boycotting Israel for its military occupation and settlements. There is a similar bill in the House, co-sponsored by a number of Democrats, including one representative from Massachusetts. In the Massachusetts legislature there are two more of these “anti-BDS” bills being considered. In fact, these AIPAC-sponsored bills have popped up all over the country like the plague of ALEC legislation. In New York, governor Andrew Cuomo set up a blacklist to punish those using the constitutional right to boycott.
My point – foreign policy is not just national. It pulls states and even cities into controversies over everything from human rights to free speech. And out in the states and cities, we ought to have a voice.
The boycott controversy recently came up in Massachusetts Democratic Party platform discussions. Progressive Democrats want to insert language into the platform stating that “Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank are obstacles to peace.” Settlements have been condemned by virtually every nation outside the US, by the UN, and even members of Israel’s security establishment see the problem. If you can see how “gentrification” might be a problem, now imagine gentrification plus martial law, ethnic cleansing, and land theft. I’d call that an obstacle to peace. It’s as much a fact as global warming. And the reality is denied just as doggedly by Democrats.
Former AIPAC lobbyist Steve Grossman thinks the issue is “divisive” for Democrats and broadly hints that he couldn’t possibly remain in a party that won’t support Israel’s Occupation. Barney Frank’s former aide James Segel thinks the party needs to hold fast to “protect the values and commitments we hold dear” – meaning another half century of occupation and land theft? Rubber-stamp vetoes in the UN?
Democrats are on the wrong side when they attack free speech and human rights. And this has got to stop.
The Democratic Party’s platform may be the “most progressive” ever written. But this does not include its foreign policy section. That part was written by Hillary Rodham Clinton and reflects her neo-conservative and neo-liberal views. Traditionally, state parties have deferred on matters of foreign policy to a presidential candidate. But the approaches both parties have used for generations are not working. And despite Democrats calling for more “soft power” it’s hard power they always use. Invading new countries each year and spending our national wealth on war is bankrupting us, not making us safer. Right now, 53 cents of every dollar of discretionary spending goes to “defense.” And Trump wants even more.
So if Republicans are on the wrong track, what’s our plan?
One state Democrat Party – Washington – actually thought about it and did something. Progressives from this state wrote their own foreign policy platform, and it’s based on the golden rule, not on golden contracts for Raytheon and Boeing:
In 2016 the two truly “divisive” issues separating progressive Democrats from Hillary Clinton-ites were her hawkishness and support for corporate-friendly trade deals. While we may all want to put the 2016 election behind us and join the unity tour with Bernie Sanders and Tom Perez, issues of Democratic support for neo-liberalism and neo-conservative foreign policy are not going away. They have to be resolved.
Democrats from each state need to weigh in separately. Like Steve Grossman, there are certain lines in the sand for some of us. I’ll never find a home in a party that turns its back on human rights. As a newbie delegate to the Massachusetts Democratic convention in June I’m optimistic that important changes can be made, at least in this state. But I’m not blind to the reality that Clinton and Obama people still own the party.
I hear the #DemExit and Draft Bernie calls, though impatience and the right wing seem to be driving many of them. I am reminded by my progressive brothers and sisters in the Greens and elsewhere that I may be on a fool’s errand. And maybe they’re right. My sixth sense tells me they are right. But I think patience and a certain amount of blind optimism are warranted right now. Now is a unique opportunity to move the center of gravity toward the left in a party that has lost its way – and admits it.
By the 2018 midterms we should have an idea of what the party is really committed to, how democratic it’s prepared to be, and how welcoming to progressive values it is.
And that should begin with a renewed commitment to Human Rights and new ways of formulating foreign policy.
There are a number of things wrong with the Democratic Party. Lack of a 50-state strategy and undemocratic party rules come to mind. Big donors and selling out to Big Pharma say a lot too. Their embrace of neo-conservative foreign policy and neo-liberal globalism alienated both progressives and Candidate Trump’s supporters. But the thing that fries many of us most about the DNC is its habitual refusal to stand up to Big Business, to name the source of our pain.
Last week Chris Hayes interviewed Tom Perez and Bernie Sanders, both of whom are on a Unity Tour to shore up the shaky relationship between centrist Democrats and progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party. Perez wants Americans to know the DNC has a positive vision for America. Whatever that specific vision is, it’s not clear Perez himself has any notion.
Sanders, on the other hand, wants the nation to know that we have to fight back against Trump and an American kleptocracy, oligarchy, autocracy – choose your phrase. Sanders chose “billionaire class.”
But, despite the many hits the American working class has taken, Perez just could not be pressed by Hayes to admit that we are in the middle of a class war. Hayes asked him point-blank, “Do you have to name the enemy?” Perez waffled. This revealing moment told me the DNC was not quite ready to abandon its funding from Big Donors, that the DNC was not quite ready to trust its grassroots. The interview continued in this vein when Hayes asked Perez if the DNC supported single payer healthcare and – once again – Perez waffled and mumbled. He’s a man with no answers.
In contrast – hate him or distrust him – there’s no question which side Trump is on. With Tom Perez, you’re never quite sure which side the Democratic Party is on.
One of my favorite blogs is Robert Paul Wolff’s “Philosopher’s Stone.” The other day Wolff wrote about what he had learned from a lifetime of studying Marx – what Marx got right, and what he got wrong. It’s a worthwhile read. According to Wolff, the thing Marx got most wrong was his conviction that the working class would rise up and fight back. He ended his meditation with this:
“I know all about gerrymandering and voter suppression, but that is no explanation. Bernie Sanders, God bless him, was the only candidate in the last Presidential cycle talking about the fact that the rich are screwing the poor. Why didn’t he pull 80% of the total vote of both parties? I don’t get it.”
Tom Perez can answer that question without saying a word.
When I was a twenty-something, just entering the computer world of the early 1970’s, computer languages to watch were Fortran, PL/1, COBOL, Lisp, Algol, APL, Pascal – and a hundred types of assembly language.
Even back then, one language was especially reviled for its ugly syntax – or rather the fact that no one could program with it without using special pads of coding paper. This was a language developed by IBM in 1959 called Report Program Generator (RPG). RPG was really only good for one thing – generating boxes and boxes of “greenbar” – thirty pound stacks of computer printouts. Even in 1971 the preferred business language was COBOL.
Fast forward a mere thirty years to 2000. RPG programmers were already recognized as an endangered species – endangered by evolution. One article provocatively (“RPG – the Walking Dead?”) asked: “Is RPG dead?”
So there you had it – a generation ago, on the cusp of a Y2K apocalypse (that never happened) – a forward-looking author counseling fellow programmers to abandon relics like RPG, learn computer languages of the next millennium – and be prepared for the wave after that – Object Oriented Programming:
Unless you’re ready to retire, you should stop by your favorite bookstore, pick up a copy of UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modelling Language or a similar book, and start learning the ubiquitous language of OO designs. Also download the Whiteboard edition of Together/J (www.togethersoft. com) and start familiarizing yourself with an OO design and analysis tool. Besides helping you learn OO concepts, Together/J will help you learn Java by reviewing the source code it generates. With this knowledge, you should be in a better position to learn the next OOP language in vogue with minimal effort. The clock is ticking. Where will you be when it strikes midnight? Hopefully, not with the walking dead.
The clock certainly was ticking, as it always is. Coal miners received similar advice a century ago – as New Bedford sperm oil whalers did a century before that – after prospectors found petroleum in Pennsylvania.
But after millions of years of human existence, is anyone really surprised that change is practically the only constant?
Besides the president?
This is a guy who’s made political pets of coal miners. Instead of actually helping them by rolling out alternative energy infrastructure projects and training miners for jobs with a future, Trump and his Republican Congress will simply give them federal pensions and hope they go quietly into the night. But as Alana Semuels writes in the Atlantic – why stop there?
If it bails out the miners, why stop there? Why not bail out all of the other pension funds, private and public, that are on the brink of insolvency?
Why stop there, indeed. The Trump administration could also create special programs to save the nation’s remaining 283 RPG programmers.
Like the miners (and the coal owners) who were warned a century ago that petroleum was coming, the poor pioneering RPG programmers were so hard at work on their coding pads – keeping American business humming – that they never heard the future calling.
* * *
Next week – how to make America GREAT for elevator operators and movie theater projectionists!
Only about six percent of Americans care about foreign policy. Thanks to geography and most of us speaking only English, Americans don’t really engage with the rest of the world – except when we’re pointing weapons at them. Most voters just accept that presidential candidates will formulate their own foreign policy by surrounding themselves with lobbyists and talking heads from ideological think tanks.
Well, if that sounds like a terrible idea to you, here’s another. Put specific foreign policy planks into all the state party platforms. And put the best and best-supported ideas into the national party platform.
Last year Democrats drafted a national party platform that some said was the most progressive platform of all time. And maybe it was – for the Democratic Party – and only when limited to certain domestic planks.
But when it came to foreign policy, the Democratic Party’s hawkish platform reflected its presidential candidate’s worldview. We would fight ISIS by giving taxpayer money to repressive and right-wing governments – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel – the Usual Suspects – though so far they’ve been useful only to Defense contractors. The DNC platform ignored Congress’s right and obligation to declare war while calling for the use of presidential AUMF statements – like the one Donald Trump used last week. The platform downplayed the use of ground forces while preferring technology – Tomahawks and drones – like the ones Donald Trump used last week. Nobody really has a different plan – just keep on using extrajudicial killing indefinitely, without ever declaring war, without ever clearing the endless war with Congress.
The DNC platform is full of jingoistic phrases such as “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” But many are beginning to question whether it just might be the United States that has inflicted the most damage on world peace and stability. We originally funded Islamists to fight the USSR, have given Israel $128 billion since 1948 while simultaneously turning our backs on Palestinians, created failed states in Iraq, Libya, and Syria – and then created millions of refugees Europe and Turkey have had to deal with.
We’re not winning any friends with this.
Republicans of the Bush administration, and Democratic Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry have all pursued policies of enlarging the world’s militaries – which ratchet up global dangers – failing to stop settlements, pulling NATO into our misadventures, conducting war games on Russia’s doorstep, throwing money at successive Egyptian dictators – all while playing God by deciding which regimes shall live, and which regimes shall die. Trump has pushed everything to its extreme, but what we’re seeing now is merely an exaggeration of the same foreign policy mistakes Democrats and Republicans have committed for years.
Meanwhile, the DNC leaves foreign policy to its presidential candidates. It also seems to think that, as long as Democrats pursue more enlightened domestic policies, maybe voters won’t even notice the foreign policy. But today’s progressive Democrats are taking notice. Many of the issues Democrats are arguing about now are not trivial differences. They deserve to be discussed, debated, and put into platforms.
Somewhere between domestic and foreign policy lie the American colonies. The ambiguous legal status and distances to places like Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Mariana Islands provide numerous opportunities for exploitation. Over decades, tax breaks and bonds bankrupted Puerto Rico. PROMESA was the Republicans’ way of sending thugs to break kneecaps and tell islanders to pay up. And PROMESA had bi-partisan support. To our shame, Democrats did almost nothing to help Puertorriqueños. Yet when it comes to taxpayer giveaways, “fiscal responsibility” rarely applies to the Usual Suspects, the DOD, or Defense contractors. That’s a bipartisan principle.
Now, if you don’t care about the people in our colonies – in far-flung places some of us can’t even find on a map – and you still haven’t been convinced that foreign policy is important, let’s consider how it affects you personally.
Police forces are now militarized. It’s not just the APCs and tanks, all that military surplus and the surveillance gear, but the many vets-to-cops who are now the face of the modern police force. State governments are passing draconian bills that threaten or abridge civil liberties. You can’t post a thought, send an email, or place a cellphone call without it being monitored. Right here in Massachusetts, partly out of good intentions – but also because of lobby groups – Democrats have proposed house and senate bills that strip the Constitutionally-protected right to boycott Israel. In New York, governor Andrew Cuomo set up a blacklist to punish these boycotters. But regardless of how you feel about Israel, stomping on the First Amendment is not something Democrats should be doing. That’s the GOP’s job.
You can’t fly into the country without being asked to give up your phone and passwords. You can’t fly out of the country without being subjected to increasingly intimate pat-downs. Men of a certain age can skip their annual prostate exams because the TSA now provides them free of charge. And you can’t climb on a plane without fear that someone will call the cops on you for speaking Arabic, working on a math problem, using the wrong word, telling the wrong joke, or having goons break your nose and knock out your teeth if you object to being bumped on a flight you’ve paid for.
None of this is new. And this is not just Trump’s Great New America. This is the authoritarian America that Democrats had a hand in making.
Two hundred million Americans no longer enjoy civil liberties along borders with Mexico or Canada, or within a hundred miles of the oceans. Homeland Security can set up checkpoints, stop and question you, confiscate your belongings, detain you, subject you to the third degree. All in violation of the 4th Amendment. Democrats voted for the Patriot Act, the FISA Courts, expansion of Homeland Security, and resisted effective oversight of the NSA and CIA. Many Democrats didn’t even read the Patriot Act before signing it.
So if you think that foreign policy doesn’t affect you, think again. Foreign policy is not something that should be decided by a presidential candidate. This is why it is critical that foreign policy planks be presented, debated, and adopted in each of the state Democratic Party platforms. Besides setting forth principles for legislative priorities in our own states, they’ll also send strong messages to the national party.
The two month experiment by centrist and progressive Democrats in resisting Trump while simultaneously trying to fix their troubled marriage is showing signs of strain.
The odd couple, who have been sleeping “indivisibly” in a narrow double bed since Trump’s inauguration, may be once again getting tired of each other’s morning breath – if not their mate’s true nature.
From the introduction of Democratic Party platform planks, to discussions of how much support the DNC is giving progressive candidates in special elections, differences are apparent and profound. Centrist Democrats are asking for money already, and Progressives are giving instead to progressive PACs. Progressive Democrats are challenging the GOP in special elections, while the DNC hasn’t figured out what its national strategy is.
Still the veneer of “indivisibility” must be preserved. And this is being done with a little sleight of hand – or, rather, some heavy-handed censorship.
To be sure, the Right Wing enjoys the friction in this stressed Democratic marriage. If nothing else it’s a nice distraction from the GOP’s own relationship problems. Jared Kushner’s New York Observer ran a piece recently telling progressives what they already know – that the DNC hasn’t been doing much to help progressives. The discussion over the Kansas election provoked a bit of heat on Facebook and on political discussion groups, though it was not unusually rancorous. But Indivisible’s response was to simply censor the whole discussion:
Elsewhere we’re seeing exhortations to avoid reading the right-wing press, to install content blockers in your browser, and to consult lists of “safe” vetted publications – all at a time it’s important to know what the bastards are up to.
Not only that. An old adage reminds us that even a stopped click is right twice a day. Why not, occasionally, the Right Wing? Must we ignore them, even if they occasionally make a good point? Or should heavy-handed “moderators” shape the discussion and, like the Great Chinese Firewall, protect us from opinions we shouldn’t be hearing?
Libertarians and Tea-totalitarians both claim that Democrats succumbed to political correctness in the 2016 elections. One aspect of this charge was that Democrats support “identity politics” – defending vulnerable constituencies. Well, good for Democrats! And – centrist or progressive – we all had better acknowledge that, right now, the Democratic Party is the only thing standing between GOP authoritarianism and a vulnerable public.
But another aspect of the Right’s criticism points at the Democratic reticence to get out in the alley and mix it up, to habitually smooth over differences until no one really knows what Liberals stand for, to avoid conflict like delicate little “snowflakes.” And they’re right, pardon my saying so.
So, people, the Democratic couple this essay started out with is going to have to figure out how to move forward. They’re going to have to have it out, scream out loud – maybe even in public or at a polite dinner – and resolve their differences once and for all.
I’m getting a bit tired of hearing that pushing for Democrats to try a new, progressive, strategy is tantamount to rehashing the Clinton-Sanders primary all over again. But we can’t have a discussion about strategies and directions if “moderators” decide it’s off-limits.
If you’ve ever seen Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?” you know that denying problems in a relationship never ends well. It’s time to let George and Martha have at it.
Democrats need to engage on their differences. They exist, and they are not trivial. Disputation and resolution is the only way forward. Censorship is not only counter-productive, it’s something we should simply not stand for – whatever the good but misguided intentions.
Review of “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth (ISBN 9781400079490)
This book, written in 2004, is one of those – like The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and It Couldn’t Happen Here – books that have had second lives following Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Philip Roth imagines an America that finally gives in to its darkest xenophobic impulses. His real-life hometown near Newark, New Jersey, experiences first one shock, then another, then another, and another, as fascism creeps into the White House under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. The story Roth tells is a slow-moving nightmare – and it really resonates because a nightmare is precisely what we are living in now.
Lindbergh, of course, really did have a real-life flirtation with Nazism, even accepting an award from Hermann Göring.
Roth’s childhood, re-imagined in terrific detail, doesn’t need to stray too far from real American history because intolerance and nativism was baked into the national cake. Rich white plantation owners gave way to automotive magnates like Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent featured headlines like “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” But with an epidemic of Islamophobia and Brown People Phobia today, hate-peddling billionaires like the Kochs, Mercers, and Adelsons, and modern day equivalents of the Dearborn Independent, we haven’t moved the needle a millimeter since 1920.
Much of Roth’s story is about political conflicts within his own Jewish family, which become a lens into the Jewish community of the time – or maybe the one of today. Roth’s fictional brother Sandy is a self-hating Jew, as is his fictional aunt Evelyn and her husband, Lindbergh sycophant Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf – a man who never met a Nazi he didn’t like. This brings to mind the curious relationship between the right-wing Jewish community of 2017 and the Trump Administration. Our modern day Bengelsdorfs – settler-ambassador David Friedman and “Rabbi to the Stars” Shmuley Boteach – now occupy prominent positions in and around the most xenophobic presidency of all time.
For a book designed to make you think, The Plot Against America also has one hell of a great plot. Father Coughlin, Walter Winchell, Fiorella LaGuardia and hundreds of real historical figures make believable appearances in this tale of what coulda, mighta been – could have easily been. For those who don’t know their history, there’s even a postscript that fills in some blanks.
I won’t spoil the book by giving anything away. Needless to say, the Jews of America don’t come out unscathed.
But Roth’s insights into the ease with which the United States can slide into fascism can’t be ignored. This is an argument, a though experiment even, and Roth makes his case.
Philip Roth understood in 2004 how easily, even wordlessly, a sitting president could unleash a pogrom on a helpless minority – and his choice of words gave me the chills for its accuracy and prescience:
The week after the September assault on Detroit’s Jews – which was addressed with dispatch by neither Michigan’s governor nor the city’s mayor – new violence was directed at homes, shops, and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, violence that Winchell’s enemies attributed to his deliberately challenging appearances in those cities after the cataclysm that he’d instigated in Detroit, and that Winchell himself – who, in Indianapolis, barely escaped being crushed by a paving stone hurled from a rooftop that had broken the neck of the bodyguard stationed beside him – explained by the “climate of hate” emanating from the White House.
When they invaded Iraq Republicans turned the country into a failed state ISIS could move right into. But then Democrats repeated the same mistake in Libya and Syria.
Fast forward to 2017. Many Democrats now recognize the mistake. But not William R. Keating, a slow learner who in my humble opinion needs a new job.
After Trump sent 50 Tomahawk missles into Syria on April 6th, the top five American newspapers ran 18 editorials praising the attack. There was not a single criticism. Breitbart’s Charles Krauthammer rejoiced that there was a new sheriff in town. Defense hawk and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Trump’s attack and urged him to take out Assad’s airfields. By bombing Syria, Farid Zakaria said, Donald Trump had finally “become president.” MSNBC’s Brian Williams called the missiles flying off to do their lethal work “beautiful.”
For the most part Democrats didn’t even bother to question whether it had been the Syrian government that killed the civilians with sarin gas. The Liberal Atlantic Monthly ran a piece titled Why America Should have Hit Assad Four Years Ago. Meanwhile, CIA-sponsored rebels are fighting US Army-sponsored rebels along the Turkish border. What the hell is going on? US involvement in Syria is not merely a fiasco, but a giant bipartisan fiasco demonstrating – once again – that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can be trusted to execute a coherent American foreign or military policy.
Sending a barrage of missiles into another nation is well beyond dispatching a drone to kill a suspected terrorist (and everyone nearby). This kind of attack is without question an act of war. The War Powers Act requires the President to report to Congress within 48 hours of initiating “hostilities” and forbids forces from remaining past 60 days. So far we have heard nothing from the President. Tellingly, three weeks before the sarin gas incident, the U.S. beefed up troops intended for Syria, and signalled its intent to stay in Syria, even after ISIS had been defeated.
Here in Massachusetts, where we are fortunate to have sensible Senators, voters still need to pay attention to Liberal hawks. Elizabeth Warren, to her credit, demanded to know what Trump’s strategy in Syria was. Ed Markey, to his credit, voiced concern that Syria could become another quagmire.
But our very own 9th Congressional district Representative, William R. Keating, stands with Trump. Keating is an Iran hawk and had to have his arm twisted to accept Obama’s Iran deal. Keating also voted with the GOP to limit Syrian refugees. No big surprise, then – Keating applauded the missle launch.
Keating, especially, needs to hear from voters. But call everyone. If you live near one of the local offices, drop in.
Representative William R. Keating
Hyannis Office: 297 North St., Hyannis, MA 02601
New Bedford Office: 558 Pleasant St., New Bedford, MA 02740
Plymouth Office: 170 Court St., Plymouth, MA 02360
The 2013 Massachusetts Democratic Party Platform is not limited to concerns of the Commonwealth. The Preamble alone mentions immigration, infastructure, national defense, diplomacy, and multiculturalism. The “Ethics and Transparency” section calls for the overturn of Citizen’s United, for example.
Delegates to the June 3rd state Convention in Worcester have an opportunity to send a message to the national DNC by voting on amendments to the following platform sections: Business and Entrepreneurship; Economic Growth; Education; Energy and Environment; Climate Crisis; Ethics and Transparency; Healthcare and Human Services; Housing; Immigration; Justice, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; Labor; Public Safety and Crime Prevention; Revenue and Expenditures; Transportation and Infrastructure; Voting and Democracy; and Women.
The 2013 platform isn’t bad as a statement of liberal values – and the 2017 Progressives’ changes aren’t so radical as to give Democrats much heartburn. The old platform mostly gets a day at the spa. But for a picky reader like me there are a number of things missing from both the current version and new proposals. Despite language on reducing “defense” spending (when we’ve had a quarter century of war), nowhere in the platform is there any mention of Foreign Policy. Plus, there are a number issues that Democrats have neglected that now demand clear statements of principle – especially since the Trump administration is attacking them so viciously.
Some of my suggestions below assume Democrats will eventually regain political advantage, but some of them assume we may not – and that it may now be up to state government to protect health, environment, civil liberties, and community policing.
Foreign Policy and Militarism – stop supporting autocratic and undemocratic regimes – no more weaponry for Saudi Arabia – slash the military budget – end undeclared wars – insist on Congress’ right to declare wars – no more aid to Israel until they end settlements – no more aid for Egypt’s dictatorship
Democratization of the Democratic Party – will we ever be rid of superdelegates?
End the Surveillance State – enhance citizen privacy (a word that doesn’t appear even once in the document) – get rid of the Patriot Act – eliminate FISA courts – get rid of or make No Fly lists transparent – breathe life back into the 4th Amendment
End useless tax breaks – remove vague language guaranteeing favorable tax rates for “businesses that generate community growth and participation” – Wal*Mart? really?
Free college education – make it even clearer that free “higher education” means a four year college education
Environment – now that EPA and Superfund money has been slashed, Massachusetts should sue for remediation (for example, Aerovox dumped PCBs in New Bedford’s harbor and then moved to Mexico) – strengthen our own MA Dept of Environmental Protection
Healthcare backup plan – create with other Blue States a Single-Payer Healthcare system
Improve the “Immigration” plank by calling for Massachusetts to follow California in prohibiting any local or state officials or agency from acting in a federal capacity or spending state money to do so (this would effectively endorse Eldridge and Cabral legislation at the convention)
Put teeth in planks that call for gender parity – all publicly-traded corporations must have at least 40/45/50% women board members
Put teeth in the Women’s Choice plank – no public funding for institutions that refuse to provide full counseling or direct services to women
Restore Net Neutrality to the FCC
Create a Citizen’s Data Bill of Rights guaranteeing that your personal and online data belongs to you and not to Comcast (Europeans have had this for years)
Massachusetts Representative Antonio Cabral has written a bill (H.3033) that places limits on the use of state funds that can be used for the federal ICE program. Another bill (H.3034) prohibits sending prisoners out of state [for example, working on Donald Trump’s Great Mexican Wall].
If you’re not an enthusiastic letter-writer, here is one possibility:
Dear [–]:
I am writing in support of two bills introduced by Rep. Antonio Cabral and recently assigned to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. These bills limit (a) the involvement of Massachusetts resources in ICE’s deportation efforts (HD 3033) and (b) the use of prison labor outside the State (e.g., to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico) (HD 3034). I also support Senator James Eldridge’s Safe Communities Act (S 1305).
These bills both deserve our support. Residents of Massachusetts towns and cities should be able decide for ourselves what type of community policing we want. The nation’s police departments have not (yet) been federalized. It will be a dark day if this ever happens.
How voluntary is a prisoner’s consent to be used as a “Great Wall” builder when prison is an inherently coercive environment and when a prisoner’s treatment depends on the goodwill of a sheriff supporting that wall? Are there no other educational and rehabilitation programs prisoners can participate in within the Commonwealth? And how can the fair treatment of our state’s sons and cousins be guaranteed if they are transported thousands of miles out-of-state?
The current wave of deportations is being executed without prioritizing the removal of truly dangerous individuals or concern for the destruction of families. It is also being carried out without regard for the previous administration’s promises to young people who grew up in the United States and know no other home. And this ideologically motivated purge is being done without regard for the economic impact the disappearance of thousands of workers will have. Worse, these reckless and cruel deportations are causing chaos and fear.
But we have an opportunity to restore tranquility and security.
I am not advocating anarchy or the selective application of law. We are indeed a nation of laws, but federal laws have their own scope and their own agents of enforcement, while the same is true of states. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts should not be compelled to effectively turn its law enforcement officials and county prisons into ICE agents and federal facilities.
I appreciate your consideration of this letter, and I hope you will give prompt and favorable attention to the bills I have endorsed. Thank you.
They swarm the porch shouting “Police!” But it’s a lie.
It sounds like something out of a totalitarian state, and it is – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are allowed to lie to citizens – even impersonate police officers. But the real police don’t like it at all. It undermines trust and creates problems. And it’s gotten so bad that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the LA City attorney, and City Council President Herb Wesson sent a letter to ICE telling them to knock it off.
As the LAPD, the city’s police department, had to point out, rousting and terrifying communities undermines actual police work. The problem is so severe and so widespread that a proposed House Bill seeks to end the practice by prohibiting ICE agents from lying about who they are.
This single issue highlights an important point – that federal and local policing have different objectives. Donald Trump’s xenophobic purge of brown people should not be conflated with the needs of American cities.
With already serious problems of police militarization, taser abuse, police shootings, racism and misconduct elsewhere, many communities are trying to do something about it – regain control over the hiring and firing of officers, conducting public reviews of police misconduct cases, and re-introducing community policing. But now they have another problem – ICE agents eroding the trust of communities that police departments serve.
Police officers are obliged to forward fingerprints and other arrest information to a variety of federal databases, and they often detain suspected criminals on behalf of Immigration and Custom Enforcement – only as long as the Constitution permits. But in communities with large immigrant and minority populations, many police departments would simply rather not be in the Immigration business. In Santa Clara County, California, for example, the DA and county police chiefs signed an agreement spelling out their involvement with federal policing:
“The agencies of this county will not enforce federal immigration laws,” said Morgan Hill police Chief David Swing, president of the county chiefs association. “It is not our mission nor our role … we will treat all of our residents with dignity regardless of status.”
Two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security started issuing a weekly report that aims to identify and publicly shame law enforcement agencies that released people from custody despite an ICE detainer request. And U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions went a step further last week, promising to withhold federal funding from law enforcement departments that don’t get in line with ICE. But several sheriffs said their defiance is not rooted in ethical or political opposition but legal concerns. Federal court rulings, including one in Oregon where a judge found that police violated a woman’s constitutional rights by keeping her in jail at ICE’s request, have left California’s law enforcement officials worrying that they could expose themselves to legal troubles for doing the same.
In fact, according to the National Sheriffs Assocation, a majority of sheriffs departments have stopped honoring ICE hold requests because so many of them are unconstitutional.
Besides previously calling for the arrest of a co-panelist, Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, Hodgson made a number of odd and false claims: that sanctuary cities are hotbeds of crime (statistics say otherwise); that California prohibits reporting to ICE of human traffickers and gun runners (a lie politifact rates as false); that terrorists hide out in sanctuary cities and Massachusetts is a “magnet” for terrorists (“we have terrorists all over this state,” he said, sounding a lot like Donald Trump); and that no statistics support that improved policing occurs in cities where openness with officers is improved by not being part-time ICE agents.
On Hodgson’s last point – it’s possible that the statistics are as hard to come by as police shooting data, but according to Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, the nation’s police chiefs know something our local talk radio gadfly doesn’t – that sanctuary cities keep crime down. And apparently the still unaggregated data confirms it to their satisfaction.
But whether we call them sanctuary cities, freedom cities, or give them some other designation, the real debate has nothing to do with “sanctuary” – and everything to do with local control of police departments.
There is no suspension of federal law in cities that do not compel Officer Friendly to become an ICE agent. There is no suspension of federal law in cities that hold all suspects for a Constitutionally permitted period. There is no suspension of federal law when cities complain that ICE agents are lying to citizens and undermining the trust of their communities. There is no suspension of federal law when cities, counties, and states decide – for themselves – what kind of community policing they want to do.
There are now three bills in the Massachusetts legislature that would help the Commonwealth protect our communities and community policing programs from ICE and rogue sheriffs.
Bill Keating wants your money. In the last week alone I have received three or four appeals from the Democratic representative of the 9th Massachusetts Congressional District. In each is his “ask” – “support Bill.”
Well, I would send this right back at Rep. Keating:
Rep. Keating may be basically an honest and decent guy, but he is among the least progressive portion of Democratic congressmen who have not signed on to John Conyers’ proposed legislation to expand Medicare into a single-payer system.
This is hardly a surprise.
Keating may be a social liberal – and he has respectable legislative ratings from Planned Parenthood, AFSCME, and the Sierra Club, for example. But when it comes to foreign policy – and now healthcare – he is a disappointment.
The Congressman is not merely an unreliable voter on foreign policy, he is a member of both the House Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security committees and can do real damage on a national level. He has terrible grades from peace groups. Keating has a 47% rating from Massachusetts Peace Action, 50% from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and 50% from the Friends Committee on National Legislation. He has been an Iran hawk and only reluctantly supported Obama’s Iran deal. He has been a consistent defender of Israeli settlements and he received a 44% rating from the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
Also somewhat of a “Defense” hawk, Bill Keating has been an inconsistent ally of civil liberties. In 2011, for example, he received a 50% rating from the American Civil Liberties Union.
My bottom line – I may not be inclined to shop around for another congressman quite yet, but William R. Keating isn’t going to get a dime from me until he starts acting like a progressive.
* * *
Those who have thrown themselves into political action recently are completely united in opposing the Trump administration’s efforts to deconstruct democratic America – “democratic” with a small “d.”
But the coming elections are going to expose divisions between Democrats blissfully content with representatives like Keating – and those who want the Democratic Party to really show some teeth and testicle. And principles.
Party machine Democrats are going to have to accept that the party is changing. Democrats wandered forty years in the wilderness of centrism. Well, it didn’t work – and voters didn’t want it. If the party has a future, it’s a progressive one.
But progressive Democrats (and progressive allies) are going to have to accept the fact that not every Democrat on a ballot will completely be to their political taste. We are going to have to hold our noses and vote for some of these guys.
On the other hand, until its direction is fully clear, the Democratic Party also needs to know why many of us are giving donations to Progressive political PACs, and not directly to lackluster candidates or the DNC.
Democracy is in decline – and it’s partly because some of us are reclining in our La-Z Boy chairs too damn much.
If you’re a Dartmouth voter, press that lever on the side of the chair and it will propel you into an upright and standing position. From there walk or drive to your nearest polling station.
The 2017 Annual Town of Dartmouth Election is Tuesday, April 4, 2017. Polls will be open from 7:00am – 8:00pm.
In some past town elections, voter turnout has been less than 11 percent. Voter apathy is as deadly as lack of electoral choice. But electoral choice depends on you voting. In Massachusetts we are having somewhat of a crisis. Fewer and fewer elections are being contested:
In my precinct (see ballot below) this is certainly true.
There are really only two contested elections on the entire ballot:
Select Board (two candidates)
School Committee (three candidates for two slots)
In all the rest there is really nothing to vote for. It’s like a North Korean election – a single candidate or slate:
Assessor (one candidate)
Trustee (two candidates, two slots)
Board of Health (one candidate)
Planning Board (one candidate)
Park Commission (one candidate)
Town Meeting Members (twelve candidates, fourteen slots)
And it gets worse. There is even one contest that didn’t even have a candidate:
And here is the real reason you should get out and vote – the ballot question:
“Shall the Town of Dartmouth be allowed to exempt from the provisions of proposition two and hone-half, so called, the amounts required to pay for the bond issued in order to design and construct a new police station to be located on town-owned property at 1390 Tucker Road, including originally equipping said building, paving, and all other costs incidental and related thereto?”
In other words – should the town pay for the new police station with a temporary tax rate increase?
Well, what voter knows how much money the bond actually represents? Or what the exemption means legally? Or who even knows what Proposition 2-1/2 is? Or what the current tax rate is?
I will wager that many voters will reject this question simply due to its opacity and ridiculous legalese. But here are a few details:
The police station will cost $13.6 million. Cops can’t work out of trailers forever. Taxpayers have to pony up for roads and schools – and police stations. You get what you pay for.
If you’re too cheap to pay, you don’t get anything but bad roads, bad schools, and cops who can’t do their job.
Paying taxes – like voting – is just another cost of keeping society and government running.
I received “What We Do Now” as a gift for making a contribution to Democracy for America (DFA).
“What We Do Now” is 200+ pages containing 27 short essays or excerpts from speeches by a number of liberal politicians, activists and writers. They include VT Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote about the six American banks that represent 60% of the American GDP; MA Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the importance of crafting a coherent economic message; Anthony Romero of the ACLU, on the dangers our democracy faces – all the usual suspects weighing in on all the usual issues. And I don’t mean to make light of them.
But after two months into the Trump presidency, I dare say we are already doing precisely what the roster of authors suggest – without having read them first. Most of us have already figured out the demagogue’s media tricks, as George Lakoff deconstructs them. And the fact that his own supporters will suffer the most, as Paul Krugman points out. We know what to expect economically, politically, and culturally. And we’re resisting.
Linda Sarsour’s essay was my personal favorite, followed by Alan Lichtman’s piece on rebuilding the Democratic Party. Sarsour takes just the right tone of stridency and progressive opposition. Lichtman, on the other hand, should be required reading (and re-reading) as a warning of how difficult it is going to be to convince Democratic centrists they were wrong. Lichtman betrayed the most partisan bias of any of the authors in the book and is clearly both a Clinton fan and a TPP proponent. But he mis-characterized opposition to the Trans-Pacific trade bill as the “rat-trap of protectionism” and didn’t bother to mention the corporate goodies buried in the TPP that were so problematic for progressives. On this Lichtman can’t see any difference between Trump and Sanders, and this is a form of blindness.
Thus, “What We Do Now” perfectly encapsulates ongoing conflicts and contradictions within the Democratic Party. For DFA to reward me with a book containing an essay by Bernie and another by a Hillary surrogate tells me the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is far from over.
Trump’s 2018 budget, says OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, is supposed to “send a message to our allies and our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration.” In fact weaponization of the budget is pretty much Trump’s only objective:
“The core of my first Budget Blueprint is the rebuilding of our Nation’s military without adding to our Federal deficit. There is a $54 billion increase in defense spending in 2018 that is offset by targeted reductions elsewhere. […] We must ensure that our courageous servicemen and women have the tools they need to deter war, and when called upon to fight, do only one thing: Win. […] this public safety and national security Budget Blueprint is a message to the world–a message of American strength, security, and resolve.”
The 2018 budget takes money, quite literally, from food programs for children, seniors, the poor, and strips virtually every federal program of value to the average citizen. Tens of billions of dollars – on top of the excess hundreds of millions already being spent – will be redirected to homeland security and the military. The Washington Post has examined the percentages of cuts to federal programs:
If this budget sends any kind of message to NATO allies whom Trump has described as “freeloaders” it is that the United States will continue to spend more than half its discretionary budget on war. This level of obscene military spending tells allies there really is no need to increase their own defense spending. Allies can continue building their economies and providing for their citizens’ real needs with continued modest defense spending. It will be the American taxpayer who must do without in order to pay for weapons we don’t really need.
And if the 2018 budget sends any kind of message to potential adversaries, it is that the U.S. relishes its role as rogue nation and that they’ll need to raise the level of their own military spending.
Trump voters chose combat and elected a combatative president. And this is what they will get. But they probably thought they would get some “American greatness” too.
Trump is a sociopath whose idea of playing president is to throw around military power. His supporters were given simple formulas for an American resurgence that simply won’t stand up to scrutiny. These voters should have known better than to trust a casino developer who profited with other people’s money and who regularly stiffed his contractors. He’s a serial liar who’d make P.T. Barnum envious.
But he had help.
Conservative ideologues have been selling a war machine and income inequality for years. For instance, Breitbart News claims the U.S. military has been “depleted” by reductions under the Obama administration.
But Trump voters are not going to get much “make America great” out of the the 2018 budget. The “Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again” threatens economc progress for working Americans and eliminates the lifelines they depend on – all while siphoning away tax money for corporate welfare schemes.
Yet Conservatives are all over the map on budget priorities. The American Spectator applauds the president’s “terrible swift sword.” But paleoconservatives at the American Conservative and neocons at Commentary don’t like the defunding of State Department and UN programs like Unicef. Even with a 9% increase in war spending the American Enterprise Institute claims the Trump budget doesn’t go far enough in diverting taxpayer money to defense contractors. The CATO Institute freely admits the Trump budget is a tool for putting public money into the hands of private investors, but it can’t contain its impatience to steal even more from the taxpayer:
“Trump proposes to devolve to state and local governments and private parties a number of programs now funded by the feds. In theory, the result should be greater efficiency and less regulation. However, in most of the areas I know about, Trump could have gone further and produced even better results.”
The Federalist complains that there is too much hand-wringing over the budget and that it’s all about eliminating bureaucracy – if you don’t count America’s massive “defense” and homeland security complex as a bureaucracy. Free market fundamentalists at the Foundation for Economic Education admit that the Trump budget is Big Government on steroids – but they aren’t buying his hype about job creation. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation calls it a “skinny budget” and applauds cost savings by slashing social and health programs for working people. America’s fake news center, FOX News, dismisses the end of the Meals on Wheels program with jokes.
The Marie Antoinette of the Trump administration, “let them eat cake” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, says, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” For school kids, yes, that’s true. But for billionaires there’s no end of caviar to be found in the 2018 budget.
While the GOP is full of ideologues competing for their own pet budget priorities, economists generally dismiss Trump’s budget as a fast-approaching train wreck for the economy. The Brookings Institution says Trump’s budget priorities will seriously hobble the economy by eliminating programs that help small businesses, aid technology and research, and help businesses improve productivity. Brookings warns the president that only competitiveness – not protectionism – can help American business. It concludes:
“Trump’s budget, like much of his rhetoric, is fundamentally backward-looking. It attempts to support a 21st century economy with 20th century tools and ideas.”
In looking at the federal budget, we have to distinguish the pension and health benefits that the federal government holds and manages for retirees – called “entitlements” or non-discretionary spending – as sacrosanct funds. These are for a citizen’s rainy day fund. It’s personal money.
The federal budget also includes “discretionary” expenses – money normally targeted for the common good – whether it’s the EPA, NASA, education, the arts – or for war. Under both Republicans and Democrats discretionary spending has often been mainly for war:
But now, with Trump’s draconian cuts to social, business, and welfare programs, the federal budget has become even more weaponized than in previous years.
Today’s remarks from Iowa’s unrepentant White Supremacist, Rep. Steve King, just underscores the difference between the GOP’s new proto-fascist vision for America – and the one engraved on the Statue of Liberty that celebrates a nation of immigrants.
American history is not just the stories of heroes, sinners, and survivors – or tales of presidents, generals and inventors. It is a record of the struggles of immigrants for a place at the American table. It’s also a personal story.
Almost twenty years ago I became fascinated by genealogy. My mother’s family lived in the United States long before it became a nation. They can be traced back five or six centuries to little Welsh and English villages, and somebody somewhere has a book with all the dry details of begats and property transfers, including the manumission of slaves.
My father’s family had no such privileged roots and were double – maybe even triple – immigrants. My father used to say that his g-g-g-g-grandfather was born on the sea. And, after ordering Canadian archival records, it turned out he was right. Johannes Mooß was born “auf dem Meer” (on the sea) in 1828, enroute from some German-speaking village to Nova Scotia:
I say “German-speaking” because it wasn’t until after the Napoleonic Wars that the Holy Roman Empire was finally dissolved. And it wasn’t until 1815 that the German Confederation, mainly a trade and tax agreement, united German-speaking states. And it wasn’t until 1866 when a Northern German Confederation, and then Otto von Bismarck, founded something akin to the modern state of Germany. But when Margarete Mooß arrived in Nova Scotia, the Europe she knew resembled this:
The land my ancestors arrived in was hardly modern Canada. The French had ceded territory to the English under the Treaty of Utrecht a century before, but “New France” maintained control in Upper Canada. It had been only 70 years since Le Grand Dérangement, or the Arcadian genocide – the forcible expulsion of 14,000 Arcadians from what is now Canada’s Maritime provinces, which killed 9,000 of them. Many people in New England and Louisiana know this history well because they are descendants of Acadian refugees.
Likewise, the United States of 1828 was hardly recognizable as the nation it is today. Michigan, in which my grandfather, father, and I were born, was not yet a state. Mexico owned all of California, Texas, Arizona, and the Southwest. Years later, when the United States grabbed this territory from Mexico, Mexicans suddenly became “Americans.”
We haven’t always had $40 billion walls separating us from other nations. On both my father’s father’s side and his mother’s side there are multiple connections to Canada. The borders between both nations were once as porous as sand – still are – and some of my Quebecois ancestors – the unwanted refuse of Alsace and Normandy – even made a brief appearance in Attleboro, Massachusetts before ending up in Northern Michigan.
Sometime in the mid-1800’s my father’s family migrated to Upper Canada (now Ontario). And sometime during the beginning of the 20th Century my father’s people emigrated once again – or maybe they simply sneaked across the non-existent border – and by pure luck all of us since then have been American citizens.
Fully bitten by the genealogy bug I made phone calls, sent out emails, and scoured genealogy boards. I gathered family trees from Midwestern German and French cousins, Francophone ancestors, people I’m related to in Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Ontario and British Columbia. Through marriage on my father’s side it turns out I have Chinese and Indian cousins – “India” Indian and Native American. My sister’s daughters share her background and also that of their Puerto Rican father. Several of my cousins are part Polish. A young cousin married into a Mexican-American family. My own children share all the ancestry I’ve described, plus the Lithuanian and Ukrainian heritage of my wife.
Despite all the ugliness happening right now, our histories and families are literally fusing. This is the reality of America, and its beauty.
As I’ve worked on the family trees, I’ve unearthed Ellis Island records from my wife’s grandfather and his brothers:
I found the stedtl in Lithuania the brothers came from, and a marker that identifies where all those who remained in that village, including a sister Perla, were slaughtered by Einsatzgruppen and xenophobic neighbors on September 11, 1941:
At the time the United States had immigration quotas for Jews, even though everyone knew what was happening in Europe. Today the lesson of protecting vulnerable people is one we have failed to learn.
I’ve never been able to determine where in Germany my father’s people came from, and I’ve followed many false leads. Some of them have been fascinating. Who knew that Germans were invited to live in Bessarabia (Russia) by a czarina in the early 19th century? Or that a century later they were disinvited by another czar and instantly became refugees – some fleeing to North Dakota. Who knew that other German refugees were brought to Nova Scotia to offset Catholic population?
As I’ve researched names on census rolls, cemetery lists, and ship manifests, I’ve discovered a lot about the fragile lives of immigrants of every era. Certainly some come for economic reasons. But unless you are hungry or have been made a refugee, who would choose to leave everything behind, pack a few belongings into a suitcase, and start all over again with almost nothing?
The ancestor born on the sea arrived in steerage and became an indentured servant as a boy. Pitted against citizens already established, and pitted against each other, immigrants work without savings, language, security, the support of nearby family – or much of anything – until they either become part of the fabric of a new nation. Or have to start all over again.
My own family story is nothing special. We all have a story like this. What is both amazing and shocking is that the nation’s xenophobes and racists have as little notion of who they are as of American history.
* * *
Modern day stories of today’s immigrants are no different. Like refugees from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere, many have escaped death squads and military juntas:
* * *
Immigrants today are just as likely to be fleeing drug cartels and pan-national gangs as those arriving a century ago were fleeing from cossacks or the Czar. Or, like the Acadians, today’s refugees may be escaping genocide:
Whatever you choose to call them – immigrants, refugees, seekers, dreamers, illegals – they’re not here to take American jobs. They’re here to survive.
* * *
For Trump and his collection of racists and xenophobes, Syrian refugees are not victims – or people or families – but simply a danger to be contained. The most ludicrous aspect of Trump’s dehumanizing Muslim Ban is that it is Europe – not the United States – that has taken responsibility for the human tragedy that perpetual American Wars of Choice have caused.
Building a massive, shameful, wasteful wall and doubling or trebling the number of ICE agents may not be equivalent to another Kristallnacht, but from Trump and Bannon we hear strong echoes of the same fascist rhetoric.
Last October I traveled to Berlin to find out how Germans were dealing with the huge number of refugees literally washing up on European shores, and I worked with a refugee aid group. For a month I handed out shoes, clothing, and supplies to people from all over the Middle East. Many were from Aleppo, a city racked by a civil war the United States has played a major role in. Many were from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries the U.S. has been waging wars against for two decades.
This is what the cowardly 45th President of the United States is afraid of – people fleeing war zones with their children:
In Germany there is opposition to the large number of people transiting through the country, to be sure. But many Germans have been welcoming. As the sign below says: “we are all foreigners.”
And if more Americans dug into their own family trees and stories, they would recognize just how much we have in common with those we should be welcoming.
Last May China celebrated – “tried to forget” might be more accurate – the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was little more than a murderous pogrom that took place from about 1966-1976. China’s true power elites stood aside and permitted the poor and angry to deflect blame on moderates and intellectuals for all the nation’s woes. Mao Zedong claimed that “bourgeois” elements had infiltrated the Party and to make China great again it needed a good old-fashioned Stalinist purge – and a purge it got. More than 1.7 million Chinese scholars, teachers, and political moderates were murdered in a single decade.
With Mao Zedong’s encouragement, paramilitary groups called the Red Guards screamed the Mandarin equivalent of “Lock Her Up!” as they conducted kangaroo courts and – like today’s Taliban – tried to physically erase a moderate, traditional Confusian culture from Chinese history. Scholars and intellectuals were sent to the countryside for “re-education” and many never returned.
In 1969 Mao declared that the Cultural Revolution had been a success. But China had to wait for Mao’s death in 1976 to restore a measure of normalcy by arresting general Lin Biao and the “Gang of Four,” and by instituting reforms under Deng Xiaoping.
In 1981 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party declared the Cultural Revolution had been an abject failure:
… on no account should the theories and methods of the “cultural revolution” have been applied. Under socialist conditions, there is no economic or political basis for carrying out a great political revolution in which “one class overthrows another.” It decidedly could not come up with any constructive programme, but could only bring grave disorder, damage and retrogression in its train. History has shown that the “cultural revolution,” initiated by a leader labouring under a misapprehension and capitalized on by counter-revolutionary cliques, led to domestic turmoil and brought catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people.
Space is limited, so please RSVP because a maximum number of people are allowed in the building. If the maximum number has been exceeded, we promise to send you minutes of the meeting.
Members of other Indivisible chapters are very welcome but please RSVP. We are expecting a big turnout.
Parking is limited at the Grange, and there will be an exercise class in the upstairs room that night. Please plan to park at Alderbrook Farm, 1213 Russells Mills Road, or along Fisher Road. At Alderbrook there’s plenty of parking. Most convenient to the Grange is the area between Fisher Road and the yellow farm stand building, and in front of the greenhouse. Fisher Road is narrow, pull well off the road if you park along it. We will be “passing the hat” to cover the cost of Grange use, and also a website start up.
One theory was that last week’s election of a new DNC chairman was really a proxy race between the Clinton wing of the party and the Berniecrats. A majority of the delegates who elected the new chair were superdelegates in the 2016 primaries so it was not difficult to predict who would vote for Tom Perez based on who voted for Hillary Clinton.
The results have been tabulated, and centrists remain in charge of the party’s direction. A 57-state strategy is good. But continuing to cash checks from big donors, abandoning “identity politics,” and mouthing the words to faux populism is bad. The DNC needs a truly progressive platform. Perez’s plan to court millenials without a progressive message is simply not a winning strategy.
With the exception of Susan Thomson’s, the Massachusetts delegate votes were no surprise either. As predicted, it was business as usual:
Virginia Barnes (Ellison) Gus Bickford (Perez) Kate Donaghue (Perez) Deb Goldberg (Perez) Elaine Kamarck (Perez) Debra Kozikowski (Perez) David O’Brien (Perez) Melvin Poindexter (Ellison) James Roosevelt (Perez) Susan Thomson (Perez)
Last Thursday billionaire public education wrecker Betsy DeVos spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing revival meeting at which all conservatives must declare their belief in Free Market Capitalism, Christian Shariah, and Death to Big Government.
When it was her turn on stage, DeVos began by immediately trashing free school lunches:
“I’m Betsy DeVos. You may have heard some of the ‘wonderful’ things the mainstream media has called me lately,” she said. “I, however, pride myself on being called a mother, a grandmother, a life partner, and perhaps the first person to tell Bernie Sanders to his face that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Perhaps this was just Betsy DeVos having a Rick Perry moment – being totally oblivious to the realities of her new job. But as the still-free press reminded her, there actually is a school lunch program that provides free lunches to 31 million children, almost a quarter of whom now live in poverty, and to others whose parents find it difficult to pay. Since there are roughly 78 million children in the U.S., the Lunch Program in fact feeds 40% of the nation’s children. Chopping this program would harm as many people as Trump’s plans to destroy the Affordable Care Act.
But this is not something that those in gilded palaces know.
DeVos’s defenders were quick to point out that the new Secretary of Educational Sabotage didn’t really mean that there was no such thing as a free lunch. Sheesh! It was just a metaphor, a joke, an expression! What DeVos really meant was that she liked putting wasteful programs on the chopping block.
Devos may have been speaking in metaphors and maybe she was even joking – unless she does happen to throw a grenade into the school cafeteria. But that’s the trouble with the Trump administration – you never know if they’re kidding, bullshitting, speaking in metaphors, secret codes, dog-whistles, are off their meds, or are making up alternate facts to suit some occasion. All the rules of communication that normal humans use have been suspended. Or maybe they just lie when they’re caught: “Just kidding!”
Although the apocryphal joke – “Let them eat cake” – was probably told by another contemptuous noblewoman a century before her, legend insists that Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine for the same crime as DeVos’s – making light of hungry kids – and for her generally snotty attitude.
For billionaires, school lunches may be an opportunity to laugh at the little people. But for everyone else it’s no joking matter.
Now that we Americans have our own aspiring dictator, it’s easy to forget about all the other guys standing in front of their gold curtains surrounded by their generals. No one expects the Trump administration to do anything but admire and support these fellow strongmen – maybe it’s just professional courtesy – but let’s not get too nostalgic about American foreign policy under Democratic administrations.
Egypt’s current dictator, Abdel Fattah del-Sisi, deposed the nation’s first freely elected president Mohammed Morsi with American blessings and imprisoned the party’s president Mohamed Badie for life. With Obama’s complicity and continuing American financial assistance Egypt imposed crackdowns on civil liberties. Today Egypt’s current dictator saw to it that the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was acquitted of charges of murdering protesters. Meanwhile, an Al Jazeera reporter, Mahmoud Hussein, sits in an Egyptian prison. Practicing journalism should not be a crime under al-Sisi or Trump – nor should it have been under Obama, when Hussein was first imprisoned by America’s pocket dictator.
Democrats should especially refrain from weeping about “what might have been” under Hillary Clinton. People from Honduras can tell you that it would not have been pretty. In 2009 when a military coup sent leftist president Manuel Zelaya into Costa Rican exile in his pajamas, Hillary Rodham Clinton saw it as an “opportunity” and asked her Clinton Foundation buddy Lanny Davis to begin back-channel negotiations with a “better” choice for Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, who himself was shocked that the U.S. and European Union would even think of supporting a coup.
And then there’s Israel. This is a nation that has received $128 BILLION dollars of U.S. aid to-date and has been keeping Palestinians under martial law for sixty years. No administration, Republican or Democrat, has ever had any real qualms about letting Israel systematically loot Palestinian land and build settlements. At least no one has ever done anything about it. Trump now has, literally, an Israeli settler as his choice of ambassador to Israel, but disregard for the rights of Palestinians is one issue both parties agree upon.
Progressives can and should be outraged at Democrats who ally themselves with Republicans on economic issues, militarism, and surveillance. Progressive Democrats can and should “primary” traitors like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin who vote with Republicans on immigration, the environment, or to defund schools. Democrats like New Jersey’s Cory Booker, who are better friends of corporations than their own constituents, need to go into voter-initiated retirement.
Alongside all these other “litmus tests” foreign policy should be a critical criterion for choosing someone to represent you. Because a politician who harms the freedom and welfare of those in other countries will eventually betray you as well.
By now most of us have found plenty of organizations that need our help, our voices, and our money. We make our daily calls, our targeted calls, write our representatives, and even take to the streets on occasion. We help out candidates in swing states or those like Tom Brock, Jon Ossoff or Josh King in Red State districts that show promise.
But most of these efforts take place hundreds of miles away from home.
If you are looking for activist groups you can jump into right here in SouthCoast MA, check out:
Indivisible Southeast Mass – a largely New Bedford based Indivisible affiliated group which meets at the NB Library on Pleasant Street
Marching Forward – a group of approximately 300 people in the Dartmouth area also affiliated with Indivisible who meet periodically at the Dartmouth Grange
If you are especially concerned about immigration issues:
A couple of years ago I was in Berlin walking through a plaza, the Bebelplatz. This is where the Nazis started burning books by Jews, liberals, and democrats (with a small D).
In the plaza is a monument that recalls this period of anti-intellectualism. If you stand in just the right spot you can peer down through pavement glass into a miniature library with empty shelves. In Germany reminders like this – like the Stolpersteine that memorialize the Nazi victims – are everywhere and literally underfoot.
In the United States we haven’t begun burning books – although we have a fierce group of fundamentalists and patriots who regularly succeed in banning them from libraries and expunging them from curricula.
What we have instead nowadays is a climate of anti-intellectualism which regards knowledge as irrelevant, facts as inconvenient, civiliity as pretentious political correctness, and democracy as a plot by a dangerous cosmopolitan liberal elite to impose their foreign values on red-blooded Americans.
Only a portion of American intellectuals are Jewish, of course, but the American Right is using precisely the same phrases that its goose-stepping cousins used eighty or so years ago.
Without much leadership from the Democratic Party a resistance movement has arisen. Liberals and progressives are making daily calls, attending meetings, writing letters, attending marches and rallies – all in defense of “what we once had.” The resistance is encouraging, but social and political movements cannot be based entirely on nostalgia – regardless of the Republican Party’s fleeting success with it. If we are honest, we have to recognize that the world we created is not that rosy. We can do better.
Hamid is a Pakistani novelist perhaps best known for the book (and film) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He writes that we seek solace in nostalgia because the world is spinning so fast. We fantasize that the men and women of the past were more confident and secure in their roles and their work than we are today. We understand the technology of the age of toasters. Robotics scares the hell out of us. We watch TV and search the internet, but the fictions and connections we are really looking for are much deeper and older, more primal. Our identities are, in part and in fact, stories. And we are story tellers. Why retreat to the past, then, when we can create new stories for an even better future? Read Hamid’s complete article here.
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And – speaking of reading – people tend to read mainly what fits or confirms their pre-existing views. Democrats and Conservatives literally read different news and hear different opinions. But if you really want to know your political adversary, you need to know what goes on inside his pointy little head. There is some disagreement whether it was Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, or Mario Puzo who came up with the quote, but “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is good advice no matter who said it.
Republicans certainly understand this rule – know what the competition is up to. So even though it hurts, tune into the president’s speech tonight at https://www.whitehouse.gov/.
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Finally – speaking of rejecting nostalgia in favor of a better future – Massachusetts Senate Bill S.291 proposes banning “Indian” names as school mascots. This would cost my own town of Dartmouth a couple dollars to change. But it would finally end an insult similar to that of turning Black jockeys into lawn ornaments or reducing Native Americans to wood statuary in front of cigar shops. “Indians” are people, not mascots. If you really can’t think up a new mascot that belongs on your school’s front lawn, try a gnome, smurf, or a pink flamingo.
Some may object to this as “political correctness” – but what does this phrase really mean other than civility? It’s long overdue that this kind of unthinking insensitivity and low-grade racism ended. As the rest of the country plunges deeper into racism and xenophobia, it would be rather sweet if a few oases of sanity and kindness, like our own Bay State, shone a little light into the nation’s heart of darkness.
Tom Perez’s election as DNC party chair yesterday was a big disappointment to Progressives who had hoped the Democratic Party would choose not only a new chairman but a new direction. Lost in yesterday’s party proceedings in Atlanta was another vote. This one concerned taking money from superPACs. The DNC voted to continue doing business as usual. Donald Trump tweeted that this was a good day for both Perez and the Republican Party, and he was right. The Democratic Party just seems incapable of helping itself.
After the vote, Perez and runner-up Keith Ellison, who will become vice-chair of the party, swapped campaign buttons. Both are decent men, and both represent a party that – like it or not – is the only serious entity standing between a vulnerable American public and the billionaires salivating over ending regulation and what’s left of the Social Contract and American democracy.
For Progressives now is not the time to succumb to temper-tantrums and despair. The DNC delegates who voted for Perez and for superPACs are the same ones, for the most part, who committed to Clinton and sandbagged Sanders. This election was not a surprise. The terms of these Clinton and Obama holdovers will eventually end but the Democratic Party will remain. Progressives are now beginning to make gains in the DNC in states like Oregon and California, and it is a matter of time before this happens in our own state.
The Democratic Town caucuses are coming. Show up. Run for a slot. You will be given a minute or two to tell your fellow Democrats who you are and what you stand for. Tell them you’re a Berniecrat. Tell them you want and end to Big Money and Superdelegates.
If the party does not reform itself long before the 2018 midterm elections, it will be replaced, and many of us will be changing party affiliation.
Patience only extends so far and the clock is ticking.
Regarding my summary of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” an anonymous reader wrote to correct me on the time period in which the book was written and to do a much better job of explaining Alinsky’s purpose than I did. – Thanks.
Alinsky didn’t write Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years, He published it in 1971 during the Nixon years.
I worked with Alinsky. Contrary to the likes of Gingrich, Saul was not a Marxist. He was a old-fashioned American patriot who frequently quoted the Founding Fathers.
One of Alinsky’s favorite quotes – mine too – and which he used to introduce an earlier book I also recommend entitled Reveille For Radicals, is from Thomas Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern for it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.”
Saul’s objective was not mere resistance. People tend to focus on Saul’s tactics but his objective – the objective of Alinsky style community organization – was participatory democracy. No less than to make US style representative democracy work the way the founders intended. Here I would recommend you go back and take a look at [the ending of]Obama’s last State of the Union.
Saul’s tactics, based in life-long experience, close observation and study under everyone from UC sociology professors to John L. Lewis and Frank Nitti – what he called called “applied social science” – were designed to involve – to enfranchise – those who were excluded from civic decision-making that effected their lives.
Alinsky used confrontation over issues important to peoples’ lives to get them involved. He started off with what he called “fast, easy victories” to give people confidence they could actually get things accomplished and to convince others to join the effort so it would be possible to take on bigger and bigger projects. In addition to political tactics Saul taught leadership skills, research skills, fund-raising skills, how to prioritize and pursue goals and how to build not only a voluntary neighborhood organization but a coalition of voluntary associations.
If everyone’s involved, all interests represented – and people are informed about available options and the implications of those options – Saul figured things would turn out at better than they would otherwise. What he called “enlightened self-interest.” An informed, involved citizenry was an article of faith with him as distinct from those who rely on demagoguery and/or ideology for their answers. Saul was a big fan of checks and balances.
The idea that an educated citizenry is essential to representative democracy is of course also basic to American style democracy as envisioned by people like Jefferson and Franklin.
Basically, Saul was a teacher – saw himself that way and saw Alinsky-style organizers that way too.
Saul taught people citizenship – how to become effectively and productively involved.
Saul believed therein lay the best available answers. The opposite of those who purposefully seek to disenlighten because an enlightened citizenry would never buy what they are trying to sell.
Newt Gingrich created the meme that Saul Alinsky was the Machiavelli behind Obama. Since then, the Right-wing blogosphere has been littered with denunciations of Alinsky. This has also resulted in a cottage industry of pamphlets, articles, and spinoffs like “Rules for Conservatives” by Michael Master, Jerome Corsi’s “Saul Alinsky: the Evil Genius behind Obama,” Will Clark’s “Obama, Hillary, Saul Alinsky and their Useful Idiots,” Richard Bledsoe’s “Can Saul Alinsky be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era,” and, well, you get the idea. Not to mention Ben Carson’s claims that Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. The Right doesn’t like it when the little guy fights back.
Alinsky learned his lessons in organizing generations ago and wrote the book Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years. He knew what kind of stacked deck workers play against. And he knew full-well what effect he had on the Right – “The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.'” Well, Alinsky’s methods worked, and his enemies respected him. Despite all their venom, the Tea Party eagerly adapted Alinsky’s methods successfully. And in fact the following quotes from “Rules for Radicals” were taken from a Right-winger who studied him in depth. Alinsky saw politics precisely as the Right does – as all-out war. And in times of war one does not always take the genteel high road.
In the quotes below, it’s clear Donald Trump uses many of Alinsky’s principles, and it’s also clear how poorly most Liberals do. Alinsky’s ideas may seem alien to people unaccustomed to street fighting. But we have now entered a period where politics has got to get a little rough.
This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience — and gives full respect to the other’s values — would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. — P. xviii
As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. — P. xix
“Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. — xxi
A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change, but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution. — xxii
But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: “Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing — but this only swings : people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.” — xxiii
The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins — that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. Two examples would be the priest who wants to be a bishop and bootlicks and politicks his way up, justifying it with the rationale, “After I get to be bishop I’ll use my office for Christian reformation,” or the businessman who reasons, “First I’ll make my million and after that I’ll go for the real things in life,” Unfortunately one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric or the first million, and then one says, “I’ll wait until I’m a cardinal and then I can be more effective,” or “I can do a lot more after I get two million” — and so it goes. In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. — P.12-13
It is not a world of peace and beauty and dispassionate rationality, but as Henry James once wrote, “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” Henry James’ statement is an affirmation of that of Job: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare…” — P.14
The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced for the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not men. — P.26
One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. — P.26
…The secretary inquired how Churchill, the leading British anti-communist, could reconcile himself to being on the same side as the Soviets. Would Churchill find it embarrassing and difficult to ask his government to support the communists? Churchill’s reply was clear and unequivocal: “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” — P.29
The fifth rules of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis — will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. — P.32
The seventh rule of ethics and means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success and failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. P.34
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. — P.35
The tenth rule of the ethics of rules and means is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral arguments. …the essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. — P.36-37
Eight months after securing independence (from the British), the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them. — P.43
All effective actions require the passport of morality. — P.44
But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead. — P.59
The organizer becomes a carrier for the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking “why” are beginning to rebel. — P.72
To realistically appraise and anticipate the probably reactions of the enemy, he must be able to identify with them, too, in his imagination and foresee their reactions to his actions. — P.74
With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason — this is a fight with a windmill. — P.76
The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion. — P.96
If the organizer begins with an affirmation of love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him. — P.98
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” — P.100
The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. — P.116-117
THE THIRTEEN RULES – Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. …The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. …the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. …the fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. …the sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. …the seventh rule : is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. …the eighth rule: Keep the pressure on. …the ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than : the thing itself. The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. …The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter-side. …The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. …The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — P.126-129
One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act. — P.134
It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger. — P.134-135
I have on occasion remarked that I felt confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday. — P.150
For example, since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations. No organizations, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations. This is what that great revolutionary, Paul of Tarsus, knew when he wrote to the Corinthians: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter killeth.” — P.152
Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations — with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they are here and will be. — P.189
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David Frum is a prominent Neoconservative who worked for the Bush administration. Many of his foreign policy prescriptions are pretty repellent. But for Frum, as with many Neocons, Trump’s proto-fascism is so frightening that he’s offering advice to the Atlantic Monthly’s liberal readers:
“It’s possible I’m not the right person to offer the following analysis. Yet it’s also a good rule to seek wisdom wherever it may be found.”
And Frum’s counsel on strategy is pretty sound. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like Alinsky’s:
The more conservative protests are, the more radical they are. You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic. Wave the flag, be more inclusive. Disinviting pro-Life women from the Women’s March may have been an error. Invite more cops and veterans. Don’t be so partisan. Be inclusive. Be dignified. Don’t let Trump set the tone.
Strategic thinking, inclusive action. The military formula is – superior force at a single point. OWS fizzled because it was diffuse. Be selective with demands that can be achieved. And go after specifics related to Trump – “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” – “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” – “Divest from the companies.” – Limited “asks” with broad appeal.
Protests are fun but meetings are effective. Bodies in the street represent potential power, not necessarily real power. What happens when people get on the bus and go home? In contrast, it’s the mundane day-to-day organizing that gets things done. Less hair-splitting, more organizing. Relentlessly use the kind of tactics Indivisible spells out to keep steady pressure on elected officials.
In three days we’re going to have a moment of truth.
With the election of the next national Democratic Party chair on February 25th, it’s going to be either Business as Usual for the Democratic Party or a confirmation that it needs to start moving in a different direction.
Whatever the result, it’s not looking too good for a new direction in the state of Massachusetts.
Most sentient creatures know that the Massachusetts Democratic Party has an honesty problem. The last three House Speakers all had felony convictions. National DNC bigwigs like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile likewise have had serious honesty problems. It may not come anywhere close to the filth and kleptocracy of the GOP, but this is a party in need of a whole lot of soap.
I have written before about the DNC Chairman’s race, and as much as the debates have had a gentlemanly tone, let there be no doubt whatsoever that this most certainly is a proxy war between party centrists and progressives. The leading candidates are Keith Ellison, a Black Muslim Congressman endorsed by (among many) Bernie Sanders; and Tom Perez, a Hispanic Labor Secretary and civil rights attorney with Clinton and Obama connections. Both men are decent-enough guys, but Ellison has promised to make the most changes to the DNC and, without a progressive direction, I just don’t see voters having compelling reasons to trust the DNC again.
Those from the Green, independent, or Berniecrat worlds have some idea of the mendacity of a party that couldn’t even help Americans get lower cost drugs because so many Democrats were in Big Pharma’s pocket. The 2016 convention exposed the Democratic Party’s corruption and lack of democracy, and the Presidential election exposed a lack of strategy and the absence of a coherent message for working class voters.
Next week 447 Democratic delegates are going to choose between Ellison, Perez, and a few latecomers. Those casting their ballots from Massachusetts are a subset of the same DNC superdelegates who got us into this mess in the first place, so don’t look to them to vote for change.
It’s going to be more Business as Usual. At least in Massachusetts.
The nine Bay State delegates selecting the next DNC chair are: Virginia Barnes, at-large delegate from the Teamsters; Gus Bickford, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party and principal at Factotum Productions which does political consulting; Kate Donaghue, publisher of the Democratic Dispatch; Deb Goldberg, Massachusetts treasurer; Debra Kozikowski, vice-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party and publisher of ruralvotes.com; Thomas McGee, Massachusetts state senator and former party chairman; David O’Brien, political and communications consultant with Northwind Strategies who formerly headed up Duval Patrick’s PAC; James Roosevelt, Jr., co-chair of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee and FDR’s grandson; and Susan Thomson, anthropology professor, musician and somewhat of a Renaissance woman.
Of the nine, all but Barnes, Roosevelt, and Thomson were pledged Clinton superdelegates in the 2016 Presidential primary. After the primaries, Sanders-proposed reforms were rejected by most of these nine superdelegates.
So – after the vote, brace yourself and try not to scream too loud.
Going forward it is CRITICAL that Massachusetts Democrats begin organizing at the town and ward level to get rid of Business as Usual Democrats. It’s going to take some time before the terms of these superdelegates and their self-perpetuating jobs expire.
But when they do, a new base of new Democrats needs to be ready.
Yesterday the Boston Globe published a piece by Martha Bayles, “Will the media be crushed?” Bayles makes her thesis crystal clear:
“Put bluntly, it’s not enough to assert that a free press is the lifeblood of liberal democracy. We must also recognize that liberal democracy is the lifeblood of a free press. And if liberal democracy stops working, no one should expect the press alone to fix it.”
And what’s the point of a free press if there is no democracy?
Our free press has handed American democracy a lifeline more than once. Watergate comes to mind. The Guardian’s and Intercept’s articles on NSA spying on Americans put unconstitutional spying on notice. The Wikileaks State Department cable dump shed light on a hypocritical and destructive foreign policy. The public got to see what sort of mischief its elected officials were up to – and lying about. The Fourth Estate has often been a fourth pillar of democracy, albeit an unappreciated volunteer.
Bayles cites a Freedom House report – that our free press is declining in pace with declining democracy. Freedom House specifically identifies Trump’s autocratic methods as a threat to watch. But it’s not just Trump himself. For mainstream Republicans authoritarianism is now acceptable – and, like plastic forks pretending to be silverware, perfect for everyday use.
In Arizona, Republicans have proposed HB 2404, which restricts the right of citizens to put referenda on the ballot. In North Dakota, HB 1203 makes it legal to run over and kill pipeline protestors. In Minnesota, Republicans want to make protesting police killings a serious crime. Republicans in Washington state want to make protesting a Class C felony. In Michigan, Republicans proposed a bill that would prohibit unionists from picketing. Republicans in Iowa also introduced new legislation to increase penalties for protesting. The Intercept goes into greater detail on these cases.
Betraying a contempt for the Judiciary, Republicans in Florida introduced HJR 121, which permits legislators to overrule any judicial ruling they don’t like – effectively abolishing the Judiciary. In Washington, a similar Republican bill has been filed. Similar confusion with the function of the Judiciary seems to have been at work in Alabama, New Jersey, and Kansas. Louisiana Republicans have enacted a “Blue Lives Matter” law that makes “resisting arrest” – a vague and often unprovable charge already abused by police – a felonious hate crime. The law is now in effect.
And it’s only been a month since the inauguration.
The DNC has a long road ahead. For many Democrats regaining Congressional seats and rebuilding a decimated party are going to seem like the main – if not the only – objective. If we are really lucky, regaining seats by doing a better job of reaching out to working class voters will be the reason.
Democrats also have a huge todo list. They must rewind and unroll all these assaults on democracy at the state level, dismantle a heavily militarized American police state, reinstate the Constitutional holiness of warrants and probable cause, provide oversight of a surveillance machine that can easily suck up all our text messages and emails. Democrats must reform our foreign policy, end shady dealings with autocrats (Putin isn’t the only one), get rid of FISA courts – and finally (and symbolically) retire the Patriot Act.
Otherwise – what’s the point of winning if there is no democracy?
There are two thoughtful articles that express both my frustration with, and hope for, Trump voters.
The first was written the day after the election by Jamelle Bouie and the title says it all – “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter.” In a nutshell, Trump voters brought their racism, privilege, and recklessness into the voting booth, completely disregarding everything and everyone Trump – with his extreme and well-known positions – promised to harm. These voters knew full well what they were doing and they should have known better.
And it wasn’t just the racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Trump voters also chose to destroy public schools, dismantle medical care for 40 million citizens, wreck environmental protections, and they actually chose to give themselves a tax increase so that a few billionaires could pay lower taxes or none at all.
The word “idiots” doesn’t even begin to describe them. But there’s also a more charitable view.
Justin Gest writes in POLITICO (“The Two Kind of Trump Voters”) that Democrats have to make a distinction between the new crop of proto-fascists in the GOP (along with their supporters) and the other numbskulls who cast their irresponsible votes for Donald Trump.
Gest writes off those whom Bouie does – he calls them the Nationalists – but holds out hope for those he calls the Exasperated, voters who were disappointed by Democratic Neoliberalism and wanted to try something new.
These Exasperated voters also heard the same Mexican rapist rhetoric we all did, and there’s no letting them off the hook. Bouie’s arguments apply completely. They voted for Trump because their [only slightly less ideological] racism and xenophobia made anyone else’s concerns invisible and irrelevant. But they still voted to screw their neighbors.
But Gest has a point. Many of the Exasperated were once Democrats, whether Southern Democrats or Democrats from Southie. Just from the numbers we know that many of them voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but changed their minds in 2016. Gest suggests that they may be irresponsible, unreliable, and unpredictable – but they aren’t stupid. They will turn on Trump as quickly as they did on Obama if he can’t deliver. And they can smell a bullshitter a mile away.
Democracy is dirty, reckless and untidy. And so is the American electorate. But Democrats have to reach out to these Exasperated voters and – most importantly – have to offer them something new and real – and something they honestly intend to deliver.
It is one of life’s great joys to have adult children I can argue with. Smart people with the right and the obligation to keep the old man honest. The other night I was having a phone conversation with my son, who expressed his annoyance with not only right-wing flacks but with flaming liberals.
And I was included on his list.
I argued that we can’t reach agreement with the Far Right because (1) they are highly averse to facts; and that (2) most of our disagreements can’t be settled with a New England stone wall (you live your life, I’ll live mine on my side of the wall) – when the Far Right’s idea of freedom really means the right to take civil rights away from a multicultural majority. And (3) – I questioned whether, at the end of the day, any amount of polite chitchat would ever really change their commitment to taking my rights away.
My son disagreed and said – well, you have to start somewhere. You will reach some of them. And anyway – what’s the alternative, dad?
This, of course, was the grown-up way of looking at the problem. And maybe my grown up son is right. Maybe we just start where luck and serendipity take us.
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Another of life’s great joys is to have second chances to spend time with your grown children. We are in South Carolina for a few weeks avoiding the New England winter, and our daughter flew down to run in a race and to visit with friends.
Yesterday we were all sunning ourselves in Waterfront Park in Charleston when a man with an NRA cap and a “Lifetime NRA member” T-shirt stopped in front of our bench and asked, “Where y’all from?” Massachusetts, we answered. “Where ’bouts in Massachusetts?” he pressed us. I replied by asking if he knew where New Bedford is. “Hell, I was BORN in New Bedford. 115 Pleasant Street. But I haven’t been back in 40 years.”
We talked about the area. He remembered random local geography and history, including Joshua Slocum, and he couldn’t remember the name of “that Portuguese sausage,” Linguica, I said. “Linguica,” he repeated with a happy grin. “Yeah, that’s really good.”
My new NRA friend stood in the sun a moment remembering New England, while I sat under one of South Carolina’s famous palmetto trees enjoying the winter warmth. Then he stepped forward and offered his hand and gave me his name, and I did the same. And we shook hands like we meant it.
I have my doubts, but my son is probably right. We have to start somewhere. And maybe the only things we will ever have in common with those of wildly different political views are things like food and warmth.
But maybe a shared appreciation for what we all bring to each other is enough to make that start.
Donald Trump campaigned with a promise to deport three million people. A mass expulsion of this scale would not only be a human catastrophe but also a civil liberties nightmare and a drain on local law enforcement agencies expected to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known by the strangely appropriate acronym ICE.
As a result many cities have enacted “sanctuary” or “welcome” policies designed to keep immigrant populations safe. Most of these policies restrict cooperation with ICE in some way. However, on January 25th the Trump administration retaliated by issuing an Executive Order which cuts off federal funds to so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” a move yet to be tested in the courts.
In an ironic reversal, it now falls to Liberal states and cities to use the Constitution’s 10th Amendment (states rights) provisions to resist oppressive Executive Orders.
Closer to home, it seems only natural that New Bedford – a city known for Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a strong underground railroad during slavery, and a vibrant immigration population today – would be a Sanctuary City. But New Bedford is afraid of joining several other Massachusetts localities – Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Hampden County, Holyoke, Lawrence, Northhampton, Somerville, and Springfield – in resisting the president’s xenophobic decrees.
But momentum and resistance is growing. There are now hundreds of Sanctuary Cities throughout the United States. In addition, there are four Sanctuary states – California, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Colorado – with varying protections for immigrants.
A malignant group with a benign name, the Center for Immigration Studies, echoes Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants are rapists and criminals. However, the facts are quite different. An article in the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s factcheck.org cites not only ICE data itself, but law enforcement officials and the results of a University of California study debunking claims like Trump’s. There is no spike in crime in cities with immigrants, and law enforcement would prefer to hear from those impacted by crime rather than drive them underground.
But Sanctuary is nothing new. In fact, it’s an ancient concept with roots in all the Abrahamic faiths.
During the Reagan years hundreds of Central Americans found refuge in Catholic churches offering protection from murderous regimes supported by Reagan Republicans. Though there was, and still is, no legal basis in the United States for a religious institution to offer asylum, the sight of armed federal agents storming a church would have been shocking. By 1987 over 440 American cities had become “sanctuary cities.”
The Catholic tradition of offering sanctuary to refugees, the persecuted, and even criminals stretches back to at least Medieval times. Even after the Catholic Church no longer ruled an empire it still offered sanctuary and it was recognized. For over a thousand years, for example, Britain recognized asylum granted by the Church.
In the Islamic tradition, Muhammad had to flee from Mecca to Medina, and the hijrah (migration) is regarded as an example of the Islamic obligation to provide protection from oppression, even to non-Muslims:
And if anyone of the disbelievers seeks your protection, then grant him protection […] and then escort him to where he will be secure. (Surah 9:6)
It might interest those who claim to be guided by scripture that the idea of Sanctuary is also found in the Old Testament.
According to one of the first stories in the Bible, after Cain murdered his brother Abel he fled to the land of Nod. There he built a city called Enoch, named after his son. Thus, according to tradition, the first human city was founded on both a crime and an act of redemption.
In another Bible passage, before the Israelites were permitted to cross the Jordan into Canaan, they were instructed to build cities of refuge (arei miklat) where those guilty of manslaughter could flee to avoid blood retribution. The cities were run by Levites who, everyone knew, would treat the new citizens and their fellow human beings fairly. Unlike the current presidency.
Today the New Sanctuary Movement is ecumenical and not even always Christian. In many communities Jewish, Quaker, Episcopal, and Unitarian congregations have joined Catholics in protecting their most vulnerable friends and neighbors – renewing not only the ancient traditions of their faiths but putting faith into practice.
On January 30th, as soon as a US-born NASA engineer set foot back on US soil, agents from Homeland Security placed him in a holding cell and demanded that he give up the PIN to his cellphone.
Sidd Bikkannavar, an employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, was stopped and questioned about his South Asian heritage, although he was born in the United States and his personal information was already known to officials from his Global Entry application.
Bikkanavar was shown a “Blue Paper,” which stated that he was obliged to give up the PIN number to his phone – although, according to Hassan Shibly, executive director of CAIR in Florida, American citizens are under no such obligation.
Thus Bikkannavar was denied his rights as an American citizen because he was racially profiled.
On the other hand, perhaps none of us has all the rights we think we do.
The NASA engineer’s experience is a sobering reminder that – since the Patriot Act was signed – there are no Fourth Amendment protections within a one-hundred mile deep coastal and border zone. If you live within 100 miles of Canada, Mexico, or the ocean, you live in what the ACLU calls a Constitution free zone.
WIRED recently offered travelers some suggestions for keeping prying eyes out of your personal data. In a nutshell – don’t re-enter the country with much to show authorities if you don’t want to have to change all your passwords after your Constitutional rights have been violated. If you’re a non-citizen, it’s trickier.
Most Americans, if they were in Bikkannavar’s position, would give up their rights in a heartbeat if it meant not being delayed. Most Americans, if in the engineer’s shoes, would give up their rights in a second if it meant not being inconvenienced by the confiscation of an expensive gadget.
But this is a calculation no one should have to make.
The Fourth Amendment unambiguously requires warrants and probable cause to protect citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. What happened to Bikkannavar was not simply unreasonable – it was a violation of his Constitutional rights:
Amendment IV – The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The “Constitution Free Zone” is only 100 miles deep but it affects approxmiate 200 million Americans:
Donald Trump’s Executive Orders are causing a lot of fear and insecurity in New Bedford’s immigrant community, resulting in a dramatic increase in demand for the Immigrants’ Assistance Center’s (IAC) services. Now more than ever the IAC needs your support.
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The IAC will be hosting another community forum on Saturday, February 25th, 10-12am, at 58 Crapo Street in New Bedford. The purpose will be to give the immigrant community an overview of the impact of the Trump presidency. Come and learn about rights and risks.
Next month, on March 31, 2017 from 6pm-10pm, the IAC will be hosting a fundraiser at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Harbor View Room at 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford. Tickets are $50 per person.
Don’t stop with that fundraising ticket. If you can spare the cash, support the IAC generously with a bigger donation. They are going to need more resources than any of us can imagine right now.
For numerous reasons I have never liked golf. My apologies to those of you who see something in it besides a bunch of old guys hacking away at $4 balls with $500 clubs. Maybe the time outside can be a salve for a stressed-out businessman. Maybe there’s something to it after all. But it’s a ridiculous game played by goofy looking people in lime green pants, weird shoes and weird hats. Just look at the smirking grifter in the photo.
Worse, it’s a rigged game. All sorts of handicapping schemes give free points to lousy players. And usually the lousy players get their free points, well, because that’s what gentlemen deserve out on the links.
Sort of like Capitalism.
Capitalists get their profits from the sweat and ingenuity of people who work for them – and then pocket the cash. Over time, as a class, Capitalists become wealthier and wealthier, while over time workers struggle to keep the lights on. Labor and business have always played an adversarial game, and the system has always been rigged in favor of business.
Because, in the language of golf, the duffers get all the handicaps.
Two points for union-busting. Two points for right-to-work laws. Two points for anti-union legislation. Two points for keeping the minimum wage below survival wages. Two points for saddling working people with taxes while the super-rich get tax shelters. Ten points for making sure members of Congress are all millionaires. Five points for a stacked Supreme Court. Five points for making housing, education, and medical costs unbearably high. Ten points for receiving free oil, mineral, and gas drilling rights on public land. Ten points for producing goods and saddling the public with the resulting remediation costs and Superfund cleanups. Five points for preventing municipalities from competing with monopolies by offering citizens broadband services. A hundred points for government bailouts. Twenty points for R&D grants. Fifty points for bringing a business to the state. A hundred points for a decade free of paying taxes on that business. Fifty points for the state picking up the tab for worker training. Five hundred points for Citizens United. And so on.
And still – with all these corporate giveaways – they whine that they can’t compete.
But when you have every advantage and you still can’t win, there’s something wrong with the game.
19th century Socialists, specifically Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, thought they were living in the End Times of Capitalism – a system they saw rapidly approaching the limits of human and natural exploitation. It would only be a matter of years, they thought, before its injustices, contradictions and cyclical crises would lead workers in European democracies to reject and replace the system with Socialism.
These old Socialists never anticipated our hyper-predatory 21st Century Capitalism with its even more obscene levels of income inequality, and they never thought for a second that feudal states like China or Russia could be shoe-horned into their model of European political evolution. In Russia, the Narodniks thought they could adapt Marxism, but Marx himself had doubts. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels corresponded with Russian revolutionaries like Plekhanov. But Engels died in 1895, a generation before the Bolsheviks came to power.
The authoritarian states that arose out of Communism were neither foreseen nor advocated by Marx or Engels. But the two “Marxists” did anticipate Capitalist globalism, chronic market manipulation, the necessity of government bailouts, monopolies, privatization of public resources, and the rise of authoritarianism – all to sustain a system that, in the long run, is unsustainable.
The 2016 election was many things. On the one hand it was a last gasp of American White Privilege. And on the other the election was a sweeping rejection of Neoliberalism – a belief that liberal democracy is somehow compatible with robber barons, hedge fund managers, secret trade deals, market manipulation, monopolies, mass incarceration and spying on citizens. Pretty much – Capitalism.
The Republican working class rejected Neoliberalism because it hadn’t been doing much for them lately – especially in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Instead, they let themselves be duped by an Orange Mussolini who dazzled them with race baiting, Jesus, and a return to coal mines. The Democratic working class was more hopeful that reducing the crushing costs of education and healthcare might keep them afloat. But both the GOP and the DNC were selling a similar bill of goods to similarly duped constituencies.
And even though they gave it one last shot, Democrats could no longer sell the Neoliberal product they’d been hawking for 30 years. In fact, there were so many young Democrats who had lost faith in Capitalism that the DNC had to resort to subterfuge to derail an old Democratic Socialist offering better ideas.
bernie
So, for the moment, Advanced Capitalism is still alive under Trump. Just barely.
White Nationalists and Evangelicals may think the Trump administration has finally brought them to the Promised Land. Liberals may think the recent series of vicious Executive Orders are nothing less than the rollback of social progress of the last hundred years. And some may call all this weird nastiness “populism.” But what we are really witnessing is a team of private physicians tending to a rich, geriatric patient who is dying. Mr. Moneybags has brought in a team of doctors and lawyers to save himself and his legacy. Only most, like him, are hacks.
The Trump administration’s unprecedented number of billionaires, financial manipulators, and retired military is the logical result (if not the last resort) of a system that can no longer trust its own citizens or coexist with nature and democracy to ensure its survival. At his Inauguration the “populist” Mr. Moneybags made a point of surrounding himself with fellow billionaires, making it abundantly clear whose interests he really intends to serve.
Since the little people started yammering about income inequality, demanding the protection of rivers, oceans and the ecosphere, and calling for real democracy – it was obvious things would have to change. It would be necessary to bring in the Big Guns to gut all the institutions that protect and serve these Bolsheviks, ingrates, Saul-Alinskians, and Welfare Queens – remind them who’s Boss. Even the usual neoliberal technocrats could no longer be trusted with the reins of government. Thus the billionaires, the generals, the proto-fascists were recruited for the job. Put people in charge of the justice apparatus who can guarantee there will be no justice.
No doubt these are acts of desperation, but desperate times – for billionaires – call for desperate measures.
The midterm 2018 elections will be here before we know it. All the promises of security, prosperity, White American renewal, replacing science with scripture, and making America “great again” will ultimately be doomed to failure. The coal industry is gone. The robots are coming. The White House is criminally incompetent, ham-handed in its propaganda efforts, and its plans are often little more than half-baked talking points. The deliriously happy billionaires and hucksters who have been tapped to save Capitalism are so focused on stuffing dollars into their own pockets that it will create an unintended form of transparency.
If democracy does survive, and even a modicum of common-sense prevails, I have to believe Americans will finally see the real picture – and reject Trump and his kleptocracy.
But what then for Democrats? Double down on Neoliberalism? Or something different? Maybe not exactly what those old Socialists had in mind – but something rational, equitable, and fair. A game that isn’t fixed. Something that puts people before obscene profit, something that can survive on its own without crisis or strongmen. Something that will elevate the lives of all Americans – not just those living in their gilded towers.
Something that would truly make America great again.
Once again, politics are local – and here are some political things of interest right in our own backyard.
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If you are a Massachusetts Democrat, check out Kate Donoghue’s Democratic Dispatch. This has many items of interest, typically Boston-centric, but her recent letter contains much good advice for people interested in jumping into state politics.
Now for the really good stuff – the upcoming town caucuses. The following comes from Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders’ progressive organization (I hope others of you will join).
Over the coming weeks, the Dartmouth Democratic Party will be convening to decide who shall represent the people of Massachusetts at the 2017 Massachusetts Democratic State Convention as Delegates and Alternates. These are positions which can help decide important decisions for the future of the party, such as platform and rules.
You have an opportunity to participate in this election (or even run for a Delegate or Alternate position yourself!) by turning up at your local caucus:
At the 2017 caucus, delegates and alternates will be elected to represent the people of Massachusetts at the Massachusetts State Convention.
In order to qualify to vote, you need to:
Be registered to vote at your current address, and within the Democratic Party, by the time of your meeting. If you are unsure of your registration status, you can go here to check. If you need to register to vote, or update your current registration, you can do so here: if you register last-minute, be sure to bring proof that you have registered with you to the meeting.
Be present at the caucus at the date and time listed (see caucus lists). There is no absentee or proxy voting.
Be at least 18 years old by September of 2018.
No one shall be denied admittance (even people not registered to vote may observe), and no one shall be required to pay any fee to participate or vote.
If you would like to run as a Delegate or Alternate…
Indicate your interest to run when you arrive, so your name can be included on the ballot.
You will be allowed to make a two minute speech, and distribute materials to promote your candidacy, so come prepared!
Though each candidate will be voted on individually, you can join with friends and fellow volunteers to create a slate of candidates with shared goals and platform policies, and campaign together.
If you were not elected as a delegate by the caucus and are a person with disabilities, a minority or youth, you are eligible to apply to the Democratic State Committee for selection as an add-on delegate.
If you are elected, you will either need to pay a $75 fee to the state party by April 7th to receive your credentials to the State Convention, or submit a low income fee waiver form. Waiver forms will be available after the caucus. If you run, but are not elected, no fee will be charged.
We no longer have a balance of power in our tripartite form of government, and you can count the number of congressmen who fight for working people tirelessly on your fingers and toes.
So in Congress every Democratic vote is precious. Progressives know how often a “for sale” sign pops up outside the offices of some Democrats. The Democratic Party passively betrays voters when it can’t even work up the enthusiasm to compete in some Congressional districts. In Florida, billionaire Stephen Bittel, a pal of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, literally purchased the Democratic state committee chair. And, for a price, liberals like Andrew Cuomo even become enemies of Constitutional protections.
There are too many back-stabbers in the party right now. We’re past due for some house-cleaning.
Within the Democratic Party there is a group called the Blue Dog Coalition. These are Democrats in name only, many from Red states, who vote Republican and from time to time become Republicans without anyone taking particular note. In the 115th Congress their coalition consists of Sanford Bishop (GA-2), Jim Cooper (TN-5), Jim Costa (CA-16), Henry Cuellar (TX-28), Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5), Dan Lipinski (IL-3), Stephanie Murphy (FL-7), Collin Peterson (MN-7), Kurt Schrader (OR-5), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9), Mike Thompson (CA-5), and Filemon Vela (TX-34).
Nancy Pelosi appointed this last Blue Dog – Vela – to the DNC Steering Committee, apparently concerned less with his politics than with some sort of regional formula.
Then there are the out-and-out traitors.
During last year’s DNC platform committee meetings, six members appointed by Clinton – Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, Illinois Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, former EPA administrator Carol Browner, former Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, Ohio State Rep. Alicia Reece and Paul Booth – all voted with CEO Bonnie Schaefer and former California Rep. Howard Berman to oppose the $15 minimum wage amendment. Shaefer and Berman were appointed by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
The DNC platform, which has yet to be rewritten, still supports fracking, the TPP, and refuses to condemn Israeli settlements.
In Colorado, Hillary Clinton’s SuperPAC consultants torpedoed a “Romneycare” single-payer healthcare proposal.
On January 12th, thirteen Democratic Senators voted with Republicans and Big Pharma, and against reducing drug costs for working people: Michael Bennet D-CO), Cory Booker D-NJ), Maria Cantwell D-WA), Thomas Carper D-DE), Bob Casey D-PA), Chris Coons D-DE), Joe Donnelly D-IN), Martin Heinrich D-NM), Heidi Heitkamp D-ND), Bob Menendez D-NJ), Patty Murray D-WA), Jon Tester D-MT), and Mark Warner D-VA). Even Ted Cruz, a Republican, voted for the lower prices.
Corey Booker not only voted against lower-cost healthcare, he is also a supporter of Betsy DeVos’s school choice programs. Bankrolled by not only Big Pharma, Booker is beholden to hedge funds that champion “school choice.”
The all-Democrat Baltimore City Council blocked a $15 minimum wage increase when it allied with business. It was remniscent of big city party machine politics under Rahm Emanuel, in which Obama’s “Bannon” turned out to be a union-busting thug.
On February 8th West Virginia’s Joe Manchin (D) voted to confirm Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General. As Sessions entered the chamber Manchin reportedly flashed him a thumbs-up.
With Democrats like this, who the hell needs Republicans?
You may not live in a state or congressional district with one of these back-stabbers, but you can certainly help “primary” them – see that they have progressive competition in the primaries, donate to their opponents, and help out in races in neighboring swing states. A few resources:
The Electoral College, like it or not, is how presidents are elected. It may be an anachronism, it may be an exception to the way all other elections work in the United States, and it may be an exception to the way political leaders are chosen in any other democracy, but it’s what the U.S. Constitution requires. And it’s not likely to change without a Constitutional convention – even though most Americans hate it. Two-thirds of us, in fact. Or 70%, depending on whom you ask.
Anyone who has driven across this vast country knows that dense urban areas – where the majority of Americans actually live – are quite different, demographically and politically, from more sparsely-settled regions. Clinton won in what some are calling urban archipelagos, and she won the popular vote by an almost three million vote plurality – the second time in sixteen years the Electoral College has subverted direct democracy.
Supporters of the Electoral College usually blame it on James Madison. But Madison thought the people at large were more qualified to choose an Executive. Detractors of the system point out that the Electoral College was a compromise with slave states – several with more slaves than owners – concerned they would always have fewer popular votes than other state at a time when slaves were property, not people, and definitely not voters.
But the fact is – today’s American population is overwhelmingly urban. Almost 80% in 2000, and 81% in 2010 live in urban areas. And as we become even more urban, the Electoral College will increasingly subvert democratic selection of a president. The Electoral College’s “winner takes all” mechanism leads to voter disenfranchisement. The system also gives a mathematical advantage to rural (white) America, which in turn creates institutional disenfranchisement of minority voters. The Electoral College is based on the odd principle that states – not the people themselves – are vested with the right to choose a president. And, increasingly, it’s a small number of states, with disproportionate focus on rural white America, that decide the presidency.
Some say the system is a stabilizing force for democracy – but if this is so then why was it not proposed for all elections? Once vocal critics of the institution, Republicans since 2000 have become converts to the Electoral College and often say that voters are a mob from which democracy needs to be protected – although we certainly weren’t spared from demagoguery this time around. Libertarians are more skeptical – your vote doesn’t count anyway, so why worry? In fact, one suggests, let’s just formalize this lunacy by abolishing the popular vote.
Meanwhile, Liberals have been trying to come up with ways to tweak a broken system. The National Popular Vote bill is one such workaround that creates a compact between states that holds all accountable to awarding the vote to the winner of the popular vote. But Republicans have been hostile to the idea since it dawned on them the system was rigged in their favor. Here in New England, Massachusetts joined the compact in 2010, followed by Vermont in 2011, with Rhode Island following suit in 2013. Maine, our beautiful but occasionally mad neighbor, ratified the compact in the Senate but defeated it in the state House two years later. Check to see the status in your state.
But this doesn’t really fix the underlying problem. The U.S. Constitution still has one more major birth defect affecting elections – one that must be corrected. Although change seems more unlikely than ever, it’s the only way to make presidential votes count. And patience may be required. The 27th Amendment didn’t immediately make it into the Bill of Rights, and it took 202 years to ratify.
With pressure, it works. Over the years Constitutional amendments have fixed a number of election problems. The 12th Amendment was the nation’s first fix to the Electoral College; it completely replaced rules which used a type of ranked voting. The 15th Amendment gave former slaves the vote. The 17th Amendment replaced the appointment of Senators with the popular vote. The 19th Amendment gave women the vote. The 23rd Amendment added the District of Columbia to the Electoral College. The 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes. The 26th Amendment gave younger adults the right to vote. With all these changes, an elite slaveholder version of “democracy” was slowly transformed into one that includes nearly all of us.
And with one more refinement, a vote for president could be something that truly counts.
I have done the unthinkable. I’ve joined the Democratic Party.
It was a painful decision because the party – long long ago a friend of working people – has abandoned its principles and, as Robert Reich writes, its only real friend right now is money.
Plus, I had to look in the mirror. We now live in a world in which no one can afford to remain a political independent or a purist. And as one Portland, Oregon, activist puts it – “you have to vote in the primary because that’s when you get to vote for who you want; in the general election in November you get to vote for who the party wants.” The parties have had their say far too long.
I’ve also joined Our Revolution, a group with a #DemEnter strategy – join the party and reform it. Or from Hillary and Bill’s perspective – we’re coming for your party.
And it is their party. At the moment.
But let’s be honest. The Democratic Party is hollowed-out roadkill, it’s vital juices seeping into the breakdown lane. It’s a tenement in foreclosure. It’s a patient on life-support. Not only the working class and rust belt states, but state parties have been victims of the DNC’s neglect. Below is a picture of the balance of political power in the United States. Red and blue trifectas indicate states where a single party has control of all three branches of government. Read Robert Reich again for the gruesome numbers. And note that Massachusetts does not number among the strongest of the Blue States.
I have an unsubstantiated theory – and I hope a political scientist will set me straight – that third parties live in political ecosystems and exist due to the stabiliity of their more mainstream cousins. Especially in nations where Duverger’s “Law” applies. There are both “left” and “right” ecosystems. Without the Republican Party Libertarians would have had nothing from which to steal six million votes. Without the Democratic Party, the Greens would be substantially weaker. Look at the blue on the map above and then do a bit of research – and you’ll find these are precisely the states where the Green Party is strongest.
So if we want stronger Green Parties – and Working Families and Socialist caucuses and progressive alliances – elsewhere in the nation, an argument can be made for attaching paddles to the flatlined Democratic Party and pumping a couple thousand volts into its chest. If the procedure succeeds we may discover the party actually has a heart. And not only the patient himself but his close relatives will be saved.
Is there anyone who would like to join me in creating a chapter of Our Revolution in New Bedford / Dartmouth / Fairhaven?
We’ve had a few weeks to mourn. It’s time to organize.
Following the hostile corporate takeover of our government, per Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages, we’ve moved from denial, to anger, to bargaining, and on to depression. But damned if any of us should accept the death of democracy. This is what we’re trying to prevent.
It is important to keep harping away at the fact that this administration does not have a mandate, that the president lost by almost 3 million votes, that the nation is 86% urban and, as such, we are disenfranchised by a broken electoral system that gives rights to states, not people. And that this administration does not represent American values.
While some point to the election results as a vindication and re-empowerment of White Christian majority culture, the demographics keep moving toward a browner nation. More importantly, the election demonstrated how easily White Evangelicals could turn their backs on not only democracy but their own professed religious values.
White Evangelicals are comfortable taking rights away from non-Whites, non-Christians, and non-citizens, and embracing an autocrat. But don’t blame it on religion. It’s the “whiteness” talking. By way of contrast the Black church has historically done precisely the opposite – shown a strong commitment to social justice, called for broadening democracy, and shown reverence for the Old Testament prophets who spoke truth to tyrannical power.
In over six hundred passages, the Judeo-Christian bible is filled with rape, murder, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It is truly a wonder it isn’t banned from more Southern and Midwestern libraries. In Deuteronomy the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivvites, and Jebusites all get slaughtered, to the last infant, by someone’s idea of God. In Hosea the Samarians get theirs too – “their infants shall be dashed, and their pregnant women shall be ripped up.”
But if we hate ISIS we should remember that our own “majority culture” is likewise founded not only on violence but on a violent ideology. Multiculturalism rarely gets sympathetic treatment in the western Bible. “To the winner belong the spoils,” as Donald Trump reminded us recently. Losers are annihilated, their lands (and oil) are seized, and those not murdered are sent into exile or barred from entry. For centuries scripture has served as a virtual cookbook for colonialism.
For some the Bible is a literal document and the intolerance found within must be observed and respected as God’s word. This seems to be the preferred version of Christianity for many White Americans. For most the document is a repository of sometimes conflicting cultural and spiritual thought and the intolerance must be viewed in a historical context – and then rejected. The positive aspects of religions preserve the heart of their ethical traditions.
The book of Exodus warns us to “not oppress the foreigner” – for we were strangers ourselves in Egypt. The Book of Leviticus tells us we can not merely “tolerate” foreigners but must treat them as fellow citizens. The Book of Ruth (the Moabite) recounts a story about honor, kindness and loyalty – one involving a foreigner who becomes accepted by her new family and people.
One look at the new White House raises the question – where are all the moderate Judeo-Christians? With the Twitter Administration now filled with (white supremacist) Christian fundamentalists and a supposedly “devout” Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, their treatment of immigrants and other faiths highlights a certain religious hypocrisy. Those who play Christians on TV, including Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, have sung Trump’s praises. Realty TV’s “Rabbi to the Stars” Shmuley Boteach supports Trump and even chief-anti-Semite Steve Bannon.
It’s safe to say that most religious people in America are appalled by the country’s new direction. Yesterday I got an email from a Jewish peace group working with Muslims to fight Islamophobia. The meeting was taking place in a Quaker Meeting House. This said a lot about how most religions view our culture, and I was moved by the expression of people really living their faith in a way that wasn’t doing violence to others. But with America’s White Evangelicals it’s a different story.
In 2015 a World Magazine poll showed only 3% of Evangelicals supporting Trump, scarcely better than Hillary Clinton. By mid-2016 the Christian Post was running a piece with the self-explanatory title, “No, Donald Trump Doesn’t Have Majority Support Among Evangelical Voters,” showing that 64% of Evangelicals had voted for someone else in the primaries – but Trump’s numbers were rising. By last November, however, exit polls showed 80% of Evangelicals had voted for Trump in the general election. So much for religious principles.
Evangelicals comprise a major part of the Tea Party. Evangelicals (and right-wing Jews) also make up a major part of the Islamophobia network. They regard Islam as a political movement, or worse, and not a religion. Or, if they do recognize Islam as a religion, it’s as a competitor in a zero-sum Clash of Civilizations game. A Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) article says Evangelicals view Middle East realities in a Biblical context. A Pew Forum survey showed that they have the most negative views of Muslims of all Americans. Their views have long been uttered by “mainstream” Republicans like Steve King (R-Iowa) who calls the United States a White Christian country and denigrates the contributions of others.
There are, of course, notable exceptions. At least some Evangelicals despise the 45th president. And in many ways religious American Muslims and Christians share a common social conservatism. But in general, Evangelicals have traded in their Christian charity and professed moral values for an opportunity to grab power. And this is what they’ve historically done.
Americans at that time had a choice between [..] a sincerely born-again Christian who taught Sunday school in his Baptist Church and was married faithfully to one woman. His name was Jimmy Carter. The other choice was a twice-married Hollywood actor […] whose wife practiced astrology. […] Christians overwhelmingly chose Ronald Reagan not because he was the most religious candidate but because he had the quality people thought was most necessary at the time, and that is leadership.
Jeffress continued:
[the] same-sex marriage ruling actually made evangelicals more open to a secular candidate like Donald Trump […] many evangelicals have come to the conclusion we can no longer depend upon government to uphold traditional biblical values. Let’s just let government solve practical problems like immigration, the economy and national security. And if that’s all we’re looking for government to do, then we don’t need a spiritual giant in the White House. We need a strong leader and a problem solver, hence many Christians are open to a secular candidate like Donald Trump.
For Evangelicals like Jeffress, it was the failure of “government to uphold traditional biblical values” – specifically, not being permitted to deny civil liberties to gays – that made them give up on democracy and embrace a strong man, a caudillo, a führer. For Evangelicals, democracy is not about equal rights for all but about replacing the Bill of Rights with a Protestant Bible and privileging their own ethno-religious group. And with the right man sitting in the Oval Office perhaps they’ll get the Christian shariah they’ve always wanted.
It is an Orwellian abuse of language to describe “religious freedom” as the right to oppress others or to take rights away from them. But this is precisely the vision Republicans and their corporate, religious and racist constituencies have. Liberals and Progressives have a truer vision for America – one that guarantees everyone the same rights. It is a vision our nation has steadily enlarged upon, and it is a vision still seen in our bruised and violated Constitution.
A vision we need to keep faith with now, more than ever.
We’ve had some big shocks lately, and people are spending a lot of time in a reactive mode – signing petitions, making phone calls, and attending rallies. As it should be. But the long game is to strengthen and democratize the Democratic Party and the progressive ecosystems in and around it.
But here in Massachusetts democracy is in big trouble. The state ranks last in competitiveness in political races, and in many districts Republicans and Democrats don’t even bother to field candidates. As an example, “Mexican Wall Slave Labor” sheriff Tom Hodgson ran unchallenged in Bristol County. In the 2016 Democratic Primary the party fielded uncontested candidates for U.S. Congress in all nine districts: there was not one challenger. Hand-picked candidates don’t give voters anything to really vote for.
And state government is almost as bad. Half the candidates for the Governor’s Council ran unchallenged. In County Sheriff Democratic primary elections, six out of fourteen ran unopposed and two slots were never filled. In almost half the state legislature primaries and in 29 out of 42 state senate races there was no challenger.
Democrats
The Democratic Party seems to run on auto-pilot in many towns, and very few people know who the pilot is.
Picking my own town as an example, the Dartmouth Democratic Town Committee is not listed with the state Democratic Party. It is not in their town and ward database, and the two massdems.org staffers I called and emailed were unable to tell me if such a committee even existed. Another Bernie guy, Warren Lynch, ready to jump into Democratic politics, couldn’t find his local committee on massdems.org either, so he put together his own directory. While anecdotal, this example illustrates a common complaint – that superdelegates and lack of competitiveness are the least of the Democratic Party’s problems. Participation in the party at a local level is hampered by disorganization and even secretiveness. By the way, I eventually found the Dartmouth Town Commitee in Lynch’s directory.
Independents and Third Parties
Those registered as Independents miss a chance to influence a political party – any party. No one knows what goes on in the sanctity of the voting booth, so you are free to vote for whomever you like on election day – even the other guys. But the other 364 days of the year – wield some influence! In Massachusetts you can re-register with one of several parties using a register-by-mail form. If you belong to a third party (Greens, Libertarians, United Independents, etc.) check the registration form. The state of Massachusetts seems to add and drop third parties. See this and this for illustrations. I assume there is some method to the madness, but it makes belonging to a third party even more difficult than it already is.
Progressives
Following Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Clinton, and Trump – and taking their cue from the Tea Party – progressive Democrats, Greens, and Independents are about to start challenging uncontested candidates, “primarying” those who behave like Republicans, and offering slates of progressive candidates. In California, progressives recently took control of the state Democratic Party.
Our Revolution was founded by Bernie Sanders and its members are largely Democrats, Greens, Democratic Socialists, and members of progressive alliances. One of Our Revolution’s projects is trying to transform the Democratic Party by compiling a database of party chairs, contacts, and bylaws from local party organizations and encouraging Democrats to re-democratize and re-energize the party. Go to the bottom of this page and join. When the research is complete in every state, you will be able to type in your address and get a listing that shows you the when, what, where, why, and whos of your local party organization.
If you are interested in helping Our Revolution with this research – or simply want to see what these young-ish progressives are up to, sign up to join Our Revolution’s orlocalorganizing team and then install Slack on your desktop and/or mobile devices. The discussions and resources will tell you a lot about the kind of activists signing up. Their #general and #random channels are for general discussion. The #research channel is for those contributing party documents and contacts. Each state and territory has its own channel. The #massachusetts channel was created by O.R. and the #se_massachusetts channel was created by a local organization in Fall River:
The fragmented state of the Left has become a bitter joke in American politics. Right off the top of my head – we have the True-Blue Democrats, the Blue-Dog Democrats, Progressive Democrats of America, Democracy for America, the Green Party, Democratic Socialists of America, Socialist Alternatives, Working Family, and even the Pirate Party. There are likewise a ton of PACs and think tanks devoted to the disparate threads of liberalism, centrism, neoliberalism, progressivism, and socialism. To Republicans, of course, we are all simply “The Left.”
Especially in light of recent events, we might be much more effective if we were a more cohesive “Left.” But we have one donkey-shaped hole into which everyone is supposed to jam all the odd shaped pegs. And we don’t have a parliamentary democracy to make coalitions like this work.
But progressives, at least, can forge cross-party alliances themselves.
In Richmond, California, a refinery town north of San Francisco, two progressive candidates for City Council went up against the Democratic Party establishment as well as a $3 million slush fund set up for Democrats by the Chevron Corporation. And the progressives won.
Both Melvin Willis and Ben Choi were fielded by an independent progressive political organization called the Richmond Progressive Alliance, originally founded by Greens. In addition, both received support from Our Revolution, a party-agnostic progressive organization Bernie Sanders created after the election.
In Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, former labor organizer and author Steve Early writes about Richmond, its Green Party mayor, Gayle McLaughlin (still active today as a councilwoman), and the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), which unites progressive Democrats, Greens, and independents. Given RPA’s support from Our Revolution, it is not a surprise to find a forward by Bernie Sanders in Early’s book.
Although the Democratic Party often describes itself as a big tent, loyalty rules preclude endorsing progressive candidates outside the Big Blue tent. And it’s not yet clear the DNC will ever be a home for progressives. But in alliances – like Our Revolution, the Richmond Progressive Alliance and Working Families – progressives can join together to field candidates whose job #1 is to help everyday people.
It’s an idea progressives should be exploring right here in our little corner of Massachusetts.
Following his inauguration – or, as Trump refers to it, the Day of National Patriotic Devotion – this week has been the unmitigated disaster many people predicted. Besides the Dear Leader’s autocratic decrees, lying to the White House press corps, his swamp-soaked cabinet picks, and his plans to seal the borders to our own Hermit Kingdom, now even some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s mental stability. It’s like something out of a Grade B disaster movie.
Only it’s real.
So If you feel you have to do something — start making calls to your elected officials. A new website called “The 65” (thesixtyfive.org) helps anyone overwhelmed by choice. The “65” refers to the sixty-five million of us who didn’t vote for this mess.
TheSixtyFive.org has a call script for each issue, and it helps you find the phone numbers for elected officials. The 65’s list of issues focuses on fighting the administration’s new iniatives and the Weekly Call to Action highlights one that’s especially time-critical. This week it’s stopping Betsy DeVos’s cabinet appointment.
If you receive email or Facebook requests to sign petitions, make a call instead. You can find your elected officials at the USA.gov website, and if you live in Massachusetts you’ll find your state senators and representatives at malegislature.gov. To spare yourself a bit of typing, you can download contacts in vCard format for all Federal and Massachusetts legislators (most email clients and Gmail use vCard). That way you’ll always have them on speed dial.
Hi, my name is [NAME], and I live in [CITY]. I’m calling to ask my legislator to co-sponsor two important bills that are priority issues for me: the Fundamental Freedoms Act (HD1156/SD992), and the Electronic Privacy Act (HD2870/SD1175). Would [OFFICIAL] be willing to be a co-sponsor on either of these bills?
I just called my representatives and one called back in person, which I very much appreciate. I’m sure in a few weeks my mumbling will be greatly improved.
You get these things all the time – petitions from moveon.org, credo action, change.org, your political, professional and civic organizations, the list goes on.
Safe in your chair, coffee mug in hand, you add your name, zipcode and email address, and – click – you’ve made a difference.
Both the White House and British Parliament offer citizens e-petition sites, and both are basically trash chutes into which voters throw their political engagement and minutes of their life.
The Atlantic Monthly calls the White House site a joke, while the Guardian (UK) calls the British version a farce.
Evgeny Mozorov, an American social networking skeptic, calls it Slacktivism:
‘Slacktivism’ is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space? Given the media’s fixation on all things digital — from blogging to social networking to Twitter — every click of your mouse is almost guaranteed to receive immediate media attention, as long as it’s geared towards the noble causes. That media attention doesn’t always translate into campaign effectiveness is only of secondary importance.
One pundit explains why online petitions are not very effective:
No. The reason is that on the internet no one knows if you’re a dog. So legislators, executives, or administrators who are being lobbied by these petitions don’t know if you are a registered voter in their district, or even if you are an American citizen. They don’t know if you are signing multiple times or if you are signing for other people. They don’t know if you’re a robot, a person, or an alien.
You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing.
Engaging with politicians is also a hot topic in the Indivisible Guide. And even more effective than having to persuade out-of-touch politicians to do the right thing is to vote for those who actually reflect your values.
We all want to do the right thing, and it’s hard to turn down a friend’s request. There are also cases where petitions have made a difference. Recently I added my name to the whitehouse.gov petition calling for Trump to disclose his tax returns – simply because he said nobody cares. It may have been a futile act politically, but the mounting signatures prove him wrong.
Let your judgment be your guide. But start making those calls.
When Donald Trump began mixing right-wing populism with the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, and – well, just about everybody – it brought to mind an old, reptilian strain of fascism and it revived sales of Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis’ book shows us that fascism damn well can happen here. And, yes, that photo above is of an all-too real Nazi rally in Madison Square garden in 1939.
People have been dreading this week, and for good reason.
When the New York Times reviewed Volker Ullrich’s book “Ascent,” it was obvious that the review was not merely about Hitler’s ascent to power but about someone closer to home. Now, with real neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the White House, no one can say “It Can’t Happen Here” was just a piece of fiction.
It’s happened already.
A while ago the New Yorker ran a cartoon with an amusing caption: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, while those who do study history are doomed to stand around helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
So recently I’ve been re-reading Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Arendt begins with the rise of antisemitism and moves on to nationalism, then to how citizens are isolated, the weak are stripped of their humanity, the average guy loses his remaining power by being subsumed into a mob, and how myth and lies become the dominant narrative. The world of “fake news” articles in Facebook streams or denying science is hardly a new one. And the complete and blitzschnellcapitulation by the Republican establishment is shocking, but one that Arendt would have predicted.
Totalitarianism depends on desperation and the suspension of critical thinking – in other words, a society gone mad. Arendt writes:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Last year Republicans managed to turn serious social and economic woes afflicting all Americans into End Times for a very specific constituency. During the presidential conventions last summer, for Democrats the glass was half full – and could topped off at leisure. Yes, they said, there were problems, but the nation had made progress and we were going to make even more. But for Republicans, the glass was totally empty. And shattered. And there were shards of glass in dead babies. White, Christian babies. And Democrats were gunning for the fathers.
By studying the rise of Nazism, Arendt figured out the importance of lies, doubt, insecurity and self-delusion. Her insights still hold today.
So when Trump and his Breitbart buddies make up their own “facts,” declare war on the “lying [mainstream] press” (some of them even use the Nazi word “Lügenpresse”):
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
And when Trump speaks to white crowds and promises to make “America great again,” whitewashing national crimes, institutional racism and promoting American Exceptionalism and Christian White identity:
“The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.”
And when Trump promises: “I’m going to fix everything. Trust me.”
“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”
We can feel the instability beginning this week as Trump begins dismantling all the agencies that protect citizens.
* * *
And, as if he had somehow been reading Arendt himself – perhaps as a cookbook – this week the new president, his press secretary, and his apologists went to war with the press and with facts. Trump ordered media blackouts on a number of federal agencies.
Last year’s election season, with the emergence of an authoritarian candidate, got at least a couple of scholars wondering how a coup might unfold in the United States. Taziz Huq and Tom Ginzburg of the University of Chicago Law School, write:
Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay? To many, the 2016 election campaign may be the immediate catalyst for these questions. But it is structural changes to the socio-economic environment and geopolitical shifts that make the question a truly pressing one. […] By drawing on comparative law and politics experience, we demonstrate that there are two modal paths of democratic decay, which we call authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion that happens simultaneously to three institutional predicates of democracy: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. Over the past quarter century, we show that the risk of reversion has declined, while the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is not exceptional. We evaluate the danger of retrogression as clear and present, whereas we think reversion is much less likely. We further demonstrate that the constitutional safeguards against retrogression are weak. The near-term prospects of constitutional liberal democracy hence depend less on our institutions than on the qualities of political leadership and popular resistance.
We’re at risk. We’re not immune. And our now-gutted Constitution can’t help us. But while a coup may not be in the immediate future, Ginsburg says:
“We’re at this moment where it’s very good to be considering these things.
In most democracies, leaders are elected by popular vote, not some crazy slave era concoction like the Electoral College. And in most parliamentary democracies citizens don’t have to suffer incompetence and corruption without relief. In most democracies there is a provision to hold new elections on a vote of no-confidence. But in the United States we either wait four years to throw the bum out – or we can try to impeach him. There is already a campaign underway to get rid of a president who started his term in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution:
“… no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”
Although conservatives wave away the word “emolument” as vague, it appears in Samuel Johnson’s 1775 dictionary, and still means today what it meant back then: profit; advantage. Constitutional lawyers, including Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout and others from the Brookings Institution, argue that Trump cannot continue profiting from his international “deals,” especially when he is the only president in American history to refuse to divest himself of conflicts-of-interest.
The Trump cabinet, while not yet rubber-stamped by the Republican Congress, is shaping up to be a weird assortment of billionaires, generals, scammers, ideologues, and incompetents. God help us when Rick Perry assumes control of the Dept. of Energy’s nukes. Or when Ben Carson puts up the photo of himself and Jesus in his new HUD office. Before settling down to a nap. Or when Betsy deVos becomes the homeschooling czarina. Or when Jeff Sessions dismantles programs to reign in police violence against black lives.
You think Ferguson was bad…
arsonist
While Bill Clinton was actually impeached for consentual sex with a White House intern, Republicans seem less inclined to hold Trump to the same standard – or any standard at all. Trump’s ex-wife’s divorce deposition included charges that he raped her and there is a very long list of victims of his sexual abuse, including Summer Zervos, who is suing Trump for defamation. This particular case could bring evidence, including videos, to light.
A serial misogynist and abuser and his incompetent cabinet.
Thus, it was appropriate that millions of women marched in hundreds of American cities. By one count as many as 4.6 million women in 600 cities protested the crotch-grabber-in-chief:
Pictures of the march were truly impressive. Washington DC was awash in pink. If you click on this link you can see the crowd from a drone-eye view:
And even before Trump’s inauguration, local demonstrators from the Coalition for Social Justice, the ACLU, and various unions and church groups were protesting Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s publicity-stunted proposal to use prisoners for slave labor to build Trump’s Mexican wall. A photo from Ash Street:
ash-street
* * *
In today’s local paper Robert Xifaras wrote that, in his 87 years, he has never seen so many “‘shameless deplorable unpatriotic divisive malcontents’ who have entered into a conspiracy not only to attack the legitimacy of the election, but to further espouse […] hatred.” Show some respect for the office!
Mr. Xifaras has apparently only recently started following the news since he obviously missed the Birtherism and racism that Trump had a major hand in spreading.
Thomas M. Hodgson, a law enforcement and corrections professional with extensive management, marketing and business experience was appointed Sheriff of Bristol County, May 21, 1997 by Gov. William F. Weld and was sworn in officially June 2, 1997 by then Lt. Gov. Argeo Paul Cellucci.
In 1994, Sheriff Hodgson, a former Maryland Police Lieutenant for Special Operations, joined the staff of the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office and served as Deputy Superintendent of Investigations. He also served five years as a Councilor-at-Large on the New Bedford City Council.
Upon assuming the role of High Sheriff of Bristol County, Sheriff Hodgson immediately set out to implement his goals for corrections reform, public safety and raising the standards for the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office to enhance the primary mission of care and custody of inmates. He instituted structured disciplines for the inmate population and expanded the Work Release programs to include graffiti removal. Several years ago Sheriff Hodgson gained international attention when he instituted the Tandem Work Crew (tethered), a strictly voluntary program for medium security inmates. While initially controversial, these initiatives have proven highly successful over the long term in providing valuable services to and saving money for the cities and towns of Bristol County. The Tandem Work Crews continue to work in communities throughout the County. He banned tobacco products for staff and inmates, removed televisions and weight-lifting equipment from cells, donating the equipment to police departments and the local Boys and Girls Club. These activities were replaced with programs affording educational opportunities, spiritual assistance and vocational aptitude. Sheriff Hodgson implemented a Regional Lock-up at the Ash Street facility for the Bristol County Police Departments in 1998.
Sheriff Hodgson has been successful in bringing together a number of Law Enforcement/Public Safety agencies through the establishment of a Law Enforcement Collaborative, consisting of Bristol County Police Chiefs, State Police and UMASS Dartmouth Police, to share intelligence and resources. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office is a member of the SouthCoast Anti-Crime Team (SCAT) utilizing the combined resources of the Sheriff’s Office and Police Departments to control the proliferation of drugs and other criminal activity in the area. In support of these efforts the Sheriff has also established a Warrant Apprehension Unit, Drug Task Force, Gang Unit and has assigned staff to the federal departments of DEA, ICE, and FBI.
In 1998 the Sheriff went to the Justice Department in Washington D.C. to be briefed on the growing national concern regarding terrorist activities and weapons of mass destruction. Since then he has become a leader in Homeland Security issues and has brought together public safety officials from Local, State and Police, Fire Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), National Guard, Coast Guard, FBI, TSA, other federal agencies, EMS and hospital groups, along with stakeholders from the private sector to form the Bristol County Homeland Security Task Force with the mission of training and preparing Bristol County to have the ability to develop and implement a cohesive response to a critical incident. It has always been the Sheriff’s belief that Public Safety First Responder Groups can best serve the community when working in a collaborative effort. The Sheriff has been invited to address groups throughout the country on the subject of anti-terrorism. The Bristol County Homeland Security Task Force meets monthly and has coordinated several major training exercises throughout the County.
Sheriff Hodgson designed and purchased a state-of-the-art Mobile Command Unit (Incident Command Center) that contains a sophisticated communication platform and other equipment that is available to every community in the County. Incident Command Center training for Police, Fire and Public Safety agencies is on-going, as is planning, implementation, and after action reports for table top exercises for Bristol County cities and towns.
School Programs: Sheriff Hodgson believes that early childhood intervention is the key to reducing the high rate of recidivism. He therefore has aggressively sought grant funding and implemented several school and youth programs, all of which have proven to be highly successful. SLAM (Students Learning a Message) provides the opportunity for student classes to be brought in to the facility for a tour and a presentation by inmates. CHOICES – inmates are taken to schools around the County to speak with students about the importance of making good choices. SAFE TO LEARN – provides training to school department staff, parents and students on proactive and reactive responses to school incidents involving violence or hostage situations. School audits and risk assessment are also provided as part of the program. N.B. JUVENILE COURT – designed to help teenagers overcome drug addiction, provided financial support and a full time coordinator. School training programs include Bullying Programs for school staff, students and parents. The I-SAFE program introduces teachers, administrators and students to internet safety and the many dangers children may be exposed to in Cyber Space. The program has been expanded to include I-SHIELD training for law enforcement personnel, enhancing training opportunities for the I-SAFE program in all communities. BCSO K-9 Unit demonstrations are frequently provided for children at schools and public safety events throughout the county.
Senior Programs: Sheriff Hodgson’s commitment to public safety also includes initiatives for the Senior Community. He has successfully implemented twelve TRIAD programs in Bristol County, namely Easton, Attleboro, North Attleboro, Rehoboth, Mansfield, Swansea, Seekonk, Somerset, New Bedford, Taunton, Fall River and Dartmouth. TRIAD is a collaborative for senior citizens introduced by the National Sheriff’s Association involving the Sheriff’s Department, Police Department and Council on Aging. Also implemented by Sheriff Hodgson is the “R.U.O.K.” Program in which senior citizens sign on to be telephoned every morning as part of a monitoring/response system; PROJECT LIFESAVER, a new bracelet-tracking-device system for Alzheimer patients, as well as the IRIS SCANNING PROGRAM, the latest innovation in identification technology being used to identify lost or missing persons and children. Identity Theft, Crime Awarenes and Disaster Preparedness Seminars have been presented at Senior Centers throughout Bristol County.
Sheriff Hodgson initiated an employee accountability system based on similar programs studied by the Sheriff and his staff at Broward County, Florida and Rikers Island, New York. The Strategic Accountability Management System (SAMS) is a management accountability system designed to hold employees accountable for the work they are performing and the subsequent results intended to encourage teamwork and achieve higher levels of efficiency. Great strides have been made and the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office has been awarded national Accreditation from the American Correctional Association for the Dartmouth House of Correction 2004 – 2007, the Women’s Center 2005 – 2008, and most recently, the Dartmouth House of Correction again for 2007 – 2010.
In 1998, Sheriff Hodgson signed a memorandum of agreement with Carlos Cesar, President of the Autonomous Regional Government of the Azores, Portugal.
Since that time, the Sheriff has worked with the Cesar Administration and now the administration of the newly elected President Vasco Cordeiro on developing reintegration programs for deportees returning to the Azores. Social workers from the Azores travelled to the United States to train with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office social worker staff and have since developed protocols that have provided necessary information to Azorean authorities to make the deported individuals’ return and transition safer and more successful for the individuals and citizens of the Azores.
For the past three years, Sheriff Hodgson, through the generous support of local business owners, has hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for deportees living on the islands of Sao Miguel and Terceira. Children living in orphanages have also been treated to separate Thanksgiving dinners during the same time period.
Several crime prevention and personal safety programs have been introduced to residents in various villages, as well as programs targeting the needs of the elderly.
The Sheriff, working in collaboration with the Azorean Government and representatives of the University of the Azores, has integrated student volunteerism, targeting the needs of children and the elderly. Sheriff Hodgson was able through the generosity of local businesses in Bristol County to purchase a transportation van for the students to travel to various villages to conduct volunteer efforts.
Most recently, Sheriff Hodgson has been actively involved in supporting efforts to prevent force reduction at the United States Airbase in Terceira, Azores, meeting with members of Congress in Washington, D.C. to discuss options for continued full service operations and other options.
Sheriff Hodgson continues to remain actively involved with other sheriffs throughout the United States to call for careful and thoughtful immigration reform with an initial emphasis on securing our borders and points of entry.
Sheriff Hodgson and his wife Jo-Anne reside in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Contact Information:
Thomas M. Hodgson
Bristol County Sheriff’s Office 400 Faunce Corner Road North Dartmouth, MA 02747 Tel: (508) 995-1311 email: info@bcso-ma.org
Democrats need to get it together. There is a lot of unfocused anger at not only Donald Trump but the people who elected him, and it’s not going to win any elections.
Case in point – a bitter piece in the Daily Kos gloating that Kentuckians who voted for Trump will be the first he betrays. Or an I-told-you-so piece in politicsusa.com telling us what we already knew – that white working class voters shot themselves in the foot and will really miss their ACA benefits.
“I told you so” is not a political message, even if it’s true.
But Democrats just killed a bill that would have lowered drug prices, so we can’t blame all the misery on Republicans or the “lemmings” who voted for them. If it were not for Cory Booker and twelve other Democrats, for example, a bill sponsored by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would have allowed pharmaceuticals to be imported from Canada. Even Ted Cruz voted for the bill, but Booker and several others in Big Pharma’s pocket shot it down. These thirteen Democrats are going to have to be “primaried.”
Besides challenging “bought and paid for” Democrats, a new DNC needs to develop a coherent plan to win back working class voters. And not just whites. Consider this discussion between Van Jones and Reverend Charles Williams which alludes to the Democratic Party’s taking black voters for granted. Democrats will also have to come up with an economic narrative more compelling than Republican trickle-down economics, says economist James Kwak. And it shouldn’t be all that difficult. Robert Greene, writing in Dissent, agrees that clarity is paramount, and so is a platform based on solid values:
We must also learn from history the importance of being able to tell a simple, clear story to American voters and potential allies about what matters to us and why. Nuance is important, but balancing that with a clear political agenda is equally crucial.
If all this sounds nice but not very specific, a clear story is one that – among other things – does not involve telling working class voters you’re on their side and then sabotaging lower drug prices.
* * *
A few other things of possible interest:
a petition at moveon.org to tell the White House Press Corps that solidarity is an appropriate response to Trump’s blacklisting and threats against CNN.
Some people are going to wait until Inauguration Day or until all of Trump’s cabinet picks have been confirmed before rending their garments, moving to Nova Scotia, or getting politically engaged.
But if you’re ready to do something right now, you’ve got plenty of options, some close to home:
During the primary debates last year Bernie Sanders told Hillary Clinton, “The American public are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” He was referring to a private email server Clinton had used for conducting State Department business which proved to be insecure when it was hacked, and from which about 50,000 emails were published in March 2016.
Unfortunately the damn emails are still a problem – rather, Democrats’ somewhat McCarthyite insistence that Clinton’s loss was due to Russian hacking. Whether true or not, this is a distraction from reforming both the party and the process that anointed, ran interference for, and unsuccessfully fielded a candidate with too many political vulnerabilities.
Having thrashed Sanders in the primaries, the Democratic National Convention was supposed to be Clinton’s coronation. Yet this was marred by a secondemail scandal that showed the DNC undermining Sanders in behalf of Clinton, as well as revealing blurry lines connecting Clinton’s campaign with the Clinton Foundation and her super PACs.
So Clinton changed the subject from leaks to leaker. At the DNC convention her campaign accused “state actors” of being involved in the leak(s) which ultimately cost part-time DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz her job. Wikileaks suddenly became not merely a gluteal pain but an agent of Russia’s former KGB chief, Vladimir Putin. In October Wikileaks released John Podesta’s DNC emails, throwing even more light on Clinton’s campaign and even more gasoline on Cliinton’s anger at Julian Assange.
Wikileaks, which has been publishing whistleblower documents for a decade, has also released hundreds of thousands of Clinton State department cables, the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, Guantanamo Bay files, Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, documents showing the NSA spying on its “friends,” CIA director Brennan’s emails, German BND emails, Saudi cables, Henry Kissinger’s cables, classified Congressional reports, TTP and TTIP drafts, IMF internal documents, Turkish AKP emails, IMF documents on the Greek economic crisis, UN confidential reports, and communications from private intelligence firms Statfor and HBGary.
Seen in one light, all this has a certain unity – democratizing American (and Western) foreign and economic policies by showing how the sausage really gets made. Seen in a dimmer light, all this must be the work of the Russian Bear.
Giving some credence to the argument that Democrats are ungracious losers, the Obama White House released an unclassified Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report (“Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”), accusing Russia of meddling in the last election. But the report is so heavily redacted and filled with qualifications and generalizations that it says little, proves nothing, and is pretty useless. The Intercept’s Sam Biddle suggests this calls for a Congressional investigation.
Several credible (and detailed) reports indeed point to the role of Russian military intelligence in sucking up troves of political, economic, and intelligence data from the US, Germany, and NATO allies (all of whom the NSA routinely spies on too). Cryptographer Bruce Schneier has a good overview, which references investigations by Crowdstrike and Threatconnect mentioned in the ODNI report.
Interestingly, much of the ODNI report is focused on “fake news” or the manipulation of Facebook “news” and “likes,” Twitter feeds, “trolling” by commenting on online articles, or published pieces in RT Online, Russia’s version of our Voice of America. RT’s coverage of the Panama Papers and the “Occupy Wall Street” and anti-fracking movements drew special ire for “meddling” although there was very little connection to the 2016 election. ODNI pointed to “Russian footprints” of hackers like Guccifer 2.0 (a Romanian hacker). Although the report characterized Russian involvement as “information warfare” it steps back from claiming it had any effect on the election:
“We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.”
If it wasn’t the Russians, it would have been somebody. Besides Russia, other nations had the means – including our own US intelligence agencies (one of which proved to have no qualms about intervening in a domestic election) – and some had motive: Israel, China, and North Korea, for example. Even Donald Trump – who, like a stopped clock, is still right twice a day – makes a valid point. Plenty of hackers could have penetrated a tantalizing target like the DNC in an election year. Wikileak’s Julian Assange claims even some 14 year-olds have the skills to do it. From the wide availability of hacking tools easily downloaded by relatively unskilled users, I suspect he’s right.
Wikileaks has repeatedly said that the Podesta documents did not come from Russia. Former British ambassador Craig Murray, a Wikileaks associate, claims he received the documents from a Democratic Party whistleblower. Who knows? And who knows if the Russians poked around, while the leak itself actually did come from a whistleblower? Maybe a Congressional investigation will tell us something. But to what end?
Every nation seems to trawl every other nation for intelligence, economic, and political advantage. And people generally use what they steal. Russia could very well have “outed” Clinton and the DNC by passing data through layers of intermediaries to Wikileaks. So what?
The provenance of the information should be less important than the information itself.
Russian bears, Red Scares, Congressional inquiries, and plots involving a guy holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. All this would make a great movie. But none of it changes the fact that the emails publicly revealed were real. Now we know. There was simply far too much coziness between Clinton, “her” DNC, the Clinton Foundation, “her” SuperPACs – and precious little transparency. Until the leaks.
Last October Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign’s press secretary, tweeted Julian Assange: “You are a propaganda arm of the Russian government, running interference for their pet candidate.” Even if it’s true, and even if Assange is wittingly or unwittingly a Russian stooge, Democrats should thank him for publishing the DNC trove. The emails didn’t cost Clinton the election after publication. Long before that they cost the party a candidate who could have beaten Trump.
The DNC emails give us a good idea of how a campaign should never be run. They also remind us that a candidate’s vulnerabilities can’t be kept under wraps in a world without much privacy or by refusing to do interviews. And they show us that the DNC needs a complete renovation.
I often spend the morning reading the local paper, going online to look at mainstream and international news and commentary. Much of what I read is liberal, progressive or libertarian, but I also like (perhaps too strong a word) to see what conservatives are up to. As I’ve mentioned before, many are moving quickly from right to far right.
Recently I took a journey into an even darker corner of the conservative world – that is, the White House corner office of the president-elect’s advisor, Steve Bannon. My travel ticket was something Bannon himself published in his Breitbart News. It was a piece by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”
Starting with this article, I used a little low-tech programming to follow the links of its “young, creative, and eager heretics” from page to page, bookmarking their journals, websites, blogs, blogrolls and followers. What I found was that many, if not most of the “Alt-Right,” are white supremacists, more than a few are antisemites, and their ranks are filled with young men who hate women.
Welcome to the Jugend of Trump’s new Republican Party.
Despite Yiannopoulos’ false characterization of Rush Limbaugh as hostile to these Young Bavarians, actually the reverse is true – mainstream conservatives are charmed. And if you’re not convinced how dangerous these lunatics can be, one of Trump and Bannon’s buddies is planning to terrorize the Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana about a week from now.
