North Korea is not a threat to the US

Like Pavlov’s dog, the mainstream media slobbers platitudes every time North Korea launches another test missile. Listening to the blather one would think that once Kim Jong-un has a missile capable of reaching the US, he is going to use it in an unprovoked nuclear attack on the US mainland killing millions of Americans.

The leader of North Korea inspecting a missile engine. Contrary to tendentious propaganda (what passes for news in the US), Kim Jong-un is a perfectly sane person acting on the basis of historical fact about his nation;s interactions with the United States.

For Kim to attack the US he would have to be insane, paranoid, and suicidal. Top officials in the US intelligence agencies say he is not. Director of Intelligence Dan Coats has said publicly that Kim is acting very rational; the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says that Kim is “not insane “; the CIA deputy director of the Korea Mission Center, Yong Suk Lee, says that Kim is not suicidal, either. So we can rest with ease that Kim Jong-un is highly unlikely to wake up one morning and nuke America because he can. According to Yong, Kim “wants to rule for a long time and die peacefully in his own bed.”[CNN, October 6, 2017]. Everyone in the mainstream media knows this or should.

North Korea is not an existential threat to the US national security. Occasionally the mainstream media does tell the truth, but that does not sell news, or make the military-industrial-security-complex, neocons, and others in the Deep State happy. Instead the mainstream media tell us about the latest war of words and weapon tests, usually instigated by the US, which the media does not tell us. The word-war is exacerbated every time the US threatens, insults and mocks Kim.

The US regularly practices nuclear attacks on North Korea by air, land and sea which also get a propaganda response from Kim. North Korea has offered to stop testing nuclear bombs, if the US would stop playing nuclear war games on its border [The Guardian]. The US has been threatening North Korea for over 70 years.

“What should frighten the American people is the long history of US crazies who would start a nuclear war. President Trump is not the first president that cannot be trusted with nuclear bombs. It is only by sheer luck that the world has escaped a nuclear war or a cataclysmic nuclear accident. There have been many close calls, and one day there will be one too many…”

What should frighten the American people is the long history of US crazies who would start a nuclear war. President Trump is not the first president that cannot be trusted with nuclear bombs. It is only by sheer luck that the world has escaped a nuclear war or a cataclysmic nuclear accident. There have been many close calls, and one day there will be one too many.
The US keeps gambling away with nuclear roulette anyway, threatening North Korea, Iran, Russia, and the enemy du jour. One of the favorite US verbal threats is to say that “all options are on the table”, that includes nuclear, but the diplomacy option is usually missing. The US has even used nuclear bombs twice against civilian populations in 1945, and according to many historians unnecessarily, because Japan had already offered to surrender. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese died mostly so that Harry Truman could try to impress Joseph Stalin with a show of US power.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur (seated, binoculars in hand) Commander in Chief of U.N. Forces; and Maj. Gen. Edward M. Almond observe the shelling of Inchon from the U.S.S. Mt. McKinley, September 15, 1950. The egomaniac and racist MacArthur saw himself as an American Caesar in the Far East. He saw no problem in vaporising millions of Asians with nuclear bombs to attain American imperial objectives.

During the Korean War (1950 to 1953) President Truman publicly threatened to use the atomic bomb, and the military planned, practiced and shipped nuclear bombs to Asia to be dropped on North Korea. General Douglas MacArthur wanted to use 26 nuclear bombs and start a war with China too [History News Network]. Truman did give General Matthew Ridgeway pre-authorization to use nuclear bombs, even after MacArthur was relieved of his command. Instead the US completely destroyed North Korea with conventional bombs and napalm, killing an estimated 20% to 30% of the population “anyway, someway or another, direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure” [Air Force General Curtis LeMay].

The Korean War is called the “Forgotten War” for reasons: the US was humiliated and lost the Korean War; over 50,000 Americans were killed as negotiating chips, they “died for a tie” as to where to draw the Military Demarcation Line between the North and South; and South Korea was “destroyed to save it”.