As the mainstream press begins the process of ingratiating itself with Trump gatekeepers and generally cozying up to extremism in general, we’re about to witness the process of normalization of the bizarre, the freakish, the obscene, and the unconstitutional. Last week my local newspaper all but endorsed prison slave labor for building Trump’s “Mexican wall.” And mainstream TV networks are hopping on board the crazy train.
So if you want the young “creative heretics” of Trump’s Great America to show you their true colors, you’ll find links to their websites here and in an annotated version here.
You’re about to encounter a lot of white sheets and brown shirts.
Only six weeks remain until the Democratic Party selects its party chairman – and yesterday Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, joined the race, making him the sixth candidate to run for the job.
Buttigieg is a former Naval officer and Rhodes Scholar who worked for Jill Long Thompson’s failed 2002 and 2008 Congressional campaigns. (Thompson was Bill Clinton’s nomination for Undersecretary of Agriculture). Buttigieg then worked for the Cohen Group (former Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen’s strategic consulting outfit), followed by John Kerry’s failed campaign, followed by a job as consultant for McKinsey & Co., then himself was the losing candidate for State Treasurer of Indiana. Now he’s a mayor.
Buttigieg is liberal, gay, white, from the Rust Belt, and has good relations with his city’s unions – all of which would endear him to most Democratic voters – but he has also had a rocky relationship with the city’s Black community and not much experience either nationally or with successful political campaigns. Buttigieg participated in Obama’s Police Data Initiative and David Axelrod speaks highly of him, but few in Washington recognize his name. All in all, a nice enough guy, but not the strongest candidate for DNC chair.
Meanwhile, Tom Perez has been courting Centrist Democrats unhappy with Ellison’s progressive positions. Working with Clinton boutique strategist Bluelight Strategies, Florida Rep. Ted Deutsch, a point man and fundraiser for Hillary in Broward County, and political strategist Ann Lewis who served both Clintons, Perez has made some headway.
But this newest entry into the race reminds us of a couple of things. First, the Clintons may be back at home taking walks in the woods, but they clearly haven’t gone away. Second, the emergence of a progressive like Keith Ellison has Centrists scrambling to keep the party boat anchored in the mud – or at least themselves at the helm. Tom Perez may be their first choice, but Buttigieg seems to be the backup plan.
The election of the DNC chair should concern anyone who believes the Democratic Party needs to change in order to take back the country. It can finally live up to its name as the “party of the people” or it can make its official capital Chappaqua and remain what Robert Reich describes as a giant ingrown and entrenched fundraising machine.
We start with conservative publications often cited in other conservative publications. Although some promote fairly extreme views, it’s nothing you don’t hear in the halls of Congress (think of Rep. Steve King) or on Fox News (think – all of them). While a few publications have managed to remain realistically fiscally and moderately social conservative, most have become pretty extreme, even William F. Buckley’s National Review. This alone should scare the hell out of Americans who remember that not even Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan would say such crazy.
They imagine themselves the Naughty Boys of the Right, and they have a catchy new name, but they are nothing more than white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The only difference between these guys and their skinheaded cousins is a hairdo and a college degree. Just like Goebbels and Speer. And they’ve found their Führer.
It is disappointing to discover that many Americans are not big supporters of democracy. Of course fifteen years of the Patriot Act hasn’t helped either. All these “Anti-Democrats” want is a dictator who will make the trains run on time and will charm them with their masculine wiles. Trump seems to really get these guys going.
Keeping immigrants out is Step #1 in ensuring White purity. Some of these people try to wrap their white racist pork in scientific bacon (fake immigration “science”) for an extra helping of severely un-kosher baloney. But you can see through it pretty quickly.
Conservatives have never liked women all that much, between all that legislation controlling women’s bodies, and revulsion at the possibility that women might be as independent as men. But now a newer generation of misogynists is on the loose. They’re guys with views so offensive it’s understandable they can’t get dates. Which probably just makes things worse.
Virtually all these next groups fit into other hater categories, but they seem to have it out especially for Jews. And, no, these are not critics of Israel’s occupation or BDS activists. These are people who really do think Jews are devious space aliens from Satan’s loins, or the Holocaust is a conspiracy like the moon landing – or they’re just pissed because we won’t convert.
This was an interesting surprise. Some of these basement dwellers abandoned Marx’s analysis that capitalism makes profits off worker’s labor and now think it’s all a plot to denigrate them as men and write off their Nietzschean qualities. Time to redecorate the man cave. Mom? Can I borrow $20?
A war is coming. The Jews, the Elites, asteroids, Altoids. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that life as we know it is about to change and only the strong will survive. Sometimes this isn’t quite so dramatic – instead there’s a nostalgia for the way things once were – like when the South had slavery. God, these people are messed up.
By far, this was the largest group that emerged as I began accumulating links. Yessir, give the “Alt-Right” boy a proper haircut – and it turns out he’s really a skinhead.
After a while I just couldn’t care anymore about which category they belonged in. There are just too many sociopaths and psychopaths who voted for Trump and have opinions like this:
We’re not going to resist Trump without – well – resistance.
I’ve been reading the Indivisible Guide – which Carolee Matsumoto sent me recently. This is not 1,391 pages of “War and Peace.” It’s only 26 pages, is very readable, and is also available in Spanish. It’s a citizen’s guide to lobbying your Congressman en masse.
Contributors to the Guide include former congressional staffers who describe their work of love as “best practices for making Congress listen.” Many of them were around during the rise of the Tea Party and it dawned on them that some of the Tea Party’s tactics were damn clever and could easily be replicated by living human beings with souls.
For skeptics or the time-challenged, here are quick summaries of the chapters:
How grassroots advocacy worked against Obama – the “takeaway” from this chapter is to resist the urge to advance only positive goals. Instead, put your Congressman on the defensive and redirect her from her own priorities. Punish him for changes he does make. Remind her of the illegitimacy of the Trump administration. Keep him (if he’s centrist) from making accommodations with the Republican agenda.
How your Congressman’s brain works -Seen under a microscope your Congressman is a simple two-legged organism with one physiological function: to run for (re)election. This chapter tells you how all the rest of its anatomical structures (constituent services, meet & greets, etc.) serve the primary function. If your Congressman is a good person, don’t go on the attack: instead, reward (and train) him. Understand the rewards and punishments that drive the organism. Understand that you (singular) are unimportant to your Congressman, while you (plural) are feared. Understand that your Congressman employs “pliable” stances on positions to guarantee “desired” outcomes. Lots of good stuff in this short chapter.
How to identify or organize a local group – Join together within your Congressional district, keep efforts focused, use social networking, make your group diverse, have a kickoff meeting, make sure everyone is on-board with the same principles: this is not a social club; it’s a serious endeavor. Choose a name, assign roles, agree on how you are going to communicate, and expand. With a couple hundred members you (plural) will be too big for your Congressman to ignore.
Advocacy tactics that really work – This is a really long chapter, and by far the most important. Identify the (1) Congressman from your district and the (2) Senators from your state. Get on their mailing lists. Educate yourselves on their positions. Who donates to their campaigns? Follow local news reports to discover where they get public pats on the back (or smacks on the backside). Attend their public events. Mobilize your members to attend their public events. Always have questions prepared in advance. Focus on a theme. Coordinate. Make sure your members don’t go rogue or off-script. Arrive early, spread out in the audience, ask good questions. Share everything on social media. Attend their other events. Don’t be afraid to interrupt if you don’t get the microphone. Find out which reporters are covering these events and talk to them nicely and rationally (next time they might interview you). If these events are sponsored, hold the hosts accountable. Make sure you visit your Congressman’s office(s). Go in numbers. Don’t be idiots. Sit-ins and civil disobedience can backfire. Build a relationship with your Congressman’s staff. They can either be your friend or a pugnacious gatekeeper. Always have an “ask” – something you want. And let people know you are going to the office to ask for it. Don’t be afraid to call. Drown them in calls. There are so many delays built into mail (checking for anthrax, etc.) and filters for email (spam, content filtering), that phone calls are often best. Keep records of your conversations. Let other members know how the conversations went. Design scripts and practice them.
This also works at the state level. Check here for your Massachusetts legislators.
I cast my lot with the Berniecrats in the Democratic primaries. After Bernie lost I was naturally pretty disappointed in the DNC, especially the outgoing chair, but eagerly awaited Sanders’ next moves, which turned out to be both a well-regarded book and something a bit more than a PAC, an organization called Our Revolution.
After donating to Our Revolution, some of us have been impatiently waiting for the “bit more” part, which promised to build a network to get progressives involved in local Democratic Party organizations.
Recently a friend who’s been hounding Our Revolution even more than I finally heard something:
I know it doesn’t look like it, but we actually are working hard on several projects I am personally excited about. First, we’re researching and building a tool to allow folks to get involved in leadership in Dem and Working Families Party positions at their local level – you can check out our progress so far at transformtheparty.com. We’ve got teams of volunteers and staffers working hard on this. Right now the search tool only works for California addresses but we’re almost ready to launch the whole shebang. Second, we’re working on a sanctuary cities project that we plan to use to pressure additional cities to become havens for those who need protection – and third, we’re getting ready to roll out local organizing plans for all 50 states. This is going to be a big deal and has taken lots of time to try to get right – but we expect it to be out within the next few weeks at most.
Today my buddy sent me a “getting started” link to a signup page at the same website, where you can enter your name, address and state. The youthful techies who have created all this are using a discussion tool called #slack which you may want to invest some time learning to use, if you are so inclined.
So at least register. Even if you’re a mainstream Democrat it may be an eye-opener to discover how things actually get done. Which – now that I think about it – is true of just about any organization.
Meanwhile the contest between Democrats supporting Keith Ellison and those backing Tom Perez for DNC chair is heating up. Both are pretty good guys, but Perez has less political experience and is a tad more corporate-friendly while Ellison has a giant Republican “Black Muslim Jihadist Anti-Semite Communist wife-beater” target on his back, making some weak-bladdered Democrats pretty nervous. The person who ends up winning the DNC chair may be less important than how he wins it, and how the arm-wrestling match plays out between centrist and progressive Democrats.
Republican and Democratic coddling hasn’t stopped Israel’s self-destructive settlements. And now, with little land remaining for Palestinians, the Two State Solution is dead. Both parties got it wrong on Saturday’s editorial page.
For Charles Krauthammer Obama’s attempt to preserve the Two State Solution by abstaining from the customary U.S. veto of a UN resolution condemning settlements, was more proof Obama is an antisemite and Israel-basher. Krauthammer griped that Obama is keeping Jews from worshiping on the Temple Mount. Actually, it’s the Israeli government that is blocking End Times wingnuts from damaging what is also the site of the Al Aqsa mosque. Krauthammer joins Trump’s ambassador nominee David Friedman in a new age of Republican advocacy for extremists even too extreme for Israel.
Then there is Eugene Robinson, who praised the veto, even while acknowledging “Two States” is a dead letter. Robinson failed to hold Democrats accountable for doing little to stop the settlements, and he ends by praising Israel’s “vibrant democracy,” worrying what kind of democracy it will now become.
Become?
For Middle East correspondents based in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, for American politicians on AIPAC junkets, or for those who have never seen the West Bank or the Galilee, the sanitized version of Israel may have some trappings of a democracy. But for the 1.7 million Arab and Bedouin citizens of Israel, it’s a place where the phrase “filthy Arab” is heard repeatedly, where racial epithets are common, and brawls occurs at soccer games between Maccabi Petah Tikva and Hapoel Haifa. Arab Israelis earn 30% less than Jewish citizens, and jobs, scholarships and loans are harder to obtain. Life expectancy is lower, and half live in poverty. Israeli Bedouins are nomads and also the domestic victims of Jewish settlement.
Vigilante groups in Petah Tikva, Pisgat Zeev and Kiryat Gat beat interracial couples. Schools in Kiryat Gat “educate” Israeli girls on the dangers of interracial dating. One of their videos is called “Sleeping with the Enemy” and was co-produced with local police. In 2004 Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, called Arab and Jewish dating “an act of war.” Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman advocates the forced expulsion of the nation’s Arabs (“finishing the job”), a view supported by half the Jewish population.
A few years ago, the Israeli community of Moshav Yishi, whose motto was “The American Dream in Eretz Israel,” had a webpage that asked: “Looking for the American Dream in Eretz Yisrael? Two acre plots, farmland, reservoirs, and terrific views? Does an Arab-free environment sound appealing? Yishi is miles inside the Green Line and even further from the nearest Arab settlement.”
If Israel really is a democracy, says former Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Azmi Bishara, “I would call it a trivial democracy.”
And then there is the required submission of news articles to military censors; a law forbidding Arab Israelis from observing Nakba Day (commemorating the expulsion of 80% of Palestinians from their homes in 1948); and a different law penalizing Jewish supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. ACRI, the “Association for Civil Rights in Israel,” reports widespread discrimination, civil liberties violations, abrogation of treaties, mistreatment of asylum seekers, crackdowns on whistleblowers and journalists, and ongoing abuses in the Occupied Territories. ACRI’s December 2016 report laments: “This year, we unfortunately moved backwards.”
And this was Israel proper.
Then there are the territories that Israel occupies (West Bank) or dominates militarily (Gaza), which include about 4.5 million people under military control. Imagine if the United States occupied all of Mexico and Central America – and you can begin to fathom the scale of the Israeli occupation. Detentions in the West Bank don’t require warrants, and forty percent of all Palestinian men have been in prison. Land is stolen and homes bulldozed. Future ambassador David Friedman has a building with his name on it built on stolen land in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Palestinians must travel through checkpoints like the one in Qalandia that, when I passed through in 2009, reminded me of how cattle are moved in stockyards.
With Two States dead, Republicans are now embracing Israel’s homegrown religious extremists, while Democrats continue to embrace a fairy-tale “democracy” that never was. And now the “Alt-Right’s” antisemites and white supremacists have joined the circus. Astonishingly, many of them are full-throated Zionists. After all, what’s not to love about a militaristic nation of ethnic and religious privilege, where government is mixed with religion, and half the citizens want to throw the “filthy Arabs” out?
It may be too late for Republicans, but Democrats had better figure out what democracy really means. At home and elsewhere.
Last Fall I attended weekly political discussions which, sadly, ended after the election. Our group ran quite the gamut of political views, but despite a few moments of heat we were usually able to hear each other. Hats off to Ken Hartnett, emeritus editor at the Standard Times, for making such civility possible.
I don’t know if something of this sort already exists, but I’d like to know if anyone is interested in an independent political forum here in the SouthCoast (of Massachusetts). Something issues-based. Something welcoming to both mainstream and progressive Democrats and not intimately wedded to the local party machinery. Something with a reliable venue, a reasonable schedule, speakers, opportunities for discussion – in person and continued online.
I miss discussing politics with real people. More importantly, we have a lot to figure out together these next four years, especially as centrist and left-oriented Democrats kiss, make up, and move forward together.
A good example of this is out in Maricopa County, Arizona — home of [thankfully former] sheriff Joe Arpaio. There Democrats and Progressives are as rare as water and as endangered a species as the white-sided jackrabbit (I’m not making this up). But misery loves company and out in the desert both True Blue Democrats and Berniecrats are moving forward together. Their Blog for Arizona is always interesting and models nicely how we in the center and on the left could be working together.
Donald Trump’s nominee for American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has long been a supporter of Israeli settlements. A building with his name on it sits in the West Bank town of Beit El, built on private Palestinian land in a settlement known for settler violence. Friedman supports the complete annexation of the West Bank and wants the United States to bless sixty years of settlements and abandon any pretense of pursuing a Two State solution.
With Democrats in disarray and Republicans ready to hand Israel anything it wants, it’s as good a time as any for Democrats to start planning for their post-Trump relationship to a little nation some either earnestly or bitterly call our 51st state. It’s also time for Democrats to abandon the illusion that, after so much land expropriated by Israel, a state for Palestinians is still possible. And when Democrats ultimately regain the White House the American-Israeli relationship is going to have to change.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, questioned whether Friedman would be working for Israel or for the United States: “Based on what he has said in the past, it seems as though he is very opinionated on Israeli issues, even though his role is to advance U.S. policies and interests and not the other way around.” Friedman has accused liberal American Jews (most of whom support Two States) of being “worse than Kapos” (Jewish collaborators with the Nazis). At the Saban Forum Friedman doubled-down on his invective.
As if to put a stamp of disapproval on Trump’s extremist nominee, this week the UN Security Council voted 14-0 (with a U.S. abstention) to condemn Israeli settlements as flagrant violations of international law. For the first time the United States did not automatically veto the resolution – a departure from the long-standing practice of shielding Israel from criticism. Israel was outraged and accused President Obama of orchestrating the vote, of rank antisemitism, and promised to hand over evidence of the “plot” to the next U.S. president.
In a futile gesture, Secretary of State John Kerry announced he’d use his remaining time to present a vision for a Two State solution, while an angry Netanyahu promised to step up the rate of settlement which has continued unabated since 1967. But even before the UN vote Israel was preparing to legalize almost 4,000 outposts in the West Bank. None of this should have surprised anyone. Last April Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel announced that the Two State solution was in its “dying throes” and that by 2019 Israel will have expanded settlements by 50%. But international criticism is not going away anytime soon. Aaccording to the Geneva Conventions seizing land from an occupied people is a war crime.
And yet hope persists. Irrationally.
In Israel 56% of secular Jews support a Two State solution with Palestinian demilitarization, but only 35% of religious Jews and 39% of Palestinians approve of the plan. Here in the U.S. only 39% of Americans support a Two State solution while 77% of American Jews do. American Jewish views on the occupation and on Two States have long been divided – generally between Orthodox and other Jewish traditions. Republicans and hard-line supporters of Israeli settlements are furious with liberal American Jews for breaking with Israel and acknowledging the violations of international law.
Israel, which does less trade with the U.S. than Switzerland, is not a NATO member and has never participated in a U.S.-led military coalition, yet this tiny country is nevertheless the beneficiary of considerable favor and largesse. Israel has received $124 billion to-date from the United States, and just received another $38 billion. Both Republicans and Democrats go out of their way to defend Israel’s interests – even censoring U.S. citizens. A recent Senate bill tried to block criticism of Israel on college campuses and New York governor Andrew Cuomo set up a blacklist of those supporting boycott and divestment campaigns to apply economic pressure on Israel.
To many Republican politicians Israel is not merely another nation but the birthplace of Christ. And for Evangelicals Israel is not just a modern state – it’s the Judea and Samaria of the Old Testament. Thus, David Friedman’s settlement in Beit El is not simply in the “West Bank” – but “Samaria.” Besides appealing to American religious sensibilities, Israel’s considerable lobby operates more freely than those of other nations which must register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This double standard may be partly due to the bipartisan sentiment that “there can be no daylight” (or conflict of interest) between our foreign policy and Israel’s – a tired and dangerous formulation.
But clearly no such “daylight” exists between Israel and David Friedman, who often says “we” when referring to Israel and has close ties to the Yesha Council of Settlements. Because Friedman, in virtually every sense, is an Israeli settler.
There was a time when the U.S. separated its interests from Israel’s. Michal Doran, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described Eisenhower’s reaction to Israel’s involvement in the Suez crisis: “In 1956, Britain, France and Israel launched coordinated invasions of Egypt. To say that Eisenhower disapproved would be an understatement. He directed at his allies a level of hostility typically reserved for worst enemies. After demanding that the attacking forces evacuate Egypt immediately, he imposed crippling economic sanctions on France and Britain. Against Israel, he threatened sanctions while engaging in bare-knuckle diplomacy.”
Yet. with the exception of Republican shutdowns of the U.S. government, there has never been a suspension of military aid to Israel or thought of witholding its get-out-of-trouble vetoes in the UN Security Council. Even Jimmy Carter, a critic of Israeli settlements for over 30 years, never used aid to Israel as a carrot or a stick. Progressive Democrats have been demanding even-handed leadership from their party on this issue, but centrist Democrats have instead thrown buckets of military aid at Israel and a few bucks at an unelected and despised figurehead in the West Bank. Like Republican Evangelicals, AIPAC Democrats have always been happy to maintain the status quo. And Israel has been grateful for all the time the charade has bought – for expropriating more land.
But Friedman has a point. The Two State solution has been dead for years. American presidents have come and gone, each happily mouthing the words “Two States” – but none has ever advocated for a Palestinian state as zealously as for Israel’s.
Perhaps now, with Trump about to be sworn in, Democrats will recognize the unsustainability and depravity of a 60-year occupation. Perhaps, with Trump now running the circus, Democrats and even a few Republicans will have to acknowledge that, paradoxically, many anti-Semites are actually quite pro-Israel. From both David Friedman’s and Steve Bannon’s perspective – what’s not to love about a militaristic nation of ethnic and religious privilege, where government is mixed with religion, and half the citizens want to throw the “dirty Arabs” out?
But without new leadership at the DNC, I wouldn’t pin too many hopes on the Democratic Party. As an article in the lefty Jewish Forward magazine put it, Democrats have a Haim Saban problem. Saban, the American-Israeli movie mogul who brought us the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, was Hillary Clinton’s top donor, a man even Breitbart News describes as an Islamophobe. Saban himself puts it this way: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”
The Democratic Party has wrestled with its cozy relationship to AIPAC in each of the last two conventions. Although Democrats say they are worried that David Friedman will move the American embassy to Jerusalem, in 2012 the DNC attempted to push through a motion to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. An undemocratic roll was called by Antonio Villaraigosa, and the voice votes caught the DNC by surprise. AIPAC had “vetted” the motion – had actually written the text. In 2016 the issue of the occupation of Palestine came up again. Clinton supporter Robert Wexler insisted that Democrats could not afford to mention the “O” word (“occupation”) if a Two State solution could be salvaged. Sanders supporter James Zogby pushed back, pointing out that everyone knows the occupation exists. Both sides also disagreed whether Democrats should support the BDS movement. Ultimately the DNC adopted wording that made AIPAC (and Clinton) happy.
So when the UN Security Council took its vote this week, the US abstention was quite the exception. And now Democrats find themselves accused of being Islamist-Leftists who love Shariah and hate Jews. But Obama’s abstention was a desperate, and ultimately futile, “Hail Mary” to save the Two State illusion.
Decades of “peace” negotiations under Democratic presidents tell us that “Two States” was always more an act than a plan of action – at least the part involving a Palestinian state. We can only assume now that another four years of extreme coddling under Trump will permit Israel to turn the rest of East Jerusalem and huge swaths of the West Bank into even more American-style suburbs – like Ma’ale Adumim with its mall and ACE Hardware.
But after that? What then?
In nine years Jews will be a minority (48%) in Israel-Palestine, which will make continued Jewish domination more difficult and unjustifiable. Within a few decades of this demographic shift, Theodor Herzl’s experiment will very likely come to an anti-climactic end.
Mainstream conservatives are embracing the fringe.
The National Review
The National Review, which was founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, has struggled with and repeatedly purged itself of white supremacists but seems to be losing the battle. The magazine has had to fire John Derbyshire, who had a little racist sideline on Taki’s Magazine, where Richard Spencer was once an editor; John O’Sullivan, another NR writer who was on the boards of both VDARE and the Lexington Research Institute; Peter Brimelow, NR writer and former editor at Forbes, and a writer for Barron’s, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.
William F. Buckley devoted much of his time to weeding segregationists, “Birchers,” anti-Semites, and the lunatic fringe from the pages of the National Review. After he died in 2008 the garden he planted was overrun with weeds.
The Heritage Foundation, whose opinion-shapers appear regularly in newspapers, has also been afflicted with the virus. Jason Richwine is the most notorious of these, penning a number of articles on blacks and Hispanics on alternativeright.com. President-elect Trump’s White House advisor Steve Bannon praised Richwine on his Sirius XM radio show. The Heritage Foundation wraps its white supremacy in “scientific studies,” like the one Richwine wrote that blasted immigration reform, claiming illegal immigrants would suck $9.4 trillion of benefits from upstanding white Americans – which one writer joked “will bankrupt the solar system.”
Besides racism, the Heritage Foundation also promotes Islamophobia. A 2014 panel the Heritage Foundation organized to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy soon devolved into a mudslinging match accusing President Obama of funding jihadist violence and promoting Shariah law. The Heritage Foundation had invited Brigitte Gabriel from ACT, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations has identifed as part of a well-funded Islamophobia Network. The panel was led by Chris Plante, a rightwing talk show host, who turned the discussion into an “Islamophobic freak show,” as Salon described it, and included Frank Gaffney, one of the fringiest of the fringe. The panel featured the trio attacking a Muslim student who rose to speak and demanding to know her nationality (it was “United States citizen”).
The Heritage Foundation’s president is Jim DeMint, a former U.S. Senator from South Carolina turned Tea Party leader, and “the most hated man in Washington” by one account. Under DeMint’s leadership the Heritage Foundation has lost credibility and clout. As Senator, DeMint was a divisive politician who went out of his way to greet a racist rally, a move that fellow Republicans slammed, with one warning that “freaks fill the void and define the party.” Call it an “unguarded moment” or a Freudian slip, but DeMint admitted that the purpose of disenfranchising blacks through Voter ID laws was to elect “more conservatives.”
It is not surprising that the Heritage Foundation was founded by Richard Mellon Scaife, who died recently. An heir to the Mellon fortune, Scaife set up a network of rightwing foundations and Islamophobic organizations. In the good old days, billionaires dabbled in art. Now they support hate groups.
(Dear newspaper editors – if you’re reading this – stop publishing garbage from the Heritage Foundation!)
Other mentions
No one could have imagined Ann Coulter’s fulminations could get any worse but now she is attending VDARE’s white supremacy conferences. We always thought Ann was just a fact-challenged provocatuese but now we know better.
The American Conservative Union, which runs the CPAC conference all Republican candidates are expected to attend, is another nexus of white supremacists and Klan admirers.
The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps tabs on all these homegrown Nazis – and it’s not like they didn’t warn us. The NAACP as well reported six years ago on the Tea Party’s deep ties to white supremacist groups and extremist militias.
Paleoconservatism and Trump
Before the Alt-Right there were the Paleoconservatives – anti-Semites and isolationist Eurocentric nationalists. Pat Buchanan, who was an advisor to both Nixon and Reagan, has written for Holocaust denying publications and cited the American Nazi Party’s William Pierce in one of his books. Over time paleoconservatives fell out of favor for their isolationism and were banished to the fringes where they became a natural magnet for the extreme right.
Stephen Mihm writing in Bloomberg News makes a good argument for Trump’s paleoconservatism. And Dylan Matthews writing in Vox suggests that Donald Trump is not merely an opportunist manipulated by the Alt-Right but an “imperfect Paleoconservative” himself. Both articles should dispel the image of Trump as a mere showman. Trump (like his father before him) has been at home in his white, white world a long time.
What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line.
Today the magazine Buckley founded is nothing but a mirror for Trump to gaze at himself adoringly.
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Seasons Greetings!
Last week a friend sent me a link to a piece by Harold Pollack in The Nation which put into words what many of us have been thinking – that the time is soon coming when writing checks and signing petitions won’t be enough. Getting out into the streets and engaging in civil disobedience may be what is required, regardless of our age.
Civil disobedience is as American as Henry David Thoreau, and one could even say it’s been an American tradition since the colonies tangled with King George II. Thoreau spent his night in jail on July 23rd, 1846 when the twenty-nine year-old abolitionist walked into town to accept his punishment for withholding taxes as a protest against slavery.
Our individual actions do make a difference. Rosa Parks, through the simple act of refusing to move to the back of a bus, kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Boycott was a turning point in building the Civil Rights movement. And the Civil Rights movement, in turn, inspired activists black and white – like the future U.S. Senator from Vermont pictured above being arrested.
In the face of what’s surely coming from the Trump administration – mass deportations, targeting of Muslims, even greater violations of civil liberties – should Americans dust off this tool of protest even if it means spending a night in jail?
A few days ago I received an email asking me to petition President Obama to use his remaining days in office to shut down our existing Muslim registry. It’s called NSEERS. Although this was a Bush-era program, Democrats missed eight years of opportunity to shut it down before it occurred to them that it was a bad idea.
The week before that, Trump placed a call to Taiwanese president Tsai Ying-wen, riling both Beijing and American liberals for an apparent violation of the long-standing “One China policy.” But hold on a second! – Taiwan has been buying American military equipment for years. Just last year they were in negotiations with the Obama administration to completely overhaul their arsenal. Obviously plenty of Democrats have been talking to Taiwan.
Democratic voters expect their party to oppose wasteful fences, xenophobia, reckless and inconsistent foreign policy, and the abuse of civil liberties. And they did — but only when the other guy did it. Only after Trump tweeted in caps what Democrats themselves have been doing on the QT. This disconnect suggests that Democratic voters are much more liberal than their own party’s centrist leadership.
Meanwhile, some Democrats have been taking criticism of “identity politics” to mean they need to “tone down” the party’s commitments to equality and civil liberties by throwing some constituencies under the bus. This would be a further retreat to the centrism that lost Democrats the election.
The Democratic Party needs a new direction and new leadership. It doesn’t seem ready or willing to part with its congressional leaders just yet, but it has a chance to reform itself, starting with the selection of a new DNC chair. Only then might there be hope for a party that seems lost in the wilderness.
But there can only be hope if the party is willing to change.
Most of the organizations which comprise the formal Israel Lobby, including AIPAC, WINEP, and ZOA, promote policies which are virtually identical to the Likud’s One State platform, which states that there will never be a Palestinian homeland west of Jordan. Look on a map to see what that means. AIPAC has enjoyed bipartisan support for years, even as both the GOP and DNC neglected the creation of a Palestinian state and lavished many billions of dollars on Israel. Besides formal lobbyists, there are also several American Zionist organizations that fund settlements and, in so doing, undermine the Two State solution.
There’s no arguing with the fact that America has a lot of anti-Semites. This week the neo-Nazi friends of Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon are planning an armed march to terrorize Jewish families and businesses of Whitefish, Montana. For most of us, however, like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who was referring to pornography, we know anti-Semitism when we see it.
But Israel managed a linguistic coup by extending the definition of anti-Semitism to include any criticism of Israel. Organizations that once fought and illuminated hatred of Jews now find themselves spending a lot of time enmeshed in Israeli foreign and domestic policy. They claim to support the Two State solution but argue that only because of anti-Semitism and recalcitrance do Palestinians have “no state” and deserve none for the time being – until Israel’s “security” needs are satisfied.
The majority of American Jews want a Two State solution and it’s not hard to see why. The One State solution means either (1) expelling all Arabs (something Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has advocated and which half of Israelis support); (2) depriving Palestinians of a state, civil laws and rights, squeezing them into reservations or bantustans, and subjecting them to endless checkpoints; or (3) inviting Palestinians into the Israeli state. Israel has backed itself into a corner with decades of “annexation” and there’s hardly anything left for Palestinians. Occupation is all it knows. Israel could also embrace (4) the American “Indian reservation” model and unilaterally declare encircled “cantons” a “Palestinian” homeland. I fear this option would satisfy most Americans because – it seems to have worked nicely for us.
American Jews and progressive Israelis see both the moral danger and the self-destructive effect of leaving nothing for Palestinians. Consequently many American Jewish organizations support the Two State Solution:
We’ve seen an uptick in attacks on minorities recently, especially following the election. At a time when Muslims have really been taking it on the chin the Senate tried to push through the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016,” an innocuous-sounding bill. But this legislation would have turned universities into censors by threatening “federal funding at colleges and universities where political speech against Israel occurs,” an expert on anti-Semitism and extremism wrote.
The bill would have required the Department of Education to alter the meaning of anti-Semitism to include “demonizing Israel” or “judging Israel by a double standard.” This new definition was adopted by the State Department under Hillary Clinton but was originally conceived in 2004 by Natan Sharansky, the founder of Israel’s Ba’Aliyah (immigration) party. Free speech advocates including the ACLU object to the political manipulation of a concept that has been around since 1879 – well before Israel was established.
While the bill’s supporters claim it was simply intended to shield Jewish students from hate, it was really just another attempt to censor debate over Israeli settlements and shut down the Boycott and Divestment (BDS) movement on college campuses, particularly student calls for university trustees to divest of Irael-related portfolios. With such legislation even progressive Jewish groups like JStreet-U, which is critical of Israeli policy without advocating BDS, and Jewish Voice for Peace, which does support BDS, could be subject to loss of their First Amendment rights.
According to Sharansky’s “3D Test” anti-Semitism is no longer simply the demonization of Jews. In fact, he doesn’t even bother to include this well-understood aspect in his definition. For Sharansky anti-Semitism is (1) demonization of the state of Israel; (2) holding double standards regarding the state of Israel; and (3) deligitimization = denying the right of the state of Israel to exist.
According to Sharansky “demonization” of Israel refers to unfair or exaggerated comparisons of Palestinian and Jewish suffering, or comparing Israel’s crimes with the Nazis. For Sharansky (and now the U.S. State Department) “deligitimization” refers to critics who refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Recognition of nations is a political function and one state can choose to recognize another any way it chooses.
Israel’s borders are contested by Palestinians, and land that Israel seized in Lebanon and Syria is also disputed. Neverthess, all U.N. members fully recognize Israel, and even the three with land disputes give Israel limited recognition. Israel, however, insists on being recognized specifically as a Jewish state. No nation seriously intends to erase Israel from a map – especially one with nukes. What Israel wants is the international seal of approval for Zionism.
Unfortunately for Israel, the world’s experience with Germany soured everyone on 19th Century ethno-nationalism. Zionism – any kind of ethno-nationalism – is incompabile with a pluralistic democracy. Israel’s occupation of 4.5 million Palestinians is brutal. Palestinians need their own state but Israel has effectively placed them in reservations or bantustans. This can’t g on. BDS is one way to exert a little economic pressure.
But this is a political discussion – one we should be free to have, on a street corner or a campus. Few Americans want the United States to become a Christian theocracy (I hope I’m right about this), and there are many Saudis, Pakistanis, and Iranians opposed to religious law in their own countries. Americans aren’t stingy with criticisms of Saudi justice and Americans have plenty to say about Cuba, China, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. It’s hard to see how Israel is being held to a different standard.
But whether Natan Sharansky or the government of Israel object to criticism. It’s a right to criticize a foreign country – or even one’s own – regardless of criteria. One doesn’t even need facts – like Republicans on climate change.
The injustice of Israel’s occupation is what the BDS movement hammers away at – martial law, settlements, selective application of laws, thirty-foot separation walls, private roads for settlers, checkpoints, settler violence, water theft, destruction of olive trees, night raids without warrants, prison sentences without trial, press censorship, gag laws for Israeli dissidents, “Judaizing” of both the West Bank and Arab communites in Israel proper. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documents a lot of it.
But a double standard does exist. Just not the one Mr. Sharansky wants to talk about.
Israel is not a western democracy in any recognizable sense. Democracies don’t maintain martial law for half a century over an ethnic and religious minority corraled into reservations. Democracies don’t legislate religious and racial laws that advantage members of a single group. We’d have a stroke if full legal rights in Germany were extended only to blond-haired, blue-eyed people in the year 2016.
Israel’s 1951 Law of Return permitted Jews (defined as having a Jewish mother) from any land to “return” to Israel, while millions of Palestinians have been permanently locked out of homes their parents lived in. As distasteful as it is to admit, eliminating Palestians by recognizing only Jewish blood is effectively a racial law. But the Law of Return was amended in 1971 to make it possible for non-Jewish relatives of immigrants to join their families in Israel, so the amendment took on an additional racial cast since mainly Ashkenazim (European Jews) were added to Israel’s population. Imagine if Britain offered automatic citizenship (along with settlement benefits) only to Anglicans and Episcopalians from any country (plus their blue-eyed descendants regardless of religion). We would wonder what kind of democracy it was.
And this is the real double standard – that Israel gets a pass for thumbing its nose at democratic norms.
Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner thinks he knows why Israel bothers western critics so much: “Western liberals – not to mention Israeli liberals – whose greatest moral outrage is reserved for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians have nothing to apologize for. It’s a natural reaction, an inevitable one. As with apartheid South Africa, Vietnam, European colonialism and other examples from the West’s history, the occupation enflames leftists in a way that other, greater tyrannies in the world don’t, simply because this tyranny – the last of its kind still standing – is being perpetrated by their own side.”
Derfner has a point, but even with greater tyrranies I’m entitled to a little extra outrage over Israel. After all, I’m paying taxes to my “own side” to help Israel prolong the suffering of stateless Palestinians. I’m not providing aid to Assad to kill residents of Aleppo. And the hypocrisy of the double standard from my “own side” disturbs me the most because the link between foreign policy and domestic policy has implications which affect me personally. If politicians overlook war crimes in Israel, they’ll also overlook the abuse of civilians by police domestically.
Meanwhile, Israel has quite the enabler in the United States. American politicians pretend that Israel does not have nuclear weapons while other countries are punished if they spin up a centrifuge. When Israel kills American citizens our own government does nothing. Israel receives massive aid packages every year – ones like no other nation on earth receives. Double standards.
Without doubt Israel is America’s favorite nation and is the beneficiary of a double standard – not because it has stood with the US in Afghanistan or Iraq like its NATO allies, but because many American politicians are evangelicals, for whom this little country is not just another nation – but the birthplace of Christ. For them Israel is not even Israel as a modern state. For evangelicals it’s a Biblical Disneyland. Israel’s substantial lobby operates as if represented domestic interests, while lobbyists for other nations have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. More double standards.
Yet is it a double standard to point out that maybe – just maybe – there should be a little daylight between our foreign policy and Israel’s – that our interests are not identical? This tired formulation (“no daylight”) is used repeatedly by politicians for no other country. And it’s just not true.
As he was leaving the presidency, George Washington offered a few pieces of advice – “honesty is the best policy” was one. But Washington also had something to say about permitting double standards for a favorite nation:
“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter… It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions … and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity…”
The Trump presidency is shaping up to be a temporary win for white supremacy and intolerance. No groups in America are less secure now than Muslims and immigrants – and by “immigrants” I mean people here in the United States legally. Retroactive enforcement of the draconian 1996 Immigration Reform Act makes many relatively small crimes deportable offenses – even for those here for decades.
On Saturday I attended a community forum at the Immigrants Assistance Center hosted by Helena DaSilva Hughes. The meeting was intended to calm New Bedford’s frightened immigrant community and provide insights into changes the Trump administration might make and to review immigrant rights under the law.
There were three speakers: Schuyler Pisha, Legal Director at Catholic Social Services; Rita Resende, a lawyer at Watt & Sylvia; and Marcony Almeida-Barros, of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. Attendees learned what sort of changes the Trump administration could make on Day One; about changes to existing immigration law that are unlikely; and about changes virtually impossible because of the Bill of Rights. If anyone is interested in the details, here are my meeting notes or (if you read Portuguese) there should be an article in “O Jornal” next Friday. The Attorney General’s representative gave a brief outline of services the AG’s office provided to anyone in Massachusetts. “You have rights,” he told everyone. “And you have a state agency to help you.”
The Immigrants Assistance Center (IAC) has a surprisingly tiny budget of $350K, 10% of which consists of donations through fundraising, while the remainder comes from foundations, grants, and small contracts with the City of New Bedford. Each year the IAC, which has a staff of 8, serves about 7,000 people. It could do a lot more with your financial help.
But besides financial support, the IAC could really use your skills: – grant-writing – one or two full time ESOL (English as a Secondary Language) teachers, or four part-timers (bonus points if you speak or read Portuguese and Spanish or both)
The IAC is small but mighty. Please help them help our community.
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Much has been written about the reasons for Donald Trump’s election and how Democrats can get their act together. One of the best prescriptive pieces I’ve read appeared in the Sunday Standard Times and was written by Scott Lang, who has some unique insight into the party’s machinery. I’m not sure Democrats can wait until the middle of 2018 for a new platform but Lang’s essay should kick off an honest discussion of: What Next?
With Trump’s meeting yesterday with Peter King to discuss a Muslim surveillance program, it is now even clearer that the incoming administration intends to proceed down this slippery slope.
Petitions may not accomplish much – and all it takes is for one tech company to build the registry. But it’s important to speak out against all the hate that is finding a home in the new administration.
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If you find these emails annoying or they’re not your thing, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the letter and I’ll stop hounding you. I promise.
Funke introduces the German Extreme Right: Pegida, the NPD, and the AFD. Pegida is now also a political party and is in Denmark. The AFD cultivates the appearance of a dry, conservative economics-focused party but its base is the radical right consisting of members of the NPD (a barely-legal party that never got much traction), Pegida (primarily a hate group for xenophobes), the German “Identitäre Bewegung” (white supremacist “Identitarian movement”), and the “Institut für Staatspolitik” (the National Policy Institute, founded in 2000), which sees itself as the voice of Germany’s “New Right.”
But Germany’s New Right is not so different from the old in its connection to Nazism. In the USA Richard Spencer’s “National Policy Institute” (founded five years later) seems to be a knock-off of the Institut für Staatspolitik – and virtually every feature of German neo-Nazism exists in the United States. This is one reason I found Funke’s book so fascinating and chilling.
Funke frames the political climate in Germany. He paints a picture of alienated young Muslims sitting in chat rooms and working themselves up to acts of violence. But this is also what happens with angry white Germans. Both seek online confirmation for their beliefs and become angrier by the minute. And for the Wutbürger somebody has to pay. Germans found an example in Jörg Haider of the FPÖ in Austria, who offered simple solutions – get out of the EU; kick out foreigners; and shut the borders. Then Austria would be great. Sound famliar?
Of course real reasons are more complex. Geopolitical issues – such as Western nations destabilizing the Middle East – created refugees. The rise of ISIS was a consequence of Western nations creating failed states. The economic meltdown of 2008 wasn’t created by Syrian asylum seekers, nor was income inequality within Western nations, nor were the bankruptcies of southern European nations. Global Capitalism, globalism, and unstable markets are not a refugee issue. But simple minds cry out for simple solutions.
Funke cites Oliver Nachtwey’s book on economic decline in Germany – the end of the “German dream” that has shaken those who thought their place was secure in the modern BRD. Low-paying MacJobs are proliferating just as elsewhere in global Capitalism, and the social safety net has disappeared. People are on their own and they’re angry.
Economic inequality engenders political inequality and political instability. Funke points to Armin Schäfer’s work on participatory democracy. Das Volk may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. They know that the big decisions are not made by little people – even in a benign liberal “democracy.” Consequently voters often sit out elections. Why bother? It’s all been decided. And the press? They’re run by elites, right-populists tell voters.
Funke cites Wolfgang Streeck’s “Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Streeck writes of the frequent crises of Capitalism, the profit-taking that occurs even when markets fail, and of the austerity programs and the sacrifices citizens must make in order to prop up the markets. The”elites,” say right-wing populists, always manage to suck money out of the system while the little guy suffers. And this is correct, although one right-wing “populist” is himself a billionaire sucking money out of the system. But the rightwing-populist cannot – and will not – repudiate Capitalism or point fingers at the real criminals. Another enemy must be found.
As the economic middle class becomes thinner and more vulnerable, the stability of the political center of the middle class becomes weaker and it can move in unexpected directions. Zick and Klein’s book “Fragile Mitte” describes this phenomenon and offers reasons for the country’s move to the right: although economically weaker, they slavishly align themselves with the ruling class.
Finally, Funke enumerates a few of the right-wing demagogues busy at work in Europe: Norbert Hofer and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria; Marine Le Pen in France; Geerd Wilders in the Netherlands; and Nigel Farage in Britain.
Right-wing demogogues claim the EU takes jobs away from workers; that the EU imposes quotas on refugees. Globalism is your enemy, say the populists, because it imposes a second set of laws over nations, injuring sovereignty and productivity. As for NATO, only the NPD in Germany is opposed. For the AFD the Defense industry is nation and business friendly. Foreigners are the problem. Never is it global Capitalism because neo-Nazis don’t really want to fix an unjust system. They just want to be the ones to run it.
Against Human Dignity
The section describes how easily hate speech becomes acts of hate. When the far-right start calling for the expulsion of foreigners, it’s not long before supporters start fire-bombing them. The “Mitte-Studie” from the University of Leipzig showed that the middle class (AFD members especially) were increasingly likely to be hostile to foreigners and evinced anti-democratic and authoritarian attitudes. A surprising number also approved of a dictator. In the German states where right-wing parties were politically strongest there were more physical attacks.
PEGIDA – Unleashed resentment
Pegida’s first demonstration was in Dresden in October 2014, where over 10,000 people protested foreigners and the nation’s asylum laws. It was founded by Lutz Bachmann, who apparently loves Hitler, and has grown to at least 40,000 members, at one point having 200,000 Facebook page supporters. The University of Göttingen did a study of the typical Pegida member: 80% male; 70% without religion; 80% in a relationship; average income, most late thirties to fifties. 90% were unhappy with the way democracy worked. And they were angry. This is a Trump supporter.
AFD: Alternative for Germany – Populist in form, Extreme Right in substance
In the preceding chapter Funke goes through a list of Pegida organizations in each of the German states, as well as showing links to the NPD and the AFD. The AFD is a party whose platform is a bland enumeration of mostly economic policy, which seems to place it on even footing with the CDU. However, the AFD has a “wing” of extremists who regularly coordinate work with Pegida and the NPD. In many ways, they are all interchangeable.
Originally the AFD was constituted as an economic opponent of the Euro and as a political opponent of the CDU. It was formed by an economics professor, Bernd Lucke, and a former IBM (Europe) executive, Hans-Olaf Henkel. Both opposed the Euro but found the international company they were in – Marine Le Pen in France, for example – distastful.
But it wasn’t long before they were deposed (see the “Erfurt resolution” of March 2015) by extreme right-wing members Björn Höcke, André Poggenburg, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Alexander Gauland, and Frauke Petry, who replaced “technocrats” and those “without vision” with “patriots” capable of taking the fight to the mainstream parties, the media, and “social experimentation.”
Funke footnotes a voting rights survey with figures on attacks against foreigners, mainly Muslims. On the “wahlrecht” website there is a page that shows percentages each party would get if an election were held today. In Baden-Württemberg, Saxony, Thüringen, and Sachsen-Anhalt the AFD is running second place behind the CDU. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they lead. They are not yet ready to take on everyone and take over the government. But they’re gaining on the CDU.
Björn Höcke, one of the party leaders, is the motor driving the extreme right transformation of the AFD. Höcke has been trying to Nazi-fy the party by making it more Völkisch – a racial adjective meaning organic, tribal, and “native” in a genetic sense. Even Frauke Petry, the telegenic, well-spoken and English-fluent face of the party, has defended the use of this old Nazi adjective. It is a perfect example of a German dog whistle. The neo-Nazis for whom the party speaks know exactly what the term really means. The party is also unapologetically anti-Semitic, although it keeps trying to appeal to Zionists on the basis of shared commitment to nationalism and ethnocentrism.
Despite the many links between the AFD and the NPD and Pegida, AFD leadership has sought to keep a safe distance from more violent elements of the other two movements. In May 2016 the party passed a resolution playing down these connections. But Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the party’s “go to” man for all things anti-Islamic, condemned the move while praising Pegida: “Pegida exudes calm and discipline, equanimity and sensibility.” Tillschneider sees the AFD’s role as carrying Pegida’s protests into parliament. Alexander Gauland, another AFD leader, describes the relationship this way: the AFD and Pegida are “naturally linked.”
Funke offers many examples of fuzzy lines between the three extremist groups. Pegida and the NPD have strong relationships to resurgent Nazism and a cadre of neo-Nazi members. The AFD takes pains to distance itself from them, creating “deniability,” but the AFD’s message is still crafted to appeal to them, and AFD leadership praises their extreme brethren. The AFD also refuses to condemn violence against foreigners. Bottom line – neo-Nazism is a unified movement in Germany. Only at the top is there a thin veneer of respectability – and even that is often unmasked by leaked internal documents or YouTube videos of private meetings. Americans should recognize the frightening similarities between German and US politics.
The extreme “New Right”
As if all these angry xenophobes were not bad enough, Germany has a problem with white supremacy. The Identitarian Movement and what we call the “Alt-Right” here in the USA have found a home in Pegida and the AFD.
In 2000 Götz Kubitschek founded the “Institut für Staatspolitik,” which publishes “Sezession,” and sees itself as thinkers of the “New Right.” Both journal and founder have close relationships to all three extremist organizations as well as the Identitarian Movement. Sezession regularly attacks the “lying press” and majority-elected political “elites.” The American Alt-Right happily reproduces these materials, although Americans now have their own Kubitschek in Richard Spencer who has a similar journal. In Austria, where voters narrowly rejected an Identitarian candidate, a 2014 Sora Institute poll showed 40% think Nazis weren’t so bad and 30% liked the idea of a Führer – numbers that doubled since the 2008 economic crisis.
Kubitschek is a disciple of Armin Mohler, credited as an “early thinker” of the New Right. Mohler described himself as a fascist and deserted from the Swiss army to join the SS. He was also an admirer of Mussolini. Kubitschek is a pal of the extreme-right publisher of the short-lived Compact magazine, Jürgen Elsässer. One issue of the defunct magazine featured a roundtable with AFD members on white supremacy.
In Germany the Identitarian movement was resuscitated from outlawed French neo-Nazism, “Génération Identitaire,” which again has its American admirers. Alain de Benoist developed a racist ideology for the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and was embraced by both German New Right and American Alt-Right. He advocates a type of Apartheid and cultural hegemony: “What the ND wants is a federal Europe, founded on the principle of subsidiarity…” This Catholic concept on the surface sounds a bit like federalism, but it really means turning your back on the rest of society. Many Catholics are appalled at the corruption of the principle, but it is part of the AFD’s platform.
Kubitschek is also knee-deep in the Identitarian movement, along with Pegida supporter Felix Menzel, editor of the “Blaue Narzisse” and whom American admirers would call a Christian Identitarian. Kubitschek has close relationships with Austrian neo-fascists and neo-Nazis. To Identitarians the problem is “population transfer.” They see themselves being replaced. The former head of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, had a catchy title in his book, “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany does away with itself). But if the problem is “population transfer,” transfer is also the solution. Identitarians believe multiculturalism must be fought and foreigners expelled. Trump has promised the forced expulsion of 11 milllion foreigners and 53% of Israelis support the forced expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Ethnosupremacy is not just for Nazis anymore.
Limits to opposing the Right
Germany’s “liberal democracy” can’t (or won’t) fight the extreme right as it once did – despite an uptick in rightwing terror attacks. In Brandenburg rightwing groups have started doing “evening strolls” – intended to send a chilling message to immigrants. AFD parliamentarians propose the most hateful policies in the Bundesrat. Is this “democracy at work? Or”democracy doing away with itself?” And both local police and national security agencies now have extremists within their ranks. When a permanent state of emergency is declared, you can bet it won’t be by moderates.
This is a terrifying book, but at the end of the day it’s a German problem. Germans had better wake the hell up and crack down on these groups before it’s too late.
Review of “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson (ISBN 9781844670864)
Benedict Anderson writes in a florid style, using metaphors where descriptive phrases would be more useful, which often forces you to reread a long paragraph in order to find the simple idea buried within. It is quite annoying, yet Anderson’s distillation of the features of nationalism is valuable for a patient reader. That said, I don’t agree with everything he writes, as you will see.
“Imagined Communities” takes us through many phases and factors in the development of nationalist thought. Anderson makes a few initial generalizations: that nationalists insist their nations are far older than historians would agree; that nationalism is “normal”; that pan-nationalism is thought to be aberrant; that the political power of nationalism is incredibly strong when compared to its thin and flimsy philosophical foundation and its incoherence. We seem to be dealing here with something as dangerous and tantalizing as a narcotic.
Anderson’s definition of a “nation” is an “imagined political community” – not merely invented but invented out of whole cloth. Its cultural and psychological roots are a preoccupation with death and sacrifice (example: the unknown soldier). Nationalism on the surface is incredibly similar to religion: it addresses many of the same needs for belonging and individual meaning. In this Anderson takes pains to disavow a causal link, but he points out that nationalism arose just as religion was being eclipsed by secularism in the 18th century.
Looking at nationalism anthropologically, religions and nations share a sacred language (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.). The sacred language (referred to as a “truth-language”) is necessary for the transmission of sacred texts which convey foundation myths. Consequently nationalists often insist on the use of a particular language since it is central to establishing nationalist narratives and propagating them.
A king’s legitimacy stemmed directly from God. Dynastic rule was possible because one’s father or ur-father was the man God had anointed to lead his people. An easily understood reason for God’s anointing of the king was sacrifice. For example, in Judaism, the near sacrifice of Isaac was necessary to establish legitimacy for the story of biblical Israel that would follow. It involved a truth-language (Hebrew), and cosmology blending seamlessly into history. But when did Abraham actually live? The question has sent historians scrambling for answers. In later years, the story of biblical Israel would become linked to the foundation of a modern state.
Printing and the Reformation weakened “truth languages” as millions of publications were issued in German, French, English, and other “vulgar” languages. When Luther posted his theses, they were printed in German. Protestantism replaced Catholicism, German replaced Latin, and married clerics replaced a supposedly celibate hierarchy led by a Pope whose legitimacy stemmed all the way back to Saint Peter. It was quite a shakeup: language had become the central feature of nationalism, not God.
The Holy Roman Empire operated on Latin which was not only a “truth language” but a pan-national language. When the Church finally lost its absolute control over Europe, the alliances and marriages joining the royalty of diverse nations meant that the royalty did not always speak the language of its subjects. For example, the Habsburgs ruled Magyars, Croats, Slovaks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Austro-Germans; the Turks ruled over a similar polyglot empire. And both were hated by everyone – the Habsburgs for their choice of administrative language, German, and the Turks for propagating their language.
But the bourgeoisie did speak the people’s language. To this class was left the responsibility of directly managing peasants, who were happy to have their local languages elevated. Slowly, local (“national”) languages became the standard among not only serfs and middle management, but by the kings themselves.
To language were added additional trappings – flags, inherited nobility, anthems, national stories of sacrifice – all intended to create “buy in” from the serfs. And all “imagined” in the sense that they were actually of fairly recent vintage. Even in the United States, Anderson points out, this was the case. Americans may have been the riffraff of Europe, but each of the founding states had its own anthems, flags, nobility (Penns and Carrolls, for example), their genealogies and generals. A war was fought to preserve an amalgam of states which itself had only existed a couple of generations. But by the time of the Civil War an imagined nation whose legitimacy derived directly from God’s grace had to be preserved at all cost. (I find it interesting that American nationalism seems to have only partially digested European nationalism. In many parts of our country inhabitants still identify with the “Old Country” – Scots/Irish, German, Quebecois (who in turn identify with their Old Country, France), Italian, Ashkenazi Jewish communities, and others)
With the establishment of the League of Nations, the “nation-state” became the norm. Empires and dynasties were on the way out. The last European empire dissolved in 1974 with the end of Portuguese dictatorship. By the early 20th Century subjects of former empires all began wanting their own nations too. Arabia, India, Israel… But Imperialism came hand-in-hand with nationalism. By the 19th Century every self-respecting “nation” was expected to have some sort of Imperial project to despoil and pillage neighbors or the Third World.
It is impossible to be honest with one’s citizenry about the reasons for subjugating another people. And it’s impossible to be honest with those brought under the heel. Consequently, propaganda has always been a feature of the nation state. It turns out, the stories invented for legitimizing the subjugation of another people are closely related to the stories invented to establish the legitimacy of one’s own “nation.” And education fulfills this function. Schools have always been necessary for normalizing national values and propagating national myth. It is no coincidence that long after European colonists left India or the Dutch Indies the educational institutions they created still exist. At first the purpose was to instill the values of the settler state, but now the same institutions promote their own fledgling nationalism.
But the lures of nationalism don’t entirely depend on language. Toward the end of his chapter on the last waves of nation-state formation, Anderson brings up the case of Switzerland, a polyglot federation. Many historians contend that Switzerland never really became a state in any real sense before 1813, that in 1891 the Swiss were late-comers to European nationalism. And it wasn’t until this year, right on the verge of the 20th Century, that they decided to look back 600 years and declare the “real origin” of the Swiss nation as the year 1291. They had rehabilitated a long-standing “Confederation” and re-invented it as a “nation.” Schlomo Sand has an even more controversial theory about the “invention” of Israel.
The last waves of nationalism occurred in Africa and Asia. As empires struggled to educate and standardize native-staffed bureaucracies, and as global Capitalism exploited new markets, schools, the media, laws, and language began forming all the trappings of modern nation-states (it took Anderson 3 pages to say this). It wasn’t long before the natives became restless, and then not much longer until they had established their own nationalisms. The 20th Century saw a frenzy of people desperate to form themselves into nations.
* * *
The last part of the book is equally fascinating because Anderson addresses patriotism and racism, both contemporary features of nationalism – especially in the United States.
Anderson contends that patriotism is almost exclusively presented in the language of love – admittedly, love of a very narrow and inflexible sort. Individuals may not deviate from this “love” – expressed as devotion, purity of heart, willingness to sacrifice even one’s life – or they will be hated. Anderson poses the provocative question – “Can the reader think immediately of even three hymns of hate?” (apparently he had not read the third stanza of the “Star Spangled Banner”). Militarism epitomizes the ideal of willingness to sacrifice for the nation, and it shares many of the same features of religion (observe a military funeral – equal parts nationalism and God).
Because we have now encountered a state based on ideology and myth, Anderson makes the case that anti-Semitism and racism are not necessarily derived from nationalism, that their roots are actually based in class. The ruler is divine, the aristocracy well-bred and cultivated, deserving of their rights to govern serfs and peasants. All are protecting the destiny of a people.
“The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of external contaminations. […] The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class rather than nation.”
Anderson goes on to say that, because racism is class-based:
“… on the whole, racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.”
This assertion is impossible to reconcile with actual history. In Nazi Europe millions of Poles were murdered. In the Americas, colonial powers waged genocidal wars on natives across the seas. The United States is currently waging a war on Muslims half a world away. The atomic bomb was not used against Europeans but against Asians. Life is cheap when Europeans are not involved.
In the British empire Lords were the supreme aristocrats. But in the colonies, even the petit bourgeoisie scrambling for advantage or exiled, could “play aristocrat.” They could have their mansions, cooks, houseboys, and horses. And they could have their slaves. From India to the Americas, brown-skinned people were subjugated to the whims of Eurotrash. And while Anderson’s theory is that this was class-based racism, there seems to be no example of a European people that was ever forced into slavery by other Europeans. Class does not appear to me to be the main factor.
Still, here we are in the New World – New York, New Jersey, New Haven. The colonies were what Anderson calls “doubles” of the Old World. Ethnically we were British, French, German, or Spanish. But the distances between Old and New Worlds made holding together far-flung colonies impossible in the long run. When the United States finally penned a Constitution, it was truly something new – something no longer based on European history, or even its own. There was no mention of Columbus, the Mayflower, or Pilgrims – all that came later.
By the 1830’s, however, the new state was a “nation.” It had a piddling history, its genealogies, some founding myths. People were beginning to ponder what their country was and how they belonged. As always, things had to be invented, facts adjusted, to suit the story. In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck and Jim’s friendship is portrayed as a friendship of equals – but Jim is also a slave.
After reading Anderson’s book, I came away thinking that he had somewhat haphazardly synthesized the thinking of other authors on nationalism – Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony Smith. I am particularly fascinated by how nationalism can easily supplant religion. For example, Zionism has largely eclipsed Jewish observance since the Six Day War; and while many Americans no longer take the family to church, they never fail to “support the troops.” In both societies religious militarism is a striking feature (think of the US Air Force Academy or the IDF). And in both there are problems with institutionalized racism – privilege of one ethic group and demonization of another.
But all in all, a useful book to kick off thinking about the anachronistic scourge of nationalism.
For many the holidays seem a bit hollow this year, and it’s not just the dark or the usual blahs. Many are fearfully waiting for the hammer to drop on Inauguration Day.
Instead we should all be considering what kind of action we should be taking.
The Democratic Party needs a fresh direction, if not a new infusion of grassroots participation. It would be great to hear from those of you involved in party politics. How do people get involved? The Massachusetts Democratic Party website seems to be infrequently updated and it lists only chairs in larger cities. Whom should people contact in their communities?
Besides political parties, what issues and groups need urgent support right now?
Perhaps now is also a good time to get out in the streets and say NO! to hate. Here is one event worth attending.
Everyone should be reading and thinking. Here’s a recent book on fighting back and here’s another. Other recommendations, anyone?
What about hosting a political discussion in your living room? Invite your neighbors (at least the ones who didn’t put out Trump lawn signs).
Now is not the time to despair but to organize and resist the coming assaults on every bit of progress this country has made in the last seventy years. We are now living in a very different, dangerous nation today — with an authoritarian, nationalist stench we haven’t smelled since the Thirties — and we can’t afford to be complacent.
Blame for losing the Presidential election has been leveled at Democrats for something called “identity politics.” The charges? Preoccupation with gays, blacks and women. Coddling immigrants. Too much political correctness. White Lives Matter!
A piece in the New York Times by Libertarian Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigates liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla adds that liberals wrongly attribute their loss to “whitelash” – white economic suffering turned into racist rage. He accuses liberals of waiting impatiently for “demographic extinction” of white, rural, religious Americans. Lilla often writes of what he sees as an almost tidal pull of religion on society. He notes that white rural Christians think of themselves as victims – a potent and volatile concept of identity – and he warns that, while “identity politics” may have started with the Klu Klux Klan, “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”
Lilla advises liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.”
But it’s not just bathrooms. As Lilla observes, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans. And not all of “America” shares LIlla’s religious views – or even his concept of what “America” is.
In “The Federalist,” a conservative journal, Rachel Lu writes that the GOP saw how successfully identity politics worked for liberals and is using it themselves. But she worries that it “has primarily been rooted in a nostalgic vision of an aging, mostly-white voting base.” She thus credits the demographic problem Lilla dismisses while agreeing with him that the GOP is playing with fire.
Kay Hymowitz, author of books on how feminism hurts men, writes in the conservative “National Review” that liberal politics exploits alliances between groups that have nothing in common except for “one source of solidarity: a common enemy known as ‘the white male.'” This is a common complaint from the White Right, and Hymowitz asks provocatively: “Now that a disaffected group of white men are claiming identity politics for themselves, will that change?”
Neoconservative Christopher Caldwell, in the New York Times (“What the Alt-Right Really Means“), addresses some of these disaffected white men – some of them neo-Nazis and white supremacists. His thesis is that the “Alt-Right,” given plenty of column inches by Trump advisor Steven Bannon at Breitbart News, is simply “practicing identity politics in the manner of blacks and Hispanics.”
But do Democrats really demonize whites in order to advantage every other group? Is Hymowitz correct that gays, Blacks, Muslims, the poor, Hispanics, disenfranchised voters, prisoners, women, Native Americans, and others have absolutely nothing in common?
Hymowitz is wrong on both counts. The “common enemy” of each group is injustice, not white men. And minorities – and whites – have plenty in common, beginning with a desire for an inclusive, tolerant nation.
The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been the Democratic Party that defended a variety of civil rights – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.
Fighting for civil rights in itself is not identity politics. Neither is protecting disadvantaged constituencies or insisting that Constitutional rights apply to all – and not merely Premium Class citizens.
True, since at least Bill Clinton’s administration the Democratic Party has neglected blue collar workers – not that the GOP ever cared – but in the Trump narrative it’s only white folks whom Democrats have betrayed. This strange, even racist, GOP narrative completely Photoshops minorities out of the working class picture. In Trump’s reality show minorities are all cast as welfare queens, rioting thugs, terrorists, illegal aliens, subversives, or crybabies.
Besides maintaining their defense of civil rights, Democrats must do a better job of representing workers – which means spending less time at Davos and the Aspen Institute and more time in union halls. Go visit Wisconsin! – a state Clinton bypassed in 2016. Pay more attention to Main Street and show less breathless infatuation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Go back to your roots, Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign finally found the winning ticket with its third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis. The Great new America they’ve promised is founded on a cynical and dangerous form of identity politics we haven’t seen since 1925.
That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Everybody has an opinion on what the heck just happened. Libertarian Reason Magazine says Trump won because “Leftist Political Correctness” created a backlash favoring an obnoxious man. Former Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann says it was “God Almighty. He is the one who did this for us.” Others fear our nation is on the same path that Germany found itself in the Thirties.
Calm down, everyone.
Last Summer filmmaker Michael Moore shocked Liberals by predicting a Trump victory. He warned Democrats that for all of Trump’s Twitter antics, his narcissism, his unseemly and undisciplined behavior, no matter how he failed to stack up against smarter people who spoke in coherent sentences – none of this mattered. It wasn’t even important that a diverse electorate hated Trump with such passion. Moore pointed to “Exhibit A” – the fact that sixteen GOP candidates had already fallen at Trump’s feet – and that it didn’t take rocket science to see why.
Besides a whiff of white male bromance for an Alpha Male, there was Clinton herself – horrible foreign policy blunders, paid speeches, a private email server, the $2 billion family business. Tim Kaine was no prize either – once anti-abortion and anti-labor – and unappealing to younger voters.
But, most importantly, people in the Great Lakes and Greater Applachia were hurting economically and they resented Clinton’s support of NAFTA and TPP. They were hurting so badly, in fact, that a Princeton study showed mortality rates for whites had been rising.
To make things really interesting, there was also the X-Factor. American voters, Moore pointed out, have a perverse, anarchistic side. “Shaking things up” is often reason enough to cast a vote. Combine voter apathy for Clinton with a high level of motivation by Trump supporters – and you can guess the outcome. Moore called it exactly, even identifying the crucial states. Trump’s win was what ProPublica termed the “revenge of the forgotten class.”
The Los Angeles Times wrote that Clinton lost Pennsylvania by 100,000 votes – which translated into twenty electoral college votes – all because Democrats did not come out in sufficient numbers. The Daily Kos published statistics from Rust Belt states showing that huge numbers of Democratic voters simply stayed home. “In Wisconsin alone, a quarter of a million voters … didn’t.” And it didn’t help that Clinton never once set foot in their state.
Nate Silver, the wunderkind statistician who aggregated polling probabilities several times a day using computer models, also failed to see the train coming. After the election Silver wrote: “Trump was stronger where the economy was weaker.” And it was economic suffering that made those voters rush in record numbers to the polls. Although the typical Trump voter was originally thought to be an economically secure white male, Silver writes that he was actually more likely than average to be unemployed. A Trump voter was also at greater risk of replacement by robots or outsourcing because his job was less skilled. The Democratic Party’s stock answer to a man who may have had multiple careers already: go back to school.
While Trump’s personality and his xenophobia suggest a new era of authoritarianism and intolerance (which could also be true) Liberal Democrats should not underestimate how conflicted many Trump voters were in casting a vote for him. No one should say (as Clinton famously did) that these were all Deplorables. Mormons and Evangelicals who supported Trump, for example, didn’t like his language or his behavior, but when someone holds out a lifeline (real or imagined), you take it.
Robert Parry summed it up pretty well: “Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat reflected a gross misjudgment by the Democratic Party about the depth of populist anger against self-serving elites who have treated much of the country with disdain.” Which is what both Trump and Bernie Sanders (and the progressive half of the Democratic Party) said about Neoliberalism during the primaries.
So while things may not be all that rosy at the moment for Democrats, prospects for Republicans are also cloudy. In the next four years will anyone really expect the GOP to fund infrastructure repairs that could employ a substantial number of their angry voters? Or will the money go – as usual – to defense contractors?
Like James Faulkner’s angry white man, Abner Snopes, the Trump voter just torched the genteel (Chappaqua) manor of the rich folks who looked down on him. It’s safe to say: when this same voter finds out Trump lied to him, Trump Tower will be next.
The Huffington Post recently published a piece: “The Democratic Party Deserved to Die.” But rather than dying or crying, for Liberals and Progressives this should be a time to realize what went wrong and to get busy fixing it.
On March 3rd, 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress for the third time, tying a record previously held only by Winston Churchill. That same evening the American Secretary of State was in Switzerland negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran – precisely the deal John Boehner had invited Netanyahu to sabotage in the People’s House.
With this invitation the Republican Congress was conducting its own foreign policy, one at odds with the State Department’s, and thumbing its nose at the president. Netanyahu’s appearance was an attempt to undermine American foreign policy. The Republican invitation was a potential violation of the Logan Act and it placed the interests of a foreign nation before our own.
As Netanyahu stood at the podium where presidents deliver their State of the Union addresses, Republicans were ecstatic. Netanyahu was the president Obama would never be – right-wing, uncompromising, eager for war – and White. The Israeli Prime Minister also represented the values of a nation Republicans have long admired and emulated – a land of fighters, where religion blends with governance and a favored ethnic or religious group runs the country.
In October I will be in Berlin to see how a nation of 80 million can absorb a million refugees. By contrast, the US, a nation of 330 million, only last week reluctantly (and with much fear and whining) took its 10,000th. I will be volunteering with a German welcome organization and talking to refugees, journalists, political and social service organizations.
If you’re interested in following my trip, you can subscribe to an email distribution list here:
This is an opt-in list. You’re on it only if you want to be.
Warm regards, David
The World Refugee Crisis
September 6, 2016
Dear friends and family,
Thanks for subscribing. I leave on October 1st and will start sending you my impressions and my own photos. But if you don’t follow international news, a few facts on the world refugee crisis:
For many years the count of refugees and displaced persons numbered in the tens or twenties of millions. Not pretty numbers, but nothing like last year’s shocking 65.3 million.
Of this number, a third (21.3 million) are refugees, almost two-thirds (4.8 million) are internally displaced people (meaning they have had to flee war zones or destroyed homes within their own countries), and 3.2 million have sought asylum.
The countries with the most refugees are Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, CAR, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Colombia.
As a consequence of its darker history, Germany has a generous refugee policy. It’s not necessarily generosity of spirit, however: it’s the law. Article 16a of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) gives asylum to those who are persecuted or in danger, and they may not be put back in danger (contrast this with the United States practice of sending Mexican, Honduran and Guatemalan refugees back to gangs and death squads). The EU’s Dublin Accords also specify rights for asylum seekers, but some countries (notoriously Hungary) abuse the agreement to shunt refugees to other EU nations. Germany and Serbia now receive 75% of all Syrians fleeing Assad, ISIS, and Russian and American bombing.
Last year the uncensored images of the body of 3 year-old Aylan Kurdi appeared in the press. Aylan drowned when his family undertook a sea escape from Syria. Soon there followed images of a Hungarian camerawoman kicking a group of Syrians fleeing across a field, amid reports that not every EU nation was doing its part to provide humane care of refugees. Indiana governor (now GOP VP candidate) Mike Pence declared his state off-limits to Syrians, who he described as ISIS militants in disguise. But the United States has only taken 10,000 Syrian refugees, while Germany has been taking that number every day. There are now a million refugees living in Germany.
The world’s reaction has either been one of generosity or of callousness. Lebanon, for example, hosts the largest number of refugees per capita than any other nation on earth. The United States is at the other end of the spectrum – all the more notable because it bears a lot of responsibilty for this human misery.
So how much generosity of spirit – how much responsibility – should we Americans be showing? Will we step up to the plate and pay for what we broke? This is, after all, the “Pottery Barn rule” that Colin Powell reminded us of when we launched the war in Iraq:
“You broke it, you bought it.”
Unfortunately Americans are often predisposed to let the other guy pay for it. And the other guy in this case is Germany. But suddenly the German welcome is wearing out.
This week there was an election in a neglected region of Germany called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MV), a state with just over a million people – Angela Merkel’s home state. In many ways the area resembles the region in Massachusetts where I live – or it could just as easily be anywhere in the US where industry has picked up and moved away. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has plenty of natural beauty but no industry. It’s only 80 miles from Berlin, but it might as well be on the moon. Although there have been a few attempts to bring jobs to the region (a DVD plant, for example), other states generally win out when it comes to development. MV has an inferiority complex. Educational levels are low, and voters are angry. Yesterday’s state primary elections shocked everyone when a three year-old political party, Alternatives for Germany (AFD), beat Angela Merkel’s CSU in her home state. Even Americans were paying attention:
AFD waged its campaign largely on the basis of refugees – although Mecklenburg-Vorpommern actually has very few of them. And the AFD is only one of several right-wing tendencies in German politics.
This is going to be an interesting visit.
Warm regards, David
First Day
October 3, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I arrived in Berlin late yesterday afternoon and am writing this from my Airbnb room, which is very nice. Because of a Berlin housing ordinance VRBO home and apartment rentals shorter than two months long are forbidden. With home-sharing schemes like Airbnb people renting rooms are usually reluctant to rent for more than a week. I’m caught right in the middle. On the plus side, I’ll get to see more of Berlin than if I stayed in just one place.
Today is both the Day of German Unity, a national holiday, and the first day of Rosh Hashana. Everything is closed. Tomorrow I visit a refugee assistance organization called Moabit Hilft (Moabit Helps) and the day after that I am having dinner with a member of the Masorti congregation in Orangienburg with whom I will also be volunteering on the 9th to help Syrian refugees.
This visit is a chance to see how one country is struggling with a terrible humanitarian crisis. Germany now has over a million refugees) and is struggling with its post-war identity. The history of this country is well-known, and for a long time it was a liberal democracy. But a dark new chapter is emerging — as it is all over Europe and our own country. Right-wing parties and movements like the NPD, PEGIDA, and AFD are gaining influence here, and in Angela Merkel’s home state the AFD actually won regional elections recently. All this could turn out to be either the same type of phenomenon as the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party — or it may herald something much worse.
This trip is also personal for me. For those of us who have lived all over, each place and each language becomes a little part of who we are. When I was 19 I had been working a dead-end job in Philadelphia after running out of money for college, so I went to Germany on a lark. There I found a job in a furniture store and later I worked in a bank. I have returned to Germany a few times since then, but I’ve always wanted to spend more than a couple of weeks in this city where history, politics and culture converge.
I will try to write every few days. But let me hear from you as well.
Warm regards, David
First day at work
October 4, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today was my first day “on the job” at Moabit Hilft. The German is starting to come back and there was plenty to do. Moabit Hilft has two locations – a “store” on Turmstraße right next to the LaGeSo (Governmental Social Services) processing center, and a small office on Lehrter Straße where they help people use computers. I got a quick hello from the director, Christiane Beckmann, who is a force of nature when it comes to her advocacy work, and after visiting the computer training office I returned to the “store.”
Working the store is not exactly like retail. No money ever changes hands, there is no haggling, no one asks if you have a shirt in taupe. Everyone just gets whatever fits them and thanks you in the only words of German most of them know. A volunteer’s job is basically just keeping shelves and baskets from descending into chaos as a never-ending stream of people paw over the clothes, shoes, toys, and personal necessities available.
I can’t list every country our “customers” came from today, but a few who identified themselves were from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Moldavia, and the Kurdish regions of both Iraq and Syria. One young man I spent the afternoon with had left Iraq after ISIS slaughtered thousands of his neighbors. Another with both excellent English and German had come only a year before from Damascus and was already helping out as a translator.
And so many children. My young colleague taught me to pay attention to how children were dressed and to recommend clothing now that winter is on the way. One girl came in with only pajama bottoms, another three year-old wore only rubber sandals. Several boys had no jackets, not even warm sweatshirts. We didn’t let them leave until we had found something warmer than what they came in with.
It is so sobering to see people who present themselves as they arrived in Germany – in the only clothes they own, and with basically no supplies. And these are the lucky ones – people who sold everything they had to come to a country that would offer them asylum.
At the end of the day we were out of almost everything. We picked up the empty boxes outside which had previously contained toothpaste, shampoo, and sanitary napkins. After that I was glad to be able to knock off a bit early. It was a rare slow day, so I was told.
Tomorrow these amazing people will do it all over again.
Warm regards, David
one of many shelves
Settling in
October 5, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today was another day of tending the store. It was less exhausting than yesterday, but it does take the starch out of you, at least us old guys. I really admire everyone who does this year-in, year-out. Today I had more good political conversations with colleagues and some great moments with the customers. It is starting to get cold and the change in seasons is on the mind of everyone that comes in. Today a man in his 80’s came in wearing rubber sandals and it took a while to find him a pair of shoes that would fit. Then another man without shoes, and then another. We were working non-stop until 2:30 when lunch was ready.
Before I continue, I would like to personally send a message to every Republican who thinks that helping out traumatized refugees poses a threat to our national security – come here and work for a day if you can stand some fact-based research. These are just people trying to survive, not terrorists. The volunteer staff here is mostly comprised of Kurds, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians. It is quite a sight to find all these folks pulling together to help the other guy – literally the other guy. An Iranian helping a Iraqi. A Syrian helping a Kurd. A Kurdish Christian helping a Syrian Muslim. And, while the effort is not going as well as it could, Germans are more than doing their share by the West, helping refugees. Why aren’t Americans helping?
But as I was saying – the pay here stinks and I’m sure they’re not giving us the number of coffee breaks German law requires. But they do feed us well. This was lunch today (dessert not pictured):
Yumm!
Evening.
When it is crisp and sunny Berlin is beautiful. When it is cold and wet and grey the city – actually, any city – is cold and feels unmerciful. I was on my way to meet with Gerhard Baader, a senior member of the Masorti (Jewish) congregation in Berlin. From his emails I thought I’d be meeting a young man about forty who had his hands in various projects. I was right about everything but his age. The Jewish High Holidays will end in about a week, and there was a police presence in front of the synagogue on Orangienburg. Next door to the synagogue was a stylish restaurant, the Cafe Orange, where I met Gerhard, a man of 87 who met me in jacket and tie and left in windbreaker with his backpack to jump on a train. More on this later.
I am hoping I can get back to the synagogue next week when they do their work with refugees, and maybe I’ll throw some lint from my pocket on Yom Kippur. After I’ve done a bit more homework and put all the pieces together I will try to give you a fuller picture of this very interesting congregation and the Berlin Jewish community in general.
And then I still have to find an Iraqi bakery. But that’s a different story.
Warm regards, David
Downtime
October 6, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
My lodging in Moabit was available only a week, so today I went apartment-shopping and finally found a room in an area called Wedding. It took the better part of the morning and a bit of the afternoon, and I found myself with a little downtime at about 2:00 pm.
My friend Jim had emailed me with a suggestion to visit a gallery in Charlottenburg where two SouthCoast Massachusetts and Rhode Island artists (who are now in New York) have an exhibition, so this sounded like the right way to finish the day. My Berlin mass-transit skills have improved and I am now less likely to go the wrong way on bus and subway lines. I got to the Galerie Friedmann-Hahn in less than 30 minutes. Thanks, Google.
Galerie Friedmann-Hahn
There I found the exhibit of paintings by Anne Leone and Daniel Ludwig which Jim had told me about, and I talked a while with Maxi and Alex and an artist friend. They made me feel very welcome despite the absence of my checkbook or any sophisticated art knowledge. It was just one of those odd connections that makes the world interesting.
Berlin at Night
Dartmouth, Massachusetts is roughly 41 degrees North, while Berlin is 52 degrees North. So dark comes pretty early here after Summer has passed. By the time I got home it was already dark. I went out a little later to one of the Turkish fast-food joints that line Perlebergerstraße and had a Dürüm Döner – basically, a Turkish burrito. Only a healthy one because it’s a wrap filled with chicken, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, garlic paste, onions and peppers.
And then I walked home.
Habibi
Warm regards, David
Desperate men, heartless men, and Ampelmännchen
October 7, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
For those joining the story, I’ve been working in the “store” that Moabit Hilft runs in Moabit (in Berlin) for refugees. People have arrived from the Middle East and Central Asia with almost nothing, and desperation can make people frantic. Just a few people grabbing everything can quickly deplenish a rack of clothes. There are two ad hoc signs in the children’s section that are meant to spell out some basic rules of who can take, and how much they can take:
Signs
I had an interesting conversation with an Iraqi man today. He was a mechanical engineer from Kirkuk who had fled ISIS with his family. Their transit passes were all stamped with “Germany” as their entry point into Europe from Turkey, and the plan had been to join the rest of the wife’s family in Finland. But after eight months in barracks and gymnasia in Finland they were “deported” back to Germany, where the whole process will begin again.
In Greece approximately 20,000 refugees have been stuck on the island of Lesbos for months, their lives in a similar holding pattern. In order to transit through Europe, the refugees have to pass through the Balkans, but Macedonia and Serbia have closed their borders, and the EU and Turkey are still bickering over a deal to distribute asylum seekers.
The basic strategy is to shuffle them around until someone else takes them
A little context.
In Syria alone, a nation [once] of 22 million people, half the population has been displaced by war. Half of that half, 5.5 million, have left Syria according to UNHRC, the UN agency for refugees. Talking to a Syrian man this evening, he thought the UN’s number was conservative — that half the country was no longer there. Some refugees have fled Syria on foot — taking astounding routes. Of the 5.5 million who have fled, 2.2 million are in Turkey, many in Lebanon and Jordan, 800,000 in Germany, 30,000 in Canada, and 10,000 in the United States — the country with the most resources and the least interest in helping.
Last week, for example, the “Christian” governor of Texas turned his back on refugees by dropping out of the Federal Refugee Settlement program. There is a line from the aptly-named chapter of the Bible (Exodus) in which Jews are reminded to take care of the stranger “for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Governor Abbott, who is known for winning a suit to display the Ten Commandments at the Texas State Capitol and is theoretically familiar with the Old Testament, seems to want to pick and choose which biblical precepts he follows. The Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Mike Pence, just tried this stunt in Indiana — turning his back on human suffering.
But I would ask the Republicans — if individuals and religious organizations are willing to step up to human and ethical responsibilities, why shouldn’t government just get out of the way? Isn’t that the usual line from this party? For Democrats the $64,000 question is — will the next president create more refugees, or will she lead the US to do its share to take care of the ones we’ve already created?
* * *
I’ll leave you with a picture of Ampelmännchen — little traffic guy. I think he is a Berlin thing — and, like the much-reviled Trabant vehicle, he comes from former East Germany, where the street lights looked like this. Ampelmännchen was so beloved that they kept the little dude around — I’d like to think it was to say “welcome back” to the East Germans who rejoined the West.
Ampelmännchen
Warm regards, David
Moving Day, Meetup
October 8, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Saturday was moving day — from my Airbnb in Moabit to a new one in Wedding, a busy commercial district. After getting set up, I took a walk and went to a Meetup group for B1-C1 German for foreigners (the class sign below says “stay calm and learn German”).
Meetup
The teacher was a young woman from Humboldt University who is about to become a licensed teacher, and who does all the classroom things one is supposed to do with language students. My classmates were a young and interesting group of students and professionals from all over — Sicily, Ireland, Ukraine, South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, the UK and the US. As always, I represented the over-40 crowd. 50. 60….
Berlin is poised to become an even more young and cosmopolitan city because of the Brexit. With London out of the picture as Europe’s financial capital, I expect this role will quickly go to Berlin.
After class, I walked down to the corner and I saw this — the DDR’s own Trabant — a car known for its lack of power, its stinking lawnmower engine — but a cutie nonetheless. Juxtaposed with a Coca Cola sign and used as a prop for a restaurant, this says it all about Berlin’s quite literal fusion of East and West Germany. Appropriately, the Trabant sits in front of the Ost-West Cafe on Bernauer Street.
Ost-West Cafe
Bernauer Street was the street on which the Berlin Wall was built and which is known for several killings of people trying to escape from East Germany. Here is what it once looked like:
Back in the day
And here is what the same location looks like today after the Wall was torn down:
Bernauer Str. today
But there are many more walls to be torn down in this world. And certainly no more should ever be built.
Warm regards, David
US-Mexico border wallIsrael’s Wall
Sonntag
October 9, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Sunday is a sleepy day in Berlin, especially now that it’s the rainy season. Nothing besides cafes and the big megaplex movie theater on the corner are open on Sonntag. Church bells ring for sometimes fifteen minutes without stopping — such as the Evangelische (Lutheran) Kapernaum-Kirche immediately across the street from me:
From my balcony
Berliners, who normally rush around at high-speed, have no option but to slow down, meet friends, and even sleep in a bit. It truly is a day of rest.
And so I relaxed, did some laundry, read about Donald Trump’s latest hijinks, and consulted the fivethirtyeight.com poll rollup to reassure myself the nation would still be there when I got back.
And then I went out to meet and thank the journalist who put me in touch with the organization I am now volunteering with. We talked for an hour and a half about refugees, politics, German society – and sonstiges – and then she had to go pick up her daughter, and I took the U-Bahn back home.
I know Deborah won’t believe this — and that probably goes for others of you who know how I pronounce the word “nature” — but I have been walking a lot around the various neighborhoods and on my way to and from subway lines, trolley lines, schnellbahn lines, and buses. Possibly even liking it.
Berlin is densely-populated, but there is green everywhere, and only now are the leaves beginning to drop:
Leaves
I keep being impressed by all the different ethnicities and languages. For the second time in some days, I ran into people speaking Spanish on the subway. And for the second time it turned out they were from Colombia. But you regularly hear German, English, French, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Russian, More than a hundred languages in all are spoken by people here:
News rack
I won’t be up at 3AM to watch the debates, but I hope this one finally sinks Trump. And I hope you hardy Democrats will all write the winner to tell her you don’t want any more wars of choice in the Middle East.
Warm regards, David
How do you say frustration in German?
October 10, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Last week Moabit Hilft let me change my schedule to spend some time in their main office on Lehrter Strasse. Among other things, this office provides help with job and housing searches and runs German classes every evening. Where the “store” provides the basic necessities of things like toothpaste and sweaters for new arrivals, the office helps people further down the integration pipeline.
Refugees get a stipend to help with housing, but they must compete with college students and an increasingly global workforce in Berlin’s ever-shrinking housing market. Finding accommodation is not easy, even with a computer. Moabit Hilft’s clients usually come in accompanied by a translator, and they are limited by family size and subsidies to certain types of housing.
There is something called WBS (Wohnberechtigungsschein), which roughly translated means “housing voucher” for public housing. WBS housing is basically like Section 8 Housing — a certain percentage of it has to be built when complexes are developed. On the wall are some guidelines on how to calculate expenses (below). The organization that publishes this is not the German federal government, but the Lutheran Youth and Welfare Agency (more on them another day). But much of the help being given to refugees is private and not funded by taxes.
WBS
From early afternoon until about 6:30 there is a stream of people coming for help with their housing searches:
Client
One of the wrinkles is that refugees must be counseled to avoid areas where there are significant numbers of neo-Nazis. These areas strongly correlate to precincts where the AfD (Alternatives for Deutschland Party) won the biggest numbers of votes (blue sections of the map, former East Berlin):
The teacher started the class at 5:00 and – as drop-in language classes everywhere – only two students showed up on time. Twenty minutes later, four or five other students arrived and it caused some disruption. One of the early-arriving students was annoyed, and his anger only grew as the class went on. At about 15 minutes from the end of the class one of the late-arriving students interrupted the young man’s companion, and the young man began screaming and charged the late arrival. I tried to restrain him but my chair and I both ended up on the floor. Luckily, two other students successfully restrained him before he harmed the latecomer.
But it was a good example of how much frustration is building up in ad hoc housing with hardly any privacy, as these folks are stamped, fingerprinted, placed in hour-long lines, and often handled like cattle.
Warm regards, David
Mostly pictures
October 11, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today was a morning for bookstore browsing and then an afternoon in the office. I also scoped out my third neighborhood for the last ten days of my stay in Berlin. Compared with yesterday, today was pretty sedate except for losing my credit card. And so I will entertain you with some pictures I snapped – although you will probably be disappointed at the quality compared to those from the real photographer in the family.
I’m always amused by the little things, either just slightly different or totally the same as at home. I’ll leave it to you to guess which.
A prison in a residential neighborhood:
Prison
An advertising sign that let you recharge your phone:
Power
A tattoo parlor with dubious claims:
Parlor
An open house in a school for students who want to go back to college:
college
A Lutheran refuge for the homeless:
Shelter
Yuppification of a poor and working class neighborhood…
Building
… all for micro-apartment for young professionals. The sign says roughly: “I’m not commuting – I’ll be living in the thick of it.”
Micro-apartments
A gay refugee organization – who knew? – but then – of course!
Gay refugees
And today’s 5:00pm German class, who are already learning the pain of nouns with three genders and declinations of them into four cases. Which immediately reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous quote: “I’d rather decline a drink than a German noun.” Er hatte recht.
German class
And that’s it for today. Tomorrow I should have an interesting interview.
Warm regards, David
Moabit in the morning
October 12, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today I had an interesting interview, which I’ll summarize in a second post today (if time permits). But I was out taking photos in the morning on my stroll around Moabit, a city that reminds me somewhat of Oakland in its rough charm. For German readers, none of this will be very special, but for Americans the pictures may provoke a smile.
A miniature rental car (I didn’t see the driver getting out):
car2go
An Afro-German center:
Afro-German
The German version of a dollar store:
Pfennigland
When you gotta go, you gotta go:
Natur ruft
Notice anything? Let me rephrase that: notice anything missing? Hint: power lines:
Look ma! No wires!
A center to promote family values – with an unwelcome ad out front:
Family values
This is the only correct way to serve hot chocolate on a cold rainy day:
Hot cocoa
The morning headline: a small fire in the EuropaCenter had some Berliners thinking of something much more serious. But it was 10/11 and not 9/11:
10/11
Missionaries camped outside a refugee center, hoping to snatch some souls. You can see the refugee tents in the background, left:
Soul snatchers
And finally, the man who made my lunch today (yeah, I really like those Döners):
Lunch is served
Inside the restaurant a black man was bussing tables and being as helpful as he could. The hint, I think, was that he was working for a tip. When I asked him where he was from, he told me: Mozambique. We chatted in Spanish with a sprinkle of Portuguese for a while, and then I took the hint.
It’s now been 40+ degrees outside for several days, and rainy, and it’s going to be a long winter for men like this.
Warm regards, David
Small world, small goof, small delay
October 13, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I had a post for you tonight, but I need to rewrite it for reasons tomorrow’s post will explain.
We have run out of memory to install in the donated laptops I was working on, so I have returned to the “store” to hand out clothes. This weekend I will look around for a few more sticks of memory so I can finish the project if it’s not too expensive.
My morning began with a cup of strong Arabic coffee some Syrian volunteers had made (4 giant thermoses of it), tidying up the children’s section of the store, then wandering around to talk to people. There is a room in which every sort of personal care product is handed out, including sanitary napkins. I noticed that this was the menstrual product stocked almost exclusively, and one of the women volunteers explained to me that this was done because 1) it’s safer for people who don’t know how to use tampons, and 2) most of the refugees don’t.
Sanitary
The volunteer had an unmistakable accent, and I asked her where she was from — Israel, she said. There are about 70,000 Israelis who have left the country and are now living in Berlin, she told me. Germany has a “Law of Return” of its own which grants citizenship to the grandchildren of expelled Jews. So for many young Israelis, a European passport, job opportunities, and religious freedom — or perhaps better expressed as freedom from coercive religion — make Berlin an appealing destination. A representative of the Jewish community in Berlin told me last week that 10,000 Israelis had come last month alone.
My young colleague told me she had met Jewish refugees at Moabit Hilft from Macedonia and war zones in mainly Kurdish territory. And I have been meeting Palestinians whose families, after expulsion from Israel in 1948 and later, had fled to Syria. As an ironic side-story, Jews and Palestinians are both getting it in this Syrian war.
The volunteer told me it was her obligation as a Jew to help refugees, that her grandparents had had to flee themselves. I mentioned the line — “for we were strangers in Egypt” — and she said, “Exactly.”
No human is illegal
As we chatted, I found out she belonged to Jüdische Stimme — the German sister organization of Jewish Voice for Peace. I had been wondering if I’d run into any other lefty Jews in Germany. And then she put me in touch with another one.
Later in the morning, a Dutch film crew came in and I discovered one of the filmmakers was from Guatemala. He and I were chatting about the “Mayans” in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when the mother of a volunteer jumped into our Spanish conversation. It turned out she was visiting her daughter from Queretaro, Mexico, where Deborah and I have been a few times.
The world is getting smaller all the time.
Later I tweaked the translation of a PowerPoint presentation, and then returned to my post. I enjoy talking to the children who come in. I have found that most of them speak German and can be Dolmetschers for their parents — so I ask them their age, compliment them on their German, ask them where they are from, how long they’ve been here, how they’re doing in school. They all ask for toys, and we really have only stuffed bears and sad little plastic things to give them. I may be hitting you all up for some donations. Actually, you can count on it.
After work, I was supposed to go visit the Berlin Quakers, who also do refugee work — almost. My meeting is actually next Thursday night, and I had misread my calendar. But I made it to Friedrichstraße and got a pure tourist shot of the Spree river:
Spree
This part of Berlin is rolling in dough, luxury hotels, and shi-shi restaurants. Still, in the most wealthy country in Europe there is poverty and homelessness, alcoholism and neglect a block away:
Homeless
Next week I will return to my friends, the Friends:
Quakers
Until tomorrow,
Warm regards, David
Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD)
October 14, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Two of the reasons that brought me to Germany were refugees and the return of the German Far Right. Both issues are focused on Muslims yet Muslims themselves are often not asked for their views in the mainstream media. I’ve had a number of one-on-one conversations with refugees but I thought I’d go talk to a group that advocates for Muslims in broader German society — one that might help me understand the bigger picture.
So I made an appointment with the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland e.V. (Central Muslim Council in Germany) and — given that Muslims have huge targets on their back — I was quite surprised to be welcomed to their offices in such a friendly fashion. But the representative I spoke to asked me to not disclose their address, publish his picture, or use any names — so for the purposes of this letter, I’m just going to call him “Bob.”
German Muslims
The Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD) advocates for Muslims in German society. Its main office is in Köln but the press office is in Berlin. The ZMD was established in 1994 and represents 300 mosques and their local communities, and 35 associations with over 100.000 members.
Many of the Muslim communities in Germany are distinguished by national and linguistic differences, and there are many Vereine (associations) throughout. Most large urban areas like Berlin, Hamburg, and Bonn have their own community organizations. Turks, Albanians, and other ethnicities have their own associations as well.
Germany, a country with a population a quarter of the size of the United States, has 4.6 million Muslims and there are also now 600,000 Muslim refugees — about 1.9 million more Muslims than in the US. Something like 5% of all Germans are Muslim, a demographic change that began during Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle) of the 60’s, when millions of Turks came to Germany to work.
Although entire Anatolian villages were emptied to provide cheap labor for Germany in the Sixties, many Germans were disappointed when they didn’t all automatically rush back to Turkey. A poll by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation found 40% of Germans no longer want Muslims in the country. A Friedrich Ebert Foundation poll revealed that 56% of Germans are hostile to Islam. In Germany today there are clothing bans for Muslim women in most German states, and the community call to prayer is outlawed. And these are the legal forms of discrimination against Muslims in a country with a tax that goes to your choice of church.
Bob told me there have been over 50 attacks on mosques recently, including a bomb attack last week, 1,000 attacks on individuals (mainly women), and that Germany has an estimated 70,000 right-wing extremists who regularly target “foreigners.” Existing laws criminalizing hate crimes against Jews do not yet apply to Muslims, but Bob told me that by next year this loophole should be fixed.
ZMD is involved in outreach programs intended to both help the Muslim community and allay fears by non-Muslims. “Wir sind Paten” (with the implication of “We’ll be there for you”) is a program in different cities throughout Germany which provides volunteers to stand by refugees and Muslim newcomers — to show them the ropes and to help navigate the confusing structures of a new society. “Wir sind Paten” also creates a network of helpers who share information about cities, training, language, laws, and navigating red tape. The volunteers support not only the newcomers, but each other.
Another ZMD program is called “Safer Spaces.” This is designed to help communities spot troubled young men and intervene before they go off the rails. The vast majority of cases of radicalization have been social misfits, people who have been damaged by trauma — Einzelfälle (individual cases), Bob told me. When I mentioned the American term “lone wolf,” Bob nodded in agreement — yes, that described the Einzelfälle pretty well.
ZMD also collaborates with the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK), an organization which shares many of the same goals with the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the US. Bob stressed that the ZMD’s core mission is pretty straightforward — to improve the lives of Muslims in Germany and to promote integration into German society.
75% of all German Muslims are Sunni, and the remainder are Alevis, Twelver Shi’a, Alawites, and Ahmadiyya, while Sufis, Ismailis, Zaydis, and Ibadis each are less than 1%. 63% of Germany’s Muslims are from Turkey and most German Muslims live in Berlin, but there are significant numbers in Saxony and other states. Berlin is interestingly also the site of Germany’s first Muslim cemetery, established in 1798. Muslims have been in Germany a long time, and they’re here to stay.
Are the various communities islands unto themselves? I wondered. Bob said, no, there was actually a lot of unity among Muslims in Germany. He said it was not uncommon for Shia and Sunni to worship together, and that being a minority (together) in Germany might even make this more likely than in the old country. After all, now everyone’s in the same boat.
Just as American Jews are largely Democrats, German Muslims are probably most at home in the SPD and the Green Party, and to a lesser extent the CDU — Angela Merkel’s party — which has now changed its slogan to “we want to know who’s entering the country.”
When I mentioned Merkel’s original phrase regarding handling refugees — wir schaffen das (we’ll manage it), Bob grinned and said, “Yeah, like Yes we can.”
To some extent, the handing of refugees has been a logistical disaster — for reasons I will explore in a later email — so implying the Chancellor’s words are mere sloganeering is rather harsh, even by Bob’s own admission. But he gave the Chancellor praise for making a moral issue a national challenge, even if her own party is not solidly behind her.
Tell me about the Far Right, I asked. The NPD and PEGIDA are basically unrepentant Neo-Nazis, he said. Bob also repeated some of the NPD’s slogans — Goodbye Ali! — Don’t touch me! — Eva and Maria instead of Shariah! Bob recalled an incident on German Unity Day in Dresden in which the ZMD’s leadership was threatened by twenty PEGIDA members, including PEGIDA’s national leader Lutz Bachmann. A neo-Nazi contingent showed up at a “unity tent” comprised of Germany’s main religions. “We had to call the police.”
In some ways, Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) is even worse, Bob said, because the party is slick, uses telegenic speakers, and couches its xenophobia and Islamophobia in dry, economic jargon. And this is what I’ve been hearing for the last twelve days I’ve been here, from just about every person I’ve talked to.
The rise of the Far Right in Germany is a result of Germany taking its eye off the ball, my host told me. “In the old days the police would intervene immediately — with even the slightest hint of neo-Nazism. But now both politicians and police give them too much leeway. Worse, the police have been infiltrated by the Far Right.” He mentioned a case in Dresden involving a police chief. And Bob worries that the Far Right has also found its way into federal security agencies. An underground National-Socialist organization (NSU) was uncovered in 2011 — 13 years late, and the case also featured murders of witnesses and shredded evidence.
Germans once used to refer to Nächstenliebe — to love your brother as yourself. This principle is what once differentiated the German CDU — the Christian Democratic Party — from their economic policy brethren, American Republicans. But while the economics may be similar, for American Republicans Nächstenliebe is a bunch of lefty hooey.
Unfortunately this now seems to be what’s happening in Germany as well. “The lack of empathy is a real problem,” Bob told me. Discrimination is quite common against Muslims, in all same the ways it is with Blacks in America. A woman with a non-German name will be told, “This job is not right for you.” The same often applies to those with Slavic names “but they can more easily change or alter their names.” Although the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) prohibits this type of discrimination, it has to be constantly monitored and reported. “You have to fight for the rights you already have,” Bob stressed.
History can be learned and changed. Or it will be repeated.
Warm regards, David
Formulas make bad movies in any language
October 14, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Tonight I had a notion to watch a good movie at the neighborhood theater. But the Dartmouth AMC theater at home doesn’t usually show my sort of thing, and neither did the Alhambra Cineplex in Wedding:
Alhambra Cineplex
Here’s what was playing tonight. Sad to say, but movie formulas make bad movies in any language. But it was interesting that the intended audience for many films was not assumed to all be native German speakers:
HartmannIkimizin YerineBurg SchreckensteinBir Baba Hindu
Warm regards, David
Die Liberale Synagoge
October 15, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
This morning I went to shul. Jewish readers will know at once that this means synagogue, but German readers may wonder at the similarity to the word Schule (school). In Jewish life at one time they were one in the same. As soon as I had written and expressed a desire to visit, I was invited to attend by no less than four people. There is a constant police presence at the synagogue, so I had a little trouble getting in until I showed one of the officers an email from someone he knew. Once in the building, I went through an airport-style security screening.
Police
The foundation stone for die Liberale Synagoge was laid in 1859 after it was designed by Karl Heinrich Knoblauch. After Knoblauch became sick, construction continued under the supervision of Friedrich August Stüler. When Stüler was unable to continue, the work resumed under Knoblauch’s son, Heinrich Gustav. A slew of engineers and specialists finally completed the work on November 6, 1866, and there was a face-lift in 1901. But in 1938 die Liberale Synagoge was torched by the Nazis and subsequently bombed in 1943 by the Allies. Yet somehow it was meant to survive. Renovation began in 1988 and in 1991 the work was complete.
Synagoge
The plaque on the building (in the first picture) reads:
This synagogue is 100 years old and was set on fire on the 9th of November 1938 ON KRISTALLNACHT by the Nazis. During the Second World War 1939-1945 it was destroyed by bombing in 1943. The face of this House of God should remain a site of warning and memory for all time. NEVER FORGET IT. The Board of the Jewish Congregation of Greater Berlin. September 1956.
The congregation I was visiting is the Masorti Jewish congregation on Orangienburger Straße near Tucholkystraße. Both the rabbi, Gesa Ederberg, and the hazzan (cantor), Avitall Gerstetter, are women, and both received training in the United States. The congregation is egalitarian and very welcoming. The hazzan explained to me that the return of Masorti Judaism in Germany owes a lot to their American Jewish cousins. For non-Jewish readers, Masorti Judaism preserves a lot of tradition but is not Orthodox.
My instructions were to go up the elevator and hang a left, so I followed some people who were doing just that. I introduced myself as a visitor to a couple of people, one of whom turned out to be the cantor. I was greeted by a friendly young man who offered me a Chumash (bible) in either German or English, and a Siddur (prayer book) in either language as well. The Chumash was Etz Hayim with its familiar deep red cover.
I got a little confused whenever the rabbi shot out page numbers almost simultaneously in German and English. Peeking over people’s shoulders didn’t help much either because everyone was in the zone, doing their own thing, on their own page. But they all were singing the same words, and beautifully too. I can’t recall a moment in the service where anyone merely read Hebrew. It was always sung, and by more than a few skilled singers who added harmony. The cantor also had a lovely voice. Even in the prayers that followed lunch, everything was sung — at length. It was incredibly musical, and very moving.
And although I’m not wired for prayer myself, I know that everyone in that room was doing all they could to please God.
As everywhere today, the Torah portion this morning was Ha’azinu: Deuteronomy 32:1-52. Somewhere in the middle of the portion, God seems to rather harshly command Moses to go die on the mountain he is climbing. He tells Moses he will only be able to see from afar where his efforts will eventually lead. In the rabbi’s D’var Torah (words) after the parsha (part of the reading), which she gave in German, she observed that many of us never get to see the fruition of our work — and she gave some contemporary political examples — but that we still keep at it. It’s what we do. Idealism or faith — whatever you choose to call it — can be a pretty good thing.
And then I thought of all the people who had worked at keeping this very building alive for 150 years, and all those who had kept trying to re-establish a Jewish community in Germany.
At lunch I found a table with a father who had brought his three year-old to shul. He was from Hungary, his wife from Russia. We talked for quite a while, then I said I really should go thank the rabbi for the invitation. But before he let me go he invited me to Shabbat dinner next week.
Like my lunch companion, the congregation is young, and it numbers about 200, though today the number was between 40 and 50. “Post Yom Kippur fatigue,” someone joked. An overwhelming majority are English-speaking, from the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. But I also talked to people from France and Hungary, and I assume many more European states are represented. Germany’s “Right of Return” law for Jews has brought back the grandchildren of Holocaust victims. I asked a young ex-New Yorker who was doing a master’s degree here how she liked Berlin. “I love it, but I know it’s not like the rest of Germany.” She told me her father respected her decision to come to Berlin but he had only visited her once because Germany brings up such strong feelings for him.
And then I thought of that parsha again.
Warm regards, David
IKEA
October 16, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today I had arranged to have lunch with a man about my age from Syria and he asked me to meet him at IKEA. Who knew IKEA had a cafeteria with really inexpensive food? Getting out to Pankow took a while, undoubtedly longer than an experienced Berliner would have required. The part of Pankow I visited reminded me of Canton (MA), Warwick (RI), or King of Prussia (PA). My lunch buddy was not the only one who thought of this:
IKEA
We talked for about five hours over too many coffees, than it got late and I went my way as he queued up to pay for his kitchen gear. Getting back to the Schnellbahn took me through more industrial park, a long walk over a freeway, and then finally to the station. I was getting lost and a bit desperate when a couple who turned out to be Iranian and Palestinian took mercy on the clearly lost foreigner and walked me right to my platform.
The Iranian lady and I chatted about her sister studying in Boston, her own studies in Heidelberg, and how Heidelberg had really changed.
A lot has changed in this country of 80 million.
Warm regards, David
Alternative für Deutschland – no interviews
October 17, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
One of my goals when coming to Germany was to see where the Far Right was headed. I was advised by a number of people to avoid the NPD and PEGIDA, both of which use violence. I heeded their advice. However, I really wanted to meet with Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD. It’s a new party that popped up rather recently, in 2013, and has gotten about 12% of the vote in Berlin. Politically, it has an ultraconservative economic program, but culturally it appeals to the same neo-Nazis who fill the NPD (which is declining in political influence) and PEGIDA.
The AfD is on its way to becoming what the Republican party has already transformed into.
While the left and center parties in Germany are pretty bunt — brightly colored (i.e., multicultural), the AfD is as lily white (and old) as the Republican Party. Here, for example, is the party leadership in Berlin:
AfD Berlin
In the United States, most of the “Tea Parties” that eventually took control of the Republican Party are xenophobic and racist organizations. The NAACP did a study in 2010 which showed that six out of seven were brimming with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. But Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks Tea Party appealed to voters more on economic terms, although Mexicans and “Welfare Queens” were soon identified as the root cause of all our economic woes.
I thought of this when I contacted the AfD. Do they deserve the benefit of the doubt if, really, they are all just free market fundamentalists like Dick Armey? Hmmm. But I also wanted to find out how their platform applied to immigrants, refugees, and Germany’s own poor — all of whom receive benefits under the Harz IV program. I wanted to know about their foreign policy (they hate the EU but love NATO). How do they really feel about multiculturalism? (One party leader said it belongs on a manure pile).
So for the last two weeks I have contacted the AfD four times for interviews — or even just a chat — anything. Recently I received an email from the Berlin office telling me they wanted me to submit questions in writing, which I then did:
From: Lydia Axtmann <…@beatrixvonstorch.de> date: 10/10/2016 9:17 AM Subject: RE: Request for an interview
Dear Mr. Ehrens,
thanks for your request for an interview with Mrs. von Storch and your interest in the AfD policy in Berlin.
Unfortunately it is very hard to make an appointment with Mrs. Storch in the next few weeks, so I suggest we prepare the appointment by clarifying some details.
For which magazine or newspaper do you work?
Which policy field are you interested in?
What will be the questions, Mrs. von Storch will have to answer.
For more information and to answer your questions, please contact me by email.
Lydia Axtmann, Ass. iur. press officer to Beatrix von Storch, MEP Abgeordnetenbüro Beatrix von Storch Zionskirchstraße 3 10119 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24 33 97 40
Accordingly, I jumped through Frau Axtmann’s hoops and put a number questions to Frau von Storch, which were all based on the party’s platform:
But I guess they didn’t like my questions All I got was a wish for a fun time in Old Germany:
From: Lydia Axtmann <…@beatrixvonstorch.de> date: 10/17/2016 11:17 AM Subject: Re: Request for an interview
Dear Mr. Ehrens,
thanks for your e-mail. Unfortunately it is not possible to meet Mrs. Storch because of other appointments she has to meet. Maybe it is possible to meet her when you are in Germany next time. We are very sorry for giving you a negative answer.
Nevertheless we hope you will enjoy your stay in Berlin.
Kind regards Lydia Axtmann
Lydia Axtmann, Ass. iur. Presse & Kommunikation Abgeordnetenbüro Beatrix von Storch Zionskirchstraße 3 10119 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24 33 97 40 Mobil: +49 170 3 55 25 67
What’s clear to me is that the AfD is good at curating its image, avoiding being seen as the same overt racists and violent thugs the other far-right groups unapologetically represent.
No, what the AfD says is that it simply has an economic platform, and if it happens to offend people — like the lazy parasites that get help from the state, or the shiftless foreigners who come here to suck jobs away from real Germans — well, screw Political Correctness! We’re just telling it like it really is.
Sound familiar?
Warm regards, David
Sounds
October 18, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Nothing new in the store. Just a steady flow of customers from morning to mid-afternoon. I thought you might like to “hear” what I hear every day – the whirr of people speaking in a dozen different languages, and the sounds of little children making the sounds that little children make everywhere…
Warm regards, David
Turmstraße
October 19, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
The LaGeSo (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales – Department of Health and Human Services) and Moabit Hilft, where I am volunteering, both have an address on Turmstraße (tower street). The street — so says a sign as you exit the subway — is so named because you can see church towers (and also a court’s tower) all up and down the street.
Turmstrasse
Within the same complex there are a number of private organizations, and throughout Berlin there are hundreds, many of them run by either the Lutheran church which is stronger in Northern Germany, or to a lesser extent by the Catholic church. There is more than a little irony in the fact that, despite widespread xenophobia, so many Christians have stepped up to help people who are predominantly Muslims.
Several people told me of a Christian concept called Nächstenliebe — loving your neighbor as yourself. It sounded like something New Testament-y until I looked up the line in which the German word appears — only to discover it’s actually from the Torah:
You shall neither take revenge from nor bear a grudge against the members of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 18:19).
And when the Torah says “I am the Lord,” it’s not just a suggestion — it’s the law.
I keep hearing about the EJF, the Evangelisches Jugend- und Fürsorgewerk (Lutheran Youth and Welfare) — and this being Northern Germany, I wanted to find out what they were up to with refugees. I wrote them several emails which were never answered, but then discovered the reason: they had moved their offices. So I tracked down and stopped by the new office one morning to see whom I might run into. A security guard told me to come back on Wednesday morning at 8:00 am and maybe someone could help. It sounded rather unlikely — but why not?
So this morning, at 8:00 am in a cold rain, I stepped into the vestibule of the EJF offices with a group of soggy refugees who were all there for social service counseling. I explained (to a different guard this time) that I was hoping to ask an administrator a few questions and — amazingly — he said, “follow me.” After about twenty minutes of being shuffled around by various staff, a young woman came out into the hall. I apologized for ambushing them and said I knew they were probably quite busy. “Yes, actually this is a really bad time,” she said like a true Berliner, “but why don’t you send me your questions and I will give them to my colleague.” So that I did, and I hope to have the responses for you soon.
The EJF was busy taking care of people who needed their time a lot more than I did.
While even fiscally-conservative Germans are doing something for refugees, our American Republicans are running away from basic human responsibility. Loving your neighbor may be the gold standard in whatever religion most of them profess, but the GOP can’t even manage the low bar when they demonize Muslims:
You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow, but you shall not bear a sin on his account. (Leviticus 18:18).
Warm regards, David
Die Quäker
October 20, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Tonight I visited the Quaker Meeting in Berlin. It was even the correct night (see my post from October 13).
To get there from Wedding, you take the U6 subway and walk a bit. Easy peasey. I’m beginning to feel like I almost live here, but Saturday I have to move again — so this will mean learning another subway line.
At 6:30 pm the city is still crowded, and the subway reminds me not so much of a rat race as a stockyard:
Rush hour
After coming up from the Friedrichstraße subway I arrived at the Meeting, not far from the train station and not far from the Spree River, in a lovely courtyard. I rang the bell and the door was opened by Gisela Faust, who at 91 is old enough to remember the Nazi era, and young enough to keep up with the young Friends who participate in a bi-weekly Gesprächskreis (conversation circle).
Gisela told me that there are about 250 Quakers in all of Germany, and about 20 in Berlin. The Berlin Meeting follows devotional practices like those I have visited in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. It is distnguished by Stille Andacht (silent worship). There is a Yearly Meeting for all of Germany, a German-language Quaker magazine, and book distribution. The Meeting also hosts a wartime research archive, paid for with support from American Quakers, which helps pay the rent.
Stille Andacht
Because the Berlin Meeting welcomes visitors, I assumed tonight’s conversation would be a social or some broad ethical topic. Not quite. It actually turned out to be a Quaker study circle. After more than a year, the seven participants had made a considerable dent in a book called Quäker Glaube und Wirken (Quaker Belief and Practice) and were now at chapter 20.72 — a paragraph on conflict resolution.
Quakers in Germany have a long history and a short history. The long history dates back to the 17th Century, before many emigrated to North America. The short history goes back to World War I, when the Society of Friends, as they are formally known, were just about the only religious organization to help Germans, who like everyone else were traumatized by the war. Even a decade after the war German children were still starving, so the Quakers set up stations that fed almost a million children. From this act of kindness Quakerism again took root in Germany.
In 1938 the very same Meeting where we were sipping tea, which is only two blocks from the Friedrichstraße train station, handled last-minute emigration requests for 10,000 Jewish children to be sent to England on what were called Kindertransporte. Later, when there was not much that could be done to help Jews, Quakers hid them and some Quakers paid the ultimate price for this “crime.”
We sat around the kitchen table drinking our tea, slowly going through each paragraph. Rather than dwelling on the nature of conflict, many of the discussions were about recognizing the truth in what someone says, working to see the world through their eyes, or the impossibility of this always happening. One woman related her experience in the criminal justice system, a man discussed how difficult it was for his father to be known as the “impartial” one, one woman talked about how difficult it was to tell a suicidal co-worker that there was hope without minimizing the difficulties of recovery. Another talked about a complex child custody case, another the challenges of marriage.
Words were parsed, personal experiences shared, but then we got to a quote with a cryptic sentence: “Unless you speak the truth there will never be love.” Hmm. Maybe those Quakers knew what that meant. Things were just starting to get interesting — the quote at least demanded some attention — but, no, it was precisely 8:00 pm in Germany, and suddenly books were closed, coats pulled on, scarves wrapped around necks — and before I knew it two of my photographic subjects had escaped into the cool city night. But I did manage to get a picture of Gisela with three of the kitchen table circle before she locked up for the night (note the jackets; they too were plotting their escapes).
Quakers
Out on the street one of the young women in the group said that she had been to a Quaker meeting in Ohio. From this I gathered she had decided to be a Quaker herself, so I asked her what drew her to it.
“Oh, no. I grew up in this Meeting,” she said. “My whole family is Quaker.”
Warm regards, David
Spandau
October 21, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
On my visit to the Orangienburg synagogue I was invited to spend Friday night (erev shabbat) in Spandau with a Hungarian-Russian couple, their three year old son, a bubbe (grandmother), and an aunt. There was a lot of singing of Yiddish songs before the meal and (as had been the case in synagogue) virtually every Shabbat prayer was sung. The dinner conversation centered around the right turn of European and American politics. I had a lovely evening.
To get to Spandau my fastest option was by train:
By train
Who doesn’t love trains?
train station
Compared with the center of Berlin, Spandau has a relaxed, old-timey feeling:
Spandau
There is a lot of open space:
Spandau park
And a canal runs through the old part of town:
Spandau canal
The streets are picturesque in the same cobblestoned way that downtown New Bedford (MA) is:
Cobblestone
A quarter of Spandau is from somewhere else. Spandau is equally Slavic and Middle Eastern, many Russians live in the borough, the neighborhood Catholic church has services in Polish, and Turks have long been fixtures of the community — and now the refugees are coming. I snapped this picture of a group of young Arab men on a street corner — maybe you can make out the name…
New Jews
Warm regards, David
Moving Day (#3)
October 22, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today I bid a fond farewell to Wedding and the U6 subway line, which has served me well in getting around the city. Sometime in the next few hours I will (hopefully) hear from my next AirBnb host and will be off — back — to Moabit. Communication is not my new host’s strong suit, so my day is kind of a mess.
Wedding
I had hoped to move into my new digs and then scoot off to a conference organized by Junge Islam Konferenz. Among other things, the morning session promised a Muslim feminist, an imam who organized an LGBTQ mosque, and a Far Right blogger with a Youtube following — all the panelists discussing the integration of Muslims into German society and the EU. It would have been really interesting:
Conference
But while all this is going on I’ll be waiting for the call that will get me into my next apartment.
Next week is my last week in Berlin. As things draw to a close I will be working a bit on a writing project, then will be traveling to Dettelbach in Franconia to visit the family of our former exchange student. Then home.
The German Book Prize was announced a few days ago, and many of the titles looked interesting, but I have probably already exceeded the weight allowance for my return flight. Since I couldn’t meet with the AfD, I settled for a book by Hajo (Hans Joachim) Funke, an expert on the extreme Right. I had actually been in contact with Lamya Kaddor and had hoped to meet her, but I’m settling for her very engaging book on German Islamophobia. A couple of plays, a book to help me remember my German grammar, and a book on Germany’s “forgotten generation” — all this should hold me for a while.
Books
Someday I hope to return to the excitement and the linguistic smorgasbord of Berlin — but as of this minute I’m really looking forward to returning to my quiet little house on the Massachusetts coast and my wonderful family and friends.
And voting.
Warm regards, David
East and West, and Sunshine
October 23, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Yesterday was a day of moving from one AirBnb to another. I checked into my new place, which is on the sixth floor of an apartment building. Looking out my window I could see people making dinner, working at their computers, having animated conversations, all of us wrapped in the anonymity of night.
Morning
I’m not a morning person — what with all that light and the cruel early hour — and when I woke up, the magic was gone. The blinking red lights from the night before were simply part of a construction crane. And it was another Sunday in Berlin — pretty much everything closed — and one either reads the paper, has friends over, goes out to eat, or goes to a museum. I chose the latter.
Daybreak
When I was in Berlin in 2014 the Stasi Museum was closed. But I decided to go there this morning. For people who don’t know what the Stasi is — it was the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst — those nice people who looked out for East Germans’ safety and well-being. Looking out for the lives of others was what they did. Similar organizations exist in every country — the NSA, FBI, GCHQ, even Germany’s present-day BND. Homeland Security.
To the Stasi we will go
East Berlin isn’t “East Berlin” anymore, but there is something spare and just a little bleaker than the rest of the city.
E Berlin
The east half bears the fingerprints of both Communism and advanced Capitalism:
Bleaker street
The Stasi museum is quite easy to get to from the subway:
Welcome to the Stasi
And I imagine it’s never looked so good:
Stasi HQ
Outside there is a display with the chronology of the rise and fall of the East German state in picture form. I snapped those. I also took photos inside the museum itself. Of those photos.
As I entered the museum, I joked with the man at the counter — Die Gedanken sind frei, aber der Eintritt nicht — thoughts are free, but not entry to the museum. He joked back — only good people with good thoughts could enter; everyone else was in deep shit.
Which was pretty much the story of East Germany.
After the war, an altruistic Soviet Union was supposed to guide East Germans in creating a worker’s paradise:
Worker’s paradise
Only it didn’t quite work out that way. No surprise: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was a dictatorship. People were miserable. The tattoo on the man’s back, for example, reads — Only when I’m dreaming am I free.
DDR misery
Within short order, East Germany became a police state. As you tour the Stasi offices, you’re shocked by how bland, bureaucratic, systematized, automated, and widespread the surveillance was. This wasn’t a spy museum with secret codes, disappearing ink, and agents in trench coats. This was the nerve center of something that put half the country under observation. For their own good.
I met a group of students from Yorkshire, England, who had come with their teachers for an enrichment program. They were shaking their heads in disbelief. I asked one of their teachers if they were equally shocked at the GCHQ and Britain’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras. He winced and said, “yeah…”
The Lives of Others
It didn’t take long for East Germany fall to pieces. In the United States we like to believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due to Ronald Reagan’s persistent anti-Soviet efforts — or our good old-fashioned American out-spending the Evil Empire until it went bankrupt.
But the truth is — from the very beginning East Germans wanted their freedom and organized relentlessly for it. Rallies, manifestos, citizen groups, covert groups, demonstrations, petitions, candle-light vigils — all the peaceful means at citizens’ disposal, and occasionally not-so-peaceful means. But the same thing was happening in other Soviet satellite nations, too.
Organizing
Finally the wall came down.
Wall down
A huge number of East Germans flooded into West Germany — and they were housed and fed…
Fed and housed
And Germans welcomed them… just as they have (sometimes begrudgingly) welcomed today’s refugees.
Welcomed
On my way home, I looked on my Google Maps and noticed that my apartment — at the bottom of Moabit, a block from the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station — is also within walking distance of the heart of the German government.
After an 8-minute walk I got a photo of Angela Merkel’s offices:
Angela Merkel’s Buro
This is the parliament building, three minutes from the Chancellor’s offices:
Parliament
And this is a huge government annex right next to the parliament:
Annex
As I walked up to the Reichstag, the parliament, there was music and someone was speaking. They had erected a huge display arguing that Germany doesn’t exist — it’s still in the hands of a shadowy group. Perhaps the Illuminati?
I walked toward the annex building and ran into two women about my age who were warming themselves in the first sunshine anyone has seen around here for — well, since I got here. One of them told me that anyone could exercise their Constitutional rights on the green — even the crazies. We chatted about Trump and Hillary — and she seemed worried that the American election was going to be so close, so I showed her the current polling. We talked about Angela Merkel and sunshine woman said she thought Merkel was a decent Christian and hoped Merkel would have a third term.
“Merkel and Clinton — how about that,” I said. She straightened right up: “It’s time for the women.”
Crazies
As I got ready to walk back “home” behind me I noticed a token police presence at the edge of the Reichstag.
Police
A state governs by consent of the governed. But sometimes it does without consent. And, then again, it also protects us from the crazies.
Democracy.
Warm regards, David
Goodbye for now
October 24, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
There are still about ten days before I return home, but my letters will be ending tonight for a couple of reasons.
One is that I am now in a routine of going to my volunteer job every day — catching the #123 bus and stopping at my favorite Turkish breakfast joint before arriving at the center. Nothing so interesting about that. Another is that I am donating my laptop this Wednesday, so writing long text won’t be so easy. I’ve never made the easy transition to mobile devices. Yeah, I know. That makes me old. Nolo contendere.
Besides my personal reasons for coming here, Germany is in many ways a mirror of our own nation. It has been fascinating trying to understand where things stand here in terms of politics and culture — as much as anyone, especially a foreigner, can ever hope to in a few short weeks. But all the same issues are surfacing both here and in the US, and for many of the same reasons. It has been a privilege to have had some great conversations with people who love to discuss politics as much as I do.
The Stasi Museum I visited yesterday had a rack of handouts, human rights brochures, interesting tidbits about the DDR (East Germany), and a newsletter called Der Stacheldraht (The Barbed Wire). It’s aptly named — in many ways it’s barbed and bitter, as victims of the Stasi probably have every right to be.
The brochure on life in the DDR had this tidbit:
To excape this all-pervasive political and social control, many East Germans withdrew into their private lives — so far as this was possible and tolerated… The dacha and the Trabi with a roof tent are examples in the exhibition of this withdrawal.
What was the Trabi roof tent? Someone figured out a way to stick a tent on the top of one of the ridiculously underpowered, stinking little bathtubs. Perhaps it was the East German version of Wal*Mart, NASCAR, Facebook, or Reality TV.
Trabi Dachzelt
We all have our ways of withdrawing from the world.
I never heard back from the AfD — but in the Stacheldraht newsletter I picked up, I found this:
We once heard from statesmen like De Gaulle, Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl, to name a few, who used to described the European Union as a union of homelands, all peacefully united in their own democratic traditions. But today this sounds a whole lot different. Now we’re headed, without anyone clearly saying it, toward a European State. Those who feel things have gone too far — those who want to preserve their own national sovereignty, who want to remain Germans, Frenchmen, Danes, Italians, Greeks, etc. — are called reactionary nationalists or relics. And if they point toward the centuries-old Christian tradition to which their country belongs, or dare to call it “the dominant culture,” there’s not much more to say than that they’ve joined the ranks of cultural arsonists.
Here is a glimpse (whether we agree with it or not) of why some former citizens of East Germany (and maybe some of our own emigres) might see the EU as just another Soviet Union. Besides the loss of their German nationality within a Soviet system, the USSR/DDR also denigrated the culture and religion that many valued — including Merkel, also an East German, whose father was a minister. So in many ways the sudden and inexplicable alliance between some former Communists and the Far Right is maybe not so inexplicable after all.
Warm regards, David
Reichsburger
October 25, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I’m sorry to annoy anyone by “un-quitting” sending you letters, but this is a correction. And maybe not auf Wiedersehen, either, because I’m doing this on an iPad.
The other day I posted a picture of a conspiracy theorist at the Reichstag (never a good combination) without realizing who and what he really was. As I was reading the newspaper today, it described a new phenomenon in Germany called the “Reichburger” — a “Citizen of the Reich” or what in the USA is called a “Sovereign citizen.” That’s what this is:
Crazies
One of these Citizens of the Reich shot a policeman in Franconia last week, and in Bavaria two policemen were fired for being involved with these groups. In Sachsen-Anhalt three policemen were also recently canned. The Berlin Police Department has circulated documents internally meant to help officers recognize other officers who many be involved.
The Berliner Zeitung says that an estimated 100 Citizens of the Reich are active in Berlin. Some are anti-Semitic. Others hold fantastic conspiracy theories, “such as, that Adolf Hitler took off with a contingent of aircraft at the end of the Second World War, heading to the Arctic, where they built the nation of ‘New Schwabenland.'”
Laughable were it not for their weapons and their hate.
Another American import to Germany is the KKK, which first appeared in the 1920’s — before Hitler took power. There are now four separate Klans here. Since 2001 they have been involved in 68 hate crimes. At least one police officer in Baden-Wuerttemberg is known to have been involved with the Klan.
The “Right Turn” in Europe and America gets more interesting by the minute.
Warm regards, David
Prison
October 29, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I was out for a walk last night and ran into my friendly neighborhood prison. In the US, our prisons are usually way the hell out of town, where no upstanding citizens have to think about crime — and they are also difficult institutions for the families of prisoners to visit.
Moabit JVA
This one, on Alt-Moabit Strasse, is right across the street from a daycare.
That got me wondering about prisons in Germany, about the number of people incarcerated, but particularly the percentage of citizens sitting in jail. I easily found this document (in English) on the Berlin Prisons website, which describes how treatment programs are developed for inmates.
When an inmate leaves prison in Germany, they have a support system to reintegrate into society, not just $100 and a bus ticket to nowhere.
In contrast, the United States incarcerates almost 9 times more people per 100,000 than Germany, and recidivism is much higher because we never treat the causes of criminal behavior, and we actually make it more difficult for him to function in the world to which he returns:
Incarcerated
Can a nation like ours, with so many people behind bars, truly be called a democracy?
Warm regards, David
Trains to Death, or Trains to Life
October 31, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Throughout Germany there are Stolpersteine — literally, stumble-stones. They are usually memorials to people who were hauled off to concentration camps or who died at the hands of the Nazis. One reads: “Here lived Ida Arensberg. née Benjamin – 1870 – deported 1942. Murdered in Theresienstadt on 18.9.1942.”
History is hard not to notice here.
This morning I went down to Friedrichstraße because I have worn out my shoes, and there is a Clark’s, a Timberland, a Shoe City, and a bunch of other retail shoe stores. I was not really thinking about the time change — even after specifically talking to Deborah about it the night before — but I had forgotten to change the time on my watch. For younger readers, the watch was an error-prone personal analog device that people in the 20th century once used to tell time.
So there I was, wandering around a half hour before any of the shoe stores actually opened. I ducked back into the train station to get a coffee, and there on the outside of the building I noticed a couple of historical plaques.
The very same train station — now with both a McDonald’s and a Burger King — had once been used to transport Jews to their deaths:
Trains to Death
And, as I mentioned in the letter about the Quakers, the Friedrichstraße station was also used to save the lives of about 10,000 children by sending them on Kindertransporte to England:
Trains to Life
The Germans, for all their dark history, at least look it in the eye everyday.
I wonder when the day will come that Americans will have our own Stolpersteine to acknowledge slavery, lynchings, shootings, prisons, torture, genocide, and all the wars of choice — our own dark legacy.
Warm regards, David
So it begins
November 13, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
So it begins.
Today President-elect Trump announced that he was going to follow through on his campaign pledge to round up millions of people he claims are “criminals” and deport them. We haven’t seen mass-deportations like this since the Thirties. And it wasn’t just Nazi Germany where this occurred.
The measure of any society is not how much power one group can wield against others. Only a compassionate society that cares for and respects its own citizens — and the rights of those who come to it for help — is worthy of our respect.
And when a government turns its back on the helpless, becoming a force of injustice, it is our responsibility to step forward and do what we can as individuals.
I am very grateful to Moabit Hilft in Berlin for the month I spent there meeting refugees and the people who care about them. Please consider making a contribution:
Closer to home, the New Bedford Immigrant’s Assistance Center is going to need our help from this moment forward. Those in our community who have become our friends and people we care about — they desperately need our help right now:
Review of “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank (ISBN 9781925228885)
This book explains when the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace the professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. It explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. It explains why — even in Bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. It takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. It looks at the record of Duval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital.
But Democrats can’t help it. This is who they are. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats draw Frank’s scrutiny. Their friends, the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs, are their idols. Their shared values are with pharmaceutical magnates and software developers, hedge fund managers and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or the teachers. Half the time Democrats at war with Labor (think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers). The New Democrats are nothing like FDR’s allies of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries, “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as the Democrats of their fathers’ generation — all while betraying them.
They are a separate economic class — themselves neither fish nor fowl, workers nor oligarchs. They have no idea where their allegiances lie. They think they’re voting for the common man but they live, dress, and eat better — and then they wonder why their noble gestures aren’t appreciated.
Frank concludes his book with this:
“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.
Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.
What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity – to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest – once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”
I would also add — don’t automatically give your vote to a party that hasn’t earned it.
American Exceptionalism is an article of faith of both Republicans and Democrats, even Liberals. In the eyes of many Americans our global dominance is proof that God conferred special blessings on us. Sending American “peacekeeping forces” to drop bombs on one more country is as natural as Friday night football or fast food. Being the world’s cop is seen as a right and a responsibility – sort of an updated version of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” The world is filled with children and somebody has to be the grownup.
E.J. Dionne’s piece, reprinted from the Washington Post (“Americans are deciding for the world,” September 23rd) is no exception. Dionne begins his piece with a tip of the hat to American Exceptionalism – the Presidential election “will be a choice on behalf of the entire world” – and then he argues that we need a president who doesn’t believe in authoritarianism. But the choice of president is not nearly as important as the authoritarianism the United States cultivates – elsewhere.
We’ve never been shy about supporting dictators like Augusto Pinochet, undermining another country’s elections, or supporting military occupations – as we did in South Africa and still do in the West Bank. Our military is in more than 150 other nations. We can ensure “compliance” from those who would cross us with sanctions, bunker busters, cruise missiles, drones, or nuclear weapons. We have a permanent veto in the United Nations and we can use international organizations to pressure others into supporting our wars – or we can just ignore them altogether. We send our enemies to the International Court of Justice – but we won’t be bound by it ourselves.
There’s a pretty thin line separating autocracy from a belligerent superpower. One is a bully in his own country; the other in the whole world. So it’s hardly a surprise when a global bully starts growing them at home.
E.J. Dionne says he’s concerned that “allowing Trump to win would strengthen the autocratic Vladimir Putin in Russia and the far right in Europe with which he is now allied.” While Russian nationalism is every bit as toxic as the American variety, Russia has actually been historically opposed to fascism. Emerging fascist elements in the Ukraine and Poland, where American concern for democracy comes second to installing missile systems, alarms Russia.
If the United States were truly interested in weakening autocratic regimes – other than by turning dictatorships into failed states, as we have done with bi-partisan resolve for 25 years – we might start by holding them accountable and taking away their allowances. Let’s make it known we won’t reward military dictatorships (sorry, Egypt). We won’t reward inhuman occupations (tough beans, Israel). We won’t give you any more missiles if your family-owned state is indistinguishable from ISIS or had something to do with 9/11 (I’m talking to you, Saudi Arabia).
And we might shut down our secret gulags and black sites while we’re at it. Those are for despots and autocrats, not for supposed democracies.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The next American election is a choice between a con man who would just love to try out the knobs and dials of foreign policy and military power – and another who has already used them to make the world a more dangerous place – and who has no qualms about pushing them again. Neither of these two candidates is any less lethal than the other, nor any more dedicated to democracy for the rest of the world. Hillary Clinton demonstrated American tone-deafness best when she addressed the VFW recently: “You may wonder how anyone could disagree, but in fact my opponent in this race has said very clearly that he thinks American exceptionalism is insulting to the rest of the world.” Well, it is.
Americans do not make choices “on behalf of the world.” We make choices in our own interests that often harm the rest of the world. Like Clinton, we can feign astonishment that being a bully is unacceptable to the rest of the world – but ultimately we just don’t care what the other kids think.
Odds-makers, pollsters, and pundits are already calling the election for Clinton. It’s hard to see how they are wrong. By even the most conservative models, Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning are 60% and she already has her requisite 270 electoral college votes.
But that’s not to say the election won’t be close. It’s going to be a long, long night.
But in the end we will all be safe from too much regulation of the financial industry, single-payer healthcare, shielding college students from crushing debt, or having to rethink American foreign policy – in short, all the policies that continue to fail us.
Drones will continue to kill civilians in a growing assortment of Middle Eastern countries – and radicalize them, Saudi Arabia will continue to unload weaponry from US defense contractors, Israel will continue to cash the US checks permitting it to continue to expand its settlements, and Egypt will continue to sentence journalists and dissidents to death.
Police forces will continue to receive military upgrades and spying gear, whistleblowers will continue to be harassed, Justice Department dollars will continue to be spent on programs for the preferential hiring of veterans to police Black neighborhoods. Life for hedge fund managers, tech entrepreneurs and the rest of the meritocracy will continue to be rosy, even as globalism and deregulation suck more and more jobs from less-skilled American workers.
In the years to follow the election, appointments to the Supreme Court will continue to be contentiously opposed, and compromise and accommodation will have citizens wondering where the appointees’ loyalties really lie.
In the end, the lumbering financial, military and social apparatus will continue on auto-pilot, no matter which party actually wins.
But throughout the land, on election night in 2016, Democrats (and even a few Republicans) will breathe deep sighs of relief.
They’ll tell themselves: Democracy, or some version of it, has been saved.
Review of “Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París, Christina MacSweeney (Translation) (ISBN 9781566894302)
Among Strange Victims has an unlovable protagonist who is content with his peeling walls and his boring daily rituals. He apparently told his family he was attending college but dropped out almost immediately. The description of his day is boring in the extreme, and unfortunately this does not make for good fiction. As he puts it, “one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely.” Sadly, most readers do not have this same strength.
Our lazy protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to identify himself at the beginning of his story, spends considerable time on a “disintegrating” bench in a gazebo, watching people. When he is not doing this he is working in a museum editing press releases and proofreading the catalog. In one chapter we learn how he goes to a cafe, has a cup of tea and returns home with the soggy tea bag, which he hangs on the wall. Gripping narrative – this is not. At about this point the reader is ready to stretch his arms a couple of thousand miles and and throttle the author.
By the time the narrator has accumulated ten teabags on his wall, still not much has happened in the story, which until now has been a tale of boredom, shirking, and masturbation. And then he decides to save the life of a hen in the vacant lot next door. He throws a table into the lot, and goes down to position it as a suitable shelter. Which is when he discovers a grisly bag full of putrefying viscera.
But now we once again enter stagnant waters when his co-worker Cecilia is sent a prank marriage proposal in his name, and she accepts. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name: Rodrigo Saldivar.
The book goes on in his way for many hundreds of thousands of keystrokes, each of them more painful than the one before. There is the mystery of a turd on his bed. Then we meet a BolaÒo type academic slumming in Mexico, an elusive and dissolute philosopher-boxer the academic is studying while living with the narrator’s mother, and a shady gringo who bought a nubile young girl whose urine is used for rituals.
In the end not much is resolved, although we do finally learn who has deposited the turd on the bed.
I am not sure if my quarrel is with the work itself or with the translation, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant, nor a rewarding read. I have limited patience for writers who, rather than invite you into their heads and hearts, try to keep you at arm’s length or deposit turds on the pages of the book you bought from them. The book has an intellectual conceit, but it’s a rather shallow one.
BTW, if you want to see another sample of SaldaÒa ParÌs’s writing, which demonstrates more talent than this first disaster of a novel, here is a piece he wrote for Electric Literature:
The enemy it was created to fight hasn’t existed for a generation, but NATO was never about common defense. NATO has always been about making the United States the world’s only superpower.
World War II was scarcely over and the victors were salivating over the spoils. The United States had set its sights on being the world’s newest empire and this required beating the competition – the Soviet Union. In 1947 a career diplomat, George F. Kennan, formulated the policy of “Containment.” “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
President Harry S. Truman is best known for the first and last use of nuclear weapons on human beings. But he is also known for the “Truman Doctrine” – which promised to contain communism in Greece and Turkey by any means necessary. The chessboard in the Middle East had already been set up by the departing British, and in 1948 Truman put his own piece on the board by recognizing Israel. The competition between Capitalism and Communism in the Middle East was just getting started.
Dwight D. Eisenhower formulated his own “Eisenhower Doctrine” in 1957. It went a step beyond Truman and decreed that any country that felt threatened by Communism could request help from the United States. This set the stage for America as World Policeman. Shortly after this came the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Egypt nationalized the Suez canal and all the usual suspects – the U.S., Britain, and Israel – attacked Egypt. The following year the United States used Eisenhower’s doctrine to intervene in the Lebanese presidential elections of 1958, assuring Camille Chamoun’s victory. Chamoun, a Christian Maronite, supported the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
NATO was founded in 1949 under Truman’s administration. It bound a number of nations in a mutual defense pact: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. NATO was an outgrowth of the military coalition formed in World War II, whose Supreme Commander was Eisenhower. Eisenhower was also the natural choice for NATO’s first SACEUR – Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 1951 Eisenhower set up shop for NATO in Paris in temporary quarters at the Hotel Astoria. A second “Supreme Commander” was installed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1952. That same year Greece and Turkey joined NATO. In 1982, King Juan Carlos, who had been restored to the Spanish throne by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, joined NATO. These were NATO’s earliest members.
Predictably, all this was seen as a threat by the Communist world. The Warsaw Pact was formed in response to NATO five years later, in 1955 when NATO added an additional member, West Germany. The Warsaw Pact’s signatories included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. A bit later came Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The Warsaw Pact was never very strong. In 1958 Hungary tried to withdraw, only to have its independence brutally crushed. In 1962 Albania was kicked out for being closer to Beijing than Moscow, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell. The New York Times reported the Warsaw Pact’s obituary, noting that it had died at the relatively young age of 36.
But NATO kept growing even after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In 1982 the Czech Republic, formerly a Warsaw Pact signatory, joined NATO along with Hungary and Poland. In 2004 Bulgaria and the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined them. Then Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, and Croatia. NATO now represented a coalition of over 7 million soldiers from 28 countries with a combined population of almost a billion people.
But NATO was never merely a mutual aid society. Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Greece, and the Netherlands had battalion-sized units attached to U.S. Army divisions in Korea. Turkey also deployed an infantry brigade. NATO’s charter was never limited to encircling the Russian Bear, and NATO has been involved in military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, the Mediterranean, and in Africa, Today NATO is an obese 67 year-old man aiming his rifle at a enemy who vanished long ago.
But that’s not really the point of NATO in the 21st Century. NATO is a tool wholly-owned, funded, and led by the United States. In recent years many on both the Right and Left have criticized the exorbitant costs to the United States of maintaining military bases in 150+ countries, the subsidies to European nations who do not have to pay for their own defense – if “defense” is the right word. And plenty of people are aware that NATO no longer has a Soviet enemy to fight, though we have now turned our attentions to the Middle East and a region of the Pacific China now claims.
The United States needs military, economic and global coalitions like NATO, the TPP, and the G8 more than ever – if it wants to remain Top Dog.
When Donald Trump’s presidential campaign really started to take off, shocking everyone, pundits ascribed its success to White Anger. The consensus in the Liberal media was that Trump’s supporters were basically all “Abner Snopes” – William Faulkner’s angry white sharecropper, racist white trash. At the time pundits made more of Snopes’ racism than the fact that he burned down the barns of rich white men. In fact Snopes would have happily burned down both Trump Tower and the Clinton mansion in Chappaqua. Ultimately it wasn’t race that made Abner Snopes angry.
But now that Trump is the GOP candidate and shock and awe has truly set in, Liberals are still scratching their heads. The same distrust of globalization has popped up in Britain with the Brexit, and it’s only slowly dawning on Liberals that there’s much more to it than racism or xenophobia. But no matter – Democrats don’t need to address such issues head-on if Trump can be a new Hitler.
The Atlantic Monthly published a piece recently that takes another shot at understanding Donald Trump’s appeal among poor whites and their anger at the “Liberal elites” they say are largely responsible for their misery. And poor whites have a point, though the Republican Party has done nothing to help them either.
Liberals see the real racism of poor whites lashing out at demographic shifts and ascendant minorities. It’s not an illusion. But they also judge poor whites to be doing little to “better themselves” – a strange formulation which, if directed at people of color, would sound a lot like unvarnished racism. Yet this is a common view among many well-educated Liberals – people like you and me. In years past we told the lazy bum, “Go get a job.” Now we tell him to go get a master’s degree. This is the essence of the meritocracy: work hard and get ahead. We pat ourselves on the back that we’re not racists because both Mark Zuckerberg and Barak Obama merit our approval.
But just as Capitalists assume markets and resources are infinite, Liberals assume the capacity to replace manufacturing jobs with highly-skilled technology jobs is equally unbounded. Yet, for a multitude of reasons, not every unemployed factory worker is going to make a happy transition to web designer or CNC programmer, particularly if he’s been out of work a decade. And how do Liberal policy makers intend to deal with this fact of life? They have no solutions.
The authors of the Atlantic piece make the case that it is the neoliberalism which upper middle class whites uncritically support – people like you and me – that has created unemployment, trade imbalances, and economic disaster for the working class – and this obviously includes the white working class. Liberals – people like you and me – see ourselves, however fuzzy the image in the mirror, as part of the meritocracy – people who have gotten up early, gone to bed late, attended night school, lifted ourselves up by the boot-straps. Anyone who didn’t manage to replicate our feats of dedication, perserverance and daring is a loser. How very like Trump we really are.
Consider a recent Town Hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, at which President Obama patiently explained to an older Carrier air conditioning employee that there is little that we can do as a nation to help people like him when factories like his move to Mexico. Yes, people like you are affected, the President explained with characteristic eloquence, but America is moving forward with high-tech jobs in exciting new industries and training is the key. End of discussion. Go get some training.
But in what? No one in Free Market paradise has either a crystal ball or a Five Year Plan.
So there seems to be a somewhat magical view that sending people off to community college or paying for everyone to attend four year colleges will solve employment problems without any long-term economic planning or public-private training partnerships. As if there were not enough issues on its plate, Education has now become totally responsible for fixing the social problem of unemployment.
But back to Elkhart, Indiana. The older Carrier employee just stood in the aisle, a bit surprised at the President’s answer, and respectfully mute as the Chief Executive explained why the country was leaving him behind in its wake of progress. When I recounted this story to a friend of mine, she had little sympathy for the air conditioning worker. “I put myself through college. He could have done it too.”
The picture of Poor White America as lazy racist “white trash” – Abner Snopes again – is pervasive. It’s also not easy to reject completely if you’ve ever seen the Tea Party in action. But like everything in this country, the reality is always more complex. The authors of the Atlantic piece argue that we should have seen all this coming long, long ago, and they lay the blame squarely at the feet of people – like you and me – who identify as Democrats and progressives.
We created these policies. We hardened our hearts. We looked away from the misery right in our own backyards – all while saving endangered species and writing checks to truly worthy causes. We do this at a distance – like the far-off wars which Liberals regularly vote for – without once seeing the real human costs. And we do this from our perch of superiority and entitlement.
But here is how Trump’s supporters see it in the small towns where jobs are long gone:
“The demoralizing effect of decay enveloping the place you live cannot be underestimated. And the bitterness – the “primal scorn” – that Donald Trump has tapped into among white Americans in struggling areas is aimed not just at those of foreign extraction. It is directed toward fellow countrymen who have become foreigners of a different sort, looking down on the natives, if they bother to look at all.”
And we do this to everyone, not just Poor White America.
Earlier in the year the Atlantic ran another piece on the white working class. Again, the takeaway from this article was that it’s the upper middle class – shrinking by the second – that has transmuted into a meritocracy of college graduates for whom advanced degrees are almost a necessity, who receive the majority of high-paying jobs and leave the rest of America behind:
The idea of a meritocracy is hardly new, but those who merit have shrunk to a kernel consisting mainly of the white upper middle-class. Though meritocracy seems almost an article of American faith, both Conservatives and Progressives now increasingly see it as a sham, a cruel lie that masks the fact that the true predictor of success in America is your father’s wealth. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal sees it:
Democrats are no less rigid or doctrinaire than their Republican brethren. Few who regard themselves as straight-ticket Democrats want to confront the party’s neoliberalism – globalism, trade, the “meritocracy.” Liberals are shocked that a whole new generation of voters hasn’t accepted this article of faith and is holding out for a different kind of America. It was unthinkable that 46% of the Democratic Party membership in Philadelphia actually meant what they said about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And, anyway, they weren’t really Democrats.
But rather than examining what neoliberalsm has actually wrought, Democrats have taken a lazy, even dishonest tack – distracting voters with external threats. A piece in “Overland,” a progressive Australian journal, describes the shameful strategy of presenting Trump as little more than a fascist:
The basic point of the article is that – without any firm identity or an understanding of who it actually serves – the Democratic party’s survival depends mainly on frightening the bejesus out of members and voters alike. The DNC stands for nothing this year – only against a manufactured threat of “fascism.”
The author of the Overland piece quotes Thomas Frank’s thesis, which is developed in his book “Listen, Liberal:”
In recent years, the Democrats have been consistently liberal on social issues, but indistinguishable from the Republicans on economic issues. They are as likely to be as hostile to unions as Republicans. Their unabashed support for free trade hurt the working class and exported the manufacturing sector. America used to be a country where a person without a college degree could get a good job, but now a college degree is priced beyond the reach of low-income and even middle-income students.
What happened to the Democrats? He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves. Their class interests blind them to the needs of working-class Americans. They do not hear from people outside their social and economic class. He takes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of people who were plucked from obscurity and turned into superstars and came to believe that meritocracy would solve the nation’s problems. They were wrong. Meritocracy served to put them out of touch and to insulate them from different points of view.
Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the people. As Franks argues, we – people like you and me – have become neither fish nor fowl – neither “the people” nor the oligarchic 1% that owns and runs the country. Liberals have become almost a separate class, lost and confused about their true identity and unreliable in their allegiances. We are really nothing but the pampered accountants, fixers, and middle management for the 1%. And if you’ve ever listened to Phil Ochs’ “Love me, I’m a Liberal,” it’s been this way longer than any of us can remember.
Review of “Zubaida’s Window” by Iqbal Al-Qazwini (ISBN 9787774563214)
Although this book has been described (by the LA Times) as a “dirge” and as a “confusing stream of consciousness” by some Goodread-ers, I found it to be a fluid account of the days in which a woman who had seen much suffering in Iraq and lived in exile in Germany for many years is now forced to watch the final destruction of her country as the United States invades Iraq. This is a masterful account of her emotional roller-coaster ride.
Our childhoods and every state of our development are inexorably bound up with our national history. Just as we might ask: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Al-Qazwini recalls when young King Faisal was murdered in a coup. She recalls each member of a family that has been blown to the far corners of the earth. Her digressions into Iraqi history and all its calamity become part of Zubaida’s narrative, just as 20th Century Jewish writers have been unable to separate the Shoah from their own family stories.
One of the saddest tales in the novel is of Zubaida’s brother, who lives two hours away in Leipzig. He calls one day to tell her he is depressed and she immediately makes up an excuse to visit him. They agree to meet at the train station. However her brother never shows up and, despite going to his apartment, leaving a note and waiting weeks for a reply, Zubaida never hears from him. Perhaps he has just picked up and left Germany, she thinks. But then she reads an article about an unknown foreign man who has leapt to his death in front of a train in Leipzig. This is both the fate and the fear of the refugee: to die un-mourned either at home or in exile.
Zubaida is pulled to leave and pulled to stay in Germany. She often buys tickets to some destination, packs a suitcase and passport, but ultimately shreds the ticket and the passport remains unstamped.
But suddenly, with an empty suitcase she is in Amman, Jordan, where she is about to take the long bus ride to Baghdad. An old woman tells her how painful exile is, the cab driver inquires about her life in Europe. She recalls the sky, the warmth, radio news in Arabic, the markets, the sadness, but also the vividness of life in the Middle East. And then she closes the suitcase and is once again in her cold Berlin apartment.
Zubaida is now curled up in a ball in front of the television. The war is just a jumble of frightening images as once-powerful men take off their medals, don civilian clothes, denounce the dictator, and hop in non-military vehicles while giving CNN interviews for the last time. The dictator’s statue is destroyed at Firdaus Square, “coalition” forces have seized control, and Iraq has been subdued and destroyed.
Zubaida feels a certain kinship with her adoptive city, where dictators have fallen and the people rejoice their sudden freedom. Suddenly long-repressed memories and feelings surface and she writes non-stop for four days. But the history she has recorded feels false, manufactured, and she leaves the pages in the rain to un-write themselves, then throws all these recollections in a dustbin. As the apartment building strangely empties of its elderly residents, Zubaida is alone with her arrhythmia, having fallen into a fitful sleep.
There has been a lot of speculation and an enormous amount of nonsense written about the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The main reason is that few people really know much about the agreement since it was negotiated in secret and the public (even our legislators) were not privy to its provisions.
This alone should be reason #1 for rejecting it, but it has its supporters.
Big Business loves it. Manufacturers love it. Wall Street loves it.
But environmentalists see red flags and the words “global warming” appear nowhere in the document. The Electronic Freedom Foundation finds privacy concerns and troubling intellectual propery language. Unions recognize its anti-worker and union-busting provisions.
Hillary Clinton loves it – though during the primaries she said otherwise. Now she and her running mate love it again. Bernie Sanders opposed it. The Green Party opposes it. The (former Republican) Libertarian candidates support it.
Donald Trump hates it, while the rest of the GOP loves it. But anything that issues from Donald Trump’s mouth must be motivated purely out of xenophobic hate-mongering – so the TPP must really be a good thing. Right?
Wrong. On this one thing Trump’s right. Read the leaked draft of the TPP yourself and click on the top links to display the annotations by environmental, privacy, and worker’s rights lawyers.
Here is summary of some of the TPP’s more troubling provisions:
Chapter 9 (corporate-appointed judges replace national law)
Chapter 11 (corporations can block national regulations, including financial regulations)
Chapter 12 (short-circuiting of immigration regulations)
Chapter 13 (nations give up their rights to control and regulate telecommunications markets, voiding national control over data protection laws – for example, Germany with its strong data privacy laws)
Chapter 14 (inadequate provisions for protecting personal information transmitted via electronic commerce)
Chapter 15 (eliminates provisions allowing states to protect local jobs or address local environmental concerns)
Chapter 17 (permits state-owned enterprises to maintain price-fixing and dumping, preventing the U.S. from challenging such market manipulations)
Chapter 18 (overrides domestic laws protecting public health, nutrition, and socio-economic development)
Chapter 19 (does nothing to address wage inequity or slave wages, blocks corporate exploitation of public-sector or unionized workers, blocks economic penalties for violations of human rights, anti-gay, or racist discrimination)
Chapter 20 (“climate change” does not appear anywhere in this chapter on the environment, blocks environmental laws that create “restrictions on trade”)
Chapter 24 (blocks small businesses from seeking certain types of “recourse to dispute settlement”)
Chapter 27 (a commission can change the TPP agreement at will – without Congressional approval or public overview – i.e, just like the TPP was crafted in the first place)
There is a a famous folktale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, about a pest control expert hired by the town of Hameln in Lower Saxony to deal with its rat problem. The rat catcher was known to dress all in green (or multicolors, depending on the version of the story) and had a magic flute he used to lure rats out of town and to their deaths in a nearby river.
But when the town failed to keep its end of the bargain and refused payment for his services, the Pied Piper turned his magic flute on the village children, luring them into a cave or (depending on the version of the story) into the same river where the rats had been dispatched.
The folktale seems to have been based on real-life events. In the 13th Century hundreds of children disappeared from Hameln and turned up later in other parts of Germany. The children, who saw no future for themselves in their dreary hometown, had been lured – not by a rat catcher – but by recruiters from regions in the east looking for young and healthy settlers and promising them a fresh start.
Depending on which flavor of Kool-Aid you’ve been drinking, Hillary Clinton is either the greatest threat to Western Civilization ever spawned by Lucifer – or is Joan of Arc on a noble steed (meaning the DNC, of course), wielding a large sword and charging in to save us from the Prince of Darkness himself.
Clinton’s defects have distracted progressives from one unique aspect of this election – replacing up to four Supreme Court justices in the coming year. She has also become a distraction to mainstream Democrats who recently got a sobering look at how undemocratic their party is – and who until now hadn’t given much thought to how far off the rails their party has rolled.
There are at at least three Hillary Clintons. The first is the Lucrezia Borgia of the Far Right, the star of Dinesh D’Souza’s new attack movie, “Hillary’s America.” This first one is a caricature engineered by people who have been hammering away at the Clintons for thirty years. The second Hillary is a political opportunist with an uneven record on everything from crime to helping poor families, with a horrific record as Secretary of State. This second Hillary’s record must be seen for nothing more than it is – shameful and destructive. Finally, there is a third Hillary – another caricature, this time from the Democratic Party’s and Clinton’s own PR machine. This third Hillary’s story is a lot like Forrest Gump’s: the former Goldwater girl has been everywhere and seemingly at the forefront of every important battle for the downtrodden since the Civil Rights movement began.
When lefty Democrats and Progressives talk about the second Hillary, DNC party loyalists think they’re hearing Dinesh D’Souza’s voice and they trot out the third Hillary. No one can agree about what she is, much less the right and left halves of the Democratic Party.
But Clinton’s own record speaks most convincingly for itself. For forty years she has been (at best) an unreliable friend of working people, yet has always managed to cash a paycheck from Wal-Mart or Wall Street. Like Trump, many of her positions on issues as diverse as gay rights, civil liberties, unions, welfare, the environment and crime have been either inconsistent or just plain harmful.
Mainstream Democrats assume that Capitalism is benign and that the rules are generally fair, that public support of entrepreneurship is reasonable, and that tax incentives for “job creators” is only fair as well. Mainstream democrats saw nothing wrong with NAFTA and see nothing wrong with the TPP. After all, we live in a global world; we can’t change things now. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Americans are blithe about the costs of change – even disruptive change. Yesterday’s toaster repairman will be tomorrow’s AI robot repairman or CNC programmer – well, that’s the idea, at least. Offshoring is just a temporary inconvenience because the nature of business requires flexibility to move where trained labor is. Surely you understand. Trade agreements have to take into consideration protections for global corporations and, sadly, we can’t – and won’t – share the details with you or even your congressman.
This is the type of arrogance and disregard for worker and consumer protections that concerns both progressives and Republicans this year. Concerns for greater national control of trade policy have been portrayed as nothing more than paleolithic protectionism and coarse nationalism by the DNC. Concern for greater national control of trade policy is conflated with simple xenophobia and hostility toward foreign workers. While there is certainly much truth to this latter accusation because the right-wing has seized on populist sentiment, these concerns are simply not being heard or taken seriously by Democrats. When Britain left the European Union it scarcely created a ripple or a second thought among Liberals. Despite all the lofty pep talks about turning coal miners into solar panel installers, not every former factory worker is going to make it as a CNC programmer or a web designer.
Republicans think that kicking out the Mexicans will magically free up the low rungs in the job market. Democrats think that globalization plus encouraging post high-school education will magically connect the unemployed with developing markets (even if they are 10,000 miles away). Both parties agree – setting national priorities, taking steps to incubate new technologies, strategically training workers for these new technologies – hah! That’s a step too far toward Big Government. Big business, on the other hand, will magically find a way to make it all work.
In some ways, though, the Republicans are a half-step ahead of mainstream Democrats on trade protections. Or perhaps it’s just that the Democratic leadership has become tone-deaf to real people when they have been talking to tech entrepreneurs at Davos for so long. For all their evasive promises at the convention, Clinton and Kaine will foist the TPP on the American public. And this represents a betrayal voters will remember.
One assumes that featured speakers reflect the soul of the party.
The soul of the DNC paved the way for the financial crisis of 2008 through de-regulation of the financial industry. They keep on deregulating this industry. The soul of this party was happy to go along with, and extend, neoconservative military adventures in the Middle East. The soul of this party implemented draconian crime bills that created our present-day incarceration nation. And, yes, many of these initiatives occurred during the administration of William Jefferson Clinton – but the party leadership still loves its power-couple and rewards their failures by trying to get them in the White House again.
The Democratic Party is a party of failed ideas – just like the Republicans. Both are slavish servants of corporations and the super-rich. Both are limited in the solutions they can offer to solve America’s problems. Both offer the same tired, failed prescriptions with minor tweaks every four years.
Whatever the Democratic Party may have been in the past is only a nostalgic – and a rose-tinted – memory of what might be. The DNC may have been pulled, kicking and screaming, into the Civil Rights movement, but it was also the party of Viet Nam, Nagasaki, and HIroshima. The DNC of today still belongs to the rich and continues to be hostile to progressives, at odds even with its own Progressive Caucus. It is a party that fails average Americans time and time again. By design.
This is a party full of Hillaries. When she eventually leaves the political stage there will be a hundred of her clones waiting in the wings.
This month’s political conventions took place in a nation badly deformed by both major political parties.
Inside Cleveland’s “Quicken Loans Arena” the GOP anointed its candidates, while in Philadelphia the DNC was hosted at the “Wells Fargo Center.” In both cases, heavily armed police and the Secret Service kept protesters at bay, safely behind protest-free security barriers. Undeclared war, drone attacks, and civilian casualties continued, and assassination lists were drawn up both Tuesdays, much like they were when Republicans were in power. Spying on Americans continued, as it had when Republicans were in charge. Whistleblowers who could no longer operate safely in the U.S. filed reports from Berlin, Rio, Moscow and elsewhere, while others sat in embassies and federal prison.
This bleak snapshot could have been taken in any year since 9/11, and the sitting president could be either Republican or Democrat. There really hasn’t been that much difference.
Inside the convention halls, old rich white people were once again the winning office-seekers. Bluster, lies, superPacs, and subterfuge got them both there. Both are divisive figures. Both paint each other as evil incarnate. Trump is Hitler, while Clinton is Lucrezia Borgia. The message at both conventions was the same: only one person can save us, and for the nation’s survival all of us must unite around our candidates, our savior. And if you refuse to get on board – well, you’re either for us, or a’gin us.
For Repubicans, this effectively meant: we’re all fundamentalists and racists now. For Democrats: we’re all militarists, regime-changers, and neoliberals. Delegates and speakers were booed if, like Ted Cruz, they told fellow party members to “vote your conscience.” At least one dissident at the DNCC had her delegate credentials revoked when she questioned the direction, the qualifications, and the integrity of the presumptive candidate.
At the Republican convention, the Evangelical right, xenophobes, and more opportunistic elements within the GOP all signed up to sing Trump’s praises. In Philadelphia neoconservatives like Robert Kagan said “I’m with her” and Democrats practiced the Zen of blocking from consciousness all the sins and omissions of past Democratic administrations. Few lessons were to be learned in the slick, revisionist narrative of the DNC.
Trump’s character witnesses included fellow billionaires, reality TV stars, most of his family, evangelicals, and party extremists like Scott Walker.
At the DNC, Madeline Albright, the former Secretary of State (under Bill Clinton) who thought killing half a million Iraqi children “was worth it” and who schooled Hillary in Cold War “containment” policy and “regime change,” spoke of Clinton’s “toughness” and the need to fight Russian and Iranian aggression. Cory Booker turned Maya Angelou’s anthem of survival and personal triumph into an ugly piece of American Exceptionalism.
For both parties, the date might as well have been the 1980s. Republicans seemed stuck in a Reagan time-warp, while the Democratic leadership wished again for those halycon days when the U.S. had just become the world’s only superpower and could throw its weight around without consequence. Nobody talked about Israel’s occupation or the Democratic Party’s new embrace of fighting BDS by suppressing free speech.
Whichever candidate takes the Capitol steps in January, it will be an old rich white person whose party is flogging endlessly recycled, failed policies. Progressives may be the only ones in the nation aware that the year is actually 2016 – and not two generations ago.
This week, Progressives are taking it on the chin from Democratic loyalists who use Hitler analogies, cite Martin Niemöller (“first they came for the…”), and paint a scene of Republican meteors wiping out the earth. One article in Quartz goes so far as to say that voting your conscience is immoral. While couched in the logic of utilitarianism and “consequences,” the “ethicists” quoted don’t seem aware of the actual historical consequences of voting for both major parties – little things like the War in Iraq or the War on Drugs. Or the Clinton-era crime bills that created an incarceration nation. Those were consequences of truly immoral voting.
But guess what, Democrats? I really don’t care who your Democratic Party ethicists recommend any more than I care who Republicans think Jesus would endorse. Your party has been complicit in destructive wars and creating domestic suffering for decades. Your ideas have failed us as badly as the Republicans’. Inside and out, both parties are bankrupt.
So whether it’s Trump Steaks or regime change, tinkering with crime bills or foisting the TPP on Americans – we’re just not buying what either party is selling.
A #BlackLivesMatter banner hangs over City Hall in Somerville, Massachusetts. The police union wants it taken down, but Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone is keeping it flying – right next to another one supporting dead officers.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has grown enormously. It has popped up all over the US and Canada, and there are spinoffs in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Brazil, and India – wherever racist policing occurs. BLM has thousands of white allies and includes just about every minority affected by discriminatory policing and the prison pipeline.
To describe it as a Black Nationalist movement is just plain wrong.
So, when Derryck Green in Monday’s op-eds describes BLM as a revolutionary terrorist organization and tries to link it with violent Black Nationalism, one can only scratch one’s head and smile. Except that libelous misinformation like this is not funny – though it is par for the course from conservatives.
To be certain, BLM is ideological. It is strident. It has goals. It will not be silenced. Its website cites Black activists whose voices do not necessarily come out of Black churches – but from the streets, from political struggle, and from progressive movements.
Green acknowledges that Micah Xavier Johnson, a cop-killer, was never a member of BLM – but this doesn’t stop him from nevertheless trying to link Johnson to BLM in the next several paragraphs. And Johnson is also a convenient starting point for smearing all activists. Next on Green’s conservative hit list – President Obama, who at one point was a community organizer – or as Green writes, an “agitator.”
Next Green tries to set up a straw man by writing that everyone thinks of BLM as a part of the Civil Rights movement, but that it lacks the moral underpinnings.
Excuse me? Who said that?
Basically, Green just doesn’t like these young black “belligerent” upstarts. He resents their “celebration of black racial pride and solidarity.” (is this really such a bad thing?) If Green were not a black man himself, I’d almost expect the word “uppity” to pop out of his mouth.
Green accuses BLM of “increasingly violent” demands. This is nothing but empty rhetoric.
What’s violent is the epidemic of killings of black people.
Green says that BLM has “peddled lies” about the number of blacks killed by cops. More nonsense. The Washington Post and the Guardian (UK) have had to create databases to track police shootings for the last two years. And Neill Franklin, a 34-year Maryland State Police veteran, has an online petition asking Congress to start a national database.
Why? Because our society doesn’t care enough about black lives to officially track the body count. But we do have preliminary figures – and they’re shocking.
As Somerville Mayor Curtatone’s principled actions show, support for police reform does not have to come at the expense of support for local police. We may never see “Officer Friendly” again, patrolling on foot and stopping by at the local soda fountain, but most Americans want our police officers to be neighbors and treat us like neighbors – not hound us like an occupation force. Most Americans want fair sentencing for crimes – and recognize that no one wins by putting people in “the system” for life.
Many white Americans are happy with their local police forces, and most are good, decent officers. But it can be a totally different story for Black Americans. BLM’s demands reflect this different reality in a racist society and are absolutely correct and needed. And “moral” as well, Mr. Green.
Derryck Green and his fellow conservatives will no doubt be profoundly disappointed by the “lack of courageous condemnation of Black Lives Matter by good and decent people” as the movement continues to grow and attract allies.
But most “good and decent people” would agree – a broken tail light should never be the prelude to what has now become the obscenely routine shooting of an unarmed black person.
The last twenty-four hours have convinced me that progressives are in an abusive relationship with the Democratic Party.
First were the emails released by Wikileaks revealing that the party actively conspired against Bernie Sanders. Then Clinton’s choice of running mate seemed designed to stick a finger in the eyes of progressives. Finally, preserving superdelegates seemed designed to flip the party leadership’s middle finger at 43% of the base who wanted not only a progressive platform but progressive reforms.
People, if you’re really honest with yourselves, you need to admit it – you’re in an abusive relationship.
All the warning signs are there. Complete control (at conventions and primaries). Betrayal (of progressive values). Breaking down self-esteem (by constantly telling you your ideas are naive and unviable). Jealousy (if you deviate from the leadership’s views). Threats (that you are reckless and irresponsible). Taking advantage of you financially. Expecting absolute and undeserved loyalty. Physical abuse (by preserving violent policing, militarism, and economic injustice). Promising you anything to keep you in the relationship. Warning you how defenseless you will be if you leave the party.
But fortunately there are healthy, positive steps you can take.
Maintain outside relationships – even though your party may try to make itself the center of your world. Talk to others. Seek “reality checks” from third parties to see if your party’s behavior is healthy. Identify a “safe place” you can go if your relationship with your party becomes dangerous. Develop a support system through community organizations and other political groups who champion real change. Stop blaming yourself for your party’s bad behavior – their values are not yours. Stop putting on a show for friends and family of happiness with your party.
Be honest with yourself. You’ve been unhappy a long, long time.
You don’t need to keep living this way. Pack your bags and leave – if need be in the middle of the night. Find a safe haven, a place where you are respected for yourself, for your values, a place where you will find like-minded people who will build up – not break down – your self-esteem. And more importantly, people who will work with you, not subvert your ideals.
Remember: understanding unhealthy dynamics and taking appropriate, positive steps is the key to real change.
To listen to the Republicans, Syrian hordes are knocking on the gates of Vienna like zombies in the trailer of World War Z, while Mexican rapists threaten pure white maidens in Everytown, USA. “Crooked Hillary” is their enabler.
Just as Mexicans are a convenient distraction from the failures of Republican free-market fundamentalism and deregulation, Trump is a convenient distraction from Clinton’s neo-liberalism and militarism. If you’re a Progressive still in the Democratic party this week, you are nevertheless admonished not to break with the “lesser evil” candidate because of the dangers of electing Trump.
But those of us around in 1964 remember the last Democratic Nazi scare. His name was Barry Goldwater.
Lyndon Johnson ran a famous ad warning Americans of the militaristic recklessness of Goldwater. In the commercial a three year old girl counting daisies is consumed by a nuclear blast caused by, presumably, Barry Goldwater.
But it was Johnson, and not the “Nazi,” who sent almost 50,000 American servicemen to their deaths in Viet Nam, and it was Johnson who napalmed, carpet-bombed, and defoliated to death and disfigurement some one million Vietnamese.
Going further back in time, it was a Democrat who incinerated two Japanese cities with nuclear weapons, a Democrat who threw Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, and Democrats who have destroyed an additional two Middle Eastern nations since Republicans were voted out of office.
This is a party with a record as horrific as the Republicans.
So while Republicans this year are certainly frightening, Progressives just aren’t buying Democratic Party fear-mongering anymore.
Hillary Clinton’s selection of Tim Kaine has progressives and others wondering – why?
Why alienate the 43% of Democrats who wanted a more progressive Democratic Party by picking a running mate who is not only “boring” but a throwback to the centrism of her husband’s administration?
It’s quite a gamble, admittedly – choosing a running-mate she thinks may be palatable to Republicans. But Clinton may have doomed her party in November.
Tim Kaine has nothing to offer progressives, nor will his checkered past on the issues unify a fractured party. Long before Trump – and just like the Clintons – Kaine campaigned on a “get tough on crime” platform supporting mandatory minimum sentencing. Though he supports environmental protection, Kaine also supports nuclear power. He is a globalist, happy to remind everyone that his home state began as an experiment in global free trade.
Hello TPP.
In December 2011 Kaine supported bans on contraception, but scarcely two months later voted to increase access to contraception. Besides his unreliable support (or outright opposition of) abortion and contraception, in 2011 Kaine opposed gay adoption and has been less than a reliable ally of the LGBTQ community. But, again in 2012, he apparently underwent a conversion on the road to Damascus and began supporting gay rights.
Tim Kaine appears to be perfectly engineered as a running mate for Hillary Clinton. Like Clinton herself, Kaine’s inconsistencies and “evolution” on issues can be taken any way you like. Kaine is a Democratic party insider, has been William Jefferson Clinton-approved, and was also on Obama’s short list of running mates. He can be whatever you want him to be. He’s not quite a Bubba, but he is a proud (albeit transplanted) son of the Old Dominion. He’s not a progressive by a long shot, but he’s not Caligula either.
Or a Donald Trump.
Speaking of which. The spectre of a Trump presidency no doubt terrifies advocates of reproductive rights. This has led to some frantic back-pedaling on critiques of Kaine. Less than 24 hours after Hillary Clinton tapped him as her running mate, NARAL issued the following statement:
“While Senator Kaine has been open about his personal reservations about abortion, he’s maintained a 100% pro-choice voting record in the U.S. Senate. He voted against dangerous abortion bans, he has fought against efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and he voted to strengthen clinic security by establishing a federal fund for it. In the wake of clinic closures around the country due to deceptive TRAP laws, Senator Kaine has co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that gives federal assurances that women will be able to access their constitutional right to abortion care regardless of what zip code they live in.”
“The leaders of NARAL Pro-Choice America and NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia expressed deep disappointment at Gov. Tim Kaine’s decision to sign into law a bill that funnels state money to anti-choice organizations, the so-called”crisis pregnancy centers. […] Kaine, who also serves as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has taken action that’s inconsistent with the strong pro-choice platform adopted by party leaders last August. This is the first piece of legislation involving a woman’s right to choose that Kaine considered since being elected chairman of the national party.”
To regard Tim Kaine’s sudden change of heart as an “evolution” is a charitable view. While Kaine benefits from the perception he is a principled man grappling with private moral views in the public sphere, Occam’s Razor may explain it better: he’s a politician.
Kaine supported keeping the Bush tax cuts in place except for the most egregious giveaways to the rich. He opposed additional taxes on millionaires and supported additional tax exemptions for property owners. He opposes regulation of the financial industry – thus dooming the DNC’s plank calling for re-regulation.
As governor of Virginia, Kaine supported “war on drugs” programs that harshly prosecute marijuana use as a “gateway drug.” Again, it is impossible to see how he will support the decriminalization plank in the DNC’s 2016 platform.
Kaine’s domestic prescriptions may be less destructive than the Republicans’ but, when it comes to foreign policy and militarism, Kaine can be expected to be an equal partner in crime with his running mate. He has opposed budget cuts to the military, fought base closings in his already heavily-militarized home state, and like other Blue Dog Democrats is focused on homeland security, bioterrorism, and counter-terrorism. In his response to “On the Issues” Kaine replied with a “Strongly Favors” to the question of expanding the military.
The Democratic Party’s 2016 Platform is now available. Juxtaposed with recent RNC convention speeches, the 2016 election now appears to be quite the trip back in time.
Neither party has any fresh ideas.
While Trump’s closing speech at the Republican National Convention recalls Nixon’s “Law and Order” speech in 1968, the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform recycles 1980’s Clinton (I) neoliberalism and Henry Kissinger’s containment policy.
The Democratic Party’s domestic policies all sound cheery and benign – although I”m not sure I believe most of them. For instance, as a sop to the Sanders people, the platform calls for appointing financial regulators outside the industry. But this has never been Clinton’s practice. Similarly, the language on global trade agreements sounds great, but does anyone really expect the NAFTA power couple to follow through on any of it? DNC donors and policy makers are so firmly enmeshed in for-profit education that reform will never happen under Clinton. For all the lofty language about Native American sovereignty, we’ll see if her administration will turn a new leaf after 400 years. For all the verbiage about Puerto Rico, we’ll have to wait and see if Clinton’s financial industry friends will permit the colony to write off or restructure its debts. Similarly, we’ll have to wait to find out what Clinton means by”within reasonable limits” when pursuing immigration reform. And is Clinton going to go toe-to-toe with the healthcare industry on drug costs? Experience tells us otherwise.
$15/hour federal minimum wage; protecting collective bargaining; ensuring equal pay for equal work; promoting affordable housing; expanding social security; protecting US Postal Service; investing in infrastructure; revitalizing manufacturing; promoting clean energy jobs; enlarging access to high-speed internet; supporting STEM education; protecting intellectual property and trade secrets; promoting small business; creating jobs for young people; reigning in Wall Street; updating Glass-Steagall; appointing regulators outside the financial industry’s revolving door; making super-rich pay their fair share of taxes; evaluating trade agreements (including TPP); reforming criminal justice system; training police in de-escalation; ending racial profiling; asking DOJ to investigate ALL questionable police shootings; rolling back “war on drugs; de-criminalizing marijuana; abolishing the death penalty; fixing the immigration system”within reasonable limits”; ending contracts with for-profit prisons; stopping racial and religious profiling; strengthening rights for LGBT and disabled; strengthening cities and rural areas; promoting arts and education; improving Tribal housing, education and sovereignty; recognizing the self-determination of Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans; protecting voting rights; restoring the Voters Rights Act; fixing Campaign Finance laws; appointing judges sympathetic to civil liberties; securing statehood for Washington DC; tackling climate change; supporting a clean energy economy; protecting the environment; promoting debt-free college education; cracking down on for-profit educational institutions; guaranteeing universal pre-school; securing universal health care by expanding Medicare; supporting community health centers; reducing prescription drug costs; investing in medical research; fighting drug abuse; supporting families with autism; securing reproductive rights; promoting public health; ending violence against women; preventing gun violence;
On the other hand, foreign policy is something that Clinton has a lot of experience with – unlike her opponent who seems to make things up as he goes along. Unfortunately, Clinton’s playbook comes in large part from war criminals like Henry Kissinger and former role model Madeline Albright (who as Secretary of State defended the deaths of half a million Iraqi children by US sanctions). For all her experience, the former Secretary of State has made hash of the Middle East.
Clinton is every bit the American Exceptionalist Trump claims to be and she promises to expand and project American military power. She finds nothing wrong with provoking Russia by pushing NATO right up to its borders. Putting boots on the ground doesn’t trouble her either. She embraces “regime change” like every good neocon (Honduras, Libya, Syria), and is not troubled by arming Iran’s Wahabbist enemies – even if they are the major supporters of global terror. Clinton supports AUMFs instead of Congressional declarations of war, and she’s a hardliner on cyber warfare. The list of foreign theaters she wants to become involved in is much more extensive than at any other time of history. Not only does she want to keep tinkering with the Middle East, but she’s pivoting to Asia and Africa as well. This is far more reckless than Donald Trump’s muscular pseduo-isolationism.
Here are the highlights of Clinton’s foreign policy planks, straight from the DNC Platform:
strengthening US global and military “leadership”; making the US military the “strongest in the world”; ending waste in the military budget; fixing problems in the Veterans Administration; supporting military families; ending the epidemic of rape in the military; beefing up intelligence efforts to defeat ISIS; spending more money on homeland security; updating the AUFM (authorization for use of military force) – instead of having Congress declare wars; promoting regime change in Syria; supporting “moderate” rebel forces in Syria; taking the lead in Afghanistan with NATO; promoting social programs in Afghanistan without demanding democracy; maintaining a US military presence in Afghanistan; reserving the use of military force against Iran; bolstering the [Wahabbi] militaries of Iran’s enemies; beefing up defenses in Japan and South Korea against North Korea; expanding NATO to counter “Russian aggression”; establishing “global norms” in cybersecurity through spy agencies; supporting non-proliferation treaties; “looking for ways” to help refugees; promoting global health; ending HIV and AIDS; ending child labor; ending trafficking of girls and women; promoting human rights; ending US use of torture; closing Guantanamo Bay; standing up to China; promoting a Two-State Solution; strengthening Europe as a bulwark against “Russian aggression”; beefing up NATO; promoting human rights in Cuba and Venezuela; becoming more involved in Africa;
But it wasn’t until Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last night that I realized how much Trump seems to consciously emulate fascist rhetoric. Last night he was selling American nationalism, pride, and strength by demonizing others – and doing it in an eerily familiar way. His wife isn’t the only one in the family to lift themes from others’ speeches: Trump’s remarks could easily have been lifted from an Austrian fascist who delivered a pre-election appeal to das Volk on July 15, 1932.
The fascist’s speech began with a litany of complaints about the degradation of the German people and its fall from greatness. The Liberals, he said, had had “more than thirteen years to be tested and proven” and turn things around. But they had failed the nation, delivering only propaganda and lies. “The German peasant is impoverished; the middle class is ruined; the social hopes of many millions of people are destroyed.” There was not a single economic sector doing well in 1932, he claimed.
“The worst thing,” he continued, “is the distruction of the trust in our Volk, the elimination of all hope and confidence.” In thirteen years all the liberals had succeeded in doing was polarizing the country. “They have played people against each other; the city against the country; the service worker against the civil servant, the manual laborer against the office worker.”
“Now, thirteen years later, after they have destroyed everything in Germany, the time has finally come for their own removal,” he warned.
What the nation needed now was economic policy fused with nationalism.
Germany First.
“As long as Nationalism and Socialism march as separate ideas, they will be defeated by the united forces of their opponents.”
And who would save the nation?
He would. of course. He would be the great unifier, giving Germans their first hint of the man’s megalomania and narcissism. He went on to proudly cite the number of his supporters:
“With seven men I began this task of German unification thirteen years ago, and today over thirteen million are standing in our ranks. […] Thirteen million people of all professions and ranks – thirteen million workers, peasants, and intellectuals; thirteen million Catholics and Protestants…”
And he would have the last laugh at those who doubted him, opposed him.
“Thirteen years ago we […] were mocked and derided – today our opponents’ laughter has turned to tears!”
And now for The Close. He was selling himself – by promising honor and greatness.
“The Almighty, Who has allowed us in the past to rise from seven men to thirteen million in thirteen years, will further allow these thirteen million to become a German Volk. It is in this Volk that we believe, for this Volk that we fight; and if necessary, it is to this Volk that we are willing […] to commit ourselves body and soul.”
“If the nation does its duty, then the day will come which restores to us: one Reich in honor and freedom…”
And – well, you probably know the rest of the story.
The classic attack ad and the notion of the “lesser evil” go hand-in-hand.
The American public votes largely on the basis of attack ads painting the opposing candidate as evil. When so much fear is generated that there is only one thing to do – vote for the lesser evil.
This strategy assures that third parties never take root – and that voters never get what they really want – as long as they are always voting against what they fear.
Vote for a Third Party? You’re voting for Caligula! For Hitler! The parties themselves are never held responsible for fielding terrible candidates or ignoring their base. It’s always the voter’s fault for deviating from the script, not getting with the program.
Why a huge swath of working-class voters would ever embrace a Republican billionaire is a mystery to me. People have been swayed by an ignorant huckster who speaks gibberish at a fourth grade level and is woefully unconcerned with facts, whose only talent is selling himself and nostalgia for imagined days of American Empire. His supporters wave away all his defects of character, errors of judgment, moral failures, evasions, his baldface lies. What they like about the man is that he can stand at a podium and regale them like a Goodfella at a bar. Like the gangster, they think he’s strong, got all the right connections, knows how to get the job done. They also buy the lie that the alternative is a woman whose election would spell the end of civilization as we know it. Let’s not forget – they were once close friends.
But Democrats are equally blind to venality from their Anointed One. She may not be a billionaire herself (the family business is only worth half that), but she and her husband are certainly friends with enough of them. The credulity of her supporters – that a candidate living in gold-plated luxury really cares about the little guy – is pathetic. Unlike her opponent, the Democrat actually has a record of accomplishment – much of it negative. Unnecessary wars, invasions, destabilizing other nations, drones, extrajudicial killings, a coup in Honduras, support of an Apartheid-like occupation in Israel, propping up of autocratic regimes, shady dealings through the Family Business, lies, evasions. Like their Republican brethren, Democrats shut their eyes to what they refuse to see. Sure, she’s a foreign policy disaster. But at least she’ll do something for women and appoint some great Supreme Court justices. The alternative is just a goose-step away from Hitler. So we are told.
Republicans just want to go back to the 1950’s – or possibly the 1850’s. America was once Great (those being the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency). Let’s return to that Greatness, put gays back in the closet, shut down the abortion clinics, and rededicate ourselves to killing Contras and Iranians. USA! USA! USA! For this we need god-fearing patriots who go abroad with Bibles in hand to kill heathens and come back to run the country according to a weird mix of Christian Shariah, Ayn Rand, and Austrian economists. This is the essence of the New Republican Party.
Democrats love their gay children and their brown neighbors no more or less than Republicans, but they realize that the country is changing, and you can’t step in the way of change coming at you like a freight train. This is realistic and admirable. But when it comes to American Exceptionalism, Democrats sound just like Republicans. Most believe that the U.S. should continue to build up its military and flex its superpower muscles; that the U.S. has the “right” to invade any other country at will; that we can go into Pakistan (or any other country on earth) with drones to kill terrorists – even if we kill a few civilians by accident. We’re not putting boots on the ground, after all. This kind of war doesn’t count as war. And, besides, this is our right. We are exceptional. We have to be the world’s Top Cop. There are no other choices. To do otherwise is irresponsible isolationism, shirking our responsibility, rejecting our exceptional world role.
Far from being the “responsible ones,” it was Democrats who dropped nuclear weapons on fellow human beings, Democrats who amped-up the long Viet Nam war, killing up to two million people, Democrats who overwhelmingly voted for the War on Iraq. And the Democrats of today who have expanded the number of countries with whom we are now at permanent war since taking over following the Bush administration. Sadly, when it comes to foreign policy and militarism – and spying on civilians and crackdowns on whistleblowers – there is virtually no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
If Democrats pride themselves that they are the Lesser Evil, it is only fair to ask – a lesser evil for whom? Iraqis? Afghanis? Syrians? Libyans? Palestinians? Hondurans? Innocent victims of drone attacks? Fracking opponents? Whistleblowers? Civil Libertarians?
$15 an hour and a Supreme Court Justice may not be enough to offset all this “lesser” evil.
If you were around for the 1964 Presidential election you probably remember Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad, warning voters of the dangers of voting for Barry Goldwater.
In the iconic attack ad a three year-old girl stands in a field counting daisy petals. “One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine, nine…” Then, as the camera zooms in on her eye, the voice of a launch commander is heard completing a countdown: “Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.”
The screen lights up with an atomic blast.
At the commercial’s forty second mark we hear the voice of Lyndon Johnson: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”
But ads are one thing, reality another.
It was not Goldwater who sent tens of thousands of American servicemen to their deaths in Viet Nam. It was not Goldwater who bombed and napalmed hundreds of thousands of people half a world away – people who had never raised a fist against the United States.
All this carnage was the work of the Democratic Party’s “peace” candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The Lesser Evil.
Fast-forward fify years and the hysteria around Donald Trump is strangely similar.
Who knows what Trump would do if he were Commander-in-Chief?
No one really does know, but we’ve already seen Hillary Clinton’s handiwork throughout the Middle East as Secretary of State.
Let voters heed their own consciences and not be swayed by “Daisy” ads. If the values of third party candidates align better with your own, vote for them.
On June 24th Bernie Sanders was asked if he’d be voting for Hillary Clinton. He answered “yes” but hedged on endorsing her. That, he hinted, was contingent upon the Democratic Party’s adoption of some of his platform issues. For the progressive 43% of Democrats who supported him, however, voting for Hillary Clinton is going to be a lot like taking syrup of ipecac – a medicine of questionable value with an awful taste and horrific side-effects.
The issues of honesty and serial scandals have dogged Hillary Clinton and her husband for decades. Her credibility deficit is not merely due to a “vast rightwing conspiracy” or Donald Trump’s nickname for her. She is an opportunistic chameleon, one who’d make a better Republican than Democrat. What Republican would ever fault her for union-busting, playing tough on crime and immigrants, turning her back on welfare mothers, being a war hawk, a friend of dictators, and a Wall Street darling?
You get annoyed when you go to your local drugstore and it doesn’t have your particular brand of shampoo. But when it comes to politics, you’re expected to make do with two parties. And you’ve been trained not to vote for what you really believe in. Instead, your only choice is a candidate barely less evil than the other. But some citizens simply vote their beliefs and conscience. And for their trouble they and their candidates are branded “spoilers.”
Donald Trump’s fevered dream of attracting Sanders supporters will never happen: unlike Trump, they have some principles. And while I also can’t imagine progressives ever voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson, we are almost certain to hear about “spoiler” Jill Stein of the Green Party. Stein and Sanders in fact share a number of common ideas for a better America and it’s more than a possibility that many Sanders supporters will vote for her in November.
Yes, if Clinton loses to Trump, even narrowly, we’ll certainly be hearing about the evil Greens. But don’t blame Stein. And don’t blame progressives. Political parties ought to reflect the views of voters and offer real choices. And there should be more than two parties in this day and age. Besides, progressives gave the Democrats a chance – only to discover that the party awash in super-delegates seems to be a pretty small, and quite exclusive, tent after all. And many of them have heard the “Hope and Change” song before from Democrats.
So the question really boils down to this – will Bernie Sanders’ supporters vote for Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein?
That depends on how Sanders and his 43% are treated next month at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia – and whether they are ready to let go of a progressive dream for America.
This election has reinforced an important truth about political candidates – that the bar is always lower for unqualified white men than it is for equally unqualified white women or men of color.
I am of course speaking of Donald Trump – and not merely of Trump, but of Rick Perry, Dan Quayle, and a long line of Good Ole Boys and Ivy League frat boys with foot-in-mouth disease, whose style is to speak first, think later – if they bother to think at all.
But let a woman try this approach and she’s a ditz or a bimbo. If she has an acerbic manner – well, she’s a bitch. In Sarah Palin’s case, the unqualified woman was quickly exiled to her porch to imagine her Russian neighbors. In Carly Fiorina’s case, her professional incompetence as HP CEO was an issue, while the male candidate who defrauded many with his fake university and who has declared bankruptcy numerous times gets a free pass.
If you are running for the Presidency while being a person of color, God help you. Every gaffe and error is offered up as proof of your genetic unsuitability for the office. Just ask Ben Carson or Herman Cain. Like Trump, Cain had women problems, but somehow Trump’s three divorces, his womanizing, his misogyny, and his ex-wife’s accusations of rape don’t really matter. Or ask Bobby Jindal, the son of Punjabi immigrants. Although what comes out of both Jindal’s and Trump’s mouths sounds much the same, it’s Jindal who is the buffoon, not Trump.
Yes, a lower bar for white men has always been a feature of American life.
Recently the rightwing commentator Patrick Buchanan wrote a piece for Townhall.com entitled “The Great White Hope.” Buchanan whines that white men are no longer respected as leaders and contributors to society. Now, he sobs, white men are seen only as the fathers of colonialism and slavery. I’m not sure how he can wave away fact as we begin to take a long, hard look in the mirror of history – and Buchanan’s case is overstated – but he writes that much is riding on Trump, a hero to millions of white men angry at the changes in society wrought by now “privileged” brown people and forced to give up their Confederate flags.
Writer Lyz Lenz reminds us that they have always been with us, these angry white men. William Faulkner’s “Abner Snopes” (from “Barn Burning,” 1939) is a beaten-down sharecropper who burns down the barns of wealthy men, and rails at rich whites and poor blacks alike. Snopes is precisely the man Buchanan is talking about – although, truthfully, Snopes would sooner burn down Trump’s tower than vote for him.
In Buchanan’s fairytale America, historical oppressors have now become the victims, the historical victims the new oppressors. Where once a white man could readily find employment because of his skin color or his connections, now that same white man is competing with Asians and Mexicans in a global marketplace. I suppose we could lay some of the blame for this at the feet of the white male titans of Capitalism.
But – no. Blame it on the Mexicans.
Which brings us right back to Trump.
Trump’s campaign has accused Clinton of playing the “gender card.” Leaving aside his remarks on Megan Kelly and others, Trump’s own campaign doesn’t do much to dispel the truth of his misogyny and racism. According to a June 4th piece in the Boston Globe by Matt Viser, Trump pays his male campaign workers a third more than women and only 9% of them are minorities. Clinton, in contrast, pays her staff equally and 33% of them are minorities. Whatever you think of her, this says something about her willingness to be everyone’s president.
This election is really a referendum on White Male privilege. Forget Clinton’s email server. Put aside for a moment her lucrative speeches on Wall Street with their guarded transcripts, and all the revolving doors that have brought the Clinton Foundation a half billion dollars. Trump’s supporters simply hate Hillary Clinton for being smarter, more experienced, and more inclined to level the playing field for women and people of color.
Charles Krauthammer’s pieces never fail to annoy me. When he’s not demonizing Obama and the Left, he’s penning fairy tales about the morality of the Right.
This week’s fable is about the differences between neoconservatives and so-called “idealist” foreign policy makers. As Krauthammer tells it, conservatives (the good guys) believe in democracy and nation-building, while liberals (the evil ones) believe in developing global institutions and downplay American Exceptionalism. Krauthammer constantly savages his bête noire, Obama, for this sin. He whines that every act of Obama’s international diplomacy, from Iran to China to Cuba, has been an exercise in appeasement or in withdrawing American power – including the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which he classifies as appeasement and containment of China.
Yet after all that, for Krauthammer democracy-building is not really as important as building up and harshly wielding American power. Real power is provoking a military confrontation with China in which the U.S. is dominant.
In fact, the conservative wonks Krauthammer admires so much have never been in love with democracy or been shy about propping up dictators and butchers. The Pahlavis, the Pinochets, the Somozas, the Saudi royals and many others have always been the Chosen Ones with American administrations of both parties.
To be fair, the Wikileaks/Manning State Department cable dumps reveal just how criminally similar Hillary Clinton is to Henry Kissinger. Even in Obama’s last term, our foreign policy is still barely distinguishable from anything that preceded it. We’re still at war in seven nations. We’re still propping up autocratic regimes. The U.S. constantly builds up weaponry, employs drones to kill both “evildoer” and hapless innocent alike, operates with impunity or in violation of the Constitution, enlists help from the corrupt and rewards them amply, and lies to the American public about what it is doing.
Krauthammer’s real objection is with Obama’s tone. He is outraged that Obama can go to Hiroshima and apologize for being the only nation to unleash nuclear terror on humans. Yet – and this should make him happy – Obama has simultaneously approved an upgrade of our nuclear weapons.
Yet if there is anything redeeming about Obama’s tone, it is the implicit recognition that American Exceptionalism is crumbling – not by Obama’s hand but because the demise of our empire cannot sustain the myth. The one thing in which the United States leads (besides gun deaths and incarceration) is military spending and invading other countries. By all other measures (longevity, health, education, savings, standard of living, contentment) we are well down the list in comparison with many of our neighbors.
And so it is refreshing when – even hypocritically or obliquely – a standing president acknowledges a few of our crimes on the international stage. No doubt it infuriates people like Charles Krauthammer, who would prefer that we continue to bluster, bomb, and bully our way into Rogue Nation status. Yet Krauthammer speaks for many Americans, especially those drawn to political candidates known for blustering and bullying.
While the distinctions between “idealists” and neoconservatives are virtually non-existent, what is really crucial is what kind of people we want to be. Can we coexist with others who don’t share our love of American-style “free markets” or “Western democracy?” Do we want to be a high-tech Hermit Kingdom, building walls between nations, in a permanent state of war with most of the world? Must we deny reality and insist on American Exceptionalism – despite our failure to provide adequate healthcare, education, and economic opportunity to most of our own population? That’s hardly exceptional.
Or is it really just the human thing to let slip that we are just like everyone else? That we, as humans, are sorry for what we’ve done?
There is a lot of wisdom in Martin Luther King’s observation, which Krauthammer derides and Obama cites, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But men like Krauthammer, disposed toward violence, and lacking the patience for those long arcs, will never fully understand history – especially when only one nation is worthy of their consideration.
In Rafi Kanter’s recent letter he questions the truthfulness of my statements about the ADL. The suggestion of dishonesty require a response.
The ADL’s recent protestations that they never denied the Armenian genocide are much like Bill Clinton’s disavowals of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Yet strenuous denial does not equal the truth.
A July 2007 piece from Jewcy, an online Jewish magazine, explained how the ADL took on the job of being Israel’s mouthpiece: “Abdullah Gul needed a favor. […] The Turkish foreign minister was fighting a push in the U.S. House of Representatives to recognize the Turkish murder of over one million Armenians during World War I. […] Gul summoned representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and several other Jewish-American organizations to his room at the Willard Hotel in Washington. There he asked them, in essence, to perpetuate Turkey’s denial of genocide. Abraham Foxman’s ADL acquiesced…”
Plenty of Jews objected to the cowardice, if not hypocrisy. One of them was Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, a staunch Israel supporter who has given talks to the Jewish Federation at Rabbi Kanter’s very pulpit. On August 23, 2007 Jacoby wrote in the New York Times: “Particularly deplorable has been the longtime reluctance of some leading Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to call the first genocide of the 20th century by its proper name. When Andrew Tarsy, the New England director of the ADL, came out last week in support of a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, he was promptly fired by the national organization.”
On April 16, 2008 the Armenian Genocide Museum also blasted the ADL and on August 14, 2007 the Watertown, Massachusetts Town Council voted unanimously to rescind its affiliation with the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” campaign.
Only after widespread outrage at its cowardice reached a crescendo did the ADL change its tune.
In a June 2010 piece in Salon magazine Armenian writer Mark Arax expressed disappointment with the ADL best: “As victims of the Holocaust, Jews might be expected to stand beside the Armenians and their tragedy. […] This sudden embrace of the Armenian Genocide actually marks a shameless turnaround for the major American Jewish organizations. For decades, they have helped Turkey cover up its murderous past.”
My original point was that the ADL too often wades in on political issues as a proxy for Israel – even when it is contrary to American or Jewish values. The Liberty billboard incident was just the latest example.
No matter what the ADL says it now believes, what I wrote was absolutely correct.
After a performance of A.R. Gurney’s Office Hours, there was a discussion which ended up defending the preservation of a Eurocentric curriculum based on the Great Books. To which I may have said something like “Western Civilization is greatly overrated.” This no doubt annoyed one person enough to write me an email – to which I replied:
Dear —
I apologize to you, and to everyone else gathered, for my cranky response to your persistent efforts to defend Western Civilization from savages, enemies of enlightenment – or, frankly, anyone outside the Judeo-Christian realm. I especially must apologize to X. I did not intend to denigrate his characterization of the noble impulses of those who founded this nation. I meant only to observe that what they actually created turned out to be, unsurprisingly, not so noble given the models they chose.
Having begun my childhood in India right after independence, I had a front row seat to a side of Western colonialism we don’t see much, fundamentalist missionary Christianity, the subjugation of other people by militarism, eugenics, racism, and the unrestrained greed for other peoples’ resources. It was clear enough as a child that something was profoundly wrong with the Great White World, and it has become even clearer as an adult.
But all this, to paraphrase Kipling, was “justified” because “our” [Western] values were superior to theirs. All this, to paraphrase the Desert Storm general Jerry Boykin, was justified because our god was stronger than their god. All this, to paraphrase the American eugenists who preceded Hitler, was justified because we are genetically fitter than the savages.
Western Civilization is the White Man’s Burden. Some of you think of it lovingly as a curriculum. The rest of the world sees it as a sledgehammer.
Even though I grew up hearing (of the Chinese) that “life is cheap in the East,” it actually turns out that the reverse is true. “We” were the only ones to have ever dropped The Bomb on humans – but, no matter, they were just Asians. “We” in the West are not ashamed to kill – in vast numbers – for money, ideology, or simply because we just don’t like you. Total up all the victims of all our wars of choice combined – they far exceed the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. And just look at our Western legacy of slavery, racism, and exploitation of the poor. Boil down all the cultural relics we have stolen or embraced – and it is little more than justification for violence perpetrated by supermen.
These are our real values, not the glowing words on a page.
We may laugh at Nietzsche’s philosophy, which express our secret values most explicitly, but any objective evaluation of our “Western” curriculum must conclude that this is a warped, ideological education that leads, paradoxically, to violence and immorality – no less than ISIS’ twisted version of Islam.
It has always struck me as incredibly strange that a Western world that embraces such violence and hatred for the weak and the “other” would also embrace a religion of peace and egalitarianism. Even if the Romans had not killed Christ and blamed it on the Jews, I think they would have had to kill him some other way. You just can’t have a guy like that running around espousing kindness and care for the poor and the weak.
The truth that the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Belgian, and American missionaries who came hand-in-hand with their colonizing forces know is this: Christianity is for the defeated. Conquerors always come with Bible in one hand and sword in another. It is always all about power: morality has little to do with it.
Indeed, the pre-millennial post-apocalyptic Christ riding in on his horse with bloodied sword is more to the liking of many Christians today. And where did they learn this version of their religion? From university graduates of the 19th Century with their classical Eurocentric educations.
And this is why I say: Western Civilization is greatly overrated.
This morning’s Standard-Times contained an article about the removal of a billboard by Outdoor Media referencing the 1967 USS Liberty incident, in which an American ship was attacked by Israel and 34 U.S. sailors were killed. The Johnson administration immediately suppressed the story and it is still relatively unknown. The Standard-Times article quotes the New England Defamation League, which attacks the group that placed the ad (“If Americans Only Knew”) for alleged “antisemitism.” No other view was presented in the article.
Without a doubt “If Americans Only Knew” is confrontational – as is PETA, who also unsuccessfully waded into local billboard marketing with disastrous results. But if you actually visit their website instead of merely taking the ADL’s word for it, it’s clear that their issues are with American foreign policy around Israel and Palestine. They leave generalizations about Jews to people like Donald Trump.
It is hardly surprising that the Defamation League would come down on the side of censorship. The ADL in recent years has expanded its definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel and it has become primarily a mouthpiece for the Israeli foreign ministry. In 2008, when it served Israel’s interests to be less hostile to Turkey, the ADL denied the Armenian genocide. Now, at a time that Jews are better-integrated into American society than ever before, the ADL has turned away from defending Jewish Americans to defending Israel’s militarism and occupation.
But the Israel-Palestine issue is not going away. More than ever, it is a valid foreign policy debate, just as American militarism is. Last year the [U.S.] Congressional Research Service reported that “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance…”
I can think of many better uses for that money – and it is certainly worth debating.
We can pretend all we want that Israel is a beleaguered little David fighting off Arab Goliaths day and night – or we can acknowledge that, like us, Israel has turned its back on its founders’ ideals and has become an ugly xenophobic nation – with an equally ugly dependency on militarism and an occupation habit. But it’s hard for Americans to criticize Zionism when we so enthusiastically embrace our own American Exceptionalism.
Still, if we are looking for an explanation for the unrelenting efforts to censor the debate on Israel and Palestine, we need only look in the mirror. This – as Walter Russell Mead wrote in “Foreign Affairs” many years ago – is the real reason we cannot bear criticism of Israel: they’re just too much like us.
I began this book last night and finished it this morning. Although the first person, present tense is grating for the length of an entire book, and Fair still is not fully open with himself or his readers, it was an engrossing read. My three stars reflects an average of four stars for interest yet only two for candor.
What happens to a man who goes off to war? The book certainly answers this question: nightmares, guilt, alcoholism, sometimes death – either by war or the man’s own hand.
How does a man like this reconcile his own religion with what he is ordered to do? I don’t think we ever really get an answer. In his account, Fair’s family expect him to become a pastor like his grandfather, but he is drawn to a darker, physical side, first becoming a policeman, where he learns to deploy violence against people who are always (well, at least in theory) criminals. For the longest time Fair thinks religion will save him, and the book contains a strange account of his interrogation of salafis who tell him how much like them he really is – a thread that really leads nowhere. Aside from Fair’s restlessness and his perpetual life crises, readers never really learn why he avoids the ministry, why he stubbornly clung to Presbyterianism despite it changing in front of his eyes, why he really dropped out of theological school. It wasn’t that his writing was starting to take off; it was something else, unnamed, unexamined.
And why does a man go off to war – especially when many in his family have warned him against it? Fair again avoids fully answering the reader’s questions, but we sense a tremendous restlessness in him that leads him to ignore his father’s and grandmother’s counsel. Fair is obviously a person of well above-average intelligence, and he is given to instrospection and guilt, but he shies away from truly probing the demons that still stir within him.
The book begins with a quote from Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Maimonides was the Arab-Jewish Talmudist who, besides being the Sultan’s physician, wrote Guide for the Perplexed and had much to say on moral conduct. Maimonides counsels the guilty party to approach his victim “again and again until he his forgiven.” Islam requires precisely the same of a wrong-doer, while in Christianity a hall pass signed by Jesus suffices. Unfortunately, all of Fair’s – and Bush and Cheney’s, and Obama’s – victims are now either dead or lost to squalid prisons in places where Americans will fear to go for a long, long time. A dark truth never acknowledged in this book is that there never will be apologies – and there never will be forgiveness for these personal and national sins.
And so in the end Fair falls back on his Christianity – or perhaps just wishful thinking. In his aunt’s words, Eric Fair ends up forgiving himself: “I am just a human kid.”
Gerrymandering, lobbyists, hanging chads, the Supreme Court, denying former felons the vote, Jim Crow style voter disenfranchisement, two parties that at times are indistinguishable, a two year election cycle, SuperPACs, Citizen’s United, political family dynasties, billionaires, voter apathy.
There are plenty of things that make elections meaningless.
We generally assume all these problems could be solved by taking money out of the equation, shortening the election cycle, getting more middle class candidates and fewer billionaires, and eliminating corruption.
That’s all well and good, but the problems begin with the Republicans and Democrats — specifically, their primaries.
In the attached spreadsheet you can see how both parties use the primaries to thwart the will of the people.
Problem
Description
State primary delegates
Republicans and Democrats have different formulae for assigning state primary delegates. Democrats give Vermont 41 delegates per million citizens and Texas 9 per million. Republicans give Wyoming 49 delegates per million citizens and California 4 per million. Some states count for more than others.
Super delegates
The Democrats, especially, have un-elected delegates who come from the monied and politically-connected classes, who are given carte blanche to select whomever they want at convention. We have been seeing this phenomenon as Hillary Clinton maintains a slim popular lead over Bernie Sanders, while amassing twice the number of delegates. In fact, almost 19% of the Democratic Party’s delegates are super-delegates. In the District of Columbia there are actually more super-delegates than regular delegates. The same goes for American colonies like American Samoa (40%), Guam (42%), Northern Marianas (45.5%), and the US Virgin Islands (42%). But super-delegates also afflict US states as well: Delaware (32%), Massachusetts (21%), New Hampshire (25%), Rhode Island (27%), Vermont (39%), and DC (56%). Amazingly, voters in the Blue states just hand the keys over to the party grownups.
Regional biases
The apportionment of state delegates, previously discussed, creates a bias in which some regions carry more weight in conventions. The Democrats allocate more delegates per capita to Blue states than Red, while the Republicans do the reverse. If you are a Democrat in a Red state, your convention vote doesn’t count as much. If you are a Republican in a Blue state, all hope is lost. These are situations created by the delegates own parties!
Winner Take All
Republicans, especially, are fond of Winner Take All primaries. Eighteen states adopt this rule for the Republican primaries. If you and 25% of your fellow party members voted for someone who lost, you get 0% representation at a convention. In five states delegates are not bound by the people’s choices. Isn’t American democracy great?
In a comparative study of national literacy published by Connecticut State University, the United States of USA! USA! USA! ain’t doing so good.
http://www.ccsu.edu/wmln/rank.html
The United States comes out 7th overall, which doesn’t sound too bad until you actually read the report.
The U.S. is:
9th in money spent on education
12th in reading newspapers
12th in test scores (after “normalization” with other systems)
23rd in households with computers
30th in libraries
The amount of money thrown at education doesn’t matter: it should be the outcomes. As the study’s Methodology section admits: “There are virtually no meaningful correlations between the input measures and the output measures [for education].” So why were input measures given undue weight in the study? Similarly, test scores don’t matter: it’s what students actually know — which is often not much. Likewise, the number of computers in a household doesn’t matter if all family members do with them are tweeting, watching porn, streaming movies, or downloading music. The ranking of American libraries, while bad enough, is actually elevated by the number of university facilities, while at the community level libraries are poorly, grudgingly, and disgracefully funded. Newspaper rankings are also inflated by the number of local papers (not their quality) that exist solely for advertising revenue, while in smaller countries papers with national circulation are stronger and of better quality. When, for example, was the last time you saw a fuilleiton section in your local newspaper — or any real international news in it? No matter how many USA Todays, New York Posts, and National Enquirers exist, Americans still can’t find Brazil on a map.
Meaningful outcomes? These were given short shrift in this “study.”
And a final question:
How do weighted rankings of [ 9, 12, 12, 23, and 30 ] amount to a composite ranking of 7?
This is a bit awkward. I am writing you in your capacity as President of the Federation, not as the old friend that you are to both of us.
Please ask the Federation to stop sending me appeals for donations. Deborah certainly holds her own views, but I am speaking for myself here.
My views on Zionism and Israel within our community are well-known, and these campaign appeals are unappreciated. I have previously asked the Federation to remove my name from its mailings, and it has ignored my requests. What other steps must I take to make this stop?
Zionism is not a religion. It is a remnant of 19th century nationalism, of a destructive and divisive type we have seen all over the world – in Germany, Serbia, Africa, and the Middle East. Nationalism is incompatible with democracy because within nationalist states there is always a preferred people, race, or religion – and its “others” always find themselves in its crosshairs. In Israel proper and in the occupied territories, Palestinians don’t have to wear yellow stars, but they might as well be required to. They are third-class citizens in Israel, and essentially non-humans in the West Bank.
Judaism, on the other hand, is a religion, and one in which ethics mean everything. It has evolved since the days of temples and priests, but apparently the fundamentalist conception of God literally conferring land ownership of Israel has not similarly evolved. Until modern day Messianism reared its ugly head after the Six Day War, many Jews believed that talking about a reconstituted Israel was an abomination. Now only the Satmars reject Zionism, but many progressive Jews believe that Zionism must be reigned-in and that Israel’s rejection of Two States leaves no other alternative for peace except a single, democratic, secular state. This is my view. I cannot consider myself a Zionist in any form.
Those who believe in a fusion of nationalism and religion remind me of the Islamic zealots who want their own religious state. Israel should strive to be a 21st century democracy and not a Jewish Caliphate. Most Americans believe in separation of church and state. Why, then, should we be expected to make an exception for Israel?
Since the program of the Federation is Zionist, I cannot support any of it. Please take my name off your list permanently. Thank you for your understanding. I hope this explains why I do not wish to have any donations given in my name.
This morning I read two different op-eds on ISIS. Dana Milbank ponders the proper way to talk about risks and “bad guys” to children, and Chace Howland regurgitates the old line that – just like Chamberlain with Hitler – the West has been too easy on ISIS: now is the time for allies to strike.
In other words – keep a stiff upper lip and attack the “bad guys” anew.
The problem is – there’s nothing new in any of this. Worse, it shows just how narrow our thinking has become on issues of foreign policy. When you have a monstrous military, every foreign policy choice involves “defense” – no need to ponder one’s own responsibility for creating the conflict. There’s only one hammer in our tool belt, and it’s a bomb.
We’ve been at war in the Middle East almost as long as my children, now pushing thirty, have been alive. A whole generation has grown up in perpetual war, never knowing full civil liberties, seeing the decline of infrastructure, education, health, and security by the middle and working classes. The only constant during all this time has been our addiction to war.
Chace Howland sees parallels between Germany of the Thirties and ISIS. The Nazis had an ideology; so does ISIS. Check. The Nazis wanted to expand their territory; so does ISIS. Check. Ergo: they’re the same. His is a rather shallow analysis for a history teacher. Nazism was a reaction to the failures of liberal democracy in a once-advanced, highly educated and cultured nation, and was characterized by scapegoating within that democracy. In many ways, the United States is a better candidate for Nazi analogies than ISIS. We have military bases in 150+ countries. The Patriot Act has gutted most of our Bill of Rights – something that white people have only recently lost but which minorities have never completely enjoyed. And we now have presidential candidates who want to slap yellow stars on our citizens.
Yes, ISIS is powerful, but only relatively so. Its power comes from all the failed states in the Middle East that the United States and its “allies” have created. If ISIS appears strong in Iraq it is because George Bush’s and Paul Bremer’s “de-Baathification” policy destroyed the Iraqi military. If ISIS is strong in Libya, thank Obama and Clinton. If ISIS is strong in Syria, thank John Kerry. And thank all the American presidents of both parties that encouraged, funded, and armed religious militias during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States created Islamic extremism. Both Republicans and Democrats have blood on their hands. And we still seem determined to finish off Assad’s Syria. This is insanity.
We claim to be shocked at the horrific beheadings and religious repression of “apostates” by ISIS. And yet our great friend Saudi Arabia is about to stage a mass execution of a variety of “criminals,” including a well-known poet who renounced Islam and a teenager who attended a pro-democracy demonstration with his uncle. Sounds like ISIS to me. If Mr. Chace thinks the ideology behind ISIS will be exterminated by allied bombing, he is mistaken. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist oil peddlers are beloved by both Bushes and Clintons.
Which brings us to the heart of things – the Middle East is a Middle Eastern problem. Even if we bomb Raqqa and Tikrit and Mosul into powder, terrorism is not going away. We flatter ourselves to think that the US and Russia are in a “proxy war” in the Middle East – one that could be resolved by finding a nice chateau for Syria’s Assad to live out his days in. But the balance between democracy, religion – and of what kind? Western, Sunni or Shiite? – is at the heart of all this. Saudis want their own democracy, not a family-owned kleptocracy; Egyptians want their own form of democracy instead of a military junta: but the United States continues to support these repressive regimes. Kurds want their own state; religious minorities want protection from majorities. Some of the messes of colonial meddling with borders need to be cleaned up.
Drones and F16’s will fix none of this.
We like to think of ourselves – not as the world’s policeman – but as a force for good in the world. Yet we are neither. Our policing of the world has been as violent and mercurial and damaging as it is at home. As a for being a force for good, this is more wishful thinking. We will never know what it is to be a good friend and neighbor until we have learned to count every one of our own citizens as such.
Wednesday’s Guest View from the Cape Cod Times (“Drug testing students?”) correctly calls into question legislation proposed in the Massachusetts Senate providing for blanket “drug testing” of middle and high school students. Senate Bill 2008 requires that “Local school departments or boards of health shall require SBIRT screening at least once annually for all students in grades 8 or 9, and in grade 11.”
The Cape Cod Times editorial points out that no other state has voted to subject its students to intrusive (and expensive) drug interviews of this sort, and suggests that lawmakers are grasping at straws at the very real opioid epidemic gripping the nation and the SouthCoast.
Both Governor Baker and the “Special Senate Committee on Opioid Addiction Prevention, Treatment and Recovery Options” have apparently made the schools a focus of their efforts. Massachusetts is throwing almost $1 million at a TV and website campaign (“Stop Addiction in its Tracks”) that so far has generated a disappointing number of clicks and deserves the same ridicule the ineffective DARE program earned in its day.
I went online to find out if middle and high school students were in fact the victims of opioid overdoses. The mass.gov health statistics for public consumption lump children in with adults (15-24). An analysis of news reports of overdose cases in SouthCoast from early September through early October shows an average victim age of 35, which is in line with a bulletin published by the Massachusetts MDPH in 2007. In other words – these are people who have been shaving a while.
In 2014 Massachusetts had 1,256 opioid-related overdose deaths, and this number is expected to increase once 2015 figures are tabulated, so the problem is very real. However, invading every teen’s privacy annually and at public expense in order to root out potential addicts twenty years before they actually overdose sounds as ridiculous as it is. Citizens don’t need to have their civil liberties trampled annually – especially when the data doesn’t support it. State Senator Montigny and the rest of the legislature need to take a big red pen to these provisions, retaining only the better aspects of the bill.
James Baldwin observed that Americans are the only people on earth who need to “find themselves.” Baldwin was probably not the first to make this observation but his point is well taken. In the absence of communitarian values we are all on our own, suspicious of and pitted against the other guy, and we have a pretty low tolerance for anyone else’s values. Social Darwinism is our creed. The poor are weak, and the rich get what they deserve. Might is right, and nice guys finish last. A sucker is born every minute, and none of us want to be that sucker. Kindness is weakness, and altruism is suspect. Donald Trump’s genius is that he recognizes all this.
Many American Christians prefer the more muscular Old Testament to the effeminate Gospel of Jesus, and we American Jews have long forgotten what it is to be a stranger in a strange land. Truth be told, many Americans would rather worship at the feet of Ayn Rand than in the pews of traditional religions which, inconveniently, all exhort us to care for orphans and the poor. Turning the other cheek is much less in our nature than smiting the sinner by rock or sword – or at least sticking them in stocks and pillory – or social networking equivalent. In order to smite as many sinners as possible, we have the most savage armory of weapons on the planet, and we are the only nation to unleash the power of the atom on fellow human beings.
We are experiencing a particularly vicious resurgence of racism and nativism in this country. Police murders of Black people are pandemic, and Republican candidates unabashedly make racist proposals. If we look carefully, the GOP’s minor candidates are guilty of even worse than the front-runner. Scott Walker is unsure if we need to build a wall to keep out Canadians, and Chris Christie wants to track Latinos like FedEx packages. You can’t make this stuff up.
None of this should be a surprise. In 1936 the Union Party ran William Lemke alongside Roosevelt and Landon. The party was formed by the infamous Charles E. Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith (an associate of Huey Long), Lemke, and F.E. Townsend. Coughlin and Smith were priest and preacher, respectively, the others populists from states with poor, uneducated citizens. Besides their virulent anti-communism, cafeteria Christianity, open racism and Antisemitism, all had a fear of foreigners and a hatred of intellectuals. Although the party dissolved three years later, their political descendants have since found a home in the various brown shirted Tea Parties which now dominate the GOP.
Before that there was the Red Scare, obsessed with Jews newly arrived from Europe. Before that, the fear of anarchists – again with its bald Antisemitism. And before that, the Know Nothings, an anti-Catholic political party with no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Irish potato famine victims coming to America to survive. Not surprisingly, they also supported slavery. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Blacks, free or enslaved, could not automatically be granted citizenship. No anchor babies! And before that – our Original Sin, slavery itself, and Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism, and xenophobia, and all the other forms of madness we have perfected.
In 1989 San Francisco enacted a “City and County of Refuge” ordinance which prevented city employees from aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless there was a warrant or federal law required it. Republicans have twisted the ordinance to mean that the city knowingly harbors foreign killers. Interestingly, the Book of Leviticus – which every fundamentalist Republican should have memorized by now – mandates cities of refuge for shielding murderers from blood retribution. To the west the cities of Golan, Ramoth, and Bosor, and to the east of the Jordan River the cities of Kedesh, Shechem, and Hebron were to be sanctuary cities. Today Hebron is filled with violent settlers (many “illegals” from America), darlings of a GOP which applauds Israel’s “Right of Return” law, permitting Europeans and Americans to settle in the West Bank, but doesn’t see the irony of denying similar privileges to those whose ancestors once lived in the third of Mexico that the United States seized in 1848.
The America of today has too much blood on its hands and hate in its heart for any citizen to truly “find himself.” We are at so many intersections – technology, environment, income equality, race, militarism. And we blow through every red and yellow light – always in a hurry to go nowhere, always taking the wrong turn.
“Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (ISBN 978-0465059997), by Martin Ford, a former software developer and entrepreneur, begins with a survey of the technology landscape – an over-clocked world where change seems to follow Moore’s Law – doubling in speed every couple of years. Ford paints a picture of the capabilities of robots and the dismal economic climate for humans that has existed since the mid-seventies: real wages are declining; wealth is being concentrated in the hands of 1% of the nation; half of all college graduates are not finding work that can use their college education; even highly-skilled professionals are being replaced by automation; the top 5% now accounting for 40% of all purchasing; and he asks whether tech firms – which pride themselves on “disruptive technology” – will disrupt the entire system. This is a great question – the entire system is indeed heading for a collapse. But Ford does not seriously explore the nature of “the system” – and he is certainly not looking for serious solutions – only bandaids.
Ford examines the “service sector” jobs left to American workers and refutes the notion that they are training grounds for young workers to learn valuable workplace skills. It turns out, actually, that 90% of fast-food workers are over 20, the average age is 35, their median hourly wage is $8.69, and most of them qualify for welfare programs costing taxpayers at least $7 billion a year. And still the fast-food chains are looking at new technology to replace half of their employees with automation. Ford writes that we can expect similar encroachments of robotics into wholesaling operations, retail, and agriculture. Yet, like men waiting for their turn in front of a firing squad, most workers today already see the writing (if not the blood) on the wall. What Ford is telling us is nothing new.
From the beginning of the computer age, even its creators foresaw the threat of human obsolescence. Norbert Wiener argued in a 1949 New York Times piece that there is theoretically no human task that a computer cannot learn and duplicate. In the Sixties, President Johnson convened a panel to write one of those government studies destined to molder in a filing cabinet – this one about the “Triple Revolution” occurring in the United States: human and civil rights; advances in weaponry; and “cybernation” or cybernetic automation. The report concluded that, without oversight and planning, the “nation will be thrown into unprecedented economic and social disorder.”
But economic planning is for Commies and sissies; and besides, the nation now had an oil crisis, stagflation, Iranian hostages, Sandinistas to fight, medical students to rescue in Granada, and corrupt ex-friends to punish in Panama. The Reagan years marked the beginning of attacks on labor, the rapid ascendency of pro-business advocacy in government – and what in retrospect was a new austerity regime being imposed on American workers. Ford lists seven trends he sees responsible for the misery of workers: stagnant (actually decreasing) wages; decreasing share of the national income by workers and increasing share by corporations (inequality); declining labor force participation (despite women being forced to augment family incomes); long-term unemployment and lack of job creation; soaring wage income inequality; declining opportunity and underemployment by college graduates; and the rise of McJobs and loss of full-time jobs with benefits.
Amazingly, Ford ascribes all these developments to technology. And he feels obliged to explicitly discount three other contributors: globalization (outsourcing and offshoring); financialization (the turn from factories to hedge funds); and politics (trickle down market fundamentalism in Congress and rabid pro-business lobbying from without).
Although Ford’s own graphs show a plunge in the percent of manufacturing jobs from a height of 32% in 1952 to a low of 8% in 2012, his discussion centers on the percentage of foreign products Americans buy from foreign corporations. He writes that the plunge in manufacturing jobs began before NAFTA and, hence, globalization was not the cause. However, labor historians might disagree with Ford. Textile workers, for example, remember the loss of their jobs to Mexico in the Fifties; and Mexicans remember the loss of these very same jobs in the Sixties to Asia. Globalization cannot be linked solely to trade agreements and Ford mistakenly labels globalization a modern phenomenon. Even the first economists, like David Ricardo, had it very much in mind.
Ford correctly nails the obsession with profit-taking and the abandonment of job and product creation. However, he writes that it is “important to realize that growth in the financial sector has been highly dependent on advancing information technology.” No doubt the hedge fund guys need their high-speed computers and trading networks. But Ford does not mention that the financial sector’s growth is largely the result of reckless deregulation and the invention of questionable financial “products” like the ones that nearly crashed the economic system in 2008 and necessitated massive taxpayer-funded bailouts. These companies, deemed “too big to fail,” were not permitted to reap what they sowed. They were hauled off the edge of the abyss, guaranteed continued rapacious profits, and their CEO’s were still remunerated handsomely despite their questionable ethics and performance. For one brief moment the curtain dropped on the wizard and those who did not avert their eyes saw how obscene profit-taking was and how income inequality is actually generated. Meanwhile, the average citizen-consumer – who represents 65% of economic growth in the United States – was left to fend for himself. The recovery plan both parties championed was not only unfair, it was irrational: it rescued the wrong people.
Ford grudgingly acknowledges the political climate that banned unions, attacked worker rights, deregulated businesses, dropped or eliminated taxes on the wealthy, sent an army of lobbyists to Washington, made sure corporate press shills printed op-eds from right-wing think tanks, and foisted all the economic risk on taxpayers and working people. Ford writes that, even in Canada where unions are healthier than in the U.S., income inequality is rising – the implication being that it’s not political. But Ford doesn’t mention the Tory government of Stephen Harper in the same breath, or the fact that some provinces of Canada (Alberta, for example) are as non-union as the American South.
Ford concludes that information technology “stands alone in terms of its exponential progress. Even in nations whose political environments are far more responsive to the welfare of average workers, the changes wrought by technology are becoming increasingly evident.” What nations is Ford referring to? Are there really any powerful First World nations that do not espouse labor-crushing austerity programs or champion trickle-down economics? The IMF, global banks, the G8, and global trade agreements have made sure the world is safe for Capitalism. Greece is not suffering because of technology.
He moves on to a discussion of comparative advantage in which businesses and nations choose to forego opportunity “X” for a more profitable one, and permit those who can do “X” more inexpensively to do so. Robots, Ford says, mean never having to say “I’m sorry, I’ll pass on that opportunity” because they can be programmed to do anything. Ford describes “long tail” distributions, which describe employee/profit relationships. In 2012 Google made $14 billion with 38,000 employees; GM made $11 billion with 840,000. His prediction is that most corporations of the future will have to look like Google, and this in turn will force people out of stable full-time jobs into the “informal economy,” the “Uber economy,” in which people pick up work where they can. Ford cites Jared Lanier, claiming this is essentially the model in the Third World, and that it is precisely what accounts for the erosion of the middle class. But Ford does not describe how a strong middle class makes a nation politically stable. He makes the throwaway point about citizens having a moral right to share in the benefits of technology – especially since much of it is funded or seeded by taxpayers. So presumably the public deserves a few more tech jobs and discounts when buying Tang.
But by all means: let’s disrupt technology but leave the system alone.
Ford loves factory tours. We are introduced to sportswriting bots, data mining apps, marketing analytics, machine learning, language translation, neural nets, genetic programming, cars that drive themselves, project and productivity management software, AI, complex modeling, smart searching, customer management, online ordering, cloud computing, specialized robotics, and programs that write symphonies. We learn that computer-delivered educational and machine-reading tests have not delivered on early expectations. Medical diagnosis, on the other hand, using massive repositories of case studies, pharmaceutical data, and symptoms, has been a useful tool in the hands of medical specialists. Ford, however, gushing over the possibilities of delivering family medicine by robot, runs off the rails when he advocates “para-medicals” – lesser-trained medical professionals, similar to paralegals, whose job it will be to run the medical robots that talk to human patients.
There is an odd tendency among humans to think up complex and stupid systems, then double down on them by devising yet more complex and stupid solutions to the systems’ shortcomings. Ford’s is one such example. Another is the predicted use of elder-care robots in Japan – because, Ford says, the Japanese are too xenophobic to hire foreigners to take care of their elderly.
Many uses of technology – like the use of IBM’s Watson to diagnose and manage types of leukemia – are lumped into robotics in Ford’s book – for example, his mention of glucose sensors for diabetics. If this is the face of robotics, then my old mercury-based thermostat is as well. Both are basically sensors linked to controllers. Google Nest and Google’s contact lens are examples of how the company is developing consumer products to enable it to creep into the lucrative medical market. These are new products and, if anything, will put people to work somewhere – likely outside the U.S. But they are, as yet, not robotic threats to human jobs.
Ford’s discussion of medical overcharging – $6,500 CT scans and $200 aspirins – does not address the issue of greed. Instead, he portrays these practices as necessary maneuvers to cope with that 5% of medical patients who, he says, account for 50% of all expenses. He teases us that AI software running on a tablet in a doctor’s hands will make diagnoses and devise more cost-effective treatments. However, who would not expect the software to cost physicians $1,000 a month and have to run on otherwise standard Android tablets, but costing $5,000 each? Gouging is so entrenched in medical software that it would surprise no one that such an exception for a single AI product would ever be made – particularly when many physicians nowadays are investors in their own labs. Ford proposes creating a single-payer health care system which can mitigate the gouging. He suggests a private management consortium modeled on the old national AT&T phone system – a sanctioned oligopoly. His ideas include auctioning off operating licenses – as if he had never heard of the problems the FCC has run into with bandwidth spectra. But my question is – why? Why is he trying to design a new health care system on the heels of the first one ever created, and one that could be dismantled after the next election? And what does all this really have to do with robotics?
Cars are another story. Self-driving vehicles are almost here, and they belong to two family trees: one is the traditional family car from Detroit, Japan, or Bavaria, plus a host of self-driving and self-parking options; the other is the Google car, a no-frills vehicle that will eventually not even have a steering wheel. Many options for these new vehicles are possible, but Ford sees, eventually, a world of commercial car fleets. For a monthly fee you would have car service, pickup and dropoff capabilities, and vehicles would cease being status objects – simply another commodity like cable TV or high speed internet. These fleets would be owned by companies like Google, Avis, Hertz and Uber. Ford slyly suggests that the changes wrought by driverless cars would be the ultimate in disruptive technology: “Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.” As fleets consolidate, the number of taxi drivers, muffler and brake guys, auto body shops, car dealerships, detailing shops, and car washes will shrink dramatically. As fleets of cars grow, the fleet of auto guys will fade into obscurity – only to be replaced by a much small number of highly-trained technicians in the fleet garages. Ford did not touch on some of the privacy issues of concern with cars today – particularly that cars gather tremendous amounts of personal information on their drivers and can actually be hacked during operation. Or that vehicles will no doubt also become part of our new surveillance landscape.
In fact, the privacy and civil liberties implications of robotics and automation are entirely absent from Ford’s book.
Expanding the context in which technology changes are expected to occur, Ford paints a picture of the fragility of the middle and upper-middle class – including the top 5% which constitutes an affluent upper tier, but one easily broken by the loss of two salaries. He discusses debt, education, aging, and labor force participation. The bottom line is: our national prosperity was once dependent upon a healthy middle class, and the middle class is anything but healthy nowadays. Most people already understand this.
When Ford turns his attention to the “Singularity” and the general kookiness of Ray Kurzweil, it’s initially an amusing story – until we discover that Kurzweil’s pseudo-religion of “eternal life via cybernetics” is widely supported by, and shapes, Silicon Valley. The use of new technology at micro levels – nanotechnology – will create, he writes, chemical and mechanical miracles that will prolong life and function like the alchemist’s bowl, synthesizing entire meals from amino acid glop – at least so sayeth the prophets of the future with their billions to spend experimenting on the rest of us.
In his final chapter, Martin Ford takes a stab at creating a “new paradigm” for economies in which, as Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy puts it, “the future doesn’t need us.” In this future, the highly educated are not really needed. Not surprising; they never were. Even today, between 20% and 50% of college graduates are “overeducated” for existing jobs in industrialized countries. Ford questions the conventional wisdom that throwing more vocational education at today’s burger flippers will magically create a climate for more technologically-related economic growth. He describes the job market as a huge pyramid, with the technical and business elite at the top – graduates of graduate programs – and not just people with graduate degrees, but people from prestigious universities. The kind of people whose survival would be assured by sticking them in a secure vault in a granite mountain somewhere in case of nuclear war or an asteroid. Ford laughs at the expectation of finding technical jobs for everyone. “The person who would have worked on a farm in 1900, or in a factory in 1952, is today scanning bar codes or stocking shelves at Walmart. […] So, historically, there has been a reasonable match between the types of work required by the economy and the capabilities of the available workforce. […] The conventional wisdom is that, by investing in still more education and training, we are going to somehow cram everyone into that shrinking region at the very top [of the pyramid].” Ford’s bleak prediction is like End Times: only a small multitude will be saved during the Apocalypse and make it to heaven. The rest of us are doomed.
Ford makes much – everything, actually – of the speed of technological innovation and sees this as the primary driver of the threat of the working class (or working aspirants). But technology is a very fast but relatively small wind-up mouse in a room with a huge elephant no one wants to talk about. That elephant, of course, is Capitalism. It takes 255 pages for Ford to mention the word – the economic system imposed on people in nations where technology is regularly used against them. He writes, “The progression toward ever more automation is not an artifact of ‘design philosophy’ or the personal preferences of engineers: it is fundamentally driven by capitalism. […] The only difference today is that exponential progress is pushing us toward the endgame. […] Changing that would require far more an appeal to engineers and designers: it would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.”
Or – and this does not occur to Ford – changing the system.
If Capitalism is a race for market domination, then a supermarket chain cannot survive its equally technologically-savvy competitors unless it eventually replaces all its cashiers with automated checkouts. Fast food restaurants cannot survive the demand for the cheapest possible “food” unless they eventually replace their humiliatingly-attired employees with vending machines or burger-stamping robots. Mass retailers like Walmart cannot mercilessly crush their competition unless they reduce or eliminate warehouse workers, retail workers, transportation workers, and replace American seamstresses with Bangladeshi children living in shacks and working in fire traps twelve hours a day. But the need to win at all cost exacts enormous social costs – costs that, under Capitalism, businesses and their wealthy owners and investors refuse to pay. This is why, as Ford points out, Social Security is abused as a permanent safety net. This is why most Walmart and fast-food employees collect welfare benefits at a cost of billions to taxpayers – when many of these same corporations are paying no taxes at all. Ford sees the dysfunction. He just doesn’t have the stomach to really change it.
So what is Ford’s solution – since he seems to think that Capitalism is the only form of economic and social organization? A basic guarantee of income. Hand out croissants to the peasants so they won’t revolt. He cites Friedrich Hayek, the ultra conservative economist, who saw this as an interim measure – right before pulling the plug on all social support systems. Ford writes that, without doubt, conservatives are not going to like this idea. I would suggest that neither Libertarians nor Social Democrats nor even Socialists are going to like the idea very much because citizens are completely at the mercy of a government that can “giveth or taketh away” such benefits. Worse, Ford envisions a society of free agents, where everyone is scrambling to “go out and participate in the market.” He thus betrays his own Free Market fundamentalism. He’s for the Uber economy. Besides, there is, as many economists and historians have pointed out, no such thing as an entirely free market. Could I, under Ford’s scheme, found an empire like the Tata’s, or Donald Trump’s? Probably not. I’d have to be born into wealth, as in these examples, or born with a silver spoon in my mouth like Bill Gates, the Walton heirs, or Mark Zuckerberg. And if the top 1% owns 90% of the nation’s wealth, how is guaranteed income really going to help the bottom 99%? The super-rich will still have their billions and their disproportionate access to influence and politics. No, if we are being honest – a monthly allowance is really just to keep the proletariat from rioting.
I have a low tolerance for “timely,” “insightful,” and “pioneering” books on social issues that seriously pull their punches, especially when they ignore the most egregious features of the problem they are examining. “Rise of the Robots” is such a book. I am very grateful to the friend who let me read his copy – and for the fact that I did not have to buy a copy myself.
Dr. Irving Fradkin (“America can be great again,” August 12) is without doubt a beloved booster of communitarian values and I have enjoyed reading his pieces over the years. However, from time to time I have found his conventional wisdom to be less than wise.
This is one such case.
In his most recent letter Dr. Fradkin portrays the problems of our democracy as a lack of bipartisanship and suggests that tweaks to campaign finance rules can make government more democratic.
What we REALLY need is an end to corporate bribery through lobbying, PACs, and classifying corporations as humans.
Dr. Fradkin wants more people to establish scholarships for students.
What we REALLY need is free university education – such as Germany and other nations offer their citizens – if we don’t want the next several generations to be drowned in debt. Of course this requires that the states and federal government not be totally broke. Raising revenues is essential, and spending on more than the military is a choice we’ll have to make.
Dr. Fradkin wants to create jobs by reducing taxes.
Reducing taxes does not magically create jobs that can easily be outsourced to Bangladesh, Mumbai, or Taiwan. And in Bangladesh where major clothing companies sew your jeans and shirts – or in the FoxConn compounds where Apple products are made – wages are criminally low and companies need not worry much about worker safety. Places like the Marshall Islands are technically in the U.S. but workers there are not protected by the same labor laws as Americans. Are virtually slave-labor jobs in places like this going to magically migrate back to us when outsourcing is so profitable?
Even when American jobs ARE created, we are now seeing a trend toward McJobs and the Uber economy – where everyone cobbles together an existence from multiple part-time, low-paying jobs where benefits are a thing of the past. This is the Third World model, Dr. Fradkin.
And what is to ensure that the Walton (Walmart) family and the fast food purveyors – even when granted cushy tax deals – will provide a working wage for their employees? Absolutely nothing. In fact, Walmart employees have to supplement their paychecks with food stamps and Medicare – which WE, and not the Waltons, pay for. What’s good for the billionaires is not necessarily good for the average guy – and to believe that charity will be given generously and spontaneously by billionaires (trickle down economics) is more than wishful thinking. It’s delusional.
Next Dr. Fradkin suggests we go begging from billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet for matching grants to communities. In fact, Dr. Fradkin devotes a lot of time to successful begging strategies, mentioning our local success story, Dr. Irwin Jacobs, as well.
There is nothing wrong with giving back voluntarily to a community that has given you so much – don’t get me wrong. But what we REALLY need is for corporations and wealthy citizens to pay their fair share of taxes, not simply drop a few bucks in our coffee cups as they pass us begging on the street.
When the working and middle classes are not living hand to mouth – that’s when America will be great again.
I re-read Josef Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” after many years to see how it has stood up. And it does – very well. Modern critiques of the book have been harsh, but Conrad’s story turned the tables on colonial Europe, suggesting who exactly were the savages.
The story is recounted, as fin de siècle stories sometimes were, as the recollections of a narrator once-removed. The narrator recounts a tale told by a mariner named Marlow, who as a young man had been out of work for some time and had obtained work as a river pilot for a Belgian colonial enterprise.
In Part I of the story, even before Marlow enters the Congo, his first ominous brushes are with the corporation to which King Leopold had given the charter to pillage a massive part of the Dark Continent (an area 75 times as large as Belgium itself). The company Marlow visits when signing on is quartered on a street with grass growing up through the cobblestones – a spent Europe. As if a heroic journey were beginning, in Conrad’s story the building is “guarded” by two old crones who usher Marlow into a perfunctory interview, then a medical examination in which his supposed “English cranium” is measured every which way (phrenology was in vogue and it had eugenic overtones). He next visits the aunt who has secured his position for him, who gives him a lecture on how he is benefitting the savages of the Congo, doing the Lord’s work.
Then Marlow begins his month-long trip up the river, on a French steamer captained by a morose Swede who tells him the story of another Swede who has committed suicide, all along which various European colonial military forces are shooting their cannons into the brush – for no purpose other than to demonstrate colonial power – or building insane projects with slave labor, whose weak and used-up laborers are literally cast upon heaps to die. It’s not a pretty picture of European colonialism. Conrad often describes the natives as “brutes” and “cannibals” and “savages” and his use of the word “nigger” describes the collared and chained people of Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries: still slaves, though only a legalism alters the true status of people “brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts.” In contrast, the Europeans are described as “pilgrims” – presumably on a quest supposed to be holy.
When Marlow arrives in Leopoldville, he discovers that the vessel he was hired to captain has been sunk, its bottom ripped out on a sand bar, and that he is to proceed to find Mr. Kurtz, an agent many miles inland whose franchise accounts for more than half of all the colonial spoils. Kurtz is legendary and expected to go great places on his return to Europe. And we learn what it is these colonists are up to. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.” Marlow, in speaking to the station master, sees a portrait of a blindfolded woman holding a torch (very likely Astraea), but it appears sinister to him. It turns out to have been painted by Kurtz, who is believed to be quite the Renaissance man. It seems to at least this reader to be a warning that the practice of foisting Western ways on non-Western people is not going to end well.
Conrad briefly pulls us out of the dark midnight of Marlow’s tale described as a dream. “It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake.”
Marlow resumes his tale, remarking that the minor colonial functionaries ensured uninterrupted trade in worthless glass beads, yet the rivets that could have repaired his boat never managed to find their way to him. Marlow resolves to get them in three weeks, but all that arrives is another colonial expedition looking for more spoils. “Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Take that, Dick Cheney. Take that, United Fruit.
In Part II, Marlow runs upriver into the “heart of darkness.” It is as if he is moving back into the time of pterodactyls, into pre-history. He considers the thin veneer of civilization that Western man has accreted and the common humanity with the “cannibals” and “savages.” He ponders the ease with which a “cannibal” with a bone through his nose can be trained to watch the pressure gauges on a steamer. On the eve of arriving at Kurtz’s station, they stop at a deserted settlement and find a sign warning them to “approach cautiously.” They stop for the night, resolved to proceed cautiously by light of day. In the morning there is a thick fog and to all the “pilgrims” their steamer is the only object left in the world, everything else “gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.” Marlow asks why the steamer’s native crew (“thirty to five” Europeans) did not eat them. And all the passengers wonder at the unseen natives on the riverbanks: “Will they attack, do you think?” The question is answered the moment the arrows start flying at the vessel and a crewman is killed.
The main narrator then interjects in a sort of flash-forward, to point out that Marlow has lied to Kurtz’s wife – women need to be shielded from the truth – the truth, Marlow believes, is that Kurtz’s bleached skull will be found with a mountain of ivory he has collected. Marlow speculates on the identity of the half-British, half-French Kurtz – mentioning a report Kurtz has written for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” It is a magnificent opus, Marlow believes. It suggests that savages can be elevated by the white man. Yet, at the end of the report, in unsteady handwriting, Kurtz has scrawled: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow is faced with the decision to convey the report to its intended readers – or to “lose” it. Mainly he wants to preserve Kurtz’s memory, but he is undecided about the report. The fast-forward ends and finally Marlow’s steamer arrives at its destination and there he meets a young Russian who knows Kurtz.
In Part III, the Russian fills in Marlow on Kurtz and, through his binoculars, he sees Kurtz’s compound walls, surrounded by heads. Now we know the truth about the man. We meet a fierce, beautiful black woman who may have been Kurtz’s consort, and we learn that Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer. But Kurtz is in bad shape and the natives return him to Marlow, whereupon he is loaded onto the boat and conveyed back out of the heart of darkness. On board he dies after many days, his last uttered words being “the horror, the horror.” Marlow returns to Belgium with Kurtz’s papers and the report (from which he as ripped the final scrawled page) and protectively guards Kurtz’s memory, even lying to Kurtz’s fiancee about his last words. The story returns to the prime narrator, who returns us to the story’s present – an old group of seafarers on a tranquil waterway flowing “into the heart of an immense darkness.”
I love this story because it so beautifully combines the political, the psychological, the cultural, and is written in Conrad’s beautiful language. His descriptions are always rich and thoughtful and – though European (and American) colonialism are officially gone – they linger about, continuing to wreak their horrors on the rest of the world.
This volume also contains three other stories.
“Amy Foster” – a beautifully-written tale of a Slavic shipwreck victim who marries Amy Foster.
“The Secret Sharer” – the tale of a ship’s captain who risks everything to help a murderer who steals aboard his ship.
“Youth” – a wonderful story, with surprisingly modern and very poetic language, about a young officer on board an old ship hauling coal to Bangkok.
Review of “Anarchism and Other Essays” by Emma Goldman (ISBN 9780486224848)
This is a fascinating book. As Emma Goldman painted it, Anarchism is the ultimate in Western freedom, but at its core it is humanist and not a sociopathic cult of individual advantage (Ayn Rand comes to mind) – and certainly not the cult of terror as it was commonly portrayed. Yet Goldman and her comrades never succeeded in making Anarchism attractive to the public. This was due to constant character assassination by the corporate press, infighting, and whispers that Goldman was somehow associated with several high-profile assassinations, including President McKinley’s. The Anarchists themselves were passionate orators who spoke in generalities, were fond of using literary references, and they were not shy about stating that the public they were courting could sometimes be nothing more than a stupid mob. And they were arguing against nationalism and populism at a time these were quite popular. Anarchists were feared and reviled as ISIS is today, and J. Edgar Hoover’s modern FBI was created largely out of this fear.
Anarchism and Communism were both finished off by the corporate press, intense government surveillance, zealous prosecutions, show trials, executions, Congressional hearings, and the suppression of their ideas by legal edict. In the United States we have always had freedom of the press and expression – as long as any ideas expressed are in line with capitalism and nationalist fever.
Anarchism may be dead, but Goldman’s social and political criticism is as relevant as ever. In fact, reading this volume of individual essays written almost exactly a century ago is to realize how little has changed in this nation. Is our militarism, police brutality, neglect of the poor, social inequality, gun fever, our culture of violence, or the massive prison industry anything new? Read this book and weep. It has always been thus so.
The book’s first essay, “Anarchism,” argues successfully for individual freedoms and shows that the only function of the state is to guard a monopoly on violence for the benefit of oligarchs to whom the masses have stupidly given away their rights, wealth, and lives. True. But for all the Tolstoy and Emerson she quotes, Goldman does not really offer a picture of how Anarchism would actually work in practice. In fact, she is rather cagey about committing to any depiction of a new way of organizing society, except to say that social associations would be voluntary.
“Minorities versus Majorities” puts her on firmer theoretical ground, but her views insult the public. Jimmy Carter knew the sting of a public too dumb and proud to be chastised for its greed and shortsighted thinking. Don’t mess with the mob. Instead we prefer the rouged flattery of a Reagan who capitalized on our American 20 Mule Team Borax wholesomeness, Christliness and cleanliness. Goldman shows that majorities routinely persecute minorities and, worse, usually do so in the service of privileged minorities. Goldman could not have foreseen the Hobby Lobby case, but this is a perfect contemporary example of her point. She points out that public opinion is fickle and dangerous and that it tends to reject justice in favor of stasis. Goldman says it is individuals, not the masses, who generate new ideas that change the world. The crowd “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”
“The Psychology of Political Violence” attempts to explain why lone wolves were flaunting society’s monopoly on violence and using it themselves: “The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless, monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at least as an irresponsible lunatic.” She defends the bomb-throwing lone wolves and the authors of political manifestos (like the contemporary Unabomber). She sympathizes with those driven to insane acts by a cruel society: “The indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they felt to be intolerable.” She lists the homicidal damage by the state: victims of wars of choice, victims of industrial accident, the poor who die of hunger, victims of police and Pinkerton killings: “Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.” And I agree. The terror of individuals is nothing compared with the terror of any state.
“Prisons” describes the huge prison industry that existed a century ago, and the prison-industrial complex built to permit corporations to further exploit the incarcerated. Sound familiar? Goldman quotes Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde, something we would shy away from today – after all, there is no need to describe the actual human experience of being unjustly (or justly) jailed or condemned. She points out that in 1915 the U.S. was spending $6 billion a year to incarcerate people – five times the combined output of wheat and coal, and representing the greatest proportion of jailed people in the world. “Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts.” Goldman points out that, whatever we are doing, it’s not working. We still have the most violent society in the world. She cites homicide rates of that time. Chicago then had 118 murders that year. London (5 times greater in population) had only 22. She points out that crime is a direct consequence of human desperation and quotes Havelock Ellis extensively. She examines the nature of crimes; from political to violent to economic, she charges society with creating the conditions for crime to flourish. Citing Quetelet, Lacassagne, and Ellis, she writes: in the end “every society has the criminals it deserves.”
“Patriotism: A menace to Liberty” cites the well-known Dr. Johnson quote describing patriotism as the “refuge of scoundrels.” Goldman describes how hyper-nationalism is nothing but a tool for encouraging a violent society to extend that violence to wars of opportunity. She cites Tolstoy’s conception of patriotism – “the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.” Goldman could not have foreseen the future when soldiers were elevated as gladiators to be publicly worshipped, thanked with several holidays a year, given preferential hiring, and granted economic, social, and even legal benefits denied others.
Goldman points out that the ruling class has its “cosmopolitan” (current word: “global”) interests, that patriotism is for chumps, for the masses. She hadn’t heard of Swiss or Cayman Island accounts but she points out that it is never the oligarchs who must sacrifice their children – they tend to get the officer positions far from the front. Quoting Carlisle: “war is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” And then we wonder why our citizens act in greater proportion like wild beasts. Goldman speaks explicitly of the links between “militarism” and “commercialism.” In the end, she writes, war is incredibly profitable – at least for some people.
She brilliantly describes the benefits of a volunteer military (which the U.S. had at the time, just as we do today: “conscription has created in Europe a deep-seated hatred of militarism among all classes of society.” And “it is the compulsory feature of militarism which has created a tremendous anti-militarist movement, feared by the European Powers far more than anything else.” It seems when someone else is dying for questionable militaristic adventures we don’t bother to examine the reasons for it so closely. In fact, she says, capitalism is based on militarism: “The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter.” She points out that militarism is reinforced by economic security. She could not have foreseen how many men (40% from the South) signed up for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she understood their economic motivations: “Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments?” Goldman also could not have foreseen JROTC or the militaristic high school recruiting provisions in “No Child Left Behind,” but she wrote: “Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception: ‘Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.’ Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy.”
The book also includes a pamphlet Goldman wrote defending the memory of Francisco Ferrer, an anti-cleric and anti-monarchist who was killed for his beliefs rather than actions by Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, otherwise known as King Alfonso XIII.
In addition to her political work, Goldman wrote literary and cultural commentary. “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” aptly nails the stifling effects of Puritanism on American culture. “It is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.” The Puritan Fathers “established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. […] Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. […] With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible.” It is Puritanism, Goldman writes, that, “having suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, […] blesses her married sister for incontinent fruitfulness in wedlock. Indeed, not merely blesses her, but forces the woman […] to bear children.” Goldman did not foresee the day when unmarried women, too, would be forced to bear children they did not want. Prostitution is “born of the hypocrisy of Puritanism.” It is the back-alley, the outlet, the furtive, the covert, the perverted expression of sexuality that, like much in this country, cannot breathe. To top it all off, she writes, the poor worker can’t even spend Sundays away from the gloom of Capitalism; he must attend church and permit himself to be lectured-to. Puritanism, in the end, contributes to stifled, miserable, unharmonious lives.
The Anarchists were among the earliest feminists. In “The Traffic in Women,” Emma Goldman describes how Capitalism and Puritanism create a culture in which women become commodities. She actually uses the word “commodity.” She also uses the phrase “double standard” when describing attitudes around sex for men and women. At first, a poor woman with no means of her own must resort to what she euphemistically calls “Mrs. Warren’s profession.” And these are working girls in every sense. “The average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors?” Citing Margaret Sanger’s observations on women driven to prostitution by economic necessity, she writes: “Also it will do the maintainers of purity and morality good to learn that out of two thousand cases, 490 were married women, women who lived with their husbands. Evidently there was not much of a guaranty for their ‘safety and purity’ in the sanctity of marriage.” Goldman points out that the “sanctity of marriage” cannot survive poverty, much less natural inclinations. Much of her critique of sexual politics had its genesis in being ostracized by friends and comrades, and actually having to set up her seamstress shop (she did piece work) in a brothel, where she was treated kindly and where she began to see the women there as desperate, even moral, workers – only driven to the profession by necessity. Citing Havelock Ellis, Goldman saw the institution of marriage in a patriarchy as inherently corrupt: “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.” For women, Goldman described marriage as a “miserable institution which they can not outgrow.”
In “Woman Suffrage” Goldman turns her attention to universal suffrage, the right of women to vote. But she warns women that the vote alone will not set them free. Starting with Christianity, she writes: “Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned women to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman.” Goldman could not predict the Palins and Bachmanns of today, so she must have had extraordinary powers of discernment. War, too, oppresses women, leaving them bereft, lonely, often without resources. Her energies are sapped and sucked by housekeeping. “Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage.” She mocks the power of the vote and asks what it has bought men: “The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.” She looks in several countries where women have the vote and finds individual freedoms there completely lacking. In four states which already permit women to vote, Puritanism keeps them in their place. She cites Emmeline Pankhurst on economic equality. Without economic parity there can be no equality. Why, after 100 years and thousands of observations like Goldman’s, is this still so? And then she takes on class.
“The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” was written as women’s suffrage was partly underway. It is in some ways a meditation on What’s Next? Goldman realized that emancipation would not be panacea. She predicted continuing wage inequality with men; that women now functioning independently would be afraid to “marry down” because of class concerns; that “love would rob her of her freedom and independence; […] that motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession.” Goldman somehow saw the future long before women had to discover how to “lean in” and attack “glass ceilings.” She cites a book by Laura Marholm on exceptional women of the day: Eleonora Duse; Sonya Kovalevskaia; and others. She writes that the more exceptional the woman, the more difficult it is to find a mate who will love her and awaken love in her: “In the case of the modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete assertion of her being.” It has taken a hundred years for some men to cherish exceptional women; but even here nothing is perfect.
“Marriage and Love” is a savage attack on the institution of marriage. “On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close inspection it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.” Ouch. “Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement. […] Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments.” Double Ouch. “Dante’s motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: ‘Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.'” Triple Ouch, anyone? She declares marriage as a failed institution; every twelvth marriage ends in divorce. She obviously didn’t see a 50% failure rate coming. “Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? […] How can such an arrangement end except in failure?”
“The Modern Drama” is Emma Goldman sticking her toe into literary criticism. She was exceptionally knowledgable of literature in French, German, Russian, English, and Yiddish and frequently cited contemporary writers in these languages. She tipped her hat to Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Andreiev, Gorki, Whitman, Chekov, Mirbeau, Zola, Maupassant, Holz, Suderman – and others. Her influences would have been chiefly European Naturalists writing fiction and drama. But Drama, the theater, was especially dear to her heart. She had nothing against propaganda and pamphleteering. She did it herself. But she especially venerated the theater as a place where people could see humanity in a mirror. She saw drama also as a way to suggest new values to society. For this reason it is not difficult to understand why she especially loved Ibsen’s plays. Much of this essay is analysis of plots; what the characters and their strivings meant to her. And, by extension, to humanity.
She was something. I would have to add her to my list of exceptional women of history I’d like to meet in a time machine. Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg…
The introduction to this collection by Richard Drinnon is aptly titled “Harking Back to the Future,” which was absolutely perfect. Emma Goldman was way ahead of her times, and a century later is still way ahead of ours.
Joseph Michaud writes (in “Runaway Debt threatens American Dream,” July 12th) that “fiscal conservatism, that is, paying one’s own debts, was an integral part of the founding of this nation.” This is not altogether true, since slavery kept generation after generation in debt to slave owners like Jefferson, whom he selectively quotes, and created enduring income inequality.
Poorhouses may have given way to austerity programs but, if we look closely, Republicans like Mr. Michaud are eternally fond of punishing the poor and minorities – even if the strategy doesn’t work. Rather than improving health, housing and education – things that would help the most – the Republican approach is to keep the poor in their place and accuse them of profligacy. This goes for people and nations, a connection Mr. Michaud draws himself.
Michaud cites Greece and Puerto Rico as poster-children for the sins of debt. However, from the beginnings of their associations with the European economic union, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and other Southern European nations were hobbled by an uneven playing field. Greece has actually cut its budget by more than 30 percent yet its economy has also shrunk by a third and unemployment has risen to 27 percent. Austerity has been a failure.
By law, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese companies must pay higher interest on credits than German counterparts. Consequently northern Europeans have more flexibility in pricing and financing than their Southern rivals and can be more competitive. These are some of the built-in inequities in the EU that no amount of “fiscal responsibility” can cure.
A century ago Congress passed the Jones-Shafroth Act which exempted interest payments on bonds in Puerto Rico from federal, state, and local income taxes. These triple tax exemptions created a Ponzi scheme that worked for a time because it was easy to refinance . Financial and banking deals were imposed on Puerto Ricans by American-appointed governors and corporations, the colony is still subject to whatever trade agreements the U.S. imposes, and trade with the rest of Latin America is limited by the Jones Act. Puerto Rico is also limited in its bankruptcy and refinancing options by U.S. law. But, by all means, let’s blame the victim.
Mr. Michaud bemoans the high number of people not paying into the system and the large number taking from it. However, he does not mention that among those paying no taxes are huge corporations like: Bank of America; Boeing; Chevron; Citigroup; ConocoPhillips; Corning; Exxon Mobil; General Electric; Goldman Sachs; and PG&E. Fiscal responsibility also means raising revenue to pay bills. But paying taxes is just not in the Republican vocabulary.
Michaud maintains that there are millions of healthy, young people drawing SSDI. Painting an image of a Welfare Queen sitting around munching on donuts, he writes that “the generous entitlement programs we have established to assist the needy are now serving as an enticement to avoid employment.” Mr. Michaud should get out of his office sometime and try living on the patchwork of assistance that troubled families have to. Reality experienced personally might change his outlook.
At least half of food stamp recipients live – and work – in poverty. With average hourly wages of $9 an hour, each Walmart employee costs taxpayers at least $1,000 per year in public assistance. Walmart alone costs the United States $6.2 billion a year. Walmart employees constitute the largest block of Medicaid and food stamp recipients in most states. One in six of Walmart”s 48,000 Pennsylvania employees are enrolled in Medicaid. Walmart is America’s REAL Welfare Queen.
Apart from the working poor, Medicaid enrollment has also risen due to the greying of America. Younger immigrants, rather than drawing on the social safety net, actually pay into it. Again, something Republicans might want to consider.
Michaud notes that three times as much money is spent on “entitlements” as on defense. Sadly, for decades we have had a defense budget – and then we have had a separate war budget, the Homeland Security and spy agency budgets, and the costs of caring for veterans from all our combined wars of choice. These costs combined – our war addiction – approaches the “entitlements” – which wage earners actually contribute to in addition to paying their taxes. Fiscal conservatives preaching “responsibility” never worry about programs like the F-35, which is a $1.5 TRILLION boondoggle. Or the projected $2 TRILLION dollars that care of Iraq and Afghanistan vets, now still in their twenties and thirties, will cost over their lifetimes.
It’s strange that Mr. Michaud’s piece included the phrase, “the American Dream.” Because of income inequality caused by Free Market fundamentalism, greed, and corruption, the American Dream is more distant than ever from the reach of our children and grandchildren. I only hope that we will restore some of that Dream to everyone – not just for the pampered and the privileged.
We don’t fully understand the link with Orfeo (Orpheus) until the end of Richard Powers’ book, when we have to acknowledge Els’ life’s goal in hindsight as the strivings, like Orfeus, of the musical being known for his ability to charm all living things, capable of even moving stones to tears. Like Orfeo, Els dies at the hands of those who cannot hear his divinely-inspired music. The Greek historian Strabo wrote of Orpheus as a mortal suspected of hatching a violent plot by his killers – and this is pretty much what happens to poor Peter Els in the book.
As I began reading Orfeo, it struck me that Peter’s father’s death merited only a quarter of a page, yet the author’s digressions on Kindertotenlieder and his dead dog, Fidelio, and the reminiscences of their attendance of musical funerals (really!) went on for pages. Powers worked a little too hard to sell us the notion that Els was a high-strung music geek – the kind who has a little eight year-old’s erection when he hears dissonant music for the first time. Please. I was really not enjoying the book at first.
But it did eventually get better.
Within short order we learn that Els is obsessed with the notion of creating transcendent music, something good, something unique, something remarkable, something possibly even holy. Unfortunately he cannot seem to find it in a world that filters out so much, that has such a short attention span: a world that generates and treats music like a commodity. Intermixing hints of the godliness of Els’ goals – and hints of a social critique of art in a capitalist society – muddies Powers’ theme.
In the first 70+ pages we find Els persisting in his art, but also taking the occasional shortcut. He experiments with Markov chains – probabilistic state machines that permit new states to be randomly generated. If you’ve heard it – and it exists – Markov chain-generated music is dull and lifeless, even when using many orders of complexity and tweaked by a human hand. It is unsurprising that Els moves on to something more alive – though randomness is at the heart of both his music and his life.
Els is explicitly compared to Faust several times – more muddying. He makes the acquaintance of Richard Bonner, a performance artist and artistic co-conspirator described as “seductive,” and he begins to see the act of making art as not simply bold but subversive. Is Orfeo the story of a Faust’s fatal seductions by a Mephistopheles or is it what happens when artists have impossibly high ambitions and are not understood?
Ultimately, Els’ wife Maddy, once a fringe musician herself but now a responsible wife and mother, begins to appear to him as a “schoolmarm” and his marriage and relationship with daughter Sara founder as he goes his own way and they move to Saint Louis. He lives a somewhat itinerant existence until (by random chance, again) he becomes a lowly adjunct professor in a charity appointment.
Much of the plot of Orfeo is counterposed with events of the Sixties through 9/11. There is the occasional reference to theory of art under capitalism (recalling Adorno and the Frankfurter school). In numerous places music (recounting the experiences of Messaiaen and Shostakovich, for example) is described as subversive to the state, and even Els’ innocent project of producing music with a telephone keypad for his daughter may have had unintended consequences (unwittingly dialing emergency services) that leave him on a Homeland Security watchlist. Creating custom sequences of DNA encoded with music might have seemed like conceptual art to Els, but in post 9/11 Amerika it is an attack on die Heimat, Verrat gegen das Vaterland.
Many reviews of the book seem to peg Orfeo as an exercise in music appreciation, and no doubt Powers adores the composers he describes. However, for “civilians” like me it was also a book about seeking patterns and manipulating them. Many of the obsessions of practitioners of art, music, and literature seem to center on recognition of patterns and concepts, and/or imposing, forcing, shoe-horning, conjuring, or wishing them [just as often inartfully] into some kind of artistic vision. To some degree, everyone in Els’ family is guilty of this offense: his doomed authoritarian father; his brother Paul, a conspiracy theorist; and his sister Susan, living in an ashram in India. Els, either by temperament or choice of collaborators, is looking for meaning in nature and working mightily to convert nature into meaning. Even Els daughter Sara is a data mining whiz – perhaps the ultimate in pattern recognition pursuits. Maybe there’s no avoiding it: it’s just what we humans do.
There is a sequence in the book early on in which Els goes for his morning walk and encounters a Spandex goddess running while listening to her iPod, filtering thousands of melodies by sending them like a concentration camp guard either to the right, where they live for a closer listening later, or to the left, where they meet a certain death. “The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.” We learn that Els has a rule for himself: that he will always listen through to the end of a piece. This flaunts the practices of a society whose teens are drowning in Adderall. After attempting to listen to the hour-long pieces Powers has chosen to describe in the novel, I confess to firmly belonging to the ranks of Adderall philistines. Life is too short to honor or indulge every artist’s notion.
Society’s brutal winnowing principle is not just for the products of art but for artists as well. Society surrounds “dangerous” art and artists like macrophages attacking pathogens – a principle reflected in the paranoia overtaking our nation. “The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain.” Once Els goes on the run, someone discovers an old composition of his and “mines” the lyrics for dangerous and subversive references. Society is clearly afraid of challenge and provocation – if nowhere else than in the citizenry’s pointy little heads.
Els is painfully aware that his artistic search is not bringing him any pleasure, nor does it seem to bring anyone else much. In England after a traffic-direction miscalculation has killed his mother while vacationing there, Els goes to a pub and sees happy publicans singing to crude tunes: “People at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years.” How easy it is for artists to doubt themselves. And sometimes with inexplicably good reason.
Our protagonist lives in an age in which randomness, chaos, and lack of control are what truly set the world in motion. And why should his art not reflect this reality? Watching the Arab Spring unfold, we see it through Els’ eyes: “As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune.” Thus, we can imagine, his interest in musical DNA was hatched.
Still in England, Els visits his first love, Clara, who has set him on his artistic trajectory. They have dinner and she takes him upstairs to her bedroom, telling him everything is on the table, anything is possible – and he flees from her. It seems tragic to the reader but Els senses the same danger in Clara that society senses in him – and he does not have the courage to live life on these terms. He really doesn’t know in which world he belongs. On the one hand, he is Sara’s father (“make something good, daddy”) and on the other a subversive wannabe. This is the tragedy of the book. He cannot be a god.
Els eventually writes an opera entitled “City of God.” It is a Reformation tragedy based on actual events in Münster, Germany. A group of Protestant religious fanatics who have become polygamists believe the earthly world must end before a heavenly kingdom replaces it. Bonner is a collaborator in the production, but it is threatened by oddly similar events unfolding in real time in Waco, Texas. We learn that Els is not in the enterprise solely for fame, since he pulls away from his own opera when Waco hits the news. Something else motivates him (l’art pour l’art)? Somehow we start taking his music more seriously, seeing him as more artistically principled, but simultaneously as more timid.
Els, based on positive reviews of his opera, is then offered a job as an adjunct music professor and one of his students comes for musical advice, showing him a complex composition it turns out was written by software called “Sibelius” – a “program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus.” Shortcuts call out to Els again. Is he himself an average tunesmith who needs a lab full of DNA to make him another Orpheus. The answer is: yes.
After concocting his test-tube music and being investigated after his dog’s death, the seventy-one year-old Els goes on the run, first visiting a therapist with whom he once had an affair, his ex-wife, Bonner (now in an Arizona care facility for Alzheimer’s patients), and finally his daughter. By now we have learned that Els has tinnitus, brain lesions which have affected his musical sensibilities, and Bonner has convinced him that, as long as he is considered a terrorist, he might as well engender a little terror – by leaving a trail of vaguely incriminating Tweets. As Els navigates to his daughter’s house in a borrowed car with “the Voice” app on a borrowed cellphone, he notices the marks of tramps and vagrants on the highway, recalling a composer who memorialized them. To a consummate pattern-seeker like Els there are signs and wonders everywhere. His frame of reference has always been musical, but ultimately all of life is just random noise.
Finally Els arrives at his daughter’s house. He notices she has a piano and has not, apparently, rejected everything musically important to him. But, having sufficiently alarmed Homeland Security, Els is now surrounded by a SWAT team. With his musical powers gone and seeing his life as one huge mistake, Els decides to “arm” himself with a thin flower vase – art as a weapon – all too easily confused with a beaker of pathogens. We know how this sad story is going to end – and in the tragic end the novel is ultimately focused on society’s fear of art and the difficult path to it by artists of any stripe – not solely as a music appreciation project by Powers, the failed composer.
The Supreme Court has ruled. Obamacare stands. But Steve DiMarzo isn’t happy and feels that only champions of insanity and inanity like Ted Cruz and Antonin Scalia can save us from decline.
Ted Cruz is an amusing sideshow, but Scalia serves on the bench, so let’s take a look at the ruling that DiMarzo mentions in his letter.
In summarizing “King et al. versus Burwell” for the majority, Justice Roberts wrote:
“The Act gives each State the opportunity to establish its own Exchange, but provides that the Federal Government will establish ‘such Exchange’ if the State does not. (42 U.S.C. §§180 31, 18041).”
Under the Act, states were to get the first shot at establishing their own exchanges but in their absence a federal exchange would provide similar services. Despite quibbling over some wording, the Supreme Court majority upheld Congress:
“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter. Section 36B can fairly be read consistent with what we see as Congress’s plan, and that is the reading we adopt.”
Writing for the minority dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia could barely contain his anger and demonstrated that he is a man with seriously disordered thought.
Scalia excoriates the majority, calling its ruling “absurd,” that “words no longer have meaning,” that the majority’s ruling exhibits “no semblance of shame.” He argues hotly that the Secretary of Health and Human Services is not a state. (But of course neither are the governmental officials running our Massachusetts exchange.) Scalia also completely ignores the legitimacy of the federal exchange and only recognizes state exchanges. Ultimately all he can do is sputter and call the majority’s opinion “pure applesauce.”
Scalia then slams the tax credits by which the federal-state partnership works as the majority’s “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” proving that for Scalia himself words truly have no meaning. What does his bizarre expression even mean? And why are the Affordable Care Act’s complex tax provisions any more objectionable than the rest of a tax code that privileges corporations and the extremely wealthy?
And if Scalia is such a keen and literal reader of the Constitution, why are corporations now considered to be people? Why does he not scrupulously support Fourth Amendment rights regarding personal “effects” and the unequivocal requirements for warrants? Why doesn’t Scalia read the Second Amendment as referring not to individual rights to bear arms but the collective right to establish militias?
Or could it be that the Justice has applesauce between his ears?
Speaking recently at his granddaughter’s graduation, Scalia remarked, “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so.” Actually humanity has been around for at least a hundred thousand – and longer if we include our close human relatives.
Here is a man divorced from reality, ignorant or antipathetic to science, an angry, inconsistent, ideologue given to incoherent argument and babbling. Scalia is a walking example of precisely WHY the Court is in decline and an argument for the need to have term limits on Supreme Court justices – or at least to be able to recall those unfit for service.
So if Steve DiMarzo wants to recommend someone to save the country – he’d better keep looking.
More than 20 states have introduced prohibitions against “foreign” (code for “Muslim”) religious laws which would not only ban Islamic “shariah law” but Jewish halacha and (surely unintended) Catholic Canon law as well: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
But when it comes to promoting Christian shariah, many of these same states are anything but shy.
Indiana’s recent passage of the so-called RFRA (“Religious Freedom Restoration Act”) was the predictable result of two jaw-dropping Supreme Court rulings. The “Hobby Lobby” ruling added religious personhood to the corporate personhood that “Citizens United” conjured up. In so doing, we now live in an alternate reality in which real religious discrimination is enshrined in law and other types of bigotry are legally sanctioned for largely Christian “religious corporations” like Hobby Lobby, owned by billionaire David Green.
Besides Indiana, Arkansas has also passed RFRA legislation. In Georgia and North Carolina similar legislation is pending. According to the New York Times, a dozen other states have some form of laws which give Christians a free pass to act in very un-Jesus-like ways.
This is nuts. We need to go back and read the U.S. Constitution again. We already have religious freedoms here. Who would claim that Christians are still fearfully huddling in catacombs? People can do whatever they want in their churches and homes. And they do – thanks to our Bill of Rights, which is perfectly adequate. If we desperately need to protect any vital, lost liberty, I suggest we restore the Fourth Amendment. That’s one that’s truly under attack.
It is the state, not a religious institution, which has an obligation to protect new families created by marriage and any children that issue from them. States need to firmly reclaim marriage as a purely civil act with legal consequences, like registering your dog or your boat. The rest is purely ceremonial. And states need to take on all forms of corporate bigotry using all means at their disposal.
So here’s what I suggest for both marriage licenses and documents of incorporation.
Go ahead and get married with a preacher who hates gays if you are so inclined. Call it a sacrament. Call it anything you want. But your marriage will simply be a private matter as far as the state is concerned. You can have a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a philosopher, your therapist, or a trapeze artist conduct your chosen rites. The state, on the other hand, requires your marriage be registered in city hall. That’s it. You’re instantly married. No one other than a state or municipal clerk will have any standing to register the marriage. Ministers lose quasi-legal marrying privileges, although they obviously continue to officiate at congregant’s weddings.
If you have a company that (like convicts and philandering politicians) has suddenly found religion, remember: your corporation exists thanks to documents of incorporation and permits issued by the state. Your company, whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public, operates at the pleasure of the state. If you and your company discriminate against even one person in the state, your corporate license should be immediately revoked. You don’t want to serve cake to gays? Fine. Make cake for your church and stop calling yourself a baker. Don’t want to sell condoms in your drug store? Fine. Choose another profession more suited to your rigid beliefs. No one is stopping you from selling to the public except yourself.
B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et-atzmo, k’ilu hu yatzav mimitzrayim.
In every generation, everyone is obligated to see themselves as though they personally left Egypt.
The beauty of Passover is that we consciously place ourselves in the shoes of people struggling to be free. We remember a story that happened long ago and far away. But our real job is to remember – personally – the slave’s struggles – any slave – and to identify personally with the underdog, the little guy, the bigot’s victim, the person whose destiny is not in his own hands. For most of us, Passover will always be a warm ritual of Jewish history, one in which we enjoy the company of family and friends – and all those cups of wine. For others it mirrors very real struggles that continue even today.
I read a wonderful article by Michael Twitty, a chef, and an Afro-American Jew. He was writing about what went into his seder plate. Exactly 150 years ago, one of his ancestors, Elijah Mitchell, was released from slavery, virtually at the moment the Civil War ended. At Passover Twitty serves a bitter herb – collard greens – on his seder plate. Instead of a shank bone there is a chicken leg – of the sort his family took with them when they began their way North during the Great Migration. For Twitty freedom is personal. The Civil Rights movement brought freedom another step closer for Afro-Americans. But who would say the struggle is over? For Blacks, like Jews, there have been numerous flights to freedom, each time discovering there is always some new way to strip them of rights and dignity. But the value of remembering history, the value of Passover, is that it illuminates the present.
Passover is a call to action. It is a constant struggle to be free. It always has been, and this is still the case today. We are at a point in our history where our democratic freedoms are threatened by any number of things. Our American ideals, and our Jewish ideals, have gone wildly off the rails, both here and in Israel.
If we really value freedom, we cannot deny it to others. A nation built on inequality and injustice, xenophobia, militarism, surveillance, paranoia, bigotry, and privilege for a small group of people is not free. Those of us who feel free, like German Jews before 1935, are at least partially deluding ourselves. The strongest person or group in a twisted society can become the most vulnerable – in the blink of an eye, in the signing of a piece of legislation, or in the interests of national security.