The South Koreans deserve a lot of credit for rebuilding a modern highly advanced society in all categories such as education, healthcare, technology, and their standard of living. But contrary to propaganda mythology they did not develop under capitalist free-trade and democracy. The South Korean “miracle on the Han river” was achieved under US backed military dictatorship, a highly planned economy, and billions of dollars from US aid, loans and direct investment. [“Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism”, by Ha-Joon Chang].

Independent left-wing journalist Izzy Stone presented the facts about the origins of the Korean conflict in his 1952 volume, The Hidden History of the Korean War, but although it triggered a momentary controversy, it soon disappeared from the headlines and is now practically forgotten, including among those who should have read it, that is journalists and aspiring journalists.

Kim Jong-un has very good reasons to fear US threats. He knows that the US is ruthless enough to kill millions of his people and destroy his country, just as the US did in Iraq and Libya. Senator John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain even said on Fox news that the US should assassinate the “Crazy Fat Kid”. Words like that, Trump’s insults, threats and nuclear war games are going to get bombastic verbal reactions by Kim Jong-un, and cause him to redouble his nuclear and missile programs. [The Nation].

While the US constantly talks about a denuclearized Korean peninsula, it is the US that first nuclearized it, starting with President Harry Truman’s threats in 1951. Then in July of 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower unilaterally withdrew from section 13(d) of the 1953 Armistice Agreement, which made the introduction of any new weapon systems in the Korean peninsula forbidden to both sides. The US broke the promise so that it could “equip U.S. forces in Korea with modern weapons;”dual capability (nuclear-conventional) weapons, such as the Honest John and the 280 mm. cannon”, i.e. tactical nuclear weapons [National Security Council Report]. All during the rest of the Cold War the US stationed at least 950 nuclear weapons in South Korea. The US may have withdrawn its nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991 as it says, but it still has plenty in Guam and elsewhere that it uses to constantly threaten North Korea with a nuclear attack.
While the mainstream media ponders how to get North Korea to sit down at the negotiating table, it is the US that refuses to talk. North Korea has often offered to sign a permanent peace treaty and non-aggression agreement, but the US has consistently rebuffed the offers. The State Department has repeatedly said in news conferences that it will not negotiate with North Korea unless they meet unspecified preconditions first [US Department of State]. What is puzzling is what the preconditions are, and how to get the US to sit down at the table. Incredibly the US and the media constantly repeat that it is North Korea that refuses to talk!

Unless there is a diplomatic solution, Kim Jong-un is rationally following in his father’s footsteps by developing a credible nuclear deterrent against US aggression. In 2000 President George W. Bush scoffed at President Clinton’s nuclear agreement with North Korea, and then he intensified threats in 2002 with his “Axis of Evil” speech. Bush followed that speech by invading Iraq in 2003 with “Shock and Awe”, leaving the cradle of human civilization in ruins, and later hanging Saddam Hussein.

Bush did not plan to stop with Iraq. General Wesley Clark says that he was told at the Pentagon that Bush planned to invade 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran [YouTube]. It is the US that has been paranoid, unpredictable and insane during the 21stcentury, and it did not start with Trump, but he takes prides in acting more insane.
After the initial US invasion of Iraq, a smug looking Bush got out of the passenger seat of a fighter jet that the pilot had landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln. He strutted over to the microphone in his flight suit and gave a premature “Mission Accomplished” speech. Lisa Schiffren gushed in the Wall Street Journal that Bush’s performance made him look hot and sexy in his flight suit, adding with admiration that Bush is “credible as a Commander in Chief”. The mainstream media has been the cheerleader for all of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Obama, Clinton and Kerry wars. They are now inciting the US public with propaganda for war with North Korea, Iran and Russia.