Unless we are the ones shaping our own government – and not Big Money or their friends in a growing police state – we can never be free. And until everyone is free, even the most vulnerable, none of us truly will be. You will not be free.
When Republicans invited Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress, the public might have wrongly concluded that lawmakers are worried about an existential threat to Israel. But Israel, with 100 nukes and growing, is the only state in the Middle East with such weapons, and it is backed by the United States, the only country on earth to have incinerated human beings with them. If anyone should be worried about nuclear weapons in the Middle East, it should be Iran.
In fact, when you look at a map of U.S. military bases in the Middle East, there aren’t many nations bordering on or near Iran that don’t have at least one U.S. military base in them: Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel, the Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And the Fifth Fleet is all over the Persian Gulf. Iran is totally surrounded by the United States. And it is the United States Iran is preoccupied with, not Israel.
Netanyahu’s theatrical performance, and the recent letter by 47 GOP senators to Iran, are both part of a campaign to garner support for throwing more U.S. weight around in the Middle East – by people who have already destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, and created the vacuum that ISIS has stepped into. Now Iran is in their crosshairs. What country do they want to wreck next? Iran, apparently.
For the last 20 years Netanyahu has been whining that Iran is on the verge of destroying Israel. Each time he calls “wolf” he becomes that much less credible. Even Mossad, Israel’s security agency, calls his claims hogwash: Mossad reported recently that Iran is “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.” But by claiming an imminent existential threat, attention is deflected from the Likud’s reckless, racist policies and its illegal settlements. And, of course, Netanyahu’s address to Congress just so happened to occur during Israeli Prime Time right before an election.
But what’s in it for the Republicans and hawkish Democrats? Political cover. You might have thought the American public would have had enough war-mongering in the last two decades. But apparently not. One more questionable act of aggression wouldn’t be very popular. But by hiding behind “existential threats” to Israel and painting a defenseless David and an Iranian Goliath, the GOP and its neoconservative allies on both side of the aisle hope to galvanize support for future, reckless military actions.
Remember the Maine? Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction? Apparently no one remembers any of these bogus pretexts for war or the criminals who sold them. We keep on buying it. Again and again and again and again.
I opened today’s Standard Times to see – not in the opinion section but in the news – a piece entitled “Attack on Free Speech.” The article refers to the killing of a filmmaker and the attempted murder of another at what the AP called a “free speech” event. The Associated Press boldly jumped from journalism to propaganda when it neglected to inform readers of details of this supposed “free speech” event.
The victim, 55 year-old filmmaker Finn Norgaard, like most attendees, was probably there just to see what it was all about. Norgaard was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an inexcusable murder that could have happened to any curious person who went to see what all the fuss over insulting cartoons was about.
The “free speech” event was organized by Helle Merete Brix, the author of numerous books and articles critical of Islam and Muslims. Sort of a Danish Pamela Geller, Brix has made a career of being a professional Islamophobe. In one of her books, “I krigens hus” (“In the house of war”) she maintains that Islam has colonized the West – despite historical proof of the opposite. Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad identifies Brix as one of Denmark’s most rabid Islamophobes and notes her influence on mass-murderer Anders Breivik.
Niels Ivar Larsen was a widely-quoted witness to the attack. Larsen is a well-known writer and translator who has called for forcing mixed sexes at mosques and mandating female imams. There is no evidence Larsen has similarly called for a female pope or demanded that Orthodox Jews tear down their mechitzas or ordain female rabbis. It’s fair to say, like Larsen, the audience was largely fixated on expelling Muslims from Europe – not a group of people like, say, James Risen. Risen’s predicament really is about free speech.
The intended victim, Lars Vilks, is a Swedish conceptual artist who, in a dispute with Sweden over two large sculptures, declared the area around them to be a micro-nation he named Ladonia. Between 2007 and 2010 “Sovereign Citizen” Vilks became notorious for creating films of Muhammad, first depicted as a dog, then visualized in a gay bar, employing other devices designed for one purpose only – to insult and marginalize Muslims.
It was at the appropriately-named Krudttønden (Danish for “powder keg”) cultural center in Copenhagen that Brix and Vilks staged their provocation. I use this word because, if words are to have any meaning at all, it is dishonest to claim it had anything to do with “free speech” or an exchange of ideas. They literally wanted to light a match in a powder keg. And they succeeded at the cost of a human life.
What happens if you insult Pope Francis’ mother? The pontiff has already told you. He’ll punch you out. While it is reasonable to lay blame for violence at the feet of a perpetrator, provocations designed to produce violence make provocateurs part of the crime. “Incitement to riot,” for example.
So were these racists, xenophobes, and sovereign citizens really pursuing “free speech” – or were they poking not only Muslims but the rest of civil society in the eye?
If exhibiting hate toward minorities is how a society exercises “free speech” (while actual free speech is limited for “security reasons”) Western democracy is built on an extremely shaky foundation.
Recent letters in these pages have attributed the Charlie Hebdo attack to inchoate hatred of Jews. It is inconceivable or insignificant to the writers that American foreign policy or Israeli domestic policy had anything to do with it.
Similarly, writers Left and Right have reframed the story as one in which democracy and freedom of speech are under attack. “They” hate us for what we have, for who we are, for the freedoms we exercise. From Lindsay Graham to Bill Maher, the only conclusions Americans seem able to draw are (1) Western civilization is at war with people who want to live in the Neolithic Age, and (2) Islam is totally incompatible with democracy. No other narratives are ever used to rationally explain Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s successes. And we won’t hear of it.
Bin Laden’s November 2002 “Letter to America” in the Guardian addresses two issues: why al Qaeda opposes the West and what it wants from it. The first answer to the first question addressed Palestine. He wrote: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. a) You attacked us in Palestine…” To Bin Laden Israel in Palestine was just another example of Western imperialism.
But we know better.
Bin Laden’s other talking points concerned Western involvement in the Middle East and the exploitation of the world’s resources to satisfy a consumer culture he regarded as immoral. He took the West to task for coddling Israel, nuclear hypocrisy, and for U.S. foreign policy and military bases throughout the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.
But we know better.
History tells us: that the West carved up the Middle East; that it unleashed Wahhabism against the Ottomans; that the U.S. built Al Qaeda as a proxy to fight Russia in Afghanistan; that “Western” Israel formed Hamas to challenge the PLO; that the U.S. left Shias to die in the first Gulf War and disenfranchised Sunnis in the next; that it inadvertently armed ISIL; that the West’s “coalition of the willing” destroyed and destabilized Iraq, Syria and Libya through regime change masquerading as defense of civilians suffering state terror; that the new GOP Congress wants to add Iran to our national catalog of military disasters.
But we know better.
Didier Francois, a French journalist who was held almost a year by ISIS, was interviewed recently by CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. When asked about the Western-educated converts to ISIS, Francois responded, “There was never really discussion about texts or — it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion. It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran.”
But we know better.
Analysts in the intelligence agencies know that ISIS and Al Qaeda ranks are swollen with ex-Baathists and anti-Assad Syrians. They also contain a sobering number of Western-born and Western-educated Muslims who are radicalized by domestic racism, growing surveillance states, unemployment and consumer culture. They and their lone-wolf brethren are radicalized in part by the realization that their own countries are not quite the democracies they claim to be, and their heritage permits them to see Colonialism with a clear eye. But ultimately they are radicalized by being told to “go home,” that they don’t belong in England or France or Germany. Or the U.S. And by joining ISIS they think they’re going home.
As Didier Francois tells us, though, it’s not the Quran. It’s politics.
And yet we only see a military solution. Americans all-too-quickly resort to war. War is not our last resort. It is pretty much our only resort. As long as we consistently choose to fight without thinking of the political dimensions, the war against ISIS and any future mutations will have only one casualty: our own civil liberties and democracy.
Only after we finally admit our foreign and domestic policies have been a failure and actually encourage recruitment to ISIS and Al Qaeda — and we alter them — will we be able to have any kind of peace.
Jack Spillane didn’t get it quite right in his Sunday editorial (“We want police who are better than ourselves”). When society so persistently ignores police abuse, it seems clear that we want violent cops.
Jack correctly points out cases in which young local men have been stopped for questionable reasons or where they have been neglected when forcefully, and fatally, restrained. Mr. Spillane also correctly commends the independent investigations that followed cases that brought grief to families and community, and says that the investigators got it right both times. Hm. Maybe.
But then he writes: “we want our cops to be better than the members of the public they police.” And he immediately gives the poorly-trained policemen, and the police forces that do not reflect the makeup of the communities they police, a free pass. “We want them to have the skills to quickly defuse a situation. That’s not always possible.” Citing Jack Nicholson’s character, Major Jessup, in “A Few Good Men,” Spillane writes: “You can’t handle the truth! The truth being that there are bad guys in the world. And that overwhelming force is sometimes needed to control those bad guys.”
Even though he is 100% wrong, Spillane is close to the issue.
The issue is that we as a society do not wish to tinker with the brutality, the militarism, the authoritarianism, and the lack of accountability of the police. The same goes for our refusal to rein in the abuses of the national security institutions. The same goes for our refusal to hold accountable those who unleash torture, kidnapping, assassinations, reckless wars, and rampant “collateral damage” on civilians. The same goes for our refusal to hold accountable those in the military on whose watch abuses at Abu Ghraib, Kandahar, and elsewhere took place. Indeed, this is Major Jessup’s world.
Whether we can or cannot handle the truth, the truth is – we are a violent, racist society. We know we are. How many wars have we started and how many people have we killed in the last 50 years? How many murders do we permit because we refuse reasonable controls on weapons? What kind of society leads the world in incarceration of its own citizens? What kind of people permit gruesome executions with mystery cocktails to be carried out in secrecy? We are almost unique in the Western world for our barbarity.
A police officer, no matter how friendly he is when he stops you, the middle class white, still has the power to end a young poor, black or Hispanic life in an instant – and what will you say? Regrettable. Tragic. Sometimes “these things” happen? Lip service. And what does society say? Oh well, collateral damage in the very necessary war against bad guys. More lip service, Jack.
Mr. Spillane concludes that we pay the police to protect us from ourselves. Not quite. We pay the police to maintain control over those we fear the most – the poor, the immigrant, the politically suspect, the “other.” It is not a coincidence that the police are also interested in middle class whites if they happen to belong to environmental or political groups. Look at the police violence we saw during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is not the police protecting us from ourselves. This is the police terrorizing society.
Last week we witnessed shocking displays of defiance and unaccountability toward the New York City mayor and the people of that city by policemen attending a funeral. Their “thin blue” loyalty toward one another is apparently wider, and stronger, than to their employers.
We need the police, but we need police who are part of the communities they serve, represent the makeup of those communities, are accountable to them, and do not run roughshod over those communities. That would be a start.
I dropped out of Facebook a couple of years ago and do miss keeping up with people. But I’m not sure either Mr. Zuckerberg or the NSA have my best interests in mind, so I prefer to go low-tech or retro. No, I’m not talking about hand-written letters. Just ole-fashioned email.
For the last few years we have spent our winters in warm places like Mexico and New Mexico. This year we decided to stay close to home and see if global warming might work in our favor. So far, so good, but we’ll know around February just how good an idea it really was. But winter here is beautiful…
Dartmouth in winter
One thing about sticking around for the winter is that it provides continuity and opportunities to commit to things year-round. Since leaving the computer world, I’ve gotten rid of almost all my computer books (anybody want the rest?) and have been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to write. Letters to the editor flow easily from responses to the daily insanity all around us. Plays and fiction, however, are much more difficult.
Telling stories people want to watch, or read, requires a lot of skill, patience, practice, and observation of humans as they go about their business. Needless to say, a career in computers did not completely prepare me for this. Still, I do have things to say and – as a Boston writer who began in his seventies told me recently – after you retire there’s really only one deadline.
Writing
Besides writing, I have been volunteering. Last year I took a training class to learn how to teach English as a Second Language and I’m now putting it to good use at New Bedford’s Adult Learning Center – part of the city schools for adults returning to earn high school equivalency degrees and for immigrants to learn English. I really like it a lot. It has all the perks of teaching – watching people light up when they finally understand something – and none of the downside – classroom management or detailed lesson planning.
On Mondays I work with two separate groups of 4-6 students on some aspect of high school equivalency – English or Math, generally. I work from existing lesson plans and just add my 2c worth. Tuesdays and Wednesdays I work with students whose native languages are Vietnamese, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Portuguese and Spanish. I get a kick out of speaking Spanish (mine isn’t too awful), Portuguese (which is pretty atrocious), and resurrecting my French.
Adult Learning Center on Hillman Street
In addition to all the other things she does, Deborah continues to do great photography. You can see what she’s up to at http://debehrens.com/. Since she does not share my tin-foil hat, semi-Luddite sentiments, she is on Facebook and I presume everyone is already up-to-date on what she had for breakfast this morning.
Deborah on the other end of the lens
Amelia just graduated from Bentley University with an MBA and a master’s in marketing analytics and starts a new job in September after doing some travel and improving her Spanish. The plan is to move to Philadelphia and commute to work in Wilmington, Delaware. She and Deborah had a chance to travel to Iceland together last Fall and we have some great pictures of the both of them looking like serious outdoorswomen with their ice picks, standing on glaciers that will not be around in 50 years. You can download a PDF version of the book that Deborah did after the trip.
Amelia and Ben
Ben graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Puget Sound and worked for a couple of tech companies in Utah before concluding that office life is not for him. He did some traveling and thinking about the future over the summer – to India and then Portugal, where I met him after he had been there for six weeks. He’s currently looking for work that doesn’t involve life in a cubicle.
Lisbon
Ben and I traveled for two weeks through Portugal and Spain together. How many dads get to do this with their grown sons? Portugal was beautiful and the people were really nice, but I can’t speak Portuguese very well. It was obvious I was a tourist and I didn’t really get a sense of confidence back until we had arrived in Spain, where I can handle the language. I had forgotten to get an international driver’s license, so Ben did all the driving for a week – which was just as well because the rotaries in Spain are even more terrifying than the ones in Boston.
We used AirBnb instead of hotels, which turned out to be really great and inexpensive. The people we met were really nice, and we ended up staying in Cartagena with a couple who owned a gallery in town. I would go back to Cartagena in a heartbeat, and I really liked Valencia too, although it is a very busy city. But at 2:00pm it’s as if the lights have gone out. Boom! Siesta. Things don’t resume until 4:45. In a cascade of clock time, dinner is then later and people then stay up till the wee hours, even taking their kids to toddler-friendly bars (if you can imagine such a thing). Barcelona was interesting, busy, and filled with things to see and do too, but it seemed to be more weary and sad than Valencia.
Berlin
We got to the Barcelona airport early one morning and both departed within 15 minutes of each other. Ben went back to the States via Stockholm, and I went on to Berlin – a city that’s been on my “bucket list” for some time. I don’t have much talent for videos, epublications, or photos, but I managed to put together a slide show with some highlights of my trip.
Going on to Germany by myself was a good thing. I had lived and worked in Germany in the 1970s and, though I keep up somewhat by reading, I have had very few opportunites to speak the language. I wanted to see some plays auf Deutsch and I did. One, Tape, was merely OK, even though the actress, Nina Hoss, was famous even outside Germany. But the other play, Verrücktes Blut, was outstanding. In it, a group of immigrant high-schoolers practically terrorizes their sweet little German teacher. A gun falls from someone’s backpack, the teacher grabs it and holds the students hostage, and they are forced to act out Schiller’s Die Räuber as both teacher and students learn something about multiculturalism. The play was stunning, excellent, and the acting was as well. The cast came out for maybe 10 curtain calls.
You can’t go anywhere in Berlin without running into history – whether it’s Prussian, Nazi, East German, artistic, literary, scientific or Jewish. The Jewish museum is built at odd angles and the whole effect is disorienting. There is one exhibit in which you trudge through a roomful of metal disks making a terrific clanging, hammering sound. If you look down you notice each disk was cut by torch into the face of a person. As you look out before you, there is a veritable sea of humanity being walked upon. Most of the exhibits, though, inform younger Germans how the Holocaust happened and remind them of the huge loss of a part of their society.
I had many great conversations with my AirBnb host who gave me a tour of Kreuzberg (sort of the Berkeley or Cambridge of Berlin). And as you walk around the city, you hear every language spoken. It is an incredibly cosmopolitan city, and Berliners are proud that it is – once again. As always, people are people. I was in a rush to catch a bus to an Eastern district where an old Soviet park had been built. I arrived at the bus stop where the driver was having a smoke. I asked him if this was where one catches the so-and-so bus. Was? Kein Guten Tag? What? No Howdy Do? he asked. Having appropriately busted my chops, I apologized for my brusqueness and then – I was 20 minutes early – we had a long conversation about life in East Germany, where he had lived before the wall came down. When it was time to get going he told me to sit behind him and he’d tell me exactly where to get out of the bus to find the Soviet memorial. Otherwise you’ll miss it. You can’t go anywhere in Berlin without running into history.
And so I’m here for the winter, I think of it as being in experimental mode. But I’m surrounded by family and friends, and have interesting and meaningful things to do. That’s almost the definition of blessed.
I hope 2015 brings you the same blessings, health and Peace and Goodwill – though experience says hoping for these last two is a bit unreasonable.
Well, the hell with it. Here’s to a Happy and Healthy 2015 – and unreasonable expectations!
Jay Ambrose’s editorial (“Colleges need more conservatives,” December 12, 2014) begins, incensed at a “pledge of allegiance” to a right-wing Christian state used by a Colorado college professor in his “American Civilization” class to get students talking about – well – American civilization.
See? he says: Colleges are filled with Democrats, liberals, Marxists, and moral relativists rejecting “Western values” – and we need more diversity to “offset such influences.”
Odd. I didn’t think Conservative liked Affirmative Action or meddling with the “free market” of ideas.
Ambrose is unhappy that most professors are Democrats. That may well be. But they’re also PhD’s for the most part – independent thinkers who don’t hate science or get most of their information from scripture and lobbyists.
It’s probably the “independent thinker” part that has Ambrose so riled.
His essay is filled with bizarre claims, figures, and logic. He objects to a Marxist professor on the grounds that millions were supposedly killed “in Marx’s name” – forget that Marx, who predicted socialism replacing advanced capitalism in modern Europe, had been dead for about 40 years when revolutionaries in feudal societies in Asia seized on some of his ideas.
But Ambrose, a bible-thumping Tea Partying Kentuckian, characterizes the new far-right Conservatism as “a sense of the world that appreciates the best of the past.”
Maybe that was true in Eisenhower’s day. But since when are fracking, filling the environment with CO2, giving corporations human rights and taking them away from people, endless welfare programs for defense contractors, preservation of advantage for the white male super-rich, attacks on immigrants, misogyny, and classism – “the best of the past?”
Assuming liberal universities do adopt “Affirmative Action for the Koch Brothers” plans and invite more conservative visiting professors, where’s the reciprocity in Christian madrassas like Bob Jones University or Liberty University?
More insidious than propagandizing college students, the New Conservatives want to reach even younger minds. Many high schools run ROTC programs and, as part of No Child Left Behind laws, are obliged to host military recruiters. These are schools that still can’t manage to completely steer clear of religion, are constantly reacting to conservative attacks on books, sex education, evolution, and on teachers who try to challenge their students to think.
What Ambrose really wants is right-wing political orthodoxy to be dispensed to the young through preferred hiring of people like him. When education starts bending to creationism, climate change denial, and militarism, we might as well all take the “pledge” that irked Ambrose so much.
The U.S. and its Western allies are at war in five countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The U.S. Special Operations Command has covert operations in 134 countries. Half the world. Today we call it a right and an obligation to be the world’s policeman. Kipling called this the “White Man’s Burden” in a poem published in American papers during the U.S. invasion of the Philippines.
Before we became a nation, our founders were busy building British Empire. Colonialism is in our national genes. Whether unabashed Exceptionalist or Neoliberal Realist, the “White Man’s Burden” has always been to “bring order and stability” to “savages,” as John Quincy Adams described it in so many words.
Today’s version of the “Burden” teaches that the West is only trying to “stabilize” and bring “democracy” to troubled nations. Authoritarian and heavily militarized nations like Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are supposed to be a solution. Model “democracies” like the U.S. and Israel are supposed to show off our best values. A letter echoing this basic notion appeared in “Israel more likely to be part of the solution, not the problem.”
The author is right about one thing: “Israel represents the West in the Middle East.” When Israel attacked Egypt during the “Suez Crisis” it signaled its willingness to join the colonial club. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is indeed “Western” in mirroring what the U.S. did to Native Americans, the Spanish and Portuguese did in Latin America, the French did in Africa, the British did in the Middle East and India, the Australians did to the Aboriginals, and Dutch and British settlers did in South Africa.
What we euphemistically call “interventions” others see as naked aggression. When others resist it can only be “evil,” not a normal human reaction. We dismiss the messages that al Qaeda and ISIL send us because they kill with knives (and not with drones), but the main reason is that we just don’t want to listen to anything anyone else has to say.
When the Christian Coalition speaks, it’s often not praying. Like their American and Israeli cousins, Muslim fundamentalists too wrap political views in the language of scripture. By dismissing political motivations, the writer ignored how Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians angers many when he wrote: “Osama bin Laden didn’t have Palestinians on his radar at all.”
Wrong.
Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” was published in the Guardian newspaper in November 2002. The 4000-word piece addresses two issues: why al Qaeda opposes the West and what it wants from it. The very first answer to the very first question addressed Palestine: “As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. a) You attacked us in Palestine…”
Bin Laden’s remaining points concerned Western adventures in the Middle East and the exploitation of the world’s resources to satisfy a Western consumer culture he regarded as immoral. The West’s coddling of Israel, its UN vetoes in support of Israel, nuclear hypocrisy, lavish military aid, and its neglect of Palestinians – all angered bin Laden and still rankle Muslims throughout the world – as Professor Brian Glyn Williams alluded to recently. But not only fighters in the Middle East sympathize. Asian, African, and Latin American countries also suffered Western colonialism and see the old South Africa reflected in today’s Israel.
The Sykes-Picot agreement carved up the Ottoman Empire among Britain, France, and Russia. Britain began subdividing its “mandate.” An old photo shows three architects of this division sitting on camels. One, T.E. Lawrence [“of Arabia”], arranged for the Wahhabist al Saud family to create an Arab kingdom. Another, Winston Churchill, had just cabled London to approve the deal. The third, Gertrude Bell, from England’s 6th richest family, drew up the map.
The West unleashed Wahhabis against the Ottomans. The West built Al Qaeda as a proxy to fight Russia in Afghanistan. “Western” Israel formed Hamas to challenge the PLO. The West decided to leave Shias to die in one Gulf War and disenfranchise Sunnis in another. The West indirectly armed ISIL.
It was the West whose “coalition of the willing” destroyed and destabilized Iraq, Syria and Libya through regime change masquerading as defense of civilians suffering state terror. The U.S. betrays its hypocrisy when it acknowledges such human suffering in Syria but none in Gaza.
The Middle East is a tough neighborhood. Israel may not be the only problem, but it is hardly a solution. 4.5 million Palestinians live – not under Israel’s Basic Laws – but under perpetual colonial-era martial law.
For Palestinians and much of the Middle East, the colonial era never really ended. Only when the West stops cultivating empire while calling it “help” will real solutions emerge.
A little fact-checking would have prevented Frank Medeiros from publicly embarrassing himself with a letter copied almost verbatim from a piece written by Jerry Schaefer in the Las Vegas Tribune three days before: http://lasvegastribune.net/police-officers-killed-fund/
True author aside, whoever wrote it sure did a lot of cherry-picking of police killings, yet still managed to get things wrong. His/their contention, that anyone who objects to police shooting unarmed black men is a racist … is, charitably, disorganized thinking. Or, less charitably, racism trying to defend itself.
Referring to the killing of officer Melvin Santiago, Medeiros and/or Schaefer ask why Atty. General Holder didn’t weigh in on the officer’s death. Perhaps it was because President Obama had already sent condolences to Santiago’s parents, as had Senator Cory Booker.
Medeiros asks, “How about Officer Jeffrey Westerfield?” Good question. This was not merely a case of Bad Black Man kills Good White Officer. It was a domestic abuse case gone terribly wrong, in which the killer’s half-brother did not hesitate to implicate him. Westerfield was not killed because he was white, and his killer was not arrested without help from the black community.
Medeiros and/or Schaefer also chose Kevin Jordan, a black officer who was killed by a white man, Michael Bowman. The author(s) ask why there was little public outrage. Perhaps because an officer was killed while working at a Waffle House by a gang of white thugs with legal gun permits. A better question would have been why so many people in the United States are carrying weapons into Waffle Houses.
Yet the real issue is and always has been how communities are policed.
In 2012 88% of all officers were male, with percentages over 92% in most small towns and cities. Nationally, between 70-80% of police officers are white, again with higher percentages in small towns. But cities are a huge problem. The New York Times recently ran a piece about police departments whose white officers exceed the overall white population by 30-50%. In the greater Boston area, Chelsea is 25% white but has 78% white officers – 53% higher. Dozens of Massachusetts cities have this problem and almost every major city has even worse figures than greater Boston. Ferguson, Missouri is absolutely the national norm.
Worse, these predominantly white police departments police black communities with very little accountability – and they kill on average one black man every 28 hours – so, yes, it does bring out the protests and occasionally a riot. It is impunity that has people so upset.
Statistics demonstrate that white officers are suspicious more, stop more, harass more, and shoot more when those they interact with are not white. All this increases distrust and resentment of the police. The status quo is not working.
We also cannot disregard the fact that Americans are one of the most heavily-armed people on earth. Put weapons in the hands of gangs and thugs – or even an angry boyfriend – and murders happen – to civilians and police officers alike.
According to the FBI’s figures on 48 killings of police officers in 2012, 42 officers were white and 6 were black – pretty much in line with police demographics. Medeiros and/or Schaefer imply, first, from their examples, that blacks are more likely to attack white police officers and, second, that the Sharptons and Jacksons and Obamas and Holders (translation: black people) only care when black blood is spilled. But as we have seen, both claims are nonsense.
The school-to-prison pipeline – a system that still uses “broken-windows” policing (coming down hard on minor crime) – results in one in three minority men being incarcerated sometime in his life. It is a system that prevents people from ever finding work again, denies them the vote, and fosters a cycle of anger, hopelessness, alienation, violence and more crime. Michelle Alexander, the author of the “New Jim Crow,” notes that more men are incarcerated today than under slavery.
We certainly need economic justice in this country, but we also need police departments that reflect the communities they work in and that treat everyone equally. We have a long way to go.
But to paint these calls for change in community policing as a sort of “reverse racism” is another right-wing “blame the victim” tactic. And as such it’s deeply, offensively, racist.
While emptying a service revolver into Michael Brown was bad enough, there is a fear that his killer may get away with it – one more “justified” police killing of an unarmed citizen. It’s impunity that has many people upset. Police impunity is just another of the many forms of injustice that roils this country.
“Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men,” said Gerald Ford – right before pardoning Nixon for all the laws he had broken.
Nixon in turn pardoned Jimmy Hoffa and William Calley, the only soldier held accountable for the massacre of 500 people in My Lai, Viet Nam.
Reagan pardoned Nixon’s FBI burglars.
Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive donor to Clinton’s presidential library and his wife’s Senate campaign, as well as his own brother, Roger, on federal drug charges.
George Bush (Sr.) pardoned the ringleaders of the Iran-Contra Affair, which included Reagan’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of Defense.
Bush Junior commuted the meager 30 month sentence given to Irving (Scooter) Libby for leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Aside from pardons, which are often a professional courtesy extended to former administrations, not even the most severe criminal acts by political leaders are ever investigated or prosecuted.
The US may have played a role in the show trials in Nuremberg, but now it refuses to be bound by the World Court. The US uses its UN Security Council veto to shield itself from charges of war crimes and human rights abuses. International law is for quiche-eating foreigners, not us.
CIA kidnapping, murder and torture have gone unpunished. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about spying on citizens. The CIA destroyed torture tapes and spied on a Senate team investigating it. And nothing ever happens. A president lies to the nation about weapons of mass destruction. Nothing happens. A famous general takes those lies to the United Nations. Nothing happens. Whistleblowers are hounded for exposing lies. Nothing happens – except to the whistleblower. The FBI kills hundreds of people over several decades and not one agent is ever disciplined for an unjust shooting.
But if government impunity is well-understood, so is that of corporations and the very wealthy.
A July article in Forbes reported: “Six of the 60 richest families in the country include heirs who have killed, raped or sexually abused someone. The circumstances of the tragedies vary — some were accidental car crashes and others were deliberate crimes. But one thing was consistent: the perpetrators hardly received any punishment.”
Deregulation, preferential tax rates or forgiveness, special laws giving corporations “religious” rights to ignore laws that others have to follow – all these diminish our ability to hold accountable anyone other than the average citizen. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, but when was the last time you saw one in jail? – in a nation that incarcerates more humans than any other.
And in the rare case where corporate misbehavior is so egregious that token punishment is unavoidable – JPMorgan Chase and British Petroleum come to mind – it turns out even their fines are tax-deductible.
No, laws are only for citizens. This is why the average guy is spied upon, stopped and frisked, and incarcerated in record numbers, especially if he is Black or political or both.
When a police officer violates the law, assaults or kills a citizen, commits violations of the Constitution (locking up journalists, preventing people from legal assembly, stopping and frisking for no reason, or insisting on a suspicion-less search) – they put themselves above the law. Unfortunately, there is actually very little meaningful community oversight of police departments. Most internal police misconduct investigations are done with little transparency, and the outcomes are predictable. Rogue cops often keep on abusing citizens.
If we truly want to be a nation of laws, we need to insist that those who make and uphold the laws and claim to be protecting us – follow the same laws. If not, they should be given orange jump suits like any other criminal.
We may be a nation of laws, but impunity engenders lawlessness when some of us are above the law.
Every 28 hours police kill another Black man in the United States. In Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, stole cigars from a convenience store and may or may not have been stopped for this reason by a policeman who emptied his service revolver into Brown.
The Standard Time’s editorial on Brown’s killing correctly highlights the racial elements of police encounters in America today. The images of Ferguson’s police officers with their M16’s, MRAP (IED-resistant armed personnel carrier), and all the other Homeland Security-funded toys used against the community, shocked those who still remember Montgomery and Selma during Jim Crow.
Ferguson police acted as if they were at war with the Black community and journalists – acting as occupiers, not patrolmen. Armaments of war were employed. Journalists were arrested as they filed stories from a local McDonald’s. Police hauled an alderman from his car and roughed him up. They tear-gassed one group of journalists and dismantled their equipment. News helicopters were banned, journalists were bullied and prevented from covering the demonstrations, and police ignored the 72-hour requirement to publish a report of Michael Brown’s killing.
None of this is a surprise to any minority community. Police “serve” Whites differently than others. Recall the kid-gloves treatment that Cliven Bundy’s White supporters received from law enforcement – especially shocking since Bundy’s supporters had sniper rifles trained on them. But militarization of the police affects everyone, not just minorities. We saw it during the Boston Marathon bombing. We saw it during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when police throughout the country used tear gas, water cannons, TASERs, and concussion grenades against protestors, denying them rights of assembly and speech.
Radley Balko writes in his “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” that 30 years ago only about a quarter of small towns had SWAT teams. Today, even with lower crime rates, that number is close to 90%. But when you have a big hammer, you have to pound every nail with it. According to Pete Kraska, a professor of Justice Studies in Kentucky, SWAT teams are deployed 137 times a day in the US. SWAT raids are used for everything from delivering a summons to raiding a house where marijuana might be found. Many innocent people have been killed in these raids. And not once has a policemen been held accountable.
Police, including most of our local forces, are armed with TASERS, which send 50,000 volts of electricity via a dart into a human’s nervous system. TASERS have been associated with hundreds of deaths, particularly when repeatedly used on mentally ill, convulsing, non English-speaking, or drugged civilians who cannot “comply” with an officer’s command. YouTube is full of dashcam videos of mouthy White suburban moms who have been tased for basically their “attitude” at roadside stops. Where once an officer was forced to de-escalate an incident with an upset person, mainly by just listening, now he can just blast him with 50,000 volts and slap on the handcuffs.
Funding all this expensive gear (via your tax dollars) is the Law Enforcement Support Office, an obscure federal agency that outfits police forces with military surplus. Similarly, the Defense Logistics Agency has an office whose motto is “from warfighter to crimefighter” and which also provides police with state of the art war gear. The Justice Department, too, has a program to transition veterans, many of whom have PTSD, into positions as police officers. All this has cost taxpayers $35 billion but communities are further on the hook for costs of upgrades and maintenance of these systems, which also include spy gear like “Stingrays,” which gather information from people’s cellphones.
The net result is that we are no longer being served by police forces that look like us, grew up with us, or even necessarily live among us. Certainly this is the case in Ferguson, 70% Black with a police department 95% White. Nationally it is true as well.
That’s because the goal is no longer the protection, but something nearer the occupation of citizens – all of us – by a government that increasingly distrusts its own citizens.
And this is the very definition of a Police State.
“Improper Payments Top $100 Billion,” said the headline on July 10.
The Associated Press article discussed federal agency estimates — not necessarily proven figures — of over-payments and fraud in these agencies. As usual, the evil welfare queens and other shiftless bums had to take the perp walk. The AP reported billions stolen or wasted by Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, SNAP, Social Security, school lunches, Pell grants, and public housing assistance.
The accompanying Bloomberg News article was scarcely less enlightening. The Pentagon paid over $8,000 for a piece of $450 gear. The generals paid over $2,000 for a helicopter part that should have cost $300. Isn’t this old news?
Pieces like this, whether intentionally or not, distort an even worse truth of unimaginable waste of tax dollars. It’s easy enough to yawn at a 20-fold markup of the odd helicopter part if “national security” is at stake. We’re being trained to save our outrage for the welfare queens, and to give the corporate welfare kings a pass.
In this pairing of articles there was absolutely no mention of the Lockheed-Martin F-35 fighter jet. The plane doesn’t work properly. It crashes. It catches fire. Its designs have already been hacked by the Chinese. One potential buyer, Norway, complained that it was too expensive: A single plane costs about $10 million and its operational costs are estimated to be $800 million over its lifetime. The F-35 has been on and off “probation” with the Pentagon for mismanagement and cost overruns.
In 2012, a defense magazine reported that the F-35 program’s costs had soared to $1.5 trillion.
This one federal program rather puts the welfare queens to shame, doesn’t it? But who would even know when we routinely get propaganda instead of news.
The one-sided “war” in Gaza was not about murdered yeshiva students or a Palestinian burned alive. It wasn’t about Qassam rockets or Israeli drones. It wasn’t about smuggling tunnels, which besides armaments also move food and building materials into Gaza. The most recent attack on Gaza was not even Israel punishing Hamas for rejecting divide-and-conquer tactics by signing a unity agreement with the PLO.
Since 1948 Israel has refused any sort of peace with Palestinians. Zionism is a zero-sum game. There can only be one winner. For Israel two states or one non-Zionist state are both losses. Occupation is unfortunate but necessary, so goes the reasoning.
Americans are extremely uncomfortable watching what is essentially a repeat of our own genocidal campaigns against Native Americans. But, then, isn’t conquering Zion THE story in the Bible? Even House Democrats talk “separation of church and state” out of the side of their mouth not supporting Zionism. And while these same liberal Congressmen fear the return of Jim Crow in the South, they apparently have nothing against martial law only for Palestinians and far worse than Jim Crow. What they are supporting is a toxic form of colonialism buttressed by US vetoes in the UN Security Council (also a vestige of colonialism) no matter which party is in power.
Israel has long maintained it has no “partner for peace” with any faction among the Palestinians. But this has been by design. In the late 1980’s Israel, which had refused to talk with the PLO, seriously erred by supporting Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama Al-Islamiya (Muslim Association) movement, the precursor of Hamas. But by the time Americans realized their similar Islamist strategy in Afghanistan had backfired, Hamas was militant and Israel sent gunships to blow the Sheikh and his family to smithereens.
With the Oslo Accords, the PLO and Fatah renounced terrorism and hopes were high for a Two State solution offering Palestinians a sovereign homeland. But Israel never rewarded the defanged, dependent West Bank with a state of its own, instead continuing to take more Palestinian land for right-wing settlers. By now it’s obvious that Israel never had any intention of giving up lands it and American supporters like to call by the biblical names Judea and Samaria. In fact, the charter of the long-ruling party, the Likud, specifically denies a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. So, from Israel’s perspective, negotiations are only for stalling and stonewalling silly Americans. Spying on the American Secretary of State just gives them an edge.
If Gazans are more militant than those in the West Bank, there is a reason. A majority of those living in Gaza now are descendants of refugees who were purposely expelled from their homes in Israel in 1948. While Israel has a “Right of Return” for Jews, this does not extend to Christians or Muslims who owned property in what is now Israel. They are now living in what is essentially a concentration camp looking over barbed wire at people who put them there. Only a fool would fail to acknowledge their anger or their rights.
There is little sense in constructing timelines of which acts of terror preceded others. While we may call Hamas terrorists, a recognized state killing 1800 people, mainly civilians, also should be called terrorist. There is no sense or justification in the cliché: “this has been going on for 3000 years.” No. It hasn’t. It’s been going on since 1948. It’s a land dispute and not a clash of civilizations or religions.
It is not surprising, then, that virtually every nation on earth – with the exception of present and former colonial powers – understands why Palestinians resist having sovereignty taken from them. It’s the Occupation. The United States and Israel can label anyone who resists “terrorist” all they want, even forgetting acts of resistance and terror that created these two nations. But the problem in Israel-Palestine, like most of the messes created by the Sykes-Picot “deal” that carved up the Middle East, will remain a mess for any knucklehead who refuses to understand why those they oppress fight back.
“Balancing the Budget” is a stated concern, if not the mantra, of the House Republicans. Given our profligate spending, they say, we need to tighten belts, impose fiscal discipline and cut waste. No more free rides for the welfare queens or the undocumented. And while we’re at it, let’s rein in entitlements too. We all have to make sacrifices if we want to safeguard our children’s children’s futures.
Well, maybe not all Americans have to make those sacrifices equally. While welfare queens are offered as culprits, truly profligate and mind-numbing corporate welfare goes unexamined. Two recent cases of “discretionary spending”? illustrate this ultra-profligacy better than anything.
By the time we stop pumping more money into them in 2022, our wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq will have cost the US between five and six TRILLION dollars. Similarly, the F35 fighter jet program has already cost taxpayers 1.5 TRILLION dollars – for a broken, badly-designed, poorly-managed, some say useless, defense program.
With just 70 million taxpayers in the US, these – not including the rest of the Defense, Homeland Security, or spy agency budgets – have already cost each taxpayer over $108,000. To put it in perspective, that’s 70 million college educations.
The profligacy – rather, the lunacy – doesn’t end there. Yesterday a bipartisan vote of the House of Representatives passed the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (H.R. 3086), which makes permanent a ban on state and local taxation of Internet access and certain types of internet commerce.
So the same legislators who don’t bat an eye burdening each human taxpayer with an extra $100,000 tax bill won’t even impose reasonable taxes on businesses. I guess it helps that the head of the FCC is a former Comcast lobbyist.
The 2016 election is coming. As usual it promises to be a match between a herd of flag-waving, regime-changing, drone-deploying, pro-corporate Republicans and a gaggle of Democrats who walk and talk exactly like them. As long as both parties continue spending more than half our national treasure on war and empire, ensuring profitable contracts for a handful of companies while allowing infrastructure and tax revenues to decline, nothing will ever change for the better.
It’s time for an alternative to both these corrupt parties.
The patriotic-sounding “USA Freedom Act” currently working its way through Congress is intended to blunt some of the nation’s anger at the warrantless surveillance of American citizens disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake characterizes the Act as “faux reform” and he knows a thing or two about the subject. As a crypto-linguist during the Cold War he studied how the East German Stasi spied on an entire nation and he found the NSA’s techniques chillingly similar.
Of all the Amendments to our Constitution, the Fourth is possibly the most important to individual liberties: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” “Effects” and “persons” still have the same meanings today as in 1792 when they were added to the Constitution, and the meaning is quite clear, yet the Fourth Amendment has never been violated as savagely as it is today.
After decades of warnings of a “creeping Security State” by Drake, Senator Frank Church, and others, we have finally arrived at the Police State. Unchecked surveillance of every citizen; police powers and technology increasing daily; police agencies and officers operating with relative impunity. Evidence obtained through warrantless surveillance is passed along to prosecutors. Defense attorneys are wiretapped. Gag orders prevent the accused from discussing details of their cases with lawyers or spouses. Kidnapping, torture, extortion and murder by faceless agencies and the executive branch go unpunished. Trade agreements are negotiated in secret, keeping even legislators in the dark. FISA courts rubber-stamp the illegal surveillance that normal courts would deny. The CIA spies on the Senate, and the Supreme Court’s mission seems to be making life great for corporations while rolling back the social gains of the last century.
In this “democracy” the very wealthy go largely unpunished while the very poor are hounded by arbitrary searches in communities with increasingly militarized police. Twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners are caged in our country. Thirteen states have passed laws making secret the mystery cocktails they inject into those condemned to death. Children are charged as adults and held in solitary confinement. Drones, cameras, bag checks, Shotspotters, cell tower dumps, cellphone “stingers,” license plate readers, fingerprint readers, retina scans, DNA registries, face recognition, kill switches on phones and cars, lie detectors, drug tests, stop and frisk, tasers, SWAT teams dispatched for minor crimes – this now characterizes law enforcement’s relationship to the public.
In 2010 Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin counted some 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 corporations feeding at the homeland security trough in over 10,000 locations across the United States. DHS and Fusion programs grant police departments the latest military and surveillance gadgets. Ignoring Eisenhower’s warnings, the military-industrial complex has become a dangerous, bi-partisan revolving-door to corporate riches for every director of the DHS and countless program directors. This half-trillion dollar industry (apart from the Defense budget) includes many specialized lobbying groups such as the Secure Identity and Biometrics Association, which advocates for a biometric-based national identity card. Over five million Americans have security clearances and serve a Police State that the Stasi would have envied. And almost all of this is being deployed, not against terrorists, but against us, the American public.
In this year’s mid-term elections 33 Senate seats and 435 Congressional seats are up for grabs. To date only a handful of politicians have questioned the wholesale assault on democracy underway since 9/11. Virtually all, Republican and Democrat, just want the issue to go away because, hey, who wants to take on lobbyists from powerful industries?
It will take more than fake, patriotically-themed reform laws to do it. The “Patriot” Act must be repealed, not amended; the FISA courts dismantled, not tweaked; and spy agencies must be neutered and brought under meaningful Congressional control.
I had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to Pascal Mercier’s “Night Train to Lisbon,” a book our reader’s group chose this month. After a couple hundred pages it was clear to me that things were not going to get better but I ploughed on, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the author never give it to us.
In theater, when someone says “hey, want some peanuts?” it’s something you notice. The second time it’s either a coincidence or a phrase that puts the audience on alert. The third time you hear “hey, want some peanuts?” you’ve entered the world of farce. This is what happens when a boring Swiss man, who can just barely manage to read Portuguese with the aid of a dictionary, is showered with manuscript after manuscript after letter after letter after note after valedictory speech by people who eagerly and inexplicably invite him into their lives — and who all seem to have reams of the stuff — never (as one would expect) in a single closet or shoebox. And, to boot, these are all people who just happen to be able to recite, verbatim and at theatrical length, arcane passages from these profound nuggets they have preserved apparently just for the eyes of the Good Burgher Gregorius — people who are always alive after 80 or 90 years, and who are always conveniently at home when Gregorius calls. Farce.
Then I disliked our epistolary hero, Amadeus. The dude had it all — money, private schools, parents who encouraged him, pushed him to excel, sisters who worshipped him. He had looks, brains, and talent. Yet he spent his life whining about everything. Where did all this Weltschmerz come from? And it is a mystery to me, given the vast quantity of letters he appears to have written incessantly, how he actually managed to study for medical school or even run a practice. Maybe it’s just me but, despite the many observations he raised in the hundreds of pages of italics which have now permanently damaged my eyes, there was never a true center to Amadeus. Thus the many relationships he had with friends, family, comrades, his wife, or his lover, were like gears that never actually meshed in reality. Mercier only projects a cardboard gearworks. This book, then, was never anything more than a highbrow Harlequin romance.
If I disliked Amadeus, I despised Gregorius. Here was a guy who chose to spend his life being a shmoe, with his nose firmly stuck only in past realities — or more accurately – in comforting fictions. And he had absolutely no sense of the world he actually lived in. Personally, I can identify on one level with a fellow with bad eyesight who loves languages and is bewitched by a feeling that speaking in, and living in, a different culture gives you a kind of second life. But Gregorius had such an unbelievably tenuous grasp of the reality around him, even in Portugal, that the book just didn’t work for me. Gregorius was less than the cardboard cutout Mercier presents us.
I wrote these notes in Mexico, where many people have done precisely what Gregorius did — taken off suddenly and started a new life. But you know what? These people manage to have cocktail parties, spouses, friends, hobbies, pictures on the wall, and they don’t take up trying to learn Farsi while simultaneously memorizing Spanish conjugations at the Gringo language schools. I wanted to slap Gregorius. Hard. But then he had that mysterious neurological condition that went nowhere, like most of the plotlines in the book.
For a book written in the God voice, Mercier’s characters are incredibly two dimensional, especially the women. In over 400 pages, we should have known Gregorius’ mind much better, or that of his sisters. But with an excess of blah-blah and an almost total lack of dialog, how could we ever learn who any of these people are?
Then there’s what passes for plot. Besides the massive number of PASSAGENS INSUPORTAVELMENTES PRESUMIDOS UNBEARABLY PRETENTIOUS PASSAGES a reader must suffer, I kept waiting for something to happen. And, as the joke goes about a waiting Swiss wife, nothing much ever did. The structure of the whole book rests on flat, inconsistent, implausible characters and piles of disconnected thought written in a score of third person voices, all of which sound suspiciously identical.
And why the hell would Gregorius ever begin his quest in the first place? An apparently suicidal woman writes a phone number on his forehead and he instantly decides to run off to Portugal? Please! We never learn who is on the other end of the phone in Lisbon, but it was apparently a working number — unlike our protagonist. To me this dropped detail, one of dozens, points to shoddy literary workmanship. Mercier’s book reminds me of THE ARTIST. I know both the book and the modern silent film won awards for their — uniqueness — but I just can’t see why.
One of the things our bourgeois, prep-school revolutionary, Señhor Amadeus, rails against is Kitsch. If he had ever truly been a living, breathing character, he’d be rolling over in his Lisbon grave over this book.
One of the definitions of the German loan word Kitsch is “a tasteless copy of a work of real art.” Another common definition is “art that chooses aesthetics that convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama.” I think both of these more than apply to the book. Mercier’s characters constantly spew forth melodramatic utterances worthy of Mexican telenovelas. But, frankly, all the characters sound the same. Whether it’s Amadeus at seventeen or Jorge, or Adriana, or Silveira.
Our old friend, the real writer, Milan Kundera, calls Kitsch “the absolute denial of shit” – in other words, a sanitized, Disneyesque reality that poses no real questions and only forces sentimentality down our throats. While Mercier makes hundreds of sad observations, there is no truly coherent point of view, there are no questions asked in earnest. Only incessant “why mommy’s.”
Art historian Clement Greenberg (Art and Culture, 1978) equates uninspired adherence to “academic” schools of thought with Kitsch. Mercier may not belong to an Academie des Beaux Arts but, when we peel away his pseudonym, it turns out that Herr Doktor Peter Bieri is indeed an ex-academic who (in extreme contrast to some of my esteemed ex-academic, truly artistic friends) has not strayed far from the dusty papers of a past life as philosopher of time, mind, and ethics. Sadly, we are treated to pages of italicized ramblings that I suspect have largely been pulled from Bieri’s own private journals.
Ultimately, Gregorius returns to Bern, looks up his ex-wife, gets checked into a clinic by his Greek opthalmologist chess-playing, always on-call for psychological counseling buddy, and the novel grinds to a merciful but long-overdue end. But in the absence of any real plot or meaningful character development, the ending is very unsatisfying — especially after 438 pages of literary torture.
Will Gregorius put on his new glasses and stylish clothes, fuck the brains out of Florence and take her off to Salamanca – or anywhere but Bern? Or will he stay in those thick glasses and academic corduroy and go back to the dreary job that Kägi is holding for him?
This morning’s paper brought us Steve DiMarzo, Jr.’s piece (“Liberals throttling right-wing views”) – in which he argues that liberals prevent climate change deniers from expressing their own opinion in the “debate.”
Sadly, climate change deniers – and science deniers, in general – keep pretending there actually is a debate, and that their views have equal scientific weight. But, to illustrate how ridiculous this is, geochemist James Lawrence Powell recently reviewed every scientific study published in peer-reviewed journals in 2013, finding a total of 10,885. Of these, only two challenged man-made global warming. Some “debate.” And DiMarzo fails to demonstrate that science deniers have truly lost their First Amendment rights rather than simply being embarrassed by real science.
One suspects that, for the Right-wing, science plays a subservient role in culture wars, in continuing to justify tax breaks for oil and coal companies, and in keeping corporations from paying for remediation or carbon credits.
Corporate interests, people like the Koch brothers, have plenty of money, media, and opportunity to present their views to the public. And, now thanks to the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling that corporations are now people, we can barely hear the voice of the average citizen for the roar of corporate lobbyists and their propaganda.
True censorship, on the other hand, is fairly easy to find. Just this week a notable Republican seeking the blessing (and a handout) from casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson had to backtrack on calling the West Bank “occupied territory” – which of course it has been for several generations. Unfortunately unprincipled groveling and denying reality is not just a Republican trait, but it seems to have been perfected by the GOP.
No, if you really want freedom of speech in this country, you have to buy it. Not for the average citizen. Both the print and electronic media continue to be consolidated, almost exclusively in the hands of corporate interests – guaranteeing that you’ll never hear all sides of an argument.
What? In the USA? Internet companies are forbidden from revealing the scope of federal spying on civilians. PBS cancelled the broadcast of a documentary on the Koch brothers (turns out they were corporate sponsors). There are now several liberal journalists (not right-wingers, Mr. DiMarzo) who are currently living abroad because of harassment resulting from their investigations of government wrongdoing. Cities are prevented from disclosing – to their own taxpayers! – the purchase of “Stingray cell tower simulators” – surveillance devices an increasing number of police departments use to capture citizens’ “metadata” without warrants.
Freedom of speech and assembly? Peaceful demonstrations are frequently broken up with heavily militarized police, whose implements of war are funded by federal Fusion centers. Progressive organizations are disrupted by police informers. Citizens on the Mexican border are subjected to warrantless searches – hundreds of miles from Mexico – as are minorities with warrantless “stop-and-frisk” searches. When the Fourth Amendment is violated so routinely, it has a chilling affect on the ability of citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights. That’s censorship too.
Sorry, Mr. DiMarzo. We should be worried about climate change. But we should worry even more about the scope of the police state erected since 9/11. The NSA (part of the military) collects civilian data based on four different authorities – not the Constitution – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 (modified in 2004 and 2008), Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. These orders have superseded the Constitution – a document that is supposed to guarantee many more civil liberties than just the right to carry assault weapons or deny science.
So, if we’re going to talk Censorship – by all means, let’s do. But let’s not pretend that science denial is free speech under attack. All it is – is willful ignorance and corporate propaganda being rebutted by real science. There is plenty of REAL censorship we should all be alarmed by.
This spring will be the 27th anniversary of the shooting of Larry Flynt. As they have each year since March 6th, 1978, millions of Americans will take to the streets, carrying banners that read, “You can paralyze a man but not an entire nation” and “I am Larry Flynt,” arm in arm, some crying softly, all silently remembering the day that Western democracy suffered its greatest test in decades. European heads of state will join arms with their American counterparts to defend the West’s battered secular freedoms from those who would end it with more bullets.
This is more-or-less the Charlie Hebdo fable as presented by the mainstream press.
But when an Evangelical Christian named Joseph Paul Franklin (who just happened to be a Nazi, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and insane to boot) finally copped to the crime, his complaint was familiar: Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine had run an offensive picture of an interracial couple. Flynt and his lawyer, Gene Reeves, Jr. were then ambushed by Franklin with a sniper rifle. Flynt’s intestines were blown out and he was paralyzed. Franklin had also tried to kill Vernon Jordan, Jr., and was trying to start a race war.
Yet nobody made a big deal of Franklin’s religion or asked: Where are all the moderate Christians? Instead, rather than react with revulsion, many Americans actually felt that killing someone like Flynt would have been no great loss. What Franklin had done was lost in the wash along with his satin robes and his dog-eared Bible.
Courts and communities have never looked kindly on Mr. Flynt’s publications and he has been charged countless times with obscenity and pornography. For his part, Mr. Flynt has some very uncharitable things to say about journalistic freedom and justice in America, and that includes the Supreme Court. Unfortunately you’ll have to check Wikipedia for what he said about SCOTUS since this is a family newspaper (Mais sacrebleu! Même les journaux américains sont censurés!). Which is to say, yes, even this column is censored.
The point is that no one in the West really defends tasteless garbage masquerading as journalism – unless it happens to be something that, predictably and deliberately, will offend another culture. And not just any culture but one we hate, Islam. Judeo-Christian culture has its protections. In some European countries cartoons and articles perceived to be anti-Semitic are actually illegal. One of Charlie Hebdo’s writers was fired for such a piece, which alone calls into question the “je suis” propaganda. In the U.S. we have no such laws but we know that newspaper editors have been called on the carpet or have been pressured to issue apologies, such as when the Standard Times ran a Pat Oliphant cartoon of a goose-stepping Israeli soldier right after one of the Gaza invasions.
Zut alors! If we’re Charlie Hebdo, then maybe we should also be Larry Flynt or Pat Oliphant.
But we’re not. We have no such absolute, high-minded support for journalists and their profession. Au contraire, mon ami, we are a nation that has actually begun hounding and prosecuting journalists for doing their job. Just ask James Risen, among others.
The real issue is not the depiction of a prophet or assaults on journalistic freedom. The real issue is the West’s hubris – its perceived “right” to denigrate the rest of the world, initiate “regime change” any time of its choosing, its “right” to foist austerity programs on “lesser” nations, its “right” to choose who shall have nuclear weapons and who shall not, and its “right” to maintain military control throughout the world along with colonial era privileges in the Security Council. These are all political issues, and the young Western-educated terrorists who seethe with political insult more than they do with outrage at the depiction of the Prophet know much more about “our” politics than they do about “their” Quran or hadiths. They are easily deceived into battle, just as we are.
We do our best to convince ourselves that the anger that terrorist attacks represent comes out of nowhere, out of unknowable religious fanaticism, out of the complete rejection of democratic values by people who want to roll the clock back a thousand years. But the manifestos and communiques we’ve heard over the years are strongly political in nature – we just don’t want to hear of it. And so we dumbly ask: Why do they hate us so? – almost rhetorically, as if no real answer could possibly exist. Yet if we are really interested in ending terrorism, we need to face the real answer to this question.
When the American war of choice in Iraq began, and the French opposed it, Congressional Republicans gave the french fry a new name. What a love-hate relationship we have with the French. One day it’s Freedom Fries, the next it’s nous sommes tous Charlie Hebdo. But long before Charlie Hebdo, the press in general had proven to be a disappointing pack of cowards. Today’s paeons to murdered satirists seem to reflect some guilt by mainstream journalists for never, truly, doing their jobs.
One expects it of the war mongers, but even the liberal press now preaches that an attack on a satire magazine is an attack on journalism and secular liberalism. Everyone seems angry that, as a consequence of the terror attacks, people living in Western “democracies” – getting weaker by the minute as Americans shed the Bill of Rights and Europeans move to the Right – are forced to feel the same fear as victims of our drones, torture, and extraordinary rendition.
The Parisian terrorists may have been monsters, but they were monsters who correctly recognized Charlie Hebdo as part of a greater – in this case cultural – war by the West on the Muslim world. It seems our historical insecurities about Mohammedan hordes storming the gates of Vienna just won’t go away. Gratuitous insults to Islam are nothing new, and are part and parcel of an ongoing war on many fronts. It is no coincidence that insult to Islam was also part of a system of abuse at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and implicit in illegal FBI and NYPD harassment of Muslim communities domestically.
As Juan Cole, a Middle East scholar, notes: “Having American troops occupy [Iraq] for 8 years, humiliate its citizens, shoot people at checkpoints, and torture people in military prisons was a very bad idea. Some people treated that way become touchy, and feel put down, and won’t take slights to their culture and civilization any longer. Maybe the staff at Charlie Hebdo would be alive if George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney hadn’t modeled for the Kouashi brothers how you take what you want and rub out people who get in your way.”
Indeed, besides Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, former Abu Ghraib prisoner and now the head of ISIS, Abu Ghraib is the gift to terrorism that just keeps on giving. Sharif Kouashi, one of the Paris killers, was radicalized in 2003 by the invasion of Iraq and specifically by the U.S. torture facility. Long before Charlie Hebdo began running insulting cartoons, Kouashi began the all-too familiar transformation from native-born, dissolute, disaffected man into seething religious fanatic, and then into a terrorist.
One need only look as far as Charlie Hebdo itself to discover that selective insult – not “journalistic courage” – was the point of its satire. In 2009 Maurice Sinet wrote a column for the magazine which some regarded as anti-Semitic. He was fired tout de suite by Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Philippe Val. Here in the United States the press routinely launders almost all criticism of the Jewish state, accepting charges it is anti-Semitic or a “blood libel.” It is impossible to have a full, public discussion about the Israeli occupation in this country, thanks to the self-censoring press. There is also a journalistic double standard if a Judeo-Christian religion has to take it on the chin.
Likewise, we will never have a completely open discussion in the press of poverty, racism, climate change, militarism, religion, or our native oligarchs. Ultimately, journalists draw a paycheck from businesses owned by rich white guys with friends in powerful places. No need to offend them. Fact and analysis are simply replaced by platitudes. Let us agree that this is just the way it is in a “market economy” – but, please, let’s not hype the journalistic courage possible in such a system.
We have never seen the photos of the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib or held to account the monsters in our own midst – the torturers, invaders by false pretense, assassins, those who have subverted our democracy. With some exceptions, the press just isn’t interested in it. From the moment journalists became “embedded” with the military in the first Gulf War, self-censorship began. In the last two wars reporters couldn’t or wouldn’t run pictures of flag-draped caskets. ISIS videos are sanitized. Journalists and editors routinely agree to embargos, gag orders, or censors. Fear of the domestic security apparatus, including the Justice Department, makes journalists think twice before telling certain stories or penning certain sentences. Government attacks on real journalists like James Risen are increasing so quickly one would think we live in Russia or Mexico. Why has this provoked no soul-searching?
It is not unfair to accuse journalists, as a profession, of failing to do their jobs, of holding their tongues, of playing along, of failing to speak truth to power, of choosing their themes timidly, of holding back, and pulling their shots. As the NSA affair demonstrates, journalists – even the brave ones at the Guardian in Britain – had to be grabbed by their collars and noses firmly rubbed in the facts for the story to be reported aggressively.
The slaughter of twelve people of any kind is horrific and society rarely knows how to react, other than to mouth platitudes or come up with odd symbolic gestures. Let France bury the martyred satirists – for that’s what victims of culture wars are, martyrs – in the national Panthéon, as has been suggested. For that matter, we could set aside a grave for Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher, in Arlington National Cemetery.
But journalistic freedom is more than defending tastelessness and mouthing fancy French paroles. If courage means anything to journalists, I suggest we say instead:
The Standard Times has been airing a lot of attacks on so-called “political correctness” lately – so many that it might momentarily be confused with Fox News.
There are certainly gradations in “PC” sensitivities, and without a doubt some are petty. But when someone launches a vicious attack on others, it is hardly “PC” to be offended or to even turn off the spigot of hate.
Today’s political cartoon shows Arts & Entertainment channel “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson with duct tape over his mouth, ostensibly the latest innocent victim of a repressive climate in which “no politically incorrect speech is allowed.”
Well, not exactly.
Robertson did not utter an essentially harmless remark, or one that people of a certain age might carelessly drop. Here’s what he – wouldn’t you know it, also a do-it-yourself preacher at Berean Bible Church in Pennsylvania – actually said about gays, mixing his own weird theology with his own weird politics:
“They received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country.”
And in an interview in next month’s GQ magazine, Robertson maintains that Blacks were happy, singing, and god-fearing in Jim Crow Louisiana – before the government messed it all up. The NAACP disagrees.
Rightly, A&E felt that many (possibly a majority?) of their viewers might be offended and they shut the bigot down. Making such remarks is something that Robertson should probably have done in his private Bubba World and not on national television. Didn’t his Mama tell him that’s what you get when you throw your own weird views on sex, religion and politics into an already tasteless reality show?
Further down the editorial page we have Bob Comeau whining about the harmlessness of Fox News telling the world that Santa is White. Comeau wants to sweep the Fox News anchor’s idiocy under the rug with “Skin color, in both cases, is totally irrelevant.”
But skin color is not irrelevant. Just ask Christopher Rougier, an “uppity” Black 9th grader who had the nerve to dress like Santa and was rebuked by a teacher at Cleveland High School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. This was a child affected by the supposedly “harmless” transmogrification of Santa into an Aryan icon. Comeau would have us believe that Fox News anchor Meghan Kelly’s remarks about Santa were simply ill-conceived humor, but then she doubled down on her inanity by insisting that Jesus was White too.
Much of the Christmas Nativity story has to do with miracles. For my money, the greatest miracle is that White America clings to the notion that a guy from present-day Palestine and another from present-day Turkey look like rosy-cheeked Bavarians. To point this nonsense out is a war on Christmas – White Christmas.
I would agree with Jack Rosen, whose own anti-PC letter to the editor was published a week ago, that people secure in their own traditions should not have a problem with Christmas. But, then again, here in Massachusetts we live in an island of greater civility within a nation populated with many Robertsons and Kellys. These racists and homophobes think they can let any verbal sewage leak from their mouths without consequence. Then, when called to account, their hate speech turns out to be “just a joke” and those who find it offensive are simply “hypersensitive.”
Well, perhaps one day, when they let up a bit, we won’t be so sensitive.
Lest anyone have the mistaken impression that American foreign policy changed when Bush retired to his ranch, the same neoconservative game plan for regime change throughout the Middle East continues today. Bush got his Saddam. Obama got his Ghadafy. And now Obama wants Assad and quite likely regime change in Iran as well.
According to an article in the New York Times by Mark Landler, Obama summoned his aides to the Oval Office last Friday to discuss his reasons for asking Congress for permission to wage war on Syria – not that American presidents usually feel obliged to follow the Constitutionally-mandated procedure. Landler: “He had several reasons, he told them, including a sense of isolation after the terrible setback in the British Parliament. But the most compelling one may have been that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.”
Not just the British Parliament but almost all our western allies have expressed reservations about yet more use of American military force. To be fair, the not-quite ex-colonialist nations France and England are in the process of trying to drum up renewed support for NATO “intervention” – an Orwellian term that really means “naked aggression” when you are on the ground watching bombs fall on you. The Arab League said no to an attack. Iraq – which Obama claims has reason to fear Syria – told the U.S. to butt out. And even Israel has preferred Assad to a failed state next door.
No one seriously believes that Syria is going to unleash sarin attacks in New York or Boston. Syria presents no risk for Americans. There really is no reason to attack. Not that many years ago, the U.S. was sending suspected terrorists, subjects of “extreme rendition,” to torture chambers in Syria. At least in terms of “fighting terror,” the two nations saw eye-to-eye.
Today the administration’s case for war has various, and shifting, explanations but it has primarily been sold to the public as a “humanitarian” mission. A few weeks ago we started hearing from editors simultaneously apologizing for, but insisting on, publishing the images of sarin victims. John Kerry told “Face the Nation” that only Saddam and Hitler have used sarin – not mentioning that the United States supplied Saddam with his.
An attentive reader might recall that the killing of civilians in Syria – by whatever means – is a direct result of U.S. support for Syrian rebels. Some of these rebels, like the cannibal commander Abu Sakkar, are affiliated with terrorist organizations who hate Assad because he’s an Alawite, not because he’s a despot. The Assad regime, with some justification, points out they are only fighting terror.
“Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.”
No, that was not Bashar al-Assad, but Lindsey Graham explaining that the United States has killed over 4,700 people in drone attacks. But only 10-15% of those 4,700 people were actually terrorist suspects. Which means that the United States slaughtered roughly 4,000 civilians.
So if we are shocked by the sight of gasping, contorted victims of Bashar al-Assad – assuming he actually did it and it wasn’t a “false flag” operation, as former chief of staff to Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, suggests – we should be equally shocked by our own regime’s carnage and terror. But the American press won’t show us images of the corpses of children killed by American drones and missiles.
As the French revolution demonstrated, nobody does terror quite as well as a nation-state. So when a government that itself uses terror starts talking about “red lines,” humanitarian concerns, and morality: beware. Consider our many recent wars and what they have given the world – only wrecked states, death, violence, and a police state here at home. And, of course, trillions of dollars for the American “defense” industry.
The U.S. may soon be launching its annual war, this time in Syria. And this time because the president has drawn a moral “red line” in the sand, condemning the use of chemical weapons.
But let’s examine whether the U.S. can seriously play the role of the world’s arbiter of chemically-related morality.
Roosevelt launched the nation’s first biological weapons program in 1941. From 1943 to 1969, the U.S. developed weaponized anthrax, Q fever, Malta fever, botulinum, cholera, dengue fever, and various dysentery agents.
Our chemical weapons program began earlier, in 1918, with mustard and phosgene gases, Lewisite, hydrogen cyanide, and cyanogen chloride. After WWII, the U.S. developed sarin, VX nerve agents, and Agent Orange. When it signed the Geneva Protocol, the U.S. specifically exempted itself from defoliants like Agent Orange and gases for riot control. In 1997, the U.S. signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, committing to destroy its 30,000 tons of such weapons. But then it dragged its heels for decades, not destroying very much.
A chemical weapons depot in Tooele, Utah once hosted the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. Tooele stored 14 million tons of chemical agents, blistering agents, and nerve gas – almost half the U.S. total – and was closed only last April. Depots in Alabama and Maryland are still operational. A facility in Colorado is not expected to complete destruction of its stockpiles before 2019. Another one in Kentucky won’t be done before 2023.
The United States is the world’s leading arms dealer. Not individuals or corporations – but the government itself. 78% of the world’s arms come from U.S. government sales to foreign nations. In 2008, when Israel used phosphorus against civilians in Gaza, it came from a U.S. stockpile stored in that country. When Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurds, they were stamped “Made in the USA.” As old archives are opened and foreign policy documents leaked, U.S. culpability in historical atrocities is revealed. The German press recently reported that Chile’s dictator, General Pinochet, had stockpiles of U.S. botulinum toxins.
From Havana harbor (“Remember the Maine!”), Laos and Cambodia, to fake yellowcake and invented WMD’s in Iraq, the U.S. has seized on many pretexts to bomb, blast, incinerate, and shoot people in faraway lands – as always, most of them civilians.
At this point, no one knows for sure where the gas used against civilians in Syria originated, or who used it. Or even why the Assad regime would be using it at a time it seems to be regaining the upper-hand. But if history is any kind of a guide, “red lines” are never used as moral guides. They are usually just cynical pretexts to justify yet another war.
As I read this morning’s editorials it seemed odd for part-time journalist Lauren Daley to be advocating for press censorship in the case of Rolling Stone’s cover photo of Dzokar Tsarnaev. But that’s apparently where American journalism is headed.
Given the magazine’s overall style, one could argue that putting anyone on a Rolling Stone cover tends to glamorize them. There was similar whining in 1970 when Rolling Stone’s cover featured Charles Manson – something TIME Magazine did as well, along with placing the Columbine killers on their cover.
And speaking of TIME Magazine, many of its “Man of the Year” issues have been fairly controversial. In both 2000 and 2004 the “Man of the Year” was George W. Bush; in 2007 Vladimir Putin; in 2008 Barack Obama; in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg. Rather than Man of the Year, “Rogue’s Gallery” would be more like it. But perhaps the lesson here is that the public wants to read about fascinating people, not necessarily morally upright ones.
Daley spent more than a few column inches portraying the cover as a desperate attempt by the magazine to be cool, relevant, “with it,” etc. She practically ran out of adjectives after starting with “vile.” She applauded CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Kmart, and Tedeschi’s taking the magazine off their shelves. I suppose as long as the government doesn’t do it it’s not censorship in her mind.
So let’s extend Ms. Daley’s censorship to all forms of media, not just magazines. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (the film version won 4 Academy awards) would never have passed the “Daley Test” because it put a human a face on the cold-blooded killers of the Clutter family. There are literally thousands of books, films, and television series that feature what we can kindly term “anti-heroes” – people like Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Dirty Harry.
But putting a human face on the monsters among us, and trying to understand how they come about, is precisely the point of the Rolling Stone article – should Ms. Daley have actually bothered to read it. Especially here in Massachusetts, many wonder how a sweet, popular, curly-headed kid – yes, the one in the picture – could have become a mad bomber. Was it simply by reading Islamist propaganda? Was it just his brother’s influence? The answers, as always, are more complex. But apparently Ms. Daley isn’t even a wee bit curious.
It is surprising that more high-school dropout CIA/NSA contractors making $200K a year haven’t come forward like Edward Snowden – but perhaps the money and the Hawaiian paradise are intended to salve itchy consciences. Though elected officials and, shamefully, the press routinely call whistle-blowers “self-styled” or “narcissistic,” and their motives, stability, and loyalties questioned – rarely are the ethical issues surrounding the disclosures taken at face value.
It is instructive to recall a time when the United States actually admired whistle-blowers. I found this account, which was all the more interesting to me because it takes place literally in our own backyard. It might be worth re-telling the story for readers of your paper:
“In the winter of 1777, months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American warship Warren was anchored outside of Providence, R.I. On board, 10 revolutionary sailors and marines met in secret — not to plot against the king’s armies, but to discuss their concerns about the commander of the Continental Navy, Commodore Esek Hopkins. They knew the risks: Hopkins came from a powerful family; his brother was a former governor of Rhode Island and a signer of the declaration.
“Hopkins had participated in the torture of captured British sailors; he ‘treated prisoners in the most inhuman and barbarous manner,’ his subordinates wrote in a petition.”
“One whistle-blower, a Marine captain named John Grannis, was selected to present the petition to the Continental Congress, which voted on March 26, 1777, to suspend Hopkins from his post.”
Fortunately, many in the fragile, new nation realized that “misconduct” and cover-ups could easily undermine a budding democracy. The first whistle-blower protections were passed almost immediately following attempts to quash an investigation. Here it is, in language that holds up even today:
“Resolved, That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these stats, which may come to their knowledge.”
Two years ago “national security” hampered Congressman Ron Wyden’s ability to debate a government program called PRISM in Congress, this week identified as the domestic spy program that puts electronic “back doors” in sites like Facebook, GMail, and DropBox for government “monitoring.” This week, following a whistleblower’s disclosures, politicians scrambled to offer apologies to their constituents for keeping them in the dark, or lying, just as the new security state had kept them in the dark.
In 2010 Dana Priest and William Arkin from the Washington Post produced a series of articles called “Top Secret America” (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/) which detailed the scope of the security state built after the “Patriot” Act. 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies now run “national security” programs. A million people hold security clearances.
And this vast apparatus is just getting bigger. Next September, a $2 billion NSA data center, the largest in the world, opens in Bluffdale, Utah to begin collecting data. The million square foot facility is expected to use 5% of the state’s energy – to spy on you and me.
In 1990, after East Germany ceased to exist, former citizens discovered that their government had been spying on a third of them. Well, American spymasters beat that. Last year NSA whistleblower William Binney revealed that his former employer was collecting information on, and communications from, virtually every American citizen, including phone conversations and emails. This week Edward Snowdon, a whistleblower from Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, disclosed details of the PRISM program and the extent of domestic spying.
Americans rightly distrust spy agencies. From the FBI’s inception in 1908, it has spied on – not just criminals – but socialists, anti-war, animal, and human rights activists, conservationists, community organizers, American Indians, Jews, Muslims, farm workers, Martin Luther King, and most of the civil rights movement. In the 1970’s we learned the extent of domestic spying via COINTELPRO and similar programs.
In consequence laws regulating domestic surveillance were passed under presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton. Yes, Reagan.
The CIA and NSA were created in 1942 and 1949, respectively. The National Security Act of 1947 specifically barred intelligence agencies from operating domestically – all the more remarkable because the US was still at war.
In the past Americans never willingly surrendered their privacy rights. But then came the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of – and, recently, a Supreme Court that has neutered the Constitution. An attack no more shocking than Pearl Harbor somehow convinced some Americans to trade the Bill of Rights for a spurious guarantee of “safety.”
Since passage of the “Patriot Act,” we now have “Fusion centers” which “coordinate” police departments and spy agencies without much accountability, often exceeding their mandates. The NYPD, for example, in conjunction with the CIA, has a Tel Aviv office. Through “Fusion” programs police departments receive funds to buy drones, tanks, military weaponry, and surveillance gear. In Boston we have seen spy gear used against Occupy Wall Street protesters and other citizen groups. License plate readers routinely track your whereabouts. We have unexplained flights over Quincy.
Last December Julia Angwin reported in the Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Holder, without debate or consent of Congress, had expanded the National Counterterrorism Center’s ability to store data on citizens, even those not suspected of a crime. A former White House staffer called this expansion of “Total Information Awareness,” which had already been attempted and rejected during the Bush administration, “breathtaking in scope.”
The rationale for this loss of rights is “safety.” But compare the 3,000 people who died in 2001 with the more than a quarter of a million people killed with guns since 9/11. The Second Amendment seems to be the only left one standing.
Big Brother? Detentions without trial? Extraordinary renditions? Assassinations? Offshore gulags? Corporate Personhood? This is not the same country I was born in.
If this is how you want to live, friends, then you deserve the loss of every right you’ve surrendered. But if you lament the loss of what we once had, then make this your top political priority –
Repeal the Patriot Act. Fire the Attorney General. And prosecute the people who have been lying to us.
I have only walked out of one play in my entire life.
“House,” by Daniel McIvor, would have been the second — if I had been able to extricate myself, unnoticed, from the tiny theater. For 85 minutes I winced at the dated, misogynist, and gratuitously oddball humor of the playwright, delivered by an otherwise capable actor.
It was painful and it was embarrassing.
One of the great things about San Miguel de Allende is the number of Canadians who, at times, seem to outnumber their American Gringo compañeros. Because of this, we sheltered estadounidenses are exposed to playwrights like Norm Foster, for example, who otherwise go unnoticed in the US. Daniel McIvor is another.
Yet on this particular night, while the largely Canadian audience was roaring with laughter, I found the play so totally devoid of humor and pathos that I wondered if there just might be a distinctly Canadian sense of humor I couldn’t grasp.
The experience did have a silver lining, however. When I get home, these tickets are going up on my bulletin board to remind me that there really are plays much worse than my own first steps in this craft.
The slaughter of six and seven year-olds in Connecticut seems to have violated acceptable limits of violence we have lived with for decades. No one with a heart could fail to be moved by the ages of the victims, the horrific nature of their deaths by assault weapons, and that once again the shooter had untreated mental health problems. There was hardly a person with dry eyes when first hearing the news.
Politicians reassured the public. Schools announced new security procedures. First responders were praised, the victims memorialized, acts of heroism noted. Experts suggested ways to strengthen community and console children. Clergy offered prayers and assurances that the dead were in a better place. As self-appointed judges, the pundits ruled that for such violence there really can be no answer.
But I disagree. We have known for years what causes gun violence. Only if we as a nation have the political will can we stop it.
Since 9/11 nine thousand people are murdered with firearms each year. Twice that number die from gun accidents and suicides, racking up a gun-related body count of roughly 35,000 a year. Since Martin Luther King’s killing there have been roughly 1.25 million deaths involving firearms. This number is twice the carnage from all American wars combined – from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Afghanistan.
The US may no longer be first in education or standard of living, but we are first in guns. Our 280 million civilian weapons are enough to stop any invasion of terrorists, zombies, or aliens – violent fantasies that figure prominently in popular culture. We are fifth in annual numbers of firearm homicides. In contrast, India’s population of a billion has a gun homicide rate a tenth of ours. Japan, with its hundred million citizens, had only eleven murders by firearms in 2008 – compared to our nine thousand the same year.
So, to those who claim there are no answers: look across the ocean. Look across all the oceans for answers which pundits claim are unknowable. Such violence is unique in the Western world. Why is that?
From our favorite TV shows to computer games, to our military spending on endless wars – eventually we must face what a violent society we have become. Here everything is framed as a war: the War on Terror, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Christmas. Now we’ve managed to turn weapons of war on our own children. The gun lobby calls gun regulations a War on the Second Amendment.
A couple of years ago, just in time for Christmas, Activision produced an advertisement for its computer game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, with the subtitle, “There’s a soldier in all of us.” In the ad, playing to a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Let it Bleed” album, a variety of civilians – fast-food, hotel, and office workers, a young girl, and a short-order cook – blast, shoot, bomb, and kill their way through an alien landscape.
The marketing gurus had it just right. There is a soldier in all of us. One retired ATF agent explained to a journalist the “cool factor” of the Bushmaster used in the Connecticut slayings: “When I say cool, it’s because a lot of dedicated people … carried it in the military, [and] would like to shoot it. They see it from the aspect of reliving their days in the military.”
And while the President mourns children who could be his own, the drones he sends to assassinate suspected terrorists have already killed hundreds of children and innocent civilians.
Like a dark twist on Mr. Dickens, this Christmas season the weapons of wars past have come back to haunt us all. None of the comforting words and platitudes recited, and none of the bandaid legislation we will create to make armaments of war in civilian hands a bit more difficult, will change things until we realize what a violent and militaristic nation we have become. Only after we renounce our culture of violence will the terror we have unwittingly unleashed on ourselves finally end.
Stephen Grossman’s piece, “Capitalism allows Americans to prosper,” lists a number of technologies which benefited humanity or changed society in some way. In most of the piece, Grossman conflates the scientific method and engineering advances with Capitalism itself.
I would probably agree with him that Capitalism has survived this long because greed is an unavoidably innate human characteristic. People were selling things and accumulating money long before accounting, international banking, and commodity trading were invented centuries ago.
In the 21st Century alone we have seen Capitalism in a variety of forms: an American version with varying degrees of greediness; a version under Fascism; a post-war European social-democratic variety; and now Chinese and Russian versions laced with remnants of their old command economies. If Capitalism is more-or-less a natural human activity, the question should not be “whether Capitalism?” It should be “what kind?”
But let’s deal with Grossman’s nonsense. It was cavemen who first discovered fire and the arrow. It was Communists who first sent a cosmonaut into space. Textiles, pottery, bronze, the wheel, the fulcrum, chemistry, navigation, celestial observation, agriculture, and many other sciences and technologies – all these were discovered or developed long before Capitalism became the religion of “Objectivists” like Mr. Grossman. If greed is an innate human characteristic, so is curiosity and laziness – the true mothers of science and technology.
Grossman claims that “the most rational people in any industry, company, or job selfishly pursuing their own happiness, increased everyone’s productivity vastly more than in any society in history.” To the stunted child workers of Fall River inhaling textile fibers, or the coal miners of Kentucky living half a life to profit someone else, this type of “productivity” is not something – to use Grossman’s own language – that a rational person would objectively choose for himself.
Indeed, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries – in which workers were exploited to such a degree – described nicely by Dickens and others – that they were kept in perpetual poverty; or lived “short and brutish” lives precisely because of the nature of piecework or industrial employment; or that the environment was polluted to such an extent – which led to alternate economic theories, revolutions, reforms, regulations, and the compromises we see today.
In contrast to the industrialists of the 18th and 19th century of which Mr. Grossman is enamored, today we know that our natural resources are finite. The capacity of garbage dumps, fuel supplies, water, minerals, even the capacity of the earth to deal with carbon emissions – everything is finite. And yet the main users and abusers of these resources produce products of questionable utility with dangers and expensive disposal costs like there is no tomorrow – and these costs are usually borne by society, not the companies producing them. A good example is our own PCB-contaminated harbor.
For Grossman there does not seem to be any middle ground. “Do you want Stalin… or Steve Jobs?” he asks. Now that we have discovered that many of Steve Jobs’ iPads were produced in Asian sweatshops, simplistic rhetoric like this should be tweaked to ask instead: What kind of Capitalism is acceptable?
Yesterday I caught the 2012 Culture*Park Short Plays Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I had the best ten hours. A few people from my playwriting group and a few friends were there, some of whose plays were being performed. My son met me toward the end of the marathon, seeing the kind of thing that has captured the old man’s fancy. Last night all was right with the universe.
As with anything, some plays had rough edges, but most were pretty good and quite entertaining — and some were excellent. As a beginning playwright, I learned a few things from several of them. Those that really connected with the audience’s emotions were those I paid particular attention to:
Bad Coffee by novelist, poet, director and playwright Pat Hegnauer depicts a novelist’s character haranguing her to promote the book and keep alive the world she has created. Hegnauer writes poetically, creating believable, moving and quite humorous dialogue. At the end, the writer’s character succeeds in keeping her world alive, something we of course have been rooting for all along. The takeaway for me was that powerful, moving language is often sufficient to carry a short play, especially if you really love your characters and don’t want to torture them too much.
Gin and Ashes by poet/playwright Kim Baker is the story of a daughter who has come to the hospital to obtain durable power of attorney for her terminally-ill mother and instead resolves a few mother-daughter issues. The characters are sparingly painted, yet we feel we know them. How does Baker do that? Playwrights can construct elaborate biographies for characters but, in the end, it’s the writing, not the detail, that makes them real and makes us love them.
How Kim Sa-Rang Got Her Name by Will Arbery is the story of a child who has been left to starve by negligent parents. Her desperate entreaties first appeal more to reason, then become more desperately emotional. Perhaps the writer’s artifice is easily-enough recognized, but it sure succeeds.
Wish by Kelly DuMar is the story of a woman who comes to a room in a convalescent home to visit a father who years ago raped her, leading to the birth of a child who then was taken from her. It compresses a life of pain into the thimble that is a ten minute play. The protagonist comes to confront her father, but all he can do is babble. The symbolism of her stealing his watch at the play’s beginning, then placing it back on his wrist at the end of the play, was just the right touch. The resolution is that, though she would like to steal back a lost life, she now accepts that she can never get back that time.
There were many more I loved, including a side-splitting, funny encounter between two drunken Bruins fans, a surprisingly poignant cooking lesson by a refugee, a tale from the Holocaust, a wonderful first play by a talented theater student, various studies of relationships, a wickedly funny, cynical piece on political campaigning, and several others. How great that New Bedford has Culture*Park!
In your latest piece, “The new Greatest Generation,” you write: “… And here’s the most remarkable thing: Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them… we need to recognize the contribution that this new generation of veterans can make to our nation… we don’t need to be nostalgic about the Greatest Generation. It’s right here among us.”
We are a highly militaristic nation, often given to outright worship of the military. Liberals frequently go out of their way to demonstrate they have no problem rallying around the flag and “supporting the troops.” It’s in our culture.
What I take issue with in pieces like this is that Americans should be complaining about what is asked of the military. Low-level soldiers should be too. It was shocking – and necessary – when Stanley McChrystal blasted the incoherence of the war in Afghanistan. But somebody had to do it. Your new “greatest generation” isn’t doing it for the most part.
I am of the same generation you are. In my view, the “greatest generation” is still the citizen-soldiers of WWII who fought a war that was less morally ambiguous than all the many wars that followed it. The soldiers you praise today as “the greatest generation” are largely victims of a rotten economy who have found a new profession in the military. Surely, as a professor, you have noticed the demographic tilts that have started to manifest themselves in the makeup of the military. They are no longer the sons and daughters of every American family, and they no longer represent all regions of the nation equally. In a very disquieting sense, the military has become a new class of centurion-mercenaries.
I have no doubts that many of the men and women you encounter have a part to play and skills to offer the country. But so do all the rest of us. Today is Thanksgiving, not Veteran’s Day, not Memorial Day, not Independence Day – not one of the many days we already pray at the shrine of militarism.
Why do idealists vote for losers? Or: Why I didn’t vote for Obama.
For the last two years we heard we had a choice between two totally different candidates from two vastly different political parties, with two completely different roadmaps of where they wanted to take the country. If the Republicans had won, said the Democrats, there would have been a virtual Armageddon for the Middle Class, with the destruction of the world as we have known it since FDR and the precipitous rise of sea levels because of global warming. And if the Democrats had won, so the Republicans said, the real Armageddon would occur because Obama actually is the Anti-Christ. Either way, the election was framed in the most extreme terms by both parties as a last ditch effort to save the country — if not Western Civilization and the planet — from evil. There are only two views allowed in American politics, hence only two evils. And what sensible person wouldn’t vote for the lesser of them? But each time we do, we predictably get — evil.
In one corner we had the Republicans, a party 91.5% White — a party that reviles gays, atheists, civil libertarians, Muslims, undocumented workers, the French with their baguettes and 35-hour work weeks, foreigners in general, abortion, contraception, NPR, Subarus, quiche, Keynesian economics, gun control, environmental and consumer protection, the social safety net — and which rejects science, evolution, and climate change — instead embracing a hodgepodge of religious fundamentalism, Ayn Randian “Objectivist” worship of individual greed, Austrian/supply-side economics, American and Israeli Exceptionalism; and which every year talks about increasing the military budget, beefing up an already-bloated security state, putting more people in prison, disenfranchising as many young and minority voters as it can, deporting as many Latinos as possible, and rollling back civil liberties to Soviet era standards. This was their idea of Hope and Change.
The “new” Republican party has been rightly viewed as frighteningly extremist by even traditional Republicans, but this ignores the fact that it has been extremist throughout the life of most Boomers — dating back to Goldwater, to Patrick Buchanan and, yes, even Saint Reagan. To add a little perspective, in 2011 births from minorities overtook those of Whites. For the GOP, then, 2012 was the Last Hurrah for the Defense of the White Man, Western Civilization, Christianity, and traditional values before demographic Armageddon — and for many Republicans, the real one — arrives. Its Birther obsession with a “Muslim” “Kenyan” could be explained by the racist fears that grew the KKK to such huge numbers in most of the Red states. But this was the last election in which Republicans could woo exclusively White voters. As even Republican pundits now acknowledge, at some time very soon the Republican tune will have to change. Many of the Tea Party faction are older, and hate tends to pop blood vessels. Demographics are not on the Republican Party’s side, though they seem unwilling to change their “core values.” Instead, next time they’ll have a few brown faces delivering the message.
In the other corner we have the Democrats, a party 66.2% White and arguably more representative of American demographics in general, led by a newly-reelected President who not only hobbled himself in the first two years of his Presidency by choosing a muddled middle road that frustrated friend and foe alike, but who is still opposed by the same obstructionist Congress that still has not discovered either moderation or compromise. Obama’s second term will look remarkably like his first.
My Liberal friends wail: if only the Republicans would let Obama make the changes we voted for! But this is self-deception, something I succumbed to myself. In his first two years, the new President had a Democratic majority in Congress, but neither his Congressional majority nor the President himself showed much enthusiasm for their mandate or any intention of fulfilling campaign promises. Why was that? It’s important to consider what the Democratic Party really is today to understand why it happened..
Quite the opposite of the Republican caricature of “Socialist” Democrats, ever since the Reagan era the Democratic Party has moved consistently to the right on most economic issues. Bill Clinton’s “centrist” Presidency brought us deregulation of the financial industry, globalization, outsourcing, dismantling of many programs for the poor, and drug enforcement programs that tripled incarceration of the poor and minorities. His Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, saw nothing wrong with exporting a million IT jobs to India, though Reich sings a different tune today. The Democratic Party has participated in, and been equally culpable in, the dismantling of the Middle Class, long before Obama took office. Since then, the Wall Street and Motor City bailouts — with their “trickle-down” benefits to Main Street while failing to help mortgage owners directly — have predictably yielded unimpressive results. Pumping money into banks while not requiring them to lend it out has predictably resulted in a lackluster recovery. And with all the money tied up in banks, wars, and debt to pay off past wars, the stimulus projects created were insufficient to create enough jobs. So when the chips were down, Wall Street and the Defense industry turned out to be more important to the Democrats than Main Street.
We’ve seen the Democratic Party’s “new” neo-Liberal embrace of globalization and the military power to enforce it numerous times. The civilian body count from Republican war hawks in Iraq was a match for the Democrats’ civilian carnage in Viet Nam. Most Congressional Democrats have consistently supported wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, and have no real objection to another one in Iran — though you’d hardly believe it from the DNC convention, at which they positioned themselves as an anti-war party while simultaneously defending “surgical” drone attacks, SEAL raids, and trumpeting their militarism. If only Drone Wars really were conducted by surgeons instead of butchers.
In foreign policy and civil liberties, the President and the Democratic Party has as shameful a record as the Republicans. Guantanamo is still open. Threats of war on Iran, sanctions, and Congressional letters and resolutions for consumption by AIPAC, WINEP, and wealthy pro-Israel donors flow as easily from Democratic mouths as Republicans. Whistleblowers are more likely to face persecution under Obama than under Bush. As during the Bush era, American vetoes at the UN protecting Israel for war crimes mirror Russia’s protections of Syria. Torture is still used by the CIA and the military and, as a professional (or personal) courtesy, the Obama Administration announced recently that no one in the CIA would be prosecuted for deaths that occurred during torture under any administration. It is quite likely that the next Secretary of State will be John Kerry — a fan of war in the Balkans and Libya. Not much has changed from the Bush years.
You call this Hope and Change?
Many Democrats, not just Progressives, believe the President and the party simply lacked courage, backbone, brass, cajones. But all that’s changed, now! Speeches at the DNC by Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, and Deval Patrick advanced this notion while crowing that the party has rediscovered its bravery. But the problem is not with anybody’s cajones. It’s that Democrats today have turned their backs on Progressive values and acquiesced to neo-Liberalism, globalism, militaristic foreign policy, and they themselves preside over the dismantling of social programs and deregulation.
The President might have played “tough” on British Petroleum but, in a case of literally letting the foxes inspect the chickens, he let poultry companies replace FDA inspectors with their own. The Democratic Progressive Caucus, branded “Communists” by former GOP crazy Alan West, does not appear to have much value to its own party. Democrats like Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, and Ross Feingold have been turned out to pasture. Ted Kennedy’s seat was recently occupied by a Republican and this may be repeated if the President taps John Kerry for Secretary of State. Neo-Liberals, globalists, Blue Dogs and Dixiecrats are what Democratic voters have to chow down on, but it has been a meal set before them by their own party leadership.
During this year’s DNC convention, besides the well-scripted theme of “we’re all in this together,” viewers witnessed nauseating GOP-Lite displays of militarism (“we got Bin Laden”), defensive genuflection to the Gods of Entrepreneurship, conspicuous and exaggerated religiosity, American Exceptionalism (“USA, USA, USA”), and scripted pandering to pro-Israel hardliners. From the GOP’s perspective, the Democrats were vulnerable to criticism that they wouldn’t worship at all these altars simultaneously. What a miscalculation! But this is where the Democratic Party is right now. Perhaps it’s because, as one pundit suggested, the Democrats have had to embrace Left, Center — and Right — since Republicans have ceded everything except the Far Right. But for many Progressives and even some traditional Democrats, today’s Democratic Party most closely resembles the Republican Party under Eisenhower — with considerably more saber-rattling than the former general, and with much less a commitment to building infrastructure.
It was once true that American political campaigns could not be fought without millionaires. The Citizens United ruling changed all that. Now it takes billionaires. People like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers (for Republicans) or Haim Saban or George Soros (for Democrats) or powerful interest groups and PACs managed again to cherry-pick their respective party’s messages, ads, and platforms. Was it a coincidence that, during the election, in a month with an unprecedented number of mass shootings, the President explicitly pooh-poohed bans on assault weapons and controls on large ammunition purchases? The Democrats didn’t want to be in the NRA’s sights. Why did not one Democrat bring up Global Warming? While there was much talk of strengthening the Middle Class, there was not a peep about the poor. Where was the Democrats’ new-found backbone?
Another disturbing example of pandering was this year’s inclusion of “God” and “Jerusalem” language in the 2012 DNC platform. Despite failing a voice vote on the floor of the convention, the party platform was changed by decree of the President and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, through consultation with several AIPAC lobbyists who made sure the wording was just right. The vote’s results and the speaker’s teleprompter text announcing those results had already been scripted before the vote.
So here was the choice before the electorate:
Voters had a binary choice between two candidates who, between them, spent over $6 billion of PAC and wealthy donor money to deliver on promises to their true “constituencies.” Voters could choose between two — only two — candidates because, despite the spectacle of up to ten GOP candidates duking it out in the primaries this Summer, in the Fall there was curiously only room for two on the podiums offered by the major media and self-appointed election groups — which habitually ignore third party candidates they deem “non-viable.”
After the two candidates were chosen, both of them shook their Etch-a-Sketches vigorously. Positions were calibrated and adjusted precisely through polls and focus groups to present a calculated but misleading impression. What a surprise it was, then, for convention watchers to “discover” that Republicans actually love Hispanics and Medicare (even while trying to get rid of both). Who knew that the Democrats loved Judeo-Christian values and SEAL teams so much? Or that the Romneys were so poor they had to eat off an ironing board? Or that Democrats have recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided” capital all along?
Not everyone appreciates that our voting choices have been trivialized, limited, scripted, and sabotaged by numerous mechanisms designed to attenuate or neuter real democracy. Not everyone appreciates the insinuation that “third party” candidates “contaminate” elections — like Green Party Candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson or candidates from the American Independent Party, American Third Position Party, Constitution Party, Grassroots Party, Justice Party, Objectivist Party, Socialism and Liberation Party, Peace and Freedom Party, Prohibition Party, Reform Party, Socialist Party USA, Socialist Equality Party, and the Socialist Workers Party — and half a dozen more so-called “crackpots.” Have you ever heard anything in the press about any of them? Apparently the Fourth Estate doesn’t appreciate their intrusion into electoral politics either. Rather than informing voters, they censor all but what’s truly “newsworthy.”
Short of campaign reform, reducing term limits, repealing Citizens United, abolishing the Electoral College, using existing law to limit the concentration of ownership of newspapers and the media, keeping lobbyists and foreign nations out of our politics, making voting compulsory like jury duty, limiting the voting season to weeks instead of years, making it easier to vote, not harder, and presenting not just two but a multiplicity of ideas from a variety of candidates — we must stop referring to the quadrennial political theater we call Presidential elections as a sign of a healthy democracy. The repair of even some of these seriously broken systems should be a goal for both parties to embrace, but they have repeatedly failed to achieve even one of them. And why? Because when it comes right down to it, neither party really stands for democracy as much as self-preservation.
_
Everybody loves a winner._ In the binary American electoral system, you ultimately either vote for a winner or a loser, whereas in a parliamentary system winners and losers form coalitions and hash out their differences. In the American system, voting one’s principles is viewed as senseless. Better to vote for the most “viable” candidate whose chances of “getting something done” are greater than the “crackpot” idealist. Any other choice is just “throwing your vote away” — even if he lies or fails to live up to promises and rhetoric. This is just about the riskiest form of voting I can think of. Yet, despite all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of “getting something done” still persists.
Principles actually do count for something. Are we not moved by the passion of principles when we hear a convention or stump speech? How then can we so easily discount our own? Voting is not simply about choosing a winner or loser. It is also about registering exactly what we want in government, even if our candidate “loses.” The alternative is to simply acquiesce or rubber-stamp PAC-designed campaign promises — knowing at some level that they mean nothing after the election. Ultimately, betraying your own principles is the surest way to throw your vote away.
So as long as I’m throwing my vote away in what passes for electoral democracy, I’d rather do it myself — and not let some politician do it for me.
In the wake of this week’s election, Republicans have decided that they weren’t paying enough attention to Hispanic voters, and now they’re going to change all that. In his editorial “The Way Forward,” far-right columnist Charles Krauthammer writes: “The principal reason [Latinos] go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants.” A few paragraphs later he proposes that, by moving immigration reform ahead and advancing Latino candidates, Republicans can “counter [Democratic appeal] in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem.”
This is a simplistic if not paternalistic view, similar to the one Republicans have about Jews who, in their minds, are supposedly devoted to a single issue: Israel. But the recent election proved to be a wake-up call for Republican (and Israeli Likud supporter) Sheldon Adelson who put hundreds of millions of dollars into uber-Zionist candidates, seeing practically every one of them lose. Meanwhile, JStreet’s PAC provided political money and cover for more moderate, less Likud-oriented, Middle East policies – and all 49 of their candidates won. In Florida, where Adelson and the Republican Jewish Caucus and others attacked President Obama on Israel, the strategy actually backfired. 27% of Florida Jews said the ads made them more likely to vote for the President.
So if Republicans plan to use the same strategy on Hispanic voters, they may be in for a wild ride.
I will leave it to Latinos to speak for themselves, but I’m guessing that years of discrimination, working for social justice, and caring for one another are not unique to any one minority group in this nation, and no matter how much Spanish is heard at the next Republican convention, Latinos will remember who their friends have been. And let’s not forget that the Republicans have had their Herman Cains, Allen Wests and Mia Loves, but a sprinkling of Black faces has not and will not alter a party unwilling to part with its extremist values. Krauthammer says as much: “Ignore the trimmers. There’s no need for radical change… Do not […] abandon the party’s philosophical anchor” – an anchor that promises only: I got mine; you’re on your own.
As we get older we look back on the sometimes strange paths our lives have taken, the odd choices we have made, fortuitous and tragic events that have shaped it, and the many people we have encountered on the way who – sometimes without knowing it themselves – said something or did something that took us down a different road.
I am retired now and volunteer as a tutor at an urban school, and I was thinking about this, mainly in the context of the 5th graders I work with, and the group of volunteers who come twice a week, sometimes just to give the kids some attention. But then, of course, I realized how fortunate I myself have been to encounter the kindness of others.
Your father, Bernie, was one of the people who, probably without knowing it, changed my life. In the late Sixties I was a kid from a troubled family. Fortunately for me, at the end of the trolley tracks in Media, your father had opened a used bookstore. For me it was more than just an escape into reading. Every time I visited his store, your father would say this or that about a book, suggest something, or sell me a bundle of books he liked. And we would talk a bit. I still have many of the books: Toynbee, Malinowski, Malamud, literature, anthropology, history, politics, sociology, religion. He even sold me a Koran under protest once, describing it in somewhat unflattering terms. Without knowing it, your father opened up a world of ideas to me – ideas that were not even necessarily familiar to him – just by chatting with me, feeding and respecting the mind of some teenager he barely knew.
Our public and private sides are often different. I don’t know what kind of man he was to family and friends. Part of me hopes he was just as I imagined him: the quiet, humorous, cultured, self-deprecating pipe-smoker I encountered each time. He never seemed to have any customers, and he would joke that the store only existed because his wife needed him to get out of the house and do something. Your father’s Jewishness and the way he spoke of things may well have influenced me too. Coming from a family without religion, I became a Jew thirty-some years ago and, while not very observant, Jewish ethics express my values best and reflect what I have tried to pass on to my children.
The kindnesses of strangers – the seemingly insignificant, half-forgotten things we do for others – they are greatly underrated. They can literally change lives. You dad’s kindness changed mine. I’m so sorry I never got to tell him this personally.
Good grief. Who says that low-information voters are undecided? Bernard P. Giroux (October 15th) ticks off a number of reasons voters should reject Elizabeth Warren. Most of them rest on hysterical fact-twisting.
Giroux states that Warren’s political principles will require a “re-write of the Constitution.” As he should know, the last change to the Constitution was in 1971, to give 18-year-olds the right to vote. Almost all 27 amendments improved upon our civil liberties or closed electoral loopholes. The usual method of amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in each house of congress and approval by three-fourths of all states. So what’s the point of his nonsense? Hysterical fear-mongering.
Mr. Giroux questions why an accomplished, tenured professor would give up a five-digit salary in academe for a five-digit salary as a Senator. He seizes on the first notion that pops into his head: “One reason comes to mind: power,” he writes. I seem to recall, from the same citizenship class Mr. Giroux apparently skipped, that our political system is based on a consensus-conflict model, in which political parties are in perpetual political arm-wrestling matches with one another. So – yes – power is the reason both candidates are competing, vying, running, fighting – all power verbs, you’ll notice.
I don’t know what Giroux has been reading, but he uses the word “statism” too broadly and as if it were a filthy word. Statism, in its simplest and most obvious meaning, indicates that a country is not left to anarchy or mob rule but its day-to-day functions are managed by – a state. The current crop of Republicans may prefer that we all live in the unpaved boonies, home-schooling our kids, and receiving faith-based services. But the “Somalian option” – letting states fail their own people – is still fortunately not very popular.
There were criticisms from both the Right and Left on how the TARP program was implemented. But Giroux chooses to ignore the millions of jobs and homes preserved by government interventions and modest US economic growth in the face of serious economic downturns in the EU, Japan, and even softening of the Chinese economy. Many believe more domestic progress would have been made if the Republicans had not made demonizing a Black, Muslim, Kenyan, Indonesian, Communist president their only priority.
Giroux writes, “living under statist rules means that you are not free to be an American. The statist will control everything you do in life and make you subservient.” As Joe Biden would say, “Stuff!”. Mr. Giroux’s political buddies are more than happy to tell women what they may or may not do with their bodies. These buddies are not averse to increasing the size of the Department of Defense by a couple trillion dollars here or rolling out more domestic Homeland Security surveillance programs there – or starting unfunded wars of choice. Republicans love Big Government – especially when energy, defense and aerospace contractors are doing so well.
But the fact is: the choice Massachusetts voters have between Elizabeth Warren and her Indjun-bashing opponent is not about the size of the state, but about priorities.
And here Mr. Giroux and I agree. He asks “Would it not be better to be in a country where the government flows from the people?” Absolutely. That’s precisely what Senatorial elections are for – voters weighing in on national priorities. And early polls show that the priorities Elizabeth Warren is campaigning for are the ones voters like.
Jeff Jacoby speaking at the bima at Tifereth Israel
Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby Keynotes Annual Meeting
Jeff Jacoby, an award-winning columnist for The Boston Globe and a nationally syndicated journalist, was a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation on September 23, 2012. Although the choice of a speaker may have appeared somewhat controversial, Mr. Jacoby has a following among Federation member as well as in the general community. It became apparent by a good number of guests who came to hear the noted commentator. In the absence of Federation president Dr. Stuart Forman, Dr. Jack Belkin, Federation Vice-president, led the meeting.
The business part of the meeting opened with the Board elections. This year, along with reelecting a number of seasoned board members, two new members were added to the Board roster, Meg Steinberg and Abrah (Salk) Zion. Rabbi Barry Hartman installed the new and reelected Board members with his inimitable mix of humor, advice, and good wishes. He noted that While Meg Steinberg and her husband Barry are newcomers to the area, having moved to Marion two years ago, Abrah Zion comes from a long-time New Bedford family. Following her family’s history of communal involvement, Abrah has been actively involved with the PJ Library program of the Jewish Federation. Federation executive director Olga Yorish opened her remarks by acknowledging the passing of two very special women, Shulamith Friedland and Rubye Finger who will be missed greatly by the Federation and the whole Jewish community. She then gave an overview of Federation’s past year’s activities, stressing the central theme of working in collaboration with other Jewish organizations in the community, as well as with other religious and civic organizations in New Bedford. “We had a challenging campaign last year and worked very hard to maintain our programs and allocations on the same level,” said Yorish, adding that she was looking forward to working with Ellen Hull again on the 2013 campaign. Ellen Hull kicked off the 2013 annual campaign whose theme “ordinary things” was coined by the Jewish Federations of North America. “We promise to do more and to work differently to keep up with the changing communal environment,” said Hull (see page 3).
Rev. Pam Cole and Rev. David Lima with Jeff Jacoby
Mr. Jacoby built his presentation as a response and elaboration on the question raised by Ambassador Michael Oren in a Wall Street Journal article “What happened to Israel’s reputation?” “Why has Israel’s image deteriorated?” asks Oren in his article. “Why have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? Especially now, after nearly two decades of the peace process in which Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths to end its conflict with the Palestinians.” To these questions, Mr. Jacoby offered his controversial answer, which he first suggested on the Globe’s opinion page on May 23, 2012. According to Mr. Jacoby, “The real answer is that Israel’s global standing has been debased not despite the “peace process,” but because of it.” Following the presentation, Mr. Jacoby answered a number of questions from the animated audience. The meeting was rounded up by a scrumptious dessert reception.
On Sunday, September 23rd, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby gave a talk at the Greater New Bedford Jewish Federation. As a member of the community, I was there to see if he would blast Jews for voting Democratic and pitch the Republican Party (he writes that God is a Republican); or if he was going to take potshots at multiculturalism and secularism and talk about the primacy of “Judeo-Christian” values – or if he was going to hop on the recent Muslim-bashing bandwagon – all points of view he regularly flogs in his Globe columns (website http://www.jeffjacoby.com). But this particular evening he chose another subject: selling the One State Solution.
Before I go on, I should point out that I agree with Jacoby on a One State Solution – though only because Israel has now taken so much Palestinian land that the Two State Solution is dead. Coming from an American, it should come as no surprise to say that a single, secular, democratic state is not only best, but is now the only practical solution to packing 12 million people into a space the size of New Jersey. Jacoby would consider this view antisemitic. Yet he sees nothing wrong with forcing Jewish law and ethnic privilege upon a substantial (and some say, only temporary) minority. Besides, there are many ways that Jewishness and democracy can coexist without requiring a quasi-religious settler state. Jewishness seems to be alive and well in the United States. We’ve also had 64 years to see what Zionism has become.
Jacoby started his talk, “Whatever Happened to Israel’s Good Name?” by asking if anyone remembered when the media actually loved Israel. Hammering away at the theme of how the media and forces of delegitimization have now conspired to “demonize” Israel, Jacoby asked the friendly audience if they remembered when LIFE Magazine had described Israel as a little nation “struggling to survive.” Well, not any more, he lamented.
He pulled out a copy of a special issue of LIFE Magazine from 1973, the “Spirit of Israel,”commemorating the nation’s 25th birthday with 92 pages of photos and articles, and held up his prop. Jacoby asked the Federation audience: Can you imagine the media publishing something like this today? Can you imagine them being concerned with Israel’s survival today? Jacoby was clearly preaching to the choir, and most of the audience was rapt and nodding in agreement. What Jacoby downplayed was that the Israel of 1973 was under a Mapai government, the Prime Minister was a bit of a novelty as both a woman and an American, most of the kibbutzim had not yet been converted to corporations, Palestinian territory had not yet been completely expropriated, and messianic nationalism had not yet taken root in Israel. This was a very different Israel in 1973.
Next Jacoby mentioned Michael Oren’s Wall Street Journal article, “Whatever Happened to Israel’s Reputation? – How in 40 years the Jewish state went from inspiring underdog to supposed oppressor.” Oren’s piece invokes the same LIFE Magazine issue and extols democracy and vitality in Israel, but stops short of admitting to readers of the international business magazine that Israel has finally come clean and formally abandoned the Two State Solution – although this was the message that Jacoby and the Jewish Federation were selling that Sunday night.
Jacoby repeated points he had made in his May 23rd Boston Globe column, “Peace process harmed Israel’s reputation,” in which he wrote: “The concessions Israel has made in pursuit of peace are unprecedented in diplomatic history. (I found myself wondering what actual concessions he was talking about). In his piece, Oren claims the concessions consisted of: Recognizing the PLO as a diplomatic partner, creating an armed Palestinian Authority, twice offering the Palestinians a sovereign state, agreeing to share control of Jerusalem, removing every Jewish community in Gaza.” But this conflates the PA with the PLO, paints Palestinian policemen as an army, casts offers of an emasculated state as true self-determination, defines continued land theft in East Jerusalem as “sharing,” and offers a revisionist version of the Gaza pullout. Jacoby didn’t even bother putting a spin on Israel’s human rights abuses or its Occupation. For him and most of the audience, Israel has no warts – and it was still 1973.
He described Ariel Sharon’s unilateral pullout from Gaza as the work of “appeasers.” The “appeasers” in this case – Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz, who implemented Tokhnit HaHafrada (the Apartheid-sounding “separation plan”) – were members at various times of both the Likud and its spin-off, Kadima. Why would crafty old Ariel Sharon suddenly go soft? Well, he didn’t, said Sharon’s closest advisor, Dov Weissblas, explaining: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. […] When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Disengagement supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Indeed, the Two State solution is dead and still pickling in the same formaldehyde – although the U.S. State Department continues to maintain that Palestinians must sit down in direct talks with Israel, even as Israel denies it needs to. The “Roadmap” is all but forgotten and Israel’s hasbarists have a ready-made answer for why there is no “political process with the Palestinians” – We never had a partner for peace.
In much of his talk, Jacoby seemed to be implying that, during all the years that Israel claimed to be negotiating a Two State Solution alongside American intermediaries, this was actually the work of an evil “Mr. Hyde” appeaser – because the more sensible “Dr. Jeckyl” knew all along what his “red lines” were – and that if it were not for Likud-Kadima’s temporary insanity no one would have promised to actually honor such appeasement crazy talk. But now the world unreasonably expects Israel to live up to the yet-to-be-explained “magnanimous concessions” it made while temporarily insane, and the damned Palestinians continue to insist on a state. No, we must have it all. Reconciling Zionism and Palestinian statehood is a zero-sum game in which there can only be one winner. This was the gist of his talk.
No one should be surprised at any of these sudden revelations because the Likud’s platform for years has spelled out its “red lines”:
The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.
Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem.
The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.
The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.
That night Jacoby (and the Jewish Federation) were also selling the line that American Jews no longer want Two States. He cited figures he claimed came from the American Jewish Committee, which purported to show that 55% of American Jews are opposed to a Two State Solution. He called this a “healthy development” and added that a Palestinian state would be a big “mistake.” I was unable to verify his statistics on the AJC website or elsewhere. In fact I discovered not only the opposite, but figures strongly to the contrary. A 2011 Gallup poll reported that 78% of American Jews and 81% of American Muslims support a Two State solution.
Lies and damned lies notwithstanding, he was on a roll, at least with a large portion of the audience. Jacoby complained that, somewhere along the line, people had actually started seeing things from the Palestinian perspective. He claimed that the act of simply sitting down and negotiating with Palestinians “has undermined Israel’s claim to the land.” He dismissed Palestinian national aspirations as being based on antisemitism, citing an admission by Edward Said. From my reading, what Said actually wrote is that antisemitism has been an obstacle to Arab nationalism, not its basis.
Jacoby then argued that Israel is now in a 19-year retreat from the Likud’s “red lines” and that Israel should unapologetically reject Palestinian statehood and sharing of Jerusalem once and for all. He tried to paint these views as “shared U.S. values.” Perhaps they are shared with people like Mike Huckabee, but One State and a completely Judaized Jerusalem are not accepted United States foreign policy and (outside the Jewish Federation) not acceptable to most American Jews. Yet many in the audience nodded in agreement. Jacoby added that Israel’s backing away from these “red lines” has created “irresolution,” “weakness,” and “panic” which only encourages Israel’s enemies and diminishes Israel’s respect.
Jacoby again echoed the obligatory throwaway line (“Israel has never had a partner for peace”), and asked provocatively, What is peace, anyway? Peace means one partner in conflict must give up his aims. He continued, Besides, peace is over-rated. Israel can exist without peace. He cited statistics showing that Israelis are quite happy with their quality of life – presumably including the economic and moral consequences of being an occupier. The hardliners firmly expect Two Staters to give up this aim.
His time was up and he took questions. I held up a copy of the 2011 B’Tselem Human Rights report and countered, As long as we’re displaying magazines tonight, this one displays another dimension of Israel that it doesn’t like to address: human rights abuses, illegal detentions, assassinations, home demolitions, confiscation of land, and press censorship.
The audience booed, and Jacoby asked me if there was a question in there somewhere. I wrapped up, Yes, my question is this – why shouldn’t Americans, especially American Jews, be concerned about these issues? He brushed off B’Tselem as an antisemitic group generating “libel” and “propaganda” against Israel, and totally ignored the question of whether Americans and American Jews had a right to be concerned with Israel’s actions. Instead he talked about a flowering democracy, flowering press freedoms, and a flowering economy in Israel.
The combination of wilful ignorance and denial in the room that night spells a real danger for this community and others like it. The extreme form of Zionism represented by people like Jeff Jacoby and peddled by the Jewish Federation repeatedly (this was Jacoby’s second talk to the group) – one which is so at odds with both U.S. foreign policy and Jewish ethics – will forever wreck the chance of Israel actually living up to the bright and shiny 1973 LIFE Magazine image that many still cling to in their minds and hearts today.
The original mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org) was to track hate groups and violent extremists, mainly Southern white supremacists. Last year it still counted 1,018 such groups – but they were distributed all over the United States. In 2010 the FBI reported that violent attacks against Muslims had increased by 50% in just one year. Mosques have been burned – sometimes repeatedly, people murdered, beaten, and stabbed. The recent mass murder by a neo-Nazi in a Sikh temple highlights the fact that those who hate the most are among the least informed.
Which brings us to Wayne Atkinson’s piece, “Islam and Christianity contrasted” (September 25th). His piece was less a promised “contrast” than simply a recitation of talking points from the usual Muslim-bashing hate groups, many of whom were once in the Jew-bashing business but have now diversified.
Last week in France, for example, the French political “tea” party headed by Marine Le Pen proposed an anti-Muslim law which made wearing headscarves illegal in public. Their new legislation would also prohibit Orthodox Jews from wearing yarmulkes.
The same week, the French satire magazine “Charlie Hebdo” capitalized on the furor over the recent Islamophobic movie, running front and back covers lampooning the Muslim prophet. The back cover was simply pornographic but the front cover broke new ground by presenting hook-nosed caricatures of both a Muslim and a Jew in a single image. When the German satire magazine “Titanic” tackled the Vatican [correspondence] leaks last July, it depicted the Pontiff in various forms of incontinence. The issue was almost immediately pulled out of circulation and images removed from its website. Apparently some kinds of “free speech” are more free than others.
Here in the US, Congressman Peter King conducts his McCarthyesque hearings on Muslims, and some Republicans sound frighteningly like German propagandists of the 1930’s. We learn that the New York City Police has been illegally spying on Muslims not only in Gotham but in New Jersey. And in two dozen states so-called “anti-Shariah” legislation has been filed, authored by the same man, David Yerushalmi, who is one of a number of high-profile haters which include Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz – who frequently present their ugly views of a culture war between “Judeo-Christian” values and Islam.
Feeling obliged to defend the very foundations of Western Civilization itself, these cultural jihadis promote American Exceptionalism, an aggressive Christianity, and snipe at non-interventionists, “multiculturalists” and religious moderates. It is no coincidence that some of the strongest supporters of this supposed “clash of civilizations” are far-right Christians like those who made “Innocence of Muslims” – as well as far-right Jews who have funded films like “Obsession” and “the Third Jihad.”
So when folks like Mr. Atkinson grasp at simple answers to complex issues, they often end up grabbing the wrong thing. Islam is not the Arab world’s only feature. Look at a map of American military bases in the Middle East. One of the only nations that we do not have some type of military presence in is Iran. American foreign policy looms large in everyone’s mind – not only rioting mobs or Al Qaeda plotters – but in the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims who experience “surgical” drone strikes, unwelcome military operations, and our propping up repressive governments.
Anarcho-terror groups like Al Qaeda indeed create a stew of politics laced with Islamic supremacism. But then American ideologues infuse their politics with the supremacy of “Judeo-Christian values” (as if Buddhists or Hindus have no place in the national conversation) and tirelessly promote American and Israeli exceptionalism. During my son’s life, he has never known a year in which we were not bombing somebody – and it has cost us trillions. Now our cultural warriors are at it again – calling for jihad against Iran next Spring.
Republicans are fond of accusing the President of “throwing Israel under the bus.” This argument has drawn a few percent of the most hard-line Zionists toward the Republican Party, but according to a Gallup poll, 68% of American Jews still love Obama — and 80% of us vote.
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote in Commentary magazine: “Time and again, Obama has made clear both his lack of sympathy for the Jewish state and his keen desire to ingratiate himself with Arab and Muslim autocrats. The disparities in the administration’s tone and attitude have been striking. For the prime minister of Israel, there have been humiliating snubs and telephoned harangues. […] Yet many American Jews chose to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, telling themselves that he could be numbered […] among Israel’s strongest supporters. Only the wilfully blind could believe that now. And many American Jews are wilfully blind. […] Obama is unlikely to duplicate the 78 percent of Jewish votes he drew in 2008. But will American Jews turn away from him en masse? Don’t bet on it. F– the Jews, Obama’s advisers can tell him. They’ll vote for us anyway.”
Despite Jacoby’s delusional belief that American Jews are “wilfully blind,” what Jewish “leaders” have nevertheless been seeing is Obama delivering for Israel.
David Harris, of the American Jewish Committee, has endorsed Obama. In an editorial in June lauding the President, Harris notes that Romney’s “pro-Israel” strategy is to position himself as the opposite of Obama. But Harris asks: “What in Obama’s record on Israel does Romney Oppose?”
Edgar M. Bronfman, former president of the World Jewish Congress, endorsed Obama in an August 6th piece in Haaretz. Says Bronfman: “The reality is that when confronted with rhetorical attacks and efforts to sow doubts about his support for Israel, President Obama could have simply adopted the swagger and bravado of his predecessor. It would have been easy for President Obama to go on a speaking tour pandering to the Jewish community and those in America who love Israel. But that is not his style. President Obama is a thoughtful, decisive and pragmatic leader. He values substantive solutions over political gamesmanship. Forgoing the bluster and bravado of others, President Obama continues his practical and deliberate support for the State of Israel.”
Even though the President is accused of being “weak” on Iran, the Jerusalem Post carried an article a few days ago entitled “Obama has Israel’s Back on Iran,” quoting Israel hawks Dennis Ross and Alan Dershowitz, who speculated that the United States could be brought into a war against Iran. Former ambassador Martin Indyk went so far as to predict that the US will join an attack on Iran next Spring — just in time for the _Purimspil, _the Purim play in which the evil Hamaan and his 10,000 sons are hanged.
Republicans sigh that Obama hasn’t made a state visit to Israel, and they were especially miffed last week when Obama did not meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, instead appearing on David Letterman to campaign. Where are the man’s priorities? But in an August article in Foreign Policy entitled “Obama has been Great for Israel,” Colin Kahl observes that 7 of the last 11 presidents — including Truman, who recognized Israel, and Ronald Reagan, the Republican saint — never visited Israel, and Republicans Bush and Nixon only did so in their last years of office.
In fact, Obama visited Israel as a US Senator in 2008, even before becoming President, stopping at outposts like Sderot, two miles from Gaza, expressing his support and solidarity in the strongest of terms for Israelis, when he could have simply posed for photo ops at the Kotel or Yad Vashem. More to his credit, Obama refrained from displaying embarrassingly poor knowledge of history, law, and geography — like most of the Republicans who have slapped on a yarmulke and drawled “Shalom.”
Aside from big endorsements, Obama has not been just good for Israel. He’s been great — even while he’s been a disaster for the Two State Solution or failing to stop illegal settlements. Some of his first term accomplishments for Israel that have won him such friends in the Israel Lobby:
Asked Ambassador Charles Freeman to withdraw his bid for the National Intelligence Council after the Israel Lobby objected to him
Kept AIPAC/WINEP lobbyist Dennis Ross on from the Bush administration as a Middle East advisor — which meant that Obama…
Did nothing to apply leverage to Israel to stop illegal settlements
Did little to apply leverage to Israel to pursue a Two State solution
Didn’t give Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell much to work with, and didn’t bother replacing him after he resigned
Intercepted arms shipments to Hamas
Provided an additional $1 billion in funds for Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow missile defense systems (separate from the $3 billion a year in military aid and $9 billion a year in economic aid)
Made bunker busters available to Israel
Imposed a series of crippling sanctions against Iran
Vetoed any and all criticisms of Israel at the UN
Attacked the Goldstone report on the siege of Gaza
Defended Israel on the attack on the Mavi Marmara, even though an American citizen was killed
Opposed a joint PA-Hamas effort to negotiate with Israel – so that the two entities which represent Palestinians can’t even come to the table with Israel
Opposed the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to obtain observer status at the UN
Continued and initiated some very expensive wars in the Middle East which ultimately benefited Israel, in some ways even more than the United States.
Collaborated with Israel on Stuxnet and other computer virus attacks on Iran
Decriminalized the Iranian terrorist group MEK which has been working with Israel to kill Iranian scientists and carry out sabotage in Iran
Granted the most meetings with a foreign head of state (this according to Netanyahu himself)
Increased military aid to Israel every year since taking office, assuring approximately 20% of its military budget
Forged a close relationship with the Israeli defense and intelligence establishment (Ehud Barak said in a July CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer “I’ve seen many different administrations on both sides of the political aisle and I honestly feel that this administration has done more in regards to Israel’s security than anything I can remember in the past.”)
Improved Israel’s QME – qualitative military edge – by providing Israel with advanced technology unavailable to any other country, such as the Fifth-generation stealth Joint Strike Fighter
About the only thing Obama has not yet committed to Israel to-date is a green light to bomb Iran. Yet.
Many are surprised at how liberally American Jews vote, even on Israel, and how liberally we answer opinion polls. Two States? Justice for the Palestinians? Wow, that’s very liberal of you. But American Jews are not seriously challenged by two real states or real justice for Palestinians or real cessation of Israeli settlement building or real concessions in returning stolen land. Obama simply gives his Jewish constituency the lip service he gives to all Democrats, and we all get to feel good about how liberal we are.
So, with a stellar “for Israel” performance record like the one above, what’s really so surprising after all? There’s still no Hope for Two States, and still no Change to bring justice to an occupied people.
Since Iraq, Neoconservatives have deserved their reputation as not only wrong but criminally so. Yet somehow Charles Krauthammer has secured a permanent editorial spot in most of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, and that includes the Standard Times.
His latest piece is “Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine.” Krauthammer laments the demise of American influence and the halcyon days when, as in both 1953 and 2003, we could effect regime change any time we chose. He whines that we have fallen so far, so fast, that now we have to ask NATO to help wage wars. He’s upset that Russia has told the US to butt out of Syria and just ordered USAID “democracy builders” out of Russia itself.
Krauthammer says we need not apologize for anything we’ve done, whether Iraq or the 1953 coup in Iran that replaced an elected, secular government with a dictator, or for supporting a dictator in Egypt for 30 years; that we have selflessly intervened in the Middle East six times for no other reason than altruism; and that there must be no daylight between the US and Israel.
Krauthammer accuses Obama of being soft on the mullahs, of turning his back on the Iranian Green Revolution. But clearly a president who has thrown the harshest sanctions at Iran, unleashed crippling computer viruses on its infrastructure, and just taken the MEK (a terrorist group) off the State Department’s terrorist list, can hardly be regarded as “soft.”
The heart of Krauthammer’s argument is that, unless we force our will on the Middle East through military force and regime change, and expand military bases and influence, the resulting vacuum will be filled by angry mobs of Salafists. He forgets that Egyptians just had peaceful elections and that Libyans just threw militias out of Benghazi.
These are the same, stale Neoconservative arguments that got us into Iraq.
I was in Jerusalem with a peace group on June 4th, 2009, watching President Obama on television with a Palestinian Anglican priest. The priest’s take on Obama’s speech was essentially: “well, we’ll see.” His skepticism turned out to be justified because, despite Krauthammer’s rant, there has been no seismic shift in our foreign policy, only minor calibrations. The only real difference is that Krauthammer would engorge the Defense budget a few trillion dollars more than Obama.
To many liberals, Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo was a big disappointment, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
When the US invaded Libya, Democrats like John Kerry actually pushed for the war. So why is Krauthammer so miserable? Because it was accomplished at lower cost, with international cooperation, thereby repudiating Neocon verities. But, again, basic foreign policy never really changed. We are still in the regime change business.
What Krauthammer sees as American decline is actually the rise of other regional players, including nations like Egypt that have thrown off US-supported dictators. Turkey, an ally, is eager to do more than being a “yes man” for US policy, yet it was rebuffed by Obama after proposing a variation of a nuclear processing deal with Iran that the US had previously floated. Russia, now a global energy giant itself, is reasserting its influence in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. And neither Krauthammer nor Obama likes it.
Contrary to Krauthammer’s wishes, a superpower can’t use military power all day long. It must create real and lasting friendships. Because of the legacy of our “selfless” incursions, our list of friends in the region is rather small. We don’t yet know enough about Egypt; it doesn’t even have a constitution yet, but it did hold peaceful elections and remove both a dictator and a military junta without bloodletting. And the US-Israel relationship is as cozy as ever. In Cairo, to the students of Al-Azhar University, Obama said the same thing he said previously to AIPAC: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable.” Our relationship with Israel, which includes looking the other way at the crimes and injustices of a 63-year occupation and shielding Israel from accountability at the UN, doesn’t win many friends. But Obama hasn’t changed it.
So, for all Krauthammer’s tantrums, and for all the President’s oratory, little has altered the status quo. The US is as friendly as ever toward Israel, as tough on Iran as ever, and as ready to use drones and war as the hardliners from the Bush administration.
Over a week ago a combination porn/hate film appeared on YouTube. Among other things, it presents an image of a bloodthirsty murderer with odd sexual proclivities, in one scene depicting oral sex. Somehow the actors hired were deceived into thinking they were making an action film depicting George, the “Desert Warrior.” But after green-screen tinkering, scene editing and over-dubbing the actors’ dialogue, a 14-minute trailer called “Innocence of Muslims” became the final product, and it was not an action flick at all — but a hit piece on Islam and the Prophet Mohammad. The trailer was placed on YouTube just in time for the anniversary of 9/11, and the calculated outrage it produced contributed to the death of the American ambassador to Libya and three others.
As the strange case unravelled, it turns out that the film was the work of Egyptian Coptic Christian Islamophobes and American Evangelical Christian Islam-bashers who (contrary to their professed love of “Judeo-Christian” values) concealed their identities and initially blamed it all on Jews. All of the usual suspects, including Qu’ran-burning reverend Terry Jones, promoted the film. The haters were having their fun watching ugly, violent fantasies realized on the big screen. Yet even after their fake identities were revealed, they remained unapologetic. So what if a few people had to die to show how evil Muslims really are?
As children we may have heard the truism, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Well, it just isn’t true. And we’ll never get the chance to ask Ambassador Christopher Stevens for his opinion.
President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton condemned both the film and the resulting mob violence. Right wing pundits went on the offensive, defending “free speech” and “freedom of expression,” and condemning the “Muslim” President for capitulating to the Muslim hordes. One would have thought the Caliphate was about to take power in Washington or the Gates of Vienna finally overrun.
YouTube, which is run by Google, blocked the film in several Arab nations, but again the right wing pundits objected to even this symbolic measure intended to cool the outrage. And a symbolic, if not paternalistic, gesture it was. Google’s own techies certainly know that Arab techies are quite familiar with censorship and how to use proxy servers and other techniques to circumvent access limitations.
In the course of normal human interactions, when we have a dispute with someone, we tend to back off bit, try to defuse the situation, let everybody cool off. But Muslim-bashers are not normal humans. They double down on their malice. Like adolescents with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, they go for the grown-ups’ “buttons” — desperate for the attention and respect so few accord them.
So not to be out-done by les Amis, a French cartoonist recalling the great success of his Danish colleague, created some new, juvenile, cartoons of his own lampooning the Muslim prophet. The cover of Charlie Hebdo broke new ground by caricaturing both a Muslim and a Jew in a single image. The back cover, however, was reserved for — again, pornographic — images of the Prophet Mohammad in various poses. The quips in the cartoon bubbles (such as “And my buttocks? You like my buttocks?”) did not exactly provide much in the way of thoughtful insight — raising the legitimate question: exactly what kind of “free speech” was Charlie Hebdo trying to exercise anyway?
But again the “defenders of democracy” insisted that the Islamophobic show must go on. Tanks were deployed in French embassies throughout the Middle East and, just to make sure that the Muslim hordes back in France would not interfere with free speech, demonstrators were actually barred from protesting the cartoons! It was a Gallic triumph for intolerance, but a definite setback for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. And, well, so much for the national motto — not to mention free speech and freedom of assembly. Gratuitous hate trumped everything, especially reason.
Yet we continue to hear that we live in the West where freedom of expression and speech are about the only thing separating us from the Chinese (with whom we are major trading partners), or the Saudis (with whom we are major arms-for-oil partners) — or those damned Islamofascists who would have us memorizing long passages from the Qu’ran in kerosene-lighted madrassas. Western civilization must be preserved at all costs!
But hold on a moment. The West actually does regulate hate speech and practices selective censorship. Antisemitic hate speech and Holocaust denial is illegal in most of the European Union and in about a dozen European nations where no equivalent protection for Muslims exists. In Israel, which exercises military and civilian press censorship, commemorating the Nakba (the Palestinian “catastrophe” which recalls pogroms and the theft of their homes in 1948) is illegal. And recently, when semi-nude photos of the Dutchess of Cambridge emerged, the British press censoreditself and the Royal photos were not printed in England. And back in France French police raided a magazine that actually published them.
Here in the U.S., we think of our nation as the ultimate bastion of freedom. But here too censorship is alive and well. By one measure the United States stands behind 46 other nations in press freedoms. During the last several wars the U.S. has waged, the sight of military caskets or photographs of stricken soldiers has been censored. At most recent national political conventions, demonstrators have had to go into cages or cordoned-off areas euphemistically named free speech zones which our Founders probably never envisioned. And systematic surveillance and spying on virtually allAmericans’ electronic communications has a chilling effect on the willingness to exercise those once-Constitutionally-protected freedoms.
A recent example of how selectively Western censorship operates is the case of the German satire magazine Titanic, which ran a cover with the pope in a cassock with signs of urinary incontinence and the caption, “Hallelujah at the Vatican — the leak has been found!” — referring to a recent scandal over private Vatican correspondence that found its way into a book. A Vatican spokesman responded, “Titanic oversteps every measure of decency,” slapping a legal restraining order on the magazine, which was then forced to withdraw issues from newsstands and pull the images down from its website.
Censorship in the West is doing amazingly well._
Now I certainly don’t want the government locking me up for what I write — although it did so in the case of Tarek Mehanna. In another case, the government won a case against the Humanitarian Law Project, which only wanted to offer Kurdish rebels ways of resolving conflicts with the Turkish government. The California State Assembly wants to outlaw criticism of Israel on campuses. And I’d rather not have the government assassinate me just because it suspects I’m a dangerous radical. We don’t need any more censorship than we already have. It’s too easily abused.
But government censorship in the age of the internet may pale in comparison to the ability of multinational corporations to either censor content — or promote select content outside national boundaries. In a recent posting on Foreign Policy, Robert C. Post, dean at Yale Law School, wrote:
A looming question raised by Innocence of Muslims is how we should conceptualize the public function played by international companies like Google. On the one hand, they may render our constitutional principles all but irrelevant, since in a digital world private companies will wield the sovereign prerogative of effective censorship. On the other hand, the absence of constitutional restraint will authorize private companies to respond flexibly and pragmatically, in ways that the American government cannot, to the inevitable crises that will accompany an international clash of cultures.
Post makes a good argument that government censorship is largely irrelevant. In Europe, where Holocaust denial is outlawed, those so inclined can still find neo-Nazi propaganda here in the United States — just two clicks away.
And so I reluctantly defend the haters’ right to spread their vile propaganda. But I wonder what kind of sick society so willingly encourages it through repetition of lies until it starts to ring almost true. What kind of sick society gratuitously and habitually puts so much hate into satire, into magazines, into film, into blogs, into everyday discourse? As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I nevertheless harbor the fear that the damage to civil democracy by such extreme and pervasive hate speech actually outweighs the value of preserving the right to say such things.
So, to those of you — US, Danish, French, German, whatever — who think you are defending freedom by actually generating hate speech — you’re dead wrong. You’re simply looking for an excuse to spew some secret malice. And to those of you who think that governments should ban hate speech — you’re also wrong. Governments, even in the West, selectively choose what and whom they want to ban and none of us should willingly give away even one freedom more to any regime that toys with freedom so carelessly. Keeping in mind that government’s dominion is ultimately weaker than the Internet’s.
Finally, when it comes to hate speech, the issue really boils down to civility. Can a civil democracy survive when it ceases being civil? Can it survive when its minorities live in fear of relentless persecution by the Leitkultur? Not for a thousand years, and not for three hundred.
It seems like a day doesn’t go by without a mosque being blocked, burnt, or picketed by racists. An ignorant “patriot” murders a group of Sikhs because he thinks they’re Muslims. Republicans, besides their usual dismissal of Blacks, gays and Latinos, show a special fondness for demonizing Muslims. Congressman Peter King regularly convenes McCarthyesque show hearings on the Muslim Menace. And in two dozen states these haters have filed “anti-Shariah” legislation authored by a Jewish White Supremacist that serves no purpose other than to show their hatred of Muslims and to proclaim their preference for the “Judeo-Christian” way of life.
Although today some regard it a sign of an enlightened democracy to permit Muslim-bashing and hate speech of this sort to go unchallenged, let’s not kid ourselves: hate propaganda kills. The Holocaust and the thousands of attacks in recent years on Muslims and those perceived to be “soft” on them by the far right, such as in Norway last year, illustrate this all too well. But there was a time when the United States recognized the lethality of hate speech. In October of 1946, during the Nuremberg trials, Nazi propagandistJulius Streicher was hanged — not for murder but for his “journalistic” career devoted to demonizing Jews.
Colm O’Broin has compared some of Streicher’s antisemitic screeds to current Islamophobic talking points written primarily by Robert Spencer, who is a friend and advisor to just about every right-wing ideologue in the United States, not to mention the author of now-discredited FBI training materials. Many of the quotes O’Broin chose are taken from the Nuremberg trial transcripts or Streicher’s propaganda paper, Der Stürmer. In a few cases I have changed O’Broin’s wording or chosen a different quote. I have also added two points. Clicking on an author’s link will bring up the original quote.
Below are the main points both the Nazi antisemites and contemporary Islamophobes hammer away on. They are amazingly, eerily, disturbingly similar.
1. Muslims/Jews have a religious duty to conquer the world.
“Islam understands its earthly mission to extend the law of Allah over the world by force.” — Robert Spencer
“Do you not know that the God of the Old Testament orders the Jews to consume and enslave the peoples of the earth?” — Julius Streicher
2. The Left enables Muslims/Jews.
“… the principal organs of the Left, which in its [sic] hardened hatred of the West has consistently been warm and welcoming toward Islamic supremacism…” — Robert Spencer on jihadwatch.org
“The communists pave the way for him [the Jew].” — Julius Streicher
3. Governments do nothing to stop Muslims/Jews.
” FDI acts against the treason being committed by national, state, and local government officials, the mainstream media, and others in their capitulation to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, the ever-encroaching and unconstitutional power of the federal government, and the rapidly moving attempts to impose socialism and Marxism upon the American people.” — Freedom Defense Initiative, a Robert Spencer/Pamela Geller organization
“The government allows the Jew to do as he pleases. The people expect action to be taken.” — Julius Streicher
4. Muslims/Jews cannot be trusted.
” [Muslim] believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure.” — Robert Spencer
“In the Jewish lawbook ‘Talmud’ the Jews are told that the possessions of gentiles were ‘ownerless property,’ which the Jew was allowed to obtain through deceit and cheating.” — Julius Streicher
5. Recognizing the true nature of Muslims/Jews can be difficult.
“…there is no reliable way for American authorities to distinguish jihadists and potential jihadists from peaceful Muslims.” — Robert Spencer
6. The evidence against Muslims/Jews is in their holy books.
“What exactly is ‘hate speech’ about quoting Qur’an verses and then showing Muslim preachers using those verses to exhort people to commit acts of violence, as well as violent acts committed by Muslims inspired by those verses and others?” — Robert Spencer
“In Der Stürmer no editorial appeared, written by me or written by anyone of my main co-workers, in which I did not include quotations from the ancient history of the Jews, from the Old Testament, or from Jewish historical works of recent times.” — Julius Streicher
7. Islamic/Jewish texts encourage violence against non-believers.
“Deuteronomy 7:16 expresses that command to hate that Moses received at Sinai from the Jewish God Jahwe. It says: ‘You will destroy all the peoples of the earth, whom Jahwe will give into your hands. You shall have no mercy on them.” — inaccurate Biblical verse quoted by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer
8. Christianity is peaceful while Islam/Judaism is violent.
“There is no Muslim version of ‘love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you’ or ‘if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn to him the other also’.” — Robert Spencer in “Islam Unveiled”
“The Jew is not being taught, like we are, such texts as, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ or ‘If you are smitten on the left cheek, offer then your right one.” — Julius Streicher
9. Muslims/Jews are uniquely violent.
“(Islam) is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” — Robert Spencer
“No other people in the world has such prophecies. No other people would dare to say that it was chosen to murder and destroy the other peoples and steal their possessions.” — Julius Streicher
10. Criticising Muslims/Jews is not incitement to violence against Muslims/Jews.
“There is nothing in anything that I have ever written that could be reasonably construed as an incitement to violence against anyone.” — Robert Spencer
“Allow me to add that it is my conviction that the contents of Der Stürmer as such were not (incitement). During the whole 20 years, I never wrote in this connection, ‘Burn Jewish houses down; beat them to death.’ Never once did such an incitement appear in Der Stürmer.” — Julius Streicher
11. God-Bashing: The Muslim/Jewish God is not “our” God
It’s not enough to demonize a people and their religion. Ultimately, you have to blame their God. And in order to do that, you have to deny that their God is the same as yours. Hey, the Nazis did it. The Islamophobes have followed suit.
“In the same way, it is possible that the Qur’an and Islamic tradition present a picture of God so radically different from that of the Bible and Catholic tradition that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the proposition that they are the same Being in both traditions, apart from some minor creedal differences.” — Robert Spencer and this too
“Deuteronomy 7:16 expresses that command to hate that Moses received at Sinai from the Jewish God Jahwe. It says: ‘You will destroy all the peoples of the earth, whom Jahwe will give into your hands. You shall have no mercy on them.” — inaccurate Biblical quote by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer
12. People who defend Muslims/Jews are secret race-traitor followers
When it’s not sufficient to bash governments for failing to wage a pogrom on Jews/Muslims, you have to resort to name-calling. Progressive Democrats and others who refuse to demonize Muslims must be Muslims themselves, just as for Streicher the FDR administration had all become Jewish, as if by a bacterial infection. Streicher pre-dated Orly Taitz’s Birtherism and the Tea Party’s obsession with Shariah Law in his “What is Americanism?”
When it comes to Israel, we seem to be continuously inundated with Israeli hardliner views. The August 21st piece (“Cooling off Israel: Five ways to avert a strike on Iran”) by former chief of Israeli intelligence Amos Yadlin, curiously labelled “National View” since it hardly reflects an American view on the subject, was no exception. The “five” views in his article basically boil down to one: Israel can’t go it alone, so the U.S. should see that it is in “our” interests to bomb Iran for Israel, or at least threaten it with war. But while Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak may bluster about unilaterally bombing Iran, they first need to drag the U.S. into such a war. Why? Because they can’t even sell their war domestically.
The Israeli public is justifiably wary of such go-it-alone threats. A recent poll by Israel’s Dahaf Institute showed 61 percent of Israelis believe Iran should not be attacked without U.S. consent. Yadlin’s article, and those like it, bear the fingerprints of a massive P.R. offensive – by AIPAC stalwarts; the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren in a recent WSJ article; frequent Standard Times contributors Richard Haas and Charles Krauthammer calling for war; a recent article in the NYT by Uzi Dayan, former IDF chief of staff; a recent barrage of Israeli government “leaks,” including a “shock and awe” style war plan; speculations in Israel’s English-language newspaper, and elsewhere.
And both House Democrats and Republicans, as well as every Republican candidate up to and including Mitt Romney, have eagerly parroted the Likudnik line: Iran has the bomb; Iran presents an existential threat to Israel; Israel’s interests are American interests.
None of this is true. This is about nuclear hegemony: Israel’s.
Despite the alarm an Iranian enrichment program provokes, Iran does not yet possess either a nuclear weapon or a missile capable of delivering it. In fact, “recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” (NYT article by James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, Feb 24, 2012).
America’s intelligence agencies say: baloney.
Hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties would result from an Iranian response to an Israeli (and/or American) first strike. If Americans still have a taste for reckless wars after our many adventures in the Middle East, we could delude ourselves that the mighty American military could make quick work of Iranian missile defenses (Iran has a military budget of only $6 billion a year), but no one can predict Iran’s non-military responses. Would the Straights of Hormuz stay open? How would the rest of the world respond? Even a brief (unlikely) war would cost at least $40 or $50 billion, to be paid for by either Israeli – or more likely American – taxpayers who already shell out $4 billion a year to the highly militarized state.
But here’s an even better idea for averting another unnecessary war.
Israeli nuclear scientist Uzi Even suggests that Israel shutter its nuclear plant in Dimona and dismantle its own (approximately 200) nuclear weapons in exchange for Iran dismantling its program. After all, if we are concerned with nuclear weapons presenting an existential threat to the 7 million people in Israel, we should also be at least somewhat concerned that Israel’s nukes present an existential threat to the other 350 million people in the Middle East.
If the U.S. goal is not simply to ensure Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the region, an approach other than beating the drums of war is necessary. On the other hand, if this kerfuffle indeed is about preserving the Zionist state’s nuclear advantage and thumbing our nose at the rest of the world, well, then we’d better be prepared to pay the price for this madness.
The Obama administration is taking well-deserved heat for trying to control the Benghazi affair with shifting talking points. Obama’s opponents altered, perhaps even criminally, leaks of these talking points to score their own political points, but the administration’s own opacity, more than Republican forgery, is the real cause of its woes. Government should be more open.
Likewise, the IRS “scandal” may be an opportunity for Republicans, but again the administration shot itself in the foot by its obsession with secrecy. The spectacle of an IRS Commissioner taking the Fifth does nothing to inspire confidence. Yet all this is bipartisan political theater deflecting attention from real IRS scandals: approving, in the first place, 5014c status for groups that are obviously political; and conducting illegal wiretaps of those whose taxes it is auditing. Neither party has challenged either.
One of the minor scandals is the Obama administration’s spying on the Associated Press. Maybe it’s not a crime if the president does it (to quote Nixon). But, really, where is the bipartisan outrage regarding these (and other) violations of the Constitution? When did the Second Amendment become the only one Americans care about?
Speaking of trifling Constitutional technicalities, there is yesterday’s admission by the Obama administration that it has been assassinating Americans abroad. This has been known for some time, yet the administration doggedly defends its secrecy. But the American public deserves to know how the Constitution may be abrogated to kill one of us. Claiming “reasons of National Security” for everything is less a feature of a democracy than a police state. Again, both major parties have no objections.
Then there is the unprecedented crackdown on whistle-blowers and renewed domestic spying. Shortly into his first term it was clear that we had exchanged Tweedle Dumb for a surprisingly Nixonian Tweedle Dee. Obama has used the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to harass and intimidate not only right-wing groups associated with ALEC but also the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Fusion centers” proliferated and civilian police forces became militarized. We now have drone flights over Quincy that no one will explain. The conservative president who replaced the liberal candidate was willing to dismantle FDA chicken inspections but never had any intention of scaling down the Pentagon’s budget.
The Democratic presidency is in trouble, and the rest of the party is too.
Brimming with millionaires, billionaires, Blue Dogs, Blue Bloods, and old-time Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party (like the GOP) is little more than a way-station for lobbyists and business interests. Recently our own Lt. Governor resigned to become president of the Worcester Chamber of Commerce. Former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran is now a Rhode Island health care lobbyist. Former state Rep. Stephen Canessa resigned from the Legislature to go to work for SouthCoast Health System as its “legislative liaison.” Watching former Obama point man and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel trying to bust the teacher’s union and shut down neighborhood schools says much about the party today. A marginalized Progressive Caucus and a few earnest souls like Elizabeth Warren will never make the Democratic Party a voice for the 99%.
Much has been made of the Republican Party’s meltdown. It now seems that the cranks, the extremists, and the just plain dumb guys are being sidelined as the party grownups try to figure out how to position themselves in 2016. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem smugly content with their permanent move to the right. In 2016 both parties will field “moderate” candidates declared “viable” by a (biased?) press. Once again, voices of third parties will be sidelined. This means that heterodox political ideas and ideals will never make it onto paper, the airwaves, the digital world, or into the public conversation.
Is this attenuated version of democracy really what Americans want? With Citizens United, lobbying, PACs, billionaires, and 501c4 abuse, democracy is up for sale more than it has ever been in our history.
Short of the Democratic Party reforming itself there is one thing voters can still do: raise the bar, demand and vote for principled candidates, and vote your conscience – even if he/she is from a third party. Eventually we’ll get the change we had hoped for.
Inflating the significance of individuals and downplaying the power of political and social movements is common. Common, but wrong. “Camelot,” John Kennedy’s administration, is a good example of how a fantasy built around an individual often overtakes reality. We remember the haircut but forget that Kennedy pulled the nation deeper into Viet Nam and botched the Bay of Pigs.
Near the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death and now upon the death of Nelson Mandela, we see the same tendency to inflate the influence and power of these individuals, to ignore the social and political contexts, and to downplay their human and political faults.
Perhaps, with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s killing so fresh, Bob Unger can be forgiven somewhat for doing the same with Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. His contention (“Lincoln’s death robbed U.S. of reconciliation”) is that if Lincoln had lived the U.S. might have been spared Reconstruction and the culture wars.
It is fair to say that the humiliation of the South and the devastating effects of Abolition to its economy, based as it was on human trafficking, led to Lincoln’s assassination. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the slave population was actually greater than the white population. In Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, slaves represented 44%, 46%, 47%, and 48% of the total population. In Jefferson and Washington’s Virginia – in the Upper South – there was one slave for every two free whites.
Despite Mr. Unger’s contention, Reconstruction did not begin after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. It had begun some two years earlier. By the time of Lincoln’s death the South’s economy was in tatters and the rise of “terrorist” organizations like the KKK required a Federal response. The South’s “way of life,” not the political power of a racial elite, was at stake.
South Africa is a completely different story. White Afrikaaners were a miniscule minority (whites now account for 8% of the population) but they ran an industrialized economy and may even have had the Bomb. Mandela was the figurehead of a substantial national liberation movement – a movement of and by black South Africans. There was nothing like this among American slaves. In contrast, the War between the States was fought over tariffs, slaves (to be sure), but a variety of issues largely viewed as economic. The Civil War transformed the U.S. from an agrarian nation into an industrial one – and not only in the South.
The questions we should ask are: if Mandela had been murdered (like Steve Biko and many others) and had not been the figurehead of the ANC, would there have been another Mandela? Certainly. Because injustice would still have required a response.
And if Lincoln had lived, would he have created a national reconciliation movement that would have been able to erase the shock of the end of slavery for 8 million Southern whites? The answer is obvious as well: of course not. Pretty unlikely. And doubly unlikely that a single man could have pulled it off.
In a recent piece, American Enterprise Institute opinion-shaper Claude Barfield (“Encryption: the next battle between security and privacy”) wrote of the demands that spy agencies are making on tech companies to provide back-doors and weakened encryption.
Barfield poses the issue as a “conflict” between tech companies and government – not as one more violation of the 4th Amendment, which provides for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” – and not as something that an ordinary citizen might have an opinion about.
While Apple and Google are actually stepping-up their use of encryption, Barfield writes that FBI directory James Comey’s is demanding neutered encryption. Barfield repeats Assistant FBI director Michael Steinbach’s unproven assertion that terrorist groups are “going dark” with all this great, new encryption.
First of all, some facts.
Terrorist groups did not suddenly discover encryption after Edward Snowden spilled the beans on blanket surveillance of U.S. citizens. Long before ISIS, Al Qaeda often used couriers instead of cell phones and internet chatter. When Osama bin Laden was finally discovered, he was totally off the grid, as had been his practice for over a decade.
Jihadists understand technology – and its weaknesses – quite well.
9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta was an architectural engineer. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed had a degree in mechanical engineering. Two of the three founders of Lashkar-e-Taibi, the group behind the Mumbai attacks, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. Two thirds of the 25 9/11 hijackers were engineers.
One study by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog in the UK, which looked at 400 jihadists, found that an astounding sixty percent of Western-born jihadists have engineering backgrounds.
If you can build a bridge or fly a jet into the Pentagon, using encryption is a piece of cake.
Flashpoint Partners, an intelligence firm concentrating on Middle East terrorism, reported recently that “there is very little open source information […] that Snowden’s leaks served as the impetus for the development of more secure digital communications and/or encryption by Al-Qaida.”
In fact, jihadists were developing their own encryption software almost a decade ago – long before Snowden’s revelations in 2013.
“Asrar al-Mujahideen,” a PGP-like program launched in 2007, uses both public and private keys to securely send files and messages.
An October 2010 article in Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula”s (AQAP) English language magazine”Inspire” cautioned readers to use encryption.
And on February 7, 2013, right before the Snowden story broke, a new encryption tool, “Asrar al-Dardashah,” was developed, which allowed secure communications to be sent over Google Chat, Yahoo and other messaging services.
But aside from spy agency fear-mongering and lies there is a better reason to reject back-doors in OUR computer products.
The recent Chinese attack on US government computers, which compromised four million federal employees’ personal information, is precisely why weakened security should NOT be baked into the security cake. If a sophisticated and determined nation-state can attack computer security, why design it with vulnerabilities?
Joseph E. Stiglitz writes in his new book, and in a recent article: the US is first in income inequality in the world, and it’s getting even worse. Social mobility is greater even in “old Europe” than here. The six Wal-Mart heirs own as much as the bottom 30% of the entire United States! So much for the “American Dream.” Kids, go to grad school abroad, then stay there.
Tea Partier Linda Rapoza’s recent piece on school diets was just plain bizarre.
The fact that Democrats themselves squashed the issue didn’t stop Rapoza from fulminating at the “bake sale ban that never was” and using it as a springboard to unleash her kooky critique on liberal, socialist, and communist (I wish she’d try to keep them straight) “attacks” on individual civil rights.
Of course, when it comes to the Tea Party’s positions in support of government surveillance, attacks on a woman’s Right to Choose, sponsorship of anti-religious (anti-Muslim) laws, or intrusions into bedrooms via anti-gay positions, their views are diametrically opposite to those of most Americans: civil liberties be damned, coercion is warranted to move forward our conservative social agenda!
Rapoza whines about “Big Government’s” intrusion into religion. But again, the truth is quite the opposite. Instead, under Republicans there has been massive intrusion of [their – not my] religion into government and the public sphere, by politicians who seem to represent, or at least pander to, mainly a Christian constituency.
Dipping not just a toe but a whole leg into conspiracy theories, Rapoza claims Executive Presidential Order 13575 is part of a New World Order conspiracy (driven by the communist United Nations) to turn the future into an Orwellian nightmare. When you read this nonsense, take a deep breath. This is typical of who is running the Republican Party nowadays. In reality Order 13575 simply coordinates the various cabinet level organizations to better serve the 16% of the US population who live in rural America – basically the same principle behind DHS coordinating dozens of US security agencies. Glen Beck may be gone, but Rapoza is still spinning the same kind of chalkboard fantasies.
Rapoza goes on to elaborate her “1984” vision of the future, and it makes me wonder if she has a backyard bunker to go along with her bunker mentality. What she seems to find most nightmarish are government “approved” cars, trains, highways, and food. What she seems to prefer is a future in which poultry inspections are left to agribusiness, passengers fly in airplanes without inspections (er, “approval”), and highways are privatized. “Approved” versus “regulated.” It’s just a word, but one that demonstrates demagoguery, not faith in reason.
Rapoza goes on to claim, again without elaboration, that preparations for this nightmarish future are “already in the pipeline.” Really? I haven’t seen such disordered though since watching Mel Gibson in “Conspiracy Theory.”
I wanted to find out what the kerfluffle over “creeping Shariah” was all about. After all, this is a Republican worry in thirteen states which have introduced anti-shariah laws. And apparently it’s more serious than even a global economic Depression.
So I went to a blog by the promising name of “Creeping Shariah” and its matching Twitter feed for some hard answers.
The website promised to easily locate the numerous recent cases of jihad being waged on our very shores. In Massachusetts alone there were forty incidents of jihad, as those sly Mahometans managed to finesse a Muslim holiday in Cambridge, plotted to build a cemetery in Belchertown, and the Muslim Brotherhood had apparently consulted with Whitey Bulger to get governor Duval Patrick to build a mega-mosque in Bah-stahn.
Those armed-and-dangerous ladies from Code Pink were raising money for Hamas, CAIR was at it again, trying to help out some headscarf-toting Muslim terrorists at a Boston pharmacy school, Yale University was cozying up to faculty jihadis by not re-inviting an Islamophobe to come back for a conference, and some crazy Mooslim women troublemakers in Kansas City wanted to wear Islamic-style bathing gear in a pool. The fate of our pools, our children, and our very nation were at stake. And all this trouble from a bunch of Muslim women, no less.
Beside the fact that New Haven and Kansas City are not exactly in Massachusetts, most of the other “incidents” reported were endlessly-recycled hate blurbs from people like Pamela Gellar and Rick Santorum – which, I will grant you – do constitute a sort of domestic terror. But most of the postings were over a year old. Maybe getting all that “news” onto his website was just too overwhelming for him. HTML can be so wordy.
But now I was really curious. Incidents of creeping shariah and jihad were obviously so numerous, so dangerous, and so troubling that perhaps a Twitter feed could provide better real-time coverage of the onslaught. And surely the feed would corroborate a pattern of Islamification of our beloved heterosexual, fetus-friendly, pro-capitalist, White-loving, brown-skin-hating, Ayn Randophilic, Judeo-Christian-based culture! I went online looking for more answers.
And answers I found. More attacks on Keith Ellison, indignation at a Toronto school which tried to accommodate a Muslim student who wanted to pray quietly in a corner of its library, and the unmitigated gall of the town of Farmington, Michigan, to sell an unused school to an Islamic cultural association. Truly disturbing stuff, indeed!
Elsewhere in the tweets were some on a Republican congressman (Wolf, R-VA) going after CAIR via the IRS, Judicial Watch going after CAIR, and disappointment that CAIR could sue a former intern who stole tens of thousands of documents for his Islamophobe father, Paul Gaubatz. I made a mental note to give CAIR a donation.
There was also a speech by Geert Wilders at the Cornerstone Church in Nashville, part of his “Warning to America” event, which concluded with the words:
You and I, Americans and Europeans, we belong to a common Western culture. We share the ideas and ideals of our common Judeo-Christian heritage. In order to pass this heritage on to our children and grandchildren, we must stand together, side by side, in our struggle against Islamic barbarism. That, my friends, is why I am here. I am here to forge an alliance. Our international freedom alliance. We must stand together for the Judeo-Christian West. We will not allow islam to overrun Israel and Europe, the cradle of the judeo-Christian civilization.
Wow. Now I get it. Only Leni Riefenstahl was missing from the picture. Or was that Hermann Goering?
I mean, thank goodness I’m a Jew! It wasn’t that long ago that Nordic types like Wilders were saying the same thing about my people. Now with the cool kids expanded to “European Judeo-Christians” and not just Christians anymore, I could join a select club and kick around Muslims if I wanted to – rather than just being a Yid whose faith and culture was once characterized by Nazis exactly as Wilders paints Islam at churches and synagogues today.
I’d get with his program, but all I’d have to do is stop trying to be a mensch. That and the stench Wilder’s words would leave in my mouth.
According to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report, Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. To date, the United States has provided Israel $115 billion in military assistance. Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel receiving benefits not available to any other countries; for example, Israel can use some U.S. military assistance both for research and development in the United States and for military purchases from Israeli manufacturers. In addition, all U.S. assistance earmarked for Israel is delivered in the first 30 days of the fiscal year, while most other recipients normally receive aid in installments. In addition to receiving U.S. State Department-administered foreign assistance, Israel also receives funds from annual defense appropriations bills for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense programs.
The Obama Administration’s FY2013 request includes $3.1 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel and $15 million for refugee resettlement. Within the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s FY2013 budget request includes $99.8 million in joint U.S.-Israeli co-development for missile defense.
On March 5, 2012, House lawmakers introduced H.R. 4133, the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. If passed, this bill would, among other things, allocate additional weaponry and munitions for the forward-deployed United States stockpile in Israel; provide Israel additional surplus defense articles and defense services, as appropriate, in the wake of the withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq; expand Israel’s authority to make purchases under the Foreign Military Financing program on a commercial basis; encourage an expanded role for Israel within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including an enhanced presence at NATO headquarters and exercises; support extension of the long-standing loan guarantee program for Israel, recognizing Israel’s unbroken record of repaying its loans on time and in full; and require the President to submit a report on the status of Israel’s qualitative military edge in light of current trends and instability in the region.
The Washington Post reported last year that Israel receives $9-10 billion a year in economic loans (ESF funds) guaranteed by the U.S. Government.
The U.S. War Reserves Stocks for Allies program from the 1980’s allows the US to store weaponry in Israel, and to “lend” it to Israel. Some of this weaponry was used in Gaza in 2008. Basically, this is a military welfare program.
A 1984 Christian Science Monitor article reported that in that year Congress passed a law sponsored by Alan Cranston and –_ note the name_ — Joe Biden which essentially forgave Israel a $9 billion debt by giving it the funds to cancel the outstanding debt.
And periodically ESF and military debts to Israel are simply forgiven or written off. This is money we cannot afford, but Israel receives more bipartisan largesse than the American working poor. The Congressional Research Service estimates we have given $130 billion to Israel over the years.
Israel maintains military control over a vast disputed area in the West Bank. If we translate it into American terms, it is like the US occupying Mexico and Central America. This costs serious money.
But last October ( 2011), Israel actually cut its own defense spending by $850 million – 5%. How can it afford to do this ? Because we, the American taxpayers, are picking up the tab.
Nowadays it’s difficult to criticize Israel without being called an antisemite. Somehow a revisionist definition of antisemitism has replaced racist generalizations of Jews. Now antisemitism is defined as any critique of Zionism, criticism of Israel’s occupation, land theft, rampant racism, civil rights abuses, press censorship, or noting similarities with the old South African Apartheid system. Despite the hasbarists’ best attempts to quash criticism, the fact remains: Israel is a rogue state with plenty to dislike.
Illegal settlements, land theft
Settler violence
Use of martial law to appropriate land, which is then turned over to settlements
Arrests without warrants
Detentions without trial for tens of thousands of people, many children
The killing of 6400 Palestinians since 2000
The killing of of over 1000 civilians during the siege of Gaza
Using children as human shields
Bombing schools, hospitals, ambulances, water and sewage facilities in Gaza
Using white phosphorus bombs on humans
Kidnappings, like the recent case in the Ukraine
Assassination teams, like the one in Dubai
The killing of 8 Turks and one American citizen on the Mavi Marmara
Resale of joint US-Israeli military technology to China
Spying on the United States
Killing and wounding of international protesters and journalists
Impunity Israel enjoys at the UN — like Syria enjoys thanks to Russia’s veto
Meddling in US politics and foreign policy by pro-Likud AIPAC, WINEP, JINSA, ZOA, and others, whose politics are not mainstream American or even moderate Israeli views
Israel’s outreach toward right-wing Fundamentalist Christian groups and wingnuts like Glen Beck, with their Jerusalem revival meetings and End Times nonsense
Avigdor Lieberman, an incredible racist, whose campaign Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism called “an outrageous, abominable, hate-filled campaign, brimming with incitement that, if left unchecked, could lead Israel to the gates of hell.”
Former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Josef, who looks and sounds like an ayatollah himself and has said a number of offensive things about gentiles, besides advocating the murder of all Palestinians
The institutionalized racism and discrimination against Arab Israelis, Ethiopians, and the difficult legacy of growing up as Mizrachim — Arab Jews
Vigilante groups (in places like Petah Tikva and Kiryat Gat) which beat Arab men who date Israeli women, or stage “interventions” with the families of the women
Laws which call into question the “Jewishness” of American Jews, of Masorti Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanist Jews — or privilege Orthodox Judaism
As I get older I find myself more in touch with emotions. How did they sneak up on me with such stealth? There’s the unavoidable outrage at a nation that has lost any morality it ever had in turning its back on the poor and minorities; anger at wars, xenophobia, and the loss of human and civil rights. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of any news program to get me all worked up. I don’t think I can change. I don’t even think I want to change. But the tears are always there too. Sometimes it’s because of unexpected kindnesses or the rediscovery that humanity still insists on expressing its humanness. A young, healthy kid hauls off and gives a kidney to a perfect stranger. An anonymous person pays the rent for a family facing homelessness. Or my daughter organizes her friends to walk to raise money for breast cancer research. Even little kindnesses wash over me and I am filled with gratitude and a sense of relief that there’s still hope for us.
But always present is despair over the kind of world we are leaving behind. Look around and note the contempt with which most people hold their neighbor. We all, even the poor, may have cable television and smart cell phones, but we are all disposable – in the way that feudal serfs, child laborers in turn-of-the-century textile factories, or present-day coal miners are. The young especially are disposable, both on proliferating battlefields and on our streets.
The other day I received an email from the school where I teach one afternoon each week. It said that the older brother of one of my students had died and there would be grief counseling. This is a school where the volunteers and community feel enormous pride in, and a connection to, both the students and their families. Although I did not know my student’s brother, attending his funeral service as a sign of respect just seemed like the right thing to do for a family that is trying so hard to make a better world for each one of their children.
As I put on my “funeral” jacket, a piece of paper fell from the pocket. It was a handout from the service of a friend’s father, a man in his eighties who had lived a full and happy life surrounded by children and grandchildren and friends who cared about him. His final trip to the cemetery, the prayers said for him, the elderly veterans who presented his wife with a flag – all these elements were common to each man of his generation as he left the world on the same well-traveled path.
The funeral service for this young man was no different. The number of people in the evangelical church was astounding: his family, friends, neighbors, people from the wider community, various religious organizations, community organizers working against youth violence, even some gang members. There were Old and New Testament readings, music, benedictions, poetry, a eulogy, and one heartfelt appeal to end a cycle of violence between, literally, family members. “We’re all family here. We all have the same names.” On one side of the memorial handout was the song “Amazing Grace.” Like my friend’s elderly father, this young man also walked a well-traveled path, more tragic and much shorter.
As I paid my respects to his family and considered his senseless death, it was impossible not to be deeply moved by both the best and worst of what humans do to each other.
After the service I hugged a couple of students who were there for their classmate. As I walked over to them, my first impulse was to offer comfort, but of course things always work out to be not quite what you expect. My students knew their world better than anyone. They were the ones comforting me.
Stuart Forman (“Moral obligation must underpin Occupy movement“) looks at the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and sees in its reflection a society beset by existential worries, alienated by not having the opportunity to contribute, by consumerism, and by the loss of meaning. His is largely a psychological analysis with a moral solution. The poorly-titled letter suggests Stuart’s prescription is for the OWS movement itself to find or promote morality, but we should actually let his arguments speak for themselves: society should be based on the common good and not dedicated to greed. This in fact is what OWS is saying as well. And isn’t this moral enough?
Stuart somewhat unfairly charges that the OWS movement has failed to articulate its goals, although its demands have been clear and unambiguous: among others, re-regulating the financial industry, single-payer health care, affordable student loans, commitment to a national energy program, rolling back the Patriot act, election reform, immigration reform, ceasing to be the world’s policeman, and ensuring that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. While there is no progressive equivalent of Grover Norquist or Glen Beck to hammer away on private media outlets at its dearest issues, OWS is not a top-down movement, so let’s not confuse a diversity of demands and people for a failure to articulate. As Stuart acknowledges, the “system” is in trouble, and lots of things need to be fixed. The OWS people have articulated enough specific reforms for anyone who really wants to listen. Now all that is needed is a political party which represents average Americans and not corporate lobbyists.
There may be a few within the OWS movement who question the entire economic system, but most are looking for a return to a Social Contract that applies to all citizens, not just a small percent. What are our responsibilities toward society and government, and what are its responsibilities toward us? Why is it we live with each other? These questions may have a psychological or a moral dimension, but they are essentially political questions. The moral philosophy of a John Rawls, whom Stuart mentions, is only one approach toward understanding or defining a Social Contract. Ensuring that all of society’s stakeholders are adequately represented by principled political parties and laws which do not privilege one group over another is another. Ultimately, fighting for reforms politically, rather than making appeals to morality, is more likely to produce the real change Americans are still looking for. In the marketplace of ideas and politics, this requires punishing politicians who fail to represent us and demanding that those we have elected do represent us. It is not the lack of morality so much as apathy and ignorance which have created this sick system.
For the last couple of months the nation has been watching as protesters from New York City to Oakland have set up encampments and debated political issues. The mainstream press has reported on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as if it was a leaderless children’s crusade or an incoherent mob unable to express its demands. But middle aged people, unions, minorities, civil libertarians, pacifists, and every stripe of progressive America have also turned out to show their support. They haveexpressed their demands, and unfortunately they are not neat, easily digested talking points from a central Tea Party organization. They are complex, interconnected demands that defy one minute sound bites.
Increasingly, city governments, with support from the Obama administration, have shut down the protests in city parks and squares by means of SWAT teams, sound cannons, tasers, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, tanks, and a host of armaments we are used to seeing in photos of protesters being similarly set upon by authorities in Syria and Egypt. The message from the ruling class is: You want class warfare? Fine. You’ve got it.
The OWS movement has successfully demonstrated the dimensions and size of a suffering working and middle class, in many ways much better than the Tea Party movement, which often veers into racist, xenophobic, and religious extremes. To be fair the OWS movement has its own share of people on the fringe, and not all members of FreedomWorks, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, or the Tea Party Express are necessarily as racist as their leaders. Both groups share at least this: they’ve both been denied whatever they imagine the American Dream to be.
But now, especially as both winter and political primaries approach, it’s time for OWS to think about how it intends to implement its many analyses and demands. Does it want the Democratic Party to magically change course? Does it want to create a PAC to promote progressive Democrats, Greens, or Independents? Recently some Tea Party and OWS groups have even begun talking with one another. There is some risk that part of the OWS movement will be co-opted.
The two million dollar questions are: How is OWS going to enter the political stage? And: Will OWS have a voice in the 2012 election?
Occupy Wall Street needs to decide, and decide quickly, if it wants to live in the halls of Congress or just in tents from REI.
It finally found its way into my synagogue’s newsletter.
Making its rounds on the internet is a sermon entitled “Ehr kumt” (Yiddish for “he’s coming”) given during last year’s Jewish High Holidays by Rabbi Shlomo J. Lewis of Atlanta’s Etz Chaim (Conservative) synagogue. The piece, also called by its admirers the “Sermon of the Century,” has been reproduced on all the usual Islamophobia hate sites, the Republican Jewish Committee’s web site, and its notoriety has increased due to commendations for Lewis by the Georgia legislature and the US House of Representatives. I won’t reproduce the almost 4000-word piece because it’s simply too long, but if you haven’t read it you will find it here.
Quite simply, it’s nothing but a piece of hate speech by a religious leader. Not only that, it’s a piece of dreck delivered at a pulpit by a rabbi on the first day of Rosh Hashanah – a day for introspection and self-examination, not high political theater.
I read and found the sermon very offensive, as I do any time a preacher, rabbi or imam takes to the pulpit to bludgeon his congregation with bigotry. It reminded me of an exchange with a Muslim neighbor who emailed me that “I want to tell you that the situation in the U.S. now is similar to that in Germany in 1935, where bigotry, hatred, lies, and wide-spread discrimination against a hunted minority were very common.” His deepest fears, true or only partially true, made me wonder what sort of ranting about Jews was common in German churches in 1935.
I thought about this while I re-read Rabbi Lewis’ sermon and it struck me as ironic that a Jew – a rabbi no less – would willingly play the part of religious Hetzer.
In the Germany of 1935, while there were certainly members of the clergy like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller, or Karl Barth, who spoke out clearly and with almost as much passion as Jewish prophets themselves against the Nazi regime, for the most part the Pfarrer (pastors) of mainly the Evangelische (Lutheran) church (but also the Catholic church) practically tripped over themselves in embracing the new German culture war on Jews. Even the church itself was enlisted in the persecution. Susannah Heschel has documented this sad chapter of German religious history.
Rabbi Lewis reminds me of a pastor in some Pomeranian backwater who chose to deliver – not a homily on redemption and hope – but the most virulent, anti-Semitic diatribe he could think of on an Easter morning in 1935, using some of Lewis’ own themes and words to paint a portrait of Jewish evil. The pastor might have invoked passages from Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet, “Von den Jüden und ihren Lügen” (About the Jews and their Lies), as Lewis seems to take his from the world of Islamophobia.
On this holiest of days Lewis led with a martial theme:
“We are at war. We are at war with an enemy as savage, as voracious, as heartless as the Nazi.”
Ridiculing what he regards as present-day “moral relativism” and political correctness, Lewis’ prescription is to return to the imagined moral absolutes of an idealized World War II:
“Evil – ultimate, irreconcilable, evil threatened us and Roosevelt and Churchill had moral clarity and an exquisite understanding of what was at stake. It was not just the Sudetenland, not just Tubruk, not just Vienna, not just Casablanca. It was the entire planet.”
The evil that faces us, then, according to Lewis, is Amalek – the personification of evil and existential threat. Lewis then continues the story for which his sermon is named. It is the story of none other than the neo-fascist Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky showing up at a synagogue in Kovno, Lithuania, and warning the city’s Jews of impending doom. Lewis embellishes the story to paint Jabotinsky as a prophet:
“When Jabotinsky came, he delivered the drash [sermon] on Shabbos morning and I can still hear his words burning in my ears. He climbed up to the shtender, [lectern] stared at us from the bima [pulpit], glared at us with eyes full of fire and cried out. ‘EHR KUMT. YIDN FARLAWST AYER SHTETL – He’s coming. Jews abandon your city.’ We thought we were safe in Lithuania from the Nazis, from Hitler. We had lived there, thrived for a thousand years but Jabotinsky was right – his warning prophetic. We got out but most did not. […] We are not in Lithuania. It is not the 1930s. There is no Luftwaffe overhead. No U-boats off the coast of long Island. No Panzer divisions on our borders. But make no mistake; we are under attack – our values, our tolerance, our freedom, our virtue, our land.“
These last words are exactly the same ones our German pastor would have used in 1935: Unsere Freiheit, unsere Ehre, unsere Heimat. Lewis doesn’t even have any idea of how distastefully he has expropriated the same language used against Jews by Nazi collaborators.
At this point, the congregation is transfixed. Lewis is working the pulpit, reciting Prophet Jabotinsky’s words. But this time the villains are not Nazis or the mutable forms of Amalek – but Muslims. High Holidays be damned, Lewis is not in a forgiving mood. Muslims – all Muslims – are guilty by association. If they aren’t perpetrators, they’re mute enablers of evil:
“Today the enemy is radical Islam but it must be said sadly and reluctantly that there are unwitting, co-conspirators who strengthen the hands of the evil doers. Let me state that the overwhelming number of Muslims are good Muslims, fine human beings who want nothing more than a Jeep Cherokee in their driveway, a flat screen TV on their wall and a good education for their children, but these good Muslims have an obligation to destiny, to decency that thus far for the most part they have avoided. The Kulturkampf is not only external but internal as well. The good Muslims must sponsor rallies in Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in the UN Plaza, on the Champs Elysee, in Mecca condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent. Thus far, they have not. The good Muslims must place ads in the NY Times. They must buy time on network TV, on cable stations, in the Jerusalem Post, in Le Monde, in Al Watan, on Al Jazeera condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent – thus far, they have not. Their silence allows the vicious to tarnish Islam and define it.”
Of course, the same could be said about his own congregation’s – most any Jewish congregation’s – silence on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but Lewis’ point is clear: there really are no good Muslims because even the “good” ones have thumbed their noses at their obligation to destiny and decency. And worse: they haven’t chosen sides properly in the Kulturkampf. For the remainder of his talk, Lewis doesn’t bother making a distinction between terrorists, Islamic radicals, Islamists, political Islamists, or just plain Muslims. His audience knows what he means.
But what Lewis is peddling is stronger than just Kulturkampf. It’s War of the Worlds or maybe an old-fashioned Evangelical Apocalypse:
“Let us understand that the radical Islamist assaults all over the globe are but skirmishes, fire fights, and vicious decoys. Christ and the anti-Christ. Gog U’Magog. The Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness; the bloody collision between civilization and depravity is on the border between Lebanon and Israel. It is on the Gaza Coast and in the Judean Hills of the West Bank. It is on the sandy beaches of Tel Aviv and on the cobblestoned mall of Ben Yehuda Street. It is in the underground schools of Sderot and on the bullet-proofed inner-city buses. It is in every school yard, hospital, nursery, classroom, park, theater – in every place of innocence and purity.”
As in many shuls, Lewis is playing to a crowd that sees Israel as a beleaguered Western force of good fighting forces of darkness and evil (translation: Muslims). The rest of Lewis’ rant is reserved for whining about Europeans, NGOs, the United Nations, the “liberal” media, and Christian Liberation Theology. For Lewis it’s not just about terrorism. It’s about the Muslim hordes knocking on the gates of Vienna while the liberal appeasers make tea for them.
Next, Lewis paints Islam as a disease to be eradicated:
“Let’s try an analogy. If someone contracted a life-threatening infection and we not only scolded them for using antibiotics but insisted that the bacteria had a right to infect their body and that perhaps, if we gave the invading infection an arm and a few toes, the bacteria would be satisfied and stop spreading. […] Anyone buy that medical advice? Well, folks, that’s our approach to the radical Islamist bacteria. It is amoral, has no conscience and will spread unless it is eradicated. – There is no negotiating. Appeasement is death.”
I found this disturbing and repugnant because, once again, my neighbor had a point. In 1935 German propaganda posters portrayed Jews as a bacteria. Yad Vashem has also documented a series of “educational” materials published at the time in Germany which included descriptions of Jews as:
“… foreigners threatening to displace the Germans from Germany. As hyenas strike disabled animals, Jews are portrayed as preying upon disadvantaged Germans/Christians. Other animals included in these comparisons are the chameleon (the great deceiver), the locust (the scourge of God) […] and the tapeworm (the parasite of humanity). Finally, Jews are compared to deadly bacteria, which threatens the existence of the human race. Just as deadly bacteria must be exterminated, so must the Jew.“
Now concentration camps and crematoria hopefully weren’t in the back of the good rabbi’s mind when he talked of “eradicating” the Islamist bacteria. But what in God’s name was he thinking? I suspect, for Lewis and his right wing political message, God didn’t even enter the equation. This was not a drash. It was a political rant, an abuse of his position.
Lewis then moves on to a meditation on the story of an Afghan woman who was a victim of an “honor” disfigurement by a relative– something which unfortunately occurs numerous developing, not just Muslim, countries. For Lewis, though, it’s all about Islam:
“If nothing else stirs us. If nothing else convinces us, let Bibi Aisha’s mutilated face be the face of Islamic radicalism. Let her face shake up even the most complacent and naive among us.”
Lewis then finishes with a rhetorical flourish, once again using the neo-fascist Jabotinsky’s words:
“A rabbi was once asked by his students….’Rebbi. Why are your sermons so stern?’ Replied the rabbi, ‘If a house is on fire and we chose not to wake up our children, for fear of disturbing their sleep, would that be love? Kinderlach, di hoyz brent.’ Children our house is on fire and I must arouse you from your slumber. […] My friends – the world is on fire and we must awake from our slumber. ‘HER KUMT.'”
This was the end of a pathetic performance that should never have taken place at a synagogue, much less the pulpit, and never on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. This was the kind of outrageous performance one expects from Glen Beck or David Duke.
On the same day, my rabbi, in contrast – also at a Conservative synagogue – talked about new beginnings. He cited stories, without embarrassing individuals, of people who had made enormous, positive changes in their lives over the course of the year. It was as inspiring and sweet as Lewis’ was repellant and hateful.
What now for rabbi Lewis, flush with his 15 minutes of fame? He’s back at it again. His latest message to his congregation is again a long political piece you’ll just have to read to understand why the framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted separation of church and state. I sincerely hope Rabbi Lewis’ congregants don’t need him for spiritual matters pertaining to Judaism or for pastoral counseling. Because this is a guy truly obsessed with seeing evil in Muslims and too busy writing his political screeds.
The Standard Times again is raising a cri de guerre from Lawrence J. Haas, a man who never met a war he didn’t want the taxpayers to fund. I will again make the observation that readers are being treated to more of this syndicated rightwing fare than ever before.
Haas is one of a number of neoconservatives who believe the answer to a failed policy of trying to remake the Middle East in America’s image is more of the same. The Kagans, Raymond Tanter, various Republican presidential candidate’s advisors, and others have been on the warpath lately, calling for military strikes, bunker busters, or – in the case of Haas – “surgical strikes” on Iran. Were it only true that surgeons, rather than butchers, conducted wars.
The cockamamie story of a Texan-Iranian used car salesman and his supposed contacts within the Iranian government plotting an assassination and attacks on multiple embassies, as sketched out by Attorney General Holder and Secretary of State Clinton, has never been properly explained. The Texan-Iranian is an habitual offender with a penchant for drugs and domestic abuse. The missing man, Gholam Shaakuri, whom Haas and others claim is a member of the Iranian government, actually turns out to be a member of the Mujahadeen e-Kalq, the MEK – a terrorist organization which opposes Iran from exile. I wouldn’t expect the administration to show any proof because there is none.
We’ve gone down this road many times before, with the Gulf of Tonkin, in Central America, with exiled Cubans (Bay of Pigs), exiled Iraqis (non-existent yellowcake, fabled WMDs, thanks to Chalabi and others). Pretexts for war are an American tradition. Remember the Maine?
We would do well to get a grip and not let the shrill voices of militarism dictate entry into another war – especially when the only justification is ideological. After decades of wars and drone attacks in Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and now even Kenya, the head spins, and the only thing certain is that we are bankrupting ourselves and making yesterday’s friends into tomorrow’s enemies.
Gilad Shalit was released today. I posted the following essay more than a year ago. There are still roughly 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails whose families love them every bit as much as Shalit’s.
Tomorrow, June 25th, 2010, will be the fourth year that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit has remained in captivity. But it has also been over forty years since Palestinians in greater numbers have been imprisoned – many without ever receiving a trial.
For three generations, more than 20% of all Palestinians – and some estimate half of all Palestinian men – have see the inside of an Israeli prison sometime in their life.
In 2010, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported over 7,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, 264 under administrative detention – indefinite imprisonment without trial.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel cites statistics noting that as of March 2010, 6631 Palestinians were imprisoned in Israel, 8 detained under the Illegal Combatants Law (7 of whom are from Gaza) and 237 were administratively detained. 35 were women; 337 were child prisoners, including 39 under the age of 16; and 773 were from Gaza.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem detailed civil and human rights abuses in a report titled “Without Trial” and has called for an end to Israel’s illegal detentions: “Under international law, a state may detain a resident of occupied territory without trial to prevent danger only in extremely exceptional cases. Israel, however, holds hundreds of Palestinians for months and years under administrative orders, without prosecuting them. By doing so, it denies them rights to which ordinary detainees in criminal proceedings are entitled: they do not know why they are detained, when they will go free and what evidence exists against them, and are not given an opportunity to refute this evidence.”
Two weeks ago, blogger Richard Silverstein reported that “Yediot Achronot published a story about a Mr. X imprisoned in an Israeli jail. The man was in solitary confinement. His jailers did not know who he was, did not share a word with him, no one came to visit him. No one seemed to know he was there. They didn’t even know what crime he had committed or how he came to be in the prison. His prison cell was completely isolated from other prisoners and he couldn’t communicate in any way with them.” Then the article was pulled from the paper and the story was censored. The story was picked up by the Daily Telegraph in the UK. The prisoner apparently shares the same treatment as Gilad Shalid.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry lists seven Israeli soldiers either kidnapped or missing in action: Staff Sergeants Zecharya Baumel, Zvi Feldman, and Yehuda Katz – all missing since 1982 in a battle at Sultan Yakoub, in Lebanon; Major Ron Arad, who was captured on 16 October 1986, after his aircraft was shot down near Sidon, Lebanon; Guy Hever, who went missing on the southern Golan Heights in August 1997; Majdy Halabi, last seen hitchhiking in Dalyat El Karmel in May 2005; and finally Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was abducted on June 25, 2006 near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom. Only for Shalit has there been any recent “proof of life” and Hamas acknowledges holding him.
For the last four years 23-year-old Shalit has been held in an undisclosed location and, like Israeli Prisoner X, even Red Cross visits have been denied. Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi has gone on record that securing the release of Shalit is of the utmost importance to Israel. But Ashkenazi has clashed with the Netanyahu government over the degree of importance. For four years Israel and Hamas have rejected each other’s demands and offers. In 2009 a German-brokered deal collapsed after Hamas rejected additional Israeli requirements that released political prisoners go into exile.
Any father – Israeli, Palestinian, or American – feels the pain that Shalit’s father swallows when he talks about his son. I know I do. I understand Noam and Aviva Shalit’s desperation and frustration with both Hamas and their own government. And it deeply disturbs me that Shalit, who was still a teenager when he was captured, and his family are paying a steep personal price. But so are Palestinian families. The father in me appeals to both sides to settle the prisoner negotiations and let all political prisoners – Palestinians and the one Israeli – free. But neither the Hamas nor Likud and Beteinu extremists have ears for appeals to humanity.
But there is a more pragmatic reason to resolve this issue now.
Israel has announced a relaxation of bans on certain humanitarian imports to Gaza in the wake of the flotilla attack. Flotilla organizers and the Turkish charity whose members were killed on the Mavi Marmara may have been accused of being Al Qaeda and Hamas operatives, but the incident has underscored the fact that Hamas remains in charge in Gaza and it represents governance in the besieged strip. While Israel and Hamas can both fume about Zionist or terrorist “entities,” it becomes clearer by the day: they have to start talking to each other. As diverse as the responses to the flotilla attack have been (suits against Israel in the EU versus an outpouring of Congressional resolutions s
upporting Israel in the US), there are two sides – and they must start talking.
Israel recently denied German development minister Dirk Niebel entry into Gaza. To Israel such visits only serve to legitimize Hamas. While this is somewhat ironic in light of Israel’s campaign against “Israel delegitimizers,” the snub of the German diplomat may also have been meant as a message to the international community to butt out of the Shalit negotiations and that talks with Hamas are off-limits.
Indeed, the issue of Hamas legitimacy has been the major stumbling block. Israel has an official policy of not talking to “terrorists.” Neither Israel, the PA, Egypt, nor the US want to acknowledge Hamas. For all its lofty verbiage, the Obama administration has also kept neocon ideology alive by refusing to talk to enemies. But Europe and the Arab and Muslim worlds are more pragmatic. Despite funding from Iran, the Arab League, Turkey, and the EU are willing to at least talk to Hamas. Hamas’ growing legitimacy has been observed by Americans. The New York Review of Books ran an interesting article on Hamas last year by Nicolas Pelham and Max Rodenbeck. Charlie Rose interviewed Khaled Meshaal in Damascus about a month ago. Pretending that Hamas does not represents 1.5 million people is as senseless as pretending that two Republican senators do not represent Idaho, a state with the same population as Gaza.
Acknowledging both elected governments (Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza) would force an accommodation with each other. But as long as “Palestinian unity” is a precondition for talks, there will be no peace, no end of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, and no resolution of a prisoner exchange.
But resolving a prisoner exchange – perhaps the simplest first step in restarting peace negotiations – would be in everyone’s interest.
It is in Israel’s interests to build on its gesture of relaxing Gaza imports by demonstrating flexibility it has not shown for some time. Now that Israel has been able to turn this gesture into a minor public relations victory and has indeed relaxed some import items, Shalit becomes slightly less valuable to Hamas as a tool to win import concessions from Israel. For Hamas, Shalit now has value only for a prisoner exchange. This would be a good time for Hamas to make some minimal concessions of its own in regard to Israel’s demands. Similarly, on the anniversary of Shalit’s capture, the Netanyahu government is under increasing pressure to bring him home. It would be a good time for Israel to make some concessions as well.
To both sides: Bring Gilad Shalit home. Bring all the political prisoners home.
Barney Frank has proposed cutting European allies’ military aid in order to reduce the total military budget by 25%. Frank has mentioned numerous European nations by name.
However, the U.S. actually provides very little military aid to Europe, as it turns out. According to U.S. Government statistics for 2009 which can be found at http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1299.pdf, all European nations combined received a total of $210 million (with a little “m” and not a “b”). The following nations were included in this calculation: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Congressman Frank will be relieved that Denmark and Italy are not among them.
However, if we look at the 2009 recipients of more than $100 million in aid, the top eight were: Afghanistan (5.7 billion), Israel (2.38 billion), Egypt (1.3), Pakistan (429 million), Jordan (238 million), all of Europe combined (201 million), and Somalia (102 million).
The United States maintains a network of over a thousand military bases in 150 countries. This is where the costs rack up. For example, Germany receives nothing besides rent for permitting the U.S. to maintain the Landstuhl military hospital and base. However, the U.S. is unlikely to shut down Landstuhl because this is where KIA and injured service members from the Middle East are sent before returning to the U.S. It serves no purpose to Germans. And as several years of wrangling with Iraq attests, the military does not willingly shut down bases and a “patriotic” Congress does not have the guts to force it to.
Some of the money allocated to Europe also goes toward the U.S. commitment to NATO. Long after the Cold War has ended and the Soviet Union was dismantled, we are still unwilling to give up those bases and dismantle our own Cold War club.
So it seems to hold true that whenever the U.S. goes to war, which is often, military infrastructure grows but is subsequently never permitted to be reduced.
Afghanistan represents 53% of all American military foreign aid. Israel gets 22%. The rest of U.S. allies get the remaining 25%. Congressman Frank has steadfastly refused to look at cuts for Israel, but clearly it’s a notable, politically-motivated exception. And the Obama Administration has asked the Congressional Research Service to prepare estimates of spending in Afghanistan until 2021, and we haven’t heard enough Democrats complaining about these plans.
If we are serious about reducing frivolous foreign military expenditures, we need to close useless bases, cut aid to countries inflated to excess by special interests, and get out of Afghanistan now and not in another decade. The rest of Congressman Frank’s ideas may have some merit, but it seems to me he’s no different from the rest of Congress: he only wants to go on a low-armaments diet if all he has to do is throw the maraschino cherry on the sundae away.
Two months ago the United States recognized South Sudan. Last March the US started bombing Libya for regime change. Four months later it recognized that new rebel regime. For decades the United States recognized Taipei, not China, as the legitimate Chinese government. Only in 1972 did the US finally recognize a nation of nearly a billion people.
Despite the ease with which nations can be recognized or ignored, the United States insists that a Palestinian state cannot exist without further negotiations with a Likud government whose party platform says: “Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.”
For decades the United States has mouthed support for a Two State solution. But for 42 years US-mediated talks have produced nothing but delays during which Israel continued its military occupation and built more settlements. In 2009 President Obama went to Cairo and again made promises to resolve the issue. But once again the US has failed to deliver.
On Friday, frustrated by four decades of stonewalling and US bias, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will go to the UN and, in more a poker play than anything, will ask the Security Council to grant Palestine the same type of statehood that it granted Israel 63 years ago. Though this will almost certainly be defeated, Abbas will finally force the US to show its hand. The US has promised Israel it will use its veto to kill a Palestinian state despite the fact that over three quarters of the General Assembly support it.
The reasons for a US veto run counter to its own interests in supporting democracy and peace in the Middle East. Instead, they are motivated by a powerful pro-Israel lobby and by growing “Old Testament” fundamentalism among a Congress which sees Israel as a divine nation.
Last month a fifth of all American Congressmen and half of all Freshman Congressmen accepted free junkets to Israel funded by a wing of AIPAC instead of facing their own constituents on economic issues during the recess. At the same time, the Israel Project, a right-wing, Muslim-bashing group, brought 18 American ambassadors to Israel as well.
All this effort was to kill a Palestinian state. The pressures that both Democrats and Republicans feeding at the trough of the Israel Lobby or acting out of religious sentiment exert on foreign policy is intense. Intense and extremely dangerous.
Dangerous because the United States is ignoring the lessons of the Arab Spring – that its pliant regimes in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and elsewhere are despised; and, by extension, the US is too for supporting them.
Dangerous because former allies like Egypt and Turkey have finally had it with biased US foreign policy and now see the United States as toxic and irrelevant. Even the Saudis have threatened to reevaluate their relationship with the United States. And Turkey is starting to challenge the US as a regional power broker.
Dangerous because the United States is becoming isolated internationally by confusing Israeli interests for our own. Two weeks ago, in a speech at the Jewish People Policy Institute, Ambassador Daniel Shapiro said it quite bluntly: “The test of every policy the Administration develops in the Middle East is whether it is consistent with the goal of ensuring Israel’s future as a secure, Jewish, democratic state. That is a commitment that runs as a common thread through our entire government.”
Dangerous because an isolated US and Israel make war more likely.
This subservience to a foreign nation’s interests troubles even strong Israel supporters.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman worried in a recent editorial that Israel’s policies have “left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.” Friedman thinks the US is painting itself into a corner with its veto: “the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.”
Once the Israel Lobby digests its meal of the remains of the Palestinian state, what’s next on the menu? Already the pro-Israel hawks are calling for war on Iran. Most of the Republican hopefuls are nodding in agreement with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon when he says: “All options are on the table.”
Today’s opinion page was a smorgasbord of conservative thought on lessons to be drawn from 9/11. I don’t know whether it’s News Corp finally exerting its right-wing politics on the paper, a new editorial policy, or what, but we seem to be treated to an increasing dose of reprints of editorials from the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Post and the Weekly Standard. None of the articles on 9/11 were particularly illuminating, but they sure did manage to defend the militaristic and Constitution-hostile world created by the former president and continued by the current one. Even Mr. Obama’s appeal to unity the previous day only papered over the reasons we now find ourselves in never-ending war.
Rather than cloaking ourselves in martyrdom, we should be asking ourselves, honestly, why so much of the world hates us. And, no, it’s not because they hate us for what we have. A lot of the world hates us for what we are doing.
The first essay by Omar Ashmawy, a military prosecutor who did not have enough misgivings about the dubious enterprise at Guantanamo to work there himself, regrets that the US military and law enforcement officers are so ignorant of Muslims and Arab culture. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but Ashmawy makes no mention of our distorted foreign policy in the Middle East as the obvious source of hatred of the United States. It serves little purpose for the FBI and Homeland Security to stop reading Islamophobes and start studying real Middle Eastern scholars when most of the Republican presidential candidates have signed on to Muslim-bashing legislation, Congressman Peter King is conducting antisemitic (in the broadest sense of the word) witch hunts, when we have covert drone wars going on in Arab countries in addition to our public ones, we support an indefensible occupation in Palestine, while half our freshmen congressmen spent their summer recess in Israel, and we honor the Arab Spring by defending despots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. We’re either ignorant, stupid, arrogant, simply don’t care, or some mixture of all of the above. But it’s a recipe for people hating us.
Similarly, the Washington Post’s article is another salute to the conventional wisdom and learning nothing from the preceding decade. There is no mention of the shredding of civil liberties – except where the Patriot Act is defended as “modest” and prudent. No mention of the loss of habeus corpus, widespread wiretaps, email snooping, monitoring of social networking, and the loss of many of our core civil liberties. The article echoes the Heritage Foundation’s distortion that military expenditures over GDP are smaller today than during the Cold War – which is true, except that both military expenditures per capita and as a percentage of our national budget have risen sharply since the Cold War. And much of the divisor, the gross domestic product, is offshore nowadays, in contrast to the Cold War when we still had a domestic manufacturing base. Today more of our tax money goes to killing people in other countries than ever before. The Washington Post’s article warns of “prematurely” getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan – despite the fact that these are already the longest wars in American history. In short, the Washington Post advocates permanent war.
Finally we are treated to a defense of Dick Cheney by neoconservative Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes. Cheney is on a tour promoting his new book, “In My Time,” and apparently Hayes, who has another book of his own on the former vice president, is simultaneously trying to sell it and rehabilitate a man whose book, if I had my way, would be titled “Doing My Time.” Cheney most certainly is a neoconservative, helped kick off the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, is married to a neocon, most certainly did attempt to expand the powers of the executive branch, and most assuredly does not lose one second of sleep over his involvement in the most disastrous American war since the Civil War. Why, on an anniversary of 9/11, is the Standard Times interested in repairing Cheney’s image with bald lies? A better editorial might have examined how a relatively small group of neoconservatives managed to steer the nation onto the rocks.
Although Muammar Gaddafi has yet to be apprehended, the end of his 40-year reign in Libya is over. We have no idea what kind of governance the rebel coalition will cobble together in the coming weeks and months and possibly years, but Liberal Hawks and the mainstream press are already having their own Mission Accomplished moment by declaring that the joint US-NATO operation, initially sold as a humanitarian mission but eventually obvious as nothing more than a regime change effort, was a resounding success. Although Elliott Abrams slammed the strategy of “leading from behind,” as an Obama staffer termed it, other neoconservatives, for example, Paul Bremer, applauded the President’s approach in Libya. Commentators argued that Obama’s strategy was finally a departure from the “Weinberger Doctrine” and that the “strategy represents a step away from […] the notion that the United States must dominate any operation where its military is involved.” Furthermore, said the President, we did it all without a single boot on the ground.
Well, not exactly. Neither the claims of a “bootless” war or the “success” of a some new strategy are true. It’s just been one more American war.
Now after this hearty meal of lies we are being treated to dessert.
The United States and NATO now state they have no plans to stay in Libya. But even (maybe especially!) the servicemen who read “Stars and Stripes” are skeptical that the United States will stay out of Libya. After all, old habits die hard.
So, rather than leading from behind, Obama’s Libyan adventure has been a case of leading from behind a curtain. If skeptics are right, the formation of a Libyan government and the adoption of a constitution will be every bit as slow as in Iraq. And why? Not just because of tribal tensions or rusty experience with democracy, but because the US will be there with its boots on the ground, meddling in the selection of legislators and ministers, pressuring the nascent government on oil and assets, trade agreements, military alliances, and serving as the salesman for American military hardware.
This morning’s editorial section contained a piece by Lawrence J. Haas advocating war on Iran. It was typical of ramped-up calls from neoconservatives inside and outside the Obama administration, many of whom have a misplaced preoccupation with Israel and who claim Iran has promised to incinerate half of the world’s Jews in a second nuclear holocaust. No matter that it is Israel which possesses the nukes and that no proof of Iranian nuclear weapons actually exists.
While this war-mongering is really all about who shall maintain a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and Central Asia — and in so doing preserve oil-dependent colonialism for a few more decades — the war mongers and their friends in the defense industry and pro-Israel lobby have stepped up the calls for U.S. military action, and they’ve added a few new justifications for it. Now in addition to threatening to nuke Israel with (non-existent) nuclear weapons, Iran is being blamed for attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and allying itself with Al Qaeda. And now that the U.S. has successfully assassinated bin Laden, we really need another bogeyman.
But since our country seems bound and determined to get into — frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of wars we’ve got going on now — let’s just call it another war, it might be good to understand precisely what the Iranians think of us. Simplistic formulations like “clash of civilizations” and “they hate us for what we have” don’t provide any insight. Apparently nobody wants to re-hash or even look at history: the U.S. coup which removed a secular, democratic Iranian government in the Fifties, American support for the Shah and his brutal secret police, or recent American and Israeli assassinations and sabotage. But in fact, the U.S. has been meddling in Iran since the beginning of the 20th century and the Iranians have a long list of gripes. Iran also has legitimate concerns for its security, as Ron Paul pointed out yesterday in a GOP candidate debate. It is virtually surrounded by the United States:
Given all this, it is unlikely Iran presents much of a military threat to anyone, including Israel. And even Ehud Barak agrees.
So, if the real issue is not the bogus existential threat to Israel, and the real issue actually is the preservation of Israel’s nuclear monopoly, how do the Iranians feel about it?
One of the best documents to gauge Iran’s views is the transcript of a speech given in 2001 by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iranian presidents come and go, but the mullahocracy remains to guide not only domestic life in Iran but also foreign policy.
In this 2001 speech, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani discussed colonialism, capitalism, the world since 1948, and Israel’s nuclear advantage, which he sees as a colonial effort and not a Jewish conspiracy. A passage below on “US-British support for Israel” is often cited as a veiled threat to destroy Israel. But the speech discusses neutralizing Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons, not destroying the nation. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.
The Speech
In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate… In response to your demands I will dedicate the first sermon to the Palestinian issue and the events in the world of Islam. I will use the second sermon to deal with other matters.
First, I have to thank all the good people who have made an effort to participate in the Quds rallies. In many streets I saw their ranks moving towards the university. This reflects the vigilance, the awareness, the faith and the dependable character of our good people. I hope similar support for the Palestinians is being expressed throughout the world.
Palestinian issue
The Palestinian issue, and the formation of the state of Israel, is among the worst periods of our contemporary history. I don’t know of any similar tragedy. In the fifty years that this pseudo state has been formed, and in the several decades before it, when fighting was going on, hundreds of thousands of holy people shed their blood, millions of people lost their homes, millions of people were injured, tragedies resulting from these events constitute the greatest encyclopedia of crime committed by the World Arrogance. History will not forget these things. In my sermon I would like to discuss some 30 points about the history of these events. I think it may be possible to speak about them in a single discourse and I would like to refer to the important points of this history.
First, this is the most misfortunate, tragic and bitter colonial event. Secondly colonialism, lead by Britain and then America, and supported by the United Nations and other sections of the World Arrogance are responsible for these crimes. If in the future an international court is formed – and this is my third point: a court will be formed sooner or later – and if those responsible for these crimes are put on trial many bitter truths will become known in the court. We should follow up this idea and we should ask just and knowledgeable judges to look into these crimes.
The fourth point is that the engine for this disaster is international Zionism. Zionism is a political party which was created some 100 years ago. It is named after the devotees of Zion, a hilltop in Bayt al-Maqdis. This party is not purely Jewish and not all Jews are Zionist. There are many Jews who don’t believe in Zionism. There are many Jewish scholars in America who have been active against the these events. They are also present in other parts of the world. Not all the members of the party are Jewish. There are distinguished Western politicians who were Zionist, such as Churchill, Eisenhower, Kennedy, etc. Of course, I am not an expert in this field and I don’t want to put any names in this list but those who are interested can find out the names of the well known Zionists. This party is still very active around the world and it is the engine for important events connected to Israel, and the Arab and Islamic world. This was my fourth point.
The fifth point is that the loss suffered by the formation of the pseudo state of Israel went beyond Palestine. The Jewish people themselves suffered. This is so because the Jewish people were settled in many countries. In our country, Iran, they were getting on with their life. They were engaged in business. They were rich. They enjoyed influence and a good life. This Zionist movement provoked many Jews, on the basis of their devotion to a religious state of their own, to take a wrong posture. They were put under pressure. There was an exodus and many of them became homeless. Now they have to live in those territories. I will discuss the living conditions in this country if I have the time. But they now have to wait for a possible reverse exodus because finally one day, this tumour in the body of the Islamic world will be removed and then millions of Jews who have moved there will be homeless again. When will this happen? We have to discuss this point on another occasion.
Formation of Israel
This formation of Israel was also to the loss of the region. The region suffered a great loss. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on armament and war. This is beside the acts of injustice committed against the people of Palestine. So who has benefited from the situation? This is my sixth point: The root of the problem is colonial. As traditional form of colonialism came to an end the colonialists sought new instruments of influence. One of these was to impose lackey governments in the previous colonies. The other was to create many military bases across the world, in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and other sensitive regions of the world. Costly military colonial posts on land and sea. But the most important objective was to create governments which were totally dependent on colonialism and the best case was that of the Jews – the Zionist government in the Palestinian land. This base was to serve several objectives.
Firstly, it was aimed at getting rid of Zionism in the West, which had become a real nuisance to governments and great powers. It was causing trouble. They threw them out and brought them to Palestine. Secondly, they made Zionism and the Israeli government dependent on themselves to make sure that they would be a tool in their hands. However, the opposite is true as well. They have lobbies which take advantage of colonialism to ensure their own survival. However, colonialism is the main factor. Later on, it was transformed into imperialism because colonialism did not officially exist any more. That was how it manifested itself.
Thirdly, they did that to cause insecurity and threaten other governments and force them to become dependent on imperialism. Then they could sell them arms and do other military things as well. This deeply affected the lives of the people and government of the region and Muslims because they needed particular Western and imperialist products.
There was constant warfare and regional countries became insecure and there was an attempt to prevent their economic and technological growth. We can see this happening and one does not need to explain it in detail. You can see all these things. Therefore, that is the important point. Please do not forget that point until the end of our discussion. Then we can see how much we can count on that when we are analysing the situation or when we are making predictions about the future. The Israeli government was established to act as a guardian, protector and gendarme that defends the interests of imperialism. I have already mentioned several points with regard to that issue.
The Israeli government itself, be it when it was in its embryonic stage or in its present shape, has been hanging from the umbilical cord of colonialism. It has been feeding off it. If the imperialists stop supporting it, it will be in trouble. Thus there is no independent government in Israel in the true sense of the word. It is totally dependent. Now, the Americans are officially contributing 4bn dollars a year to it. There is also the unofficial contributions made by Jewish communities and others. It is a lot.
US-British support for Israel
It is also supported politically in the United Nations and many other places. They also contain Islamic and Arab governments. Israel needs all of those things and the Americans and Britain are meeting its needs. Therefore, we should consider it to be an outgrowth of colonialism and a multi-purpose colonial base. That is where we should start discussing the next point. So the survival of Israel depends on the interests of imperialists and colonialists. So they go together.
The colonialists will keep this base as long as they need it. Now, whether they can do so or not is a separate issue and this is my next point. Any time they find a replacement for that particular instrument, they will take it up and this will come to an end. This will open a new chapter. Because colonialism and imperialism will not easily leave the people of the world alone. Therefore, you can see that they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favours Israel. Well, from a numerical point of view, it cannot have as many troops as Muslims and Arabs do. So they have improved the quality of what they have. Classical weaponry has its own limitations. They have limited use. They have a limited range as well. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.
If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality. Of course, you can see that the Americans have kept their eyes peeled and they are carefully looking for even the slightest hint that technological advances are being made by an independent Islamic country. If an independent Islamic country is thinking about acquiring other kinds of weaponry, then they will do their utmost to prevent it from acquiring them. Well, that is something that almost the entire world is discussing right now.
Now, even if that does not happen, they can still inflict greater costs on the imperialists. That is possible as well. Developments over the last few months really frightened the Americans. That is a cost in itself. Under special circumstances, such costs may be inflicted on the imperialists by people who are fighting for their rights or by Muslims. Then they will compare them to see how they could advance their interests better or what they can do. However, we cannot engage in such debates for too long. We cannot encourage that sort of thing either. I am only talking about the natural course of developments. The natural course of developments is such that such things may happen.
Those who are desperate, but who are also faithful and idealistic, see that this is in their best interests. Then no-one will be able to control them. That is when they become disappointed with such ordinary deceptive methods. Therefore, in the future, the interests of colonialism and imperialism dictate whether Israel will survive or not. Moreover, it is the resistance put up by Muslims and Iraq and the Palestinians themselves that matters. They should besiege imperialists and make them think about whether it serves their interests or not. They should also think about whether maintaining the current balance of power, which favours Israel, is affordable or not. Both of those things may change in the future.
Iran’s policy
Well, what kind of policy should the Islamic Republic pursue? That is a different issue, which is our eighth or ninth point. As I said, the supreme leader of the revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i has repeatedly said what our policy is. He explicitly said that during the Friday-prayer sermons which he delivered recently. He has enunciated our policy. Whatever we say is an analysis of those policies. The government, the Majlis and all the Iranian institutions and our friends abroad all pursue the same policy.
Well, during all those stages, the Palestinian jihad was proceeding as well. To be honest, the Palestinians never remained completely silent. They had their ups and downs. However, they never became silent. For a while, armed struggle intensified. However, they had to intervene. Their intervention took place through the pressure that was exerted on those who were involved in the armed struggle. It raised the issue of Camp David through puppet governments. It took up 20 years of the Palestinians’ time.
It is not the case that the jihad has completely subsided. However, there have also created false hopes along with the people’s rather quiet jihad. In the end, it resulted in the formation of the so-called national authority. They made false promises which included only 6,000 km of the 28,000 km of the Palestinian territory. In this way, they could form a small and insignificant government here. However, it seems that that era is coming to an end.
At this stage the Palestinians waited. They fell silent and waited. They formed political parties. Some of them took up arms but they were not strong. The final stage of compromise was held at Camp David II, in New York or Washington in America. At that stage Arafat who had been optimistic about the efforts of the American brokers lost hope. When he came to Iran he said President Clinton’s comments at the meeting was a bomb which destroyed the negotiations, the statements of the American president – expressed after several days of intense negotiations – was merely a different version of the Israeli demands, and the meeting broke up. Arafat had written it all down. He read them for me from his notebook.
In the meantime the intifadah began and found a new climax. The Palestinians came to the conclusion that negotiations, be they in Madrid, Camp David, Oslo or any other place, will succeed, only if it is accompanied by their own efforts, selflessness and revolutionary actions. This was the background to the second Intifadah. It began when the Lebanese, with their spirited actions, forced the Israelis, for the first time, to flee in disgrace. This was a good and inspiring lesson. The Palestinian struggle lives on and the Intifadah, the current climax of the Palestinian struggle, is the result of the misleading and dishonest actions of the Western powers. We are witnessing this in the world today. The situation has deep roots. This is the tenth point that I wanted to make.
Now is the Palestinian revolution, the current Intifadah, going to weaken in the future? Some people may think that the Palestinians are going to get tired, that a small community is not going to be able to stand against all this power, that the feebleness and incapability of the Islamic world and its governments will undermine their resolve. But this judgement is wrong.
Palestinian intifadah
For one thing the Palestinian jihad has been the source of inspiration to many other Islamic movements throughout the world. It was a source of inspiration to us in Iran. It has been a source of inspiration to Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Chechnya, African countries, Sudan. They feel obliged to support this jihad. Furthermore, their own advancement has similar positive effects on the Palestinian movement. These countries are not going to forget their source of inspiration. They will keeping an eye on the situation. The Palestinian movement will survive. There may be ups and downs. There many be small ups and downs in view of the global situation. But this is not going to die because it is rooted in the homelessness of five million people, in the innocence of eight million people, in the innocent blood of hundreds of thousands of martyrs whose call is still being heard, in the fallen weapons that call to be taken up, in the feelings of innocence and justice, and more than anything, in the path of martyrdom and happiness and the path of the Almighty. Therefore, you cannot say that the Palestinian movement will die. There may be ups or downs but it will survive. And it will undoubtedly end with the liberation of Palestine.
The huge wave of Islamic jihad of Palestine subsided with the start of the compromise negotiations. Then, when the talks reached a deadlock, the Palestinian intifadah intensified once again, and today, we face a new situation. The important issue today is very important and deserves a mention.
This is my 11th point. It seems that global arrogance has planned four different moves to stop and quell the present intifadah, or at least rid itself of its grave consequences. The first one concerns propaganda. You can see the great propaganda campaign which is in progress in the world today with the aim of introducing them the Palestinians as terrorists, and Israel as the side that is defending itself. You need someone as foolhardy as Molla Nasreddin legendary witty folk figure to believe this. Otherwise, who can believe that Israel, with all its helicopters, F-16 aircraft, tanks and rockets – which it uses to assassinate people – is the side that it is engaged in self-defence, but a selfless and devoted human being, who sees no other option but to attach a bomb to himself and blow himself to pieces in some place, is the terrorist element? If one day, the world reaches such a conclusion and offers such a judgment, then we must consider humanity as dead and buried, and we must start to believe that humans are the same as, or even worse than, animals. Of course, already there are people who act in such a way, but at the same time, claim to champion the cause of human rights.
In my opinion, such a belief is not going to find any place among the righteous-seeking and struggling people. Yet, this kind of propaganda exists in the world today.
The second method they have chosen is violence. You can see how it Israel is perpetrating violence. When one person is killed inside the Israeli territory, a squadron of helicopters begin to fire indiscriminately at the people. You can see for yourselves how far violence has gone. Is this kind of violence a proportionate and appropriate response? Of course, it must be acknowledged that both these methods – that is to say propaganda and violence – have had some effect, but in general, they just aggravate an already bad situation. The people who have no choice but to resort to martyrdom-seeking operations are not going to frightened of this violence. After all, they have nothing to lose. How is a person going to lose anything when he believes that by blowing himself up, one minute he is on this material world and the next moment he is going to be transferred to the divine paradise on the wings of divine angels, and once there, he will sit next to the Prophet and the disciples of God, in a reception given in the honour of divine martyrs?
This is really like a duck trying to threaten the river, or the sea. There is no way that a fish can live without the water of the sea.
As I said earlier, the conditions in Palestine are creating this type of people. These acts of violence by Israel may silence some uncertain or opportunist elements, but as a rule, they will strengthen the resolve of others. It is because of this that I want to tell global arrogance to be on guard. It is here that the cost of exerting pressure on the people of Palestine and lending support to Israel can be very high for global arrogance. If one day, these tired, faithful and martyrdom-loving people decide to deliver blows to the vital interests of arrogance no matter where they are, then they can do this. They the Americans may be able to stop half of these operations, or even two-thirds of them, but some will still be carried out, and when they do, the costs will be huge. The events in New York can be a lesson for the Americans, particularly today, when, due to their aggressive moves and their mistakes, they have paved the way and made it possible for some groups to be armed with non-conventional weapons.
Therefore, as a person who has good knowledge of history, particularly the history of popular movements, I would like to admonish the Westerners not allow to matters to go this far. They should not feel happy about events such as attacks by helicopters, or other acts of violence by Israel. This is very dangerous, and we really do not want to see the world security to be disrupted, and we do not want to see the present insecurity – which has cos
t the world more than 1,000bn dollars and has paralysed the world in many areas, including in Israel itself. The West should not allow the world to suffer from such conditions. They should not allow a situation of confrontation and antagonism between the devoted, martyrdom-seeking forces, and the centres of arrogant power, in the form of the Third World War. This is the worst possible scenario, if arrogance continues with its present ways.
The other path that they have chosen is the path of deceit and false promises. America announces that it supports an independent Palestinian state, with Bayt al-Maqdis as its capital. However, we see that things are different in practice. Europe says the same thing, and Mitchell puts forward a plan. Naturally, such plans have short-term effects for a month or two. Nonetheless, after a while, it seems the people who made these promises start to regret their statements, while, at the same time, those who had believed these promises also start to regret their decision. These plans are not going to produce much. Their last plan involves the use of the so-called Palestinian self-rule authority. This is very bitter indeed. They provide the self-rule authority with a list of names, and ask them to arrest and hand over to Israel for example 200 people on the list. God forbid if the leaders of the self-rule authority fall for this, although they already have done to some extent. They the Israelis are not going to be happy with just an arrest. They are after more.
The worst things that can happen is division and fighting among themselves. All those who have been engaged in jihad for the past 50 years will destroy all their background with one wrong action. We do not want this bitter incident to occur in the history of the Palestinian struggle. However, it is possible for such a thing to happen. I think a few days ago, the Israelis announced that they had complete confidence in Arafat and his intention to establish security. You have witnessed that Israel and America emphasize that there should be complete calm for one week before serious negotiations can begin. They think that this one week is enough and after that it will be difficult to revitalize it the intifadah. During this week other decisions will be made. The self-rule government should not give in to this and think that it will achieve its objectives in this way. In America, he Arafat saw and heard the final words of Mr. Clinton and he noted them in his old note book. He knows what can happen. As a result, God willing, the leaders of the self-rule government will not be deceived by this big trickery.
Another solution that they are hopeful about, is to tire the mojahedin and to propagate, what they used to always say to us in Iran, that there is no use in these actions, and they are like trying to achieve the impossible; they said why should these valuable human beings be destroyed like this. These are not in line with Islamic and Koranic logic. These who are in the arena are Muslims.
The Koran says that it is not such that your enemy should not be harmed… In a serious and true jihad, if you suffer, your enemy will also suffer. It addition, it says: you have some hopes that are far beyond their reach. With this suffering, you will reach absolute prosperity and with their suffering, they will plunge into hell; these are not equal. You rely on justice and God, and they are on the edge of an abyss of fire preceding sentence in Arabic and these two are not the same.
You, who believe yourselves to be intelligent people and diplomats, shouldn’t say that why are these Palestinian children are being lost like this. These blows are very fatal. You are destroying the enemy from within. A nation which does not have atomic and chemical weapons and F-16s, has discovered something stronger than F-16s which it has pursued. You have left them no option. You have shut off everywhere to them. You have placed them there through your extermination methods. As a result, it seems that these methods which the imperialists are using, will lead to no where. These were some eight or nine points which I have made and not kept count of. You yourself should count them.
Self defence or terrorism
See what arrogance Israel is demonstrating in this regard. The conference of the Islamic countries’ foreign ministers in Qatar was on the basis of an invitation by Arafat and everyone was Arafat’s guest. Israel arrogantly said that Arafat has no right to leave Palestine and even went further and said he shouldn’t leave Ramallah. Today, they are saying he has no right to leave his home. Well, this is a self-rule government. He is a weak designated against elected mayor without any authority. What government and establishment is this? What have you pinned your hopes on? Why have you wasted the Palestinian nations’ time for 20 years. Today some advise the youth and the women who have recently joined the masses of martyrdom-seeking individuals, to protect and preserve themselves for some other time. I want to mention two other important issues in another part of my speech.
Now that the situation has become a bit desperate, the Europeans, who during the past few months pursued a different approach to that of America and Israel and had made the Islamic world a little hopeful, have changed their stance.
They are openly saying that Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine are terrorist organizations. They are so shameless that they ask Islamic countries to treat these groups as if they were terrorists, to close down their accounts, to close their offices, to put their members on trial. To be so obedient is a source of shame for European governments which see themselves as being equal to America. How can they explain this injustice to their own nations and freedom-loving people? Is this fair judgment? There are five million Palestinian refugees, their families live on UN handouts in camps and shanty towns. Their groves, homes, farms and workshops inside Palestinian territories are being taken over by rich Zionists. They are only defending themselves and you call them terrorists. It is shameful. You have to be truly shameless. What sort of people pronounce these things and vote for these things in their countries? Let the world see the truth. Let the freedom-loving people of the world see the truth. Let them see that those who call themselves the leaders of the free world and who claim to be defending human rights are, in fact, opposed to human rights. They are weak and inferior. There is no rationale for their actions. Their helicopters openly terrorize people on the streets. They, and not the Palestinian Authority, control the airspace. The helicopters come down and target taxi passengers after identifying them. This is what terrorists do. Are they defending helpless people? If this is their rationale then the actions of ordinary terrorists are truly more honourable than this form of freedom seeking encouraged by the West ? One day the world will judge.
Warns USA
The second issue concerns America itself. In Afghanistan, the Americans – according to their own thinking, according to their own analysis – achieved a swift victory through the power of bombardment. Of course, it seems to be the case, but they attach very little value to the main principle and they think that the role played by the Afghan nation, the United Front and the mojahed forces. That is at least what they pretend. That is what they are displaying to the world, even if they do not truly think so. They are trying to exhibit to the world that America has found a way for fighting its opponents. The bombings, on the one hand, and the use of domestic Afghan forces, as far as they do whatever America tells them. But, such calculations about Afghanistan cannot work in other places. You know that the forces which forced the Taleban to withdraw were also involved fighting, their problem was that wherever they were about to advance, Pakistani aircraft would hit their positions in support of the Taleban. And, wherever the Taleban
had any shortcoming, the systematic army of Pakistan would intervene voluntarily. Now, the reverse is happening. Now, America is attacking the Taleban instead of the United Front which Pakistan was attacking. America also tied the hands of Pakistan so that it does not interfere from the other side. Yes, that role was indeed played by America, we accept that much. But, if America intends to compare this with other situations and use this process as a model and tested method for its future policies – which seems quite likely at the moment, because such assumptions exist in the While House and the American parliament – that would create another tragedy for mankind and world security, and it will very soon draw the attention of the Americans to the fact that they have made a strategic mistake. That is not a simple task.
The people of Afghanistan were in fact long tired of war, of clashes and of the selfishness of their domestic leaders and many other things. The way was already paved. Even if it was not America, any other powerful country, if it had become involved, could have done this and could have organized such a task. Of course, the future of this is very difficult to predict , because neither America has the capacity, acceptability or popularity among the people, nor there is any trust for it America. Others will not accept this either. We should all work together for the future of Afghanistan so that the people of Afghanistan do not fall into the trap of war, and so that their security, work and reconstruction of their country could get under way. And, if America wishes to show good will, it could also support and help. They the Americans should not think of turning that place Afghanistan into a military base, because the consequences of that can already be envisaged. It will result in dealing blows and receiving blows, it will have ups and downs; but, ultimately, nations cannot accept captivity.
You see that despite this massive deployment of forces the Jews in Palestine are faced with such circumstances. Fifty years have passed and it will be the same in 100 years. The Crusades lasted nearly 200 years and they ended like that. It’s the same now. At the end, nations will rise and resist. Amidst this, some will secure their immediate interests, and many will experience the loss.
On the whole, it seems today, the world situation and our region, is in need, on the one hand, of the alertness of nations and governments, and on the other, the realism and fairness of the arrogant powers who want to revitalize the colonial era by deploying troops, and occupying the previously abandoned military bases and securing a presence in the region. There is the hope that, God willing, this trend will secure the interest of justice and righteousness…
Qods Day Speech (Jerusalem Day) Chairman of Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani December 14, 2001, Friday Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, in Persian 1130 gmt 14 Dec 01 Translated by BBC Worldwide Monitoring
John Kerry was one of the first to push for another war in the Middle East, this time the war on Libya. Even before U.S.-initiated hostilities began, I sent Senator Kerry a critique of his dumb idea, with the title Are you out of your mind? — thereby omitting an adjective I really wanted to use. Months later, the yacht club Senator finally deigned to reply to me. Below is his justification for another one of the wars Democrats have championed. I have not changed Kerry’s text, only highlighted portions of interest.
What strikes me about Kerry’s response is that he repeats the lie that the intervention was to “avoid a massacre,” yet everywhere else the motivation for the intervention is more honestly described as regime change or seizing the opportunities of the Arab Spring. Kerry’s assumption that seeing the U.S. involved in (and currently failing at) another Middle East war would send a warning to other dictators does not seem to have impressed the Syrian dictatorship — the same one that helped the U.S. with extraordinary renditions.
Kerry cynically writes that failing to help Muslims would send the wrong message. There are many more opportunities to send the right message in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. We’ve squandered them all.
As to why we invaded Libya and not, say, Syria? Kerry’s answer is so slippery it’s hard to believe he actually wrote, “we must weigh our ideals.” One weighs polls, not ideals.
Finally, Kerry says that bombing Libya in a “supporting” role is not war. Little matter that in the first days of the invasion it was hardly “supportive” and essentially a U.S. show. The senator seems to have succumbed to the same mental gymnastics as global warming deniers. Just deny it and it won’t exist.
But read his letter yourself. I’ll never vote for this weasel again.
Dear Mr. ___:
Thank you for your letter regarding U.S. actions in the NATO coalition preventing crimes against humanity in Libya.
Everything I believe about the proper use of American force and the ability of the community of nations to speak with one voice was reaffirmed when the world refused to stand by and accept a bloody final chapter of the uprisings sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. With a mandate from the Arab League and the Gulf states, the United Nations Security Council approved a limited military intervention to avoid a massacre.
Neither the U.N. nor any nation should be drawn into military intervention lightly. But there were legitimate reasons for establishing a no-fly zone over Libya and forcing Gadhafi to keep his most potent weapons out of the fight.
First, what is happening in the Middle East could be the most important geostrategic shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Absent U.N./NATO resolve, the promise that the pro-democracy movement holds for transforming the Arab world could have been crushed. Other dictators would have seen the world’s failure to challenge Gadhafi as a license to act with impunity against their own people. The vast majority of the protesters in these countries are crying out for the opportunity to live a decent life, get a real job, and provide for a family. Abandoning them would have betrayed not only the people seeking democratic freedoms but the core values of the U.S. and other democratic nations. It would have reinforced the all-too-common misperception on the Arab street that America says one thing and does another. We are already spending billions of dollars to fight increasing extremism in many parts of the world. We didn’t choose this fight; it was forced on us, starting with 9/11. To fail to see the opportunity of affirming the courageous demand of millions of disenfranchised young people for jobs, respect and democracy would be ignorant, irresponsible and short-sighted. It would ignore our real national security interests and help extend the narrative of resentment toward the U.S. and much of the West that is rooted in colonialism and furthered by our own invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Second, the pleas for help came not just from the Libyan rebels, but from the Arab League and the Gulf states. Silently accepting the deaths of Muslims, even at the hand of their own leader, could have set back relations for decades. Instead, by responding and giving the popular uprising a chance to take power, the U.S. and our allies sent a message of solidarity with the aspirations of people everywhere that will be remembered for generations. Rather than be forced to debate “who lost Libya?” the free world is poised to say “remember Tripoli” every time demagogues question our motives.
Third, the particular nature of the mad man who was vowing to “show no mercy” to the “dogs” who dared challenge his rule demanded that his threats be taken seriously. Gadhafi is after all the man behind the bombing of Pan Am 103, which claimed the lives of 189 Americans. The military intervention in Libya sends a critical signal to other leaders in the region: They cannot automatically assume they can resort to large-scale violence to put down legitimate demands for reform without consequences. U.N. resolve in Libya can have an impact on future calculations. Indeed, the leaders of Iran should pay close attention to the resolve exhibited by the international community.
It is fair to ask, why Libya and not other humanitarian situations? The truth is that we must weigh our ideals, our interests and our capabilities in each case when deciding where to become involved. We must not get involved in another lengthy conflict in a Muslim country. With French and British willingness to lead on Libya, we do not need to take on the primary ownership of this conflict-and the Obama administration has made clear we will not. So the risks are manageable and, in my view, the rewards are potentially enormous.
The question of presidential authority is an important question. Some argue that our involvement in Libya is unconstitutional because it violates the provisions of the War Powers Act enacted in 1973. I am very familiar with the debate surrounding this act because it was created in response to the Vietnam War. Presidents have taken the view that the WPA does not include every single military operation and since it was enacted, only three of the numerous military actions we have participated in were authorized prior to engagement. Additionally, the WPA is very specific in its wording, requiring Congressional authorization only when our “Armed Forces are introduced into hostilities.” In Libya, we have no ground troops nor are we considering ground troops – in other words, our troops have not been introduced to these hostilities. Our troops are engaged in the conflict solely in a supporting role. President Obama and I both support the War Powers Act and neither of us believes that our intervention in Libya violates it. How
ever, I believe we are strongest when we speak with one voice – which is why on June 21, 2011, Senator McCain and I introduced a bipartisan resolution to provide limited authorization for our engagement in a supporting role in Libya. I cannot emphasize enough that this authorization only provides for the limited use of American forces for a limited time. This resolution is no blank check for the President, but is consistent with the vision of action outlined in his May 20th letter to congressional leaders. It makes clear the goals of U.S. policy in Libya: the departure of Qadhafi and his family and a peaceful transition to an inclusive government that ensures freedom and opportunity. It also plainly states that our participation in Libya will continue to consist of non-kinetic support of the NATO-lead operation in the form of intelligence, logistical support, and search and rescue missions; Congress does not support deploying, establishing, or maintaining the presence of units and members of the U.S. Armed Forces on the ground in Libya. On June 28, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the resolution and I look forward to the full Senate’s consideration of the legislation.
I plan to maintain a close watch on our involvement in Libya. The President will be required to consult with Congress frequently regarding our efforts by providing regular briefings and reports. These must include an updated description of U.S. national security interests and policy objectives, a list of U.S. Armed Forces activities in Libya, an assessment of opposition groups and potential successor governments, and the legal and constitutional rationale for conducting military operations consistent with the WPA.
I believe that the passage of the Kerry-McCain resolution would demonstrate to the country and the rest of the world that the Congress of the United States and the President of the United States are committed to this endeavor. The Arab Awakening could be the single most important geostrategic shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall. If we support the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people and assist them in their transition to democracy, I believe the positive implications for our own security will be immeasurable.
Thank you again for your interest in this critical issue and please do not hesitate to contact me in the future.
Last Spring we were presented with the unseemly sight of a foreign leader insulting a sitting president before both houses of Congress. On May 24th House Majority leader Eric Cantor escorted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into the congressional chambers in what could easily have been mistaken for a State of the Union Address by the President. What made the display particularly unseemly was that Netanyahu used the opportunity to excoriate President Obama for his tepid criticism of Israel’s illegal settlements while the President was in London.
An article in the New York Times guessed at the motives: “With elections coming up next year, the lawmakers appeared eager to demonstrate their support for Israel as part of an effort to secure backing from one of the country’s most powerful constituencies, American Jews.” The article failed to mention that most congressional Zionists are fundamentalist Christians, not Jews, for whom Israel is not just another country, but a veritable Biblical Disneyland.
All this is bad enough, but now they’re at it again. This week we learn that, instead of meeting with constituents during the Summer recess, a fifth of American Congressmen will be accepting free junkets to Israel funded by the American Israel Education Foundation, one of AIPAC’s many PACs. According to the Jerusalem Post, 81 Congressmen, 55 Republicans and 26 Democrats, will visit Israel. Significantly, the number includes half of all freshman Republicans. The Republican delegation will be headed by Eric Cantor and the Democrats by Steny Hoyer.
Not to be outdone, the Israel Project, a right-wing group known for its vicious Muslim-bashing, is bringing 18 American ambassadors to Israel as well.
All this precedes an anticipated call for a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September. Similar to a call for Israel’s creation 60-some years ago, also at the UN, the call for a Palestinian state is largely symbolic because it is expected that the Obama administration, like Congress, fully subservient to a pro-Israel lobby, will cast a veto. This call for Palestinian statehood — without American “facilitation” — is a final recognition of the fact that the United States has been consistently biased and is no longer relevant to the peace process.
So, while the American economy is in shambles, a motley group of American Congressmen will be getting tans at the Dead Sea, a militarily-controlled area off-limits to Palestinians. They will be touring Jerusalem, visiting Tel Aviv, and possibly popping into Ramallah to visit a Palestinian caretaker government most Palestinians hold in contempt. They’ll be meeting with Israeli generals who will tell them how Israel is stopping terrorism in its backyard so that we don’t have it in ours.
If you do a little research online, you can find out about these junkets. According to legistorm.com, a number of groups send congressmen to Israel for these — I wouldn’t call them serious fact-finding missions — vacations. The American Israel Education Foundation is the major organizer, but other groups fund similar “educational” trips: the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, the Brookings Institution, Center for Middle East Peace & Economic Cooperation, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, IDT Corp., the Jewish Community Relations Council, Makhteshim Agan, New America Foundation, Project Interchange, the Republican Jewish Coalition, numerous local Jewish Federations, Tel Aviv University, Telos Group, United Jewish Appeals, and the World Jewish Congress. In all, Legistorm has recorded 1020 of these junkets to Israel since roughly 2001.
It’s bad enough that Congress is being diverted from doing its job of fixing the economy by these trips and that the Likud gets more attention than constituents, but the worst part is that we are letting a foreign nation and its boosters corrupt and bias our foreign policy. In exchange for the campaign donations they disburse, these lobbyists assure that our Congressmen keep giving Israel $8 million a day in military assistance and producing vetoes at the United Nations.
All this will eventually result in a backlash, not only against Israel, but unfortunately against Jewish Americans too, whether they objected to this madness or supported it. It’s time to say: enough. And time to do the right thing and abstain from vetoing a Palestinian state in September.
American Free Market fundamentalists claim that regulation, taxes, government interference, and lack of incentives are stifling job creation and business growth. No matter that many of them are already operating off-shore, pay no taxes, or are stashing their money out of reach of the IRS.
Not enough people stop to think that the overall state of the world economy might also have something to do with it — what with Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and now Italy in economic crisis. Wealthier Eurozone nations like Germany and France are on the hook for a lot of European debt, and this will ultimately hit them if weaker economies default. And then there’s Japan, which has been battling sluggish economic growth for over a decade. That’s a lot of uncertainty. More uncertainty than knowing you have to pay your taxes every year on April 15th at a predictable tax rate.
With so many capitalist nations sick or on life support, where are all the customers for American products and services going to come from? The reticence to expand businesses and hire people may actually have more to do with the dismal chances of recouping investments in an uncertain world. But it certainly is convenient to blame unions, government, regulators, and those calling for Big Business to pay its fair share of taxes instead of considering the scary proposition that Capitalism itself is on the ropes.
Surely there must be a country somewhere which provides all the incentives, tax relief and lack of regulation that Big Business craves, and that country would naturally have the most dynamic free-enterprise economy in the world — if the acolytes of Milton Friedman are right. And it is a given that all that economic success would occur in a democratic country with well-educated, free, and healthy citizens. Turns out, this is a Free Market Fundamentalist’s delusion.
Where is this supposed paradise?
Qatar and Paraguay have impressive GDP growth according to 2010 figures from the International Monetary Fund. On this same list on which the US finds itself 117th with 2.84% growth, there are a handful of economies with double-digit increases (Singapore, Taiwan, India, China) and approximately 70 with growth over 5%. Mexico and Bangladesh have twice the growth of the United States and Afghanistan three times our growth. Using CIA World Factbook figures, Taiwan and China both claim to have poverty rates half that of Switzerland’s 5%. India’s is 25% and ours is 12%. Even Syria has a lower poverty rate than the United States. Leon Panetta said so. But many of these countries are not free. For example, Singapore abolished trial by jury and for China they’re optional. Some of these economic “dynamos” are in war zones. Some are places you wouldn’t even want to visit.
So it would appear that economic growth can either lift a nation’s standard of living or leave millions in poverty even while profits are taken. But growth or recession can change in a heartbeat. Singapore’s economic growth, for example, is expected to plummet to a third of their 2010 figures as the world economy cools. However, ask a Free Market Fundamentalist why this phenomenon happens here in the US, and they’ll tell you that it’s due to too much regulation and taxation, both of which have been in decline since the Reagan administration.
So the next time a Tea Party person reads his voodoo economics off his palm, or quotes Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman, they’re just invoking their prophets and reciting their economic prayers. Like any religion, it has little to do with reality and everything to do with wishful thinking. Wall Street’s, not ours.
A little side show at Rick Perry’s Christapalooza, “The Response” in Houston. Who would Jesus hate? Well, if you ask guest speaker Mike Bickle of IHOP, the answer would be: everyone besides Christians.
Multiculturalism is a filthy word in their lexicon. Feminism is just as bad. Gays merit both contempt and physical punishment. Violence toward minorities has always been their trademark, and for decades they’ve attacked liberals, secularists, and those who do not share their Middle Ages mentality.
No, I’m not talking about the Taliban. I’m not even talking about Anders Breivik and his Knights Templar revivalists (who pathetically are a hundred years behind the KKK), or the Tea Party racists who want to bring back Jim Crow, although the description is certainly apt for any of these groups.
I’m talking about their cousins, the religious Right in Israel, particularly the Kahanists, who for years have been running amok with few or no consequences and who are now the model for violent extremists like Breivik and multiculturalism-haters in the Tea Party or rabid Zionists in the U.S. like Joe Kaufman. As incomprehensible as it seems to me for Jews to be involved in violent, hate-soaked, religion-perverting nationalism, it is more shocking that these particular fellow Jews (if indeed we share any values) are the model to which the rest of the haters aspire.
Last year a guidebook called “Torat HaMalech” was published in Israel. The subtitle of this book could easily have been “Who Would Moses Slay?” because it was nothing more than a 230-page justification for murdering non-Jews. If there had not been such an uproar, a second printing could easily have been accompanied by a forward by one of the many Israeli Islamophobes who inspired Anders Breivik.
Why do Jewish brownshirts and thugs like Baruch Marzel, a “former” Kahanist who had a little love-fest last month with Glen Beck at the Knesset, operate so freely in Israel and in the Occupied Territories and in the Orthodox communities of the United States? Because, as the U.S. State Department is fond of saying of the American relationship with Israel, there is hardly any “daylight” between them and the government. Israel’s Likudnik policies are fully congruent with the extremist right. Israel is slowly being ethnically cleansed of Arabs, both in the West Bank and the Galilee, and even at the cost of importing hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russians. As the Mizrachim might agree grudgingly, It’s never been about religion. It’s always been about race and culture, particularly the domination of Ashkenizi culture. And as always, religion is just a tree the nativists hide behind. Even “liberal” and “secular” Jews who have moved into the West Bank because of economic inducements prefer not to think too much about how they got their cheap housing. For them it’s not about religion either. When it comes right down to it, there’s never been enough “daylight” between the Left and Right in Israel. And that’s the triumph and corrupting influence of nationalism.
Living in Israel today is like living in Anders Breivik’s Norwegian Utopia of 2083, where Muslims are being removed by state institutions and racial and cultural “purity” is well on track to being restored by a brutal form of nationalism. Israel’s twisted form of Revisionist Zionism has now become not merely the paradigm for European Christian nationalism but their How-To manual. But if by chance Breivik’s dreams come true, it won’t be a win for religion. And Europeans may not turn out to like all that concertina wire and concrete.
So when I hear Jews or Christians utter the phrase, “Judeo-Christian values,” I wince because a perverted and violent form of religious-themed nationalism is what it is has really come to mean.
Just another meaningless, cynical phrase falling from hate-filled, profanity-laced lips.
Besides all the other pledges the Religious Right takes nowadays — Anti-Abortion, Balanced Budget Amendments, No New Taxes for the Super-Rich, Defense of Marriage for Straight People, Repudiation of Global Warming, Fighting Evolution, or Promoting the Return of Christian Shariah — I sometimes wonder if they simply take a basic pledge to waste their time on social issues that are of interest only to a narrow group of narrow people.
Today’s Time Waster is Michelle Bachman’s new pledge to the National Organization for Marriage to defend straight people from harassment by gays and their straight enablers of the sinful gay lifestyle.
I am truly grateful that hordes of rowdy homosexuals and angry lesbians have never come to my street to harass me while I’m trying to have a nice quiet evening with my wife or tried to recruit me to the other team. So far, I’m working on my 3rd decade of marriage without ever receiving a single threat or so much as a peep from this apparently scary constituency.
On the other hand, I am more than a little disturbed that NOM and its supporters aren’t as tolerant when it come to letting gay people have their own quiet evenings without being demonized or asked to attend re-education camps. If anything, the defense of loving relationships is under attack by NOM.
And doesn’t Michelle Bachmann have anything better to do?
While the details of the debt agreement are yet to be hammered out, the big picture is emerging and there’s little question that President Obama needlessly capitulated to the Tea Party, which impressively projects its extremist minority views on the entire nation. Yet despite the president’s weakness and failure to keep campaign promises, conventional wisdom is that Liberals and Progressives will still rally around him in the next election solely out of fear of the Tea Party.
Don’t count on it.
Liberal Democrats are not very happy with the President at the moment. The Congressional Black Caucus, for example, has promised to oppose the debt agreement. “Seeing a Democratic President take taxing the rich off the table and instead push a deal that will lead to [massive] cuts is like entering a bizarre parallel universe – one with horrific consequences for middle-class families,” Progressive Change co-founder Stephanie Taylor wrote. “MoveOn’s 5 million members, along with the vast majority of Americans, will not stand for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts-not now, and not six months from now,” moveon.org’s Justin Ruben darkly hinted. Even House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi hasn’t been fully sold on the agreement, saying only “I look forward to reviewing the legislation with my caucus to see what level of support we can provide.” Liberals rightly regard Obama’s multiple capitulations as paying ransom to hostage takers — in a nation that officially never negotiates with terrorists.
About my only point of agreement with the Tea Party is that Mr. Obama will be a one-term president. This will not be due to the Tea Party’s savage racist attacks on the President. It’s been largely self-inflicted. Young people are not going to turn out to vote in such numbers as they did last time for a president who has now shown that the “audacity of hope” was merely a cynical slogan. Besides the youth, Mr. Obama has lost the support of many independents, Libertarians, and reflexive Democrats who supported him last time. His numbers are way down with minorities. Mainly, however, Mr. Obama has lost the support of the left wing of his own party.
Three years ago I hoisted a glass with friends after Mr. Obama was elected. But after watching the Democrats feebly continue (and expand) not only the Bush wars, bailouts for the rich, tax cuts for the wealthiest, and embracing Republican “trickle-down” economics and neoconservative foreign policy, it is impossible to continue supporting this bankrupt party. In the next election I’ll probably vote Green. If I’m going to throw my vote away, I’d rather do it myself than have the Democrats do it for me.
If there is concern about third party “spoilers,” the Democrats now have an opportunity to reevaluate the viability of the President and should follow Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sander’s advice to primary someone other than Mr. Obama. Otherwise, they’re going to lose the next election.
There is more than a kernel of truth in the joke that the Democrats are the Party of No Ideas and the Republicans are the Party of Very Bad Ideas. This country either needs some new ideas or some very good old ones because the Tea Party’s loony prescriptions are going to harm this country for decades. Yet the Democratic Party’s failure to present better policies is taking us nowhere. They seem to be forever peeking out the door, checking to see if it’s safe to support workers, consumers, minorities, or the environment — then darting indoors when they conclude it’s not.
I don’t hold out any hope for the Republicans, who have spinelessly let their party be hijacked by Dick Armey, Grover Norquist, nativists, fundamentalists, “ex-gay” therapists, Birthers, the Christian Identity movement, Larouchites, Secessionists, and every species of ding-dong. But the Democratic flirtation with centrism has also failed. Their own Blue Dog Democrats are nothing but Republicans in disguise.
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has completely botched his Lincoln-esque “Team of Rivals” approach. Concession after concession hasn’t worked. Golf with Boehner hasn’t worked. Worse, far from building a “team of rivals,” Mr. Obama has actually resigned his job as team captain only to become the Gatorade carrier for the opposing team.
Democrats should not blame what used to be the Progressive wing of their own party for the coming defeat in November. Democrats could have remained true to their own values, but they abandoned those along with a constituency that elected them. Tragically, this could have been avoided.
The golden days of Summer are for days at the beach. And days at the beach mean sunscreen, proper hydration, a snack, sunglasses, and a good book to read. But if you’re like me, you may be running out of thrillers. But no worry! We’ve got some great recommendations of fiction from – yes! – the FBI. But first some context.
In recent days, the Norway shootings have revealed a huge number of connections with American hate groups and so called Islam experts. Despite the huge number of these groups, Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano took it on the chin from right-wingers last April for suggesting it even exists. The Southern Poverty Law Center and former DHS investigator Darryl Johnson have written that Napolitano caved to right-wing criticism and dismantled a unit responsible for investigating home-grown terror in 2009. A report by CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently revealed that one of the many “Islam experts” feeding at the government trough who has trained DHS employees, Walid Shoebat, is a complete fraud. Congressman Peter King is still running his McCarthyite hearings on American Muslims, and instead of focusing on real terror, national paranoia has now led to effectively ignoring domestic threats and instead demonizing one of our own religious communities. It all sort of reminds me a bit of the obsession with Jews by the Jüdische Abteilung of the Nazi bureaucracy.
But, people! There’s a silver lining in all this rain! A recent Freedom of Information Act request forced the disclosure of a PowerPoint and other materials the FBI used to train agents on dealing with Muslims. The materials themselves, as well as the recommended readings, are fascinating in a crude, reptilian sort of way – in their demonization of Muslims by the authors, many of whom, it turns out, know bupkus about Islam or have their own axe to grind. If you want some exciting fiction, ladies and gents, it doesn’t get any better or more fictional than this!
So without further ado, here is the FBI’s recommended Summer Reading List on The Evil Moozlim Threat:
The Arab Mind (Raphael Patai)
“The book came to public attention in 2004 after investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing for the New Yorker magazine revealed that the book was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior’ to the effect that it was the source of the idea held by the US military officials responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal that ‘Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation’.”
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (Robert Spencer)
This book should simply be titled “The Incorrect Guide to Islam” because it is a hack job by someone who lacks any academic qualifications in Islamic studies. This book’s many similarities to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” should not be overlooked by librarians.
The Truth about Muhammad (Robert Spencer)
Karen Armstrong sums up this one best: “Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read. Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life. Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.”
The Quran Itself
No doubt included for those who want to selectively hunt the Qu’ran for suspicious passages.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam (Yahiha Emerick)
Of this appropriately-titled book, one reviewer wrote: “Throughout the book Yahya Emerick seems to be getting his information from modern fringe scholars who are not representive of the majority in Islam. Many of the ‘reformers’ he mentioned and praised were founders of extremist movements and many people believe these men caused a lot of damage to Islam. I personally do not think Mr. Emerick is qualified to say many of the things he does, I think he should have co-authored the book with a recognised mainstream scholar. There are also many other things, and then some of the information about shias is very incorrect, I am not shia but I found the ignorance about the shia side of Islam offensive. I personally could not give this book to a non muslim because of the errors and minority views it contains…”
Islam and Terrorism (Mark Gabriel, PhD)
From the Amazon.com blurb: “After earning a Ph.D. in Islamic history, Mark A. Gabriel became convinced that Muhammad did not speak for God. His search for truth led to the love of Jesus Christ, as well as complete rejection from his family and two attempts against his life by political fundamentalists. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in world religion at a Christian university, he speaks and writes about the true nature of Islam with the non-emotional accuracy of an academician. As a reflection of his new life in Christ, he has chosen a Christian name to replace his Islamic name.” Objective?
Milestones (Sayyid Qutb)
Qutb’s book is hopefully intended as an introduction to political Islamism, not as a serious study of how most Muslims look at society, particularly European and American Muslims. From an NPR program on Qutb: “Egyptian writer and educator Sayyid Qutb spent the better half of 1949 in Greeley, Colo., studying curriculum at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. What he saw prompted him to condemn America as a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should aspire to live in. Qutb’s writings would later become the theoretical basis for many radical Islamic groups of today — including al Qaeda. Qutb increasingly saw the redemption of Egypt in the application of Islamic law.” About as representative of all Muslims as reading – oh I don’t know – Che Guevara.
Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands (Terri Morrison and Wayne Conaway)
Last year in a talk to the youth of her Christian Democratic Union party, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared MultiKulti (multiculturalism) to be dead in Germany. Economist Thilo Sarrizin from the Sozialdemoktratische Partei Deutschland broke with his own party to declare it a failure as well in a badly researched book. In Norway a member of the far Right angered by his own country’s embrace of multiculturalism, and exemplified by what he regarded as Creeping Shariah in Europe, murdered many of the next generation of leaders of the Norwegian Labor Party – all children. The fanaticism with which the Right in America has pursued anti-Immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Gay, anti-Feminist, and anti-Secularist rhetoric and legislation, and has had such a bug up its ass since a Black president was elected, got me thinking that when it comes right down to it, race mixing is what really upsets them.
All this got me thinking of the ultimate example of multiculturalism we probably all saw years ago in George Lucas’s Star Wars. I mean, of course, the bar scene on a remote outpost in space. I went looking for the image and found what I was looking for:
But apparently I was not the first. Our old dependable racist pill popper, Rush Limbaugh, beat me to it, I’m ashamed to say he even had the same picture in mind:
I’m sure Rush would much prefer an America that looks like this homogenous group of ansehnliche Jugendliche:
The question should not be “Why can’t we all just get along?” It should be “How can we afford not to?”
In a rapidly shrinking world made even smaller by the import of foreign workers, offshoring, trade agreements, globalization, and refugees, multiculturalism is under renewed attack. Although there’s significant help from the more racist elements of White America and from the Tea Party, hostility to multiculturalism is shared by the German Chancellor; a majority of House Republicans; Black Americans like Louis Farrakhan, Herman Cain and Allen West; Christians like Pat Robertson and Andreas Breivik; Jews like Ayn Rand, Pamela Geller and David Horowitz; Indians like Dinesh DiSouza; Muslims like the late Osama bin Laden; the heads of state of nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia; pundits like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; and conspiracy theorists like Orly Taitz and The Donald. Pardon me if I missed a few million.
What all these examples show, though, is that there will always be people who can’t play nice with others. They also serve to remind us that one person’s victim can quickly become another’s tormenter. Being persecuted yourself does not automatically guarantee compassion for others. Sadly, it often has the opposite effect.
But changes in demographics are virtually impossible to roll back. Large-scale Jewish resettlement of Israel began half a century ago. Palestinians were there for centuries. But nobody’s going anywhere. American descendants of slaves have no African home to return to. Many Latinos living in Texas are the descendants of those who were there when the United States took it from Mexico. To Native Americans the arrival of Europeans was not a welcome development, but where are the voices calling for 200 million Europeans to return to the Old Country? The descendants of South African white settlers are still trying to figure out their place in a post-Apartheid nation. Indian and Chinese merchants have old, established communities on almost every continent. The fingerprints of British, French, and Portuguese colonialism are all over Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The handiwork of Spanish colonialism is seen all over most of the Americas. The least and most recent of these global changes has been an influx of Muslims into Europe, whether resulting from French colonialism or the German Gastarbeiter program. Yet, apparently, there are those who believe they can just roll back the clock on all this change.
What’s done is done.
Multiculturalism encompasses more than ethnicity and language. It has certainly been a shock to many American fundamentalists and conservatives to discover that we have Gay culture, Green culture, liberal culture, conservative culture, religious culture, secular culture, and a bewildering assortment of others. Amazingly, not all families look like June and Ward Cleaver’s, and this has been difficult for many to accept in an economic system where White Protestantism was once dominant and automatically conferred economic and social advantages on its members over all others.
Faced with the reality of change, the only sensible approach is to accept reality. Fundamentalism, racism, ignorance, fear, or self-interest blinds people to what is rational. Their first impulse is to try to make unwelcome interlopers or the new competition pick up and leave. We see this in the Zionist state, where Arabs are hounded from their homes and villages, even in Israel proper. We see this in a variety of Muslim states where Shi’ites, Alawites, Copts, Sufis, and others are persecuted or driven out. We see this in a dozen American states which have instituted laws for ostensibly preventing illegal immigration but whose real function is to harass and send the message to Latinos: you don’t belong here. We see it in new voter registration laws that attempt to disenfranchise minority, poor, and immigrant voters. It’s no coincidence that many of these same states had Jim Crow laws not so long ago.
Resistance to all this change is futile. But why embrace multiculturalism?
First, the world is the way it is because we have changed it. We have to live with the reality and the consequences of how we’ve changed it. Cross burnings and lynchings or the demonization of people who are, for better or worse, now our neighbors doesn’t unravel reality. It only serves to criminalize and destabilize society, to trivialize the meaning of our Constitution, and to divide communities. Embracing reality is really the only sane option. We can’t move forward if we don’t think rationally.
Second, we strengthen democracy by being inclusive, not by building walls. What does it say about our so-called democracy, in the 21st Century, when gays still do not have all the legal protections of any other class of citizens? If we are truly so concerned about the institution of marriage, why is there such a preoccupation with keeping the fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ideal of heterosexual marriage the standard, and so little interest in keeping families together or raising healthy, well-educated children? Inclusivity focuses on what we all have in common, rather than attempting to preserve some advantage for just our own group or foisting our own religious views on the rest of society.
On those rare occasions in which Americans have been attacked we have felt a remarkable connection to each other, regardless of culture or religion. In the first days after 9/11, there we were — giving blood, saying prayers, just helping each other. But within days we needed to find someone to blame — and the nativists chose Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, or brown-skinned people whom they thought were Muslims. They weren’t picky. Any number of people were beaten, stabbed, shot, and that was just the beginning. These acts of hate may have sufficed to unite xenophobes, but it did not united the rest of society. Faced with economic hardship, the nativist looks accusingly at the undocumented worker. Faced with doubts about the nation’s future, he grasps at straws, believing that simpler times, simpler rules, a simpler mix of people will make everything all right.
But we can create a sense of shared values, compassion, and true connections to teach other by welcoming multiculturalism.
We are blessed with a vibrant mix of people here in the United States. We’ve got just about every language spoken on earth. Go to Washington DC and you’ll often hear Amharic on your cab driver’s radio — at least until the next wave of immigrants replaces the Ethiopians in the taxi business. We’ve got Spanglish. We’ve got Yiddish. We’ve got Creole. Different Creoles. We’ve got tortillas and spaghetti, Swedish meatballs and sushi, baba ganoush and blintzes, hot dogs and crepes, kale soup and cornbread. And there’s the fusion of all these. Instead of a bright white light, we have a dazzling prism of color in film, music, art, theater, and literature. Every religion is here, every spiritual dialect used to talk to God.
Besides the incredible, beautiful, variety within our society, new Americans are a credit, not a debit in demographic and economic terms. While European population growth is flat, ours is growing. This means that the future generation will be large enough to buoy economic growth, even when many of us today are long retired.
Our strength has always been new citizens bringing new strength to an old democracy-in-progress. In every case new Americans have adopted the national story as passionately as each previous group. Multiculturalism is the celebration and the embrace of this ongoing change. The alternative is stagnation, hate, and the erosion of our democratic principles.
When al Qaeda murdered 3000 civilians on our shores in 2001, it was clearly an act of terrorism we felt so deeply that it created in us a blind rage and irrationality that persists today. But quickly we forgot how deeply violence affects any of us as humans as we fashioned an inept, emotional response to a group of cave dwellers we ourselves had created. With the exception of bin Laden’s assassination, we have rarely been able to strike at al Qaeda itself, so we have waged instead proxy wars against half a dozen weak nations in the Middle East — the equivalent of being beaten up by a bully, then going home to slap your little brother around.
In the last decade we have seen American jets, drones, and aircraft carriers drop hundreds of thousands of bombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya — at least, those are the nations we know about. And we Americans have defended Israel’s slaughter of over a thousand civilians in Gaza. Yet we never think of how deeply and for how many decades those who have never harmed us but whom we have harmed will hate us. And how this is the true wellspring of non-state terrorism
The real difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is highly subjective. If al Qaeda had an air force like ours, would it have been an act of terrorism to do what we ourselves are doing this week in Libya, or would we have seen it as an act of war? And, while on the topic of Libya, is the US/NATO intervention and support of Libyan “Contras” any different than Iran’s support to Muqtada al-Sadr in the early years of our second war of choice in Iraq? We call that “terror.”
When Ronald Reagan, his friends in the Argentine dictatorship at the time, and the CIA armed, funded, and organized Contras in Central America secretly, illegally, and in defiance of Congress, Reagan dubbed them “freedom fighters.” Yet the Contras were operating in opposition to a democratically elected government in Nicaragua. No matter, we only recognize democracies we choose to. Reagan was not the first.
When Hamas (which was voted in to power overwhelmingly by Palestinians, and which Israel declared war on the moment it unilaterally left Gaza) uses arms against Israel, it is deemed a terrorist organization. But why isn’t it terrorism when Israel bombs civilians in Gaza? Israel, which has disproportionate influence in American politics and is well-known for its many (and sometimes botched) assassination efforts throughout the world and its frequent human rights abuses, is our friend and of course their enemies (like Hamas) are our enemies. But Hamas poses no threat to the United States, and never has.
Please don’t misconstrue my following remarks. I don’t approve of bus bombings, the murder of the children of even the most violent Zionist settlers in Hebron, or unleashing Qassam rockets on some of my friends in Sderot or Ashkelon (who years ago actually used to go shopping in Gaza). But I don’t believe in murdering civilians. Period. But, please! Hamas is no more a terrorist organization than Israel or the United States — because each one of these parties has chosen to use violence in addition to whatever legal mandate they have, and all end up murdering civilians. Some terrorism “experts” lump Hamas in with al Qaeda (which is not a liberation organization but simply an anarcho-terror group). Yet over the years Hamas has actually been guilty of less civilian slaughter than Israel. It carries out fewer human rights abuses than the Contras ever did, and it was democratically elected, just like Netanyahu. Hamas even roots out extreme Salafist groups sympathetic to al Qaeda. If Hamas were an iceberg, its huge underwater portion (were it recognized by Israel and the United States, both of which refused to respect the results of the Palestinian elections) is its political wing. In many respects Hamas’ goal of getting Israel out of Palestine closely resembles Sinn Fein’s, whose goal was and still is getting the British out of Northern Island. Or the Kurdish independence movement, which wants to keep Turkey out of “autonomous” Kurdish areas and ultimately wants its own nation.
The bitter irony in all this is that the United States, which broke from Britain to create its own country and used a bit of terror to accomplish this, and Israel, which was founded on the Zionist goal of Jewish nationalism and whose founders actually used non-state terrorism against the British, seem to have lost any sympathy for self-determination. Both have expanded their bloated militaries into other nations. And in order to maintain their doomed empires, both regularly depend on state terror. “Collateral damage,” we are told, is unavoidable when protecting our way of life from non-state terrorists.
So terrorists come in all sorts of packages. George Bush famously listed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil.” But the true Axis of Evil consists of any nation that murders civilians. To this list we have to add the United States, Israel, and even Norway. Yes, even this tiny “peaceful” Scandinavian nation sent its jets to bomb targets in Afghanistan and Libya, almost always with civilian “collateral damage. What is”peaceful” then? What is “terrorism?”
The bottom line is: You don’t have to hijack an American Airlines flight and kill thousands to be a terrorist. The guys who do it best, do it regularly, and tax you for the privilege all have their own air forces. Yes, the best terrorists are state terrorists.
As a theater lover, a Jew, and a political junkie, I read David Mamet’s first book, “The Wicked Son,” a couple of years ago. The book’s title refers to the telling of the Passover story, in which the “wicked son” asks what Passover means “to you” – demonstrating that he has distanced himself from the Jewish community. Mamet then proceeds to present the most hardline version of Zionism which, if you disagree with even a point of his extremist views, qualifies you as a Self-Hating Jew. So, besides being the author of the misogynistic piece “Oleanna” I already knew him to be a right-wing shmuck.
But now David Mamet has outed himself as a Self-Hating Jew. And I mean exactly, precisely, literally that. He hates Jews. And he was only too happy to bloviate about his apparently stupid co-religionists on a fundamentalist Christian television show. Listen to this embarrassing, shameful performance yourself:
In the clip, Mamet is on Pat Robertson’s show, 700 Club, to flog his new book, “On the Dismantling of American Culture,” which tries to sell the same themes as disgraced German economist Thilo Sarrazin’s book “Deutschland schafft sich Ab” (“Germany Does Away With Itself”) and Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik’s manifesto – namely, that (like Breivik and Sarrazin’s Europe) “America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.” Mamet’s book contains a number of other fundamentalist prescriptions similar to Breivik’s: feminism has emasculated men, global warming is a hoax, multiculturalism is evil, and Obama is a “one-worlder.”
In his previous Zionist screed, only Jewish Two Staters or those sympathetic to rights of Palestinians drew his ire. But this time around, in today’s interview with Robertson, Mamet blasted away at Jews in general. “My people, the Jews, have a lot to answer for” over their support for Obama. Robertson asks, “Do you think the Jews are ever gonna wake up?” Mamet answers that Jews in general always wake up too late.
I suppose that was the answer and the opportunity that Robertson had been waiting for all along: Damned Jews; Why don’t they just embrace Jesus while there’s still time?
David Mamet was only too happy to help make Robertson’s point.
Yesterday’s terrorist attack in Norway was totally expected.
Of course, when it occurred, the first fingers jabbed into the air were pointed accusingly at Muslims. The Washington Post’s necon columnist Jennifer Rubin didn’t bother for any pesky facts to come in before quoting extensively from an article in the Weekly Standard: “We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.” Rubin expanded the Standard’s neocon arguments to demand more defense spending. The Washington Post never published an update or retraction.
The New York Times also published a headline somewhat prematurely: “Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead – Powerful Explosions Hit Oslo; Jihadis Claim Responsibility.” The problem was that no such thing had occurred.
Even President Obama got into the act. “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring,” he said, referring to al Qaeda.
But because of the climate of sanctioned and encouraged hate speech here in the United States, it was a surprise to me that the attack did not originate here – in the cradle of anger, paranoia, and hatred.
The proliferation of anti-immigrant and xenophobic groups like Pamela Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” has created a large network of hate websites, encouraging violence against foreigners (Muslims principally) and giving a forum to foreign xenophobes like Geert Wilders and neo-Nazi groups like the English Defense League. It turns out that the alleged Norwegian attacker, Anders Behring Breivik, was a regular contributor to “Atlas Shrugs” over several years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which previously used to track the KKK, now has a full-time job tracking militia groups, “sovereigns,” neo-Nazis, various “Aryan churches,” the “Christian identity” movement, and a slew of groups which violently target Blacks, gays, Muslims, abortion doctors, immigrants, “secularists,” and others.
But if you think these insects are only hiding under a couple of rocks, an NAACP study of the Tea Party movement last year identified these same elements in six of the seven Tea Party organizations [http://www.naacp.org/pages/tea-party-report].
A typical example (from the report): “Larry Pratt of Virginia is a member of two different national Tea Party networks: Tea Party Nation and 1776 Tea Party. He has been promoting the gun and militia movement for years. In 1992 he spoke at a Colorado meeting of Aryan Nations leaders, former Ku Klux Klansmen, and adherents of so-called ‘Christian Identity’ — a doctrine in which Jews are considered Satanic and persons of color are referred to as ‘mud people.'”
No rational person can claim to understand how Constitution’s protections are being applied nowadays. Freedom of association, speech, privacy, and assembly are all under attack by our rapidly-expanding security apparatus and security-friendly courts. But paradoxically we have never been freer to advocate shooting our neighbors in the head with a fifty caliber weapon. Last week a federal appeals court defended the rights of a right-wing racist, Walter Bagdasarian, who had called for Barak Obama’s assassination. In 2008 Bagdasarian, in a Yahoo financial forum, called Obama a “n––” and wrote “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” He posted another comment 20 minutes later that said “shoot the n––.”
This insanity occurs within religious groups that should know better. Any number of Christian churches, including the infamous Westboro church, have hosted Dutch extremist Geert Wilders. Although primarily a Christian fundamentalist assault on secularism and a competing religion, as a Jew it rankles me that even a Stoughton Jewish congregation has hosted Wilders, who has extensive links to European neo-Nazis. A Muslim I know has likened the current climate for Muslims in the U.S. to the Germany of 1935 for Jews. He’s absolutely right.
The argument for “tolerance” may well be that democracy cannot afford to legislate civility. But what kind of civil society can survive if even the most violent forms of hate speech are permitted?
So, friends and neighbors, just keep watching the news. Al Qaeda is the least of our worries. It’s only a matter of time before someone — encouraged by their fundamentalist church, a right-wing synagogue, a Tea Party congressman, or some bizarre court ruling — harvests the fruit of the pervasive hate in this sick society.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has been successful. So successful, in fact, that Israel has responded – as it usually does – by sealing another crack, putting another finger or gob of gum in the dike, in an effort to stanch the flood of criticism of its Apartheid laws and occupation.
This week Israel made it illegal for citizens to support non-violent boycotts of the nation.
If you thought that, somehow, Israel was still the “only democracy in the Middle East” because at least its Jewish citizens were free, well now you can forget that. Although primarily targeting Israeli Palestinians, it also restricts the rights of its Jewish citizens.
Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston has it about right: this is the quiet sound of the nation finally turning fascist. If going fascist is too strong, then it’s the sound of the last feeble exhalations of a dying democracy.
And what about American citizens who still want to boycott Israel? Rest assured that our Constitutional rights are still … being held ransom.
While vets are our friends and neighbors, so are the kids and under-employed adults thinking of enlisting.
Yes, we don’t want to demonize anyone. But by the same token some of us don’t particularly want friends and neighbors to go to slaughter (or to slaughter others).
Of our 1.43 million active duty military, 84% of the Army and 94% of the Marine Corps are male. 75% of the military is White, 18% Black, and the rest a mix of other ethnicities. 52% are married. 93% have a high school diploma or GED. The greatest number of soldiers are between 21 and 30. However, of the 4300 who have died in Iraq so far, more than half were 18-24 and minorities accounted for 30% of the deaths. These are all characteristics of the new “professional” military consisting of all “volunteers.”
Some of this picture — of a white, older, married male military — is skewed by the fact that many men hadn’t completely thought through staying in the Reserves which, during the height of the Iraq war, accounted for almost half of all active duty personnel. A resulting “back door draft” forced many of these men to “re-enlist” against their will because there were not enough troops to wage the Iraq war.
In a CRS study of active duty deaths since 1980, only 10% of all deaths were due to hostilities. 52.6% were accidents, 17.53% illnesses, 13.72% suicides, and 4.8% were homicides. The mortality rate in the study ranges from 0.0495% in 2000 to 0.1214% in 2007.
But for each of the 45,706 deaths since 1980, there are 7 to 10 injuries for every death.
The 55,482,849 (!!) enlistments since 1980 have also resulted in millions of Americans with mental problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse problems; and who have had difficulty in keeping their marriages, families, and jobs afloat.
Forget for a second the $1.1 trillion that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost to-date.
The human and social costs of militarization are costing us more than we know.
Thank you for printing Karen Jacob’s wonderful letter from the Midwest. Her observation that a militaristic United States is all her college-age son has known in his life really struck me. With a twenty-one year-old of my own, I remember quite clearly the CNN reports from Baghdad shortly after he was born.
Of course, to his generation we have bequeathed an additional $4 TRILLION debt, as an article buried on page A4 reports. The Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute (http://www.watsoninstitute.org/eisenhower) calculates that in just the last ten years this staggering debt – almost one-third of the total – was racked-up by wars which, by objective assessment, have been dismal failures like all our wars of choice following WWII. And these recent wars, as Jacob points out, have extinguished over a quarter of a million human lives and created private psychological hells for a large number of our returning troops.
Imagine our economic strength and health, and the respect the rest of the world would show us, if we weren’t quite as trigger-happy. Yet we cloak ourselves in the delusion that the world resents us for what we have, not for what we do. When our number one national priority is building the world’s largest military, every international nail must be pounded using our expensive military hammer. This way of thinking has to change.
During the last twenty years, particularly the last decade, we have permitted our Constitutional freedoms to be systematically eroded. The big surprise to many is that the Obama administration has been every bit as hostile to civil liberties as its predecessor. You can’t go anywhere without being x-rayed, scanned, ID’d, having to partially disrobe in front of latex-gloved inspectors, or submitting to bag inspections. Federal agencies no longer need much of a reason to spy on you, search your home, wiretap you, or infiltrate your religious and political organizations. Even local law enforcement agencies are getting into the act. America in 2011 has more than a passing resemblance to the Soviet Union of 1961.
This is what we’ve bequeathed to the next generation – a nation that has squandered its riches, destroyed the safety net that ensured a healthy middle class, neglected its own infrastructure, outsourced everything but consumerism, lost the last bits of respect anyone ever had for it, and has seen other economies and nations eclipse it in both wealth and influence.
There are those who say that everything we’ve done was the unavoidable need to to fight to protect our democracy. But as the Romans, the British, the Russians, and every other empire discovered along the way, empire is a costly addiction and one that cannot be sustained.
At some point we must recognize that democracy is not preserved by buying fleets of drones, aircraft carriers, and F16’s, hiring soldiers and mercenaries, doubling the number of spy agencies, having a thousand military bases in a hundred countries, throwing our weight around in four or five simultaneous wars, building moats around ourselves, or imposing our concept of democracy on the rest of the world while our own citizens slide into poverty.
Democracy is not about fighting to keep what we have because the accumulation of power alone has never made any people free or democratic. Democracy is about being clear about who we are as a nation, and about creating as many options as possible for citizens to lead free and productive lives. These rights were intended for human citizens, not for multinational corporations promising to share a few crumbs of their prosperity with us whenever they remember to pay their taxes. Democracy implies a commitment to “others” – to neighbors, to our communities, to those who come to join us in this grand experiment, and above all to our children.
This Fourth of July, amid all the fireworks and patriotic speeches, spend a few moments thinking about what kind of nation you want to leave to your children and grandchildren.
This is what our nation’s founders were thinking those many years ago.
The Standard Times editorial this morning (“Public Employees, Private Freedoms”) is a long piece defending the dismissal of Bourne firefighter Richard Doherty for griping that he had to work on the Fourth of July. To me, Doherty’s firing seemed to be just vindictiveness on the part of the town. After a somewhat tedious case law review (so that we fully appreciated all the “nuance” involved), the op-ed took the town’s side, offering the weakest of arguments:
“As a newspaper, we aggressively defend First Amendment rights, but Doherty’s behavior undermined public confidence in the town’s ability to provide emergency services. Public servants have a right to express their opinion, but there is no right to a job funded at taxpayer expense for conduct that breaches the public trust.”
First, does any sane person truly believe that Doherty’s gripes “undermined public confidence?” If undermining public confidence in government infrastructure is such a horrific betrayal of the public, please, let’s dismiss every Republican who has ever disparaged “Big Government” or actually undermined its effectiveness by slashing necessary services. But going after a guy because he whined about working on a holiday? Give me a break. I could see firing Mr. Doherty if he had refused to show up for work instead of merely griping.
Second, it seems to me, for all the nuanced case law review, the Standard Times misses the point that Constitutional freedoms are not abrogated the moment a person becomes a public employee. The First Amendment does not have a clause exempting prickly firemen from its protections.
The Standard Times editorial asks the question, whether a gay person could confidently receive services from a firefighter who had gone on record making homophobic remarks. Valid point, but once again, let’s ask this question about half of the Republican Party, including five candidates who want to roll back gay rights. Would a gay person accept help from a homophobe? Sure, if their house were burning down or they were going into shock. Being civil to those whose opinions we despise or who despise us is all part of living a society. We don’t have to like everyone who serves us. But they have to do their job.
The foregoing arguments also apply to the recent case of Anthony Weiner, whose antics have brought disgrace on him and his family. New York voters will have a chance to weigh in on Mr. Weiner’s effectiveness in a 2012 election. At that time they can decide if his personal actions warrant revoking the public’s trust in him. Frankly, Weiner’s wronged wife is the one who should be firing him, not the public which merely has a prurient fascination with sex scandals.
Far worse betrayals of the public trust go unchallenged and unmentioned daily in your pages. The president’s recent violation of the War Power Act, the fact we are now ensnared in combat in five Middle Eastern countries, our shameful foreign policy, and recklessly giving half the TARP money to the nation’s richest people. These are the real betrayals of public trust! Consider for a moment how many years the Democrats in the House Ethics Committee avoided any serious investigation of Charles Rangel and you understand how betrayal of the public is not a serious issue, to Republicans or Democrats.
Which brings me to the Standard Times.
As long as the press has colorful sex scandals to report or whining firemen to vilify in the op-ed page, it can continue to half-heartedly fulfill its duty to expose the truth of larger, more important issues. We have plenty of wars, employment, infrastructure, and budget crises a properly informed public needs to know about. Of course, in the age of embedded journalism, this requires going head to head with government, not simply being an echo chamber for it.
When the editor writes, “As a newspaper we aggressively defend First Amendment rights,” I want to shout something unprintable here. The hell you are! Why not simply give the vindictive town bureaucrat who just didn’t like Mr. Doherty space to vent in your own column?
The editor seems to have no grasp of what, truly, betrayal of the public consists.
What nation permits the secret police to spy on its regular citizens with little oversight, cultivates informants, infiltrates cultural and political organizations, and turns neighbor against neighbor?
If you immediately thought of East Germany and the Stasi — go to the back of the class! This is happening in your own country.
This week the Wiesenthal Center announced that it had purchased a letter written in 1919, the first statement by a young Adolf Hitler proposing the removal of Jews from Germany.
Flash forward almost one hundred years later, in much of the United States it is now open season on Muslims. The number of attacks on mosques, particularly in the South, is now in the hundreds. Besides Quran burnings and mosque arson, Muslims have been beaten, stabbed, and shot. Even Sikhs (who are not Muslim but who wear turbans) and other brown-skinned people have been attacked. Hate groups freely sponsor talks by bigots like Geerd Wilders, often at churches and synagogues. “Anti-shariah” laws have been sponsored in numerous states; the goal is to outlaw religious courts similar to Jewish battei din, which their ignorant sponsors claim is going to replace secular law (which they want to outlaw themselves by pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda).
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports a huge resurgence in white militias and hate groups. The Washington Post reports that approximately one hundred cases of domestic, right-wing terrorism have been weakly pursued, or not at all, since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Meanwhile, gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are still trying to get a modicum of justice. In the minds of the same bible-thumping, Quran-burning fundamentalists, permitting Bob and Jim to get married is going to somehow destroy their own marriages.
And it’s all so petty. This morning I read in these pages that permitting transgendered children to use school lavatories would cause the end of civilization as we know it. It probably never occurred to the writer, a former teacher, that the incredibly minuscule number of children who would supposedly throw schools into such chaos could probably simply use the faculty bathrooms.
But the shrill voices just never shut up. We constantly hear attacks on gays in the military, illegal aliens, unions, environmental regulations, helping our neighbors, paying our fair share of taxes, and any number of things of which Ayn Rand would not approve.
Sixteen states have copied Arizona’s anti-Latino bill, SB 1070. The goal? Removing evil “illegal” foreigners from our midst.
And now, this week in our own community, a Guatemalan man was stabbed in a hate crime, allegedly by a thirteen year-old. I don’t know what was worse – the crime itself or the age of the perpetrator.
The specter of Mr. Hitler usually invokes some Jungian archetype of the ultimate evil, unbounded hate that humans simply cannot comprehend, some abstract demonic impulse, something paranormal.