Kim Jong-un is not paranoid to be fearful, and he has been acting predictably. The US has left him no choice other than to defend his country with the deterrent of nuclear weapons. Bush sabotaged the negotiated nuclear agreement that the US and North Korea had made under President Bill Clinton in the 1990’s. That is what precipitated North Korea withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and resuming their nuclear program.

In 2003 when Bush persuaded Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to abandon his nuclear program, he singled out North Korea when he said, “we want to have lessons learned, because we want Libya to be a model for other countries” to unilaterally disarm. North Korea was paying close attention in 2011 when President Obama and Hillary Clinton destroyed Libya and assassinates its leader, once he was defenseless. Clinton then gloated “we came, we saw, he died, hahaha”. The lesson of Libya is that “if you have nukes, never give them up–if you don’t have them, get them” [US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats].
The North Koreans are not going to trust a US agreement again. They will trust in themselves, as they did when Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-sung led the guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. Korea’s historical philosophy is based on the principle of self-sufficiency and resistance against foreign domination, especially in the North. The North Koreans now call their historical philosophy “Juche”. North Korea is determined to follow the principle of Juche to the “realization of independence in politics, selfsufficiency in the economy and self-reliance in national defence”” [official DPRK Juche link].
President Trump slammed the door shut on negotiations with Kim Jong-un by threatening to totally destroy North Korea with “fire and furry” and insulting him with the “Little Rocket Man” slurs. Kim takes it seriously when the US repeatedly threatens to destroy his country. Trump’s insults caused Kim to “lose face (kibun)”. Respect is extremely important in Korean culture. The natural reaction for a Korean who has been disrespected is to become infuriated. It is predictable, and the US knows it.

The suitably deranged and utterly brainwashed (these qualities often go together) Nikki Haley aptly mirrors the morally degenerate forces in control of US foreign policy.

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s latest outburst that “if war comes, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed” is an obvious provocation, which the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov called “a really bloodthirsty tirade”. Interestingly, Levrov added that “Moscow has been closely working with the US on the North Korean issue, with several meetings being held between the countries’ diplomats in the Russian capital, and other venues.”

In the 21st century the US has killed millions of defenseless people all over the world with wars of aggression, and by using excessive force and total war against civilian populations. The US uses food, water and medical supplies as psychological weapons of mass destruction. As Madeleine Albright said, 500,000 dead children is “worth it” to bring a country to its knees. That is what the US sanctions are now doing to North Korea. But as Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “North Korea will ‘eat grass’ before giving up nukes”.

The Koreans know the history of US aggression well. The US’s first contact with Korea in the 19th century was an act of aggression. The US considered Korea’s isolation, self-sufficiency and refusal to trade an arrogant and intolerable insult, and a loss of profit. So in 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant launched an invasion against Korea. When Japan colonized and annexed Korea in 1910 the Western colonial powers including the US cheered their approval.

All Korea has ever wanted was to be left alone. During their 4000 year history Korea has not been an aggressive expansionist country. To the contrary, Korea has often been invaded by China, Mongolia, Japan, Russia and the US. Historically Korea has resisted contact with foreigners because foreigners had always brought invasions. Like his Korean ancestors, Kim Jong-un just wants North Korea to be left alone for the Korean people to determine their own future.

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About the author

David William Pear, currently serving as a senior contributing editor, is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. He is also a regular columnist and commenter on OpedNews. His articles have been published by The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Russia Insider, Pravda and many other progressive publications. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, St Pete for Peace, CodePink and International Solidarity Movement. In February of 2015 he was part of a people-to-people delegation to Cuba with CodePink. In November of 2015 he was a delegate with CodePink to Palestine to show solidarity with Palestinians. In 2016 David spent 10 weeks in Palestine with the Palestinian non-violent resistance group International Solidarity Movement (ISM). David frequently makes extended trips to Russia as a private citizen. After retiring from finance in 2009, David earned a certification as an Emergency Medical Technician. David is a Vietnam veteran having served as a member of the 5th Special Forces Group as a combat advisor to the Army of the Republic of (South) Viet Nam. David resides with his wife and three cats in Clearwater Beach, Florida.