But Mr. Hitler was hardly a demon. He was, unfortunately, much like us. Exactly like us.
Today, if his name were not so widely known, Mr. Hitler’s ideas would be warmly praised by the religious right – as they were in fact for a time in the Thirties here in the U.S. Because what Hitler wanted was not really so different from what the American religious right wanted then and wants today – a “purified” Christianized culture, preferably overflowing with White Protestants.
It was a relatively short twenty years from Hitler’s letter to the Final Solution. People today cannot comprehend how Germany, a nation of rational people, the most advanced technologically at the time, could have permitted itself to slide into insanity so fast.
Do we have to wait another twenty years before we understand?
The Standard Times editor has apparently jumped on the Terry Jones bandwagon (“Blame violent Islam for deaths”). Not only does the editor appear to share a few of Jones’ own Islamophobic views, he completely misunderstands this as a religious response to the continuing, unwelcome American presence in Afghanistan.
The editor’s last words are: “Let us remember… that Terry Jones might be an irresponsible fool, but he is not responsible for the murder of innocent foreigners in Afghanistan. Those who … practice a faith that they insist commands them to use violence in the service of an angry God are the ones with the blood of innocents on their hands.”
The editor’s use of the words “in the service of an angry God” is horrifying. I doubt he has been trained as a theologian and his inference belies the ignorant Muslim-bashing in vogue today and the rejection of the fact that Muslims worship the same God of Abraham that most Americans do. As for the Angry God, the god of hate is the terracotta idol Reverend Jones apparently worships.
In the 2007 Pew Research study cited in the editorial, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream” (http://www.pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf), 26% of American Muslims under 30 did not entirely repudiate suicide bombings as a tactic. Yet in the same study we find that 82% of all American Muslims over 30 see absolutely no justification for it.
But if the editor thinks these figures are “alarming,” let’s look at “mainstream” American values regarding the killing of civilians. I think you’ll see they have nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with politics.
For example, the majority of the American public supported dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright told anchorwoman Lesley Stahl that the sanctions-related deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it” in order to apply pressure on Saddam Hussein.
And let’s not forget the numerous Afghan and Pakistani civilians who are “accidentally” murdered by drones as I write this. Or the thousands of Vietnamese who were cremated by napalm air strikes. Or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians murdered in “Shock and Awe” – all for nothing. Or the millions of civilians we have left to the whims and caprices of homicidal dictators our own State Department supports.
Our disgust for murdering civilians, it would seem, only applies when we aren’t the perpetrator.
We like to pretend we don’t understand why we are despised. Or we come up with ludicrous explanations to delude ourselves. “They hate us for our democracy.” Or “those damned people and their angry god.”
But the real reason they hate us? Because we won’t stop invading their countries or deciding who should run them. The explosion of rage in Afghanistan had nothing to do with Islam and (I’ll agree with the editor here) had less to do with Terry Jones. Following the disclosure of the premeditated murders of Afghan civilians by Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and other U.S. soldiers, the Quran burning was just the latest affront from America – a nation that will never understand why the world doesn’t embrace us with open arms.
Finally, if Terry Jones is an irresponsible fool for his pronouncements on Islam, the editor is as well for echoing his tripe.
I’ve always loved Passover, dragging in the big tables, turning the living room of our small Cape house into a dining room, inviting visitors who had nowhere else to go or nothing else to do, or finding silly props for the ten plagues. The home-made Haggadah my wife and sister-in-law created back when the children were small, the dog bone substituting for lamb shank for the vegetarians among us, my wife’s matzoh ball soup, the different charoset recipes, all these adaptations have kept Pesach going after our generation stepped up to replace beloved parents, aunts, and uncles no longer at the table.
On occasion we’ve added oranges and olives to the Seder plate, as we honor the liberation of real people in real times. The same cacophony of “Dayenu” being sung in several keys simultaneously by my tone-deaf family can also be heard when we belt out “Tell old Pharaoh, Let My People Go.” Liberation is liberation, at least in our book. When we say, “Next year in Jerusalem” my thoughts used to fly to a peaceful Jerusalem, one in which both Jews and Palestinians had somehow managed to work things out. Despite the hopeless odds and the ugly reality, I had always hoped for a Two State solution, long after logic told me it was impossible.
But this year Passover will be quite different. By the time April rolls around, the Two State solution will be a dim memory. For the first time in the experience of everyone around the table, there will no longer be even the illusion that, if only everyone had talked things out, there could be peace. Talking and photo ops went on for the better part of my adult life. The only constant in all this theater was the building of settlements on Palestinian land. Without a state or land of their own, Palestinians are now the subjects of a Jewish Pharaoh enforcing Jewish laws. While little bloodshed is likely to follow next week’s U.S. veto of a Palestinian state in behalf of Israel, there will be no peace for generations. The quest for a Palestinian homeland must now necessarily turn to a battle for civil rights in some new version of Israel that ensures rights for all, not just for Jews.
What is so different this year is that it is no longer possible to hold that sweet old picture of interdependent Jewish and Palestinian liberation in my mind. For years I believed that Israel’s survival depended upon Palestinian liberation. I believed also that the establishment of the state of Israel itself was incomplete because Israel had chosen the role of the Egyptian taskmaster, and only by repudiating oppression could it ever hope to survive in the long term. And I also believed that, as Jews, we could never support oppression by a supposedly Jewish state. Now that hope for Palestinian self-determination is about to be destroyed, there is nothing left but to acknowledge that, by these actions, Israel is simply another flawed state and not the deserving recipient of any prayers. At least this Israel.
Oppression and occupation have been institutionalized for so long that Israel cannot conceive of its existence as anything but a Zero Sum game in which a Palestinian state cannot also exist. And most of this has been accomplished through the cheerleading, political support, and funding from American Jews. The point of no return has finally been reached. The lovely postcard images of Jerusalem as the City of Peace have been replaced by the stark photographs of Palestinian “squatters” being kicked out of their houses by settlers in formerly Arab neighborhoods. This is now the only true image that can remain of Jerusalem.
Next year I’ll have to have to find a way to celebrate a Passover which celebrates liberation, justice, and hopes for the City of Peace. But next April it will no longer be Israel’s story.
What with the new fears of terrorists, illegal immigrants, and nationalized health care, it is easy to forget that we have actually been a nation of frightened cattle for a very long time. This could have been my 4th grade class:
Aside from the fact that real democracies don’t persecute their minorities, Jews are reminded in many pieces of scripture to never forget when we were “strangers in a strange land” (see the book of Exodus). Maybe this is one reason why Muslim-bashing ticks me off so much. As a group, we should know what it’s like – if not us personally, then our parents.
Nowadays, though, we have discovered that, after centuries of being despised by zealots and Christian-tinged nationalists, we have suddenly been mailed gold membership cards to a newly-constituted “Judeo-Christian” country club [others need not apply]. We’ve arrived, we tell ourselves. They love us. Things have changed.
Well, I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the folks who hated Jews last year have simply moved on to new enemies. They haven’t stopped their hating, and I don’t trust their unctuous expressions of new-found love. The religious right responsible for so much of the bigotry toward Muslims (and previously Jews and African Americans) still can’t decide whether they want to kiss us, convert us, wear tallit and sing in Hebrew, or keep blaming us for Golgotha. By the time they realize we really aren’t converting any time soon, I suspect they won’t love us quite so much. And then it will be time for us to die in their End Times scenario. All this is to say – we’re really still the enemy. But ever since the Holocaust it’s just been, well, a bit awkward to say things like that in polite company. But give it time. They haven’t really changed.
Yet Jews are not their only enemies. Blacks, gays, tree-huggers, socialists, progressives, unionists, Hispanics, immigrants, flag-burners, pacifists, anti-globalists, anti-imperialists, secularists, atheists – the list is pretty long – everyone’s a target. And it has always seemed so obvious to me that much of their hostility to Muslims is that Islam is simply their number one religious competitor.
But none of this is new.
A few years ago, while doing some genealogical research, I came across a 1909 immigration document which recorded a family member’s recent arrival in America on a ship from Antwerp. I always found it odd that the shipping company had recorded all this information (but more on this in a second):
19y; male; single; can read/write; Citizen of: Russia, Race: Hebrew; Last Residence: Russia, [town] Destination: NY, NY; Has ticket; Passage paid by brother; In possession of: $25; Has been in US before in NY; Never in prison or supported by charity; Not a polygamist or an anarchist; Place of Birth: Russia, [town]
In that year, 1909, many Jews were sympathetic to movements advocating anti-authoritarian forms of government based on justice, not nationalistic slogans. After all, nationalism had never been kind to Jews in Europe. For reasons of both fact and perception, most Jews were presumed to be anarchists in 1909.
And a cautious nation couldn’t be too careful about letting such troublemakers into a society whose ideal was British and German Protestantism. Organizations such as the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League were alarmed that so many of these new Jewish immigrants were “undesirable” that they helped legislate large fines on steamship companies which failed to screen them out (thus the detailed steamship records above). The League’s Numerical Limitation Bill was hardly subtle: restrictions were harshest on eastern and southern Europeans (Jews and Italians). The Dillingham Commission further restricted such immigration and totally eliminated Asians. The American nativists of the time believed these foreigners were inherently “lesser breeds” and incompatible with a superior Christian, European society – something echoed frequently by Tea Party types in the U.S. today and by Islamophobes like Geert Wilders. The League’s charter:
We should see to it that the breeding of the human race in this country receives the attention which it so surely deserves. We should see to it that we are protected, not merely from the burden of supporting alien dependants, delinquents, and defectives, but from what George William Curtis called “that watering of the nation’s lifeblood,” which results from their breeding after admission.
Sound familiar?
First they came for the Jews, then the Muslims. Who’s next?
Here’s an example of the lack of transparency and dishonesty from the State Department that led to the most recent Wikileaks disclosures.
I have written previously about the case of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a non-violent Palestinian activist who was jailed for making a peace sculpture out of the many tear gas canisters and spent concussion grenades shot by Israel Defense Forces at people in the occupied village of Bi’lin. Recently Abdallah’s prison sentence was completed but Israel still keeps him locked away in Ofer Prison.
The case has been in the news for more than a year. Thousands of people around the world have written to their politicians and diplomats about Abu Rahmah. Former President Carter, Desmond Tutu, and a number of European diplomats have all spoken out about his case. It is inconceivable that people in the State Department are as clueless as they pretend to be.
Matthew Lee of the AP wire service has been trying unsuccessfully for weeks to get a straight answer from State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley about Abu Rahmah’s political imprisonment. The following clip shows the lengths that the State Department has gone to in deep-sixing any real concern for political prisoners and in deferring to Israel about human rights abuses.
Al Jazeera has a series called Empire hosted by Marwan Bishara. Recently Bishara did a segment on Hollywood called “Hollywood and the war machine” which took an unflattering look at how — long before the American press began “embedding” with the military — sleeping with the Pentagon was Standard Operating Procedure in Hollywood. Bishara interviewed outsiders Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Christopher Hitchens for his segment. Although the United States has lost almost every war following World War II, Hollywood (with incredible Pentagon meddling) nevertheless projects an image of the military as an unstoppable victor. How can this be?
At one point in the video Michael Moore describes American war movies as “war porn.” A spot-on characterization of a nation that rarely succeeds in its conquests but still likes to fantasize that it can still get it up with anyone of its choosing.
Yesterday, with a second Depression afflicting the nation, two wars, Wikileaks, and the Tea Party rebellion, I discovered that TIME had decided to make Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, its new Person of the Year for “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.” TIME’s Richard Stengel sees Facebook as not just a new social mechanism; it’s “the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet.”
Accepting the honor (on Facebook), Zuckerberg wrote:
“Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
The Wall Street Journal quickly put its seal of approval on TIME’s choice with an essay by a philosopher-ethicist, no less, on why Facebook is so important to us. Humans, it appears, were apparently built to “breathe, eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and check Facebook.”
Thus, to the visionaries at TIME and the WSJ, Facebook is not only a new social function but a new bodily function and has been elevated to a replacement for normal human relationships. NPR showed a bit more skepticism, though, wondering if perhaps better choices might have been available to TIME’s editors. NPR’s poll showed 75% of NPR listeners thought someone else should have been chosen. ComputerWorld saw the choice of Zuckerberg as a snub to Julian Assange, who was also the leader in the NPR poll. Many journalists wondered what was going on in Richard Stengel’s mind.
Like the Nobel Prize award to Obama last year, Zuckerberg’s award does not come as a surprise in our new Snookified world. We do live in a society in which basketball players earn a thousand times more than teachers and ex-cons like Martha Stewart and Buddy Cianci have their own TV and radio shows. And maybe it’s simply to avoid predictability that undeserved awards are given in the first place.
But undeserved? Is this really too harsh? How can one say that Zuckerberg, a white, privileged son of both a dentist and a psychiatrist, who came to Harvard via Philips Exeter academy and whose social networking creation may well be the result of theft or plagiarism, does notdeserve the award?
After all, who doesn’t love self-indulgent narcissism? This is the true product of our collective use of Facebook — billions of digital pork sausages oozing from the grinder. If talking to one’s friends on a cell phone while visiting a rest room isn’t enough, Facebook lets people disclose even more about their one-night stands, drunken binges, the games they play on company time, or the fragile state of their mental health. You can post thousands of photos of yourself on Facebook. If you’re deranged, you can even post your suicide note, as Clay Duke did. How can something like this not be vital to the functioning of a society? We can get our 15 minutes of fame every day on Facebook.
Stengel tries to apply lipstick to the pig by describing how Facebook and Wikileaks are “two sides of the same coin”:
“Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends.”
Apparently TIME’s editors, one would have supposed champions of the Fourth Estate’s responsibilities, don’t see transparency in government as something which empowers citizens in any way. For TIME, narcissism is true empowerment. Taking flak for his choice, Stengel said that “I do think something is going on deep down in the human character that’s changing and evolving. […] Is there a bigger story than that? I don’t think so.”
Stengel also justified passing over Julian Assange: “There is no Julian Assange without Bradley Manning,” he wrote, referring to the presumed source of many of the leaked classified documents.
The latest Call of Duty Black Ops advertisement is absolutely, 100% correctly, titled “There’s a Soldier in All of Us.”
We have seen the enemy, and he is indeed us.
In the ad, to a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (the “Let it Bleed” album), a variety of businessmen, celebrities, fast-food, hotel, and office workers, a young girl, and a short-order cooks blast, shoot, bomb, and kill their way through some unspecified Middle Eastern country. How appropriate! We are, after all, precisely the folks who voted for these wars and donated our children’s bodies and souls to fight them.
loonwatch has previously reported the links between the Tea Party and the far-right English Defense League or individual loons like Rick Lazio, Rabbi Nachum Shifren, and a Brooklyn group protesting Park51. We’ve posted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams’ “Allah is a Monkey God, Muslims are His Animals” remarks along with his amusing charges that the NAACP is a “racist” group. We’ve posted the NAACP’s resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party.
The complete 94-page report, which studies six of the national Tea Party organizations and includes a forward by NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes several efforts that the various Tea Party organizations have made to soften criticism for their racism. For instance, Mark Williams was eventually fired for his Islamophobic remarks, as was Tim Ravndal for his calls for violence against gays. It also cautions that not everyone within the Tea Party movement is a racist:
“It would be a mistake to claim that all Tea Partiers are nativist vigilantes or racists of one stripe or another, and this report manifestly does not make that claim. As this report highlights, however, all of the national Tea Party factions have had problems in these areas. Of the national factions, only FreedomWorks Tea Party, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, has made an explicit attempt to narrow the focus of the movement as a whole to fiscal issues – an effort that has largely failed, as this report documents.”
But the report takes the Tea Party to task for the nativism found within most groups, suggesting that its core issues are less economic and more xenophobic:
“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government. Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues.”
“While Tea Partiers and their supporters are concerned about the current economic recession and the increase in government debt and spending it has occasioned, there is no observable statistical link between Tea Party membership and unemployment levels.”
The report warns:
“Tea Party organizations have given platforms to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots. Further, hard-core white nationalists have been attracted to these protests, looking for potential recruits and hoping to push these (white) protestors towards a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy. One temperature gauge of these events is the fact that longtime national socialist David Duke is hoping to find money and support enough in the Tea Party ranks to launch yet another electoral campaign in the 2012 Republican primaries. […] The leading figures in one national faction, 1776 Tea Party (the faction more commonly known as TeaParty.org), were imported directly from the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project. Tea Party Nation has provided a gathering place for so-called birthers and has attracted Christian nationalists and nativists.”
The largest and fastest growing group is Tea Party Patriots. The report describes its May 2010 convention in Gatlinburg:
“Notable among the workshops were presentations by Pam Geller, an anti-Islam agitator; and a set by the Oath Keepers, a quasi-militia group that focuses on recruiting law enforcement officers and military personnel, and defending their version of the Constitution. A similar workshop with Spike Constitution Defenders, mixed a bit of Posse Comitatus-style rhetoric into their propaganda. Another workshop presenter, Samuel Duck, conducted a workshop advocating repeal of both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendment.”
The second largest Tea Party group is ResistNet which is described as “notable” as a home to nativists and Islamophobes. It includes a number of militia members and anti-immigration activists, including Robert Dameron, founder of Citizens for the State of Washington (Yakima, WA); Wendell Neal, leader of the Tulsa Minutemen (Broken Arrow, OK); Mike Jarbeck, director of the Florida chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (Orlando, FL); David Caulkett, creator of IllegalAliens.us and Report Illegals (Pompano Beach, FL); Robin Hvidston of the Southern California Minuteman Project and Gilchrist Angels (Upland, CA); Ruthie Hendrycks, founder of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (Hanska, MN); Evert Evertsen, founder of Minutemen Midwest (Harvard, IL); and Rosanna Pulido, the founder of the Chicago Minutemen and a former staffer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Chicago, IL).
The report adds:
“Another ResistNet partner organization is TakeAmericaBack.org, a website launched in April 2009 to publish anti-immigrant propaganda. One article claimed that ‘multiculturalism’ demands that ‘Americans learn to speak Spanish so illegals can take over America with foreign cultures.’ Another article on this site concluded that ‘a Kenyan, Communist, son of a terrorist, as our wannabe president, who has not only expressed his hatred of America, but is also an avowed Muslim…’ Also included among the official partners is a trio of groups run by anti-Islam activist Pam Geller.”
“It is this untenable attempt to vilify President Obama as ‘non-American’ and ‘foreign’ that pushes a significant number of ResistNet Tea Partiers out of the ranks of a responsible opposition and into the columns of bigots and xenophobes.”
One minor quibble: it’s not just the attack on President Obama that moves these wackos into the column of bigotry and xenophobia.
Next in membership and growth is Tea Party Nation. Describing its Convention in Nashville in February 2010:
“Despite all of these pre-conference difficulties, the convention in Nashville was well attended. Sarah Palin spoke there, generating discussion about her speaking fee, rumored to be over $100,000. Underneath the hoopla attending Palin’s appearance, the convention highlighted the place of Christian conservatives, indeed Christian nationalism, inside this movement generally, and in Judson’s Tea Party Nation specifically. The convention also built bridges to nativists and so-called birthers. There was a marked shift away from a supposed focus on bailouts and budget deficits towards a culture war.”
The convention was also attended by an inexplicable (and to this Jewish writer, a disgusting) number of Jewish ultraconservatives, including Andrew Breitbart, Orly Taitz, and members of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It wasn’t that long ago that we were reviled by such bigots; now some of us are sleeping with these people.
At the bottom of the list and the bottom of the barrel is the 1776 Tea Party, heavily loaded with vigilante militiamen. These guys (and the membership is overwhelmingly male) practically define the word “fringe.”
“On February 27, 2009, Robertson attended a Tea Party event in Houston with a sign reading ‘Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.’ He’s also sent out racist fundraising emails depicting President Obama as a pimp. Robertson also has a history of promoting anti-Semites on his ‘Tea Party Hour’ radio program. Both incidents increased the negative publicity surrounding the 1776 Tea Party, but its notoriety did not stop two leaders of an anti-immigrant vigilante group, Minuteman Project, from stepping in to run the 1776 organization.”
The report includes a chapter, Tea Parties – Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse. The Tea Party is riddled with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, militia members, and Christian Identity spokesmen. Dale Robertson, chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, supports the views of Pastor John Weaver:
“According to [Weaver’s] particular theology, Jews are considered a satanic force (or the incarnation of Satan himself), and people of color are considered less than fully human. By contrast, the white people of northern Europe are considered racial descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel, and the United States of America is considered their ‘promised land;’ a theory descended from a theology known as British-Israelism. Although Weaver describes his particular outlook as a variant of ‘Dominionism,’ his essay, ‘The Sovereignty of God and Civil Government’ was listed in a book catalogue published by the British-Israel World Federation. As such, this would place Weaver just one step to the right of the most radical forms of Christian fundamentalism. The list of out-front anti-Semites on Tea Party platforms includes an event in July 2009. One thousand people gathered in Upper Senate Park for a rally in D.C. A full line-up of speakers included representatives from several tax reform groups, FreedomWorks, and talk show hosts. Also on the platform that day was the band Poker Face, playing music, providing technical back up, and receiving nothing but plaudits from the crowd. The band, from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, already had a reputation for anti-Semitism. Lead singer Paul Topete was on the public record calling the Holocaust a hoax, and writing and performing for American Free Press – a periodical published by Willis Carto, the godfather of Holocaust denial in the United States. According to Topete, ‘The Rothschilds set up the Illuminati in 1776 to subvert the Christian basis of civilization.’ Because of their bigotry, the band had been kicked off venues at Rutgers University in 2006 and a Ron Paul campaign event in 2007. But they made it to the stage of the Tea Party without any questions asked.”
And there’s a lot more in the IREHR document: David Duke, European fascists, neoconservatives, and loons like Pamela Geller. But in the interests of space and time, read the frightening report yourself.
There is a scene in the film A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessep, must answer for a soldier’s hazing death. He explodes, “You can’t handle the truth!” before his classic monolog, explaining how lesser men will never understand the darker side of what it takes to create an effective military.
This scene absolutely nails the American relationship to authoritarian power, but it applies equally toward foreign policy and our rapidly expanding security apparatus. Guantanamo, the end of habeas corpus, imaginary WMDs to justify war, lying at the UN, airport scanners, and now the Wikileaks revelations all illustrate the same principle with painful clarity. We just want mommy to make it better. We don’t care how she does it. Maybe Colonel Jessep had it right: we can’t handle the truth.
Pundits have had their fun with the Wikileaks disclosures. If you’re on the left, they are a confirmation of everything we have learned about our endless wars and the hopeless prospects for “democracy building.” If you’re on the right, they justify a third American war in a decade in Iran. The Wikileaks documents portray compulsive data-gatherers sitting in their offices trying to fit what they have learned into neat little boxes reflecting American interests. Or of dispatches from diplomats who only hear what they want to hear. Or — as former ambassador Charles Freeman notes — who are often told only what they want to hear by their foreign contacts.
Why do we accept military and foreign policy conducted in an antiseptic environment, free of “trivial” moral concerns or inconvenient transparency? We may not usually get it, but we have an expectation of transparency in our elections, economics, health care, tax laws, banking, and other domains. Why should disclosures of foreign policy missteps by both the Bush and Obama administrations be so violently attacked?
Yes, violently. Canadian Conservative Party advisor Tom Flanagan called for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s assassination, as did Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin. National Review Author Jonah Goldberg asked why Assange hasn’t been garroted yet. Daniel Ellsberg, no stranger to leaks himself, believes Assange is in physical danger. Senator Joe Lieberman pressured Amazon.com to stop hosting Wikileaks in the United States, and domains throughout the world have been under constant denial of service attacks.
Wikileaks have provided many opportunities for political posturing. For example, Senator Charles Schumer, who wants the US to release Jonathan Pollard, a spy in federal prison for revealing military secrets to a foreign country, now wants new laws to prosecute Assange (an Australian) for publishing military statistics and embarrassing diplomatic cables.
The mainstream press can’t quite believe its good luck at the endless stream of stories Wikileaks has generated. In general it has shown more interest in what is “newsworthy” than what is valuable to an informed public, depending on “embedded” reporters, softball questions, remaining addicted to talking heads instead of reporting real news. The Rolling Stone’s interview with Stanley McChrystal was a striking exception, and it occurred only after the public really started questioning the war. The truth is: it has taken a dramatic flood of documents from Wikileaks to really get the mainstream media to focus on what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, rather than focusing, much of their attention is on the salacious details of Assange’s whereabouts, his safety, or the raciest snippets from the cables. But, like any business, the media only give us what we really want.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by political dissidents. Within a year it had already published over a million documents. As long as those documents related to China, Somalia, Peru, Iran, Ivory Coast, Kenya, or non-Western states, Wikileaks garnered approval from human rights groups, Western governments and the mainstream media.
But last April Wikileaks posted a video of the wanton killing of a number of Iraqi civilians in July 2007, including two Reuters photographers, by American Apache helicopters. In July Wikileaks released 92,000 documents from Afghanistan. Last October Wikileaks released 392,000 documents from Iraq which provided a glimpse into the war between 2004 and 2009. Both collections of documents painted a picture of the failed use of force in nations we simply do not understand. Then this month the first of a quarter million diplomatic cables began to be released. And they haven’t been flattering either.
China, Somalia, and Burma don’t have anything on us. Murder, torture, terror, repression, duplicity, lying, and all the things that Colonel Jessep hinted at do not apply to just our enemies. We can do them as well as anybody.
Transparency. We have a right to know. And I believe we can handle the truth.
Have you ever noticed that every ideological dispute and every problem to be dealt with becomes a war in the United States?
This is often the realm of the far Right’s Kulturkampf against creeping liberalism, atheism, and the like. But not exclusively. It can be just as easily attacks on civil liberties or social programs which are likened to war by progressives.
And if it’s none of the above, then it’s a Federal war on drugs, crime, terror, poverty, childhood obesity… just add your own campaign name.
We are so swamped with thousands of simultaneous wars that we don’t have time to understand or stick with any of them. We are a nation in a perpetual state of war. We can’t seem to live without it.
Today’s Standard Times editorial (“Don’t weaken airport security”) is the result of good homework but bad analysis.
Acknowledging sperm mutations and an increased risk of cancer from the new “porno” scanners, the editors nevertheless advocate submitting to an imaging procedure which displays prostheses, colostomy bags, tampons, and the outline of genitals.
The editors warn that opting out of the virtual strip search and instead requesting an “enhanced pat-down” may not make them any happier. This second option, as it has sometimes been implemented, is neither enhanced nor a pat-down. It is simply sexual molestation by another name.
As terrorists get more sophis ticated, we will be called on to give up more and more of our privacy and our liberties. The Standard Times pooh-poohs the notion that these new procedures are indicative of a Big Brother society – but what’s next from the TSA when terrorists regularly start carrying explosives embedded in their bodies? Full strip and cavity searches?
Throwing away our right to privacy in the most intimate of ways is not the answer. Neither is privatizing air traffic safety. TSA agents, for all the outrageous things they are asked to do by the changing dictates of security agencies, are much more professional than their private sector predecessors. And neither is the answer to implement racial or ethnic profiling. Not only is it statistically useless, as a recent study by Professor William Press from the University of Texas at Austin shows, it leaves the door open to simple harassment. Just ask Donna Shalala, former US Secretary of Health and an Arab American, about her treatment at Ben Gurion airport last July. Apparently her profile as an American VIP and supporter of Israel were not as important as her profile as a suspicious 69-year-old Arab woman.
Until the root causes of terrorism have been addressed, attempts to bring down planes will continue. If Americans have no interest in discovering the real reasons our country has so many enemies, then we’d better get our scientists busy working on improving those million dollar bomb sniffers.
If my only choices are to have my genitals filmed or groped – or to be prohibited from traveling – these are not really choices at all. And this is indeed symptomatic of a Big Brother society with its rapidly multiplying security apparatus. I’m surprised the editors don’t find any of this as appalling as the average citizen does.
Re: “US deal for Israeli freeze on settlements helps Mideast talks” editorial in the Thursday, November 18
What was the Globe thinking when it endorsed an extravagant American giveaway to Israel engineered by Dennis Ross – in exchange for three more months of a charade known as US-brokered peace talks and a promise never again to exert such pressure on Israel?
If anyone has noticed, the 10 months of the so-called settlement freeze were never observed by Israel. So what does another 3 months of non-observance buy anyone? Just more settlements for Israel.
And if anyone has noticed, Israel’s new precondition – demanding that the Palestinians recognize not just Israel, but a Zionist Israel – is designed to scuttle such talks because of the implications for not only Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens but for millions of Palestinian refugees with unresolved land claims.
This US-financed largesse most closely resembles bribing both a home invader never to do it again and the judge to not prosecute him.
It is well past the time for tasty carrots for Israel – carrots we can scarcely afford. Now it’s time for some well-applied pressure – if not the stick. Withholding UN vetoes, taking away military aid, and demanding that Israel comply with international law have a greater chance of producing the needed attitude adjustment that decades of asking “pretty please” has failed to deliver.
I have written previously about those who claim to be friends of Jews, for example Islamophobes, House Democrats and Republicans, talk show hosts, and Christian Evangelicals, but who (if you scratched them) would probably show a different color underneath their paint job. In Germany, as in the United States and even Israel, there is often quite a difference between having truly learned the lessons of the Holocaust and providing mere lip service. In Germany there are many who utter all the right words but — scratch the surface — and you discover a garden variety anti-Semite. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: Philosemitism. The following is my translation of a recent analysis by a German Jewish blogger. It’s important to watch Europe because the degree of its anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is just a preview of what we can expect to be seeing here shortly. And the discussion of Philosemitism is one we should be having as pro-Israel organizations increasingly are sleeping with people who are anything but the friend of Jews.
How do you discredit a woman and turn her into a “controversial” scholar? Another example of how anti-Semitism works.
Tamar Amar-Dahl is a historian who emigrated from Israel. Like many young Left or liberal Israelis, she left Israel and, in 2006 in protest against the Lebanon War, surrendered her passport in exchange for German citizenship. Now Tamar Amar-Dahl has found herself in the crosshairs of Anti-Semitism researcher Clemens Hani.
You have to wonder what motivates Henri’s attack on Amar-Dahl. Is it envy from an unsuccessful political scientist whose best effort is the occasional article in Ha’galil, and who couldn’t manage to get a teaching position as Amar-Dahl did last year at Humboldt-University in Berlin? What leads Clemens Heni, the “Aryan with the oversized nose for anti-Semites” (Posener) to fling dirt at a young political scientist? Is it “only” political differences? Or is it possibly animosity toward people of Jewish ancestry who just don’t fit into Clemens Hani’s preconceived notions of how to be Jewish?
In a pamphlet published a few days ago attacking Amar-Dahl, Heni writes:
“Dr. Tamar Amar-Dahl received her doctorate in 2008 in Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University for work on Shimon Peres. She is a highly controversial political scientist and activist.”
Why Amar-Dahl is “highly controversial” remains Heni’s little secret. In reality he’s less interested in performing after-the-fact “quality control” on political science than in cobbling together conspiracy theories of “anti-Zionist machinations” at German universities, in which he takes on any political scientist who had anything remotely to do with Amar-Dahl — beginning with Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, the director of the Institute for History of German Jews in Hamburg, who had the temerity to invite Amar-Dahl to a lecture; to the director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Prof. Dr. Horst Möller, who together with Prof. Dr. Moshe Zuckermann from Tel Aviv, had supervised Amar-Dahl’s dissertation; to Prof. Dr. Christina von Braun, the director of the newly-established College of Jewish Studies in Berlin, where Amar-Dahl recently accepted a teaching position.
Yes, our relentless little denunciator, Clemens Heni, didn’t even stop with Hans Mommsen, who has praised Amar-Dahl’s work. Don’t forget: Mommsen is without a doubt one of the most internationally well-respected historians of National Socialism and the Holocaust, but Heni nevertheless paints him as “no expert on anti-Semitism.” Apparently those in Heni’s circle still hold a grudge against Mommsen for refuting the Goldhagen hypothesis in 1996 and in so doing discrediting Heni’s great role-model in all things relating to anti-Semitism research.
And so, with his big detector he sniffs at any fart in order to breathe it in, eyes wide open. Even Amar-Dahl’s former supervisor, Prof. Dr. Michael Brenner, was quoted, and Heni apparently phoned around looking for new critics in Munich. In the end he reveals to an incredulous public that Amar-Dahl was not all that serious because she based her work on the theories of Edward Said and even published them in a periodical which reprinted materials from the “anti-Israel agitator” Noam Chomsky. A collection of “facts” that basically just makes you shrug and which ultimately says less about Tamar Amar-Dahl than it does about Clemens Heni. Because the only one who seems to be shocked and stunned is the great sniffer himself.
A bewildered Heni asks:
“Didn’t the faculty of the Institute for the History of German Jewry know who Tamar Amar-Dahl is, how unscientific (sic!) she works, and what she represents?
[…]
Why is Humboldt University funding an anti-Israeli academic?”
Not even Heni is stupid enough to accuse Amar-Dahl of “secondary anti-Semitism” for her remark at an FES [Friedrich Ebert Foundation] conference, where she said:
“I’m shocked that, once again, the subject of the Holocaust and the Jews is — as they say — being replayed and regurgitated here. Sometimes I feel it’s just way too much.”
A quote taken completely out of context — but quite a find for “sensible anti-Semitism researchers,” as Clemens Heni is: is someone who would now accuse the daughter of Moroccan Jews of being an anti-Semite because she — especially as a Sephardi Jew — apparently was not personally as affected by the destruction of European Jewry as the Ashkenazim who survived. In whose personal lives persecution and destruction do not happen to play a more significant role. Almost every family lost relatives or friends — in contrast to most Sephardim or Mizrachim. Such different experiences, which form an individual and are passed along to his children as well as current acquaintances — all this leads Heni to hate the young political scientist.
A person of Jewish faith or ancestry has to match the Jew in Clemens Heni’s mind. And if he doesn’t, he’s bound to invoke the personal animosity of this “Philosemite.” This in a nutshell is the dangerous side of Philosemitism. Just as he has an exaggerated sense of everything Jewish as positive, he threatens to revert to raw hatred when individual Jews or people of Jewish ancestry simply don’t conform to the image he has fantasized.
I have to admit: for a long time I didn’t understand how this kind of Philosemitism really worked. I always thought that it expressed itself in extreme forms of classical anti-Semitism. That someone — even one claiming to be a “friend” of Israel and of Jews, could suddenly become disappointed in some imaginary, only in his own head, with a collective notion of “the Jews” — and then erupting into raw hatred. Precisely against a “collective” Jew whom he had once regarded as infallible. But the real — at least more typical — Philosemitism is even more insidious. It does not direct its type of anti-Semitism at the collective itself; rather, it selects a specific group: those who are in some way not “Jewish” enough, as Philosemites have defined it. He is disappointed in them and he directs his hostility at these “disrupters” of his own picture of Jewry. Precisely this, no difference, is how it works with Clemens Heni: a person of Jewish ancestry who commits the crime of not being “like a Jew should be” can be nothing other than an anti-Semite. Sure, what else can it be, Heni? Of course! But the worst thing is: there will always be more! More and more anti-Semitic Jews. Pretty soon you won’t be able to see Israel because of all the anti-Semites.
That’s why this type of Philosemitism is not the opposite of anti-Semitism, as one might be led to believe. Portraying it as simply the opposite, as positive racism, makes it seem harmless. Because if it is really the opposite of anti-Semitism, it can’t be all that dangerous: it doesn’t result in the destruction of an enemy. But it works another way. This specific form of anti-Semitism doesn’t target Jewry in its entirety, opposing “the” Jews. At least not directly. Philosemites like Heni reserve their worst attacks for those who disappoint them. For these they reserve the most awful portrayal they can think of — which for Philosemites with their moral categories is: to be an anti-Semite.
This is the real hatred of the Philosemites. The moment in which his understanding of Jews leads to disappointment, he targets — not collective Jewry — but “anti-Semitic Jews” whom he equates with them — as enemies whom ultimately he’d like to see wiped out. Admittedly: Heni has gone easier on Amar-Dahl than Alex Feuerherdt. Meanwhile, the latter insults Jews as openly as anti-Semites. But according to Heni it’s only a “secondary anti-Semitic response.” But they mean the same thing.
This is exactly why it’s often not enough to check one’s “facts” in the case of people like Tarach, Feuerherdt, or Heni. Because (historical) proof doesn’t even occur to them. Refute one of their assertions; they’ll just find a new one in order to legitimize their attacks. You can’t address such people with empirical data alone. We also have to expose their followers for what they are: just garden variety anti-Semites, cloaked in fleece as “friends of the Jewish people.”
Rightwing bigots are bristling at Juan Williams’ firing from NPR for his remarks about Muslims on airplanes. Thank goodness he still has that $2 million job at Fox News, which apparently has lower standards of professional conduct or, for that matter, basic human morality.
“I think the U.S. Congress should investigate NPR and consider cutting off their money,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also a Fox News contributor. Gingrich called William’s’ firing “an act of total censorship. […] I think the whole idea that if you honestly say how you feel about Islam — what he said was very balanced, people should read what he actually said — the idea that that’s the excuse for National Public Radio to censor Juan Williams is an outrage and every listener of NPR should be enraged that there’s this kind of bias against an American,” Gingrich said.
Ok, Newt, here’s what Williams actually said:
“But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.”
If Gingrich can’t understand why these words applied to Muslims are so offensive, perhaps a couple of pictures of air travelers in “religious garb” who are also identifying themselves “first and foremost” as members of a particular religious group will illustrate the pernicious bias against Muslim Americans and the double-standard that NPR finally did something about.
When Americans go to the polls on November 2nd, we will drag along considerable anger into the voting booths — anger at incumbents, anger at the economy, anger at the decline of American power, and anger at a growing sense that the country has run off the rails. As angry as we are, we will lash out at everyone and do anything but look in the mirror at the quite unflattering image before us. For, in reality, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the mess we are in.
True, incumbents from both parties voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and now Pakistan — wars which have accounted for $1.1 trillion of our $1.3 trillion deficit. But it was the average citizen who wanted to lash out at someone — anyone — after 9/11. It was we voters who put in motion wars signed off by politicians from both parties who replaced their own consciences and judgment with polls and focus groups. Besides, haven’t all our wars been slam-dunks?
It was we ourselves who gutted state governments, schools, libraries, and added to our own insecurity by choosing to slash taxes and support services. This winter if we break a strut in an icy pothole we can only blame ourselves for neglecting infrastructure. If grandma has to start eating pet food or choosing which medication to take because retirement benefits have not kept up with inflation for two years — we can blame ourselves for insisting on fiscal restraint for everything except wars, spying, and police services. Some of us want to smash the gods of government by dismantling the EPA and the Department of Education because we have lost our faith. The new watered-down health care bill is an abomination at the altar of Free Market Capitalism.
Angry people are seldom rational people. Americans are not unique in grasping at easy answers, quick solutions, the quarterly return, the unstudied decision, and even at straws. The lure of the Tea Party has both Democrats and Republicans scrambling to share some of their radical rhetoric. It may feel good to scream for the death of government, but if we throw the baby out with the bathwater, at the end of the day one out of ten of us will still be sitting, unemployed, in a recently foreclosed house, without any rational plan by a government to get us out of this mess — and still waiting for the Free Market to help out.
Whoever survives the next election is going to be there with agendas set — not by some cabal of “special interests” — but ultimately by us, the voters. If we see a rise in demagoguery, an increase of hate directed against gays, Latinos, Muslims, Blacks, Mormons, liberals, or some “other,” we need only look in the mirror to see the cause. We ourselves have permitted a new generation of Gordon Gekkos to wreck the economy by rewarding corporations for sending jobs offshore or literally gambling with our money. Some want to expel all foreigners and abolish the 14th Amendment. Hate won’t bring the jobs back from China but tough talk apparently sells at the polls. But talk is cheap.
If all this rage produces a series of poor choices, don’t expect the politicians to save us from ourselves. We citizens may have no interest in forcing election reform, but we sure like to whine about craven politicians whose votes reflect our own views — those of us who bother to vote or to express them. Don’t expect the news media to inform us of anything other than what’s “newsworthy.” We can’t understand economic analysis or international news — we don’t even know where some of these countries are — and besides, we have short attention spans; half of us think we need another war with Iran. We’d much prefer Talking Angry Heads, conspiracy theories, and Reality TV. And even though it’s stealing trillions of dollars from our future, we don’t really want to see stories about Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan on the 11:00 news. We want to know about warehouse fires and dog bites. And so that’s what we get.
And in the end we get the democracy we deserve. If we are well-informed and work at understanding the roles of government and business and can appreciate the function and limits of both, our elected representatives will formulate sensible economic, environmental, educational, and foreign policies. But if all we are capable of expressing is anger and rejection, the search for easy answers will only lead us deeper into the swamp.
The Forward listed Charles Jacobs as one of America’s Top 50 Jewish leaders in 2007. Apparently they were looking more at the range of his activism and less at what mischief he was actually up to.
Long before the Park51 project made news, Charles Jacobs spearheaded opposition to an Islamic Center in Roxbury and slammed governor Deval Patrick and Boston mayor Thomas Menino for supporting the project and meeting with Muslim community leaders. Despite widespread repudiation Jacobs continues to maintain that the Roxbury center is linked to global terror plots. He has also leveled personal attacks in the Jewish Advocate on fellow Jews who extended hands of friendship to the Muslim community, notably Rabbi Eric Gurvis. In June seventy Boston area rabbis signed a petition supporting Gurvis and denounced Jacobs’ smears.
In a FrontPage Mag interview Jacobs describes how he – and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – views Islam as nothing more than a rulebook for terrorists:
Two years ago I attended a three day conference in Jerusalem on Global Anti-Semitism sponsored by Israel ‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Senior leaders of American Jewry were present. We all heard how Islamic anti-Semitism – theologically based, was spread with Saudi funding to mosques and madrassas throughout the Islamic world, instructing tens if not hundreds of millions of people that Jews were the sons of monkeys and pigs and that to kill us is a holy deed.
Jacobs is a regular contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace blog and to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag. His “Clash of Civiliations” worldview meshes with pro-Israel advocacy and neoconservatism.
In July of this year Jacobs participated in a panel discussion in Aspen, Colorado, entitled “Conscience and Conflict,” featuring fellow neocons John Bolton, Phillis Chesler and Caroline Glick, at which he bemoaned Europeans as “neopagans” and “socialists,” decried mosques as “victory markers,” and stated “there is no moderate Muslim doctrine.”
Recently Jacobs made a big stink over a visit of students from the Wellseley public schools to an area mosque as part of multicultural education. In an article entitled “Propaganda is not Education,” Jacobs wrote:
Those who care about “religious ignorance and conflict over belief systems” should care about the radicalization of the historically moderate American Muslim community and the unwitting embrace of radical Muslims by our political and civic leaders.
Not only are Jacobs’ enemies all of the world’s Muslims, the press, Europeans, the United Nations, non-governmental aid agencies, liberals, and academics – but now even political and civil leaders have let him down too.
Dennis Prager is at war with leftists, secularists, labor unions, civil rights organizations, Big Government, academics, atheists, Europeans, internationalists, “moral relativists” – and Muslims. Nothing personal, it’s just his worldview – that and the fact that not one Muslim in the entire world is a moderate:
There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude?
Long before it was fashionable to burn Qu’rans, Prager, a Republican convert, began trash-talking them:
In 2006 he wrote that “America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on,” in taking great offense that the first Muslim elected to Congress had decided to take his oath of office on a Qu’ran and not on a Christian bible. The ADL noted the bigotry of Prager’s remarks and conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson pointed out the irony that “here we have a Jew pushing a Muslim to use the Christian Bible.”
In Moment Magazine, which features articles of contemporary Jewish interest, Prager awkwardly (and self-contradictorily) defended his views, even after it was pointed out that many politicians had sworn their oath of office on books other than the bible or on none at all:
America has no state religion, nor should it ever be allowed to have one. But it has always been a Judeo-Christian country. Jews – and America itself – will suffer if we cease to be one. Just ask the Jews of secular Europe how their secular societies treat them and Israel. For that matter, just think about how our secular universities have become anti-Israel hate centers.
On the one hand Prager says America should be secular. But on the other hand he says it should privilege Jews and Christians. This is vintage Prager – a new believer in Kulturkampf between Islam and the West.
Despite his own advanced case, Prager denies that Islamophobia actually exists. As the co-author of a book on anti-Semitism himself, Prager should know better, but he wrote:
The fact remains that the term islamophobia has one purpose – to suppress any criticism, legitimate or not, of Islam. And given the cowardice of the Western media, and the collusion of the left in banning any such criticism (while piling it on Christianity and Christians), it is working.
When it comes to anti-Semitism, however, Prager rejects identical arguments and in fact argues that Zionism is part of Judaism – so any criticism of Israel or Jewry amounts to the same thing:
Among the many lies that permeate the modern world, none is greater – or easier to refute – than the claim that Zionism is not an integral part of Judaism or the claim that anti-Zionism is unrelated to anti-Semitism.
Thus, anyone who challenges Zionism – for example, Palestinians who are in conflict with Israel or the legions of academics, NGOs, international organizations, or human rights groups, even many Jews – is by definition an anti-Semite.
The Middle East conflict? Bah! That’s just anti-Semitism he writes in a piece, “The Middle East conflict is hard to solve but easy to explain:”
Those who deny this and ascribe the conflict to other reasons, such as “Israeli occupation,” “Jewish settlements,” a “cycle of violence,” “the Zionist lobby” and the like, do so despite the fact that Israel’s enemies regularly announce the reason for the conflict. The Iranian regime, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Palestinians – in their public opinion polls, in their anti-Semitic school curricula and media, in their election of Hamas, in their support for terror against Israeli civilians in pre-1967 borders – as well as their Muslim supporters around the world, all want the Jewish state annihilated.
Thus Prager completely dismisses any geopolitical causes or trivial issues like land theft or ethnic cleansing. No, there is just one reason for all this hostility and it can only be Islam. And it’s clear that Prager is not just talking about a few fanatical winguts when he lumps all of the world’s Muslims into this denunciation, in an article entitled “The Islamic threat is greater than German and Soviet threats were:”
A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones. But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.
So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims – specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others – the term “Islamo-Fascism” is entirely appropriate.
Dennis Prager’s attitudes toward Muslims are echoed in his views on immigrants in America. A Tea Party supporter, Prager supports Arizona Law SB1070 and believes in American Exceptionalism or Judeo-Christian Dominionism. In this clip at a Tea Party event in Colorado, sitting next to Sarah Palin, Prager describes his revulsion for internationalism and European morality, praising something rather like an American version of Zionism. His a world view common to the Tea Party, Likudniks, and neoconservatives.
As for Islamophobia – it’s just one of Prager’s many hobbies – but integral to this worldview.
There’s no pretty way to say it — Zionism is incompatible with American values. American Zionists do not — can not — really claim to respect Constitutional principles of separation of church and state, basic equality, or a democracy for all citizens. To be fair, fundamentalists of all stripes lack respect for these values, but American Jews are not typically fundamentalists.
Yet it is astounding to speak with normally liberal, tolerant fellow Jews — who fear creeping Christian fundamentalism or express contempt for shariah in places like Afghanistan — but who see nothing wrong with creeping Jewish shariah (pardon me, halakha) in Israel. Or who find nothing wrong with expressly making Palestinians second class citizens. Their argument is simple — there are many Arab countries but only one Israel; the Palestinians should simply go away so that a Jewish state can exist. What’s so wrong with that?
Of course such an argument makes as much sense as forcing Native Americans to go back to — where? Asia? — because America is now mainly a Caucasian nation. Yet the argument for Zionism voiced by many American Jews is essentially the same and it could quite easily be turned against us. For example, some future Evangelical Avigdor Lieberman (spawning in a Tea Party test tube somewhere as I write this) could simply declare the US a Christian nation. Legal, social, and professional rights would be restricted for non-Christians in this nightmare world. Jewish heretics who taught evolution would end up in the slammer. Jewish civil libertarians would be given the same treatment they were given in the early 1900’s when everyone suspected them of being anarchists; or given the same treatment that they got in the 1950’s when everyone suspected them of being communists. Most Jews are liberals precisely out of such fears — at least on one side of the brain.
But then there’s Israel. Many Jews regard Israel as an “insurance policy” against precisely the kind of Christian dystopia I just described. But this is where the two hemispheres of our brains do not seem to be connected. On the one hand, we have our fears. On the other, we are completely prepared to inflict the same violence and ill-treatment on Palestinians. In fact, it’s worse than that. We wouldn’t do it ourselves – after all, here in America we have friends everywhere in business, at university, in the community, who are Muslim. But Israel, as the ultimate insurance policy, must be allowed to do anything it likes as long as it exists to protect us from our most secret fears.
But there are many other aspects of Israel for American Jews. Israel is the land of the patriarchs, the landscape of the prophets and of countless Torah stories. Jewish fundamentalists believe it was literally given by God (although they would like to have David’s Kingdom, which includes Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and more real estate). For some Israel is a Jewish Disneyland where American Jews can go to live out a fantasy of returning to our roots — even though, as Helen Thomas pointed out, our roots might actually be in Germany, Poland, Russia, or Lithuania. As a secular Jew, it seems to me that the allure of making aliyah (emigrating to Israel) fulfils a mainly psychological function. American Jews from Brookline to Orange County are not in any kind of real danger, so let’s be honest — they are not moving to Israel to ensure Jewish survival. And let’s be a little more honest — when you move from country A to country B, you do love country B more.
While Jews have always revered the land of our ancestors and desired some kind of return to Israel — at least by the pious among us — Judaism managed to survive thousands of years without the Revisionist Zionism of today. During all these centuries, Jewishness was something preserved in cultural diversity, observance of the law, study of the Torah or — for the more secular — in Judaism’s ethics. Collectively the “Jewish people” — Klal Yisrael — meant many different things. But when the Jewish state came into existence, Zionism expropriated thousands of years of tradition and understanding and replaced “the Jewish people” with a state to which all Jews were able (if not obligated) to immigrate. And this state has not done a particularly good job of preserving the Jewish cultural diversity of the past; as in any society, there are winners and losers. In Israel the Ashkenazim now determine what Germans like to call the Leitkultur. Yet most American Jews now speak of their great love for this particular state, its centrality to their Jewish identity, and even the siddurim (prayer books) make references to the modern state — not just the biblical one — and offer prayers for it. In religious institutions, the preoccupation with the state of Israel has advanced nearly to the point of idolatry.
All these seem to be symptoms of some serious cognitive disorder. We just can’t help ourselves. Real estate has taken priority over values. We are no different from the Wahhabists. Jerusalem and Hebron are our Mecca and Medina. Our attachment to Judaism is now defined only by this new nation-state. Without Israel, our identities would be shattered, our faith incomplete, our hope for redemption lost. And don’t forget the Holocaust! We are a traumatized people! It is argued to the point of annoyance that Israel is necessary as a refuge to preserve Jewish existence. But even if it no longer serves an existential purpose, then it is a psychological homeland for people who can never return to Europe. Of course I am glad that so much positive mental health has been achieved, but I also care about the Palestinians.
I am sitting here on the eve of national elections a free man, permitted to vote, to write letters to the editor, to demonstrate, to live in a neighborhood with people of other ethnicities and religions, and I live under the same laws that apply to all citizens. My home cannot be summarily bulldozed with twenty-four hour notice. My neighborhood cannot be declared a military zone one day and then given to a Christian developer the next. Except for exceptional circumstances If I run afoul of the law I will be tried under transparent civilian laws, not by a military tribunal.
I am a free man and a free Jew not because of Israel but because of a bunch of privileged white male slave holders whose flawed but thoughtful and secular vision of democracy was nevertheless sound enough to endure and to improve upon for a couple of centuries. Meanwhile, the “Jewish state” we love so much exhibits an advanced case of the disease starting to afflict us here. In Israel non-Jews barely merit being treated as human, democracy is in shambles, and I am left to wonder whose perverted concept of Judaism managed to make Israel a nation which (for many Jews) has become a proxy for authentic Jewish values or practices.
You can’t be a Zionist and claim to revere American-style democracy too.
YNet News reported today that the United States has backed Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for recognition by the Palestinians as a “Jewish state” — even though Israelis themselves heatedly dispute the meaning of the term.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley backed the new Israeli demand, saying, “I’m not making any news here. […] It is a state for the Jewish people. […] What Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday is, in essence a core demand of the Israeli government, which we support.”
In siding with Netanyahu, the US move puts Abbas in an impossible position, but it also ignores the fact that Israel is actually more religiously diverse than the United States.
Israel’s population of 7.64 million is 75% Jewish and 25% non-Jewish. The Jewish population may in fact be lower than the official numbers because of Eastern Europeans who are not halachically Jewish and Druze and Bedouin populations may be higher because some have never been counted. In comparison, the population of the United States is 86% Christian and 14% non-Christian, yet sensible Americans do not define the United States as a Christian state.
Of Israel’s 5.77 million Jews, 42% or 2.44 million are secular. The number of people in the Jewish state who actually want to preserve a Jewish ethnocracy could well be a minority. And yet the State Department feels compelled to butt into a discussion of the character of another state.
When Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat, there was no question he had a Jewish state in mind, although the monarchy he proposed governing a nation of transplanted Europeans, which had purchased (not stolen) the land of natives who then conveniently disappeared, bears almost no resemblance to Israel. But since the first Zionist congresses and even Ben Gurion’s time the nature of the “Jewish state” is something that has deliberately remained a bit vague. Zionism, as a nationalistic movement, promised to offer something for everyone [except of course the native people who did not go as willingly as Herzl had hoped], but the intractable tension between secular and religious Jews has existed since the founding of Israel.
On the one hand, seen from a purely Jewish perspective, the nature of Israel is a Zionist question which Israeli Jews (and perhaps friendly Diaspora Jews) have to dispute. But in this discussion Phillip Crowley and Hillary Clinton don’t get a vote.
On the other hand, seen from a democratic perspective, the nature of Israel as a country with substantial religious minorities is one the minorities should also have a vote on. Unfortunately, the 25% of the non-Jewish population is represented in only 9% of the Knesset and not at all in the governing coalition. And then their remaining democratic rights are to be scrutinized and be subject to loyalty oaths.
Not surprisingly, the Jewish and democratic perspectives do not align at all.
If the United States feels compelled to speak out for something, it should be human and civil rights for all of Israel’s citizens and the subjects of its half century occupation. It is disappointing that the State Department continually demonstrates contempt for the principles of freedom or justice — such as by not intervening on behalf of Abdallah Abu Rahmah or taking an interest in the American citizen killed in the Mavi Marmara flotilla attack. It is shocking and sickening that the Obama administration is backing the religious nature of a state jammed down the throats of its victims — something even inimical to our own constitution — and that this new Israeli precondition is actually a new obstacle to peace.
If anyone doubts the unsuitability of the United States as an “honest broker” in this conflict, this is just one more example.
The current Middle East peace talks have played out much as they have in past years. The United States lavishes billions of dollars of military aid each year on Israel, ignores or defends its misuse of military power on civilians throughout the world, and still pretends to be an impartial peace broker. The Israeli Right calls for more settlements. The Palestinians, their unity fractured, call for an end to settlement activity. A few days ago a formal 10-month “freeze” on Israeli settlements ended — although in practice building never stopped in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The Palestinian side had warned that they would walk away from the peace talks if building resumed formally, but so far they have only appealed to the United States to exert whatever influence it can to stop the new construction.
The United States and its Israel Lobby advisors are now asking Israel for a two month extension of the November 2009 ten-month “freeze” in exchange for backing Israel’s annexation of the Jordan valley (goodbye 1967 borders!), offering future vetoes in the UN security council in behalf of Israel, additional aid beyond the $30 billion defense plan, this year’s $205 million Iron Dome gift (which has ballooned to $422 million), a $3 billion missile shield program called David’s Sling, and this year’s outright gift of $2.75 billion for F35 jets, another $1.5 billion in contracts for parts for those jets, and $2 billion in jet fuel. All this for two months of extending a freeze that actually never happened. Or could these bogus peace talks simply be an opportunity for the US to arm Israel to attack Iran? Obama’s willingness to abandon even approximate 1967 borders is something that neither Palestinians, members of the Arab League, Jordan, Syria, or Egypt are likely to accept.
To make matters worse, in this round of talks, Israel has introduced new preconditions which can only be interpreted as signs that, as a recent TIME magazine article reported, Israelis are not particularly interested in peace. Netanyahu now wants the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. While to some this may appear to be a perfectly reasonable request, it is not the same as recognizing Israel — to which both the Arab League and Hamas have agreed in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders. For the Palestinian Authority, however, it would sign away the civil rights of Israel’s 1.5 million Arab Israelis and claims to property in Israel by Palestinian refugees — which not even the Abbas government dares. Israel has also stated that it will not give up the Jordan Valley or return “consensus” settlements like Ariel or Ma’ale Adumim. And it just keeps building because there is nothing — and no one — to stop them. These are not the actions of a nation that wants peace.
For anyone who has bothered to look at a map of Israeli settlements and military zones in the West Bank, such as the one at peacenow.org/map.php, it is easy to see why the issue of settlements is central to peace talks. There is no longer enough land remaining after decades of Israeli land theft to cobble together a contiguous state. Palestinian writer Ali Abunimah advocates a bi-national state in his 2006 book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Former Israel defense minister Moshe Arens and current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin have also promoted a bi-national state — an idea which 56% of West Bank Palestinians support. Mahmoud Abbas has hinted at it as an option. A few years ago, Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former deputy mayor, wrote that “the question is no longer whether [Israel-Palestine] will be bi-national, but which model to choose.” It has come to this.
American favoritism, Israeli theft and intransigence, and Palestinian disunity have all led to the failure of a Two State solution. Perhaps it’s for the best, but a single state will plunge Israel and Palestine into several generations of a civil rights struggle we can’t even imagine. Besides the indigestible lumps of an already fractious Israeli society – twenty-two political parties, the ultra-Orthodox, the secularists, the settlers, the Russians, the non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, the Asian immigrants, the Ethiopians, the Mizrachim, the Ashkenazim, the existing Palestinians — the resulting national configuration will have a few million more new Palestinians — and there could still be the problem of Gaza. At some point — whether by politics or demographics — the Jewish nature of Israel will be questioned and — whether one, two or five decades from now — it will cease to be an ethnocracy which privileges only Jews.
The alternative, of course, is a Two State solution. But Israel and its domestic defenders will make sure that unchecked land theft makes that an impossibility.
All that remains is to pick a name for the new, eventual, bi-national state.
In the first several chapters of her 1951 book On the Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt examined 19th century anti-Semitism and provided a class analysis of how it arose. As a classless group often associated with, under the protection of, providing services to, or granted special rights by the monarchy, Jews became a proxy for class antagonisms with the monarchy and among the European classes. First a declining aristocracy, then a scattered group of small political parties, each discovered that Jews were a useful substitute for challenging state power directly, and that anti-Jewish sentiment could be easily linked to religious antipathy for Judaism. The state religions, for their part, were only too happy to oblige. Even after the collapse of European monarchies, Jews continued to play a similar role in nationalist movements. And, of course, imperialism played a part in defining anti-Semitism.
Arendt’s analysis differs from the normative Jewish view, recited at Passover each year, that “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us.” Arendt dismissed this as a hollow explanation of anti-Semitism, but admitted it serves another purpose:
“In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of external anti-Semitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence.”
Arendt noted that the Jewish view was, strangely, precisely the same that the anti-Semites had of Jews. There was nothing historically unique, really, about a particular group of Jews. All Jews were simply an eternal plague to be fought, put down, or got rid of and, as she notes from Nazi records, anti-Semites coolly exterminated Jews without particular animus.
Whether one agrees with Arendt’s class analysis or not, it still seems clear that the historical causes of, and flavors of, anti-Semitism must be varied; that the relationship of Jews to the states in which they were persecuted — often first as protected, perhaps emancipated, in some cases elevated to the nobility — is not simple and does not indicate a generic, unwavering hate of Jews shared by everyone in every age. How otherwise could German Jews have succeeded in bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries? How could Jews have attained influential posts in the various empires in which they lived during exile? The Book of Esther disqualifies itself as history but still seems to be a potent myth.
And if Arendt’s mechanics of anti-Semitism are correct and class antagonisms are at the heart of anti-Semitism, how then can antagonism to the state of Israel be explained? Since Andre Sakharov’s revisionist definition of anti-Semitism (based mainly on opposition to a Jewish state and not confined to simple baseless hatred) virtually every Diaspora Jewish organization has taken more interest in defending the state of Israel than in pursuing justice for individual victims of hate crimes. Arendt’s higher standard for defining anti-Semitism doesn’t seem to be at work in organizations like the ADL. But the Purimspil is recited as if a fact.
Could it be that antagonism toward Israel has nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Zionism?
Today Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a well-respected Palestinian activist in Bil’in, was convicted of “incitement” and organizing illegal marches by an Israeli military court. For the crime of organizing non-violent protests Abu Rahma faces up to ten years in prison.
His conviction ended an eight month long trial, during which he was kept in prison.
I have written previously about this case — in which Abu Rahma was initially charged for possession of spent Israeli grenades and rubber bullets used on protestors – well, actually for making a peace sculpture (pictured here) out of them. I also wrote previously about the stupidity of maintaining a military presence so far out in the hinterlands solely to confront peaceful protestors.
But Israel’s goal is to crush all resistance, even peaceful protests. Imagine if Martin Luther King had been sentenced to ten years behind bars for his work. Yes, there are many Palestinians working with non-violent methods of protest and resistance.
Despite the charges, Abu Rahmah did not find himself behind bars because he presents any danger to society. On the contrary: Abu Rahmah, who is a teacher and part-time farmer, is probably Palestine’s most famous non-violent advocate — and apparently an all-too successful one.
As a member of the Popular Committee and its coordinator since it was formed in 2004, Abu Rahmah has represented the village of Bil’in around the world. In June 2009, he attended the village’s precedent-setting legal case in Montreal against two Canadian companies illegally building settlements on Bil’in’s land; in December of 2008, he participated in a speaking tour in France, and in December 2008, exactly a year before his arrest, Abdallah received the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal for Outstanding Service in the Realization of Basic Human Rights, awarded by the International League for Human Rights in Berlin.
This is not the work of a violent man.
Last summer Abdallah stood in a group with Nobel Peace laureates and internationally renowned human rights activists, the Elders, discussing Bil’in’s grassroots campaign for justice and was photographed with Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu when the Elders visited his village. Ironically, Abu Rahmah may soon be in prison precisely for his involvement in this peaceful campaign.
Abu Rahma’s work has been characterized by insistence on non-violence and noted for its creativity. Demonstrator in Bil’in have called attention to their struggle by painting themselves like James Cameron’s Avatars and have expressed their solidarity with people in Gaza by creating a parade float like a Gaza flotilla ship.
Today’s conviction will likely be followed by a sentence in coming weeks. If Abu Rahmah serves any more time than the eight months he has already been held in military prison it will only serve to send a message to young Palestinians that non-violence is a useless option. And if Abu Rahmah serves one more day in prison it will reinforce the view, increasingly justified in even Israel itself, that Israel is a becoming nothing more than a police state.
Please send a message to the Department of State** urging Secretary Clinton to convey a message to Israel** that a sentence of any more prison time for Abu Rahmah would send the wrong message to the world and an entire generation of Palestinians.
Foreign policy types have gone into overdrive dissecting the musings of Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic Monthly on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran as if they were passages from the Mishna. Goldberg’s career has been notable as a shill for the IDF (he was also a former solder) and he was also a notorious proponent of the Iraq war, so his conclusions on the inevitability of such an attack are not surprising, but neither is the fact that so many of his sources are anonymous. His article is a major piece of Israeli propaganda, but the U.S. has its own reasons for becoming embroiled in another war.
I have a print subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, and it’s again no surprise that on page 63 of the magazine there’s an obligatory picture of IDF jets flying above Auschwitz as if to highlight the “reasons” for Israel’s posture. The Israeli term “hasbara,” meaning “explanation” or “spin,” can be understood completely by reading Goldberg’s article. Bring on the violins.
But this 4th American war – and that is precisely what we would have if we became involved – is not about an existential threat to Israel. It is not about Ahmedinijad-as-Haman destroying the Jews of Shushan or Ahmedinijad-as-Hitler sending every Jew to a nuclear crematorium.
It’s all about the U.S. interest in Israel’s nuclear hegemony.
Otherwise, why would we play along with Israel’s policy of nuclear “ambiguity” and not press for a more consistent approach to nonproliferation in the Middle East?
If the fear really were that the Iranians were going to nuke Israel, well, they’d be nuking several million Palestinians and sending radioactive clouds over Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, too, wouldn’t they? The Iranians may be unfriendly, but they’re not stupid – and they’re not reckless, either. Persians, like Israeli Jews, still have to live in an Arab neighborhood. That’s why the Israeli protestations about a second Holocaust ring so hollow in my ears.
Yes, Iranian nukes have nothing to do with an existential threat to Israel and very little to do with the often-reported Iranian “national pride.” Iranians, from the Ayatollahs to the Green Movement, are sick of the West intervening in regional affairs, threatened in part with the Israeli attack poodle. Having nukes of their own would neutralize the West’s advantage in the Middle East. And that’s precisely the reason for Iran’s nuclear program.
“Because colonialism and imperialism will not easily leave the people of the world alone. Therefore, you can see that they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favors Israel. Well, from a numerical point of view, it cannot have as many troops as Muslims and Arabs do. So they have improved the quality of what they have. Classical weaponry has its own limitations. They have limited use. They have a limited range as well. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.
If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality. Of course, you can see that the Americans have kept their eyes peeled and they are carefully looking for even the slightest hint that technological advances are being made by an independent Islamic country. If an independent Islamic country is thinking about acquiring other kinds of weaponry, then they will do their utmost to prevent it from acquiring them. Well, that is something that almost the entire world is discussing right now.”
Of course it is possible to interpret this as an Iranian threat toward Israel, but I think the emphasis must be on the strategic neutralization of the West’s nuclear proxy.
One question not frequently asked is: what was the U.S. involvement in Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Israel’s 2007 bombing of Syria’s al-Kibar reactor? If past is prologue, then it might be useful to examine the history. A “senior US intelligence officer” testified to Congress in 2008 on American participation of the al-Kibar bombing:
“One of the things that I’m sure also people are wondering is whether there was any discussion between us and the Israelis about policy options and how to respond to these facts. We did discuss policy options with Israel. Israel considered a Syrian nuclear capability to be an existential threat to the state of Israel. After these discussions, at the end of the day Israel made its own decision to take action. It did so without any green light from us – so-called ‘green light’ from us; none was asked for, none was given. […] We understand the Israeli action.We believe this clandestine reactor was a threat to regional peace and security, and we have stated before that we cannot allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.”
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
The facility had been under watch by the United States since 2003. Without having to read between the lines too much, it is clear that the bombing of the al-Kibar reactor was done with the assistance, permission, advance knowledge, and blessings of the Bush administration, which saw the reactor as an effort by two of Bush’s “axes of evil” to threaten “regional peace and security.”
Goldberg is correct only in his conclusion that the US will assist Israel with the attack – not for all the Israeli propaganda reasons he enumerates.
Israel’s reason is not to protect itself from an “existential threat” but to continue to amass armaments to delay the inevitable end of its Occupation of Palestine and create more “facts on the ground.”
The U.S. reason is not to preserve regional peace and security but to simply ensure continued nuclear hegemony by its proxy, Israel.
If and when the US becomes involved in the bombing of Iran – even if only by logistical support, looking the other way while Israeli F16s fly over Iraq, or providing the bunker-buster bombs Israel will use – it will not be an unwilling participant in the next war, its fourth and possibly a World War.
While foreign policy junkies were busy parsing Jeffrey Goldberg’s overhyped article in the Atlantic on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran, another article in the same issue of the Atlantic by Robert D. Kaplan attempted to repurpose one of Henry Kissinger’s old Cold War theories for use with Iran – specifically, that the only way to deal with upstart revolutionary nations like Iran is to be willing to engage with them in limited nuclear war. Kaplan writes:
We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book of a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.
What is he saying? That, should Goldberg’s wet dream not come true and that Iran does get the bomb, the United States should be willing to use its own against it – regardless of preemptive use or massive civilian casualties. Kaplan reflects a little on the implications, but seems pretty happy with the war criminal’s approach anyway:
At the time of his writing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, some analysts took Kissinger to task for what one reviewer called “wishful thinking”- in particular, his insufficient consideration of civilian casualties in a limited nuclear exchange. Moreover, Kissinger himself later moved away from his advocacy of a NATO strategy that relied on short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance the might of the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. (The doctrinal willingness to suffer millions of West German civilian casualties to repel a Soviet attack seemed a poor way to demonstrate the American commitment to the security and freedom of its allies.) But that does not diminish the utility of Kissinger’s thinking the unthinkable.
This analysis is typical of Kaplan. In 2005 he tried to sell the same stinking Kissinger fish, this time for war with China.
Couldn’t the Atlantic have hired two writers with different views for these bookended articles? More to the point: couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of real Iran experts? And couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of writers who personally had NOT served in the Israeli army?
Kaplan, a stealth neocon armed with only a BA from UConn, seems to have the ear of ostensible Liberals. Unfortunately, his influence is all out of proportion to his scholarship or the quality of the goods he’s selling. Tom Bissell’s blistering review of Kaplan’s career and work shines light not only Kaplan’s errors of judgment – but that shown by those who peddle Kaplan’s work.
Encouraged by a rising tide of bigotry and xenophobia, opponents of the Cordoba Center, a proposed Islamic Center that has been termed “the Ground Zero mosque” by its opponents, have charged that it tarnishes the memory of 9/11 victims or that it is funded by Islamic militants. This nonsense has been propagated by any number of right-wing politicians like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and by people like Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. In this morning’s paper Kevin Cardin (“Until radicalism subsides, ground zero mosque inappropriate”) has added his own shouts from a mob that would like to erase religious tolerance from this country’s laws and legacy.
But let’s immediately clear the dung from the shovel that Cardin has been swinging. The Cordoba Center is not a mosque and it is two blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers on property that was once a Burlington Coat Factory. The Cordoba Center’s plans are actually based on a model anyone who has visited New York’s 92nd Street Y or a Jewish Community Center will be familiar with.
The project is spearheaded by Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, CEO Sharif El-Gamal, a New York real estate investor, and Faisal Rauf, a New York imam who in 2001 condemned the 9/11 attacks as “un-Islamic” and whose book “What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America” directly challenges the views of those who embrace Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilization” theory. Kevin Cardin appears to be one of these, ignoring the fact that the Cordoba Center’s founders are precisely the sort of “moderate Muslims” whose absence he laments.
Cardin finishes his rant by asking how the Saudis would feel if a U.S. president forced them to build a grand synagogue in the heart of their country – somehow seeing this as equivalent to an American religious denomination simply exercising its freedoms. Interestingly, Cardin shares a mode of thinking with Osama bin Laden, who similarly sees the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia as a clash of civilizations and an affront to Muslims everywhere.
But thankfully it is not up to Mr. Cardin to decide who has the right to religious freedom in the United States. Although some Christian fundamentalists may see it otherwise, the U.S. Constitution is crystal clear on religious freedom. The First Amendment begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Yet in each generation American religious groups have had to contend with bigotry like this. Early in our history it was Protestant discrimination against “Papists.” In the 19th and early 20th Century many Jews were accused of being anarchists. During the McCarthy era many were suspected of being Communists. Now we have the Muslims to pick on.
Let me make a suggestion to Mr. Cardin. Drive over to Newport, Rhode Island and visit the Touro Synagogue. Step inside and (if I recall properly) on the right near the door is a letter from George Washington to the congregation, assuring their welcome and safety in the United States. It reads in part:
“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Sit in one of the benches there and ponder the fact that nowhere in the world are people of any religion more free to practice their religions than in our country. And if you are so inclined, say a little prayer that it remains this way forever.
After the firing of Helen Thomas for her imprudent remarks that Israel should get out of Palestine, it’s clear our nation has no more tolerance for bigotry. And so, in this new Zero Tolerance climate, I’m surprised by the tolerance shown to Abe Foxman of the now inaptly-named Anti-Defamation League.
But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.
Unfortunately, right above this paragraph were his insinuations that Islamic radicals were behind the project, and highlighting the fact that these Islamic interlopers were not from the Judeo-Christian “shared values” club:
In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.
I wish Foxman were referring to the values most Americans share in condemning religious persecution.
But Foxman’s logic only works for Islamophobes. Jerry Haber points out that:
Perhaps some Christians are offended when those they consider to “Christ killers” wish to build a synagogue nearby? This sort of sensitivity we have to pay attention to?
On the ADL’s Interfaith web page there are a number of items taking various swipes at the Catholic Church, the Presbyterians, and Sabeel (a Christian Palestinian organization). According to Foxman, the Oberammergau Passion Play has not been sufficiently rehabilitated since Hitler’s time; the Presbyterians are still flirting with anti-Semitism, and Sabeel should not be opposing Israel-friendly Christian Zionists or supporting the BDS (Boycotts, Sanctions, and Divestment) movement. No mention of the ADL’s own Islamophobia.
None of this shocks since the ADL long ago stopped being an anti-defamation group and has now become principally a pro-Israel attack organization.
Speaking for New Yorkers, Bloomberg expressed nicely the reasons Americans should welcome Cordoba House:
If somebody wants to build a religious house of worship, they should do it and we shouldn’t be in the business of picking which religions can and which religions can’t. I think it’s fair to say if somebody was going to try to on that piece of property build a church or a synagogue, nobody would be yelling and screaming. And the fact of the matter is that Muslims have a right to do it too. What is great about America and particularly New York is we welcome everybody and I just- you know, if we are so afraid of something like this, what does it say about us? Democracy is stronger than this. You know, the ability to practice your religion is the- was one of the real reasons America was founded. And for us to say no is just, I think, not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.
Foxman, who has been with the ADL for 45 years too long, has not only betrayed the ADL’s mission to fight against religious discrimination, he has unfortunately become a bigot himself. Having backed into the anti-Arab corner he finds himself in, Foxman is hopelessly out of touch with American values of religious tolerance and is also out of touch with mainstream American Jews and Jewish ethics.
It’s time for Abe Foxman to be forcibly retired. Now.
Tisha b’Av recalls the destruction of both temples. It is a time for reflection, reading the Book of Lamentations, and thinking about the darker human impulses which are said to have led to these historical calamities.
As always, a number of thoughtful essays have appeared on the internet. Some predictably hammer away the theme of Jewish power over powerlessness, or beat the drum for war against external powers of darkness, while others recognize that darkness exists in our own souls and that this is a time for reflection and re-prioritization.
David Rosenberg’s letter (“Obama’s policies amount to tyranny,” July 8) recalls another time in our history when public discourse was in the toilet and the quality of political arguments was equally deficient. During the Depression demagogues like Huey Long, the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the Rev. Gerald Smith, Dr. Francis Townsend, and William Lemke were fond of throwing around the same kinds of accusations we see today from the tea party and its supporters.
The Rev Smith, ever the political opportunist, was associated with the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the America First Party and the Union Party.
In 1936 at the National Press Club, Smith called President Roosevelt a communist. He also accused Roosevelt of plotting Long’s death. Smith, who railed against Jews and socialists, drew up designs to build a full-size recreation of Jerusalem in the Arkansas hills and was known for other goofy notions, such as linking mental health care in Alaska to a secret government brainwashing program. An early prototype of Glen Beck, Smith was so nutty that even Strom Thurmond kept a healthy distance.
Father Coughlin, who became America’s first mass media (radio) demagogue, coined the phrase “Roosevelt or ruin” and referred to Roosevelt as the “great betrayer and liar” or as “Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.”
Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, the Christian Front, and was the pastor of the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church, which he ran as a multimillion dollar business until 1942 when the Vatican shut him down. Like Smith, Coughlin was a notorious anti-Semite, unlike today’s Fox pundits who have traded in 1930 slurs against “Judeo-Bolsheviks” for more up-to-date attacks on “Islamo-Fascists.”
Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?
David Rosenberg writes: “The Tea Party is a nonpartisan, grassroots movement of individuals united by the core values of our founders derived from the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights.”
If Rosenberg thinks that the tea party is nonpartisan and grass-roots, why are all its proponents associated with the Republican Party? Gallup Poll results published in April state that “Tea Party supporters are decidedly Republican and conservative in their leanings.” Republicans like Sarah Palin pose as if following the tea party, but they in fact are its featured speakers and its leaders.
More than that, they are the more extreme wing of the Republican Party. A case in point is the re-election defeat in Utah of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Republican incumbent who had worked across the aisle with Democrats. “As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas,” Bennett told The Ripon Society.
“The concern I have is that ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office,” he added. In our own state the so-called “Massachusetts Republican Assembly,” which calls itself the “Republican wing of the Republican Party,” is affiliated with the tea party movement but is clearly identified with the Republican Party.
But let’s explore the supposed “grass-roots” nature of the tea party.
Tea Party Nation is a Republican concoction that features Sarah Palin. Tea Party Express is the creation of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which in turn was created by Sacramento-based GOP consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates. Tea Party Patriots has a 10-item “Commitment to America” that no Democrats have signed onto and was created by Republican Dick Armey.
Armey, who has been affiliated with or created many more “grass-roots” organizations than the Depression-era demagogues mentioned, founded the Institute for Policy Innovation, Contract with America, Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, AngryRenter.com and FreedomWorks — which is a major financial donor and ideological leader of the tea party. Fox News commentators like Michelle Malkin and Glen Beck serve as the tea party’s free propaganda center.
A media watchdog organization, MediaMatters, summarized: “Despite its repeated insistence that its coverage is ‘fair and balanced’ and its invitation to viewers to ‘say “no” to biased media,’ Fox News has frequently aired segments encouraging viewers to get involved with ‘tea party’ protests across the country, which the channel has described as primarily a response to President Obama’s fiscal policies. Media Matters has compiled an analysis of Fox News’ promotion of these events.”
MediaMatters then went on to list dozens of video broadcasts and Web links which go far beyond reporting into the realm of promotion and political organizing. In April the bias was so evident that Fox stopped commentator Sean Hannity from starring in a Cincinnati Tea Party rally (Los Angeles Times, April 15).
What have we really learned from the Holocaust? Was it of the suffering of European Jews? Or was it an evil that challenged moral complacency in the 20th century and reverberates even today? Is it a franchise for the state of Israel, Yad Vashem, or the Wiesenthal Center — or does anyone living have a right to invoke it for art or politics or ethics?
In the last week two news articles appeared which raised these questions.
One concerned a video that has gone viral, called “Dancing Auschwitz,” produced by Melbourne artist Jane Korman. The other was the posting, in Hebrew, of the message “Liberate all Ghettos” on a wall of the former Warsaw Ghetto by Israeli conscientious objector Yonatan Shapira, an Air Force pilot who created the 2003 “Pilot’s Letter” signed by 27 pilots who publicly refused to fly missions over the Palestinian territories.
Korman’s video, which features Korman’s father, an 89 year old survivor, and other family members dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” was warmly received in the local Melbourne Jewish press and the Orthodox Jewish world.
Shapira’s graffiti, on the other hand, was immediately slammed on the Jewish Telegraph Agency website, Yad Vashem, and YNet News. Noah Flug, chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem, called on Polish police to launch a criminal investigation and said, “Yonatan Shapira and his ilk disrespect the Holocaust and its heritage. His actions harm the commemoration of the Holocaust and hurt the feelings of the survivors and the memory of the victims, including his family members who were murdered by the Nazis.”
Flug’s representative message on Shapira’s political act — and his silence on Korman’s video — make it clear that as long as the Holocaust is invoked in a way that does not stray from Jewish territory, it’s OK. But as soon as the messages of the Holocaust begin to be applied universally, they are condemned.
I have watched Korman’s video a half dozen times, and each time I find myself crying. Tears for both the absolute evil and the resilience and hope of the human race. It is edgy, but Korman’s message is precisely about these themes. While I did not have an emotional response to Shapira’s message, it was equally daring and timely, and — with the message in Hebrew — a challenge to Jews to internalize the universal message of the Shoah.
I applaud both Korman and Shapira.
In one of the segments of Korman’s video, we are reminded of the absolute universality of the Holocaust. “Lo tir tzakh” (“Thou shalt not kill”) appears in front of the dancing family. In Shapiro’s graffiti, the universal again appears in the message: “Free all ghettos.”
The real messages of the Holocaust, whether in art or politics, will continue to resonate with anyone on earth who has endured persecution. Survival and liberation belong to us all.
After Israel’s attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla, with very few exceptions the organized American Jewish community reacted with overwhelming approval of the hijacking, kidnapping, and murder of nine flotilla activists, which also involved one American ship and one American death. Representatives of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism joined an anti-flotilla demonstration which mocked the flotilla attack and launched their own “Free Gilad” flotilla in the East River. The Union for Reform Judaism was “saddened” by the flotilla attacks but continued to defend the collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. No surprises from the Orthodox Union: even its youth organization was given talking points for defending Israel’s Entebbe-style attack on the flotilla.
… the American Jewish establishment heeded the call of the Israeli government to defend its actions in the face of an extremely negative public relations storm.
“Thank you for listening and understanding and for advocating and for trying to put things in the right perspective, remembering that we are the victims here and we are the ones who were compelled to take these actions to defend ourselves,” said Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, on a conference call June 1, organized by the JFNA and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, in which more than 700 people participated. “As you know, today the war is on the screens. The war is a political war, a PR war and also a legal warfare. And for that we need you more than ever.”
Bottom line: American Jewish denominations have not criticized any of Israel’s attacks on Americans or Palestinians. And they have never questioned whether any of these attacks were legal, disproportionate, or ill-advised.
They have willingly enlisted in every one of Israel’s wars and have now entered a state of moral hibernation.
But now America’s Jewish Establishment has a little problem of its own. A conversion bill in the Knesset now threatens to give Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate exclusive control over conversions. The bill actually involves a change to Israel’s Law of Return.
Naturally, American Orthodox Jews see nothing wrong with the change sponsored by Avigdor Lieberman’s Beteinu party, but Conservative and Reform Jews are crying foul. The Jewish Federations of North America, which represents most Jewish movements in the United States, are concerned about changes in the Israeli law.
So it’s not surprising, but quite disappointing, that the American Jewish denominations have been so blind and so quiet on issues of human rights and justice in Israel and the occupied territories, while being so vocal in defense of “religious pluralism” in Israel.
But religious hegemony in Israel is just another side of Zionism. As long as this tiny nation continues to occupy another population almost its own size, continues to occupy land in two other countries — and continues to turn on its own Arab, Druze, Ethiopian, Mizrachi, civil libertarian, and anti-war citizens — is it really so surprising that it also discriminates against Masorti and Progressive Jews?
And then there’s the law itself.
The entire controversy ignores the fact that the Right of Return is, by very definition, a discriminatory law which promotes ethnic cleansing and discriminatory ethnic or racial laws. My children can immigrate to Israel while Palestinians who have lived there for a millennium have their houses razed. Under other Israeli laws, Palestinian refugees cannot return to their homes in Israel.
If justice is the issue, the “Right” of Return should simply be scrapped, rather than amended for the benefit of American Ashkenazim.
Israel is in crisis. Lobbying for religious pluralism in narrow self-interest, while ignoring systemic injustice in Israeli society, is pointless. The American Jewish community must rouse itself from its moral slumber and begin speaking out for justice — for all citizens and the millions whose land it occupies.
For an instruction book, look in the back of any Tanakh.
The Tea Party loves to claim that Obama and a cabal of “socialists” are bringing us to the brink of a totalitarian state. Fox News commentator Glen Beck incongruously adds his own conspiracy theories, in which he obsessively tries to link liberal Democrats with the Third Reich. But for anyone who has actually studied history, Fox News and Glen Beck have more in common with German Fascism than the liberalism they attack on a daily basis.
The Weimar Republic began in 1919 after the collapse of the monarchy. Consisting of a coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the German Democratic Party, it formed a social democratic government which attempted to provide a safety net for its citizens. That is, until it could no longer pay German war reparations. By 1923 inflation had wiped out the middle class and the Nazi Party, which had formed in 1919, was now a movement of angry, frightened people. In 1925 presidential elections brought back former monarchist and Social Democrat von Hindenburg, who presided over a few years of relative stability.
But the Great Depression of 1929 plunged Germany into massive economic crisis, and by then the Nazi Party had begun to attract serious money from German industrialists. By September 1930, the Social Democrats, who had previously controlled parliament, were down to 37% of the popular vote, and the Nazi Party’s popularity had spiked 700% to become the second most powerful party. In March 1932 the presidential election candidates were von Hindenburg, Hitler, and Thaelmann. In little over a year the Nazi Party had doubled.
Several months later, parliamentary elections led to a Nazi majority, and Leftists were purged. In February of 1933, as we now know, the Nazis torched the Reichstag and blamed it on the Left. Hitler then asked for dictatorial powers, which were granted by both remaining (liberal and conservative) parties. By May of 1933 labor unionists were among the first inmates of newly-built concentration camps. Kristallnacht, which was the beginning of the end for Jews, did not happen for another five years. It had all started with an attack on workers and social democracy.
The obvious question is: how did the Nazis gain such influence so quickly?
The Nazi Party was not established by Hitler, who was only it’s 55th member. It had been created by hyper-nationalists who believed the Weimar Republic’s social democrats were out of touch with populist sentiments. The early Nazis opposed an “internationalism” they associated with the rise of European social democracy, the League of Nations, and a global economy. They were proponents of “Voelkisch” movements that sought to unify Germans around an idealized (and somewhat artificial) German nationalism established by von Bismarck, which had existed for only thirty years.
Hitler’s platform for the Nazi Party was described in his Twenty Five Points, which included abrogating the treaty of Versailles, imposing punitive measures for foreigners working in Germany, the right to annex territory, the expulsion of foreigners, immigration reform, nationalization of the press, shutting down foreign-language publications, discrimination against Jews, nationalization of trusts, and increasing old-age pensions. Nazism opposed international finance, admired mercantilism, and claimed to hate both capitalism and socialism. Nazis complained that Germans were under attack by Judeo-Bolshevism: Foreigners were out to take over their world, and Jews were the worst of the lot.
The Nazi Party should have, by any reasonable expectations, remained a fringe group of extremists. But Nazism gained great strength among former supporters of the conservative German Democratic Party, particularly among Protestants in Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and East Prussia, and particularly among older voters who wanted to return to “traditional German” values. The greatest number of its voters came from the broken middle class, although 40% came from wage laborers.
Despite Nazism’s ideological opposition to capitalism, industrialists supported its anti-union positions. The Nazi Party obtained funding from industrialists like Hugo Stinnes, Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolf Kirdorf, coal mining and steel magnates, a group of Nuremburg industrialists, and international cartels like I.G. Farben, AEG, and Royal Dutch Shell. 1933 records from just one bank show contributions to Hitler from Ford Motors, German General Electric, Telefunken, AEG, I.G. Farben, and the Association of Mining Interests.
Support for Nazism and its principles was not just a German phenomenon. In 1922 Henry Ford printed half a million copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and ran a series for several years in his “Dearborn Independent” titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” In 1937 Thomas Watson of IBM and a delegation from the Chamber of Commerce met with Hitler. Business as usual would continue with der Fuehrer.
Besides censorship and shutting down almost 4000 newspapers by the end of the war, dominating the public discourse meant making sure propaganda was carefully controlled by official sources. The Nazi Party’s official paper, the “Voelkisher Beobachter,” was not the only outlet for Nazi propaganda. “Der Stuermer” was oriented toward the Hitlerjugend. “Das Reich” was established by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. “Der Angriff” was the Berlin Nazi daily. But the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” was the Fox News of its day and was owned by the Stinnes family, which also directly funded Hitler. This p
aper was among the earliest outlets for Nazi views.
Some of the Nazi party’s tactics will be familiar to today’s Democratic congressmen. The Nazi Party’s “Sturmabteilung” (disruption section) was originally intended for breaking up meetings of its political opponents. Later, this group, which consisted of various militia members, became known as “brownshirts” or “storm troopers” and was used for physical attacks upon its opponents.
So when Fox News propagandist Glen Beck fires up Middle America and the Tea Party with disinformation, I think of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sturmabteilung. When I see legislation like Arizona’s SB1070, I think of the Twenty Five Points.
When I see Muslims vilified on a daily basis, I think of Jews in post-Weimar Germany. When I see Americans slamming the UN and multilateralism while promoting militarism, I think of 1920 German views on the League of Nations and its abrogation of the treaty of Versailles. When I hear about Americans who are tired of “foreigners” building mosques or speaking Spanish in “their” country, I think of the German “Voelkish” movement. When I hear about “Islamofascism” I recall the Nazi phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism.”
And when I think of the old, white, Protestant, frightened, misinformed, angry Tea Party activists longing for a return to traditional American values, I think of the Germans who all too willingly let Hitler destroy their nation.
On July 1st something rather remarkable occurred in the German parliament. A motion calling for an investigation of the Gaza flotilla, improving the situation of the people of Gaza, and for renewed support of the Middle East peace process passed unanimously. But not everyone thought it was so wonderful.
The Jerusalem Post printed an article with a response from the Wiesenthal Center. The Juedische Allgemeine ran an article entitled roughly “Mental Blockade in Parliament” and pictured an upside-down photo of the Bundestag.
In an article in Der Spiegel written by Henryk Broder, a Zionist journalist who regularly rails against critics of Israel by calling them anti-Semites and whose works can be found on his German-language site, Achse des Guten (axis of good), Broder slams parliament’s “veering” out of its depth into the Gaza controversy. In an article titled, “Einigkeit und Recht und Gaza” (Unity and Justice and Gaza), a play on the German national anthem, Broder invokes the spirit of Kaiser Wilhelm II moving about the room – Germans uniting in an anti-Semitic universe to sing an anthem which before 1952 included the verse “Deutschland ueber alles.” Broder takes CDU representative Philipp Missfelder to task for Missfelder’s remarks:
Now, against the background of our historical responsibility and our history, which is marked in today’s world not by guilt but by great responsibility, it is now a matter of coming together to achieve the objectives of peace.
And he slams Rolf Muetzenich for spelling out the message parliament is sending Israel:
I think we need to make it clear to Israel that the siege on Gaza only achieves the opposite of what Israel really wants to accomplish… It is the responsibility of the federal government to help – something we can do because of our special relationship with Israel – so that this problem area is finally acknowledged by the political actors in Israel. I would hope that both the Chancellor and the Foreign Minister to the Israeli government would be more proactive than those who have preceded them.
Broder concludes:
The debate late Thursday was not a triumph for parliamentary democracy, it was an act of national self-discovery. To deputies who have not tired of assuring each other how great it would be to all reach cross-party consensus, they were presumably unaware that – each for himself and all together – they had conjured up Wilhelm II. If in the past the so-called “Jewish question” was the cross-party tape that held Germans together, it is now the Palestinian question which creates a sense of national unity. A parliament and a government stymied by one self-inflicted crisis after another, which can’t even agree on hotel taxes, now wants to make a significant contribution to peace in the Middle East. Like children playing monopoly who take over Opel and want to save Karstadt from bankruptcy.
Whether making a joint resolution on Gaza or declaring that the earth’s surface rests on the back of the faction leaders, it’s completely irrelevant to the course of world history. On the one hand this is comforting, on the other it’s terrifying. The deputies just want to play. Yesterday it was a trip to Jerusalem, tomorrow it will be cops and robbers.
I don’t agree with Broder’s conclusions, but his article points out that Germany is now confident and independent enough to be motivated by friendship and responsibility – and, yes, no longer guilt. And perhaps there is even a germ of truth in Brodeur’s snotty reference to “national self-discovery.” It could very well be the same kind of national self-discovery that Brazil and Turkey and the Arab League and the EU have experienced in puzzling out the Israel-Palestine conflict. These nations have all discovered that they do not have to imitate the US relationship with Israel.
Aside from Broder’s whining, there is also the fact that Germany really has become a friend of Israel’s.
Since the war Germans have paid reparations, introduced Holocaust curriculum into education, and each government since 1965, when diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany were restored, has strengthened the relationship between the two countries. Holocaust denial violates German law. German presidents have visited Yad Vashem, knelt in supplication at the site of the Warsaw uprising, and pursued a policy of repeated apologetic gestures toward the Jewish state. As Paul Belkin points out in a monograph published by the US Congressional Research Service, German’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer
pursued a foreign policy rooted in the belief that the legitimacy of the young German state depended largely on its willingness to atone for atrocities perpetrated by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime of Adolf Hitler. Accordingly, his policies were motivated by a perceived moral obligation to support the Jewish state. The cornerstone, enshrined in the Luxembourg Agreement, was a long-term commitment to provide unprecedented financial reparations to the state of Israel and restitution and compensation to individual victims of Nazi persecution.
To this date, reparations have totaled approximately $32.5 billion. As Belkin points out, reparations paid were in excess of international expectations. The US actually voiced concern for Germany’s ability to rebuild itself under the weight of the reparations it had voluntarily chosen to pay.
Descendants of German Jews stripped of citizenship during the “Nazizeit” (nazi period) are granted automatic citizenship and Jewish communities have begun to reappear in Germany. In Berlin, which once had 170 synagogues, the largest German synagogue was recently rebuilt at a cost of $10 million. There are now 100,000 Jews living in Germany, compared to over half a million before the war. In 2008 the German and Israeli cabinets met – the only such meeting with a cabinet outside Europe.
Germany is now Israel’s second largest trade partner after the US. A variety of cultural exchange programs exist between the two countries, including a sister cities program. Like the US, German politicians regularly speak of a “special relationship” with Israel and refer to “shared values” between both countries. In short, relations have normalized in a way that would have been unimaginable shortly after the war.
In 2000 Germany paid for half the $1 billion cost of two “Dolphin” class nuclear submarines. Germany’s BND cooperates with the Mossad in intelligence gathering. During the Six Day War Germany permitted the US to make covert deliveries of supplies to Israel via Bremerhaven. As part of UNIFIL, German naval vessels patrol the Lebanese coast, ready to interdict Hezbollah arms shipments.
Many Europeans see themselves as post-national multilateralists. Germany is also constrained by its own reticence to again become highly militarized. And Germany, as one of the wealthiest and most visible nations in the EU, often provides the leadership for pan-European initiatives. This stance (“Haltung”) often brings Germany into conflict with US and Israeli unilaterialism and militarism. While Israel and the US would have been content to let the peace process die, in 2002 Joschka Fisher, Germany’s former Foreign Minister, helped resuscitate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
But, as Fischer’s own history attests, the German electorate can at times be much farther to the left of, say, the American electorate and certainly Israel’s. Germany has not always been in sync with its “special friend.” For instance, Israel (with a US echo) has sharply criticized Germany for its efforts to involve Syria in Israel-Palestine peace negotiations. Israel has also conducted “flyovers” of Germany’s UNIFIL vessels, triggering German complaints for the Israeli harassment. While Germany has repeatedly slammed Hamas for its use of violence and has denied certain Hamas members visas, it has also been open to unity talks between Fatah and Hamas and, to the consternation of Israel and the US, recognizes both political parties. Germany is one of the Palestinian Authority’s donors, and this irks both Israel and the US. Similarly, in the case of Lebanon, neither the EU nor Germany classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization because it plays a role in Lebanese politics and UNIFIL must deal with it.
Nor has Germany always been in sync with the EU. In 2002 Germany blocked EU sanctions against Israel. In 2004 it voted for an EU resolution condemning Israel’s “separation” wall but government officials privately defended it. In 2006 Germany voted against a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. The same year Israel blocked EU condemnation of the Gaza blockade. Germany has been involved in prisoner exchange negotiations in Israel’s behalf since 1996, most recently being involved last year in the case of Gilad Shalit. And Germany is Israel’s voice within the EU, with which it frequently differs on Israel.
Israel and its American lobbyists were once fond of using a sledgehammer to pound critics. The sledgehammer was, of course, the loosely-wielded accusation that objections to Israel’s occupation were “anti-Semitic.” Of course, for most people anti-Semitism is like pornography — you recognize it when you see it. Swastikas on walls, death threats, discrimination, slurs, publications like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” or stories like the “blood libel” and assumptions about the physiology or psychology of Jews were all recognizable features of anti-Semitism. Jewish “rootlessness,” “clannishness,” “cosmopolitanism,” or avarice were as common as charges that Jews controlled the global economy. To all of this the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia added the rejection of Jewish nationality (meaning “peoplehood” and clearly not, in 1906, referring to a state):
While the term Anti-Semitism should be restricted in its use to the modern movements against the Jews, in its wider sense it may be said to include the persecution of the Jews at all times and among all nations as professors of a separate religion or as a people having a distinct nationality.
So it was understandable when Israel’s critics, in response, uttered a collective “You’ve got to be kidding” and waved the classical definitions of anti-Semitism back at the accusers.
So Israel simply redefined anti-Semitism.
Redefining anti-Semitism
In 2005 Natan Sharansky developed a definition of anti-Semitism which was published in the Jewish Political Studies Review and is now used by many Jewish and political organizations.
Sharansky’s definition of anti-Semitism completely throws out ill-treatment of Jews as individuals or a people and replaces the “Jewish people” with the “state of Israel”:
The first “D” is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.
The second “D” is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.
The third “D” is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.
A Jewish child taunted for wearing a yarmulke and bullied on the way home would not be the victim of anti-Semitism according to this revisionist definition.
“Delegitimization” equals a Palestinian State
In the last few years Sharansky’s last “D” has been getting quite the workout. The Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, has developed a strategy for fighting Israel’s critics by labeling them “delegitimizers” and “naming and shaming” them. As BDS becomes a more accepted way of challenging the occupation, Israel is fighting back by categorizing BDS supporters as “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites. The concept has entered Israeli consciousness to the point that politicians bludgeon each other with it. Tzipi Livni recently accused Benjamin Netanyahu of delegitimizing Israel. Everything is potentially delegitimizing. The Gaza flotilla was described as a delegitimization effort. The Goldstone report was seen as another such effort. Refusing to buy Jaffa oranges is too.
On the one hand, most of the people of Israel see the two-state solution as the path to a peace agreement. There are even quite a few Israelis who have mobilized for a Palestinian state and the promotion of its legitimacy, and are winning converts to it.
What they do not notice is that this claims a certain price. The more you market Palestinian legitimacy, the more you bring about a detraction of Israel’s legitimacy in certain circles. They are accumulating legitimacy, and we are being delegitimized.
So one doesn’t even have to deny Israel’s right to exist. Simply calling for a parallel Palestinian state makes one an anti-Semite, as Jewish groups like J Street are beginning to discover.
While Arad says that most Israelis want a two-state solution, Israel’s political parties and members of the Knesset have apparently not heard. For instance, no one who has bothered to read the Likud platform really believes that Israel has ever been dedicated to two states:
The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.
It is therefore questionable if the polls are correct and Israelis really want a two state solution. Or, if they do, what they mean by two states.
No Palestinian State equals a One State Solution
It is pronouncements like Arad’s that convince many that Israel will never accept a Palestinian state.
But Arad is hardly alone in rejecting two states.
A few weeks ago Moshe Arens, who has served as both defense and foreign minister with the Likud, suggested simply granting citizenship to Palestinians:
Unlike the dire predictions heard so often, Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria would not be the end of the State of Israel, nor would it mean the end of democratic governance in Israel. It would, however, pose a serious challenge to Israeli society. But that is equally true for the other options being suggested for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This option of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria merits serious consideration.
The one-state solution is an option that many Palestinians now recognize as inevitable, although they might take issue with Arens’ claims that Israel would “continue” to govern democratically. For instance, the Palestine Strategy Group, which represents the viewpoints of Israeli, occupied, and Diaspora Palestinians, examined different state formations in a paper it published in 2008, Palestinian Strategic Options to End Israeli Occupation. While a Palestinian state has always been a national goal, the end of Occupation is an even greater goal:
[…] So, if Israel refuses to negotiate seriously for a genuine two-state outcome, Palestinians can and will block all four of them by switching to an alternative strategy made up of a combination of four linked reorientations to be undertaken singly or together. […]
Fourth, the shift from a two state outcome to a (bi-national or unitary democratic) single state outcome as Palestinians’ preferred strategic goal. This reopens a challenge to the existence of the State of Israel in its present form, but in an entirely new and more effective way than was the case before 1988. […]
Is this what Israel wants? Israel cannot prevent Palestinians from a strategic reorientation along these lines. Does Israel really want to force Palestinians to take these steps?
One of the authors has described this option as simply shutting down the PA and turning the struggle for a sovereign state into a civil rights struggle. Given the fact that Israel’s land grab has already eliminated the possibility of a viable contiguous state and Israel itself is ideologically opposed to a Palestinian state, a single state appears inevitable. And because of demographics, that state will not remain exclusively Jewish.
A number of political analysts share this view. John Mearsheimer recently discussed the inevitability of a single state in detail in a talk last April at the Palestine Center, in which he began:
Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans — to include many American Jews — Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank.Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream.
It is ironic, but Zionism’s own excesses, rather than external enemies, have destroyed the dream of a Jewish state.
Once again J Street’s positions fail to significantly distinguish it from AIPAC. Today J Street joined with AIPAC and broke with Americans for Peace Now in applauding new sanctions on Iran. To its credit, J Street made one distinction from AIPAC — in calling for continued diplomacy and warning against war:
We believe that a dual track approach that combines meaningful diplomatic engagement with broad-based sanctions is necessary to convince Iran to clarify its nuclear intentions. We commend the President for his efforts in strengthening the resolve of the international community on Iran. […]
We reiterate that nothing in this bill should be taken as authorizing or encouraging the use of military force against Iran. We are opposed to the use of military force by Israel or the United States against Iran.
While J Street joined with AIPAC in welcoming the sanctions, it broke with APN and Gush Shalom. Americans for Peace Now, on whose board J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami also sits, condemned the sanctions. APN’s Deborah Lee issued a statement which contained this critique of sanctions — any sanctions:
APN’s core concern about this bill remains unchanged: imposing sanctions the goal of which is to ‘cripple’ the civilian economy and inflict misery on the population — in the hopes that this population will rise up against its government — is a flawed and in all likelihood counterproductive approach. It is an approach that has failed for decades in Iran. It failed in Iraq and Haiti. It has failed in Cuba and North Korea. And it is an approach that only last week Israel abandoned in Gaza, recognizing that squeezing the population of Gaza with a blockade on civilian goods had not only failed to force Hamas out of power, but had enabled Hamas (and the world) to blame Israel for all the misery the people of Gaza were facing. It took Israel three years to recognize the error of this approach. It is regrettable that Congress did not draw the obvious lesson from these experiences.
While J Street has taken it on the chin from mainstream Jewish organizations and the Israeli Lobby for its unwavering support of a Two State solution, many of its recent positions — endorsing supplemental military aid for Israel and sanctions on Iran — seem designed to blunt right-wing criticisms and win supposedly “moderate” Jewish support.
But aside from a position truly supportive of two states, J Street is beginning to look much like AIPAC. J Street has adopted the Obama approach: position yourself as a progressive, but consistently make tactical political calls that sell out progressive principles. Positions on the Goldstone report, BDS, sanctions, supplemental military aid, slamming the UN — all have been disappointing echoes of AIPAC.
Today J Street took the additional step of distancing itself from even the progressive Zionist peace movement.
J Street has a short window in which to establish itself as a voice for something new in the Middle East.
Sometimes disparate news items all come into focus as parts of a larger story.
“Material Support” for terrorists expanded to include Free Speech
This week the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a ban on providing “material support” to terrorist groups. The particular “material support” in a case brought by the government against the Humanitarian Law Project referred to the Project’s efforts to advise the Kurdistan Worker’s Party on non-violent means to resolve conflicts with the Turkish government. In its 6-3 ruling the Supreme Court essentially scrapped the First Amendment by declaring that, in the interests of fighting terror, the government had the right to determine who Americans can talk to and what kind of speech is permitted.
“Not even the ‘serious and deadly problem’ of international terrorism can require automatic forfeiture of First Amendment rights,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote. “There is no obvious way in which undertaking advocacy for political change through peaceful means or teaching the PKK and LTTE, say, how to petition the United Nations for political change is fungible with other resources that might be put to more sinister ends in the way that donations of money, food, or computer training are fungible.”
“The decision sends a clear message that the First Amendment does not protect even the most benign forms of advocacy on behalf of groups designated as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ by the Secretary of State,” said Stephen I. Vladeck of the American University Washington College of Law.
Even conservative Justice Roberts wrote that Kagan’s positions had gone too far. “The government is wrong,” he wrote, “that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct” and not speech protected by the First Amendment. But he nevertheless concluded that combating terrorism trumped protection of free expression.
Justice Sotomayor, in dissenting, said that “under the government’s definition, teaching these members to play the harmonica would be unlawful.”
Demonstrating the high caliber of arguments for the majority position, Justice Scalia replied, “Well, Mohamed Atta and his harmonica quartet might tour the country and make a lot of money.”
Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court
The ruling highlighted President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan, who appears to on her way to be the Court’s newest conservative justice.
When liberal Justice John Paul Stevens retires, he will most likely be replaced by Kagan. To the many other disappointments with the Obama administration this can be added.
Freedom of Speech will now be regulated by lobbyists
Although the Secretary of State maintains the official lists of whom Americans can talk to or visit, this list is subject to tinkering, political posturing and lobbying by foreign governments and their friends.
A case in point is the recent call by AIPAC, an Israeli lobbying group, to redefine the Turkish charity, IHH, as a terrorist group. The call was enthusiastically endorsed by a majority of Congressmen from both parties.
Based on documents supplied by AIPAC, echoing Israel’s claims that the charity “has well documented ties to Hamas and has been linked to other Islamic terrorist organizations, including al‐Qaeda,” Congress will likely add it and additional politicized (but hardly terrorist) organizations to the State Department’s watch lists – even though the State Department itself has never established such “documented ties.”
Oh, well, with a bit more lobbying and a few more PAC contributions I’m sure such ties will be “established.”
Over the last few years I have struggled with the idea of BDS. A year and a half ago I set about informing myself of the different kinds of BDS tactics.
About a year ago I visited Israel and Palestine. One of the people I met was Omar Barghouti, a well-known voice for BDS. Nothing about divestment from occupation or military-related industries – whether Israeli or international corporations – seemed inappropriate at the time, but I had reservations about cultural boycotts and felt that consumer boycotts were meaningless or even destructive. Part of the reason is that I have Israeli friends – great people who share a vision for peace but will be affected by these campaigns.
This year – having seen the occupation up close and having a chance to think about it – it was more difficult to define the parameters of what was appropriate and what was not, but I gave nuance and thoughtfulness my best shot.
And I’m not alone. Lots of Jews have grappled with BDS. Jerry Haber, in an excellent piece, analyzes Bernard Avishai’s nuanced and thoughtful reflection on the subject in his Nation article. Avishai is a decent guy, a progressive Zionist whom I heard speak last October in Washington. His ethical gyrations reminded me of my own.
Avishai, like numerous other liberal Jews, voices the great fear that BDS will drive even progressive Israelis into the arms of the right, and that BDS would create a “siege mentality” in Israel – and on this basis he advocates selective application of BDS tactics. Yet Haber parts with Avishai and describes how he added his name to a petition for TIAA-CREF’s divestment from Israel.
Where I part with Avishai’s arguments – an argument shared by well-respected figures in the Israeli peace movement like Uri Avnery – is that it’s way too late: Israel has been in a siege mentality almost since its founding. If this is the primary progressive Jewish argument against BDS, it’s a non-starter.
As we have by now been forced to recognize, Israel itself admits that the blockade of Gaza is meant to strangle the Gazan economy and punish its people. This has become such a well-known secret that Chuck Schumer can recite the same rationale (“Strangle them economically”) to Orthodox constituents without fear of being labeled a bigot, as Helen Thomas was. And it’s not just Gaza. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot travel and their economy is still severely limited by Israeli control. Critics of Israel, NGOs, and just recently a German development minister, have all been barred from Israel-controlled areas.
Finally it was clear to me: the Israeli government doesn’t appreciate nuance and that force might be the only language they understand. Economic force.
All this being the case, why is it not appropriate that Israel drink its own medicine as long as the Palestinians are forced to? There are no longer any justifications for any more tortured, nuanced discussions of BDS. It’s a matter of justice, and a simple matter at that.
Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions should be applied to Israel until the day that the Israeli equivalents of BDS (economic strangulation, restrictions on travel, etc.) cease to be imposed on Palestinians and international critics of Israel’s occupation.
If anyone thinks that Israel has any intention of sharing Palestine with its existing inhabitants, please read the Peace & Security portion of the Likud’s platform:
The Likudniks are still peeved that they never got what they regard as their proper amount of land from the British:
Settlements
The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.
Self-Rule
The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem, including the plan to divide the city presented to the Knesset by the Arab factions and supported by many members of Labor and Meretz. […] The Likud government will act with vigor to continue Jewish habitation and strengthen Israeli sovereignty in the eastern parts of the city…
The Jordan River as a Permanent Border
The Jordan Valley and the territories that dominate it shall be under Israeli sovereignty. The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel. The Kingdom of Jordan is a desirable partner in the permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians in matters that will be agreed upon.
Security Areas
The government succeeded in significantly reducing the extent of territory that the Palestinians expected to receive in the interim arrangement. The government will insist that security areas essential to Israel’s defense, including the western security area and the Jewish settlements, shall remain under Israeli rule.
The Golan
Based on the Likud-led government’s proposal, the 10th Knesset passed the law to extend Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration over the Golan Heights, thus establishing Israeli sovereignty over the area. The government will continue to strengthen Jewish settlement on the Golan.
Let’s let British Petroleum conduct an investigation of what it did wrong in the Gulf of Mexico.
One has to wonder what kind of fool would suggest this. But the Obama administration and Congress have agreed to let Israel investigate its own attack on a group of ships bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza on May 31st — an attack that killed one American citizen and took control of an American ship and affected citizens from numerous countries.
The White House backs Israel’s inquiry into its deadly raid last month on a flotilla trying to break a blockade against Gaza, saying the independent public commission is “an important step forward.” … Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Israel’s panel can meet the standard of a “prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation.”
The McClatchy News Service ran a similar article, titled “Israel plans impartial inquiry of its deadly attack on aid flotilla,” by Jerusalem-based reporter Shera Frenkel.
Not only are we getting a whitewash, it’s being packaged as an “independent” and “impartial” investigation.
If citizens of the 40 countries whose citizens were hijacked, beaten, or killed by Israel are content that at least “some kind” of investigation is being conducted, think again. A whitewash is under way. Whatever Israel’s own probe concludes – and Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised that it will exculpate Israel – the world must keep pressing for a credible, independent, international commission to investigate the flotilla attack.
With US approval, Israel appointed a commission to investigate itself composed of chairman Yaakov Tirtel, 75, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge who still serves on a military appeals court; member Shabtai Rosen, 93, who worked on maritime law issues while at the UN; and member Amos Horev, 86, a retired major-general in the Israeli army, former president of the Technion, and an advocate for the Israeli defense industry.
Besides old guard members of Israel’s military-industrial complex, Israel appointed two “international observers” without voting rights. Neither of the men hastily chosen, a Canadian general who may have looked the other way on human rights abuses in Afghanistan and a Loyalist politician once associated with Ian Paisley and British colonial abuses in Ireland, is likely to stand up to much scrutiny.
Ken Watkin, the Canadian, was implicated in the Canadian Afghan detainee issue, in which several detainees arrested by Canadian Forces disappeared or were tortured following transfer to the Afghan National Police. According to a report in the Toronto Star, while acting as the Judge Advocate General, Watkin refused to answer questions when testifying in Canada’s House of Commons about whether he had been told to authorize the transfers or knew of the torture, and claimed attorney-client privilege in refusing to answer the House’s questions.
Irish Loyalist David Trimble, the second Israeli observer, is known for his association with Ian Paisley and British suppression of the Irish independence movement. Trimble is a neoconservative who supports interventionist foreign policy, as his membership in the Henry Jackson Society indicates. Trimble opposed the appointment of former US Senator George Mitchell as chairman of multi-party talks which resulted in the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement (GFA) of 1998. He recently founded the “Friends of Israel Initiative” to combat “international delegitimization” of the Jewish state. Trimble also has been quoted as saying, “One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry.”
With an investigative body like this, don’t get your hopes up. My guess is the whitewash has probably already been written. Israel’s forthcoming report should be ignored and, instead, there must be a truly credible, independent, international investigation of the flotilla attack. As a recent Ha’aretz editorial concludes:
… both its puzzling membership and weak mandate – bodes ill for Israel. A committee whose makeup and authority are perceived as predetermined will be unable to satisfy international leaders and their constituencies abroad who demanded the inquiry in the first place. It would therefore have been better if the Turkel committee had never been born, sparing us the deceptive appearance of a real investigation.
J Street today applauded increased sanctions on Iran at the UN. An enrichment processing proposal brokered by Turkey and backed by Brazil, which had previously been acceptable to the United States, was rejected by the US in backing Israel’s demands for sanctions on Iran. A J Street press release supported the move:
J Street welcomes the passage of enhanced multilateral and broad-based sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council today.
This vote would not have been possible without the tireless diplomatic efforts of the Obama Administration. We commend President Obama and his team for their effort and this step in the right direction, and urge them to continue employing a dual track approach – meaningful engagement plus multilateral sanctions – to convince Iran to change course.
Today, the Government of Iran hears a clear message from the international community that there are real consequences to continued obfuscation, delay, and intransigence over its nuclear program, as well as real benefits should they fully address international concerns.
We expect the Iranian regime to immediately make clear it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, to submit to international inspections, and to end its support for groups that use violence and terror against Israel. Such action will put Iran on the road to reintegration into the international community.
Other nations seem to be held to a different standard than Israel on nuclear weapons. J Street has not called on the UN for an end of Israel’s formal policy of nuclear ambiguity/obfuscation or asked it to rejoin the world community in respecting the international laws it continues to break. Such lopsided resolutions are guaranteed only to ratchet up the rhetoric from Teheran and make the Iranian regime more unpredictable.
These sanctions are particularly stupid because there was an opportunity to try a reprocessing scheme the US had once supported and to insist on monitoring access. Teheran had warned that the offer would be off the table if sanctions were imposed, and this now gives them a domestic popularity boost in standing up to the United States. There will also now be no monitoring, and Iran will have scored points for its home team.
The imposition of sanctions, however ineffective they are expected to be, coupled with the attack on the Mavi Marmara, is also a setback for NATO ally Turkey and a gain for Israel. A message certainly not lost on certain Middle Eastern and new European allies, these sanctions make it crystal clear that the United States is willing to betray NATO allies and friends when it comes to Israel. Stephen Walt calls it right when he cites Stephen Cook of the Council of Foreign Relations complaining about how Turkey needs to be “kept in its lane.” We can’t have just anybody running around being a regional power broker in the Middle East. There’s already a reserved seat.
This move is also exceptionally misguided because it further complicates the United States’ relations with other nations in the Middle East. But the president, the State Department, and apparently J Street, all continue to see the world as it was during the Bush administration. The US with the help of Israel will continue to try to project its power in the Middle East – at least for a few more years. Other regional players need not apply for the job.
Stuart Forman’s letter on the Gaza flotilla makes several statements which distort or put a spin on Israel’s war with Hamas, the blockade of Gaza, and attempts by protesters to break it.
Stuart writes that as a result of Israel’s evacuation of Gaza Israel became the target of 10,000 Qassam rockets. This is a distortion of the timeline. In 1996 Shimon Peres declared war on Hamas. In September 2005 Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza. In January 2006 during Olmert’s term Hamas won popular elections in Gaza. In 2008 Israel and Hamas agreed on a cease-fire of hostilities which had dated back to the 90’s. During much of this time Gaza was under periodic bombardment by Israel and a number of Hamas leaders were assassinated, often with significant collateral damage. In December 2008 the cease fire ended and Israel attacked Gaza, killing more than a thousand civilians.
Thus, the hostility between Hamas and Israel long predated Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. The thousands of rocket attacks must be considered over decades, not just a few short years – and within a context of a war declared by Israel.
Stuart states that Israel provides 15,000 tons of humanitarian aid each week to Gaza. This aid is actually provided by humanitarian organizations like UNWRA or foreign NGOs and is funded by foreign nations like the US or the EU. The delivery is simply managed by COGAT, the office for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. And the UN estimates that the amount of aid is only one-quarter of what Gazans actually need.
Stuart suggests that Israel is only doing what is necessary to protect its citizens, but banned aid includes: biscuits and sweets, cardamom, cattle, cement, chickens, chocolate, coriander, cumin, donkeys, dried fruit, fabric, fishing nets, fishing rods, fresh meat, fruit preserves, ginger, glucose, goats, greenhouse planters, halva, heaters, horses, iron, jam, margarine, musical instruments, notebooks, nutmeg, pens and pencils, plaster, potato chips, razors, rope, ropes, sage, salt, seeds and nuts, seltzer, sewing machines, size A4 paper, tar, tarpaulins for shelter, toys, various containers, vinegar, and wood. Israel has also apparently estimated the minimum number of calories required by Gaza inhabitants, though it claims this data has never been used to restrict food.
Stuart portrays the Israeli government’s blockade as a reasonable effort to keep weapons out of terrorist hands and that humanitarian aid could have been delivered if only the protesters had first docked in Ashdod. But as we see from the list above, Israel’s intent goes well beyond protection, to punitively crippling the Gaza economy and depriving its inhabitants for voting for Hamas in 2006. The flotilla organizers’ intent was clearly to point out this collective punishment by an act of civil disobedience.
Israel still has stores of confiscated materials that have never been delivered to Gaza from eight previous attempts to break the blockade. Thus, Stuart’s repetition of promises by the Israeli Foreign Ministry are simply not to be believed. In addition, by failing to deliver humanitarian aid and impounding it, as it has done with all flotilla shipments, Israel is violating any number of international laws.
While Gazans may have originally voted for the political wing of Hamas, the Israeli blockade has only entrenched the military wing. Israel is making the same mistake it made in 2002 in the West Bank when it decided it didn’t like the Palestinian Authority and bombed the government compound in Ramallah. The more Israel beats and bombs and deprives Palestinians, the more radicalized they will become.
But the deprivations of Gazans are not all to be laid at the feet of Israel. Egypt has been complicit in the boycott by closing its Rafah crossing into Gaza. Hamas itself has diverted aid that might have gone to the Fatah faction. Assisting Israel in its punitive measures, a Democratic congress actually cut US aid to Gaza in March 2009. There is plenty of blame to go around. But now that the world knows how dire the situation in Gaza is, it’s time to fix it.
Today, 78 miles in international waters, Israel Defense Forces boarded a small flotilla of six ships bound for Gaza with food, building materials, medical equipment, books, and toys – killing 19 on board with live ammunition, according to Israel’s Channel 10 and the BBC. Most of the deaths occurred on the Mavi Mamara, a Turkish ship.
The “Freedom Flotilla” consisting of 700 people from 40 different countries, including many Americans, a Nobel Peace laureate, European parliamentarians, and non-violent peace organizations, was again attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. In the past, many of the same organizations and individuals found similar ships boarded, contents inspected, passengers brought to Israeli jail, then deported. This time, Israel displayed the same callous disregard for the lives of Western civilians that it has previously shown toward Arabs.
Since Israel’s siege of Gaza in 2008, which killed thousands of civilians, Israel has maintained a clampdown on imports and exports in Gaza – punishing Gazans collectively for supporting the political wing of Hamas in elections – and creating hardships which have predictably increased support for the military wing of Hamas. Despite initial promises to investigate the situation in Gaza, such as Senator John Kerry’s visit shortly after the siege, the United States has turned a blind eye to the resulting hunger, homelessness, poverty, and unemployment in Gaza. Israel has been permitted to impose capricious bans on imports such as pasta and spices and on exports such as fish and Gazans have had to rely on a network of tunnels to survive. Israel’s actions are in violation of numerous human rights principles and international law. The flotilla was intended to raise awareness of this and the hopelessness of life in Gaza.
The flotilla attack comes at a time when Israel’s rightwing government has clamped down on civil liberties, barred foreign critics from entering Israel or the West Bank, arrested journalists, banned NGOs, placed numerous non-violent Palestinian leaders in prison without laying charges, proposed stripping some of its own citizens of their citizenship, and stepped up harassment of peace organizations.
Despite Israel’s recent entry into the OECD – a club for the world’s wealthiest nations – and despite our own financial difficulties – the United States continues to pamper Israel with $3 to $5 billion a year in military aid, loans, military and energy development projects, and occasional splurges like last week’s “Iron Dome” boondoggle which gave one of Israel’s state-owned military industries, Rafael Systems, $205 million for a missile shield system that in 2008 was judged to be useless against Qassams.
It is high time to pull the plug on aid to Israel and to make that nation accountable for its attacks on American citizens. It has long been clear that Israel has used US aid to finance racist settlement programs, build separation walls, private roads for settlers, maintain checkpoints, and to inflict casualties on civilians in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Gaza. Now this military aid is being used against our own citizens.
In the long run, the leverage this will apply on Israel will actually benefit it. Unless the United States stops asking “pretty please” and applies meaningful pressure on Israel to coexist with a Palestinian state, its 62 year occupation will continue until the same fate befalls Palestinians as American Indians – where they live in isolated reservations within Greater Israel. When that happens, Israel will be in precisely the same position that white South Africans found themselves. It will be the end of either Israeli democracy or a Jewish state.
BDS, short for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, is an umbrella term for several non-violent tactics used by opponents of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. BDS is also a movement originated by Palestinians who wanted to replicate the success of a similar campaign in South Africa. Just as farm worker boycotts in the United States were joined by Anglos who refused to buy Gallo wine, product boycotts and institutional divestments from Occupation-related companies have been embraced by individuals, schools, religious organizations, investment advisors, and trade unions. On many college campuses a large proportion of BDS supporters are Jewish. The basic purpose of BDS is simply to apply economic pressure on Israel to end the Occupation.
Israel’s foreign revenue
In 2008 Israel’s GDP was $207 billion. For purposes of comparison, Israel’s population and area is roughly equivalent to New Jersey, which has a GDP of $475 billion. Israel’s exports are about $45 billion, with about a third to the United States, and roughly the same amount to Europe. Israel’s major domestic product is weapons systems, and it is the 4th largest defense exporter in the world, right behind the US, Russia, and France, and slightly ahead of Britain. Many of its defense industries are government owned, such as IMI and Rafael Systems which was recently given $205 billion by the United States for the Iron Dome missile system.
In 2009 Israel’s major exports to the US were gems ($6 billion), medical ($4b), computer ($3b), military ($2b), and electronics ($2b). While some of these products are benign, many of Israel’s industrial and agricultural zones, such as Mishor Adumim, Barkan, Katzerin, Tulkarem, Hinnanit, Ariel, Maale Efrayim, Ataroy, Qiryat Arba, and the Jordan Valley, are built in or around settlements. This makes selective boycotts of particular products almost impossible because the Occupation is so deeply integrated into Israel’s entire economy. While products from these industrial zones could be forced to be correctly identified or banned, as Britain has begun to do, this is a tedious task which requires massive categorization and publication efforts from the BDS movement. Consequently, blanket boycotts of Israeli products have been proposed.
Besides military subsidies, Israel also enjoys period gifts from the US, such as this month’s $205 million Iron Dome project, various loans, joint military and energy development projects, and a free trade agreement dating from 1985 – a decade before similar agreements with our Canadian neighbors.
Acknowledging that the Occupation is morally indefensible, Bard and Troy describe their counterattack: “Israel advocates are always going to lose a fight over ‘settlements’ and ‘occupation,’ or at best get mired in stalemate. BDS shifts the terrain, making the battle one over Israel’s right to exist, over the legitimacy of Zionism, over the anti-Semitic tropes shaping the anti-Israel movement, and the rank anti-Semitism behind the disproportionate, obsessive focus on Israel.”
In its “Firewall” paper, the Reut Institute writes that BDS is a “primary assault on Israel’s existence today [which] is directed at its political and economic model; [and] it may become existential…” It goes on, “Ending ‘occupation’ and resolving the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is very important to combating delegitimization; yet Israel’s delegitimization is fundamentally ideological, and stems from a core rejection of Zionism’s and Israel’s political model. Therefore, it is likely to continue even following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Reut’s other prescriptions are varied, from PR efforts like softening discrimination in Israel toward Arabs, to cultivating more effective hasbara networks. Another of their strategies is to attack specific BDS supporters by “establishing a ‘price-tag’ for attacking Israel by ‘naming and shaming’ delegitimizers.” Yet accusations of anti-Semitism are rarely made with much discrimination.
But Reut’s most troubling recommendation is that “Israel [my italics] must identify delegitimization hubs, usually metropolitan areas hosting strong anti-Israel sentiments and containing a concentration of international NGOs, media, corporations, and academia. Within these hubs – such as London, the San Francisco Bay Area, Madrid, Paris, Toronto, and Brussels – Israel must significantly increase its diplomatic and public diplomacy activities. Contending with each hub requires a tailor-made approach based on unique constellations of hundreds of relationships with local elites in political, business, media, and security spheres.”
In other words, Israel is to develop a hit list of mainly academics, NGO’s, and progressives and then unleash local American Jewish organizations on them. These “delegitimization hubs” must be obliterated like terrorist hideouts by drones. This new Jewish McCarthyism has already brought back the pogrom and led to censorship and blacklisting of progressive Jewish groups by more “mainstream” Jewish organizations. In the Bay Area, for example – one of the Reut Institute’s targets – the Jewish Federation actually created a blacklist of Jewish peace groups who work with BDS supporters. In Boston and Seattle this story has been repeated. This is troubling on many levels, not the least of which is that a foreign nation is directing attacks on individuals in the United States.
BDS is also suspiciously or negatively viewed by many liberal Jews. Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Michael Lerner, both lightning rods for their criticism of the Occupation, oppose BDS, as do Israel’s Gush Shalom founder Uri Avnery and various progressive American Jewish groups such as Meretz USA and J Street. They see BDS targeting not only the Occupation but also positive aspects of Israeli society and democracy, and they complain that BDS targets only Israel.
Well-known critic of Israel, Noam Chomsky, judges BDS to be ineffective because, in his calculations, only the US government, not consumer pressure, will work on Israel to end the Occupation. Chomsky also opposes BDS on principle because “breaking contact with Israeli academics, artists, writers, journalists … means breaking contact with many people who have played an honorable and courageous role well beyond what can be found here, and are a much more substantial element within their own society.” Americans for Peace Now, like J Street, opposes cutting US military aid to Israel, preferring diplomatic efforts and reductions of non-military aid (both unsuccessfully tried).
Arieh Zimmerman, a friend who lives on a kibbutz a couple miles from Gaza, understands the Palestinian use of BDS: “We so outgun the Palestinian side of the equation that any serious resistance to Israeli rule is effectively ruled out. Personally, I prefer the idea of economic resistance to that of suicide bombing. But what is clear is that any people with their backs to the wall will find some means of resistance to their conqueror.” But he also believes that BDS is a crude tool where precision is required, and boycotts raise the same ethical issues posed by Israel’s own collective punishment of Palestinians: “There are boycotts and there are boycotts. Boycotting the corner butcher because he is known to have a heavy thumb is one thing; boycotting his neighborhood to teach him a lesson is another. Can collective punishment ever be excused? Unless collective guilt is proven, what justification can there be for collective punishment?”
But some Jews regard BDS more as a set of tactics than just a movement – tactics which must be at least selectively tried, given the lack of political will by presidents and congress to resolve this festering international issue. Jewish Voice for Peace cautiously supports BDS as a tactic. Independent Jewish Voices in Canada and Americans Jews for a Just Peace cite human rights as their justification for supporting BDS.
But cultural boycotts are especially troubling for many Jews because of strong family, cultural, and religious connections. Rabbi Brant Rosen echoes Zimmerman and describes the painful realization that “though a movement like BDS might feel on a visceral level like just one more example of the world piling on the Jews and Israel, we need to be open to the possibility that it might more accurately be described as the product of a weaker, dispossessed, disempowered people doing what it must to resist oppression.” Orthodox Jewish studies and philosophy professor Jerry Haber recently enumerated 13 reasons for Liberal Zionists to give guarded support to the BDS movement.
BDS is as American as apple pie
While Palestinians may have recycled BDS from the South African anti-Apartheid movement, boycotts have precedents in American and Jewish history. The original Boston Tea Party was part of a wider boycott of British goods. The day after Rosa Parks was arrested, 35,000 flyers were distributed urging a boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama transit system. Recently a number of cities have passed resolutions calling for a boycott of Arizona over several pieces of legislation directed at Latinos. Rather than being a tool of hate, boycotts have more often been used as a tool of justice.
And boycotts have been frequently used by Jews, too. The Talmud recounts the boycotting of price-fixed myrtle. In 1936, American Jews organized a counter-boycott of German products. In 1989 Jews boycotted the 50th anniversary of WWII in Poland. In the 90’s, the Reform movement proposed boycotts of several states. In 2008 Israelis in Acre boycotted Arab merchants. Jewish organizations have at various times promoted boycotts of Pepsi, Coke, Burger King, and Starbucks. Were these signs of bigotry or simply acts born out of principle?
Divestment, too, is an everyday investment activity. Whether to avoid supporting defense or tobacco industries, or to promote green products, we often align our investments with our ethics. Churches apply their own teachings to guide investments. Catholic Church doctrine on abortion and contraception frequently initiates their divestments. Similarly, many Protestant churches have pursued selective divestments because of the Occupation, not because they hate the people who brought them the Old Testament.
Finally, American sanctions have been imposed on Cuba over human rights abuses which have affected far fewer people than in Palestine. Sanctions have also been slapped on Iran in recent years. Unfortunately, sanctions as practiced by the US have often been a proxy for warfare. Despite Israel’s hostility to the US and intransigence toward repeated demands to end settlements, any use of sanctions on Israel – at least by that name – would not fly in the US in the present political climate. However, pulling the plug on Israel’s many sources of American taxpayer-funded revenue might during our economic disaster. Israel is becoming an economic liability.
BDS can be applied selectively
I tend to agree with critics of BDS that it’s basically a poor replacement for US pressure on Israel. But what kind of pressure could be applied – and what grassroots efforts would convince the US government to translate public sentiment into political action? Largely due to AIPAC, Christian Evangelicals, and other Jewish organizations’ stranglehold on the discourse, the average citizen’s more moderate views generally go unheeded by his congressman.
Administrations come and go, going through the motions of proximity talks and shuttle diplomacy, but it is increasingly a heartless, unconvincing performance. BDS is a real way that individuals can move the Israel-Palestine issue forward. While the BDS movement may prefer to see their whole program implemented, we are free to select those tactics we are comfortable with. Here are my preferences:
The most effective pressure on Israel to end the Occupation and vacate illegal settlements would be withdrawing its $3.15 billion a year military subsidy. If this does not work, it’s money well saved – especially since Israel just joined the OECD, an exclusive club for the wealthiest nations. But if Americans still want to reward Israel’s bad behavior, these funds could be placed in escrow to assist the eventual evacuation of settlements rather than to subsidize them.
Temporarily cutting joint economic and energy development projects, suspending the 1985 free trade agreement with Israel, and making it known that we will no longer be a rubber-stamp for Israel at the UN would also go a long way toward resolving this issue. The United States keeps timidly pleading with Israel to simply freeze settlements, not evacuate them, and is generally rewarded with the diplomatic version of an obscene gesture by Israel. Using leverage with demands, rather than useless pleading, is a language Israel will finally understand.
I oppose a cultural boycott of Israel because I am opposed to the suppression of ideas by anyone. Avigdor Lieberman should have an opportunity to make his views public so that Americans can actually hear what spews out of his mouth. The same applies to athletic, artistic, academic, or any other human boycott. Despite Israel’s own use of collective punishment in the West Bank and Gaza, racist visa policies toward Arab Americans, and harassment of NGOs and critics, no individual Israeli should have to answer for people’s displeasure with his government, even if he supports its views. Here I agree with the critics.
I have no such ethical qualms about an economic boycott. But consumer boycotts of non-military Israeli products are economically meaningless. Most of the economic value Israel receives from the United States is in joint military projects and outright gifts, such as the recent Iron Dome giveaway, and this could be best addressed by sanctions.
Boycotts of Israel’s non-military products are economically meaningless for another reason: Americans have not been known to deprive themselves of consumer goods for political principles for roughly 40 years. And that’s the problem with tactics – they depend on the times and the situation. Resurrecting anti-Apartheid economic tactics, despite all the “existential” warnings from the Reut Institute and others, will probably be ineffectual today.
One of the attacks on BDS is that it targets only Israel, but it’s hardly the case. Foreign and multinational corporations producing particularly repugnant products, such as the militarized Caterpillar and Volvo tractors used to crush Palestinian homes (and occasionally people), have more often been the target of boycotts and divestment. Motorola has been a target because of products used for monitoring the “separation wall” and on civilians in Gaza. The list of targeted companies includes almost every global defense corporation from Boeing to Raytheon.
While an individual consumer may find it impossible to avoid the Motorola cell phone that comes with his phone plan, divestment is a more powerful tool. Investors have every right to eliminate tobacco, nuclear, or Occupation-related industries from their portfolio.
Don’t write off BDS
There are many Jews who, despite the conflation of BDS with anti-Semitism, “existential” threats, “blood libels,” and other forms of rhetorical hysteria, simply want the Occupation to end. We see BDS as a less-than-ideal grassroots tactic in the absence of any real political will to create Two States. Whatever your flavor of Zionism (or not), a Jewish rebirth in Israel should not mean the demise of Palestinians or their hopes self-determination.
BDS should not be regarded just as a monolithic movement but as a non-violent toolkit for registering our individual and collective rejection of Israel’s Occupation. You don’t need either the BDS movement itself or Jewish defense organizations to tell you which elements you can or can’t use. Moral foreign policy would be ideal, sanctions would be great, divestments are your own concern, and the jury’s out on the effectiveness or appropriateness of economic and cultural boycotts.
But let your own conscience be your guide. Don’t write off BDS.
Today Israel barred Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank. Chomsky was to have given a talk at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah.
Chomsky attempted to cross into Palestine at the Allenby Bridge, directly into the Occupied Territories, and his speech would not have posed a security risk to Israel.
Barring foreign nationals from Palestinian territory is one more method of denying Palestinian sovereignty. It is also a way of punishing critics of Israel, even while it violates international human rights agreements. It is a way of collectively punishing Palestinians for their resistance to the Occupation. And, importantly, it is another nail in the coffin for Israeli democracy. Like the former Soviet Union, Israel is rapidly becoming a nation that can’t take any sort of criticism – whether from liberal Jews or American politicians who perform obeisance at AIPAC conventions.
Israel has limited entry to the Occupied Territories to non-governmental organizations, intellectuals with critiques of the Israeli state and, amusingly, this week deported a Spanish clown who was going to perform in Ramallah, on the grounds that the clown was a terrorist.
In 2008, Ha’aretz reported that the number of people denied entry to Israel had risen by 61%. Krista Johnson, an employee of an NGO, was denied entry to Israel after attending a Sabeel conference in Boston (suggesting that the Shi Bet is spying on American here in the US). A Druze family was denied re-entry into Israel after making a condolence call to family in Syria. Kate Maynard, a British human rights lawyer, was denied entry to Israel in 2005. Recently, Jared Malsin, an American Jew who had been hired by the Palestinian news service Maan to produce English-language news, was arrested, imprisoned and deported. Israel has regularly turned away physicians attempting to enter Gaza to provide medical care. One American Jewish critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein, has been banned for ten years from entering Israel.
If you are an Arab-American, travel is even more difficult. Last year an American law student from Harvard was deported because she was conducting research on Bedouin land claims.
What does the United States Department of State have to say about all this? > “Palestinian-Americans Must Enter Through Allenby. For some time, the government of Israel has not permitted Americans with Palestinian nationality (or even, in some cases, the claim to it) to enter Israel via Ben Gurion Airport. Many are sent back to the U.S. upon arrival, though some are permitted in, but told they cannot depart Israel via Ben Gurion without special permission (which is rarely granted).”
In other words, we know our own citizens are being racially profiled but we aren’t going to do anything about it.
This reminds me of the Cold War decades when one of the things which upset Americans most about the Soviet Union was the tight control of cultural visas. Or that American Jews were routinely arrested or banned from the Soviet Union for attempting to free or organize Soviet Jews.
Of course, for Palestinians themselves, deportation is nothing new. During the Nakba roughly 800,000 Palestinians were expelled and not permitted to re-enter Israel. In 1967 another quarter of a million Palestinians were expelled. Since 2002 Israel has deported “undesirables” from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, truly making Gaza a gulag.
While the word continues to look away from these violations of human rights, many Israelis and a growing number of American and European Jews are becoming concerned by the erosion of any last pretense of democracy. Deportations and expulsions may have served the Soviet Union for some time, but eventually the contradictions of that system collapsed it. Creating “Fortress Israel” may play to the most extreme elements in Israeli and American Jewish society, but ultimately it is a prescription for self-destruction.
Today President Obama just handed Israel another $205 million gift of American taxpayer money. Beyond the $3+ billion the United States gives Israel annually without question or oversight, this extra gift is intended to subsidize an Israeli missile defense system called “Iron Dome” built entirely by Rafael Advanced Systems, one of Israel’s larger defense contractors.
This little present comes immediately on the heels of Israel’s acceptance into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – a club for the 31 richest nations in the world.
Aside from the many questions raised after Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza, its refusal to stop building illegal settlements, the demolition of Arab homes in East Jerusalem, and its open hostility to American efforts to restart peace talks, this no-strings-attached gift begs an additional question – why are we giving an ostensibly rich nation our money?
Most taxpayers may not realize it, but American costs of subsidizing Israel’s military are enormous. Massachusetts taxpayers alone will spend $870 million over the next 8 years on military aid to Israel. Our neighbors in Rhode Island will have $130 million diverted to Israel – enough to pay for health care for 10% of the state.
Here in Massachusetts the money siphoned off taxpayers could provide 10,000 families with housing grants each year, job training for almost 15,000 unemployed workers, could fund early education for 26,000 children, or primary health care for 721,000 citizens. Why are the Tea Party patriots not in revolt over this?
In a time of extreme economic distress, this spending is simply reckless. And it does nothing to ensure Israel’s long-term security. Only by pressuring Israel to go back to honestly-brokered talks with the Palestinians will that nation ever become more secure.
In squandering American tax money to subsidize an Israeli defense boondoggle, we are throwing away any leverage on Israel to solve this issue once and for all. Instead, we are signaling to the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors that the United States has no intention of being honest peace brokers. Next to Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, our ongoing military support of Israel and its occupation of Palestinians is (and is rightly seen as) a third war.
But, worst of all, we are stealing money from our own citizens. If American taxpayers begrudge arts programs in the schools, satellite library locations and wonder where all their tax money is going, here’s a good place to start tightening the belt. Tell your congressman it’s time to pull the plug on military aid to Israel. For that matter, we could stand to reign in our own “defense” spending.
Charles Osborne’s recent letter (“Bigots in Arizona? Not so fast”) conveniently re-frames a civil liberties debate over a new law in Arizona as an unreasonable attack on sensible, tolerant Arizonans. While the law may be a desperate measure by some residents that state, the peanut gallery is indeed filled with angry white bigots.
There’s no question that there’s an immigration problem in Arizona. But there’s also no question that Americans love their low-wage fish processing workers, their lawn cutters, their farm workers, their meat and poultry workers, janitors, cleaning ladies, and nannies. There never seems to be much interest in cracking down on the demand which fuels the supply of illegal labor – the employers – or in fashioning sensible guest worker programs with citizenship options. And after all, if after five years of making the American Dream a little cleaner, a little more nutritious, a little prettier for American citizens, why shouldn’t those who have contributed to it be able to dream it for themselves?
But the new Arizona law is being questioned – not to ignore that border state’s problems – but because it is simply a bad law which will legitimize racial profiling.
Mr. Osborne takes President Obama to task for pointing out that the new law will indeed lead to families being stopped while enjoying ice cream. But forget the ice cream. Any opportunity – driving with a burnt-out headlight, beating a red light, spitting on the sidewalk, having a noisy party, a nuisance pet, an unkempt yard – can and will be used as an opportunity to check any Latino’s legal status. Furthermore, the new law would make it a virtual necessity for Latino citizens to carry papers all the time to stay out of jail. And let’s give Mr. Obama credit for stating what everyone knows all too well – that “driving Black” may not be a crime but remains a fact. Now to this we can add “driving Brown.”
But Mr. Osborne’s criticisms go a little beyond defense of Arizona citizens. He recalls the glory days when Arizona was a place where citizens who immigrated (in his words) “learned the language, became familiar with our customs.” To me, it sounds like culture war is the real basis of Mr. Osborne’s support for this new Arizona law.
I was amused by Steven Grossman’s posturing as one of the Tea Partiers. There is a natural affection between people with no ideas and those with poorly conceived ones. They tend to converge in rejecting “Liberal” values of study, reflection, and moderation, along with the recognition of the fact that we’re all stuck together in a construct known as a society. If people like Mr. Grossman had their way, we’d be worshiping at the altar of 80’s style greed like Gordon Gecko or Ayn Rand.
But, ideology aside, Mr. Grossman should be taken to task for some of his bad logic and absent fact.
According to Grossman, Liberal intellectuals have (1) not solved any problems (2) because they contemplate, (3) deliberate, (4) worship complexity – all of which leads to (5) dithering and paralysis. After reading this, I found myself wondering how someone could pack so much nonsense into a single argument.
Let’s take a few examples to see why this is all nonsense. The world economy is fairly complex. Modeling something as mundane as weather requires supercomputers and complex algorithms. Avoiding war requires finesse, deliberation, and compromise. The “dithering” that Mr. Grossman ascribes to a particular Liberal (I assume he meant Neville Chamberlain) in dealing with Hitler was certainly not common to that other Liberal, Franklin Roosevelt, who brought the U.S. into the war. And while we’re on the subject of Roosevelt, he and other Liberals solved a rather big problem called the Great Depression. And, as most people in the financial world (such as another letter in the same issue of the paper) attest, the recent financial bailout was an equally serious situation. Both the Bush and Obama administrations pursued similar solutions to the problem, using the same econometric models and the same Keynesian economic theory. The difference is that Liberals are now attempting to push through changes to protect the economy from questionable banking, insurance, and securities practices. Mr. Grossman may not like it, but that’s hardly “dithering.”
And what the heck is Grossman frothing about when he complains that Liberals are joining conservatives in turning their backs on the Enlightenment or “real” intellectualism? He seems to equate liberalism with New Age mysticism, Marxism, Beatniks and Hippies. Of course, none of these groups (some of which are defunct) ever saw eye-to-eye. But why let facts get in the way of an impassioned argument?
Mr. Grossman does have one thing in common with the Tea Partiers – despite his implied claim to speak for “true intellectuals,” he seems incapable of constructing a reasoned argument based on anything resembling fact.
In these pages we have recently been treated to a series of letters to the editor blasting the newly-passed Health Care Reform bill. There is something common to all these letters – they are from people who have perverse notions of why it is we live together in a society, what our individual obligations to society are, what society’s obligations to us are, and what values we as a society choose to define ourselves. The current debate over health care is once again an argument over a Social Contract.
John Clifford (“Health care law is about power and control”), who represents himself as an “independent,” is nevertheless a determined mouthpiece for the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Party. Clifford whines that mandating that all American citizens buy private medical insurance is somehow a step in the direction of socialized medicine and presents a list of talking points torn from the inventive pages of gop.gov. Rodney Fernandes (“Dawn of the entitlement age”) portrays those who receive public assistance as zoo animals, ignoring the corporate welfare “entitlements” and bailouts we have treated American business to for decades. Randall Faria (“Ignoring true cost of health law”) takes a less severe approach, applauding new provisions preventing insurance companies from excluding those with preexisting conditions – but his main objection is that it’s not good for business. He writes, “it will not be long before my employers realize it will be cheaper to pay the fine than continue my coverage.” Apparently his employer hasn’t realized all this time that it would be cheaper to simply not offer insurance at all. Nelson Strebor (“Health care is not a right”) believes in Social Darwinism and Tea Parties.
Then there is Ron Wisner (“Democrat’s massive money pit”), who presumably dashes off some of his posts to libertarianletter.com while taking his yacht on the Marion-Bermuda race. Mr. Wisner, who fulminates against illegal immigrants, in support of the Iraq war, and who blames the financial crisis on government not letting market forces prevail, actually addresses the Social Contract in one of his blog posts. Wisner rejects the Social Contract, writing that “the individual has been enjoined to give up some of those fruits to less productive citizens, not because of any agreement, nor because of any hope of gain, proportional or otherwise to his loss, but as mandatory largess and to a notion of sanctimonious altruism. There now ceases to be a quid pro quo.” He also writes: “If the individual chooses to do otherwise, he may leave the company of men and his survival is thus solely an issue for himself and his industriousness and innate abilities.” Mr. Wisner’s notions remind me of those of the 19th century anarcho-capitalist, Lysander Spooner, who ended up pronouncing the U.S. Constitution null and void.
Yes, there is a certain element of “quid-pro-quo” in a Social Contract. We support society; it supports us. But the Social Contract also involves agreement on what kind of society we want to live in. It also involves the prioritization of social goals – not always based on simple dollars. And it defines what kind of values we choose as a society. A society that cares more about education and health care of its citizens is a totally different one from a society that wages billion-dollar-a-day wars. A society that funds its libraries distinguishes itself from one that provides funding for junkets to China for corporations thinking about relocating their operations. A society that raises its taxes a fraction of a percent is different from one which hands out tax breaks. A society that cares about health care for the children of others is different from one prepared to let the uninsured fend for themselves.
Most of these views, particularly Wisner’s, remind us of Thomas Hobbes’ famous thoughts on the Social Contract. Hobbes wrote that, without a Social Contract, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Instead, we would live like animals in a state of nature, where we would enjoy the “right to all things” but there would be “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes).
If you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s the Tea Party vision for America.
In his piece on radical Islam, Wayne Atkinson argues that Muslims are about to overrun Europe, institute shariah government there, equates Islam with Nazism, calls Muslim immigration a ticking time bomb, writes that Islam contains an “evil element,” and rues the absence of moderate Muslims.
Where to start with all this nonsense?
Writing in this month’s issue of Foreign Policy magazine (“The Islamists are NOT coming“), Charles Kurzman and Ulal Naqvi at the University of North Carolina demonstrate that, with very few exceptions, Muslims seem to prefer democracy over shariah. And when Islamic parties do throw their hats in the political ring, they find themselves liberalized by the electoral process. Gee, it turns out that Muslims are just like us in this regard.
While Atkinson wails about Muslims overrunning Europe, perhaps he forgets that it was the French who colonized North Africa and the British who carved up the Ottoman Empire and invited former subjects to join their Commonwealth. Or that the Germans during the Wirtschaftwunder of the 60’s and 70’s imported huge numbers of Turks to sweep their streets and take out their garbage. Now, like every generation of immigrants, many have become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and members of Parliament. This is in a country where the ruling political party is the CHRISTIAN Democratic Union. Or in England where the official religion is Anglican Christianity. The irony of worrying about religion overrunning Western nations seems wasted on Mr. Atkinson.
Shariah courts in Western countries exist – but they have no legal status. It may surprise some that similar Jewish courts (battei din, “houses of judgment”) have existed for decades if not centuries in the West. And anyone who has watched Judge Judy or Judge Brown on television has seen that many times cases are settled out of mainstream courts when both parties agree. Poor Mr. Atkinson is afraid of … binding arbitration.
And what of the “mysterious failure of moderate Muslims” to speak out against extremism? When one has wax in his ears, he cannot hear. Countless organizations, from CAIR to the ADC, individual congregations, imams, interfaith groups, and individuals have spoken out constantly.
Mr. Atkinson seems to be pushing Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory, ignoring the fact that Muslims have as strong an attachment to democracy and kindness as anyone else. This “clash” is a view that Christian and Jewish fundamentalists love. It’s also pretty self-serving.
Yes, religion is constantly hijacked by extremists. Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Christian extremism all exist. What does its existence say about the faith traditions they hijack? Nothing. Religions are all dialects which express similar human feelings and beliefs. But Mr. Atkinson sees one “true religion” at war with “evil” ones.
Rather than demonizing a religion and falling on simple-minded formulations such as “they hate us for our way of life” it would be more productive to study the politics of terrorist organizations. We might find out, for example, that terrorists tap into widespread resentment of Western nations which prop up kings, dictators, and generalissimos while historically undermining democracies. And uncritical Western support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine does not help either. Take away the itch, and the scratching will go away.
Want to end terrorism? Start looking at the political and historical realities instead of falling back upon ignorant theories regarding other’s religions.
Regarding Juanita Schoff’s letter (“Founding fathers firmly rooted in faith”), there is no question that some of our nation’s founders were deeply respectful of religion and its mission to uplift morality. George Washington, an Episcopal vestryman, delivered this message in his farewell address. Adams and Jefferson and many of the other founders had similar views.
And there is no denying that religion was a major part of the landscape of the 17th and 18th centuries. But it was – as it is today – also to be feared and criticized. Thomas Paine in his best-seller, The Age of Reason, pilloried many aspects of religion and argued for skepticism and reason over revelation. But he also shared Washington’s and Jefferson’s views of religion as a moral agent.
Schoff mentions the Mayflower Compact, which was hastily written to prevent a faction that did not share the religious views of the majority from splitting off to settle in Virginia. But their own religious intolerance was one reason Rhode Island was founded, and the colonists’ “morality” did not prevent them from murdering the native Wampanoag who had befriended them. We had early warnings that mixing religion and politics was a bad idea.
Nor did religious morality put up much of a fight against slavery or slow down the destruction of millions of Native Americans. In fact, religion happily offered metaphors and language for America’s “Manifest Destiny.”
Schoff mentions Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson, who literally took scissors to the bible to produce his own redacted version, had ethics and society in mind. Religion (like the French, Latin, and Greek, math, law, and science he studied) to Jefferson was intended to improve man’s reason and nature. But learning and reason were equally esteemed.
I find myself agreeing with much of Juanita Schoff’s letter. Who’s to dispute the fact that America was founded by Christian fundamentalists? But it’s clear that the message of her letter was: “Faith is important and the Founding Fathers said so.”
But our conception of religion 250 years later is quite different. America is no longer a homogenous Anglo-Saxon Protestant colony with citizens used to, or tolerant of, a state religion. We live in a world where religious power has been attenuated for centuries. And we have other options – philosophy, ethics, and humanism – or our own combination, including our own religious views. And in the interest of learning to live with our fellow man, these philosophies are best shared with like-minded friends – and not foisted upon the public at large.
But writers like Juanita Schoff continue to press religion on us publicly. So perhaps it is time to question whether religion truly has a monopoly on creating ethical and moral behavior – as the founders assumed. If not, then these assumptions are no longer valid. Cannot service, contemplation, cultivating respect for the rest of humanity, and following precepts like the Golden Rule lead to an ethical life? I think so. And if so, why do we need to revive the Continental Congress’ practice of buying bibles?
Religion is best practiced privately and earnestly, rather than poorly and in public.
Whatever the limits of the founders’ vision, today our Constitution prevents government from establishing any national religion or imposing any religious litmus tests on public officials. I wish groups like the one Schoff cites would quit trying to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. We’ve seen what religious regimes look like in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran. We don’t need one here.
The selective application of law in Israel continues to astound even the most jaundiced observers of Israel’s ongoing Occupation.
Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a school teacher and coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, was indicted in an Israeli military court on December 22 on charges of incitement and arms possession. The specifics? That Abu Rahmah had collected used tear gas canisters shot at demonstrators in Bil’in by the army and made a peace sign out of them.
Abu Rahmah, pictured here on the right at the grave of a protester who was killed by a rubber bullet, is one of a number of members of a non-violent organization that has dedicated itself to publicizing its fight with Israel over a piece of the Israeli “separation wall” which even Israel’s supreme court has ruled is illegally separating the village from its olive trees.
I visited the village last Summer and the number of tear gas canisters littering the area is shocking. Children find all kinds of Israeli projectiles: tear gas canisters, grenades, and rubber bullets.
During our visit, we were shown a few of the thousands of rounds that have been directed at people waving flags and protesting on the other side of a barbed-wire fence.
If appropriate indictments were made, it would be against the government for using armaments of this type against people who have expressly chosen non-violence and public relations over armed resistance.
Not lost on one of my traveling companions, Abu Rahmah’s peace sculpture was no different in concept than one we encountered on a kibbutz two miles from Gaza, where residents had welded Qassam rockets onto a plough and made a menorah out of it. I used the image in my Chanukah card this year.
It remains to be seen if the welder at the kibbutz will face similar charges.
On October 26th the first J Street Conference took place in Washington DC. I was there with Brit Tzedek, which announced the day before that it was merging its grassroots organization with J Street.
Only time will demonstrate how effective a lobbying organization J Street will be. There are also issues of how welcoming J Street will ultimately be for those of us who, while we support Israel’s right to exist as a legally constituted state, are not Zionists.
On the plus side, the highlight of the conference for me was standing in line to pick up my badge and seeing 1500 other progressive Jews doing the same. While I may not share J Street’s centrism, I think they’ve thought through a strategy of speaking from within the community, not outside it, as some of us have previously had to do. Aside from where we may be on the political spectrum, J Street gives many of us a way to critique Israel Jewishly. Until now it has been a source of some pain that I have been on the margins of my local Jewish community for my political views. With Brit Tzedek (and now J Street) it’s nice to be able to feel I am still part of it and doing my best to care about it on my own terms.
On the flip side, J Street does not support the Goldstone report, is opposed to BDS, has been unfriendly to various groups of progressive Jews, appears to rule out negotiations involving the political wing of Hamas, and has taken a tough posture on Iran. Many of its positions are so nuanced that it’s tough to figure out (as in the case of their position on House Resolution 867) what they really support. I am especially concerned that an organization dedicated to an issue of justice is prepared to abandon principled positions in favor of tactical ones. However, I am going to give J Street some time to demonstrate whether its strategy can work and I intend to work with it. If it is successful in broadening a national discourse, it may make it possible for less centrist views to be heard as well. If not, those of us with our perfect political analyses can continue talking to ourselves.
While it’s too early to see if J Street’s strategy will be successful, one thing they’ve already accomplished is demonstrating that AIPAC, AJC, UCJ, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the rest of the Zionist lobby do not speak for many American Jews. There is much more support for moderate views than “mainstream Jewish leaders” want to admit. The fact that only one representative from a Jewish Federation in the United States appeared at the conference demonstrates how out-of-touch many Jewish organizations are with their members.
President Obama lent his support for this new moderate Jewish stance in sending his National Security Adviser to the conference, and numerous Israeli political and diplomatic figures were present as well. And for an 18 month-old organization to have a quarter of Congress at its coming out party was also rather astounding.
It is unfortunate that the Israel-Palestine issue, which here in America should be a foreign policy debate everyone can weigh in on, has been hijacked by Christian Zionists, the Israeli lobby, self-appointed “Jewish leaders,” and congressmen angling for campaign donations. However, the reality is that the Jewish community has a privileged voice, and this confers on us an additional responsibility. The J Street strategy is to amplify this Jewish voice with a focused and disciplined message, calculated to be heard within the Jewish community. While some of us may find J Street too centrist, it is difficult to argue with the reality of the political landscape. Giving J Street a year to demonstrate whether its approach is viable may be the best thing we can do, rather than sniping and griping about it.
But if there is a danger in this strategy, it is of creating an AIPAC-Lite organization that serves mainly to co-opt progressive voices. I hope J Street will not fall into this trap and instead will find its own voice – principled and distinct – based on Jewish values that unite its membership.
While I was working this morning, a friend sent me an email with an article from the Associated Press on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. At first I thought it was a hoax, and then re-read it carefully:
“President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism.”
The announcement from Oslo was neither a hoax nor a prize. It turned out to be either wishful thinking or a misguided incentive.
Right-wing commentators are going to have a field day with the prize, and maybe they should. President Obama doesn’t deserve it. At a time when the United States has yet to shut down Guantanamo Bay, will still be in Iraq well beyond 2010, is contemplating the expansion of war in Afghanistan, is accelerating the delivery of Boeing’s bunker busters for use in Iran, and has been no more an honest broker for peace in Israel-Palestine than his predecessors – the president’s peace accomplishments are few and dismal.
So while Conservative pundits froth over his prize, Liberals too may wish to hold off on congratulating the president – until he has actually earned this award.
The mainstream media and right-wing blogosphere is filled with strange theories about Iranian plans to destroy Jews in some variant of a nuclear “Final Solution.” What’s frightening is that the same people who spread this nonsense are the ones that got us into Iraq. And the ones who believe these lies are the same ones who claimed that the Iraqis were responsible for 9/11. And when we listen to a Khadafy or an Ahmadinejad at the UN, their words make no sense to Western diplomats — if they stay to listen to these speeches at all.
Lost amid the religious verbiage, hate of Israel’s Apartheid form of government, posturing for the rest of the Muslim world, and their downright quirkiness, both Khadafy and Ahmadinijad have nevertheless been delivering a consistent, coherent message to Western nations of the Security Council: Your time is up and we’re tired of playing by your rules. For its part, the West has also been delivering a message: Nothing has changed. The world is still ours. This was certainly the case in New York and Pittsburgh this week.
In his rambling, extemporaneous speech at the UN, Moammar Khadafy slammed the notion of privileged Western nations leading the Security Council:
[The Security Council] is political feudalism for those who have a permanent seat. […] It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the terror council. […] Permanent is something for God only. We are not fools to give the power of veto to great powers so they can use us and treat us as second-class citizens.
An even more reviled speaker in Western eyes, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, made the same points more lucidly in his speech:
It is not acceptable that the United Nations and the Security Council, whose decisions must represent all nations and governments by the application of the most democratic methods in their decision making processes, be dominated by a few governments and serve their interests. In a world where cultures, thoughts and public opinions should be the determining factors, the continuation of the present situation is impossible, and fundamental changes seem to be unavoidable.
[…] Marxism is gone. It is now history. The expansionist Capitalism will certainly have the same fate. […] We must all remain vigilant to prevent the pursuit of colonialist, discriminatory and inhuman goals under the cover of the slogans for change and in new formats. The world needs to undergo fundamental changes and all must engage collectively to make them happen in the right direction, and through such efforts no one and no government would consider itself an exception to change or superior to others and try to impose its will on others by proclaiming world leadership.
Ahmadinejad took aim at Israel, likening the slaughter of civilians in Gaza to “genocide”:
How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.
This was apparently too much for France and the United States to bear. “It is disappointing that Mr. Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Mark Kornblau, a spokesman to the US mission to the UN, said in a statement. Right on queue, 13 Western nations then walked out of a speech that covered much more ground than Israel.
Between New York and Pittsburgh, backroom meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria involving the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Israel, the Obama administration has been busy. Busy swatting down the Goldstone report, abandoning serious demands on settlements, and engaging in war frenzy to either impose more sanctions on Iran, or support bombing it, on behalf of Israel. When Obama came to the podium, he enumerated four main themes in a “new” American relationship to the rest of the world:
First, we must stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and seek the goal of a world without them. […] Because a world in which IAEA inspections are avoided and the United Nation’s demands are ignored will leave all people less safe, and all nations less secure.
That brings me to the second pillar for our future: the pursuit of peace. […] That effort must begin with an unshakeable determination that the murder of innocent men, women and children will never be tolerated.
Third, we must recognize that in the 21st century, there will be no peace unless we take responsibility for the preservation of our planet. […] We will press ahead with deep cuts in emissions to reach the goals that we set for 2020, and eventually 2050.
And this leads me to the final pillar that must fortify our future: a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. […] In Pittsburgh, we will work with the world’s largest economies to chart a course for growth that is balanced and sustained.
Yet when we parse the Obamaspeak and compare it to the President’s actual actions this week and this month, all the flowery speech rings hollow. Nothing has changed. The world order will remain the same.
Rather than the global or regional non-proliferation he spoke of, Obama’s actual non-proliferation consists of: No nukes for Iran. North Korea, a much more terrifying nuclear power ruled by an unhinged despot who has actually killed millions of his own citizens and whose nation has already tested nuclear weapons, merits a mere “tsk tsk” from the President. While Israel and the United States have staged simulated war exercises against Iran, Iran has not threatened Israel and no Iranian weapons testing has been detected. But Israel and/or the US are on the verge of attacking Iran militarily solely because Israel, our proxy in the region, fears losing its nuclear monopoly.
The pursuit of peace, particularly the claim that the murder of innocent civilians will never be tolerated, becomes another one of the President’s hollow high school valedictory speeches when measured against his own administration’s promise to torpedo the UN’s Goldstone report and prevent Israeli war crime charges from ever reaching the Hague. Of course, the United States could someday find itself in the same position as Israel, given Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, illegal renditions, assassinations, waterboarding, drone bombings, and the use of mercenaries in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. So perhaps avoiding the Hague is just American pragmatism. But for a country winding up one war in Iraq, escalating another in Afghanistan, and rattling drums for a third in Iran, the “pursuit of peace” is Orwellian Newspeak.
The last two themes, global warming and globalism, don’t inspire confidence either. Neither the President nor I will be around in 2050 when emission levels are low enough to do any good, and I wonder how much of the planet will be. As for global prosperity, Obama seems to offer a view that opportunity in the developing countries will be linked to sustained, balanced growth in the traditional industrialized nations. Did no one else hear anything new? Globalism and Capitalism have failed. Oratory won’t change the facts.
Even though we might not share the Libyan president’s taste in clothing or the Iranian president’s mock Holocaust denial, you’ve got to admit: the UN Security Council is an anachronistic body. It’s 1948 in a time warp. It still consists of the colonial powers who made such a mess of the Middle East right after WW2, and they’re still trying to set the rules, still reminding everyone that the Security Council is theirs, and that they control memberships in the nuclear club. And, with the exception of China, an old White Boy’s club at that.
But out with the old and in with the new. Two of the permanent members, France and Britain (each scarcely over 60 million) have insignificant populations compared to Indonesia or Pakistan (both Muslim states), India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, or Brazil — all of which have populations over 100 million and two of which are also nuclear states. At least two of these would be better candidates for permanent memberships on the Security Council.
So Khadafy and Ahmadinejad’s arguments really shouldn’t come as a surprise in a world that has changed greatly since 1948. These two leaders may not be the most accessible to Westerners, but they have been echoing the sentiments of many of the 187 other nations of the UN whose views are routinely ignored or vetoed by present members of the Security Council.
The Goldstone report is a case in point.
The report, commissioned by the UN, condemns Israeli and Hamas crimes against civilians during Operation Cast Lead last winter. Aside from various ad hominem attacks on Judge Goldstone, himself a Zionist Jew, no one has seriously attacked its actual findings. The only issue that the US, France, and Britain have with the report is that the investigation was not initiated with their blessings. Hence, in UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s words: no mandate. Apparently the rest of the world did not agree. Yet the US will very likely veto the transmission of the findings to the Hague.
Iran’s nuclear program also illustrates the same point.
In the Sixties a handful of Western nations were instrumental in providing Israel with nuclear weapons: the US, France, and Norway all played various parts. The United States has played a game for decades of pretending Israel has no nuclear weapons, and the other members of the Security Council have played along. When the Shah of Iran was in power, the United States and Germany actually helped Iran develop nuclear power. But now with an Iranian government that no longer takes orders from the West, the rules were simply changed.
When the world is yours, you can do what you want.
Petah Tikva, with the dubious distinction of currently being Israel’s only city with native neo-Nazi gangs, has just launched a municipal program to prevent Jewish women from dating Arab men. This is one of several programs throughout the country to prevent interracial dating and marriage.
Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, has formed citizen patrols to prevent Arab men from “race-mixing” with Jewish girls, according to an article by Jonathan Cook. The patrol, consisting of a vigilante brigade of roughly 35 men, is known as “Fire for Judaism.”
Cook reports that “polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with ‘national treason’.”
A 2008 Ha’aretz report discussed a similar program launched in Kiryat Gat schools intended to prevent Jewish girls from becoming involved with Israeli Bedouin:
The program enjoys the support of the municipality and the police, and is headed by Kiryat Gat’s welfare representative, who goes to schools to warn girls of the “exploitative Arabs.”
The program uses a video entitled “Sleeping with the Enemy,” which features a local police officer and a woman from the Anti-Assimilation Department, a wing of the religious organization Yad L’ahim, which works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men.
In 2004 in Safed posters warning Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to “beatings, hard drugs, prostitution and crime” appeared. Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, was quoted in a local paper that “seducing” of Jewish girls was “another form of war” by Arab men.
Cook adds, “both Kiryat Gat and Safed’s campaigns were supported by a religious organization called Yad L’achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to ‘saving’ Jewish women.”
“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,” says the organization’s website.
I read your Iran policy this morning. I was momentarily buoyed by your measured remarks “that the immediate imposition of harsher sanctions on Iran would be counterproductive.” This appears to be the same position that APN has, and one I completely agree with. But further down in your statement you ominously add “the full range of options should always be available when considering possible US responses to any future Iranian threats or provocations.”
The “full range of options” can only mean only one thing: support for war.
The only “Iranian threats or provocations” so far have been Holocaust denial and the insistence on the right to pursue its own nuclear program (like Israel, India, or Pakistan). We may not like Holocaust denial, but is it a provocation?
It seems to me that the only provocation thus far has been Israel’s. Israel was the party that conducted a simulated attack on Iran last year. Israel was the one to send its navy up and down the Suez canal earlier this year. Israel is the nation which keeps making remarks about “when” to bomb Iran, not “if.”
Just as Iraq was “unfinished business” for many neoconservative, Iran is as well. How many wars are we going to permit neoconservatives to get us into?
I would like to see JStreet come out strongly against any kind of attempt by Israel or its American neoconservative friends to draw the United States into an Iran war. This, unfortunately, is the direction we are already heading. Already, most significant American Jewish organizations have been enlisted to support this coming war and JStreet should be a voice of sanity resisting efforts that serve only one purpose: to preserve Israel’s nuclear hegemony, not to protect it from some supposed “existential threat” – a threat that Ehud Barak has denied.
Please sharpen your message of opposition to any American support or participation in a war against Iran. We don’t need to be embroiled in any more wars.
Regards, – > JStreet’s Iran statement: > > Iran > http://jstreet.org/page/iran > > J Street believes that an Iran with nuclear weapons, especially one that continues to support terrorist groups, would present a major threat to Israel, American interests, and a challenge to peace and stability in the Middle East. > > The Unites States and Israel have a clear interest in preventing Iran from possessing nuclear weapons. The international community equally shares an interest and responsibility in ensuring that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapons capability. > > We believe that an effective policy on Iran demands a comprehensive and multilateral approach. The United States needs to reach out to its international partners. J Street applauds the efforts of President Obama to engage the European Union, Russia and China, and other members of the international community in developing a common strategy on the question of Iran¹s nuclear program. > > J Street believes that US policies should be designed with the aim of influencing Iran’s decision-makers to arrive at an outcome that is in line with the above goals. > > We strongly support President Obama¹s efforts to engage in a diplomatic dialogue with Iran as the most effective means to achieving that outcome. That policy of dialogue needs to be combined with diplomatic pressure and the possibility of further economic sanctions. Diplomatic engagement should not be open-ended. But a policy of strategic patience and caution is required. Political “posturing” and the setting of artificial deadlines in our view hinders diplomacy. > > J Street believes that the immediate imposition of harsher sanctions on Iran would be counterproductive. The hardliners in Iran have a long and successful track-record in manipulating the threat of sanctions to bolster their own position. At a time when the hardliners are in some disarray, the imposition of tougher sanctions by the United States may allow them to consolidate their hold on power, and only serve to alienate large sectors of the Iranian population. > > We do not rule out the option of deeper and more targeted sanctions in the future. But to be most effective, any policy of sanctions requires broad international support and needs to be seen as supporting, and not replacing, diplomatic efforts. Endangering the unity of the international coalition by pursuing unilateral American or narrow “coalition of the willing” enhanced sanctions is likely to prove counterproductive and allow Iran to more effectively play off different actors in the international community against one other. > > J Street, like most Americans, was inspired by the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy. We were outraged by the violent crackdown of the Iranian regime on the peaceful demonstrations by the Iranian people for the upholding of their democratic rights. The US Government should play a behind-the-scenes role in supporting outreach to open channels of communication with Iranian civil society. > > J Street believes that the full range of options should always be available when considering possible US responses to any future Iranian threats or provocations. > > But at this time we urge Congress and the President to exercise strategic patience. We ask Congress not to move forward at this time with further sanctions and we are strongly opposed to any consideration at this time of the use of military force by Israel or the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Last Wednesday, according to Ha’aretz, Israel asked the United States for help in “curbing the international fallout from the Goldstone Commission report released this week, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.” Apparently taking a page from her predecessor, John Bolton, Susan Rice’s first big job at the UN will be to thumb her nose at the institution. Or perhaps it’s not her thumb she’s showing the UN.
Ron Kampeas at JTA quotes unnamed sources that the U.S. will torpedo any attempt to refer the Goldstone report’s recommendations to the International Criminal Court:
A top White House official told Jewish organizational leaders in an off-the-record phone call Wednesday that the U.S. strategy was to “quickly” bring the report – commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council and carried out by former South African Judge Richard Goldstone – to its “natural conclusion” within the Human Rights Council and not to allow it to go further, Jewish participants in the call told JTA.
The report said the U.N. fact-finding mission investigating Israel’s conduct during the January 2009 war found evidence of Israeli war crimes. Israel has denied the allegations and said the report’s mandate was biased – an opinion echoed by U.S. officials.
The Obama administration is ready to use the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council to deal with any other “difficulties” arising out of the report, the White House official said Wednesday. The administration also has made clear to the Palestinian Authority that Washington is not pleased with a P.A. petition to bring the report’s allegations against Israel to the International Criminal Court.
The official said the Obama administration’s view was that the report was flawed from its conception because the mandate presumed a priori that Israel had violated war crimes and that the mandate ignored Hamas’ role in prompting the war through its rocket fire into Israel.
No mandate. Biased. Difficulties. Flawed. But no dispute with the Goldstone report’s basic findings.
This circling of the wagons will have several effects. One is that it seals the verdict of Obama’s Cairo speech as meaningless verbiage or, worse, the proof that a promise by the United States to start being an honest broker in the Middle East was a lie. The use of an American veto in the Security Council will also be rightfully seen as a confederacy of criminals refusing to be held accountable for their crimes.
But even a U.S. veto cannot completely inoculate Israel against legal actions.
A U.S. veto might indeed protect Israel from the ICC, but a report with the credibility of a revered and honored jurist like Goldstone will certainly help mount prosecutions across the globe in other countries, particularly Europe. Indeed, his report already contains that fallback position (once again for Hamas too), invoking the universal jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions as well as referrals to the UN General Assembly and other avenues. Many Israeli military and civilian officials already have to check with government lawyers before setting off on international trips. There will be many more, whatever happens in the Security Council.
Attorney Michael Sefarad, a specialist in international human rights law quoted in Israel News, believes civil cases are also likely to follow an American veto.
The Goldstone report is highly unusual, since it states Israel’s inquests into the operation were unworthy. The bottom line is that this report brings us one step closer to seeing foreign courts hear war crimes cases involving Israeli officials.
Such actions will then raise the precedent for Americans to be prosecuted for illegal renditions, torture, and reckless murder of civilians by drones and air strikes.
On September 15th a United Nations Human Rights Council commission led by Richard Goldstone, a South African Jew, released a 545-page report on last winter’s offensive in Gaza, Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. The report accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes and potential crimes against humanity. The commission will forward its recommendations to the International Criminal Court in the Hague if independent examinations by Israel and Hamas do not occur within 6 months.
The report follows two others by Human Rights Watch, one issued on the 13th on the killing of unarmed civilians, another on the 6th concerning Qassam rocket attacks on Israelis. Both the UN and HRW findings are similar.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, carefully documented cases of IDF killings of unarmed civilians, the bombing of ambulances, of the IDF preventing medical personnel from helping the wounded, the use of white phosphorus on civilians, and called on Israel to permit the UN to investigate the allegations. Israel consistently refused, choosing to impede investigations.
Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who participated in the Gaza operation recounted the use of the “Johnny procedure” (using Palestinians as human shields) and the shooting of unarmed civilians, 70 cases of which were documented by B’Tselem. Similar findings were released by a group of soldiers called “Breaking the Silence,” whom the government attempted to intimidate in the months after Cast Lead. On September 9th B’Tselem released its report analyzing the number of civilian casualties which again were consistent with the UN results.
A joint report by Israel Physicians for Human Rights and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society documented cases of shooting unarmed civilians and widespread attacks on hospitals and ambulances by the IDF. Employees of the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, and the UN numbered among IDF victims.
By UN and B’Tselem counts, almost 1400 people were killed in Israeli operations, while only 330 of them were militants. These figures agree with statistics from another human rights group, Amnesty International.
The day after the Goldstone report was issued, Israel immediately went on the offensive. It flew Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon to New York to kick off a number of meetings with Jewish and pro-Israel organizations. Ayalon reportedly told the American Jewish Congress they had to commit to “removing … and torpedoing” the report. The AJC dutifully condemned the findings as “grotesquely distorted” and attacked Human Rights Watch as well. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League labeled the investigation an “initiative born of bigotry.” NGO Monitor, CAMERA, UN Watch, and other pro-Zionist “watch” groups all ratcheted up their attacks on the United Nations and most of the established human rights organizations.
But not all Jewish organizations were ready to vilify the Goldstone report. JStreet, the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” PAC, had condemned Israel’s disproportionate force in Gaza in the early days of the military campaign but has cautiously refrained from publicly commenting on the report. The progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun wrote this evening of “the disgrace of Israel now trying to deny what everyone knows to be true.”
All this comes at an inconvenient time for Israel. It is simultaneously trying to swat down a damning UN report and trying to drum up support for bombing Iran. All this while defying the White House on the issue of settlements and imposing new travel restrictions on American citizens which use ethnic profiling.
In the coming days we are certain to hear a lot of rhetoric on the right of a sovereign nation to defend itself while the entire world is arrayed against it, and so on. This argument has kept its charge for a surprisingly long time, but the battery died after Gaza. Many of Israel’s problems are linked to increasingly ugly displays of nationalism, blindness of its own excesses, insensitivity to the people it has displaced, and to no longer caring whether it is accepted as a “nation among nations,” as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu titled one of his books.
The tragedy of the UN report is not that it was ever written, but that Israel is so determined to repudiate what others can so clearly see.
Zionist organizations in America are on the warpath. A war with Iran over nuclear exclusivity. The American Jewish Committee released a video on Youtube today entitled “This is the button,” inexplicably accompanied by lounge music, showing a toy truck followed by a terrorist explosion in Argentina attributed to Iran. Then the image of a child’s toy truck is followed by video footage of Iranian thugs on motorbikes terrorizing demonstrators in Teheran. Then videos of hangings of adulterers, and finally the words “This is the button” followed by another image “You don’t want to see what Iran does with the button.”
Clearly any nation that would murder civilians, suppress dissent, or make a mockery of its legal system cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapons. I certainly agree, but unfortunately these characteristics describe every nation that already possesses nukes, especially Israel.
The AJC goes on to inform us in its online petition to Congress: > “With enough low-enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, and more centrifuges spinning each day, Iran is dangerously close to crossing the nuclear threshold. A nuclear Iran would particularly threaten Israel and our moderate Arab allies, and would destabilize the Middle East and threaten the security of the entire globe.”
“The security of the entire globe.” Why is hasbara so melodramatic? A nuclear Iran would indeed spell the last days of Israel’s nuclear hegemony but, according to Ehud Barak last week, “Israel is strong, I don’t see anyone who could pose an existential threat.” The Iran War will be all about Israel’s ability to remain the only nuclear power in the immediate region.
The nation’s synagogues have also apparently been enlisted in the Iran War by former American Michael Oren, now the Israeli Ambassador to the United States. Oren sent a letter to most American congregations, including mine, to be read during services at Rosh Hashanah. The instructions read: > “We are facing a critical juncture in our history. The Jewish community must confront this unprecedented threat before it is too late. I urge you as leaders of the Jewish community to impress this situation on your congregations. It is imperative to act now, at the start of a new year, and to join our voices in doing what [is] absolutely necessary to stop the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Meanwhile, hardly a peep from the mainstream media on Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which now has an estimated 150 to 400 nuclear weapons. The AJC letter sounds like we’d all be doing the Saudis and Egyptians a favor by defending Israeli nuclear hegemony. But those familiar with Israel’s history of violence are buying none of it. Egypt, for one, has categorically rejected this notion: > “The Middle East does not need any nuclear powers, be they Iran or Israel – what we need is peace, security, stability and development.”
The Saudis are equally unenthusiastic about Israeli nuclear capabilities and regard them as the most pressing security threat in the region: > “The existing Israeli nuclear capability is the most dangerous strategic threat to Gulf security in the short and medium term,” Saudi Prince Muqrin told the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
What Israel is doing now in Congress and within the Jewish community is reckless: drumming up support for bombing Iran and laying the groundwork for American military and economic support for this needless piece of aggression. One thing the United States does not need right now, and cannot afford, is a third war in the Middle East. If Israel wants to initiate the Iran War, it should be prepared to accept all costs and all consequences itself.
If nuclear non-proliferation is truly an American goal, then a nuclear-free Middle East should be the objective. And that includes Israel. Selectively choosing countries for the nuclear club, particularly those with a history of violence in the region, is a bad idea. And going to war to defend a foreign nation’s exclusive nuclear capabilities is not only a bad idea, it’s a dangerous game that risks pulling us into a third war.
I will not be in shul today trying to get in a contemplative groove while listening to a special political program cooked up by the Conservative movement’s rabbinical assembly, defending the invasion of Gaza, demonizing the Goldstone report, and calling for an escalation with Iran.
The cardboard villains and victims, the unrecognizable portrayal of reality, the false piety and the contrived martyrdom would all just make my blood boil. Besides, defiling the sanctity of a practice that for centuries has called on us to look inward and change our behavior – by instead rejecting that call of conscience, rejecting repentance, rejecting justice, being exhorted to actually harden our hearts – all this is diametrically opposed to the spirit of the High Holidays. Maybe I’ll join the rest of my community for taschlich on Sunday.
Many American congregations like ours have chosen this year to make Rosh Hashanah one big Israel defense rally. But Gaza must remain one of our central moral concerns this year because it represents the most horrific aspect of an already horrific occupation by a nation in the Middle East that we so uncritically support and identify with. And by “we” I mean both Jews and Americans.
This imperfect, temporal nation like any other, governed by mortals, defended by fallible soldiers, and guided by the usual mix of both decent and immoral men, heroes and ideologues alike, has been elevated in the Jewish and Western imagination during the last century to being the actual Land of Moses, the land that G-d (and not the United Nations) gave to the Jews. With this gilded baggage, how could Moses’ land ever be corrupt or guilty of wrongdoing?
Discarding inconvenient Jewish history and the admonitions of prophets easily found in any Tanakh, the new Israel remains equally unblemished in sermons during Jewish High Holiday services – perhaps the one place one would expect the Neviim to actually be read. And who but a self-hating Jew like Richard Goldstone would dare to enumerate this nation’s crimes?
This is a tough year for the Jewish conscience. Tshuvah or salve? That’s the stark choice. Organized religion as usual peddles the latter.
So this year I thought I’d recall that very first “self-hating” Jew, the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is actually believed to be not a single person but several in a tradition of conscience and self-correction within Judaism itself. He had much to say on injustice, violence, bloodshed, outright evil, and the spinning of a web of lies to deny it all. This prophetic tradition continues today with men and women of less greatness, but Isaiah was there first. If the Goldstone report hit a nerve today, imagine the impact that Isaiah 59 did “back in the day”:
The Jewish Telegraph Agency is reporting that your UN ambassador, Susan Rice, has slammed the United Nations’ Goldstone Report, which investigated claims of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead by both Israel and Hamas. She is quoted as saying: > “We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given” to the Goldstone commission by the U.N. Human Right Council “prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.”
I had hoped when I voted for you that your administration would be the first in some time to uphold international law and not simply the law of the jungle. If the JTA’s report is true, this is a disappointing development. The United Nations and the ICC most certainly do have a mandate to investigate these alleged crimes. I expect the United States to respect, not dismiss, international law.
Judge Goldstone, himself a South African Jew, led a commission that accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes and potential crimes against humanity. The commission will forward its recommendations to the International Criminal Court in the Hague if independent investigations by Israel and Hamas do not occur within 6 months. This face-saving opportunity provides a way for Israel to deal with these crimes itself. Your administration should encourage Israel to proceed with a serious investigation of its own, not simply torpedo the commission’s findings.
The Goldstone report follows two others by Human Rights Watch, one issued on September 13th on the killing of unarmed civilians, another on the 6th concerning Qassam rocket attacks on Israelis. Both the UN and HRW findings are similar.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, carefully documented cases of IDF killings of unarmed civilians, the bombing of ambulances, of the IDF preventing medical personnel from helping the wounded, the use of white phosphorus on civilians, and called on Israel to permit the UN to investigate these allegations. Israel consistently refused, choosing to impede investigations. It is interesting that this is precisely the approach Iran has taken with investigations of its nuclear program.
Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who participated in the Gaza operation recounted the use of the “Johnny procedure” (using Palestinians as human shields) and the shooting of unarmed civilians, 70 cases of which were documented by B’Tselem. Similar findings were released by a group of soldiers called “Breaking the Silence,” whom the government attempted to intimidate in the months after Cast Lead. On September 9th B’Tselem released its report analyzing the number of civilian casualties which again were consistent with the UN results.
Another joint report by Israel Physicians for Human Rights and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society documented cases of shooting unarmed civilians and widespread attacks on hospitals and ambulances by the IDF. Employees of the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, and the UN numbered among IDF victims – again corroborating the others.
All of these reports, and several others, have been remarkably consistent. I have followed these events for the last nine months and have read the Goldstone report myself. For your administration to summarily swat these finding down is an affront to reality, to human rights, and to the obligations of civilized nations.
The day after the Goldstone report was issued, Israel immediately went on the offensive. It flew Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon to New York to kick off a number of meetings with Jewish and pro-Israel organizations. Ayalon reportedly told the American Jewish Congress they had to commit to “removing … and torpedoing” the report. The AJC dutifully condemned the findings as “grotesquely distorted” and attacked Human Rights Watch as well. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League labeled the investigation an “initiative born of bigotry.” NGO Monitor, CAMERA, UN Watch, and other pro-Zionist “watch” groups all ratcheted up their attacks on the United Nations and most of the established human rights organizations. And then there is AIPAC.
I hope you are not buying into this public relations campaign at a time when Israel is thumbing its nose at your own administration’s call for an end of settlements and has added racial and religious profiling to Americans’ travel visas within Israel and the West Bank. I ask you: what do you intend to do about this latter issue? I expect your administration to defend my rights as a citizen a bit more zealously than a military ally.
Given what has happened at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and with illegal “renditions,” the United States is not in a position to take the moral high road and condemn Israel. But the US also does not need to summarily exonerate Israel either. Such an act would simply be regarded as a mutual defense pact between violators of international law. It would be better that both countries investigate their own actions. Here in the US, Attorney General Eric Holder has work to do in investigating violations of the Constitution and civil and human rights abuses here and abroad. Frankly, he needs much more support from your administration. In Israel the Knesset should convene a special investigator to examine the IDF’s excesses or crimes during Operation Cast Lead. For either nation to try to sweep its misdeeds under the rug would simply constitute criminal behavior followed by criminal neglect.
The American Jewish Committee’s David Harris claims in an article in the Wall Street Journal that travel between Caracas and Teheran without visas represents a threat to the Western Hemisphere.
There are many countries which have reciprocal agreements that make visas unnecessary for unrestricted travel. Israel and the United States were once examples of this.
Harris is a good example of the aging “Israel first” mentality which, until the last few years, has had no serious competition in speaking for Jews in America.
American Jews are overwhelmingly committed to democratic institutions, but organizations like AIPAC, ZOA and Harris’ AJC can’t seem to stay out of bed with neoconservatives, Christian fundamentalists, and right wing racists when Israel is involved. Or they simply ignore American interests altogether, as the issue of visas demonstrates.
This has created an opening for dozens of Jewish peace groups, including the new lobbying organization JStreet, whose members prefer American democratic values where Israel and American foreign policy are concerned.
“Israel first” groups like the AJC would do well to ponder for a moment why it is that they put the word “American” in their names. They are increasingly mere mouthpieces for Israeli hasbara campaigns and have ceased to represent either American or Jewish values.
Shimon Peres, in his letter to the Diaspora, asks Jews to:
seek peace, even as he insults Palestinians
fight for Israeli nuclear hegemony
oppose BDS by investing in Israel
keep indoctrinating your children
stand united with Israel, quoting scripture for political ends
This is all increasingly a tough sell from a state that consistently betrays Jewish values while appealing to them: > Message from the President of the State of Israel, HE Shimon Peres, to the Jewish communities in the Diaspora, on the occasion of the Jewish New Year 5770 > > Hopefully, the coming New Year will be marked by the realization of our aspirations: attaining peace, increasing security, promoting economic growth, safeguarding the future of the Jewish people and strengthening the ties between Israel and our Jewish brothers in the Diaspora. > > The opportunity to attain peace is beckoning, and must be seized, even at the cost of painful concessions. The Arab world’s intractable position to say “No” to negotiations, “No” to recognition of Israel and “No” to peace, has today been replaced by the three-fold “Yes” to the Saudi Initiative. The international community is keen to support endeavors to move the peace process forward, and I am confident that, with concerted efforts, the vision of a comprehensive peace can be realized. This will create stability, tranquility, security and prosperity for our children and their children after them. > > Nuclear arms in the possession of extremist fundamentalist hands pose a danger to the whole of humanity and not only to Israel. A broad and consolidated stand by the international community against Iran is called for. I pray that this terrible threat be removed from all of humanity and that the world may enjoy a new era of peace and security. > > Israel’s economy is showing the first sparks of recovery from the global economic crisis. The macro-economic signs are promising, and these indications are reflected in a growing scope of investments, the hi-tech industry is reviving and start-up companies are again sprouting. This is the time to seize the opportunity. This is the time to invest in Israel in fields such as alternative energy, water production, homeland security infrastructures, educational and learning-related tools, and in the stem-cell industry. This constitutes the future and it is in our hands. > > It is vital to build with our brethren in the Diaspora ties based on solid foundations of partnership and education. Indeed, the role of Jewish education in the Diaspora cannot be overestimated. It serves as the very building-blocks of the bridges that connect the Jewish communities abroad and Israel. It serves as the terms of engagement between the young generation of Jewish youth and our nation and as the stepping stones to a greater awareness of the significance of Israel-Diaspora relations. It will serve to preserve our rich heritage and traditions. > > The spirit of partnership must be enhanced in every area of Israel-Diaspora relations. We face dramatic challenges, which again underscore the necessity to stand united in moments of trial, responsible one for the other, as dictated by our Prophets. Indeed, a threat to the well-being of Jewish communities in the world equates a threat to Israel itself, and the fate of Diaspora Jewry is at the very core of Israel’s heart. > > Dear Friends, as we embark on this New Year, I want to convey my heartfelt good wishes to all of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, in the hope that it will be a year of joy and good tidings to all. > > And let us pray for the safe return home of the hostages and missing soldiers. > > Shana Tova U’Metukah, > > Shimon Peres
Jews in Chestnut Hill who were faithful to their spouses, good to their kids, honest in all business dealings, and who paid every cent of the taxes they owed may have been wondering what there was to repent as they entered the Jewish High Holidays. So the leaders at the Conservative Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts decided to defile the sabbath and usher in the High Holy Days by promoting hate speech against Muslims and a neo-conservative message.
[Don’t Boston area synagogues get tired of having talks on the same 3 topics: (1) the Holocaust, (2) Why We Must support Israel, and (3) Evil Islam? What ever happened to Judaism? But I digress…]
On September 12, 2009 David Dalin spoke on the topic of “Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the rise of Radical Islam.” The synagogue’s events calendar described the talk:
DR DALIN will speak at 9:00pm. This spiritually enriching prelude to the High Holy Days will conclude with a dessert reception at 10:00pm.
Rabbi Dalin is no stranger to controversy over his scholarship, he is a neo-conservative like his friend and co-author Irving Kristol, and his book, “Icon of Evil: Hajj Amin al-Husseini: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam” has also drawn criticism for its questionable scholarship. One reviewer described it:
… unfortunately, this book is a ridiculous polemic that tries to paint al-Husseini as a major figure in the Holocaust and claims that secular Arab dictators like Saddam Hussein were radical Islamists who are part of a vast terrorist conspiracy…maybe Dick Cheney was a ghost writer for this piece of fiction. Oh and speaking of fiction, one whole chapter is a crazy “what if” scenario that has the Germans defeating the British in WWII and al-Husseini leading the Holocaust in “Londonistan” where prominent U.S. Jewish figures, like Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, are unable to escape the onrushing German army and die in concentration camps. This is just way over the top.
Dalin is currently a professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, a right-wing Catholic university in Southwest Florida founded in 2003 by former Domino’s Pizza founder and owner Tom Monaghan.
The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports that a Holocaust education bill (Senate bill 2651 and Congressional H.R. 4604) sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center is making its way through Congress. The bill provides $2 million in cash grants and is intended to be used for education in 9 states with requirements to teach about the systematic murder of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany. Only this group of genocide victims is mentioned in the bill. I’m sure, with a topic so untouchable, a price tag so cheap, and political advantages so great, the bill will be passed without a single objection.
But here’s what’s wrong with it.
Before the Nazi’s Final Solution there was the Armenian genocide which destroyed 1.5 million human lives, the Rape of Nanking in which 300,000 were killed, and many others – including the murder of approximately 12 million Native Americans between 1500 and 1900.
In our own lifetimes we have seen genocides in Rwanda, which killed almost one million, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where almost a quarter of a million perished. Unimaginable mass-murder motivated by politics has been an even greater feature of the Twentieth Century. Mengistu killed millions in Ethiopia, then there was Pol Pot’s murder of 1.7 million, Stalin’s purges and forced collectivization which killed over 10 million, Kim Il Sung’s 1.6 million concentration camp victims, and Mao’s cultural revolution, which was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
And even the Nazi atrocities were not limited to 6,000,000 Jews. Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” makes the case that all Poles were “next” on the Nazi’s list of extermination victims. Besides homosexuals, gypsies, Communists, and other enemies of the state, the Nazis actually ended up extinguishing over 10 million human souls. Timothy Snyder’s article in the New York Review of Books provides a startling account of the much greater scope of Nazi genocide.
The grand total for our century is well over 120 million victims of sinat chinam, the Jewish word for baseless hatred.
To memorialize only this one group is immoral. And not only does the bill trivialize genocide, which is manifestly greater than the bill’s scope, it will only serve political purposes for the constituency that promoted it and will do nothing to actually combat the human urge to hate or destroy the “other.”
Years ago I read an essay by Theodor Adorno entitled “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (Education after Auschwitz). In it Adorno warns of the relapse into barbarism and cautions that the most important way to prevent this relapse is by looking at root causes: > One speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it is not a threat – Auschwitz was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror.
Adorno also warns about creating saccharine caricatures of the victims, of nostalgic images of a world destroyed. Instead, Adorno wants us to scrutinize society itself and – specifically – how we raise our children: > I also do not believe that enlightenment about the positive qualities possessed by persecuted minorities would be of much use. The roots must be sought in the persecutors, not in the victims who are murdered under the paltriest of pretenses. What is necessary is what I once in this respect called the turn to the subject. One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again. > > It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it. Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty. One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection. But since according to the findings of depth psychology, all personalities, even those who commit atrocities in later life, are formed in early childhood, education seeking to prevent the repetition must concentrate upon early childhood.
In other words, stopping baseless hatred requires a totally different approach than using grant money to produce materials that will certainly “explain” the need for a Jewish state. It’s a more difficult process of a society looking at itself and its institutions.
Finally, Adorno doesn’t let the “peaceful” superpower off the hook: > Furthermore, one cannot dismiss the thought that the invention of the atomic bomb, which can obliterate hundreds of thousands of people literally in one blow, belongs in the same historical context as genocide.
The cost of self-reflection and coming up short in one’s own estimation is probably what will actually keep modern society from following Adorno’s advice. $2 million for slick Zionist brochures is a bargain in comparison.
Neoconservatives and pro-Israel organizations and ideologues have been calling lately for military action against Iran. House Democrats with close ties to Israel have also been making the same noises. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has organized a call for rabbis to condemn Iran from the pulpit during the High Holy Days. And now Obama’s Defense Secretary is trying to sell war on Iran – to the Arab world.
It sure looks like we’re being prepped for another war.
The Jerusalem Post, in an article titled “Arab world should arm against Iran,” quotes US Defense Secretary Robert Gates calling for Arab nations to beef-up their militaries. The article is based on an interview with Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara, which can be viewed below. According to Gates, large weapons purchases are already being negotiated with the United States.
In the interview, Foukara asks Gates about the double-standard of asking Iran to give up nuclear research while never questioning Israel’s nuclear program. Gates responds:
First of all, it’s the Iranian leadership that has said it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Those threats have not been made in the other direction. It is the Iranian government that is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions with respect to these programmes, so focus needs to be on the country that is feuding the will of the international community and the United Nations.
There’s so much wrong in Gates’ response that it requires some comment. First, I am still looking for a credible translation of an actual threat by Iran against Israel. Neoconservative and pro-Israel warmongers apparently found what they were looking for in some flowery Farsi. But in terms of violations of UN resolutions, Israel is the clear winner. Then Gates has the threats backwards. Israel’s war games last year, this year’s demonstrations of Israeli naval force in the Suez Canal, and countless Israeli speculations of the “best time to bomb” all convey the impression that, if anyone is about to become an aggressor, it’s Israel.
This is a very troubling interview because it demonstrates that the Obama administration itself, as much as any lobbyist or group of pro-Israel House Democrats, is also starting the beat the drum of war.
FOUKARA: The issue of Iran and Israel is obviously rattling a lot of countries in the region, the Israelis, the Gulf states, who are thinking about buying more and more weapons, and indeed there has been some sales authorised by the United States. Some estimates put the weapons packages to the Gulf states and Israel at about $100bn. How much substance is there to that?
GATES: That figure sounds very high to me. But I think there’s a central question or a central point here to be made and it has to do both with our friends and allies in the region, our Arab allies, as well as the Iranian nuclear programme, and that is one of the pathways, to get the Iranians to change their approach on the nuclear issue, is to persuade them that moving down that path will actually jeopardise their security, not enhance it.
So the more that our Arab friends and allies can straighten their security capabilities, the more they can strengthen their co-operation, both with each other and with us, I think sends the signal to the Iranians that this path they’re on is not going to advance Iranian security but in fact could weaken it.
So that’s one of the reasons why I think our relationship with these countries and our security co-operation with them is so important.
FOUKARA: I mentioned $100bn and you said that doesn’t sound right to you. What does sound right to you as a figure?
GATES: I honestly don’t know.
FOUKARA: But there are a lot of weapons being asked for by the countries in the region?
GATES: We have a very broad foreign military sales programme and obviously with most of our friends and allies out there, but the arrangements that are being negotiated right now, I just honestly don’t know the accumulated total.
FOUKARA: You’re asking the Iranians to give up their intentions to build nuclear weapons. They are saying they’re not building nuclear weapons. On the other hand, a lot of people in the region feel that you know that the Israelis do have nuclear weapons and they say why doesn’t the West start with Israel, which is known to possess nuclear weapons rather than with the Iranians, who are suspected of having them. What do you say to that argument?
GATES: First of all, it’s the Iranian leadership that has said it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Those threats have not been made in the other direction. It is the Iranian government that is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions with respect to these programmes, so focus needs to be on the country that is feuding the will of the international community and the United Nations.
FOUKARA: But you decided that the rhetoric of the Iranians reflects the reality of what’s going on in Iran in terms of nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a leap of faith?
GATES: Well, we obviously have information in terms of what the Iranians are doing. We also have what the Iranians themselves have said, so we only are taking them at their word.
FOUKARA: So you know for sure that they are working on a nuclear bomb?
GATES: I would not go that far but clearly they have elements of their nuclear programme that are in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
We want them to adhere to these resolutions and we are willing to acknowledge the right of the Iranian government and the Iranian people to have a peaceful nuclear programme if it is intended for the production of electric power so on. What is central, then, is trying to persuade the Iranians to agree to that and then to verification procedures under the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].
That gives us confidence that it is indeed a peaceful nuclear programme and not a weaponisation programme.
The truth of the matter is that, if Iran proceeds with a nuclear weapons programme it may well spark and arms race, a real arms race, and potentially a nuclear arms race in the entire region.
So it is in the interest of all countries for Iran to agree to arrangements that allow a peaceful nuclear programme and give the international community confidence that’s all they’re doing.
FOUKARA: But the Obama administration seems to have a difficult circle to square because on one hand they’re saying that they want improved relations with the Muslim world. On the other hand, any pressure on Iran, is seen by people in the Muslim world as an indication the US is not genuine in wanting to improve those relations because many Muslims say Israel has nuclear weapons, and the US is not doing anything about it.
GATES: The focus is on which country is in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions. The pressure on Iran is simply to be a good member of the international community.
The neighbours around Iran, our Arab friends and allies, are concerned about what is going on in Iran, and not just the governments.
So the question is how does Iran become a member in good standing of the international community. That’s in the interest of everybody.
A year ago, columnist David Ignatius dismissed the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran. But, like a bad penny, it’s a story that keeps coming back.
And those are the measured statements. Joshua Muravchik and John Bolton of the American Enterprise Institute, openly calls for bombing Iran. As do Michael Freund of Shavei Israel, Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, and many others.
In February Reuters reported that Israel claimed that time was running out and it had only about another year to attack Iran.
In May Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak offered to give up settlement outposts in exchange for the U.S. letting Israel “focus its attention on the Iranian nuclear threat”. Make your own inferences about what that means.
In July, the Jerusalem Post reported that a deal between European nations and Israel was evolving, which would permit Israel to attack Iran in exchange for unspecified “concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors.”
But back to Rosenberg. His particular insights are within American halls of Congress: > Anyway, this fall will be critical. While we’re sweating the health care issue, the usual suspects will be ignoring all that and trying hard to set us up for a third war in the Muslim world. And, I hear, that it will be a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans who will join in opposition to President Obama to sneak this one by us. Why not? Both parties want to please the pro-war crowd in advance of the 2010 elections. Watch your favorite liberal. I expect that if you pay attention, you will hear things that you haven’t heard come out of a Democrat’s mouth since the run-up to Iraq. […] If we go to war or give Israel a permission slip, it will be the Democrats who bear prime responsibility. Pay attention.
Participating in, or permitting, an attack on Iran would have frightful consequences. The Christian Science Monitor ran an article last June entitled ‘How Iran would retaliate if it comes to war.’ The Atlantic Monthly ran one titled ‘What if the Israelis bomb Iran’ War colleges, foreign policy wonks, and even Fleet Street and Wall Street have begun speculating on the results of such an attack.
Rosenberg has it partly correct: the current administration and a Democrat majority will bear responsibility for either condoning or providing support for an Israeli attack. Who now blames the Viet Nam war on anyone but LBJ and the Democrats?
But judging by the number of Zionist organizations rooting for war with Iran, this constituency should also be held accountable. American Zionist organizations may resent the claim that Jews are being unfairly associated with neoconservative politics and Israel advocacy at odds with American interests. But if this were true, then they would stop wallowing in that swamp and dragging American Jews, whom they claim to represent, into the muck with them.
Both Democrats and American Jews will be blamed for any war on Iran.
And finally, if anyone has any doubts that the United States would not be pulled into this war, look at a map:
This one comes from a Boston blogger who apparently thinks defending Israel is most properly done by bashing Muslims. The host is a Conservative Jewish congregation’s [oxymoronically named] Brotherhood group in Stoughton, Massachusetts. The speakers are an assortment of Islam bashers and miscellaneous wingnuts from both Judaism and Christianity.
What could be more spiritual and serve the purposes of interfaith relations than bashing a 3rd religion over bagels? > “Islam as Religion and the Strategies of Denial and Delusion” is the topic of a panel discussion to be held at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton. The temple’s brotherhood is sponsoring the discussion and a Sunday brunch on August 23rd at 9:45 a.m. The panel will include Rebecca Bynum, Hugh Fitzgerald and Jerry Gordon. Rebecca Bynum is publisher and senior editor of** New English Review** and board member of World Encounter Institute. Among her areas of interest are the intersection of religion and ideology and the nature of interfaith dialogue. Her book, Allah Is Dead is due to be published this year. Hugh Fitzgerald is a board member of World Encounter Institute and senior editor of New English Review. He has appeared in Free Republic, American Nation and Earliest Christianity. He is also a senior analyst for Jihad Watch, with a focus on the challenge of Islamic aggression toward Israel and the U.S. Jerry Gordon is a former Army Intelligence officer who served during the Viet Nam era. Mr. Gordon has published widely in such outlets as FrontPageMag.com, The American Thinker, WorldNetDaily, ChronWatch, The New English Review, and Israpundit. He has been a frequent guest discussing Middle East issues on radio in the U.S. and Canada. He is a graduate of B.U. and Columbia University. Cost of the brunch is $10 for members of the temple and Rep. Jewish Comm. (co-sponsor), $15 for everyone else. RSVP to the synagogue office at 781.344.8733 or e-mail ahavathtorah@hotmail.com.
You can get a sense of the scope of the Israeli occupation by imagining what it would be like if the United States occupied an area and a population in the same proportions as Israel’s occupation of Palestine:
According to CIA World Factbook data, Israel’s current population is 7,233,701, ours is 307,212,123. Israel’s land area is 22,072 sq km, ours is 9,826,674. The West Bank’s area is 5,860 sq km. According to the human rights organization Adalah, there are 22,000 political prisoners in Israeli jails. According to the United Nations, there were 634 military checkpoints in the West Bank in June 2009. According to the International Institute For Strategic Studies, Israel has an estimated 168,000 troops, 408,000 reservists, compared with Department of Defense figures showing an estimated 1,445,000 troops, 850,000 reservists in the US.
How vast would the occupation be?
If the United States were Israel, it would be maintaining an area of 2,608,931 sq km under martial law – the combined land mass of Mexico, all of Central America (and North Korea, to complete the total) .
If the United States were Israel, it would be imposing martial law on 104,528,935 people – almost the entire population of Mexico.
If the United States were Israel, it would have 7,134,887 soldiers on active duty, with most supporting the occupation, and 17,327,582 on active reserves.
If the United States were Israel, it would have 934,330 political prisoners in jail.
If the United States were Israel, it would control 276,921 checkpoints throughout its occupied territories.
How can Israel afford this?
Since 1948 Israel has been the beneficiary of, conservatively, over $114 billion in aid from the United States, more in loan guarantees, and the actual costs to U.S. taxpayers have even been greater due to the fact that the United States must pay interest on money we borrow to finance these expenditures. This dollar amount represents only public money to Israel, not funding from North American Zionist philanthropies.
If the United States were Israel, the total value in foreign aid received would be $4.84 trillion dollars.
This hypothetical, extrapolated figure represents one-half of the American public debt, so it is not an exaggeration to say that the United States has been sustaining not only the Israeli economy but the occupation of Palestine; yet Israel’s own deficit is only 2% of GDB, so this is aid we cannot afford to give Israel.
Many Zionists seem to be reading only the page in the Torah with the deed to Samaria and Judea. But the Torah, Talmud, and ethical Jewish writings have much to say on how to treat fellow humans:
The Essence of Judaism
On another occasion it happened that a certain non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, “I will convert to Judaism, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai chased him away with the builder’s tool that was in his hand. He came before Hillel and said to him, “Convert me.” Hillel said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” – Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a
Compassion
If we Jews remain indifferent to the plight of the oppressed, what right do we have to criticize the leaders of the free world for having abandoned us during the Holocaust? – Elie Wiesel, “From Cambodia to Sudan: Breaking Down Wall of Apathy,” Article in the Forward (New York, 11 March 2005)
Respect for Human Dignity
Come and learn: Human dignity is so important that it supersedes even a biblical prohibition. – Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 19b
Rabbi Eliezer said, “Other people’s dignity should be as precious to you as your own.” – Mishna, Pirkei Avot 2:10
Equal Application of the Law, even for non-Jews
There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you. – Exodus 12:49
I charged your magistrates at that time as follows, “Hear out your fellows, and decide justly between any person and a fellow Israelite or a stranger. You shall not be partial in judgment: hear out low and high alike. Fear no person, for judgment is God’s. And any matter that is too difficult for you, you shall bring to me and I will hear it.” – Deuteronomy 1:16-17
You shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes. Keep far from a false charge; do not bring death on those who are innocent and in the right, for I will not acquit the wrongdoer. Do not take bribes, for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those who are in the right. You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. – Exodus 23:6-9
When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the LORD am your God. – Leviticus 19:33-34
Last night I attended what was supposed to be a constituent meeting with Barney Frank at the Dartmouth Council on Aging. Instead, it was like stepping into a Harry Potter novel where the forces of darkness shrieked accusations that national health care would murder grandma, flashed pictures of the President photoshopped to look like Hitler, and proved only that they had no respect for, or intention of conducting, a civil dialog. It further amazed me that the local Republican Party, which orchestrated much of the circus on display last night, was scarcely distinguishable from the Larouchists, Birthers, conspiracy theorists, and the un-medicated in attendance. For all their noise, the Republicans are a party in trouble.
But the fact still remains: Americans actually want national health care and, despite some Blue Dog back-stepping on the public option, Americans like that idea as well.
According to a June survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 53% of Americans strongly support a public option in health care, and another 30% moderately support the idea. And why not? Besides education, many voters feel that their tax money should actually do something for them personally, rather than evaporate in military expenditures and corporate bailouts.
Despite all the fear-mongering, the United States is the only Western nation to have no comprehensive and universal national health care. All of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel – virtually every modern industrial nation we compete with – provides this option for its citizens. The sky has not fallen in any these countries, and many of them are actually doing better than we are economically.
The proposed health plan simply ensures that everyone in the U.S. is covered. Yes, there is never a major change that does not have unintended consequences, and adding primary care for 50 million more Americans will undoubtedly expose weaknesses in our health care infrastructure, require additional physicians and health care workers, necessitate building more walk-in clinics, foster innovations in delivery of services, and stimulate the development of more sophisticated systems for storing medical records. The self-employed could actually develop businesses secure in the knowledge they had a safety net. With a system in place, over time and with more confidence, the burden of health care could shift off employers to the public sphere, making U.S. corporations more competitive with foreign companies who do not have this burden.
I’m afraid that Fox News and CNN got their amusing sound bytes from the mobocracy last night, but a rational consideration of the benefits – and risks – of expanding coverage for all Americans will have to occur off-camera.
Recently Israel created a visa system for American visitors which restricts us to either “European” or “Palestinian” areas or locks us out of the West Bank altogether – another reminder of the similarities Israel and the old South African Apartheid regime share. I sent our State Department a letter of complaint, and I hope others do as well: > Department of State > U.S. Consulate General, Consular Section > United States Department of State > 27 Nablus Road, 94190 Jerusalem > > Dear Mr/Ms Consul: > >
Earlier this year I traveled to Israel and the West Bank with a peace group, to see for myself the “reality on the ground” for both Israelis and Palestinians. It was an important visit for me, and of the kind I would like to see possible for other Americans in the future. > > Now, Israel’s new travel restrictions on American citizens will make these important cultural contacts difficult or impossible. > > https://jru.usconsulate.gov/border-crossings.html > > Israel’s new restrictions on American citizens traveling to and from the West Bank and Gaza are a violation of the Oslo Accords (Article IX, Section 1.e): > > http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/iaannex1.html > > Israel’s limitations of travel on American citizens to a country it has dubious rights to control are an unacceptable limitation by a foreign power of my rights as an American. > >
One group of Americans, Palestinian-Americans, is unduly harmed by these new restrictions. If they are lucky enough to obtain a “Palestinan-only” visa, they lose the right to visit the rest of Israel. This is clearly discriminatory and it would be my hope that the U.S. government would fight this for American citizens’ interests. > > Placing such restrictions on Americans would be analogous to permitting Israelis to visit only several American states – and then only after basing these visas on religious affiliation, thereby discriminating against any visitor. > > I urge you to strongly register American objections to these new visas and to ensure continued, unfettered access to all of Palestine/Israel by American citizens. > > If Israel is unwilling to comply, I would urge you to place meaningful restrictions on Israeli citizens’ travel to the U.S., including student and special religious visas. > > Regards, > > David Ehrens
I just read Tom Segev’s book, 1949: The First Israelis (ISBN 978-0805058963). Segev calls himself a First historian, as opposed to a New historian, in using only recently-available archive materials from the Knesset and national archives. 1949 is the story of the first years of the new Jewish state, told in the words of those who created it. There are many quotes, for example, from Ben Gurion’s diaries and from transcripts of Knesset sessions and other government meetings.
Segev spends a lot of time on Israeli immigration, the secular/religious divide, government austerity programs, school system(s), the relationship to other governments (particularly the US), and what is striking is that, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 puts it, “that which hath been is that which shall be, and that which hath been done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” applies nicely to tensions in the Jewish state which persist to this date.
For example, post-Zionism – the view that Zionism has done its job and that it’s now time to move on to make Israel a “normal” nation – is currently seen in Israel as a discredited aberration of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Or anti-Zionism – calling for a single, secular state of Jews and Arabs – is now seen as a contemporary response to the failure of a Two State solution. But Segev discusses some of the voices of the Canaanite Movement, like Yohanan Ratosh, who foresaw an Israel eventually without Jews. Of course, breaking as it did from right-wing Revisionist Zionism, the Canaanite movement was hostile to not only Judaism and Eastern European Yiddishkeit, but Islam and Arab civilization as well. It envisioned a secular, Hebraized, Middle Eastern culture encompassing former Jews, Arabs, and Druze. Other groups, like the Hashomer Hatzair, were militantly anti-religious. Organizations like “The League for the Prevention of Religious Coercion” sprang up within 3 years of the founding of the state. Religious Jews were described as “God’s Cossacks.”
Recent riots in Jerusalem over a parking lot could have been torn from the headlines of 1949. In May of that year, the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rioted over ticket sales for movies on the Sabbath, and over automobile traffic in the Meah Shearim quarter. The haredi, operating on the warnings in Jeremiah 17:27, took “reproof” to mean even physical violence – arson, rock-throwing, home invasions, bare knuckles, and even biting people – and rioting were justified in protecting the peaceful day of rest. Segev, in the chapter entitled “The Battle for the Sabbath,” recounts how (to avoid writing) the ultra-Orthodox bent down the corners of their prayer books containing page numbers to record the license plates of Sabbath violators, whose cars were then torched later in the week.
Segev reminds us that American peace envoys have been involved in Palestine since the very founding of the state of Israel. In September 1948, when the Swedish UN negotiator, Folke Bernadotte, was murdered by Zionist terrorists, Ralph Bunche took over the UN negotiator’s role. Bunche negotiated the 1949 armistice agreement, for which he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.
And the Israeli relationship with America has often been as troubled as it is today. Although the United States was the first nation to recognize Israel, our support of the state was not the one-sided love-fest now cited by Israel’s defenders. Apparently, in recognizing Israel, the United States also expected (imagine!) that an Arab state would soon follow, in realizing the two states apportioned to the land by the United Nations. And the United States was dismayed by Israel’s already apparent plans to sacrifice peace for more land. Segev writes: > Mark Ethridge, the US delegate to the Lausanne conference, wrote President Truman that Israel’s inclination to base her future on her military security, while forgoing the chance of making peace, seemed “unbelievable,” in view of her being such a tiny state. According to him, he had tried to explain to the Israelis that they were endangering their own future and that of the entire Western world, but his efforts had been in vain.
Truman himself wrote to Ben-Gurion arguing in behalf of an Arab state “because he sympathized with the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, just as he had earlier supported the Zionist cause because he had sympathized with the Jewish refugees…” Ben-Gurion fumed about Truman’s letter: > The State of Israel was not established as a consequence of the UN Resolution. Neither America nor any other country saw the resolution through, nor did they stop the Arab countries (and the British mandatory government) from declaring total war on us in violation of UN resolutions. America did not raise a finger to save us, and moreover, imposed an arms embargo… […] There are no refugees – there are fighters who sought to destroy us, root and branch. […] The rebuke and the threatening style [of Truman’s letter] are incomprehensible.
Interestingly, not all distrust of the United States resulted from Israel’s rejection of American even-handedness. Some of it sprang from Israel’s founding as a state that rejected, at least initially, both Western civilization and capitalism. At the founding of Israel in 1948, MAPAM represented Marxist Zionists and had the second largest bloc, next to Ben-Gurion’s MAPAI party. But even Ben-Gurion himself did not regard Israel as a capitalist state. During the “austerity debates,” which resulted from immigration which overtook Israel’s ability to provide jobs and housing for the new olim, Ben-Gurion defended a planned and controlled economic system. He famously declared, “the state of Israel is not a capitalist state.”
Likewise, Americans were suspected of being members of the CIA with “Arabist” motives. When “Fred Harris”, a freelance American military advisor, actually one Fred Grunich, was asked by Ben-Gurion for his military advice, many in the Knesset openly interpreted the real motivation to the desire by the United States to spy on Israel. American Jews too were seen as convenient sources of money but were regarded as second-rate Jews who were not prepared to suffer for the new state, as their Polish brethren had.
Israel’s selective enforcement of laws and endemic corruption have likewise been present since its founding, mainly as a consequence of the internal tensions within Israeli society, which have often caused competing groups to “look the other way” to either bolster their own power or prevent offense to another group. The take-away message is that Israel has always been less a nation of laws than a collection of ideologies and a series of handshake agreements. Conflict between religious blocks, MAPAM, and MAPAI, and major organizations like the Histradrut, the JNF, and the army actually made many fear civil war in the early years.
The discussion of the Nakba, now disputed and actually criminalized in Israel, is recounted in a number of memos and letters by various cabinet and Knesset members of Israel’s first government. As Arab village after village and Arab city after city were emptied and its inhabitants deported, it became clear that it was deliberate. While the American ambassador, James McDonald, argued for a return of the refugees, Ben-Gurion was “as hard as a rock” in his rejection of this. Moshe Sharett wrote: > The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine, in a way more spectacular than the creation of the Jewish state, is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population. […] The opportunities opened up by the present reality for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state, are so far-reaching, as to take one’s breath away. The reversion to the status quo ante is unthinkable.
Josef Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund, proposed measures designed to drive internally displaced refugees even farther into desolate areas: > They must be harassed continually.
1949 recounts the stories of the aliyot of Yemenite and Polish olim. Yemenites were regarded as savages and were subjected to horrendous conditions in the resettlement camps in Israel. Polish immigrants, by contrast, were put up in hotels.
The Kulturkampf between religious and secular worlds in Israel occupies a large portion of Segev’s book, particularly in the story of the Israeli school systems(s). Censorship, laws, agrarian policy, immigration, defense, housing, settlements – any topic the first Knesset ever discussed – is mentioned in this very readable, exceptionally interesting book.
Press censorship, preventing Arab political parties from participating in elections, a “Nakba” law which punishes commemorations or public events, followed by banning textbooks that mention it. Then there are the proposed “loyalty oaths”, and now the removal of Arabic names on road signs. Tolerance and civil liberties are not doing very well in Israel. Gaza continues to fester as the largest ghetto on earth and several commentators have made invidious comparisons of Israel and post-Weimar Germany.
Now is precisely the wrong time to stifle discussion of Israel’s many problems – or the nature of Zionism – and it may soon be difficult to have these discussions anywhere except outside Israel.
Former Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara in his essay, “Loyalty to racism,” makes the valid point that all these recent repressive measures have been designed to bolster Zionist ideology and coerce patriotism from Israelis, while eliminating political expression for Israeli Arabs.
“Were the Nazis ‘Nazi’ only because they created and used gas chambers to incinerate their Jewish and non-Jewish victims? Would the Nazis have been less evil and therefore ‘less Nazi’ if they had annihilated their victims by way of bullets instead of ovens, or by starving them to death as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians?”
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs suggests applying Natan Sharansky’s “3D” test to such analogies. However the litmus tests of “demonization, double standards, and delegitimization” will always test pink (especially in the hands of zealots) because the tests themselves are flawed. The issue is not the indisputable fact of the Shoah or the legitimacy of the Israeli state, but its nature. Even the National Socialists came to power legally in 1934.
“The homeland is blood and soil, it is earth bound by blood, it is the Alpha and Omega of all existence”
Certainly anyone making Nazi analogies must proceed delicately – that is to say, as factually and dispassionately as possible – but, despite some differences, there are also many similarities between National Socialism and Zionism that are based on historical co-evolution, and can not be avoided.
Zionism employs racial, ethnic and religious nationalism as a means to promote the interests of a privileged ruling people (“Herrenvolk”) associated with “their” land. “Natural growth” resembles the National Socialist concepts of “Lebensraum” and Israel’s desire to build eastward is what the NS-ers called the “Drang nach Osten.” The annexation of other lands (“Anschluss”), occupation (“Besatzung”), and “voelkisch” (ethnic) ties to the land (“Blut und Boden”) are painful features of the expression of these ideologies. Like the National Socialists, the Zionists’ nationalist philosophy trembles at the fear of “Umvolkung” (loss of nationhood). The Revisionist Zionist, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose school of Zionism holds the most currency in Israel today, was an open admirer of Mussolini.
Nazis belittled Jewish “belonging” to the German soil (“Boden”) and to the DNA of the nation (“Blut”). According to Nazis, Jews were a deracinated people who were overly urban, sickly, lived in squalor, and had to be removed. Similarly, we often hear the refrain from Zionists that “there was never a Palestinian people.” Jason Kunin touches on some of these themes in his essay, “A Genuine Peace Movement Cannot be Zionist.”
Benjamin Netanyahu recently attempted to embarrass the German Foreign Minister by using the Israel Project’s strategy of calling the dismantling of settlements “ethnic cleansing” (he actually used the German word “Judenrein”). Avigdor Lieberman, doing his part for Nazi analogies, published 60-year-old pictures of the Mufti with Hitler to tar Arabs with the taint of Nazism.
Should only Zionists get free passes to use Nazi analogies?
National Socialism and Zionism are the anachronistic products of 19th Century German nationalism: Nazism in part the legacy of Fichte and others, and Zionism flowed from the pen of Herzl. Yet both developed out of a common German Romanticism. Assimilated German Jews like Heinrich Heine and Herzl himself were drawn to, if not torn between, simultaneous German and Jewish nationalism.
Nazism and Zionism, then, are cousins, if not brothers.
Finally, there’s this sobering definition of fascism from Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism, Vintage Books):
[Fascism is] “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
The answer to Lerman’s question should be “no.” Maybe even “hell no.”
In May and June I traveled to Israel and the West Bank with an interfaith peace group to see for myself the “reality on the ground” for both Israelis and Palestinians. Toward the end of our visit, President Obama delivered his speech to the Arab world in Cairo, calling for an end of illegal settlements in the West Bank. On the day before we left Israel, some of us photographed an anti-American demonstration in Jerusalem.
No, these were not angry Palestinians, but shouting Jewish settlers and religious Zionists in West Jerusalem, pronouncing President Obama a Muslim and mixing both religious and racial insult with protestations that Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) will never be shared with Arabs. This is a widely-held view by most of the coalition parties that comprise the current government – Likud, Beitenu, Kadima, Shas – though not necessarily the average Israeli – and it underscores a growing rift between American democratic values and an increasingly xenophobic and nationalist Israeli government. If there were any doubts before, our democracy is not like theirs and our values are not their values.
The July 19th Jerusalem Post illustrates this rift in an article, “Obama’s Real Agenda,” by Anne Bayefsky, which complained that Obama had for the first time invited moderate American Jews, including JStreet, to talk with him about Israel, and was being too even-handed: “President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American president in the history of the state of Israel.”
But while President Obama and Secretary Clinton insist on an end to the illegal settlements, Israel keeps building them anyway, pushing settlement blocks deep into the West Bank and clearly trying to create a “reality on the ground” which will forever block the possibility of a Palestinian state – in defiance of American foreign policy goals over many presidencies.
And Israel’s government has also gone on a xenophobic offensive as well. Efforts by Transportation Minister Katz to “Judaize” street signs in even Arab towns and cities in Israel – or the revised “Nakba” bill which punishes Israelis who talk about or commemorate the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian “disaster”) – have even mainstream Israelis concerned about civil liberties. A bill in the Knesset proposing a national biometric identity card is likewise raising a lot of eyebrows. Coalition parties like Shas and Beteinu openly call for the forced deportation of Israeli Arabs to Jordan and Egypt.
But while the United States is now heading in the direction of increased tolerance and compliance with international law, Israel is racing in the opposite direction. Jewish Israelis can no longer speak of their country, which governs an Arab population almost the same size as its own by martial law, as a Western democracy. Israel, for all its cultural links and trade with Europe and the U.S., is giving up hope of ever being accepted as a “normal” Western nation. Although the reason some ascribe to this is “anti-Semitism” it is also true that “normal” nations in the 21st Century no longer build colonies and habitually thumb their noses at international law. Now, with the U.S. sounding more like Europe, Americans have drawn Israel’s ire as well.
Last year the Bush administration initialed a 10-year $30 billion military aid package for Israel. Israel’s per-capita military expenses are the highest in the world and Americans have been paying for roughly 15-20% of these expenses -things like last December’s war on Gaza’s civilian population, guarding settlements in war zones like Hebron, building the 500 kilometer “security wall,” the ubiquitous checkpoints, or the recent jailing of a former U.S. congresswoman trying to deliver aid to Gaza.
Nations and empires with an addiction to wielding military power usually have to give it up when they start running out of money. If Israel resents U.S. “meddling” or – worse! – even-handedness, perhaps it’s time to take a step back – starting with the American military aid Israel uses in violation of international laws and in opposition to our own foreign policy. Only when Israeli taxpayers shoulder the full costs of their military occupation will a fair and peaceful settlement with Palestinians occur to them.
Many Israelis and Jewish groups get upset when unfavorable parallels are drawn between the Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, particularly in Gaza, which has been compared to the Warsaw Ghetto. Groups like the American Jewish Committee see any parallel, even by Jewish progressives, as offensive and anti-Semitic.
But this week Benjamin Netanyahu used the Nazi term “Judenrein” in a meeting with the German foreign minister while discussing the possible removal of West Bank settlements. Reuters quoted a “confidant” of Netanyahu saying that the Israeli prime minister told Frank-Walter Steinmeier earlier this week that “Judea and Samaria” [the West Bank] cannot be Judenrein.” The term was used by Nazis to refer to areas “cleansed of Jews.” Asked by Reuters how Steinmeier reacted to the term, the confidant said, “What could he do? He basically just nodded.”
In attempting to leverage German guilt, the Prime Minister himself opened up the same can of worms the AJC and countless organizations would have preferred to leave buried: the meaning of many of these nationalist terms, and the frightening similarities between German nationalism and Zionism.
Aside from this, recent racist pronouncements by Israeli’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch could really best be uttered auf [1936-era] Deutsch. Germans of today have managed to move past ugly 19th Century racist nationalism, but Israel (which was founded on similar principles first described in Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl) just seems to be getting warmed up, especially the new government.
Now that Netanyahu has mastered German 101, here are some other phrases from the German past, with suggested uses, that might be useful for him and his coalition government:
Abwanderung
“wandering off” or “emigration” – euphemism for deportation or worse. A synonym for “transfer” or even for the Nakba. For example: The Palestinian Abwanderung never happened in 1948.
Anschluss
annexation of other countries. Netanyahu could have said this week: The Anschluss of the Golan Heights will be permanent.
Besatzung
occupation. As in: the Besatzung of Palestine.
Blut und Boden
“blood and soil” – an ideology focusing on a concept of ethnicity based on descent (Blood) and homeland (Soil) and which celebrates the relationship of a people to the land that they occupy and cultivate. This could be a handy phrase to describe the lure of Zionism to outsiders.
Drang nach Osten
“drive toward the East” – a term coined in the 19th century to designate expansion into Slavic lands. In Israel this could be used to describe the pressures of “natural growth” that drive the eastward expansion of already illegal settlement blocks in the West Bank.
Gesinnungs-unterricht
ideological indoctrination. This could be used to describe appropriate kinds of education to prevent fellow Jews like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel from becoming “self hating” (the other Netanyahu story this week) or in forming narratives for public consumption. For example: AIPAC can provide a bit of Gesinnungsunterricht.
Gleichschaltung
elimination of opposition. This is a wonderful utility phrase that can describe political detentions of Palestinians, extra-judicial killings, imprisonment and harassment of Jewish activists, and the introduction of new laws banning criticism of Israel’s democracy or even mentioning the Nakba.
Herrenvolk
ethnic group which rules. This could be used to describe the relationship of Israeli Jews to Israeli Palestinians, as in the sentence: Our Herrenvolk will replace the filthy Arabs in the Galilee.
Judenrein
cleansed of Jews. Oops! Bibi knows this one already.
Konzentrationslager
concentration camp. A synonym for Gaza.
Lebensraum
“living space” – space to accommodate “natural growth”. Wow! This really is a timely word. Bibi could have alternately explained to Steinmeier that: We just need more Lebensraum.
Ostmark
euphemism for annexed land in the east. Since Israel is running out of names for illegal settlements in the West Bank, perhaps something like “Ostmark Illit” would have a cute ring to it.
Rassenschande
literally, “shaming the race.” This could be used to describe anti-miscegenation programs like those in Petah Tikvah, Pisgat Zeev, and Kiryat Gat which use informers, vigilantes, rabbis, police, and municipal authorities to inform on and threaten girls who date Arabs.
Sprachregelung
term meaning “convention of speech,” a formal or informal agreement that certain things should be expressed in specific ways to avoid confusing and seemingly contradictory messages, and to enhance the outward appearance of unity, but also to replace sensitive expressions with euphemisms. This could be used interchangeably with hasbara.
Staatsfeind
enemy of the state. Since Israel is running out of ways to demonize its critics, and “anti-Semite” and “self-hating Jews” are getting a little too much play these days, this would be a refreshing new word. As in: That verdammter Staatsfeind, Noam Chomsky!
Siedlung
settlement or colony. Why use English when Deutsch sounds so cool and sophisticated?
Umvolkung
a term used to describe a process of assimilation of members of the people (das Volk) so that they forget about their language and their origin. As in: American Jews are practically goyim because of their Umvolkung.
Untermenschen
subhumans. Example: The Palestinians are Untermenschen.
Volk
“the people” – a racial or ethnic conception of a nation. In Israel, only for Jews. As in: Israeli Arabs are not a member of unser Volk.
völkisch
“ethnic” – the völkisch movement had its origins in Romantic nationalism, and was expressed by early Romantics such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his addresses to the German Nation published during the Napoleonic Wars, from 1808 onwards, especially the eighth address, “What is a Volk, in the higher sense of the term, and what is love of the fatherland?” If the word “Zionist” has a slightly negative ring to it, völkisch could be used instead. For example: Herzl described our völkische aspirations.
Zwangsverkauf
compulsory sale or transfer of property. This could be useful in describing why the settlements are legal in Israeli courts.
The bright blue background of the website at http://www.birthrightisrael.com depicts smiling Jewish kids popping up in goofy Flash animations, along with the words “Your adventure. Your birthright. Our gift.” For many, Taglit-Birthright Israel equals a free vacation. Trips to the Masada, target practice with the IDF, working on a kibbutz, three and four star hotels, a little eco-tourism, late night DJ parties and “mega events”, and maybe some sex on the beach.
The “Birthright” experience shields participants from Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, or Israel’s Arab largest communities. All itineraries are cleared by the government, and the authorities are aware of each group’s location at all times via GPS. Participants are unlikely to get a glimpse of what life is like in the Occupied Territories for Palestinians or within Israel proper for Arab Israelis like former Knesset member Azmi Bishara.
Taglit-Birthright Israel describes itself as a “unique, historical partnership between the people of Israel through their government, local Jewish communities (North American Jewish Federations through the United Jewish Communities; Keren Hayesod; and The Jewish Agency for Israel), and leading Jewish philanthropists”. Since its inception, over 200,000 young adults, 75% from North America, have made the 10-day trips. The cost of the program to-date has been $450 million. Any American Jewish young adult from 18-26 who has never been to Israel before and who is part of a Jewish community with a Zionist organization (Federation or UJC) qualifies for this program – designed to encourage young adults to make aliyah (immigrate) to or to at least enhance ahavat Yisrael (love of Israel).
Under Israel’s original Law of Return, any Jew (technically a person with a Jewish mother) could become an Israeli citizen. In 1970 the law was amended to permit non-Jews with a Jewish grandparent, in-laws, parent or spouse to immigrate as well. The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003 restricts immigration of Arabs of childbearing age who are residents of the West Bank and Gaza. But American Jewish and even non-Jewish Russians of childbearing age are most welcome to come to Israel and alter the demographics. Interestingly, Israeli law and Zionist programs like Birthright seem to be designed to slow Arab population growth more than to preserve Judaism. Israel now has more than 300,000 non-Jewish Russians alone. In 1999, half of all Russian immigrants were not Jewish.
But if you really want to clinch the deal, bringing kids to Zionist Disneyland isn’t quite enough. You’ve got to show them the crematoria. Taglit-Birthright Israel has combined a program with the International March of the Living tour of Polish death camps.
“A special emphasis is placed on the topic of the Holocaust and Jewish life in Central Europe prior to WWII. Included are visits to concentration camps and centers of Jewish life and culture in Poland prior to the program in Israel. Also explored is the absorption of WWII survivors into Israeli life after the War. […] The tours and activities incorporate all of these subjects into experiences with the sights, sounds, smells and sense of touch in contemporary Israel.”
And apparently it works. There are countless stories, like this one, from disaffected Jewish teens who have overnight become card-carrying Zionists. Others, like this one, reflect on the emotional manipulation of these tours.
An Alternative
Birthright Unplugged is not funded by Jewish federations or Zionist philanthropy, but offers Jewish teens a tour which provides a more accurate view of the reality for Palestinians:
In six days, we visit Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank and spend time with internally displaced Palestinian people living inside Israel. Throughout the journey, we help participants develop an understanding of daily life under occupation and the history of the region from people profoundly affected by and under-represented in Western discourses about the occupation.
It also runs trips for Palestinian teens which often gives them a first glimpse of East Jerusalem or the sea:
Our Re-Plugged trips are for Palestinian children living in refugee camps. In two to three days, we visit Jerusalem, the sea and the villages their grandparents fled in 1948. The children stay with families who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. They document their experiences with cameras and create exhibits in order to contribute to the collective memory in the refugee camp and to share their stories with people abroad. […] This experience is nearly impossible for most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who receive identity cards at age 16 which Israel uses to control their movement. As internationals we are able to move with relative freedom and so, unlike the children’s parents and grandparents, we can take them on this trip.
I just came across an organization in Stoughton called the No Place for Hate Committee. Interestingly, it’s a project of the Anti-Defamation League, which should be a bit sensitive to religious hatred.
I wonder if they know there’s a big problem with Islamophobia right in town?
Specifically, the Ahavath Torah congregation, which has run a welcome for Dutch racist Geert Wilders, whom Britain had the good sense to keep from spewing hate speech there, and also a kaffee klatch with an author promoting her book, Allah is Dead.
Stoughton also experienced the famous Danish Flag Incident in 2006, when Town Manager Mark Stankiewicz felt compelled to fly the Danish flag alongside Old Glory to thank the Danes for running the equally famous Muhammad cartoon.
Feel free to call the town and inquire what, if anything, the No Place for Hate Committee is doing. You can reach Mark Stankiewicz at +1 (781) 341-1300, Ext. 211, twnmgr@stoughton-ma.gov.
I watched President Obama’s speech from East Jerusalem, where I was staying during a long tour of Israel and the West Bank. The president’s speech made me proud and I was also moved by expressions of hope from Palestinians I talked to afterwards, although they have been betrayed so many times by U.S. policies that this hope can only be described as a guarded hope.
During my stay I visited the Dheisheh refugee camp, just down the road from Bethlehem, and wept at the desperate life for children who followed us around. I was surprised to see how friendly and open inhabitants were to an American, despite the fact that the IDF rousts them every other night and our nation’s relationship with Israel is well-known. I visited Hebron, a microcosm of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, where I met both gun-toting settlers and a worker for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. Again, I was shocked at the war zone “reality on the ground” for Arab residents of the H2 zone in Hebron.
I talked to Israelis in Sderot and Ashkelon who have been the target of thousands of Qassam rockets. I talked to Hebrew University students in Jerusalem, visited Bir Zeit university in Ramallah, and listened to two men from an organization called “Combatants for Peace” who had each lost daughters to violence from the other side.
People on both sides of this conflict are tired and living in fear and under intolerable conditions, particularly Palestinians living under perpetual martial law. The situation simply cannot go on forever. We talked to an Israeli professor who described Israel’s settlement efforts as “cantonizing” Palestinians into islands which will ultimately be linked together by bridges and tunnels (already being constructed) to try to satisfy a legalistic requirement of “contiguity.” To Palestinians, each of whom knows the details of Oslo, Camp David, and the roadmap to a degree that would shame most journalists, what Israel is doing is tantamount to creating large Indian reservations. And I agree. I can tell you, based on all the conversations I had, any “cantonization” plan would be rejected by even the most moderate of Palestinians. And there are 7 million Palestinian refugees outside Palestine. Any new Palestinian state must be big enough to accommodate some fraction of them who decide to return to a new state.
I urge President Obama to pressure Israel to accept the Green Line, to remove the “Berlin-like” walls, and to recognize a divided Jerusalem. If Israel cannot do this, the president should hit Israel with sanctions, as the first President Bush threatened to do. The issue of huge illegal settlements like Ma’ale Adumim which cut into the heart of the West Bank, must be negotiated. It might actually serve interests of peace for a few Jewish towns to exist in a new Palestine, just as Muslim towns like Nazareth exist in Israel. But ultimately these are decisions that the PA and Israel will have to make. President Obama’s job is to be an honest, unbiased, peace broker.
I hope the president’s speech really is a fresh start with the Muslim world, but Muslims, as he must certainly know, are sensitive to betrayal or words that are not accompanied by action. I hope the president’s inspiring words translate into concrete action during the next two years. Otherwise, hope can fade into frustration, and frustration can boil over into violence. I urge the president to demonstrate he meant every word in his Cairo speech, and to deploy Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Mitchell in finally ending this nightmare.
In May/June 2009 I travelled to Israel and Palestine. These entries are from my travel diary.
Expectations
May 20, 2009
In a few days I will be leaving to go on a two-week trip to Israel and Palestine with a group from Interfaith Peace Builders. I need to be able to see with my own eyes what is happening there, but for me the great mystery is why Israelis have made such an extreme right turn over the last 60 years and why the Palestinians are so divided.
After all the history, news articles, and foreign policy papers I’ve read, the reality on the ground will probably not be very surprising. Perhaps I’ll just be one of those who sees what he expects to see. Or maybe I’ll be influenced by a few of the politically-correct fellow-travelers I’ll be visiting with. Or maybe all I’ve presently concluded will turn out to be accurate. Or just maybe – there will be some place, event, or person which significantly alters my thinking on this issue. I guess I’m prepared for any of these things to happen.
As I travel around this disputed land I will be keeping a notebook on what I’ve seen and whom I’ve talked with, when appropriate. My plan is to rework each day’s notes into an entry in this blog, sometimes illustrated with photos or additional information I’ve gathered. I tend to think on paper, and this is how I intend to digest my experiences.
Into every life a little rain must fall
May 25, 2009
We had a very compressed orientation in Washington DC, then went to the airport to catch our flight through JFK to Tel Aviv. Delta cancelled our flight! After all kinds of aggravation, we finally were put up at the Five Towns Motor Inn outside the airport in NYC and we’ll be flying out of here at 8:30pm tonight – if nothing else goes wrong. Apparently 3 raindrops is enough to shut down JFK because the New Yawkers are such wimps compared with us hardy New Englanders.
The people are wonderful and are not a bunch of politically correct teenagers. We’ve got 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 year-olders, a Mormon, a couple of Jews, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Quaker, Catholics, Unitarians, etc. These are people who have pets, drink beer, swear, and have equally strong opinions. In short, they’re a lot like me. We’ve had a very good chance to see each other under unflattering conditions, sweating and collapsing after a 23-hour day. But bad travel karma has resulted in a lot of time to get to know one another, and it’s been very nice in a bizarre sort of way.
Our adventure has already begun.
Arrival in Israel-Palestine
May 26, 2009
We arrived in Tel Aviv in the afternoon and cleared customs easily. Everyone was fairly friendly and the main concern was Swine Flu (whoops, in Israel, the Mexican Flu).
The first thing you notice when you leave Ben Gurion airport, which is a bit east of Tel Aviv, and start the trip up to Jerusalem, is how small the country is. The bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem takes about the same amount of time to get from Taunton to Boston. As we went up route 6, the driver pointed out countless Arab towns that had been swallowed into a suburban sprawl that resembles the East Bay a bit.
Everywhere there are hilltop developments, somewhat like the ugly boxes that made Levitttown what it is. You can occasionally see remnants of old Arab towns if you look, and they are very clearly different, simpler architecture – now relegated to empty hollows on the lower parts of the now settled hilltops, cut off from traffic and rotting until they are bulldozed and new settler housing is constructed.
We continued to East Jerusalem to check into our East Jerusalem hotel, the Azzahra. The accommodations were pretty Spartan. No AC, showers barely work, plumbing so narrow that you have to throw your toilet paper away separately. Jerusalem, even the Arab district, is regulated by Israel and only Arabs with special permits can enter. There are separate bus systems to Arab and Jewish neighborhoods, separate license plates, even rolling checkpoints at street corners, and it very obviously reflects the traces of an occupation.
As we entered East Jerusalem, we passed a home that had been taken by armed Israeli settlers and which had an armed lookout post on its roof. This is something out of the Wild West. I haven’t figured out which analogy is most apt – that of Apartheid, or that of the way we treated Indians in the 18th – 20th centuries. Either way, it doesn’t belong in the 21st century.
Tomorrow we are meeting with an Israeli group which tries to stop home demolitions of Arabs’ homes, and we are also staying overnight in a West Bank refugee camp. Later in the week we become more regular tourists and will be spending more time in Israel proper.
At 9:00 I went to bed and fell asleep instantly. In ten minutes I awoke to the mezzuin’s call to evening prayers. It went on for 2-3 minutes and then stopped. It’s probably no worse than living near a fire station, but it is a reminder that when (and if) Palestinians ever have their own state it will probably have an Islamic character.
As for me – I’ve been wondering if religious states of ANY kind are a good thing.
Home demolitions
May 27, 2009
We met today with Yahav from ICAHD who gave us a glimpse into how home demolitions work. Displaying a number of maps he discussed how developments like Ma’aleh Adumim are used to slice into Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories. Although the theft of Palestinian land is bad enough, the way in which it is executed is pure evil.
Basically, land is suddenly zoned for “green” or military use and Palestinians almost never win zoning appeals. After 3 years of disuse, the land is declared “abandoned” and becomes state-owned. Thereafter, the state demolishes homes and reclaims the land for Jewish-only developments.
Because Palestinian family units are multi-generational, homes expand with every new generation, often by adding a new floor. The gotcha is that Palestinians rarely obtain building permits for a new floor or wing, so out of desperation they build anyway. The state then declares the house “illegal,” fines the owner the assessed value of the house, plus demolition costs, and bulldozes the home.
We arrived before dinner at the Deheisheh refugee camp outside Bethlehem in the West Bank, where we stayed overnight at a hostel and toured the camp. The camp itself is like a poor neighborhood in Mexico, with unsafe electrical systems, sewage problems, and no trash removal – especially shocking since this is administered by Israel, which should be maintaining some minimal level of care over this subjugated population.
The speakers were very impassioned, but also very helpful in understanding the prospects for a 2 state solution, which seems to basically be zero at this point thanks to not only Hamas, but to Israel, which has virtually cut the West Bank in half with a massive settlement called Ma’ale Adumim which we visited a couple of hours before an armed Palestinian shot at the two security guards who had previously waved our tour bus through their gates. Ma’ale Adumim looks like a really ugly California development and has schools, a junior college, a mall, and 40,000 units – out in the middle of nowhere but specifically located in order to prevent a Palestinian state from ever occurring.
This was a very amazing day and it was a very moving experience to have the cutest little kids say “hello” in English, smile at us, and follow us around despite the IDF patrols that run through this dismal 1 kilometer square ghetto with European faces like ours. I heard a 43 year old mother tell us what she told her son after the IDF killed his best friend in 2002 when the 13 year old threw a rock at them.
I learned that 30-60 percent of all Palestinians have been in prison or detained – not because they are necessarily terrorists, but because the area is under martial law and Israel has the “right” to put people in detention for 6 months at a time without trial, or haul them away for 18 days for simple questioning. No search warrants are ever required.
This has apparently been a great success in making people hate Israelis and teaching them Hebrew. The reasons Palestinians give for these arbitrary detentions are (1) fishing for intelligence, (2) disrupting demonstrations which would be legal elsewhere, (3) seeing who they can turn to collaborators.
I had a nice lunch in a falafel restaurant with the tour guide, a cultured Arab man who seems to know everyone in Jerusalem. While we were eating near the Damascus Gate, we saw a single settler being accompanied by two armed guards through the crowds on the corner. In contrast, here I was having a nice lunch and a good conversation with an Arab who knows full well I am a “Yehudi”. The Palestinians really don’t have a problem with Jews. It’s the Occupation they are fighting.
“God is not a real estate agent”
May 28, 2009
Today we got up and drove to Bethlehem for a bit of sightseeing, but also an ambitious set of meetings.
Our first meeting was with Zougbi Zougbi, who runs the Wi’am Center in Bethlehem, a beautiful Arab city. Zougbi is a city counselor and the director of the center, which provides family services to children and women, as well as mediation and conflict resolution based on a pre-Islamic Arab form of mediation called sulha, which involves concluding the agreement with a cup of coffee.
In Zougbi’s view, the occupation has been devastating to families, particularly women. He supports Abbas and said that Abbas is doing a generally good job of keeping peace talks going and that the relationship with the US and Europe has been beneficial, although he laments the one-sided relationship with Israel. It occurred to me that the US was truly wasting an opportunity to befriend the Arab world. Zougbi criticized Zionism as being at odds with a Judaism previously respected by Muslims. “God is not a real estate agent.”
We asked him if the Two State solution was dead, and he suggested that it was. We asked about Hamas and he asked us in return if we’d like to talk to a fellow city counselor from the [political, not armed] Hamas party.
The Hamas city counselor, Saleh Shoker, turned up about a half hour later and answered our questions. From the banter between Zougbi and Saleh, it resembled the joking and arguing between, say, a Republican and a Green Party member.
Saleh admitted they were militant, but asserted they were not violent by nature, although he said, “Sometimes you need to wage war to have peace,” sounding amazingly like Israelis we had talked with. “How can I talk to someone who holds a gun to me and still talks peace,” Saleh said of Israel.
I asked him if Hamas could ever support a Two State solution (which Hamas has previously suggested it might by supporting the Saudi Proposal), and I didn’t get much of an answer. He suggested that the world should first ask Israel to stop the occupation. When pressed repeatedly, Saleh said that he thought there was a remote possibility if Israel were to return to the 1967 borders, but said that Israel never would do this. He treated us like naive fools for even thinking it was a possibility. He could be right. The settlements we saw today are designed precisely to derail any possibility of two states and, thus, any hope of peace.
Refugee Rights
In the afternoon we drove down the street to the Palestinian Center for Residency and Refugee Rights. We met with the communications officer, Hazem Jamjoum, who discussed the mechanics of how the occupation strips Palestinians of their land and the history of the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1947-1948, resulting in 750,000 refugees who could never return to Palestine.
Before Israeli independence, Jamjoum maintains, the Haganah and paramilitary groups Stern and Irgun ruthlessly targeted and terrorized people in 535 villages through a plan called “Plan Dalet” and has subsequently practiced ethnic cleansing through more bureaucratic methods, involving Jewish National Fund land trusts, zoning regulations, and the racist application of Military Order 125, permitting the state to annex land for military use. He suggested a number of resources, including books by Ilan Pappe. He pointed to the Koenig Report of 1976 as an example of explicit plans for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
“We’re not David anymore, we’re Goliath”
May 29, 2009
Sderot
Today was an excellent view into how progressive Israelis think. In the morning we drove to the Erez checkpoint into Gaza and took photos of the elaborate security measures in place, then drove a few miles into Sderot to meet with a couple of members of a group called “Other Voice”. We met with Nomika Zion and neighbor Eric Yellin at Zion’s home. On the way into Sderot we saw the ubiquitous yellow and pastel blue bomb shelters every hundred yards or so, and we noticed that the city was fairly empty.
Yellin and Zion are founders of Other Voice, which is calling for peace between Palestine and Israel despite having first-hand experience with Qassam rockets. Zion began by explaining what her collective does, her family’s relationships to Zionism and kibbutzim, and leaving the kibbutz to establish an urban collective.
She discussed the people who make up Sderot – a large Uzbek population, Ethiopians, Moroccans, Palestinian collaborators who were allowed to leave Gaza, and a variety of social progressives and religious groups including Chabadniks. The one thing that unifies this disparate community is the fear of rocket attacks. From 2007 to 2008, Zion says, roughly 10-60 Qassam rockets per day were lobbed at Sderot.
Because these homemade weapons were so unpredictable, no one ever knew when they would hit and the bombings started at 7:00 in the morning, just in time for school. Zion reported that virtually everyone in the community suffered, continues to suffer, from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For 3 or 4 years, residents had been sleeping in “safe rooms” which altered family dynamics, intimacy, and broke down even people’s immune systems (we heard similar complaints in the Dheisha refugee camp regarding surprise IDF raids which occur sometimes every night or every other night).
Zion recounted the moral dilemma of a parent transporting a van with her and other children to school when it suddenly became necessary to take all the children out of their safety seats and rush them into a a bomb shelter. Which one to take first or leave last?
She said that Israel had become a much more violent and racist society, that most Israelis didn’t even want to know Palestinians. “No voices, no faces, no names.”
She described Gaza as a ghetto and said of Gazans, “they are not our enemies, they are our neighbors.” Zion recounted the days when the Moroccans of Sderot would visit Gaza to do their shopping and when there were much closer relationships between Jews and Palestinians. Zion pointed out how the blockade of Gaza had cut Palestinians off from moderates in the West Bank, had starved them, and driven them into the hands of Hamas, for whom their situation was merely a political opportunity. Desperate people will grasp at anything, and the Israeli government’s actions were incredibly stupid.
In Zion’s view, it was in Israel’s interest to stall peace. “The greatest fear of the Israeli leadership is peace,” she said. Eric Yellin, who described himself as an “ambivalent Zionist,” discussed his wartime blog a bit, then sketched a brief portrait of the politics in Israel. According to Yellin, the left virtually dissolved after Oslo, when suicide bombings increased, after the assassination of Rabin, with Barak declaring no partner in peace, with the second intifada, and the rise of Hamas.
Kibbutz Zikim
We then drove to nearby Kibbutz Zikim in Hof Ashkelon and met with Arieh Zimmerman and Mayan Dror. Arieh gave us a history of the kibbutz from its origins from the Hashomer Hatzair until the present, including the various products its members have produced. Zikim is one of only 80 socialist kibbutzim remaining in Israel (200 have become privatized).
Because of its proximity to Gaza, the kibbutz has been hit by numerous Qassam rockets, resulting in 7 injuries, including those of 2 children. Over the past 7 years Zimmerman estimates that 1000 rockets have been launched from Gaza. The daycare center at the kibbutz is covered by a concrete shell to protect the children within.
Despite the attacks, Zimmerman is quick to point out that “we’re not David anymore, we’re Goliath”. He blames the government for not acting to end the occupation. In Zimmerman’s analysis, the only solution is for two states to exist, and for Jerusalem to be divided. Both Zimmerman and Dror pointed out that the kibbutz has actually had Arab members.
Zimmerman also faults Israel’s ultra-Orthodox, which represent only 12% of the population, for exerting a disproportionate influence on Israeli politics, which has resulted in racist settlement policies designed to benefit them to the detriment of Palestinians.
When I asked him why Israel’s Left and progressive ranks have thinned, Zimmerman offered two reasons: (1) that the political pendulum swings from time to time, and (2) that the Labor party was almost single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the Left because smaller leftist parties like Meretz were joined at the hip with it through coalitions. After the unilateral Gaza withdrawal, Barak delivered the message that Israel had no partners in peace with the Arabs and apparently the majority of Israelis bought it.
Even though Zimmerman acknowledges that Hamas (as opposed to the people of Gaza) may not be motivated in peace, neither is the Israeli Right. He wrote me, “Israel, being the stronger in this conflict between two peoples bears the onus of making the greater effort in making peace with our Palestinian neighbors. We ought to have a government and politicians capable and desirous of problem solving rather than being so energetic in demonstrating their arrogance and pandering to […] right wing extremists.” The problem, as Zimmerman sees it, is that no one is a partner for peace at the moment.
Still, the kibbutzniks have managed to preserve their sense of humor. Collecting fragments of Qassam rockets and plough disks, resident artists fashioned a massive menorah from them, proclaiming both their resilience and their belief in turning swords into ploughshares.
I left Ashkelon beginning to understand the extent of the disarray of the Left in Israel.
Palestinian citizens of Israel
May 30, 2009
Today we drove through the Judean desert from East Jerusalem to Nazareth. Along the way we saw many different villages, including Jericho, which has been completely cut off from the highway by a large trench. Across the highway are IDF observation posts with sniper nests. The amount of militarization in Israel and its territories is truly troubling.
In Nazareth we met with Nabila Espanioly, the director of an advocacy center for women and families. Espanioly gave us an overview of the center’s services, mainly funded via European NGO’s and not Israel. She told us that Nazareth is about 4% Jewish, 20% Christian and 76% Muslim.
Nazareth was spared in 1948 because a Canadian officer who had been instructed to destroy the city understood the affection that Christians had for the city and demanded that the order be given in writing. The written order never came. Nazareth remained under military rule until 1966 (as much of the West Bank still is).
In 1948 4% of the land in and around Nazareth was Jewish, while today it is 97%. Despite the fact that Palestinians represent 96% of the population, they receive only 4% of so-called “development” funding – for education, health, and social services – that Jewish Israeli cities receive. The Bedouin population is not even counted and there are 52 “unrecognized” villages around Nazareth.
60% of those living in poverty are Palestinians, and roughly 20% have left Israel in the last 20 years, particularly Christians, who have often had a bit more money than Muslims, and for whom their land is not an essential component of their religion.
Karmi’el
Later in the day we drove to Karmi’el, a Judaization project (settlement) for approximately 60,000 Israeli Jews. It is built on the ruins of a Palestinian village of Suhmata. The area looks a bit like Scotts Valley in California and, like it, is home to a high-tech park with various defense industries. Kibbutz Zuriel is also built on Suhmata.
At the far end of the settlement is a Bedouin camp of 3 families without water, electricity, or heat. We visited one family whose gas-powered generator was supplying their heat and electricity. Their compound was entirely surrounded by concrete, but they were still hoping to preserve their land and way of life in the face of development.
We drove on to the Arab town of Sakhnin, a mixed town with 5 mosques and 3 churches. Like Nazareth, 95% of Sakhnin’s land was confiscated after 1948. Men in the town now have to commute to Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Netanya to find work. While the national unemployment rate is about 11%, among Arabs it is closer to 30%.
In Arab towns where Palestinian citizens of Israel live, police officers are almost always Jewish and do not live in town, but on nearby Jewish settlements. In the evening we had dinner with a Palestinian couple in an outdoor structure they called their “tent”. But it was actually made of reeds and reminded me of a sukkah where Jews observe sukkot.
“Following in Moses’ footsteps”
May 31, 2009
Today we traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with Dani Adamansu of the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews, which originated as an American organization.
The history of Ethiopian Jews, or Beta Israel, is rather interesting. They believe they are the descendents of the Lost tribe of Dan or, alternatively, Jews who went into exile after the destruction of the first temple in 563 BCE. There they resisted conversion to Christianity and retreated to the northern province of Gonder where they maintained a pre-Talmudic type of Judaism, observed laws of Kashrut, and studied Jewish texts.
As early as the 16th century, the Chief Rabbi of Egypt observed that they maintained Jewish laws (Halachah) and viewed them as certainly Jewish. The Beta Israel thought of themselves up until that point as the only surviving remnant of Israel. As a religious minority, and simply as a religious community, they were mistreated by the Mengistu regime during the 1980’s, during which many of the community were forced to escape via Sudan.
In the 80’s Operation Moses brought 8000 Ethiopians to Israel and in the 90’s Operation Solomon brought over 14,000. Between these massive airlifts, many actually walked to Israel. As Adamansu put it, “we were following in Moses’ footsteps.”
Today about 85% of the 120,000 Beta Israel in Ethiopia have emigrated to Israel. They regard themselves as orthodox, highly patriotic, but are not completely accepted in Israel.
They have settled in roughly 20 cities in Israel, with many in the Negev, and they are struggling with new immigrant issues, including institutionalized racism, employment, housing, and educational problems.
We asked Adamansu if the Ethiopian community felt it had anything in common with Arab Israelis. The response was “no”, which many Palestinians and Arab Israelis agreed with. In many cases, Palestinians reported receiving the roughest treatment from Ethiopian IDF soldiers.
Adamansu shared the opinion we were beginning to see as a widespread one that the Arab armies were greater than Israel’s. “We are not the strongest army in the Middle East,” he said.
We asked Adamansu if he thought there could ever be peace with Arabs or accommodation for sharing the land. He answered the question by quoting the Talmudic debate (Bava Metzia62a) between Rabbis Akiva and Ben Petura on the ethical obligations of a man in the desert with a friend and only enough water to save one of them. Petura had maintained that “Better both should drink and die than that one see his friend’s death.” But Rabbi Akiva disagreed, stating that the owner of the water had only an obligation to save himself.
We asked if the Ethiopian community included progressives who were concerned at all with the plight of Arabs. “Not really.” Most immigrants were concerned more with poverty, clothing, housing, and education, he said.
“An army with a country”
May 31, 2009
We met in the late afternoon with Ruth Hiller, who lives on Kibbutz Haogen about 10 km north of Netanya. Hiller was originally from California, and has lived in Israel since 1972. She came out of a religious Zionist movement and moved to Israel to live out a “romantic, idealistic, activist life of nation-building.”
Hiller lived a typical Israeli life, raising a large family (6 children) and sending daughters into the military. But in 1995 her 15-year-old son came to her and told her he was a pacifist. Although it was possible to ask for a non-combat assignment within the military, he did not want any part of the military and was looking for the right to do some kind of alternative civilian service.
After over 20 years in Israel, Hiller was confronted with a clash between national and personal, family values. She discovered that options for Conscientious Objectors were limited in Israel to religious reasons (only the ultra-Orthodox have the right not to serve). She looked for models and patterns in other countries. She talked to Americans, studied the South African Black Sash movement, and went through the process of trying to find a lawyer who would handle her son’s case.
Hiller soon discovered that even Israeli progressives and civil libertarians could not always be counted on to help, and it took the help of a former Meretz Member of the Knesset to find a lawyer who would finally help the family.
In the Israeli military, a “profile” is a person’s military status. What Hiller was looking for was a “new profile” – a civilian designation, not a military one, which would permit young people to serve the nation totally outside the military. Ultimately years of personal efforts led her to establish “New Profile“, which provides information to young people who are looking for alternatives to military service. New Profile networks with other organizations: Yesh Gvul, Combatants for Peace, and Shministim.
Among New Profile’s goals is the “Civil-ization of Israeli society.” New Profile finds Israeli society highly militarized, dangerously militaristic, and she sums up the relationship between society and military with: “Israel is not a country with an army, rather it’s an army with a country.”
The number of soldiers walking around with guns is shocking, though not to Israelis who have become inured to the sight. Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Knesset members are often ex-generals. The surplus of soldiers is being used as teacher’s aides, which exposes children to guns and uniforms at an early age.
At 40-45 military officers can retire and many become teachers, principals, and this in turn offers unlimited access of the military to schools. These teachers take students on week-long boot camps, and then to Auschwitz. Thus, Hiller argues, indoctrination and militarization begin in childhood. And she points out that the arms industry is the largest industry in Israel and so even in employment the militarization continues.
From childhood through retirement, the main business of Israelis is war-related and, despite prevailing views, this only serves to make Israel less secure. Hiller observes, “in attempting to create a safe haven for Jews, we’ve succeeded in making this the most dangerous place for Jews.”
Hiller notes a disturbing trend in shutting down public discussion of militarization. New Profile was recently targeted by the government. Eleven members were interrogated, four had PC’s confiscated, and all were slapped with a ban on talking to political associates for 30 days. New Profile has since moved their website to Europe.
“This is the way, the other way leads to nowhere”
June 1, 2009
Each day of this trip has felt like a week. This was no different. We left East Jerusalem this morning and traveled into the West Bank to a small office in which a German film crew were setting up cameras. Our dialog with the speakers was about to be filmed.
Our meeting this morning took place with two men from an organization called Combatants for Peace. We were here to listen to Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, both of whom had lost daughters to political violence. Aramin’s daughter was killed by an Israeli soldier’s rubber bullet, Elhanan’s by a suicide bomber.
Aramin began by sketching a typical progression to Palestinian radicalism, from trying to display the Palestinian flag at 13, to throwing rocks, to reaching for the gun at 16, to ending up in an Israeli prison at 17.
During this time, as with many Palestinians in Israeli jails, he had the chance to study and reflect. He recalls watching a Holocaust movie and initially feeling a flush of hatred, seeing it as revenge on the Jews.
But then he began to see the parallels between Palestinians and Jews, and came to view the enemy with a certain degree of sympathy for their own historical suffering. He started talking with one of his jailers, and he describes the relationship they forged as strange, but a friendship nonetheless.
In 1992 he left prison and began to hear about Israeli refuseniks who wouldn’t serve in the Occupied Territories. In 2005 hear got a call from one of these ex-IDF soldiers and he describes their encounter as “the most difficult meeting of my life.”
But, Aramin went on, “we had a common enemy – the Occupation and fear.” In 2007 his daughter Amin was killed by a rubber bullet fired from 15 feet away by an IDF soldier. Aramin could have easily returned to violence, but instead he chose to pursue reconciliation.
Then Rami Elhanan spoke. He smiled softly at Aramin and said, “we have an alliance which is sealed by the blood of our daughters” and then told his own story.
A 7th generation Jerusalemite, Elhanan served in the 1973 war, lost friends in that war, and returned to normal Israeli life. In 1997 that life suddenly ended, and a new one began. His daughter Smadar went missing and was later confirmed dead in a suicide bombing on Ben Yehuda street.
A year went by, then Elhanan met Yitzhak Frankenthal, the founder of Parent’s Circle, a man that Elhanan had first pegged as a bigoted religious zealot but who instead turned out to be quite the mensch and one who changed his life. Later Elhanan recalled that Frankenthal was one of many people who had paid his condolences while the family sat shiva for his daughter.
Like his Palestinian counterpart Elhanan could easily have chosen revenge, but instead chose reconciliation. “This is the way, the other way leads to nowhere,” he said simply.
Both Elhanan and Aramin believe the ultimate problem is the Occupation, an injustice that serves as the fountain from which much of the violence springs. “The occupation must stop,” Elhanan said.
Combatants for Peace now has 600 members, 50 are quite active, and the organization includes men and women, Jews and Palestinians, in equal measure. Members have given over 1000 lectures in Israeli high schools. “We show something not popularized in the media,” Elhanan said, referring to how little Americans know of peace groups in Israel. “This is our main activity – to make people lose their indifference.”
Both men said that since the Second Intifada, 7000 people have died and that doing nothing about it is a crime. Elhanan scoffed at Israel’s claims that the Palestinians have been the main obstacle to peace. “It’s very convenient to say there’s nobody to talk to, because if there’s no one to talk to there’s nothing to talk about – and nothing to give up.”
As we left, I asked both men if there was ever a moment they felt they were at a fork in the road, with one path leading to revenge, the other leading to peace. “God is testing us,” Aramin replied. For the more secular Elhanan reconciliation was the only way to be able to get out of bed in the morning.
For both men there is only the one path.
The PA does PowerPoints
June 1, 2009
Later in the morning we met in the Red Crescent offices with a crisply dressed Palestinian Authority representative who gave us his own views on what he regards as a lopsided U.S. relationship with Israel. He introduced himself but requested that we not quote him by name.
Our speaker discussed the U.S. role in the peace process, one he regarded as being in bad faith and biased. He talked about the massive aid the U.S. gives Israel, some of which is in violation of international and even U.S. laws prohibiting aid to countries which commit human rights abuses. And he discussed military aid to the Palestinian Authority.
There were no real surprises in any of the PowerPoints. And perhaps that was the point – that Americans really don’t have much to fear from people who present their views in the most boring of ways.
Our host pointed out that, despite Israel’s presence and its continued theft of land in Palestine, it does nothing and pays nothing to provide any services for Palestinians. Those services, instead, are provided by thousands of NGO’s, many European, which results in a lot of duplication of effort. Some of these efforts, he maintained, were sweet and well-intentioned (such as promoting reconciliation or vague notions of peace), but what Palestine really needed was a well-funded government that could truly provide services for its people. And that just wasn’t happening.
The PA representative criticized the PA’s bloated bureaucracy which at one point employed 170,000 people, 30,000 of which were security forces. But he also said that the PA is now being better and more professionally managed although it still needs much more work.
He was dismissive of Hamas’ commitment to democracy, even while participating in elections. With Hamas, “democracy is a one time thing.” It’s what God says; it’s not what people want.” This was a pretty tame criticism of the same party that had attacked the PA the day before in Qalqilyah, killing three police officers.
Regarding the Two State solution, our host was generally optimistic. He felt that such a solution had to come about within two years or else it would plunge Palestine into a violent Third Intifada. Our host proposed that, if the world had any concerns about security between Israel and Palestine that West European (not American) forces might be put in place to ensure peace between the two nations.
I came away from this discussion realizing how difficult the PA’s position is. On the one hand, it is seen as a thin veneer of the Israeli occupation – one many Palestinians see as similar to, say, the Vichy regime. On the other, it numbers many who regard themselves as patriots trying to build the infrastructure of a new Palestinian state.
Of Martyrs and Morons
June 1, 2009
Later in the afternoon we are touring Bi’lin, where the construction of the so-called “Separation Barrier” is the site of ongoing clashes between protestors and the IDF, and the site of the recent killing of a Palestinian protestor, Bassem Abu Rahme, who has now joined a long list of “martyrs” in the struggle against Israeli encroachment.
We visit villager’s homes and watch a gruesome video of Bassem’s killing. In it, an Israeli peace activist is shot in the head with a rubber bullet and severely injured. Bassem stands up, screaming that an Israeli has been wounded, and then he himself is struck in the chest by another bullet fired at point-blank range. He is carried to an ambulance. A photographer makes sure to capture the extent of his wounds, and his lifeless body is transported away at high speed.
In the afternoon we take a walk out to the site, which is actually quite remote – even from the settlement which has taken Bi’lin’s land. I can’t help thinking that this young man’s killing was so unnecessary. It serves no purpose for the IDF to even engage them this far from anything.
We sit in the living room of one of the organizers of the Friday afternoon demonstrations, which they describe as non violent. And for the most part they are, although there is a certain amount of in-your-face shouting that no sane person would do to a man with a gun in his hands. But these are people with little left to lose. In the videos, the IDF at times appears to be quite restrained. Then, without warning, the rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, like the one that injured American visitor Tristan Anderson, begin flying in the video we are watching.
Our host’s 4 year-old daughter and her older brother walk through the living room holding the remnants of past confrontations, silver canisters and black bullets each about 4-5 inches in length, and passing out the DVD’s of Bassem’s killing, as they have probably done hundreds of times before for us “internationals.” Many of the young adults in the village have digital and video cameras. Many small children know how to use them. This is a land war that Israel cannot win. The Palestinians put themselves at risk, capture the photos and videos, and put them out on Flicker or YouTube. A poster of the newest martyr is placed on walls throughout his village, and the tale is told to a stream of visitors outside Israel.
Quite aside from being the army that did the impossible in the Six Day War, it suddenly occurs to me that the IDF is now being led by morons who don’t understand the public relations disaster that shooting people with cameras out in the boonies can create. And I think of the terrible cost that is being paid for this land grab – not only by the demonstrators who get themselves shot, but the children who are brought into the struggle at an early age, and even the soldiers who go home from their deployments and replay in their nightmares their shooting of unarmed civilians.
Visit with an American-Palestinian entrepreneur
June 2, 2009
We left Bi’lin and headed to the Friends Meeting in Ramallah, where we met with Sam Bahour, an American born in Youngstown, Ohio, who moved to Palestine in the Nineties with his family, in order to be the first Telcom giant in Palestine. He has a joint master’s degree from Northwestern and Tel Aviv University, which he attended specifically to cultivate Israeli business contacts after his arrival in Palestine.
The Oslo Accords have been a disappointment, and Bahour is still waiting for the telcom spectrum to open up in Palestine, but he is almost a giant at 6’6″. He is also someone extremely capable of explaining the Palestinian situation to Americans in their own language.
Bahour resents the portrayal of Palestinians as terrorists in Israel and the U.S. In a country where everybody’s a politician, divisions between Fatah and Hamas run deep. But Bahour thinks that the West should open up channels with all political entities in Palestine and should take at least a hands-off approach to Palestinian politics. Even though he is secular, Bahour acknowledges that even Hamas has political objectives. “[Hamas] is not a carload of bandits, it’s a constituency.”
In discussing the Occupation, Bahour says, “either we have the law of the jungle or international law.” Israel, says Bahour, completely violates international law in neglecting its obligations as an occupier toward its subjugated people. He also blames other nations, specifically the U.S., which have obligations to monitor the observance of international law by an ally.
Bahour dismisses American calls for Palestinian unity between Hamas and Fatah as a precondition for talking to Israel about its international law violations. “Our unity is none of your business.”
The expectation of a Two State solution, Bahour says, has succeeded only in prolonging the conflict and has virtually destroyed its likelihood of success. If it is to be successful, Palestinians will start a national timer (perhaps a couple of years) toward a deadline for two states, after which all options are “bad.”
“Non-options” include the status quo and transferring Palestinians to Jordan or Egypt, as Israeli hardliners have called for. “Options” within this time frame include the improvement of international support for a Two State solution under international law; transferring the occupation to a third state (in which the IDF is replaced by some other nation’s army); or “Israel wins and the national struggle changes overnight to a civil rights struggle.”
For the moment, Bahour says, the Palestinian Authority is a “fake layer” between the Occupation and the Palestinian people. In other words, the PA has the responsibility for pretending to be a government, while Israel maintains martial law throughout much of the West Bank.
Then what?
A month ago, Bahour and Geoffrey Lewis co-authored a piece in the Boston Globe called “Endgame Diplomacy for Mideast“. The piece calls on President Obama to carry out an intervention between Israel and Palestine along the lines of that in Northern Ireland. And Bahour predicts it will cost Obama some political capital, especially in Israel (see image below).
Bahour thinks that, while Hamas has a small constituency, some new entity must emerge to unify Palestinians, and it won’t be Fatah. “There’s not enough superglue to put Fatah back together again,” he joked. But he thinks this is a Palestinian problem, not an Israeli or American one.
Bahour called for Israel to dismantle the “security barriers” which serve no other purpose than to steal land. “Put it on your land, but not in my living room.” He criticized Israel’s arbitrary enforcement of even its own laws, and called on Israel to dismantle the illegal settlements.
And then he stretched, opening up the floor to questions with a smile. “Other than that, everything’s great!”
Birzeit: University under Occupation
June 2, 2009
After meeting with Sam Bahour, we had lunch and drove to Birzeit University in Ramallah. Originally a girl’s school, Birzeit graduated its first class in 1976. Our university guide, Omar Khoura, told us that student elections are often watched as early indicators of Palestinian social values.
The university has 8,500 students, 41 B.A. programs, and 25 masters level programs. Most students are Palestinians, with approximately 125-150 foreign students each year. Tuition is approximately $1600/year, or $2000 for more expensive programs such as Information Technology.
The university’s first president was deported in 1973 by Israel. From 2001 to 2003, during the First Intifada (1987–1991), the university was closed, and from 2001-2003 a road blockade prevented traffic from reaching the university. From 1979 to 1992 the university was shut down 60% of the time. In 1980 Israel used Military Order 854 to set curriculum, hire and fire faculty, and to control admissions, but this met with international condemnation and was eventually abandoned.
Students and faculty face unexpected challenges under Israeli Occupation. Foreign faculty are routinely deported or denied entry. Even a visiting American professor can use his 3-month visa only once, and it is not quite long enough to be a guest lecturer for an entire semester. A student who wishes to do graduate work in the United States also has some unusual problems. To obtain a student visa, students have to travel to Jerusalem. But residents of Ramallah cannot enter Jerusalem, so the U.S. consulate visits Ramallah periodically or forwards a written request to Israel. If, at the end of all this red tape, a student is accepted in a U.S. graduate program, he or she may not leave Israel via Ben Gurion airport but must travel to Jordan, a more complicated route that adds 2-3 days to the trip because of checkpoints.
Khoura added that a whole generation of students has never been to Jerusalem and never seen the Mediterranean because of laws restricting movement of Palestinians.
After speaking with Khoura we toured the library and university art gallery where I saw a beautiful painting, Jerusalem, by Suleiman Mansour. We then peeked into classrooms and wandered around the campus before our dinner with Hebrew University students.
Hebrew University students
June 2, 2009
Four Hebrew University students joined us for dinner and we talked for quite a while before and after dinner.
Elinor was studying international relations and was interested in Arab dialog, as was Aviad. Elad was a Likudnik who described himself as a “cave man” in comparison to the others, and Rona talked about the “hallucinating Left” and the “Tel Aviv bubble.”
No matter what their politics, all four feared the Arab armies and their “tool,” the Palestinians – a theme we would see over and over again.
Some of us had protracted conversations with one of the students. I ended up discussing a software project of Aviad’s which would let Palestinians and Israelis engage in discussions over the internet.
Although we mainly discussed the mechanics of software design, it seemed so sad that such discussions could not take place face-to-face.
“This is all Jewish property”
June 3, 2009
Today we visited the H2 section of Hebron which is connected to the Kiryat Arba settlement. We entered H2 from Kiryat Arba, which is an illegal settlement under international law. But H2 contains settlements which are illegal even under Israeli law, such as the Hazon David settlement shown in my photo.
We met with David Wilder, the English-speaking representative of the Hebron Jewish community. Wilder was all business, taking us into the settlement’s museum which documented the 1929 Hebron massacre, in which 67 Jews were slaughtered by an angry Arab mob.
Wilder did not mention the 1994 Hebron massacre in which an American-Israeli, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Muslims who were praying in a mosque and wounded over 100 with an automatic rife and grenades, but most in our delegation knew of the community’s reputation and were simply there to listen to, not confront, Wilder.
The Jewish presence in Hebron goes back to Abraham, who bought a crypt for his family there. The Cave of Machpelah is housed within the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the oldest Jewish holy site and perhaps the second most important to Jews. The tomb was built by Herod using the same construction methods as the temple in Jerusalem. No one was arguing with Wilder on that one.
Besides, he was packing a pistol.
Wilder reviewed the history of Jewish presence in Hebron. In 1540 Sephardim built a synagogue there. In the 1800’s Chabadniks arrived, and in 1928 Lithuanian Jews came too. Relationships between Jews and Arabs soured in the Twenties, and the Haganah attempted to arm the Jewish citizens, but they refused the weapons, believing they were safe. Wilder credits Arab incitement and deceit to the massacre which occurred in August 1929. In 1931, he continued, Jews returned, again in 1967. “We came back home,” he said.
Wilder wanted to make sure he got his points across before any questioning. Main point. Why we are here. The roots of Monotheism – well, actually, the Jewish roots of monotheism (Abraham was not really being portrayed as the father of both people). And then from Jewish beginnings, Jewish renewal. Jews had to come back to reclaim Hebron. “We all know what happens when you take a tree and cut off its roots.”
And then, as if he had failed to make his point: “This is all Jewish property.”
Wilder went on to debunk the notion that a community of 400 living in a compound protected by 2,500 IDF troops and at war with 180,000 Arab residents of Hebron might be tad zealous. “The kids here live ideals,” he explained.
Then Wilder explained that Israel was at war with terrorism, that Arabs in Palestine were tools of the great Arab armies, no different from al Qaeda. And now we had received this same analysis from every political color on the Israeli spectrum.
He viewed U.S. calls for peace as tantamount to acquiescence to terror, and claimed that Islamists were planning to take over the U.S. capital. He recommended a video, Farewell Israel, which paints a view of the inevitable clash of civilizations between Islam and everyone else.
Wilder continued, that all European nations are afraid of Islamists, making little distinction between Islamists and Muslims. Then came the big surprise: “U.S. Jews are petrified of Obama” (even though 78% of all American Jews voted for the president).
It was all certainly interesting, but I concluded that Wilder lives in a bubble.
We took a peek into the community’s compound then went on a tour of Hebron’s Old Souk, the Arab market. Walking around, the town resembled a war zone. Every square inch of H2 was patrolled by the IDF. Arab homes had windows broken regularly by settlers, who regularly rain down trash and garbage on the market. Nets and cages have been built to catch the debris and to prevent injury. Arab homes have been torched, and only those with yellow license plates (Jews) can drive on the main street.
Later we met with Donna Hicks from Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization which provides escorts to Palestinian children, monitors settler violence, and intervenes in military invasions of Palestinians homes. Hicks explained that it is impossible to be neutral in the face of such oppression and they are not there in the same capacity as the international observers who also roam Hebron’s streets. Hicks described Hebron as a microcosm of the Occupation.
“It’s the Wild West”
June 4, 2009
On the last day of our tour we met in suburban Jerusalem with Ronen Shimoni from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
B’Tselem was established in 1989 by academics and politicians who thought it would only be necessary for 10-20 years. B’Tselem’s goal was originally to pressure Israel to respect international law during its Occupation. But, as the human rights situation has not improved, B’Tselem sees its work continuing long into the future.
Shimoni outlined B’Tselem’s structure, the work it does, the number of field workers, and some of the challenges it has faced. To Shimoni the main problem is that the Occupation has been carried out completely arbitrarily, with no regard to rights or law. “There is no law. It’s the Wild West.”
Theoretically the IDF is supposed to carry out internal investigations whenever there are complaints of abuse by soldiers. But investigations are either never done, investigators never travel to the scene, or serious human rights abuses are seen as minor disciplinary infractions. A case in point was the shooting of a handcuffed, blindfolded teenager in Ni’ilin who had been detained at an emotional funeral that the IDF regarded as a riot.
Because of B’Tselem, villagers had received cameras they could use to document the abuses, and the shooting was captured on video. Settler violence has also been documented in this way.
The case is now closed. The IDF soldier was demoted for “inappropriate conduct.”
The same problem exists in civilian courts. A case brought to civilian courts by B’Tselem, documented with a video showing Ze’ev Braude of Kiryat Arba shooting two Palestinians at close range was recently dismissed despite the powerful evidence.
Administrative detentions are another serious issue, says Shimoni. Palestinians can be picked up for “suspicion,” with no reason given, even to a lawyer. Detentions can be as short as 18 days, or as long as 6 months, but can be automatically renewed. This, says Shimoni, is a legacy of British colonial martial laws. At the moment there are about 459 under administrative detention, some who have been there for 4-5 years. Administrative detention has even been applied, in rare cases, against Israeli Jews. And then there are thousands of Palestinians in prison for relatively minor infractions, such as rock throwing and demonstrating.
Recently B’Tselem has done a lot of work documenting human rights abuses it regards as war crimes during the Gaza invasion. But it is no surprise that Israel’s suppression of Gaza was so violent, Shimoni says. After Israel unilaterally evacuated settlers from Gaza, it was declared an “enemy state”.
We asked Shimoni how such institutional problems could exist, why the IDF appears to be so undisciplined, and why settlers seem to have such power in relationship to the government. Shimoni gave us an interesting explanation.
Settler councils function as massive lobby groups, and receive a lot of support from Jewish communities in the United States. Because most Israeli citizens serve in the military, there are a lot of connections between people in the IDF and civilian entities. There are many “gentleman’s agreements” between the IDF and settler groups, such as the one in Hebron that permits the illegal (even by Israeli law) Hazon David settlement from being torn down. The Israeli government has official settlement policies that are tepid versions of some of the actions that settlers carry out, so even when cases come to a court, rarely are the punishments more than a wrist slap.
All this, Shimoni says, contribute to Israel’s arbitrary (or non) enforcement of laws.
So for Palestinians, Israel is the “Wild West” and they’re the Indians. Or as Sam Bahour put it, they are subjected to the “law of the jungle.”
Shimoni was asked if Israel was an apartheid state. He answered the question by saying that the closest analogy was what China is doing in its occupation of Tibet through martial law and the settlement of large numbers of Han people in Tibet.
Parting thoughts
June 6, 2009
After being back for a few days my niece Pamela, always one to get to the heart of any matter, asked me what the “take-away” message from my trip was.
That’s a tough one I couldn’t answer in the tiny IM message box before me. I promised I’d think about it.
In Israel and Palestine we met a lot of really good, decent people on both sides of the checkpoints (since we cannot speak of borders) – people who just want to live without fear in their own country. But it was very clear to us from what we saw with our own eyes, and to most of those we listened to on both sides, that the Occupation was unjust, illegal, and arbitrary.
To Palestinians a forty-year occupation has meant the frustration of their own national aspirations, a fact totally lost on Israelis who, almost without exception, regard them as simply terrorist tools of great, massing Arab armies. The number of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza, and the degree of discrimination against Arabs in even Israel proper, leaves no question that Israel is a racist society. Since returning from Israel, the Obama speech in Cairo has let loose a torrent of racist and xenophobic rage in Israel (see this video or this article, for example). Even with a Two State solution, Israel will be grappling with these issues internally for decades, just as we – even with an African-American president – continue to do.
There is no question that violent elements from both the Palestinian and Israeli worlds exist – and that includes often-forgotten Israeli state terror – but Israel has long been given a free pass in the West, while Arabs have been demonized. Obama’s Cairo speech encouraged the Palestinian mainstream, most of whom are fairly moderate. But if Obama fails to deliver on a Two State solution, almost every Palestinian we talked to predicted a violent Third Intifada.
Take-away insights? Things I didn’t know before?
First, Israel-Palestine is a tiny land, far smaller than I had thought. You can be in the Negev in the morning and the Galilee in the afternoon. In the mountains in Galilee you can see halfway across the country.
Second, the Occupation is far worse than anyone can imagine. The system of checkpoints and what some call the “matrix of control” can only be described as totalitarian rule. And Israel’s gotten quite good at it over 41 years.
Third, the amount of militarization in Israel is frightening. Americans notice it immediately, but Israelis are used it, and it pervades every aspect of society – from the defense industries which are Israel’s number one product, to teacher’s aides in their military uniforms. Everywhere you see soldiers with their automatic rifles, settlers with pistols and uzis – even at a political demonstration against Obama in Jerusalem some of us observed. And those are just the external manifestations.
Fourth – and this is just my own view as an American Jew, Israel has managed to pervert its own state religion. When Hillel was asked to summarize Judaism while standing on one foot, he is famously said to have replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” But nothing is left of Hillel’s Judaism in Israel. The Occupation has become a giant land grab. The Torah (never mind the Talmud) prohibits the destruction of fruit or food-bearing trees even in wartime: “When you shall besiege a city a long time, and wage war to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against fruit trees… Only the trees which you know are not trees for food, you may destroy and cut them down to build siege machinery against the city waging war with you.” (Deut. 20:19-20). And yet this is a common tool to destroy Palestinian orchards. In amending its Law of Return to permit non-Jewish Europeans to immigrate to Israel (as almost a million Russians are) for no other reason than to displace Arabs, Israel has further undermined its own Jewishness. Zionism has largely replaced Judaism as the state religion.
Fifth, there are serious contradictions between a state that is in part secular and sees itself as democratic, yet in all aspects discriminates against its non-Jewish (or not Jewish-enough Conservative or Reform) citizens. Secular Jews hate the ultra-religious and visa versa. Ashkenazim despise the Ethiopians and prefer to settle them in the Negev. Everybody hates the Arabs, making little distinction between Christians or Muslims. And most Jews, even the secular, find little wrong with laws which give priority to them, while discriminating against everyone else. Israel’s 22 political parties betray the reality of a highly fragmented, dysfunctional society. One person we talked to offered the view that Israel’s common enemy, the Palestinians, and fear were the only things holding the country together.
Sixth: Is Israel an Apartheid state? All its laws, checkpoints, transit and auto licenses, restriction of movement, economic subsidies for settlements, ghettoization, and institutionalized racism sure suggest that it is. And many progressive Israelis actually do refer to it in this way. But it also resembles the United States of 200 years ago in the way we treated American Indians. Massive developments slice into Arab towns, while military laws, transparently racist “environmental” laws, and selective enforcement of building codes are all used against Palestinians to take more and more of their land. Whether you call them “bantustans,” “cantons,” or “reservations,” the words are less important than the reality.
Lastly: What are the prospects for peace? I came away with the feeling that only international pressure on Israel to observe international law and to return to something close to the 1967 borders will ever create peace. We are at a very good point in history, in which the right-wing government of Netanyahu and Lieberman has really spelled out its policies quite clearly: no home for the Palestinians and continued persecution of them. They want an abstract notion of peace, but without justice. The amount of racist rhetoric in Israel has grown quite loud of late, and the world now has a much better idea of just who the main obstacle to peace is. And the United States is going to be critical in creating a Palestinian state. A Palestinian state is essential to peace in the region. It is in our American interests to have peace with the Arab world, and it simply has to be done – despite the objections of a far-right Israeli government and its supporters in the United States.
Many people are pessimistic about a Two State solution, and many feel that the entire land should become a secular state of Palestine. I am not one of them. The realities that created Israel left a traumatized population, still hunkering down behind their gates and security barriers, still shaking over every international slight, still associating any criticism with anti-Semitism, still living in their own ghettos. I don’t see any way for them to live with Palestinians for many years. And they say this themselves. Palestinians, for their part, want – and have always wanted – a state of their own. Like Jews, they have their own traditions and they will likewise need some time to develop their own democratic institutions – separate from those in Israel that occupied them for 60 years.
As far as land swaps and the status of settlements go, these are things that will have to be negotiated by the parties themselves. But I do believe that massive settlements like Ma’ale Adumim, which stab into the West Bank and which were designed for no other purpose than to destroy the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state, should be dismantled. Maybe, to avoid humanitarian issues, the settlers could continue to live there for 10-20 years under some international agreement or lease arrangement. After all, Israel already leases land in Jordan. This issue is going to require some creative thinking and less ideological intransigence. Perhaps the tens of billions we currently give Israel for military aid could instead be placed in escrow to aid both countries’ resettlement efforts.
I hope Obama’s words prove to be more than flowery speech, and I am cautiously optimistic that in my lifetime we will see the end of this nightmare.
“I was taught from infancy that the Jewish people never existed merely in order to exist, we never survived just to survive, we never just carried on in order to carry on. Jewish existence has always been directed upward: not just to the Father, the King, up in the heavens, but up toward the great human calling.”
I just finished reading Avraham Burg’s book, The Holocaust is over: We must rise from its ashes. Allan Brownfield has written a good review of the book for those who want a quick summary of its 242 pages. Burg’s book, as the title suggests, alludes to the use of the Shoah to justify Israel’s human rights abuses, and Burg documents this in painful ways. But his stories are also filled with amusing insight into how the Shoah has been packaged into a common, unifying, one-size-fits-all, Jewish experience – for example, the anecdote about a Iraqi Jewish friend who experiences the Holocaust “all over again” on a business trip to Poland. Other stories, like the one of his father’s involvement in the Eichmann trial, in which he pictures Jews having replaced Eichmann in his bulletproof defendant’s box, are the keen observations of an insider who grew up in Rehavia, an old Yekke neighborhood in Jerusalem.
Those expecting a trivialization of the Holocaust will be disappointed. From Burg’s stories of his family, neighbors, and friends, it is indeed remarkable how many Israelis have had direct experience of camps or fleeing for their lives. These are woven into the fabric of the book, but he prefers to bring his readers a different message.
The working title of the book was “Hitler Won.” This angrier viewpoint is indeed embedded within Burg’s pages, but he ends the book by calling – a view he credits to his mother – for a more universal love of humanity which conquers fear and suffering: the “courage of love.”
Burg’s book is really about two Jews. One is represented by his father Yosef, a reserved German-Jewish scholar and government official who witnessed the collapse of a world in which Jews played a major part. The other is his sensitive mother, Rivka, a Sephardic Jew from Hebron, whose family was wiped out in the massacres of 1929. What they represent, of course, is the cosmopolitan, progressive Jew with a connection to Judaism’s humanistic values, and the traumatized Zionist, still reliving the Holocaust and finding in Zionism a kind of “survivalist” Judaism, a worldview we can find today in Israel and in Zionist organizations in the United States.
These two Jews have always existed. Abraham and David. Heine and Jabotinsky. Buber and Kook. Maybe even Hillel and Shammai. This is why we are continually searching for clues about who we are and what Judaism really means.
According to Henry Nichols, U.S. torture and suspension of legal protections is “minor” compared to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and North Korea. Nichols, describing one of his own violent fantasies in which he throws the Guantanamo detainees in the ocean and chums the waters, demonstrates just how aberrant and repulsive torture is and the depths of the souls from which torture is even thinkable. This is the “minor” cost of torture.
Besides revealing something of the psychology of those who think torture and civilized society can somehow coexist, Nichols goes on to trowel on a bunch of nonsense about both the detainees and their rights. He still maintains they are the worst of the worst, yet are being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, even being paid for their work. Unfortunately, 99% of these detainees (who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place when the Northern Alliance picked them up, never had any connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Of the 877 housed in Guantanamo, only 3 have ever been convicted of anything.
I would like to see Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, Maj. General Geoffrey Miller, and any of the Attorneys General (or even congressmen and congresswomen) who played a role or looked the other way brought to account for their participation in illegal detentions, torture, and extreme rendition. Photos of this treatment must go on public record, along with honest assurances that this will never happen again. In addition, all remaining detainees should receive trials in civilian courts – which have actually had a better track record in convicting terrorists than secret military tribunals. President Obama is making a huge mistake in trying to sweep all this under the carpet, as his predecessor did. A Special Investigator should be appointed to get to the bottom of this dark chapter of our history.
Those, like Mr. Nichols, who scoff at the severity of U.S. torture methods, or who think “it could never happen here” delude themselves and should be given the opportunity to experience waterboarding personally before declaring it so “minor”. Torture and contravention of the Constitution has happened here. We need to confront this reality and make sure it remains anathema to our (not always observed, but at least professed) democratic values.
Bob Unger gets a lot of it right in his essay on education (“Our nation has lost its edge”) in Sunday’s Opinion page. He asks what has changed from the decades of relatively good public education in the Fifties and Sixties, and concludes that it is the loss of a national mission toward excellence in education. However, Mr. Unger’s prescription for thousands of fresh-faced Harvard and Yale grads dedicating themselves to teaching is a little too “Hollywood” for my taste. Haven’t we seen Hillary Swank in “Freedom Writers”, or any number of movies in which a single, caring teacher turns around the lives of students in an uncaring institution? It’s the teacher version of “High Noon”.
Teachers alone, even a legion of them, cannot pull us out of the educational gutter we have thrown ourselves in. Our failures in education are less the result of single working moms and penurious taxpayers, and more the result of a general devaluation of education and literacy, as well as poor choices and self-delusion.
Our poor choices are reflected in the piles of money we throw at education without understanding the value we receive in return. Large proportions of educational budgets are spent on children with severe injuries and medical conditions who are housed in special care facilities where they receive medical, not educational, services. We pour money into acres and acres of football and soccer facilities sited on costly pieces of real estate. We are obliged by federal law to build computer labs with a certain number of workstations per student where, often without regard for how these resources should be used, children can Twitter and plagiarize from online versions of books that have long since disappeared from the stacks of libraries.
We delude ourselves by thinking our children can compete with those from other nations when they attend school 60 to 90 fewer days a year. Taxpayers and the school boards they elect delude themselves by thinking they can compete while they cut AP and enrichment programs, the arts, school days, school weeks, and even school years. Communities delude themselves by thinking that the little bumps in standardized test scores are really measures of success. While they read their Excel spreadsheets looking at financial tea leaves, qualitatively the schools continue their decline because the primary mission of education has long been abandoned to Quality Assurance metrics and proper business management techniques. The parents think that the experts have everything under control. The politicians have better things than education to fund, such as wars. And the students themselves, not easily deceived, know quite well that they are being cheated, scammed, and relegated to second-rate futures.
Add to this the general abandonment of a social contract which should commit us to the care of the next generation’s future, as we benefitted from the care of a previous generation, and you have all the ingredients for educational decline.
Who am I calling Neo-Nazis? Geert Wilders or the Florida synagogue leaders who invited him? The proper answer is: both.
On April 28, 2009, Geert Wilders brought his hate speech to the Orthodox Palm Beach Synagogue in Palm Beach, Florida. In the speech, Wilders went through his usual laundry list of hate-filled views, including his claim that “Islam is not a religion” and “the right to religious freedom should not apply to this totalitarian ideology called Islam,” all to the applause of the audience. Wilders also called for stopping immigration from Muslim countries and urged “voluntary repatriation” to those countries. A video of the speech can be viewed online.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on members of the Jewish community to condemn Wilder’s hate speech: > A synagogue should be the last place that Geert Wilders’ Nazi-like propaganda would find a warm reception,” said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “Members of the Jewish community know all too well what happens when a religious minority is demonized by demagogues. Wilders uses the same scurrilous attacks on Muslims and Islam that the Nazis used against German Jews and Judaism in the 1930s.
Here’s the congregation that defiled their own sanctuary with sinat chinam:
Rabbi Moshe Scheiner Palm Beach Synagogue 120 North County Rd. Palm Beach, FL 33480 +1 (561) 838-9002 pbsynagogue@bellsouth.net
In his letter of March 24th (“A disconnect in the dialog“) David Cohen makes a strange interpretation of my criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, claiming that such criticisms “demonize and objectify” that country, thus introducing his own disconnect in whatever dialog he hopes for. Yet Israel can blame only itself, not its critics, for the world’s disapprobation.
I had pointed out how deftly Mr. Cohen, the ADL, and the Jewish Federation had managed to change the subject from Gaza to anti-Semitism. Mr. Cohen saw this as “writing off [my Jewish friends and neighbors] as genocidal partners of an apartheid state.” I’m not in the habit of using such incendiary rhetoric, but friends can disagree.
Cohen goes on that the Jewish Holocaust is singular in history. I wish he were right, but of course there is the Armenian genocide – which his own employer, the ADL, actually denied. And there have been many more, starting with King David’s slaughter of the Amelekites and including genocides in our own lifetimes in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.
There is nothing singular about the human capacity of violence, injustice and brutality. And it is indeed shocking, after all Jews have endured through the centuries, that a Jewish state could be guilty of human rights abuses. But it’s a fact, and one that Mr. Cohen wants to filter through “lenses,” explain by past persecutions, and diminish by assigning equal blame to oppressor and oppressed.
I’ll happily accept Mr. Cohen’s challenge to acknowledge that not every violent act is Israel’s fault. Israelis in Sderot are justifiably frightened from countless home-made rocket attacks that have killed several civilians.
But does this mean any sensible person must assign equal blame to both parties? Do Palestinians have racist policies that take Israeli homes and land? Did Palestinians kill 1500 Israelis in the Gaza offensive? Do Palestinians control Israel’s borders and internal checkpoints in their own land? Did Palestinians build a “Berlin Wall” on Israeli farms? There are fundamental injustices underlying this conflict that have yet to be acknowledged by Israel’s defenders and professional lobbyists, of which Mr. Cohen is one.
I would in turn challenge Mr. Cohen to acknowledge the reality and Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinian “catastrophe,” the Nakba, which “cleansed” 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. But Cohen seems to believe that dialog is only possible if no one criticizes Israel or asks it to confront some ugly realities.
In fact, the Nakba is a fitting event to consider next month at Passover, which re-tells the story of persecution and the flight from oppression. Recalling both the Exodus and the Nakba, we are reminded us that oppression is universal and that when our religious texts call on us to pursue justice: “justice, justice shalt thou pursue” – it means justice for everybody. On Passover some Jews add an olive to the seder plate to remind us that Jewish history is forever linked with that of Palestinians, and neither people will be truly free until justice exists for both.
Mr. Cohen may talk that line, but let’s see him walk it. There will never be peace without justice, and justice requires some painful admissions that, as of yet, Israel’s defenders are not prepared to make.
I am responding to Bob Unger’s essay of March 8th, in which the Standard-Times apparently took some flak for a Danziger cartoon and a few letters opposing Israel’s siege in Gaza. With very little effort, a delegation from the Jewish Federation and David Cohen, who works for a number of pro-Israel lobbying organizations including the ADL, succeeded in convincing the paper that the problem was anti-Semitism.
How easily the subject can be changed.
The subject, in this case, being the illegal and (a number of us would say) immoral treatment of Palestinians in Israel’s Occupied Territories.
The descriptions of Unger’s friend’s father sleeping with a packed suitcase under the bed indeed strikes a chord with many Jews who regard Israel as their rainy-day policy. Of course, sleeping with a suitcase under the bed also is a current reality for Palestinians who never know when their homes will be bulldozed. But the world has changed much in 60 years. A couple weeks ago “Waltz with Bashir,” a film based on an Israeli soldier’s nightmares resulting from his involvement in the Sabra-Shatila massacres in Lebanon in the 80’s, almost took an academy award for best animation. Military “refuseniks” regularly decline to serve in the Occupied Territories. In 2007, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, wrote a book which appeared last year in English, “The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes.” This is the counterpoint to Mr. Unger’s editorial and, more importantly, suggests the tremendous ethical turmoil Israelis are grappling with in confronting their society and their history.
But for American pro-Israel groups like the Federation or the ADL, it doesn’t matter that Israel is now the most powerful military nation in the Middle East, the only nation in the region to have nuclear weapons, and has both the ear and the purse of the United States. David has become Goliath and yet these organizations still think of Israel as a nation of helpless refugees of three generations ago.
The cartoon which partly prompted the delegation’s complaints was indeed in poor taste and does not adequately depict the politics of Netanyahu or Livni, although Lieberman publicly urged that Gaza should be destroyed completely like Grozny was by the Russians, and that Arab members of the Knesset should be killed – so Danziger had him pegged correctly. As for Netanyahu, his party flatly rejects a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River and so Palestinians must either remain in a quasi-Apartheid state, or be forcibly deported. Not quite as bad as Lieberman, but bad enough. And none of the three candidates seemed particularly appalled by the massive loss of life in Gaza. So maybe Danziger didn’t have it so very wrong after all.
For the ADL to whine to the Standard Times about anti-Semitism is the very definition of the term “chutzpah.” The ADL itself has been criticized by Jewish peace groups for actually defending Avigdor Lieberman’s racist attacks on Israeli Arabs.
Cultural understanding is already alive and well in this community. Any visitor to Buttonwood Park will see Abe Landau’s arm with its concentration camp number on the Holocaust memorial there. Avahath Achim is among the oldest synagogues in New England. A charter school is operating in the Tifereth Israel building. Jews have been well integrated into our region’s and American life for centuries. Jonathan Sarna’s excellent history, “American Judaism” from the Yale Press, paints a fairly positive portrait of Jewish acceptance in America since the earliest Sephardic Jews arrived with the Dutch. In the Truro Synagogue, you can read a wonderful letter from George Washington stating that this is a country of all faiths – a letter that Washington wrote to all 24 of the nation’s Jewish congregations at the time. The suitcase under the bed has been unnecessary in this country for hundreds of years.
The dispute over Palestine is a political and territorial issue which has less to do with Jew versus Muslim than occupied versus occupier. It is an issue which demands more attention to justice, human rights, and international law than to exploring our feelings or singing Kumbaya (or Hatikvah). If anything, we’ve been a bit remiss in the cultural or historical understanding of Palestinians.
What is interesting now is that the Obama administration has sent a number of signals indicating a new, more balanced, approach in dealing with the Arab world – and pro-Israel supporters don’t like it a bit. This, I suspect, not simply the cartoon, is what truly upsets pro-Israel flag-wavers, fixated on persecutions of the past, in which every affront means an existential threat or anti-Semitism.
Friends of Israel have been a little touchy about the upcoming UN Review Conference on racism” nicknamed “Durban II”), dubbed Durban II, and its resolutions. Israel plans to boycott the conference and several of its friends, including the U.S. and Canada, have stepped back considerably from endorsing the conference. Although it will attend as an observer, the U.S. has abandoned efforts to continue to shape the draft resolutions. In doing so, the United States made the right decision, and for the right reasons.
The Durban II document blasts xenophobia toward foreigners in general terms. It mentions discrimination against immigrants without identifying particular nations. It deplores propaganda used against foreigners vaguely. It expresses shock at tribal and ethnic violence, once again without so much as a mention of a continent. The document says that militias should not be used to terrorize minorities – where? It suggests that victims of slavery might have some justification for seeking recourse to reparations (a view which President Obama has opposed). It complains that the global War against Terror has given rise to racial profiling and human rights abuses, including spying on people in their places of worship. If this had been a much shorter document of universal principles, it would have meant the same thing to all countries.
But on about the 8th page the document dutifully deplores the Holocaust, then launches into a full page of criticisms of Israel. The word “Zionism” does not appear in any draft resolution (despite distortions by Israel and its policy defenders in the U.S.) and only the facts of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as its discrimination toward its own Arab citizens, are condemned. The document criticizes Israel’s “Law of Return” as a racial law, which is indisputable since the law pertains only to Jews or in-laws of Jews. And who can rationally dispute the facts of Israel’s occupation – facts documented for decades? Everything on that page was true.
But Israel is the only country that is specifically singled out for criticism, and for all the committee-generated verbiage, the Durban II document lacks the courage to target any specific human rights abuses other than those in Palestine and Israel. There are also quite a few missed opportunities. On about page 16 it calls for an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation, but fails to identify the countries with the worst records of persecution of gays (Iran and Saudi Arabia come to mind). The document goes on to encourage the recognition of international bodies and discusses UN procedures and bodies, but in none of the remaining 30 pages are any countries other than Israel ever mentioned by name.
It is regrettable that the United States decided to walk away from the draft process after several dozen revisions, but it did try. Other points might have been added to the document – expressions of concern for the treatment of native people in the U.S., Brazil and Tibet, or concern for the persecution of Uighurs in China might have been added. The treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in Islamic countries, Venezuela, the treatment of Baha’i or Kurds in various countries, or the treatment of foreign workers or religious minorities in Saudi Arabia, could all have been mentioned as well. Of course, by naming names and naming crimes for each of the 195 nations of the earth, the draft document would have been tens of thousands of pages long.
While Israel and several pro-Israel organizations in the United States rejoiced in the State Department’s seeming rejection of anti-Semitism, there is a more obvious truth: The Durban II document was simply a mess. In fact, the word “anti-Semitism” was absent from State Department spokesman Robert Wood’s explanation for the rejection of the document.
It may be true that the United States is not eager to pay reparations, doesn’t welcome criticism, and doesn’t want to criticize its friends – which includes not only Israel, but Saudi Arabia and China. But another truth is that the Durban II outcomes document, by failing to hold none of the nations of the world accountable for racism and human rights abuses (with the notable exception of one), is also a document that means nothing.
Another Islam-bashing event at Congregation Ahavath Torah in Stoughton, Massachusetts on February 27, 2009, courtesy of JTA, reprinted in the Baltimore Jewish Times. It truly irks me when Jews act like neo-Nazis:
STOUGHTON, Mass. (JTA) – In his home continent, Dutch politician Geert Wilders is something of a pariah, banned from the United Kingdom and facing prosecution in the Netherlands for his harsh views of Islam.
His calls to end immigration from Muslim countries and ban the Koran – he compared it to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and said it incites to violence – have earned him broad condemnation in Europe and forced him under the protection of a security detail, a rarity for Dutch leaders.
But in some quarters of the American Jewish community, Wilders is more akin to a hero. At the very least, he was greeted as such by about 250 people last week at a Conservative synagogue in this Boston-area town.
The boisterous crowd at the Ahavath Torah Congregation gave Wilders, who heads the Dutch Party for Freedom and serves in the parliament, a standing ovation and shouted “Bravo” at the conclusion of his speech.
In an event co-sponsored by the Middle East Forum’s Legal Project and the Republican Jewish Coalition, Wilders made his only synagogue appearance on his recent tour of the United States, where he appeared on cable news networks and radio talk shows, spoke at the National Press Club and held a private showing of his anti-radical Islam film “Fitna” for senators and their staff on Capitol Hill.
The Middle East Forum’s director, Daniel Pipes, said he doesn’t agree with Wilders that the Koran should be banned. But he does believe that Wilders should be able to publicly present that view, which is why his organization co-sponsored the talk and is raising funds for Wilders’ legal defense.
“I don’t need to agree with him to see the importance of him making his arguments,” Pipes said.
Wilders is among a small number of European political figures who have spoken out forcefully about the impact of Muslim immigration and what they see as a religion irrevocably at odds with Western values. In the Netherlands, renowned for its liberalism and tolerance, the debate has often been particularly fraught.
A former parliamentary colleague of Wilder’s, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was forced into hiding for her work on a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women. Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and Hirsi Ali’s partner, was murdered on an Amsterdam street in 2004. Pim Fortuyn, another Dutch politician outspoken about immigration and Islam, was murdered in 2002.
In Europe, where freedom of speech laws are generally more restrictive – Holocaust denial, for example, is widely outlawed – figures like Wilders have pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse. But in the United States, with its comparatively looser speech laws, the violence and intimidation directed at Islam’s harshest European critics is seen by some as allowing radical viewpoints to flourish.
“If our collective voice is impeded from speaking” or “shut down,” said Pipes, then “the way is paved for radical Islam to move ahead.”
Pipes says hate speech laws, which also have been used to prosecute Holocaust deniers in Europe, are a bad idea.
“I believe in the First Amendment,” he said.
Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks takes a similar position, saying that while he also opposes banning the Koran, he believes Wilders’ views should still be given a hearing.
“If we only had speakers we agree with 100 percent of the time, it would be a very small universe of speakers,” Brooks said.
Bjorn Larsen, whose International Free Press Society arranged Wilders’ U.S. tour, said the Dutch politician was invited personally by the rabbi at Ahavath Torah, Jonathan Hausman.
Hausman would not speak on the record to JTA about the event.
Security was tight in Stoughton, with bags being checked and guards for Wilders. After a showing of “Fitna,” Wilders said the Koran is being used as a justification for “hatred, terrorism and violence against the world,” and he outlined how he believes the rise of Islam in Europe is threatening the traditional Judeo-Christian values of the West.
A staunch supporter of Israel who once lived on a moshav, Wilders also proclaimed solidarity with the Jewish state.
Israel “is receiving the blows for all freedom-loving people,” he said. “We are all Israel. We have to defend our freedom.”
Wilders noted that while he was banned from the United Kingdom despite being a member of the Dutch parliament and carrying an E.U. passport., the head of Hezbollah was allowed to enter the country.
“This is Europe today,” he said.
There were no protests at Wilders’ speech – there was little advance publicity – and many in the crowd were sympathetic to his arguments. Andrew Warren of Sharon said he wanted to judge for himself whether Wilders is xenophobic, and said afterwards that Wilders had not crossed the line.
“The unfortunate reality is that a lot of troubling passages in the Koran are being embraced by militant ideology,” Warren said.
Louise Cohen of Brookline described Wilders as a hero and a man of courage.
“What’s disturbing to me is that no one has said that there is anything in his movie that is false,” she said.
While unaware of Wilders’ call to ban the Koran, Cohen said his film makes a case that the Koran is a hate document.
That view troubles Ron Newman, who said Wilders took certain verses from the Koran that appeared to promote violence and used them to generalize about all of Islam.
Saying that a similar approach could be used with portions of the Torah, Newman cautioned that the line of reasoning could be used to produce an anti-Semitic film.
“I don’t like that being done to us,” he said. “I don’t support people who do that to others.”
Nonetheless, as a staunch supporter of free speech, Newman said the attempt to squelch Wilders’ film and the refusal to allow him into Great Britain is a travesty.
In his recent letter defending Israel’s assault on Gaza, Irving Fradkin again maintains that Israel is blameless for human rights abuses which have received widespread international condemnation. He also attempts to sell Israel as a modern democracy as one reason for Americans to support it. Enough has been said about Gaza, but I would like to refute Dr. Fradkin’s rosy image of Israel as a democracy like ours with a few facts.
Dr. Fradkin claims that “Arabs and Israelis there have equal rights.” Perhaps this is just a Freudian slip, but Arab Israelis are Israelis. Palestinians in occupied territories clearly do not enjoy the same human rights as Israelis. However, Fradkin’s portrait of happy Arabs in Israel is totally distorted. Because of institutionalized racism, Arab Israelis do not have the same rights to own property or exercise freedom of speech or assembly. Wages for Arab citizens are 30% lower. Nor do Arabs now even have full electoral rights. Two weeks ago, the Central Elections Committee in Israel banned the Arab parties Ta’al and Balad from running in recent election. Avigdor Lieberman has openly called for revoking Arabs’ citizenship and called for “transfer” – forced deportations of Arabs. This is a more realistic picture of life for Arab Israelis.
Dr. Fradkin writes that Israel “wants peace and wants to share land peacefully with the Arabs.” But go to the Knesset’s website at http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/elikud_m.htm and look at the Likud’s platform: “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” Now look at a map and you’ll notice that all of the West Bank is west of the Jordan River. Where do Israeli hardliners want Palestinians to live? Jordan and Egypt. Forced deportations are not the same as peaceful sharing.
He writes “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” First of all, unlike Turkey, a secular democracy which Dr. Fradkin fails to mention, Israel is a theocracy: a “form of government which defers not to civil development of law, but to an interpretation of the will of a God as set out in religious scripture and authorities.” It has no constitution. Its laws are selectively enforced along racial and religious divisions – or ignored altogether. It has major human rights problems, including the use of torture. Israel has press censorship. If all this is a democracy, then let’s call Pakistan a democracy too.
For those who work for peace in Israel and Palestine, there are a number of strategies for applying pressure on Israel. Divestment is one, while boycotts and sanctions are others.
Divestments
Divestments can be divided into those concerning (1) Israeli businesses based on illegal settlements (such as the well-known cosmetics line, Ahava), (2) American or international companies whose products are used for oppressive means (for example, the militarized Caterpillar tractors used to bulldoze Palestinian homes), or (3) all Israeli companies. The Global BDS movement, for example, has demonstrated cases of companies which have been forced to move out of settlements into undisputed territory. I am generally supportive of divestments, but would caution against calls for divestment of all Israeli companies, particularly if their only crime is being a subsidiary of an international company. Of course, many of these international companies are subsidiaries of military contractors which profit enormously from continuing oppression and human suffering. This is a tricky area which needs some kind of litmus test.
Boycotts
Boycotts can similarly be divided into (1) academic, sports and cultural boycotts and (2) consumer boycotts. While I have read the arguments for restricting Israeli cultural connections with the U.S., “human” boycotts punish even progressive Israeli voices – athletes who want to promote peace, non-Zionist Israeli history professors, or Israeli film makers who try to depict the truth. We have already seen in the case of Tariq Ramadan, who was denied a visa to the United States to teach for a semester, or in the case of the Israeli tennis player Shahar Pe’er, how these forms of punishment can be applied to hurt individuals. I oppose punishing civilians for their government’s positions (Americans would be unable to travel anywhere if this were the case). I am opposed to any form of ideological purity tests applied to individuals, whether they are Avigdor Lieberman’s loyalty oaths for Arabs, or ways of exempting people with “correct” views from boycotts. We have had some experience with this in our own history. These were the HUAC hearings in the Fifties. I am certain this view differs from many who are working for peace in the Middle East.
Rather than limit the contact of Israelis in the United States, I would like to see the expansion of Palestinian contacts with the U.S. While www.pacbi.org makes some valid points about the exceptionally free access that Israelis, many of them dual-nationals, have in the United States, only stepped-up cultural and political contacts with Palestinians will counteract this. We need a more free exchange of ideas, not more restrictions on them. In the case of consumer boycotts, however, I believe that Israel must feel the pinch of the world’s disapproval of its policies, so I am in favor of boycotts of all Israeli products as long as the Occupation continues. This is something that does not target an Israeli citizen individually, but is something he has the power to change.
I believe that, as a political tactic, a boycott must be easily explained or understood to be adopted by the public. PACBI has issued a clarification of how to consider various types of boycotts. While this is a good start, it demonstrates the complexity of explaining cultural boycotts to the public.
Sanctions
Sanctions are perfectly justified, since Israel is in violation of so many international, U.S. export control, and even its own laws that we have lost count. There are many kinds of sanctions, among them: (1) military, (2) economic, and (3) diplomatic. Tactically, boycotts and divestments may distract us from concentrating on sanctions, which, to me, are the most powerful forms of demonstrating disapproval of Israel’s policies and actions. The most effective sanction we could apply is to completely withdraw all military aid from Israel. The United States has no business propping up any government which commits human rights abuses, whether it is in Pakistan, Egypt or Israel. For this reason, Americans must cut all military aid to Israel and eliminate economic cooperation projects, including cooperative energy programs.
Israel’s current military expenditures, the highest per capita in the world, are approximately $14 billion a year and roughly 7.3% of its GDP. Israel has over 150 defense industries, with revenues of $3.5 billion. Yet Americans are paying for between one-third and one-half of Israel’s military budget, or subsidizing Israel’s GDP by 2.5% or more. The only way to reverse Israel’s extreme right turn is to place these military burdens on their own shoulders. This can be a painful reminder to Israeli voters of how expensive their misadventures in the Occupied Territories have become (just like our own disaster in Iraq). In any case, Americans should not be responsible for bailing out Israel. In regard to diplomatic sanctions, however, it is not productive for any country (for example, Venezuela) to cut off relations with Israel. Peace only happens when enemies talk. And Israel has a lot of enemies. Besides, doesn’t it accomplish more to call in the Israeli ambassador weekly for a well-publicized dressing-down?
In a recent letter, Henry Nichols argues for keeping Guantanamo Bay open, wants to keep using torture, and complains that detainees moved to the US will be given trials on the mainland. For a former prison guard and policeman, Mr. Nichols displays an alarming contempt for the American legal system and our Constitution.
Nichols certainly favors the word “animal” to describe the detainees, but he apparently doesn’t know who they really are. According to a study of 517 detainees by Mark Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and legal counsel to two of them, only 8% of the detainees can be identified as al Qaeda fighters and only 5% had been arrested by US forces. 86% had been arrested “somewhere”, by “somebody”, for “something” – and that’s about all we have been told. Of course we want to keep really dangerous people locked up, but we really should know who they are first and what they are charged with. Many of the lawyers like Denbeaux who have defended detainees have expressed their disgust with what are basically kangaroo courts following on the heels of torture.
A recent scandal in Britain concerning US pressure on the UK to suppress reports of the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British national, point out the illusion of military justice at Guantanamo. Even if we do not presume their innocence, we still can’t claim a detainee is guilty until he has been tried in a real court system. Richard Clark, President Bush’s former counter-terrorism expert, has pointed out that several detainee cases have already been tried in the United States in real courts. The sky has not yet fallen.
Mr. Nichols then makes the amusing argument that placing these suspects in a conventional prison among the main prison population would raise costs – as if costs alone should determine whether justice is sought. Aside from the inadvisability of doing this, apparently he hasn’t considered the costs of running a completely dedicated supermax prison in Cuba.
Finally, let’s not forget: if the United States makes a practice of holding foreign nationals (and even some Americans, in violation of the Constitution) in prisons without trial – it will not be long before Americans begin popping up as inmates without rights in foreign prisons. Do we really want to go down this road?
I have jury duty in a few weeks, and as I sit in the jury room in Taunton, bored and wishing I were somewhere else, I will remember the rights that our Constitution defends. And how people like Mr. Nichols are all-too willing to destroy them without a single thought.
No, not you bean counters in Boston and in local town governments. I’m referring to every citizen of this fine state.
Boston just announced a cut of 900 jobs, including over 400 teaching positions. This is a 5.5% cut, or $107 million out of $833 million in Boston’s school budget, and a 6.2% reduction of the city’s 6500 teaching positions.
This all sounds reasonable until you hear that the city budget shortfall is estimated to be $140 million next year. As usual, schools are going to assume 75% of the burden.
In 1980 some cheap bastards – actually, we Massachusetts voters – voted for a referendum which capped property taxes at 2.5%. Proposition 2 1/2 thus became Massachusetts General Law Chapter 59 Section 21. For 28 years this law has guided the downward spiral of town and city services. In these hard times Proposition 2 1/2 will ensure that the downward spiral will end in death. Cynical banalities like “the schools just couldn’t compete” or “it’s time to privatize” will be uttered over the grave. And we will then look to casinos and corporations to come up with the money.
Wait a minute! Aren’t we currently bailing out the corporations?
Never mind. We’ll talk excitedly about how the new Duncan Donuts Academy, the Harrah’s Charter Schools, the McDonald’s pre-schools, and the Marvel Comics and National Enquirer libraries are providing services we used to pay for ourselves.
And all because we continue to be the same kind of cheap bastards the people on our block were 28 years ago. People who expect someone else to do it, someone else to pay for it, someone else to step up to do the right thing.
If there’s anything we can agree on in this consumer culture, it’s this: you get what you pay for. By paying for nothing, we get nothing. No future for our children, no future for young people, no stability for the elderly, no common dreams that bind our society. Proposition 2 1/2 has done enough damage. Repeal Massachusetts General Law 59 Section 21.
I have recently read several of my co-religionist’s pieces in the Standard Times, and would like to offer a different Jewish view on the siege of Gaza. Does the world unfairly fault Israel for protecting itself, as Irving Fradkin and Bob Feingold maintain? Are critics of Israel usually anti-Semites, as another recent article suggests? The answer to both of these questions is an emphatic “no.”
Before the siege of Gaza, Hamas and Israel had been exchanging rockets for months, both parties in violation of a truce. On November 4th Israel launched attacks in Gaza. On December 19th Hamas announced an end to the truce, and on December 27th Israel unleashed its tremendous military might on a population of 1.5 million locked into a space twice the size of Dartmouth. After the escalation of hostilities, 3 Israeli civilians were killed, 1500 Palestinians were killed – half of them children, and 10 Israeli Defense Force soldiers were killed, half by “friendly fire.” It was the reckless and disproportionate use of force on a civilian population that had nowhere to go, combined with the use of phosphorus bombs on civilians and other violations of international law that has so enraged the world and drawn the criticism of the UN and human rights organizations. In addition, there was indiscriminate bombing of infrastructure – sewage plants, first responders, medical facilities, UN food distribution centers, schools, and aid agencies. This was calculated to punish Palestinians for voting for Hamas, and for no strategic military reason.
Irving Fradkin suggests that what Israel did was simply what the United States would do if Mexico or Canada began bombing the US. A more apt analogy is: what would the United States do if the military wing of a Canadian political party began lobbing missiles into Detroit? Would we destroy most of Windsor, Ontario and the surrounding province, killing thousands and destroying half its infrastructure? I would like to think we would act swiftly, forcefully, but far more surgically than Israel did in either Gaza or Lebanon.
Those with longer memories than Mr. Fradkin will recall that, in 2002, Israel similarly destroyed the Palestinian government in Ramallah and brought about the demise of Fatah, the Palestinian political party it now wishes were in power. Israel now openly admits it is trying to do the same with Hamas. Although the U.S. and Israel have categorized Hamas as a “terrorist” organization, it actually has more in common with Sinn Fein than Al Qaida or Israel’s Irgun. For years Hamas has been running social services important to desperate Gazans, is involved in government, is constituted as a political party, and has generally been less corrupt than Fatah. Like it or not, Palestinians have some valid reasons to embrace Hamas. And, like it or not, Israel will have to talk to Hamas – just as it is now clear that the United States will have to start talking to Iran.
The issue of peace in Israel and Palestine is complicated by all sorts of emotional, religious, historical, and racial baggage. The only way this issue will ever be resolved is to look clearly at the reality of life for both Israelis and Palestinians. Israel/Palestine in 2009 is not biblical Israel. The Ottoman empire is gone. Israelis aren’t leaving, and they won’t be bombed. Palestinians aren’t leaving, and they’re not going to permit themselves to be herded into Indian reservations. Israel must admit and address the misery of Palestinians since the Nakba, and Palestinians and the wider Islamic world around it must acknowledge that the Israelis, too, had nowhere to go after the Shoah. But Israel holds more cards than the Palestinians, receives massive military aid from the United States, and has less motivation to compromise on the basic issues that have stymied a resolution. It will be up to Israeli voters in the next election to decide whether they want to reject a militaristic, go-it-alone strategy that we have abandoned here – or to finally engage in good-faith negotiations organized by a very different U.S. administration. I would urge everyone, especially American Jews, to pressure Israel and our own government to keep the fragile and heartbreaking realities of not only Israeli lives – but those of Palestinians too – in their minds and hearts.
Recent discussions of the war in Gaza have focused on rocket attacks, Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorists, or that it is our only friend in the region. But Operation Cast Lead is not a war over the exchange of rockets. Despite Israel’s assertions, the massive civilian casualties in Gaza are well beyond anything required for self-defense. These deaths are in fact the costs of a calculated attempt to neutralize Hamas before elections in February.
Gaza has been described as the largest prison camp in the world. It is one-tenth the size of Rhode Island and houses 1.5 million stateless people, refugees and children of refugees from what became the Jewish state in 1948. Israel controls Gaza’s borders and hunger is endemic. Most Gazans are dependent upon the United Nations’ World Food program. Unemployment is about 45%. Gaza’s tunnels, while known primarily as conduits through which arms are smuggled, are also used for bringing in food and trading goods for Gaza’s underground economy. And that’s Gaza in times of relative calm.
Israel’s siege of Gaza has killed over 800 Palestinians, a third of whom are children. 1500 people have been wounded. What Israel categorizes as ‘militants’ are often just policemen or government employees. In addition to reckless bombing of schools, mosques, police stations, and apartment buildings, Israel has also targeted indisputably non-military infrastructure, including a sewage treatment facility. Two thirds of Gaza is without power and food supplies have been exhausted. Israel has barred doctors, food, aid agencies, and journalists from Gaza. There is now a massive humanitarian crisis.
Hamas and Israel have been exchanging rockets for months, previously with few casualties on both sides, so Israel’s urgency is political theater. Next month Israel holds elections (from which its Arab parties have been excluded). Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of Kadima is talking as tough as the Likud. These two right wing parties officially refuse to talk to the elected Hamas government. Livni is openly critical of lame duck Ehud Olmert, who has urged concessions to Palestinians, including returning illegal settlements. Livni wants to create new “facts on the ground” – code for a political landscape without Hamas. While the United States has historically taken Israel’s side in peace negotiations and at the UN, Israeli politicians don’t quite know what to think of an incoming Obama administration open to at least talking to enemies. Anything brutal had better be done quickly in the waning days of the Bush administration.
Israeli hardliners seem to have learned nothing from their own experience in Lebanon in 2006 or from American misadventures with Neo-Conservatism. The slaughter of large numbers of civilians does not weaken support for militants living among them. In fact, it has the opposite effect. And Hamas has a political and social service dimension, as Sinn Fein had, which distinguishes it from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the Irgun. Hezbollah has not disappeared from Lebanon and neither will Hamas from Gaza. Whatever their negative views of Fatah, Palestinians recall the 2002 siege in Ramallah which removed Arafat from power and effectively destroyed Fatah and increased Hamas’ credibility. Operation Cast Lead has only produced a humanitarian disaster and sowed more anger on the Arab Street. If it truly wants peace in a Two State solution, Israel must instead address the issues of its future neighbors and try something new.
The solution to peace in Israel and Gaza is not the wholesale destruction of Palestinian government, infrastructure, and massive carnage, but long-term negotiations with Palestinian leaders. A new wind is blowing in Washington, and it will serve Israel’s interests better to abandon militarism and unilateralism before it damages its last remaining friendship.
Barak Obama, in noting that he was born to an 18-year-old mother, asked his supporters to “back off” of criticisms that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant. Obama pointed instead at McCain’s impulsive choice of a running mate with only 20 months of experience as governor of a state with a relatively small population.
But since Sarah Palin was expressly chosen to appeal to an Evangelical Christian constituency which largely believes in denying the right to young women to decide for themselves when to obtain an abortion, and which promotes sexual abstinence as the only acceptable sex education program, this is an issue that is not going to go away. The issues of Choice and Sex Education have now stuck to Palin like superglue.
The governor’s family, particularly her daughter, deserves absolute privacy in this matter. Nationally, however, the case highlights the high incidence of teenage pregnancies in the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of three girls becomes pregnant before the age of 20, and 80% of those pregnancies are unintended. As a comparison, the teenage pregnancy rate in the U.S is ten times that in the Netherlands.
Palin, as a mom, should not have to answer to anyone about how her family has chosen to act. But Palin, as a fundamentalist politician who wants to force others to share her social and ethical values around sex and pregnancy, should not get a free pass. She is going to have to answer questions about the failure of the abstinence programs she prescribes.
In respecting Palin’s right to pursue her own family’s values around a surprise pregnancy – and I hope the nation will – we must also recognize that this is a right that every family and all women deserve.
In Wednesday’s editorial section Henry Nichols argues that an American president needs a military background. Our current president sort of has one, mainly confined to avoiding as much reserve duty as possible and strutting in costume aboard an aircraft carrier. But look at the damage he’s done to the country.
I would argue that a military background might be nice to have, but so would a previous career in some other, non-martial, area of public service. Most importantly, however, I would prefer his ability to seek advice, be open to talking to friends and enemies alike, to re-engage with the rest of the world, and to have sound judgment and high intelligence – all of which the current president lacks.
Mr. Nichols argues that a president should follow the advice of the generals, citing Patton and MacArthur as paragons of great advice. Patton was famously a racist and anti-Semite, notorious for slapping a hospitalized soldier, and insubordinate to President Eisenhower, who fired him. MacArthur, another strong force of nature, was similarly sacked for insubordination by Truman. I would agree with those who say that sometimes those who have seen war are most loath to enter into one. This seems to have applied to Eisenhower, but neither Patton nor MacArthur were cut from this cloth. MacArthur, for example, had advocated widespread atomic bombing of Korea and attacking China. This is why we entrust government to calm, sane people directly accountable to the public, who should be agonizing over decisions that may have horrendous consequences.
I will agree with Mr. Nichols that a president must seek advice from the military, but surely he knows that the president has the last word once a war is authorized by Congress. The president also must have a bigger picture in mind than simply managing military campaigns. The president is also responsible for shepherding our economic, health, education, energy, and environmental concerns – all of which have been severely neglected during this administration. With the biggest deficit in history, perhaps the next president should be a former economist.
Several of the other points Mr. Nichols makes in his letter simply make no sense. Bombing Hanoi may have gotten North Vietnam’s attention, but it certainly did not shake their resolve. Losing 2 million civilians to carpet and napalm bombing actually strengthened it. And his picture of Iraq as a beach head against hordes of violent Islamic extremists just waiting to overrun our shores is as ill-informed as it is comical. This costly U.S. invasion of the wrong country just inflamed people who think of themselves as patriots fighting foreign invaders.
No, whether economist, lawyer, or former soldier, the number one job qualification of our next president must be sound judgment. And a better knowledge of geography.
School vouchers are not synonymous with school choice. Vouchers have a history of abuse, particularly in the South, as a tool for maintaining school segregation. They have been rejected by the AFT, the NEA, and most liberals as a tool for dismantling or undermining public schools, a potential cause of “white flight” from urban schools, and a means of damaging public schools further by concentrating students with learning, behavioral, and health problems. None of these criticisms can be ignored, and better solutions exist for providing parents with school choice, while preserving public education.
In the Fifties, Milton Friedman proposed a system of vouchers intended to promote competition and local control of schools. Another free market capitalist, Friedrich Hayek, even envisioned a school system funded entirely by vouchers, without a single public school. These politicized notions are at best wishful thinking. I would not expect to see many educational corporations clamoring to serve the predominantly poor student body in, say, nearby New Bedford’s West Side Junior-Senior High, a last resort school for predominately poor children, where not one eighth grader tested proficient in English or Science (according to the 2007 MCAS tests). Have the champions of a free market economy forgotten to follow the money? If I were a corporate education mogul, Manhattan would be my first choice as the best place to set up shop, New Bedford near the last.
One question not usually discussed in polite society is whether broken schools are the cause or the result of a broken community. It’s always convenient to accuse teachers of being the complacent, poorly-educated, self-interested cause of bad education. But no one ever takes the educational bureaucracy itself with its changing educational strategies and fashions, community, poverty, crime, dysfunctional or broken families, or the children themselves to task. And even if we do, we still expect a public school teacher to be able to reverse a lifetime of trouble or neglect in a single school year – and to see it reflected on a standardized test. The public that believes this is smoking more crack than some of the students in those roughest of neighborhoods. Schools that attempt to tackle these problems in a holistic manner are more likely to obtain results than by simply cashing vouchers. This is where charter schools offer the most promise.
The real problems in schools are ownership and quality. A parent in a private or religious school is asked to join committees, to help out in the school, to donate their time, and this establishes relationships with teachers and administration. While a child attends that school, both the student and parents are members of a community they have themselves chosen. Choice coupled with involvement produces a sense of ownership. Contrast this with the educational mills of today, institutions federally mandated to show more interest in standard deviations on test scores than on educational excellence or community building. Public schools today teach to the standardized test and spend too many of their resources dealing with the toughest educational problems. They increasingly provide less for the average or superior student, who is frequently pulled out and sent to private or religious school. Private schools, on the other hand, are not encumbered by SPED programs, MCAS tests, NCLB compliance, or health and behavioral problems, so it is not entirely fair to compare them. It is fair to say that social problems play a much greater negative role in public schools than their private counterparts. Again, public schools need to address these problems with more than a school psychologist or an IEP form.
If a voucher system were instituted, I can’t see how it would fail to accelerate the separation of “good” and “bad” students. Ultimately, the poorest children with the least concerned parents and the most problems would remain in the public schools. Everyone else would have bailed, including students from families who previously lacked the financial resources. Of course, if the vouchers were big enough to send any kid to, say, the Forman School in Connecticut, where annual tuition is approximately $49,000 a year, this would indeed raise standardized test results in the sending public school by taking the test takers out of the sampling population since private schools are not accountable to state standards. Vouchers are simply a Very Bad Idea.
On the other hand, if public schools were more like private schools (minus the exorbitant tuition), fewer families would seek other options and many would return to public school. What do suburban parents who flee from urban public schools want when they move Junior to Ye Olde Exclusive Academy? Safety, enrichment programs, small class sizes, excellent instructors, an approachable administration and staff, and a track record of producing students accepted at good colleges. Minority parents want no less for their children. NCLB is supposed to provide alternatives to failing schools and, increasingly, minorities have embraced privatization and the idea of vouchers as one means to provide these alternatives. But this doesn’t go far enough. No parent with financial resources waits until a school has hit absolute rock bottom before transferring their child to a private school. And not every child has the same experience at the same school, so even a choice between two adequately-performing schools is desirable. And choice is as American as Coke versus Pepsi.
In some communities, families do have the choice of leaving a comprehensive public school to attend a public vocational school. Aside from a few schools like Boston’s Latin Academy, there are very few options for students who want to pursue a more rigorous academic track. Just as there is a network of vocational schools supported in part by the federal Perkins Act, we should also be investing in public academic schools of excellence. Public schools should serve the entire public, from the most disadvantaged to the most gifted.
Charter schools are an option that gives communities more direct control over curriculum and school administration. Educational outcomes in charter schools are often better than in traditional schools, although one 2004 union study analyzing NEAP data showed lower test scores in charter schools. Massachusetts DOE figures show dropout rates in Massachusetts charter schools are higher than comprehensive schools, but these are often high-risk kids who drop out and are coaxed back to school. So why, despite any shortcomings, are charter schools so popular? I believe it is the ownership factor that makes students want to attend such schools. A Boston Globe article described the MATCH Charter School in Boston: > Once they begin classes at MATCH, students face an eight-hour school day, a dress code, a strict code of conduct, and academic standards that designate a D as a failing grade. They also are required to attend at least two hours of daily tutoring with a member of the MATCH Corps, a group of 45 tutors who live in a dormitory at the school. And their parents get contacted at least once a week by a teacher, tutor, or the principal. Propping up these high academic expectations is an underlying familial atmosphere.
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has proposed “readiness” schools, which sound rather similar to charter and pilot schools, and which insist on the same educational standards as conventional schools, assuring the unions they can be part of the solution rather than a fearful impediment, while improving administration and accountability. The governor’s plan would double the number of charter schools in Massachusetts with the next 4 years. This is a smart decision because these schools (by whatever name we choose to call them) have the greatest potential to introduce innovative programs, involve parents, and motivate students, as private schools currently do. Charter schools can promote school choice within a public education system, while not destroying the system altogether as vouchers would.
Peter Friedman’s essay in Monday’s editorial section sounds like another press release from the Bush administration: Don’t blame the Republicans for the current energy crisis, and if it were not for Bill Clinton, we’d be bathing in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil by now, and would have made more progress in exploiting oil shale and nuclear power.
Never mind that even John McCain has opposed drilling in the ANWR, or that exploitation of this area was rejected in the Senate in 2005 – under Republican watch. Or that two U.S. Geological Survey reports, one from 1987, the other 1998, disagree on the quantity and location of possible oil. Or that the 2008 Energy Information Agency’s 2008 report predicts a maximum of 780,000 barrels per day after 20 years of development. (The U.S. currently consumes 21 million barrels per day.) Their report also estimated that the additional supply would create a reduction in oil prices of only 47 cents per barrel.
But these are all speculations. EIA admits in a May 2008 report, “There is little direct knowledge regarding the petroleum geology of the ANWR region.” In other words: We don’t really know.
Dr. Friedman claims that the Green River region in the Southwest has three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia in oil shale. However, a 2006 Congressional Research Service report stated, “… oil shales have not proved to be economically recoverable, they are considered a contingent resource and not true reserves.”
It turns out that oil shale doesn’t actually contain petroleum, rather a substance called kerogen, a petroleum precursor. According to the report, extracting “oil” from shale requires strip mining vast areas, lots of superheated water for a process called retorting, and results in vast environment destruction and groundwater contamination.
And after all that, the report continues, – “unlike conventional crude oil, oil-shale distillates make poor feedstock for gasoline production and thus may be better suited to making distillate based fuels such as diesel and jet fuel.” Kerogen also has high nitrogen content, making it “problematic in terms of producing stable fuels.”
After a number of federally funded oil shale research programs, federal support for oil shale research ended in 1985 – smack in the middle of the Reagan administration.
It may well be that some newer, cleaner form of nuclear power can be developed that addresses valid public disposal, capitalization, decommissioning and security concerns. Perhaps the book hasn’t been closed on this technology, but I want it overseen by a less secretive and much more transparent government, with contractors above reproach. I don’t see that happening under a Republican administration.
Dr. Friedman doesn’t mention conservation once and doesn’t accord other forms of energy source any space in his piece, despite the fact that conservation can prolong energy reserves and ameliorate environmental problems, and that the use of alternate energy sources would not only provide energy and harm the environment less, but provide a new technology focus for American jobs.
The only point on which I agree with Dr. Friedman is that we can’t blame the Republicans. Yet we desperately need an energy policy based on values that don’t emanate from buddies in the oil industry.
And it won’t come from Republicans like Dr. Friedman.
While the intent of Public Law 107-110, a bipartisan bill otherwise known as the 2002 “No Child Left Behind” act, is to impose outcomes-based education on individual states, it has also imposed a number of questionable practices. States have generally abandoned the pursuit of excellence in education for something that more closely resembles quality assurance metrics. We no longer care if students can compete in the global workforce or can master calculus or a second language. We now seem fixated on metrics to reduce the variability and defect rate (six sigma in QA parlance) of the widgets on our educational assembly line. Complaints that NCLB lowers educational goals, cheats students, and forces schools to “teach to the test” are all well-founded.
In addition to this myopic focus, NCLB forces schools to provide student information to military recruiters (one “outcome” of this is death), and drives up educational costs as teachers flock to educational mills to get masters degrees in education – not necessarily the subjects they teach – to become more “highly qualified.” These professional development costs are then passed along to the schools. NCLB also mandates the use of specific types of educational studies (again seemingly based on statistical/QA principles) and arbitrarily equates the adoption of expensive computer technology with excellence in education. Yet many school technology plans do not tie computer technology to particular uses or outcomes, merely hoping that computers will somehow prepare kids for the future.
Other provisions of NCLB claim to help minority and disadvantaged students, although in eight years it would appear that only the testing has improved – and then only by employing creative statistics – while dropout rates continue to rise, programs for medium- and high-performing students have disappeared, and school budgets have increased in order to comply. And here again, NCLB is of little help, since these additional costs must be borne by each state and school district. Individual programs within NCLB, such as the reading program, were flops. nochildleft.com lists 17 areas in which NCLB actually lowered standards, raised dropout rates, reduced teaching time, and made some of the best teachers leave for private schools.
I was disappointed with Steve DeCosta’s article (“Big Government”) in Sunday’s paper. His article was framed in the language of conservative tax activists, such as the Tax Foundation, whom he quoted, and it placed the spotlight on local government.
But the real issue is not whether local governments are wasting taxpayers’ money. It is why local governments are not getting the revenue they require to provide essential services.
It is also about our economic priorities at the national level. Mr. DeCosta’s article offered vague statistics and could have dug deeper to contribute to an informed debate over how we as a society choose to live together and determine and fund our social priorities.
Some of his statistics were not helpful. For example, “The Tax Foundation reports that about 30 percent of all American income is turned over to one government or another in the form of taxes.” Unfortunately, this says nothing about how or where the money is spent, or by whom.
So let’s check.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, federal taxes consume approximately 20.27 percent of average American incomes, state taxes 7.12 percent and local taxes 3.56 percent.
The article goes on to quote: “Between the feds, the state, and our cities and towns, 19.7 million people work for us,” the size of Madagascar, it points out. Or that one out of seven Americans is a government employee. But wouldn’t it be more useful to actually know what services these people are rendering and which type of government they come from?
Using figures drawn from the same government sources, we learn that 1.88 percent of all Massachusetts workers are employed by the federal government, 3.24 percent work for the state, and 6.53 percent work for local government. Of these local government employees, half are teachers; the rest dogcatchers, snow plow operators, police, fire, sanitation and medical workers.
What we see here is that local governments employ the most workers, who deliver the most direct services to taxpayers, yet they receive the least amount of tax revenue, even adjusting for state and federal transfers.
So why is the focus of Mr. DeCosta’s article on local government? Perhaps recent tax override referenda have inspired the theme. But if we really want to deal with the costs of government, we have to acknowledge that the federal government is getting most of our money.
Rather than giving local librarians pink slips and arguing with our neighbors, we should be paying more attention to how our federal taxes are spent and where the government jobs really are. This is where the article missed the boat.
So let’s take a look.
Of the nation’s 2.7 million federal employees, 770,000 are postal workers. After this, many of the remainder either carry guns or provide service to people who once carried guns. The VA runs a vast parallel medical care system that employs more than 250,000 people. Combined, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and the spy agencies employ more than a million people.
In contrast, the Department of Labor employs 15,000 and Housing and Urban Development 10,000. These figures reflect our national priorities.
So, rather than standing out in the rain, waving picket signs urging the lowest possible local taxes at the local level, it might make sense to pony up for higher local and state taxes, lower federal taxes and exercise restraint on unnecessary expenditures — military spending and servicing the national debt come to mind.
It might make sense to ensure every American has medical insurance and to gradually shut down the parallel VA hospital system.
It might make sense to spend more on education to make Americans more competitive in the global economy, and less in creating defense bureaucracies or building electronic fences to keep out the poor.
It might make sense to spend more on developing mass transit infrastructure and less on automotive research or expanding the highway system.
These are topics we can all argue about, but at least our discussion will have turned to what kind of society we want to live in.
The debate over how we spend tax money is already highly politicized. Mr. DeCosta’s article suggests that local governments are doing their best with what they’ve got, and I agree.
But I would have preferred a more substantive article, particularly addressing use of our federal taxes, to fuel a public discussion of why it is we live together in a society, and what we should expect to both contribute and gain from doing so.
Last Sunday Ken Hartnett’s article quoted Jean Duval, the head of the New Bedford teacher’s union: “Sooner or later, people have got to talk about the human material in front of the teachers and administrators. They are doing the best they can with the material in front of them.”
Since then, Ms. Duval has been roundly vilified in the editorial pages. In a Wednesday editorial, Mara Honohan, a seventh-grader from Normandin Middle School, wrote of resenting being spoken of as “material.” Warren Berube sarcastically observed that a union person would never say such a thing. On Tuesday, Mary Worden’s editorial asked the rhetorical question, “What exactly is the human material in front of teachers today? Is it a person who shouldn’t be there?” And then she proceeded to put words in Ms. Duval’s mouth by assuming that was what she meant. The Standard Times’ own editorial unfairly rips Duval for her “negative attitude toward the students.”
It’s clear society wants teachers to see only an individual and not just a socioeconomic statistic. And teachers do precisely that in classrooms every day. But there is also a bigger view in which the statistics are shocking, shameful, and frightening –- and it serves no one’s interests to pretend they don’t exist. Most administrators and teachers (and I am one) don’t blame the students, but it is hard to ignore increasing percentages of kids working full-time jobs, falling asleep on their desks, or not showing up for class, living in cars when dad’s drunk, or changing foster families every other month. Add to this high numbers of special needs, intellectual challenges, juvenile offenses, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, non-English speaking, and lack of parental guidance -– and all the innovative educational programs in the world can’t offset these strikes against learning.
And it’s worse than that. Perhaps someone should state the obvious even more forcefully than Ms. Duval –- that public schools in general -– forget New Bedford for a minute – have become a dumping ground for children no one seriously intends to educate. By “no one” I mean their parents and society. The absent or dysfunctional parent isn’t helping. Public schools are expected to work miracles with a student population that a Tabor Academy or a Bishop Stang would never admit. Meanwhile, the cities, states, and federal government play politics with education but never fund it adequately. New Bedford and the state of Massachusetts couldn’t even agree on the importance of the MCAS. We seem to want public education to deliver educational miracles and cure social ills, but we don’t want to talk about it unless it’s a four-letter word like “MCAS” – and we sure don’t want to pay for it.
So hats off to Ms. Duval for telling the Emperor that he’s buck-naked. It seems strange to me for a community to react so strongly to a little tactlessness on the part of someone stating the obvious, but not to concern itself at all with the real causes of student failures.
Mayor Lang and the New Bedford School Committee want to issue diplomas to students who fail the MCAS. In crafting his argument, Mayor Lang questions the state’s (and presumably the Federal government’s) authority to set educational standards. “It comes down to this. Public school administrators and teachers are not trusted to accurately assess and pass a kid onto the next grade or course.” They also blame the MCAS for New Bedford’s high dropout rate. But let’s do a little math.
89% of New Bedford’s teachers are “highly qualified” versus 96% of Greater New Bedford Voc’s. Teachers at Voc make an average of $6000 a year more, the student ratio is lower, the number of non-English speakers is half that of the New Bedford public schools, and the number failing the English MCAS is almost half that of the New Bedford public schools. NB public schools have a whopping 18.6% of students in Special Education, while Voc has 11.3%. The dropout rate is half at Voc, and so on. When you look at the number of students in the NB public schools who failed 8th grade Math and Science, it was 53% and 63% respectively! These students’ problems started in Middle School and apparently the kids were promoted all the same. This completely undermines Mayor Lang’s remarks above. Somebody has to pull these kids off the assembly line. Accountability is not a bad thing.
It is pretty obvious that New Bedford’s schools do have problems not of their making, but are cranking out students with inferior educations all the same, and the MCAS tests unfortunately reveal this nasty little secret. Looking at the statistics, it’s also clear that New Bedford has a higher proportion of students with learning, social, economic, and language problems, and it’s probably not getting the funding it needs. Like it or not, the high dropout and MCAS failure rates indicate external problems. Whether these students pass or fail an MCAS test, they are still as much at risk for dropping out or failing other tests.
But denying the validity of the MCAS is shortsighted. And so is putting the District’s funding at risk at a time when it needs to be asking for more help.
The mayor should be working with the DOE, not fighting it, or with concerned Massachusetts legislators to demand the state’s fair share of federal “No Child Left Behind” funding. Besides opening up schools to military recruiters and imposing unrelenting standardized testing upon them, one of the things NCLB is supposed to do is to actually help school districts improve. Well, supposedly. Massachusetts could join Connecticut, Utah, Texas, California, Virginia, Maryland, and several others in fighting for more help than just better looking bubble test forms. The National Education Association estimates that the Bush administration’s NCLB act has actually taken $22 billion away from schools in 2005 and 2006. I wonder which defense contractor got that money? We surely could have used it.
The advice to “follow the money” always seems to hold. New Bedford should be going after the funding to deliver better education to its students rather than telling the world that the MCAS figures lie. Unfortunately, the figures are right on target.
Peter Friedman writes “a reversal of Roe v. Wade would place the decision where it belongs – in the political jurisdiction of each state legislature, where it would likely remain legal.” As long as this is a hot topic for middle-aged white men, let me join in and demonstrate how ridiculous his argument is.
Mr. Friedman forgets why the Supreme Court had to rule on Roe v. Wade in the first place. Texas law had made it illegal for a woman to attempt to obtain, or for a physician to even consult on, an abortion – regardless of the circumstances. With states like Texas usurping intimate decisions and intruding into medical decisions historically left to patients and physicians, the Supreme Court was forced to rule on the basis of invasion of privacy. But it also considered prevailing views and abortion’s historical legality in ancient and Anglo-Saxon law.
The Supreme Court noted in its ruling that American laws against abortion originated late in the 19th century. Prior to this, abortion laws were based on English Common Law, which permitted abortion before “quickening” of the fetus. In the 1830s, Connecticut and New York were the first to write Common Law into legislation. It wasn’t until much later that “activist judges” of Friedman’s stripe started changing the laws and made abortion illegal.
In defending “choice,” the Supreme Court defended the decision that a “woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.”
The Court also wrote that “some amici argue that the woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree.” In so ruling, for the past 32 years there have been reasonable limits on abortion, respectful of controversy and morals, but the Roe v. Wade decision stands primarily as a defense of the rights of individuals to decide intimate matters themselves.
As Roe v. Wade itself shows, states will often violate civil liberties if Constitutional rights are not pressed. As we have seen in the case of states’ support for segregation and recent anti-gay statutes, states are all too often ready to deny rights to the citizens they should be protecting.
Friedman spends half of his column whining about how his graphic description of partial-birth abortion was edited by The Standard-Times. Such abortions are hardly the norm, and the shock value of depictions of them is a totally separate matter from matters of civil and personal rights. He maintains that support for legalized abortion dropped to 43 percent in 2000.
But the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University reported a large majority of Americans in 2000, while hardly in favor of reckless use of abortion, nevertheless supported the right of a woman and her physician to choose it. Lydia Saad of the Gallup Poll confirmed similar results for 2000 and 2004 polls. But if Friedman really does believe his own figures, then he can’t also claim that abortion “would likely remain legal” if it has this much opposition.
States should be free to legislate and govern as they please, but never free to deny civil rights or privacy to citizens. Thank God for our federal Constitution.
Today is the anniversary of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in 1776, and an appropriate date to reflect on the nature of the Iraqi insurgency. The resistance in Iraq today is not much different than that from our own history.
Armies of the 18th Century usually took a winter break, but Washington’s use of guerilla tactics allowed the Colonists to take Trenton. Other guerilla tactics, employed by hit-and-run fighters like Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” also served to weaken British resolve. Improvised weapons were also common. Marion’s sabers and muskets, for example, were created by local blacksmiths. Terrorism was used to frighten those who might be tempted to aid the British. Collaborators were murdered, tortured, or their homes were torched. After the war, collaborators were purged from their positions and many sought refuge in Canada, Britain, or the West Indies. Alliances with “foreigners” who supplied the Colonists with cash, and military experts such as the Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben who provided expertise in military tactics, created a better-funded and better-disciplined resistance.
The War of Independence ended up involving 175,000 of the approximately 400,000 men in the Colonies. Most civilians felt the sting of war, from either the loss of a family member, a home destroyed, looted, commandeered, by being shot at or harmed, or having to flee as the British invaded. The longer the British occupation dragged on, the smaller the Loyalist support.
In the end, a British force of mainly conscripts who no longer understood the sense of dying in a foreign land lost to a weaker military they had defeated in a majority of the war’s battles. But the sheer size of the occupied land made the continuing occupation impossible, and the costs of the occupation could no longer be justified.
From the British loss in India, to the American loss in Vietnam and Russia’s loss in Afghanistan, from the lessons of the Roman empire and Alexander the Great, this seems to be a lesson that has to be learned over and over: that no foreign country can occupy even the weakest country for long.
The 2004 Presidential election is over, and a majority of you has chosen George Bush.
In an era of sound bytes, spin, and dog-wagging – and with the lies and unchecked statistics of today’s political campaigns – it is all too easy to conclude that you were deceived. But I believe the reality is far worse. You cast a vote yesterday for a peace-of-mind no one can honestly deliver to you and decisively condemned secular liberalism by embracing fundamentalist “moral values.” In so doing you have repudiated our Founders’ vision of America and our children’s’ futures.
This country, which now seems defined by SUV’s and cocooning in dens with 90-inch entertainment systems, now finds itself increasingly unemployed or underemployed, with a downsized space program that can’t even keep its budget Martian rovers running. Our social nets have failed. Almost half of Americans have no health insurance, a matching figure has no life insurance, and the Social Security system is in danger of being looted or privatized. Your answer to all of this is to build a new heavily-armed Roman Empire. And you thank your Evangelical gods that you have no responsibilities toward that other half of this nation.
Now, when those Chinese-manufactured entertainment systems of yours have a glitch, you phone in for support and reach a customer service person in Bangalore. Meanwhile, our schools are in crisis and privatization and “standards” have replaced any real funding. As long as you have a slogan like “No Child Left Behind,” you can safely ignore the reality. Much of the world is angry at America for its belligerence, self-interest, and meddling. You see the loss of our former educational, technological, and economic greatness as equivalent to the terrorist’s taunt, so little do you care for distinctions. More telling, your half cares little for what the rest of the world thinks. We own all the nukes and your half is developing increasingly itchy trigger fingers.
For many Americans, the future is a dark and uncertain place and national fears are tangible and multiply with every presidential speech or Homeland Security alert. You want mommy to make it better and you’ll believe anyone who promises that force equals security. Despite your seeming lack of interest in taking rational steps to ensure economic, energy and political success in the future, you cling to irrational views that you can buy or build this physical security. Even dogcatchers in this last election ran on platforms of “Keeping America Safe.” Soon it will be the mandate of house painters.
This new aversion to risk and uncertainty (except for your total disregard of the economy, foreign policy, education, technology, social security and medical care) has led to a country with zero-tolerance for dissent or unrest. Let’s forget for one moment that you have cheered while the Patriot Act has shredded our Constitution. Your expectations of security have led you to even worse excesses. Recently, the Boston Police shot a Red Sox fan to death in a massive show of force to protect – what? – the streets from a few drunken celebrants. Similarly, a University of Massachusetts student was burned severely by flash grenades deployed by the State Police breaking up similar Red Sox hooliganism. Your patriotic Homeland has now become one that now values its security – whatever that is – more than its children. So much for your moral values.
So, to all of you who have bought the fear and the false promises of security: you were not duped, but succumbed to your weaker nature, like victims of get-rich-quick schemes. You were motivated by ignorance and a lack of perspective of what is truly important in a society and in our national history. Led by your “moral values” to reject freedoms for gays, immigrants and dissenters. Led by your own self-absorption to deny the economic, medical and energy security we actually do have some control over. Led by blind animal fear and the false promise of security you will find is a mirage. You have chosen a leader as weak and as bereft of compassion and vision as you.
So, to you, the other half: you deserve the next four years of George Bush.
No one who has children – or a heart – could fail to be horrified or angered by the massacre of hundreds of schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia. As George W. Bush put it, “This is yet another grim reminder of the lengths to which terrorists will go to threaten the civilized world.”
Unfortunately, the monsters who committed these acts –and 9/11 – were made in the “civilized world.”
Anyone who has ever watched a Rambo movie should remember that the Soviet Union was embroiled in Afghanistan, much as the United States was in Vietnam. In 1989, one of the CIA’s teletypes in Islamabad printed out, “We Won” as the last Russian soldier departed Afghanistan. How had the United States “won” in its struggle for influence in Afghanistan? By supporting Islamic jihad organizations, Osama bin Laden specifically.
Steve Coll of the Washington Post has written a book called “Ghost Wars,” which offers a fascinating view of the love-hate relationship between the United States and bin Laden. As it transpired, even after the Russian departure, the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence services continued to fund the mujahadeen, and run bombing and assassination campaigns against the Russian puppet, Najibullah, who warned Afghanis that “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan … Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.” He was right. He was also dead by 1996, betrayed by U.S.-funded warlords and hanged by the Taliban.
Likewise, Chechen rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA-sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress’ Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. According to Bodansky, the Chechens were directly trained by Pakistan’s security service, the ISI, and funded by the U.S. government.
The “civilized world” must take responsibility for many of these threats itself.
While we are angered and disgusted by suicide bombers, we seem to be blind to terrorism committed by governments. We forget that the first self-described “terrorists” were the French Jacobins, who pursued their “Reign of Terror” on civilians in the late 1700s. State terrorism is nothing new. Terror originates in injustice and only works by turning a blind eye to human suffering, whether by a state or a self-appointed group.
When millions of Jews were slaughtered in Europe, or Armenians wiped out in Turkey, the world barely took notice. It took several years for the world to recognize the slaughter of Bosnians. Humanity generally ignored the genocide in Rwanda. Americans watched without outrage an interview by Lesley Stahl of Secretary of State Madeline Albright, in which Albright assessed that the deaths of a half-million Iraqi children by economic sanctions “was worth it” in pursuing U.S. policy.
We currently argue the “nuances” of genocide in Darfur. Although we have sympathy for Russian families in Beslan today, where was our sympathy for Chechen victims of horrific Russian atrocities and massive destruction in Grozny? Where is our sympathy for the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the war in Iraq? Why do we tolerate the obscene term “collateral damage?”
Why do we light a candle for the kidnap victim in Colombia but forget the victim of government death squads and torturers who continue to be trained at the School of Americas? We grieve with the families of suicide bombing victims in Israel, but where is our sympathy for innocent Palestinian civilians bombed indiscriminately “in retaliation?” Why must, everywhere, so many innocents pay, and why do we apparently feel so little for them that we take no notice of their deaths?
Listening to remarks like those of the president’s, we cloak ourselves in the delusion that our governments always pursue morality rather than simply pragmatic foreign policy. We swear allegiance to states but confuse this allegiance for our personal declarations of faith and morality. Only when we recognize that state terrorism is a symptom of global injustice, and in fact perpetuates violence by the enemies of those states, will we be able wage a successful “war on terror.”
Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” paints a portrait of neighbors fixing their common stone fence in the spring. It is a fairly apt description of the relationship we have with our neighbor in the north, Canada. Unfortunately, Frost’s famous line also has been used to describe Israel’s “security barrier” in the West Bank. The chief problem with this analogy, and with the Israeli wall itself, is that “good fences make good neighbors” only when the fence is situated on one’s own property.
Consequently, the International Court of Justice ruled in July that the fence is “contrary to international law” and that Israel must cease its construction, dismantle it and pay reparations to those damaged by it.
Senate Resolution 408 condemns the International Court’s ruling. Massachusetts senators must vote against this resolution, and thereby vote for the international rule of law, when it comes up for a vote around Labor Day.
Strangely, although there is little discussion in the United States about this issue, the Israeli supreme court has condemned the wall in recognizing that Israel is occupying the West Bank and that the wall violates Palestinian human rights.
On June 30, it ruled that Israel has held the West Bank “in belligerent occupation” since 1967 and “the route which the military commander established for the security fence, which separates the local inhabitants from their agricultural lands, injures the local inhabitants in a severe and acute way, while violating their rights under humanitarian international law.”
On Aug. 24, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz recommended that Israel formally declare that the Fourth Geneva Convention, which formed the basis of the ICJ advisory opinion, applies to its military occupation of the West Bank.
It is true that the United States, Korea and India also have built security barriers, but they all have been built on recognized borders or cease-fire lines.
The wall Israel is building in the West Bank cuts deeply into Palestinian territory. The wall is twice as long as Israel’s border with the West Bank, and it has not even been completed.
Israeli Attorney General Mazuz, in an 84-page report to the prime minister, recommended that the government show “respect” for the ICJ’s decision, despite its misgivings, and that “a maximum effort to adapt, as soon as possible … the fence’s route and arrangements … in the seam zone to the principles the High Court of Justice has set.” Thus, even Israel appears to offer more respect for the ICJ and world opinion than this Senate resolution would.
If there is ever to be a solution to this 50-year-old problem, it will require evenhanded foreign policy by the United States.
By voting for this resolution, the United States effectively flouts international law and eliminates any influence it could ever hope to exert in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Urge your senators to vote “no” on Senate Resolution 408.
John Kerry for President 901 15th Street, NW 7th Floor Washington, DC 20005
Dear Senator Kerry and Staff:
Please accept my campaign contribution of $1. Please use it to buy yourself a coffee you can sip while reading my letter.
I am sorry I am writing to you and not to Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich. Your spineless support, and the spineless support by many members of Congress, for both the invasion of Iraq and the imposition of the Patriot Act brought us to this point. We have a system of checks and balances, and you simply didn’t do your job in checking the power of the president.
There’s not much to like about your campaign, aside from future Supreme Court appointments. This might be the only advantage to voting for you.
I have read your campaign positions on your website and you are either holding back or being so cagey about what you’d really do that it’s impossible to truly distinguish your positions from Mr. Bush’s. This morning’s Boston Globe reports you chastising Mr. Bush about potential terrorist attacks: “President not doing enough, Kerry says” Well, Mr. Kerry, what would you do?
You do the same on Iraq. But what really distinguishes you from Bush on Iraq? All you’ve really said is that you don’t like the way he’s run things. Many Republicans echo that sentiment too, but guess who they’re going to support? And what exactly would you do differently? Your campaign materials say you’d drag NATO into this mess. But NATO says they’re already over-committed. Europeans characterize your plan as not being invited to the dinner, then being asked to clean up the dishes. Your plan sounds as credible as the “secret” Nixon plan.
And why have you not unveiled a comprehensive energy plan? Not the usual tired old energy incentives, but a sweeping plan as bold as the space program? It seems to me that our oil addiction is the only reason we have “interests in the region.” We need to be able to get the hell out of the Middle East and create balanced relations with both Israel and the Arab world.
And why do you continue to support Israel uncritically? I’ve seen your positions on your own website and also seen a survey you sent back to an Arab-American group, and you don’t even support Israeli withdrawal from illegal settlements! If you’re afraid of losing the Jewish vote, well, you’re already in danger of losing my Jewish vote. Because the only thing that will truly make Israel secure is a moderate Israeli government dealing with a moderate Palestinian leadership. And this excludes religious fanatics from both sides, both armed Jewish settlers and armed Islamic militants. They’re all nutcases.
Sure, everyone wants health care and education. I’ve heard you talk about the $29 billion you want to reallocate to education from an end of tax credits to the very wealthy. But I haven’t heard a truly coherent plan for health care, just the expansion of a patchwork of entitlement programs.
As a former (and not by choice) programmer, I appreciate your remarks on outsourcing and on “leveling the playing field.” However, I feel the real crisis in our country is that we have lost a domestic manufacturing core that keeps other support and service industries here to serve them. Fix the manufacturing hemorrhage and you’ll fix a lot more. But then you have to have a PLAN for that. If you have one, talk about it.
In the coming weeks and days you need to truly differentiate yourself from the Bush campaign. On the surface you both wave the flag and talk about non-specifics, profess concern for education and health care. You need to unleash an attack on militarism and bigotry, talk about a new social contract, talk about a plan to GET OUT OF IRAQ altogether, unveil real energy, health, and education programs, and introduce voters to a potential Presidential cabinet who will be implementing them. If you play it too close to the vest, you’ll lose. As much as voters hate being lied to, they need a reason to switch allegiance.
I don’t care whether you threw your medals away or whether Bush didn’t show up for National Guard service. I don’t care if either one of you inhales or cheats on his wife. I am interested in ideas, vision, and the courage to go out on a limb and risk it all to put those ideas forward because they are the right things to do. My doubts about you are that you just hedge your bets, play the game, and buckle when it’s time to stand up against wars and threats to civil liberties.
Don’t make me vote for a lesser of the two evils. I’m tired of voting for evils in any form. Do what’s right and you’ll have my support. Because if there are no candidates with a vision worth voting for, any vote is a wasted one.
The Likud has presided over all but three of the past 13 Israeli governments since 1977 and bears the greatest responsibility for government policies and for the way both intifadas have been handled. Thus, my harsh critique of Israel is in some ways synonymous with a critique of the Likud. As a Jew myself, I find no connection between Judaism’s ethics and current Israeli policies.
Far from creating a strategic center of stability in the Middle East, as neo-conservatives had once hoped, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is now a mirror of the 16-year-old Israeli quagmire in Gaza and the West Bank. Both situations in parallel threaten to destabilize any remaining good will the Arab world once had toward the United States, not only because of our own missteps but because of our uncritical support, and now overt emulation, of Israel. After 9/11 the gloves came off. Israel, known for its “extrajudicial killings” (i.e., illegal assassinations), torture and preemptive strikes against terrorists was seen as the model of how to handle homeland security and terrorism.
The Dec. 9, 2003, issue of Time magazine asked, “The U.S. military is reportedly turning to Israel for tips on how to manage the insurgency in Iraq. Will it work?” Iraqis, who as Time pointed out, grew up with images of Israelis dishing out rough treatment to Palestinian civilians, had an idea of what might be coming. Americans, had they and Congress not suspended critical judgment, should have expected a disaster, as well.
Israeli Defense Forces trainers were sent to Fort Bragg to train U.S. squads. Use of the IDF technique of bulldozing homes of suspected terrorists is now being used in the Sunni Triangle. Searches of homes are often accompanied by destruction of doors and walls, a technique used by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank.
Also familiar in the West Bank, checkpoints and home invasions have become routine in Iraq. Israeli practices of kidnapping and incarcerating relatives of targets of military interest also have been introduced in Iraq. Many of the female detainees in Abu Ghraib are simply spouses or children of suspected Baathists.
According to a November 2002 article by John Diamond in USA Today, Israeli commandos were active in Iraq, looking for Scud missile sites before the invasion. The same article reported that Israel also built two mock Iraqi towns in Israel for American training exercises that were taught by IDF forces.
Using the Israeli policy of preemption used in Lebanon and Syria, U.S. troops are now behind the lines in Syria, hunting down suspected jihadis before they can cross the border into Iraq. However, this technique might have unintended consequences. This week, for example, U.S. troops accidentally wiped out a clan of 45 people at a wedding party in Iraq on the Syrian border.
Techniques employed at Abu Ghraib also appear to have been patterned after those used at one time by Shin Bet, the Israeli security service. In September 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Shin Bet’s “coercive techniques” could be no stronger than those applied by the police. However, the list of techniques documented in the Taguba report reads like a list of those banned techniques: blasting prisoners with noise while bent, bound and beaten in urine-soaked hoods, violent shaking, sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners into painful positions for long periods of time.
The U.N. Committee Against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, all have criticized Israel for routine torture. The second intifada, which began in September 2000, has killed 2,700 Palestinians, including 545 children, and there have been as many as 20,000 injuries. Israeli deaths have totaled approximately 840, including 100 children, with perhaps 2,500 injuries. The disproportionate number of deaths and injuries of Palestinians results from the continual use of lethal force against civilians. Of course, it is also true that Hamas targets civilians almost exclusively. However, both sides’ atrocities should be receiving equal condemnation from the U.S.
For example, on May 19, Israeli forces opened fire with tanks and helicopter gunships on a protest march of 3,000 people in Rafah in Gaza, killing 10 to 23 children. Israelis from peace organizations such as Shalom Achsav, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, and other segments of society condemned the massacre, but here in the U.S., the Bush administration only called for more “restraint” by Israel. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution, 14-0, condemning Israel.
The U.S. abstained. Why the tepid condemnation or none at all? Could it be because the U.S. is now using similar tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq?
It has been recently reported in the Arab press that American snipers have killed a high proportion of women in Falluja. One report counted 56 women killed by snipers as of April 17.
Also on May 19, the newspaper Ha’aretz reported that 2000 Israelis in a peace march were headed for the besieged city of Ramallah with 20 vehicles of donated food and supplies. Police broke up the march with tear gas and rifle butts. Several people were injured, including a member of the Knesset. Peaceful assembly and rights of expression are often a problem in Israel. Within Israel, there has been strong condemnation of the IDF’s treatment of Palestinians. In a November 2003 article by Esther Schrader and Josh Meyer in the Los Angeles Times, Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, a group of retired leaders of the Shin Bet internal security service and a number of active-duty soldiers are quoted as saying that Israeli measures have been unduly harsh and threaten to destroy Israeli and Palestinian society if no solution is found to the conflict.
Even Israel’s military establishment knows that these strategies have failed. On November 26, 2002, Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror addressed the Washington Institute’s Special Policy Forum. In this speech, he suggested that “if Saddam Hussein were deposed … the Palestinian leadership would see that reform is inevitable in the long run – that the only way to negotiate is without terror. Hence, action in Iraq could be an important factor in changing the mindset of the Palestinians and, perhaps, other Arab leaders.”
Of course, Amidror was wrong, but his better points, dwarfed by the remarks on Iraq, were that Israel’s current methods lack a coherent strategy. He warned policymakers that “at the end of the day,” Israel must negotiate with the Palestinians and that civilians must not be harmed.
Just as even formerly pro-war Americans have begun to call for an exit strategy in Iraq, many Israelis have been calling for an exit strategy in Gaza and the West Bank for years. Last weekend, 150,000 people demonstrated in Rabin Plaza in Tel Aviv, calling for Israel to get out of the territories. Even Ariel Sharon, who apparently is seen as a softy within his own Likud party, sees the hand writing on the wall: Israel cannot hang on to the West Bank and Gaza much longer. Whatever our cultural and religious backgrounds in this country, we should be standing up for justice, not defending policies that we would be embarrassed by or prevented by federal law from carrying out domestically. This applies to our actions in Iraq and our support for Israel. Why is the Bush administration trying to create legal gray zones where U.S. law does not apply?
In Israel’s case, certainly it is a nation of laws and a parliamentary democracy. But we don’t need to idealize a nation that builds a Berlin Wall on stolen land, bulldozes homes, runs checkpoints that remind one of apartheid, conducts dubious and violent interrogations and has not been able to draft a Constitution in the 50-plus years it has existed. In our own case, we should not be supporting leaders who have ripped up selected pages of our own constitution, such as habeas corpus.
We have to stop conducting and condoning Machiavellian foreign policy and just do the right thing. And the right thing is to condemn torture, cease practicing it ourselves, condemn attacks on civilians, cease practicing it ourselves, and deal fairly with all people in the Middle East, whether they have oil reserves or not. This is going to require Americans to replace the Bush administration, just as peace in Israel will require the Likud to be replaced.
Like us, like Iraq, like Israel, every nation is a country in evolution. No country finds its way by being forced to follow another’s example.
This is the lesson we need to learn from our disaster in Iraq. This is the lesson we should learn from many of Israel’s failures. And it is a lesson we should have learned more than 30 years ago in a place called Vietnam.
Well, the nasty truth is out. A few “bad apples” have committed “abhorrent” acts in “isolated incidents” that are not typical of the US military. At least that’s the spin.
The facts of American torture are more upsetting than just the recent events at Abu Ghraib prison. Torture, degradation, and murder have been in the CIA and US and British military intelligence playbooks forever. Much of what’s in the news this week is familiar to former Northern Irish and Vietnamese prisoners, and to some of the 60,000 graduates of the School of Americas, which once published a guide on torture and has trained some of the most sadistic human rights abusers in this hemisphere. Worse, ever since 9/11, American pundits and policy makers have begun to openly speculate whether torture should ever be an option, and many think it should. Though only a tiny proportion of the military uses these tactics, let’s be clear that they most certainly are practiced.
While individual soldiers must bear responsibility for either abandoning or failing to have a conscience, the Bush administration’s buck-passing and rationalizations do nothing to convince either the Western or Muslim worlds that it holds itself accountable to similar standards. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld bears great responsibility for creating many of these problems by underestimating troop strength, using a large proportion of mercenaries outside military control, and then keeping Congress and even the President in the dark about problems. The President, as usual, seems to be asleep at the wheel, with as porous a memory of events as Condoleeza Rice’s. Finally, it’s a bit of a shock to realize that it was Colin Powell who whitewashed the My Lai Massacre.
Despite loud protestations that the images we have all seen are “un-American,” the US military has had torture in its repertoire for a long time. We just haven’t had 100,000 National Guard citizen soldiers with instant cameras snapping photos of it before. Because of the decent human concern of soldiers who did come forward despite the risk of retribution, like Specialist Joseph Darby, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were brought to light. Now we must demand the same morality, humanity, and accountability from the highest ranks of the military and the Commander-in-Chief. With regime change in Washington, we just might get it.
So, a few “bad apples?” Sure. I’ll tell you exactly where in Washington they work.
The horrific beheading of Nick Berg, now thought to be by Jordanian militant Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, has once again brought Arab anger at the US into focus. For some Americans it has confirmed their quest for peace; for others it has deepened anger toward the Muslim world. For everyone, it has again brought the gruesome reality of this pointless war into America’s living rooms in a way not seen since the Vietnam War.
While pictures of torture and murder at the Abu Ghraib prison continue to surface, so have rationalizations for the military abuses. Republican Senator James Inhofe expressed “outrage at the outrage” of “humanitarian do-gooders”: Referring to Iraqi prisoners, Inhofe said, “they’re not there for traffic violations,” although as many as half of the prisoners may be innocent victims of security sweeps.
Boys Will Be Boys
Meanwhile, Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, suggested what happened at Abu Ghraib was no worse than “fraternity hazing.” Whether this was uttered in a drug-free moment is unclear.
Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, commander of 320th Military Police Battalion, claimed the abuses were “payback” for the purported abuse of Jessica Lynch.
General Antonio Taguba, author of the Taguba Report, pointed the finger at a few bad apples, poor training, and a breakdown of the chain of command, but oddly didn’t see any patterns in the huge number of cases he documented.
Frontpagemag.com played down the torture and murder as mere shenanigans.
Before the occupation, Iraqis were used to torture and murder at Abu Ghraib. Yet instead of shutting down Saddam’s torture factory, the Americans merely added a new innovation: humiliation and total disrespect for Islamic sensibilities. The abuses, which were known even a year ago, have turned moderate and even friendly Iraqis against the American occupation. As Hasan Abu Nimah, former Jordanian ambassador to the UN put it: “If Americans are still asking “why do they hate us?”, they will find the answer now.”
We Didn’t Do Nothin’
But Americans still don’t get it.
In an essay on the Conservative website, http://www.townhall.com/, Walter E. Williams, a professor at George Mason University, wrote recently, “Of the pictures I saw, the worst acts shown were an Iraqi woman being gang-raped and an American soldier putting a rifle butt to an Iraqi prisoner’s groin.” But then he went on, “These acts aren’t anything that Americans should be proud of, but at the same time, they don’t qualify as torture and atrocities so far as those terms have been historically defined.” This lazy academic apparently doesn’t spend much time in the University library or has never heard of the Geneva Convention. The murders of dozens of prisoners, reported in the mainstream press, are not atrocities to Dr. Williams.
The Reagan worship site, www.federalist.com, dismissed the inquiry as a “feeding frenzy” and also dismissed “two sensational claims: first, that such actions render U.S. forces and Saddam’s agents of terror indistinguishable; and second, that any abuse of Iraqi detainees will lead to the abuse of American captives in retaliation.” This now ridiculously false claim was written before Berg’s murder.
Shock and Awe
Americans seem to learn lessons only when they are personalized. As writer Greg Stone observed, the grisly murder of Nick Berg was another version of “Shock and Awe.” The US has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis by antiseptic laser-guided missiles, smart bombs, and half a million children by economic sanctions, but to most Americans this suffering is no more real than a video game. Only by personalizing the terror do Americans seem to “get it.” Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” US Central Command’s Tommy Franks answered the question of how many Iraqi civilians have been killed with the response, “We don’t do body counts.” The head of the Iraqi Health Ministry’s statistics department, Dr Nagham Mohsen, was told to stop compiling civilian casualty statistics in Iraqi hospitals. She was also ordered by the US not to release any of the partial information that had been collected to date. Apparently Iraqis aren’t even worthy of being statistics.
Incitement
For two consecutive years, George Bush had been telling America in his State of the Union addresses, that Islamist terrorism was personified in the form of Iraq. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, an attack on Saurabh Bhalerao, a 24-year-old Hindu from India, almost cost the graduate student his life. While he was being stabbed and beaten, his attackers screamed, “Go back to Iraq!” Their source of information: the President of the United States.
After 9/11 Americans again lashed out indiscriminately. Ann Coulter’s 9/13 article “This is War” concludes with “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” and expresses what many fundamentalist Christian Americans believe. No matter that we lashed out against the wrong people.
Fighting for Jesus in the Army of God
General William Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and a Christian fundamentalist, has given speeches for the last two years, telling audiences that Americans have been victorious in battle because “my god was a real god and his was an idol,” “we in the army of God . . . have been raised for such a time as this,” “we’re a Christian nation,” and our “enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” Put in words that al Qaida might cite, it is a religious obligation to “kill the disbelievers wherever we find them.”
Persecuted Minority?
A 2000 survey of Christian Evangelicals by Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research concludes: “Evangelicals motivate each other by thinking of themselves, much as the first Christians did, as an embattled minority, marginalized at best or persecuted at worst for their religious beliefs. While other Americans may not necessarily see them in this way, what is most important is that this is how evangelical Christians see themselves. And it is their shared profound dissatisfaction with aspects of the American mainstream that gives them cause to fight to be heard by the American mainstream.”
This view was best expressed by Pat Robertson in a 1993 interview with Molly Ivins, and may explain the Religious Right’s affinity with Israel: “Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal- based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”
This “embattled minority” not only has the ear of many people of government; they are the government. The Christian Coalition conference in late September this year will feature George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Carl Rove, House Majority leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority leader Bill Frist.
Fundamentalists vs. Everybody Else
Far from being embattled, Christian Evangelicals are a warring minority with disproportionate influence in the current government. What do they think of non-Christians and other Christians?
Not much.
According to the 2004 report on Christian Evangelicals cited previously, the four most influential religious thinkers were James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Pat Robertson, in that order – all of whom, like al Qaida’s sheiks, seem to be more interested in politics than in God.
James Dobson, for example, must be using the same notes that Osama bin Laden uses in his calls for Christian jihad to right the wrongs against persecuted Christian minorities around the world. Dobson’s radio show is carried on over 4000 radio stations worldwide and he publishes a number of Christian magazines, including Clubhouse for children. In November 1989, the magazine carried an article on Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who devoted her life to caring for the poor in Indian slums. Dobson said of the now-sainted nun: “she is by no means a Christian. She is a New Ager and does not believe in being born-again and considers Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and other religions to be acceptable ways to God….”
So much for mainstream Christians.
Jerry Falwell called the founder and revered prophet of Islam, Muhammad, a “terrorist” on CBS’s “60 Minutes”.
Franklin Graham labeled Islam a “very evil and wicked religion” and said the Qur’an, Islam’s revealed text, “preaches violence.” The Bush family has a close relationship with both Franklin Graham and Graham’s famous father Billy.
Pat Robertson claimed Islam is a “monumental scam” and branded the prophet Muhammad “an absolute wild-eyed fanatic…a robber and brigand…a killer.”
Jews don’t fare much better, but attacking them is a bit tricky because Evangelicals believe that all the Jews in the world must return to Israel before the Second Coming, and this tends to encourage a Christian form of Zionism.
Confederation of Scoundrels
In bed with the Christian Right is the Jewish Right. For example, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews will attend this year’s Christian Coalition conference. Although ostensibly to promote understanding between Christians and Jews, the organization has a simple purpose: to provide Christian support for the government of Israel. The organization sponsors the “Stand for Israel” and “Bless Israel” programs. “Stand for Israel” was the brainchild of both Eckstein, who resides in Israel, and Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition.
The relationship has created a general feeling of disgust in the American Jewish community. A July 2002 article by Ami Eden in the Jewish paper Forward describes Eckstein as a “pariah” and quotes Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League as saying, “I don’t care how many millions [Eckstein’s group] brings in [for Israel], I find it distasteful.”
A former South African, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, is a founder of a conservative Jewish group, Toward Tradition. Recently he founded the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, which has on its board Dr. James Dobson, Charles Colson, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Rev. Pat Robertson, Pastor Rick Scarborough, as well as Rabbi Barry Freundel, Rabbi David Novak, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Michael Medved, John Uhlmann, and Jack Abramoff.
In November 30, 2001, Rabbi Lapin issued a fatwa declaring that, in his opinion, US troops were not bound by restraints on brutality (“Toward Tradition says, Don’t Impose ‘Just War’ Rules on our Armed Forces”). Rabbi Lapin commented: “In war, the objective must be only to win, and the Torah understands this. Now consider three examples of ‘just war’ theory. First, believers in this theory say an army must avoid harming civilians. But the Torah has no concept of ‘civilians.’ In ancient Israel, the population were all equally combatants. Also, while loving peace, God sometimes commanded Israel to wipe out an enemy, including women and children!” In so doing, Lapin threw Talmudic injunctions on excessive violence and treatment of civilians into the garbage and proved himself a close cousin of the sheiks who follow bin Laden.
And it seems the US military has heeded these voices of intolerance.
Not content with already being a dangerous lunatic, in June 2002, Lapin issued a press release defending Reverend Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who asserted that “Islam is not just as good as Christianity” and had called the Prophet Muhammad a “demon-possessed pedophile.” In contrast to the Anti-Defamation League and other liberal Jewish groups who joined CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) in denouncing Vines, Lapin said, “As CNN’s Lou Dobbs has correctly pointed out, we are at war now not simply against ‘terrorism’ but against radical Islam. Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship Ministries reminds us that Muslims are recruiting in U.S. jails, seeking to raise a following of criminals. For Jews who support Israel to side with Islam in this dispute and condemn the Baptists is deeply misguided.”
Christian Zionists
Christian organizations such as Bridges for Peace, Christians for Israel, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem and Chosen People Ministries, provide tens of millions of dollars of support for Israel, often going to programs in the occupied territories.
The Likud party in Israel has long accepted aid from Evangelical Christian groups. In 1979 Menachim Begin gave Jerry Falwell a Lear jet to thank him for services rendered in the 1977 election. This year Likud member and Israeli President Ariel Sharon greeted various Evangelical groups to thank them for their support, and in January the Israeli parliament created a Christian Allies Caucus to coordinate activities with Christian groups. Also earlier this year, Natan Sharansky, Israeli minister to the Diaspora and for Jerusalem affairs, met with Evangelicals in Memphis to thank them for their “steadfast support for the state of Israel.” Bill Broadway’s March 27, 2004 article in the Washington Post discusses numerous other connections between the Likud and Christian organizations.
In his article titled “Israel’s Christian Soldiers,” Craig Horowitz noted: “Citing Scripture, Evangelical Christians have taken up the cause of preserving Israel with a passion–no matter how many liberal Jews find their unlikely devotion unsettling” and “the Evangelicals may now be seen as even more important allies than American Jews.” He cites Tom DeLay speaking before the Knesset: “I stand before you today, in solidarity, as an Israeli of the heart.” It is tempting to chalk it all up to cynical politics, but these politicians’ personal religious views truly influence national politics.
Though their uncritical support of Israel raises eyebrows, it is gratefully accepted and courted by pro-Israel groups. From the Horowitz article again: “Let’s be honest,” says Rabbi A. James Rudin, who was director of inter-religious affairs during his more than 30 years with the American Jewish Committee. “It’s hard to ignore their support even, as my father used to say, if they’re doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.”
So, while liberal and moderate Jews in the United States are inclined to support organizations like Americans for Peace Now, the Religious Right is hoping and working for a Messianic era, in which not only Muslims but Jews will be erased from Jerusalem and a second Messiah will appear to the faithful, completing the Evangelical view of the End of Time.
These are the people currently running our country.
The Crusades
In the statement read by Nick Berg’s murderer, Abu Ghraib and other facilities were called the “prisons of the Crusaders.” While Islam proselytizes, many Muslims are sensitive to the possible link between the occupation and Christian missionary activities that may follow. In fact, this is not an unfounded concern.
Franklin Graham, whose remarks concerning Islam have drawn the condemnation of Islamic and Jewish anti-defamation organizations and who delivered the invocation at George Bush’s inauguration, runs an organization called Samaritan’s Purse, whose workers are waiting in Jordan until it is safe to operate in Iraq. While it is officially a charity, it describes its mandate: ” to promote the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also from Jordan, the killer of Nick Berg, must also have been aware of Samaritan’s Purse.
Likewise, the Southern Baptists see the occupation as a great opportunity for converting the barbaric Mohammedans. Missionary coordinator Sam Porter of Oklahoma puts it this way: “If someone says ‘Why would you to come to Iraq to serve in an impoverished, war-stricken country?’ we would say it was because of the love that the Lord Jesus Christ put in our hearts. If a country opens up for evangelical missions to go there, we go. We believe strongly that Jesus Christ is the son of God and we intend to proclaim that.”
Missionary organizations like Frontiers (frontiers.org) specifically target Muslims, much like Zion’s Hope, “Jews [sic] for Jesus”, and the Southern Baptists target Jews.
William F. Buckley, in a May 2003 piece in the National Review Online, wrote that “the program initiated by sundry evangelical Christian ministers to accost Islam by teaching the tenets of the Christian faith to those who seek to bring that faith to Muslims is very good stuff, overdue.” Insinuating that Islam was like the Soviet “Evil Empire” whose demise Ronald Reagan helped, Buckley wrote that “our diplomats and our generals have prescribed roles to play, but ahead of diplomacy and military action are our philosophers, even as the preachments of Locke et al. preceded the thought that galvanized our Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.” Buckley apparently believes that Jesus-as-Philosopher (precisely the Bush formulation) is a necessary prerequisite to Iraqi democracy.
On May 2, 2003, frontpagemag.com ran an article by Michael Anbar titled “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” Anbar, who also writes for think-israel.org, boils down Islam to a simplistic formulation: “Islam is a politically driven religion bound on military triumph, conquest and subjugation.” Interestingly, many Muslims see Zionism precisely the same way. But Anbar portrays Israel and the West as fighting for their survival in the face of scimitar-wielding hordes. Anbar fully subscribes to the notion that Islam, “which politically dominates a third of humanity and has aspirations to conquer the rest”, must be conquered and reformed. He writes:”Harvard’s Professor Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” is, therefore, not illusionary.” Discussions like this, in which Christians and Jews debate reforming Islam by presumably military and political means, do indeed tend to frighten Muslims, most of whom do not share these apocalyptic views.
Drop the Bomb on the Bastards
Well, if you can’t fight ’em, reform ’em, or convert ’em, then nuke ’em.
On March 7, 2002, Rich Lowry, an editor of the National Review actually suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Mecca, Baghdad, Tehran, Gaza City, Ramallah, Damascus, Cairo, Algiers, Tripoli, and Riyadh. Apparently, the idea of a “Final Solution” is still kicking around.
Add to this a constant diet of horrible, dehumanizing images of Arabs in the media, and you have a mix that guarantees war on the Arab “brutes.”
Arabs make Great Villains!
In the Disney movie, Aladdin, impressionable children are given instruction in Arab culture:
“Oh, I come from a land . From a faraway place Where the caravan camels roam, Where they cut off your ear If they don’t like your face It’s barbaric, but hey, its home.”
If you’re looking for a villain, look no further than the Arab. According to a 1995 article by Marvin Wingfield and Bushra Karaman entitled “Arab Stereotypes and American Educators,” Arabs are represented as uncultured billionaires pawing blonde women, or as terrorists, belly dancers, harem girls, or fanatical tribesmen. Media analyst Jack Shaheen, the author of “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” has documented over 900 films in which Arabs are depicted negatively.
In “The Nature and Structure of the Islamic World,” Ralph Braibanti writes: “The 1994 movies True Lies, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role, is blatantly racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab. Movies slanted against Arabs or Islam are not a new phenomenon. Time magazine listed films starting with The Sheikh (1921), Protocol (1984) and Jewel of the Nile (1985)–all of which emphasized Arabs as exotic, sex-crazed lovers. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) depicts the Arab as ‘a political naif in need of tutelage from a wise Westerner.’ The Formula (1980), Rollover (1981) and Power (1981) emphasize the Arab as an unscrupulous, oil-wealthy plutocrat. Black Sunday (1977) and Delta Force (1986) portray the Arabs as terrorists.”
In an article by Laurie Goodstein entitled “Hollywood Now Plays Cowboys and Arabs,” she describes how Arabs have become the new villains in shoot-em-up movies. Most Arab actors can’t seem to find any work other than being ultimately slain by the “good guys.” She cites the case of actor Sayed Badreya: “With his dark beard and his accented English, he has had his pick of parts as terrorists, hijackers, kidnappers and Islamic militants.” According to Badreya: “When I got to Hollywood, at first I couldn’t get a lot of jobs, so I grew a beard and look like a really bad Arab, and I started to get a lot of work because that’s what they want.” This puts Arabs in Hollywood where Black Americans were about 1950.
But Arabs make even better target practice.
Let’s Get Us Some Ay-rabs!
Video games like Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and Intifada, provide many hours of fun for the whole family, blowing up and shooting Arabs to pieces. In fact there are hundreds of these games. In a visit to www.newgrounds.com, we found several pages of listings of free games, including “IRAQ ATTACK – Lay waste to Saddam’s regime… Or US oil fields if you like! Wacka wacka!” and “AL QUAIDAMON – Your very own war prisoner! How will you treat him?” No rules, no political correctness, and you can download the “cheats.”
In an essay by Judith Moriarty, “Song of the Rain: Lament for Iraq,” she writes: ” today’s youth are well trained and conditioned to the thrill of killing Missiles fired from ships far out to sea by computer and bombs dropped by computer have soldiers well trained. Blood, guts, gore, Terminators, and violent films/TV movies of every description, are typical viewing. Lest we forget, World War II veterans were not exposed to this. A reverence for life was still a valued character trait. Americans watching war from a distance see none of the shredded bodies of children, families terrorized, homes broken into by soldiers, nor do they smell the charred flesh of melted bodies by some new cook’em micro-wave weaponry. Watching “Shock and Awe” with a bag of pork rinds, a six-pack, and a super sized grinder stuffed with salami, ham, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles etc., sure makes war a lot more enjoyable.”
The US Army does its part to promote this same culture of militarism among children by publishing a free game called America’s Army with software developer UBISoft. According to descriptions on the website, the game depicts two American/European-like armies similarly. However, the “game” does include many interviews with military commanders, descriptions of Gulf War operations, and familiarizes children with military hardware and armaments. The Army describes the program as a recruiting tool, but because of the supplementary interviews it doubles as dandy propaganda.
A Change of Climate
How will things ever change?
If we don’t want to be attacked by religious fanatics, we need to get rid of our own. We live in a secular state, no matter what some may believe or prefer. A code of ethics must bind public servants to serve the entire public, not just that portion of it which shares their religious values. Outrageous and inflammatory statements by politicians and soldiers alike should be grounds for immediate dismissal or impeachment. Lying to Congress is already a crime. The President should be tried for this crime. We must demand accountability in government, however high the investigation goes. We should not rush to prosecute low-level soldiers until a full investigation of these atrocities has been completed.
The world was told a terrible lie about Iraq. The needless murder of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of a nation on false premises demands punishment of the President. The reckless management and planning of this war demands punishment of the Secretary of Defense. The victims of this war demand justice and their families deserve compensation. Apologies without feeling and remorse without repairing the damage are characteristics of sociopathic behavior. Do we want a government of sociopaths? If not, we need to replace them.
Root Causes
But none of this will remove the root causes of our habitual invasions of other countries. Americans don’t understand other cultures because our view of multiculturalism is that of the melting pot – and we’re the pot everyone is expected to melt into. We don’t care about history. If we did, we might learn something from it – that long-distance invasions of other countries always fail. The Romans learned this lesson two thousand years ago in Palestine. The British should have learned this lesson during their Age of Empire, and one would have thought we learned this lesson during the Vietnam War. The Russians couldn’t hold on to Afghanistan, and they won’t be able to hold onto Chechnya. American Colonists taught the British the same lesson during our own Revolutionary War. But ignorance and religious fundamentalism step into the breach and insanity and catastrophe replace learning lessons.
We are a violent and aggressive society. We scare other people and nations. In fact, we take pride in it and our weapons. Then we turn around and are amazed when they fear or dislike us. We can reverse this by electing candidates based on party platforms, rather than beauty contests, and taking back the ability to declare or wage war from the President – as our Constitution has always mandated. We can stop spending so much of our GNP on military equipment and use it for social needs – or bank it. As it is, our children will be paying off the Bush deficits for decades.
Mending Fences
Only regime change in Washington will permit positive changes. Even if John Kerry is elected, it is doubtful he would distinguish himself from the Bush administration in foreign policy. Still, someone will eventually have to address the following:
We have a lot of fences to mend. The US must normalize its relationship with the UN, with Europe, with Israel, and with the Arab World.
In the UN, we must re-dedicate ourselves to a more international view. We are only 4% of the earth’s population, and a shrinking percentage at that.
We must approach the New Europe with the realization that this is an entity with a population that exceeds that of our own, with a rising economy and currency, and a more independent view of foreign policy. We can no longer force foreign policy down their throat, we must expect friendly give and take from them, and we won’t always agree.
Normalized Relations with Israel
With Israel, normalization does not mean abandonment, but it does mean dropping a very expensive foreign aid habit. Israel must accept a Palestinian homeland and return land taken by settlements. The Arab world must recognize Israel’s right to exist, and both Israeli and Iranian nukes should be under international supervision. Jerusalem should be a shared city, as it has always been. Instead of spending $3-9 billion a year on Israeli defense, we could instead participate in or sponsor joint Israeli/Palestinian construction, infrastructure, and water projects.
Stopping military subsidies to Israel is the only way to get their attention since they currently hold all the cards. We can never forget Israel, especially since there are so many Americans with connections to the country. But we can also not permit injustice, poverty, and despair in Palestine. And the United States has an equally large Muslim population, and this is an important issue for them as well. Thus, we can never forget them either.
This will no doubt upset fundamentalists in Israel and the US who believe that the Six Day War was a sign from God, and who still harbor notions that a bigger chunk of real estate is still due them. However, for the majority of Israelis and Americans who just want peace, it will mean the beginning of a normal existence that the country has yet to experience.
Normalizing Relations with the Arab World
Though a resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian issue would solve a number of issues with the Arab world, reducing our dependence on oil would also improve this relationship.
First, any strong dependence on another party is unhealthy. Just as we must rebuild a strong domestic manufacturing core, we must also be a bit more energy self-sufficient. As Chinese, Indian, American and EU markets grow, all will be competing for a shrinking amount of oil, so reducing dependence is inevitable. By having relationships with Arab nations other than through oil, we can establish real ties, not ones of convenience or desperation.
Tolerance
We live in a secular society, and that has worked for us for hundreds of years. In a country of 300 million people with citizens from every land and every religion, we cannot afford to have a state religion. Despite the crowing by Christian Evangelicals that the US is a “Christian Nation,” separation of Church and State has been hardcoded into our Constitution. It may be true that many Judeo-Christian concepts have found their way into our laws, but erecting monuments with the Southern Baptist translation of the Ten Commandments in courthouses does not honor the other legal traditions, some of them Babylonian, that also shaped our concepts of justice. In the end we publicly follow the laws of the land and privately follow the dictates of our conscience and our personal religions. That is the American way.
It is clear we have a troubled relationship with religion in the US. Christian Evangelicals feel embattled, Jews and Muslims still feel the sting of prejudice, mainstream Christian denominations are bristling with debate over social issues like gay marriage, sexual abuse scandals, intermarriage, and whether to become politically active. Religious traditionalists – and by this I mean Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who quietly live a faith that has a strong daily structure, such as observing dietary and other prohibitions – have a hard time in a society dripping with commercialized sex, greed, and vulgarity. It is not surprising that alliances have formed between Orthodox Jews and Southern Baptists around “family values” and similar shared concerns. Religious traditionalists also share values surrounding education (Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and Christian Evangelicals all deny Darwin’s theory of evolution and many home-school their children). While preserving our secular democracy and avoiding dragging religion into government with “Faith-based initiatives,” we nonetheless have to make society as friendly as possible for all religions, not just Evangelical Christianity. We cannot afford to maintain the intense polarizations that currently exist.
America as a Great Experiment
Despite all our faults, the greatness of this nation is that we have always been able to meet the challenges of social change. It is time for us to begin a national dialog – not the current monologue or harangue – on what we want this country to be. We need to re-invent a notion of a social contract that re-dedicates this society to serving the people that live in it rather than the corporations that pillage it. Citizens need to understand how they can be useful and valued by society. We ought to choose national priorities more carefully than spinning a wheel and declaring one afternoon that we’re going to send astronauts to Mars. We currently live in a society that throws away its sick and elderly, marginalizes its minorities, and offers little hope or support for families or the newest generation. It is no wonder that, in this climate of fear and uncertainty, “family values” transmogrifies from social to exclusively religious issues. We could resolve to never let the country drift so far off-course in the future as it has today.
I read Barbara Cornwell’s letter on gay marriage (“Leviticus is my guide on the marriage issue,” March 5 Standard-Times), and marveled at how much of the book of Leviticus is selectively quoted. Leviticus is regarded by many scholars to have been written by the priestly Levites long after God gave the Torah to Moses, and much of it was written to specifically guide the Levites’ own conduct as priests.
Besides its views on homosexuality, I wonder how many of the other laws in Leviticus guide people such as Ms. Cornwell? Do they follow the letter of the law in regard to burnt offerings? Do they keep kosher, observe jubilee years, abstain from wearing cloth made of blends? Leviticus calls for adulterers to be killed, prohibits shaving, and prohibits –virtually every religious institution in New Bedford is guilty of this – using pillars in construction.
Perhaps this line from Leviticus is more important: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what tolerance and civil rights truly boil down to.
Save your outrage for the outdated electoral process, Florida election fraud and the Supreme Court appointment of a president. The Greens have comparatively little political influence; they can’t automatically get on a ballot or qualify for matching election funds. So let’s be clear: it wasn’t Nader that elected Bush in 2002.
Democrats seem to have forgotten who they are. Some of the recent crop of Democratic candidates like Joe Lieberman were virtually indistinguishable from Republicans. John Kerry, with his support for the Iraq War, NAFTA, and the Patriot Act, and now with his “Band of Brothers” show, goes out of his way to be GOP-Lite. Democratic candidates like Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have run spirited campaigns, yet have not received much support from their own party.
If Democrats won’t give voters a choice, third parties like the Greens will. Don’t blame Nader, Dean, or Kucinich. Blame a party that’s driving away its own membership.
The Bush Administration’s investigation of what the Intelligence community knew before its own invasion of Iraq should be deeply troubling to Americans.
Besides lying to us about ìweapons of mass destructionî in the first place, the Bush administration now seeks to redirect the blame to Intelligence agencies. In investigating itself, accountability to voters goes out the window and a whitewash seems likely. Far from a failure of spy data, the fact is, the Bush administration favored “regime change” and concocted the invasion of Iraq well in advance of 911.
The National Security Strategy (the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive strikes on other nations) may have been published by this administration on September 2002, but every page has the fingerprints of neo-conservatives who now litter this administration. Visit the newamericancentury.org website and read their 1997 Statement of Principles, signed by Elliott Abrams, William Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others. Its vision is of a new century of US military domination and a massive increase in military spending. Sound familiar?
On page A21 of the January 27th (1998) issue of the Washington Times, a public letter to then-President Clinton (“Speaking of Iraq”) appeared, signed by current Bush administration members Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others, calling for “regime change” in Iraq.
In an editorial published in “Foreign Affairs” in April 1999, Paul Wolfowitz again presented his rationale for an invasion of Iraq.
Now former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill confirms that the Bush administration had planned the invasion of Iraq in advance of 9-11.
Need more proof? Let a bi-partisan Congressional investigation, not the Bush administration itself, decide.
In failing to remind Congress that it is constitutionally the body that declares war, in failing to call the executive branch to account for its explanations of WMDs, in refusing to press Dick Cheney for the records of his pre-war meetings with old cronies, and now in patiently listening to more mendacity and finger-pointing from the Oval Office, only suckers who continue to believe these lies will demonstrate what “failure of intelligence” really means.
I know of former textile workers here in the New Bedford area who, 4 years ago, were unemployed by companies who could no longer compete with Chinese textiles. They went back to school on retraining programs and chose the computer industry. Now they are back at square one, as the computer industry has become the newest casualty of deregulated industry and monetary manipulation by foreign governments.
While this hemorrhage of IT sector jobs apparently is not enough to make you lose any sleep, it is not the trickle or insignificant amount you imply in your article (“First, the number of high-tech jobs outsourced abroad still accounts for a tiny proportion of America’s 10-million-strong IT workforce” and “Second, even as the number of outsourced jobs increases, the overall percent of high-tech jobs going abroad is likely to remain relatively small”). Both these points are simply untrue. Your third point is simply stupid: “There’s no necessary limit to the number of high-tech jobs around the world because there’s no finite limit to the ingenuity of the human mind. And there’s no limit to human needs that can be satisfied.” You have waved away the problem because, apparently in your fevered mind, tech jobs are as infinite as the stars.
I have no idea how someone with logic and facts as weak as yours ends up in a first-class university, but wonders never cease.
I read Alan Dias’ letter on gay parenting in the Aug. 7 Standard-Times and found his facts and arguments to be seriously flawed.
Dias begins by quoting a 1995 study by an Australian academic, Sotirios Sarantakos, that makes many claims about the result of gay parenting. It apparently doesn’t occur to some that gay parents often adopt, and these children are frequently troubled or developmentally delayed before they enter an adoptive home. A 2003 study by an Australian Law Reform Institute generally discredits Sarantakos’ findings. Among the problems with Sarantakos’ study, it turns out, are that many of the parenting issues found in single gay parent families are identical to those in single straight mother families.
Mr. Dias also quotes a University of Southern California study by Stacey and Biblarz and again makes sweeping generalizations about all gay parents. However, it turns out that the USC study is primarily based on single gay mothers. There was also not enough data on gay father families in this study to draw any conclusions.
This is hardly a study worth quoting.
If one wants to be a bit more thorough, there is other research (for example, Bigner and Jacobsen) which indicates that there is little difference between the parenting styles of gay and straight fathers. Or Flaks, Ficher, Masterpasqua and Joseph, which showed slightly better parenting awareness among gay parents. Or Green, Mandel, Hotvedt, et al, which showed no differences between IQ or social development among children in gay and straight families.
At the very least, the issue is far from settled. But who is Dias to pontificate on the suitability of parenting styles or to decide who is “dysfunctional”? In our society I see the results of horrible parenting every day, and the overwhelming majority of dysfunctional members of society have come from straight parents.
Gay unions and gay families are not a threat to the rest of us. The more people who grow up in stable, loving homes, the better. If Mr. Dias wants to prop up the institution of heterosexual marriage, he should start with the causes of divorce, which is now about 43 percent in the US.
It now takes two parents, each working the typical 50 hours a week, to make ends meet in this society. Vacations and leisure are virtually a thing of the past and it is a lucky family that has meals together. Why not start here instead?
The Bush administration has managed to bring us to the brink of, if not surely into, yet another reckless war. To this administration, the Axis of Evil consists of nations that might develop nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
It claims to have proof that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction and is concerned about North Korea’s abandonment of the Non-Proliferation treaty.
But frankly the people who really scare me are the ones who already have nuclear and chemical weapons and all-too-itchy trigger fingers.
The United States sells 45 percent of the world’s armaments. It has 10,000 nukes and 52 tons of excess plutonium. The U.S. has the world’s largest non-nuclear bombs such as the daisy cutter. A 10,000-acre facility in Utah is only one of several, which stores U.S. supplies of chemical weapons, and there are lingering doubts that we have fully abandoned our biological weapons program.
The United States now has most of the world’s weapons of mass destruction, and we are the only country to have ever vaporized human beings with nuclear weapons.
There is no reason for a war in Iraq or anywhere else on earth. If this administration has proof of Iraq’s weapons programs, now is the time to cough it up.
If it is concerned about North Korea’s rejection of non-proliferation agreements, let it also pressure its friends India, Pakistan, and Israel, which have never signed this agreement. And let us abandon the Star Wars program and re-embrace the Anti-Ballistic treaties the Bush administration unilaterally abandoned.
This administration, which came to power under shadowy circumstances, has utterly failed to protect us, failed to ensure our economic security, failed to protect our civil liberties, and failed in its accountability to the American people.
If we are looking for a regime to change, I suggest we look in our own back yard. Another war will not make us any more secure.
The Bush administration has managed to bring us to the brink of, if not surely into, yet another reckless war. To this administration, the Axis of Evil consists of nations that might develop nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. It claims to have proof that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction and is concerned about North Korea’s abandonment of the Non-Proliferation treaty.
But frankly the people who really scare me are the ones who already have nuclear and chemical weapons and all-too-itchy trigger fingers.
The United States sells 45% of the world’s armaments. It has 10,000 nukes and 52 tons of excess plutonium. The U.S. has the world’s largest non-nuclear bombs such as the daisy cutter. A 10,000-acre facility in Utah is only one of several, which stores U.S. supplies of chemical weapons, and there are lingering doubts that we have fully abandoned our biological weapons program. The United States now has most of the worldís weapons of mass destruction, and we are the only country to have ever vaporized human beings with nuclear weapons.
There is no reason for a war in Iraq or anywhere else on earth. If this administration has proof of Iraq’s weapons programs, now is the time to cough it up. If it is concerned about North Koreaís rejection of non-proliferation agreements, let it also pressure its friends India, Pakistan, and Israel, which have never signed this agreement. And let us abandon the Star Wars program and re-embrace the Anti-Ballistic treaties the Bush administration unilaterally abandoned.
This administration, which came to power under shadowy circumstances, has utterly failed to protect us, failed to ensure our economic security, failed to protect our civil liberties, and failed in its accountability to the American people. If we are looking for a regime to change, I suggest we look in our own back yard. Another war will not make us any more secure.
I sent a version of this letter to every US Senator shortly before the Invasion of Iraq
October 8, 2002
Dear Sen. xxx:
I am writing you to convey my opposition to President Bush’s plan to attack Iraq.
This war, if you and other members of Congress let it happen, will be fought for all the wrong reasons – not the least of which is its use as a distraction to our domestic economic problems.
I urge you to listen to the significant number of Americans who oppose this proposed action; to our friends in Europe, Asia, and virtually every other nation on earth; and to the United Nations, which for many years was a partner rather than an enemy. Very few people in the world believe this war is necessary, and the Administration has not yet offered a convincing argument.
The United States can be strong without becoming a belligerent nation. Rather than rejecting negotiation and pursuing unilateralism, it is time for this Administration to be jerked back into line, back into reality, and to be forced to listen – rather than trying to dictate – to what the American people want.
Please do not let the Bush Administration have _ carte blanche_ to pursue this stupid and dangerous war. Remember the legacy of the Viet Nam War and the decades-long impact it had on the U.S.
We’re at war with everyone. We spy on our own citizens. Our infrastructure is crumbling but nobody wants to pay for the upkeep. We seem headed for a police state or a prison state when we could be educating, healing, and building something together. Civil discourse is no longer civil.
Becoming a more diverse country has people worried. Nativism and Islamophobia are now the “new antisemitism.” A Presidential candidate runs openly on a platform of hate. We keep poking our noses in every country of the Middle East. We live in fear. We hate our neighbors. We’ve lost sight of what the purpose of a society is. It’s every man for himself, and the economic system isn’t working for 99% of the country.
There’s a lot to say about all this and other topics. These essays are collected from Letters to the Editor and other pieces I’ve written.
Ach nein! Was meinst Du denn? Weder von uns ist ein Nazi!
From left to right: Olaf Scholz; Justin Trudeau; Emmanuel Macron; Giorgia Meloni; Joe Biden; Fumio Kishida; and Rishi Sunak
Top left: “democracy” demo in Tel Aviv. Top Right: Netanyahu quoting Don Corleone. Bottom left: fighting with police interviewers. Bottom right: Legacy.
Top left: “Kahane chai (lives). Top right: with Ben Gvir. Bottom left: Smotrich promising annexation. Bottom right: Smotrich denying existence of Palestinians.
The film would have you believe that one crafty Israeli has wrapped the entire American foreign policy establishment around his little finger.
some of Trump’s “good people on both sides” (Charlottesville)
Germans know a fascist when they see one
an early “dictator-buffoon” hybrid
storming the Capitol, January 6, 2017
fascism ultimately depends on violence
ready to play ball with fascism
“Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten…”
“Beit Lahiya is gone, Beit Hanoun is gone. Operations are underway in Jabalya, essentially clearing the area of Arabs.”
If you wouldn’t vote for the fascist on the left, why are you using the fascist on the right’s social network?
Kim Jong Un was unavailable
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Objectivity Wars panel held at the Columbia School of Journalism, with Masha Gessen speaking (Kegoktm, 2022, CC)
Killing the “animals” – Israel’s “surgical” bombing of Gaza
Palestinian home vandalized, reads – “Death to the Arabs”
Leaflet warning Gazans to flee south
Nof Zion is a religious Zionist settlement in East Jerusalem created by removing the Palestinian residents of Jabel Mukaber (Author, 2009)
for Palestinians in the West Bank there is no such thing as freedom of movement. Instead, checkpoints and walls and barbed wire (Author, 2009)
Approximate range of Hamas attacks
Some of the 20 sites attacked
Density of Israel’s agricultural settlements and Gaza’s refugee camps
Hitlerjugend (Hitler youth)
Ozzie and Harriet was a television program in the 1950’s
From Reuters data
But don’t expect to see Sheriff Hodgson show up when you call 911
Paul Heroux at the State House
Thomas Hodgson in an election ad telling voters that jail is not a country club.
Sheriffs in the thrall of the Dear Leader
Bristol County’s Chief Trump Bum-Kisser
Sweeping racism under the rug while quoting Martin Luther King
Not everyone appreciates that our voting choices have been trivialized, limited, scripted, and sabotaged by numerous mechanisms designed to attenuate or neuter real democracy. Not everyone appreciates the insinuation that “third party” candidates “contaminate” elections — like Green Party Candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson or candidates from the American Independent Party, American Third Position Party, Constitution Party, Grassroots Party, Justice Party, Objectivist Party, Socialism and Liberation Party, Peace and Freedom Party, Prohibition Party, Reform Party, Socialist Party USA, Socialist Equality Party, and the Socialist Workers Party — and half a dozen more so-called “crackpots.” Have you ever heard anything in the press about any of them? Apparently the Fourth Estate doesn’t appreciate their intrusion into electoral politics either. Rather than informing voters, they censor all but what’s truly “newsworthy.”
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Since the war Germans have paid reparations, introduced Holocaust curriculum into education, and each government since 1965, when diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany were restored, has strengthened the relationship between the two countries. Holocaust denial violates German law. German presidents have visited Yad Vashem, knelt in supplication at the site of the Warsaw uprising, and pursued a policy of repeated apologetic gestures toward the Jewish state. As 