DAVID W PEAR—North Korea is not an existential threat to the US national security. Occasionally the mainstream media does tell the truth, but that does not sell news, or make the military-industrial-security-complex, neocons, and others in the Deep State happy. Instead the mainstream media tell us about the latest war of words and weapon tests, usually instigated by the US, which the media does not tell us. The word-war is exacerbated every time the US threatens, insults and mocks Kim.

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David has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Maryland and attended classes at George Washington University to receive his Certified Financial Planner certification. He also attended courses at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for his certification as a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA). He has volunteered for public health service, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, emergency medicine and needs of the homeless. His hobbies include boating, fishing and motorcycle touring. He is also a licensed skydiver (USPA-inactive).

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Time to Organize a Mass Movement in Defense of Social Security and Medicare for All

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by DAVE LINDORFF

Photo by americans4financialreform | CC BY 2.0

Now that it looks like the President Trump and the Republican Congress will succeed in ramming through the most regressive tax bill (not “reform” bill as the media keep slipping into calling it) in the history of the income tax, it’s time to gear up for the real battle — a battle that calls for not more lame Soros-funded, Democratic Party-led “resistance,” but rather a deadly serious mass movement to defend and expand Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what remains of federal welfare assistance.

The Republicans have made it clear that their claim that this tax bill, in slashing taxes on corporations and the rich, will “pay for itself” through supposed higher economic growth is bogus and that the real goal is to, as conservative strategist Grover Norquist once put it, “to shrink government down to the size that we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But make no mistake, the Republicans aren’t talking about shrinking the biggest drain on the federal budget — the military — which consumes 54% of each year’s discretionary budget. No, they’re talking about cutting social spending, or in other words the key elements still left from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This campaign will be based upon a lie which the corporate media tend to repeat uncritically: that Social Security is “bankrupt” and more importantly that it is the main cause of the nation’s $20-trillion deficit (soon to be a $21.5-trillion or higher deficit after the new tax law works its magic). In fact, Social Security benefits are, always have always been and will through 2019 continue to be fully funded by payments made into the program by past and current workers’ FICA payroll taxes. The program has over its 81-year history contributed exactly nothing to the federal deficit. Rather, that deficit is the result primarily of the nation’s massive military budget and endless series of wars and cold wars since the end of World War II, as well as to a gutless Congress that continually adds to to the red ink by refusing to fully fund government programs, preferring to borrow and push the costs onto future generations. (Truth to tell, Congress has since World War II cravenly used borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund to finance US wars without having to raise income taxes to pay for them.)

Now is the time to begin building a mass movement to not only defend but to expand those programs, which are actually among the most meager and inadequate of retirement and state-run health programs among all developed nations.

The strategy for going after what Republicans scornfully (and Democrats ignorantly and lazily) deride as “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicaid, are actually earned benefits that workers have, over their lifetimes, paid for with taxes taken from both their paychecks and from their employers, is to claim that the government just can’t afford these programs anymore.

It’s true that because of demographic changes and medical advances — a declining birthrate, a major increase in life expectancy, and the arrival of a massive wave of so-called “Baby Boomers” born in the two boom decades that followed the end of World War II — there is a bulge in the number of people reaching retirement age and eligibility for both Medicaid and Social Security retirement benefits. We know that is happening (the first Baby Boomers reached 62, the earliest age for claiming benefits, in 2007, and reached 66, the age of eligibility for what is known as “full retirement,” in 2011). That bulge in elderly citizens claiming benefits will continue enrolling for retirement and Medicare eligibility until the period 2026 through 2034, when the last Boomer babies, born in 1964, will be reaching, respectively, either age 62 or age 70, the latter being the age one can file and receive maximum monthly benefit checks. (Then, left unsaid, is the reality that the shortfall problem will begin to go away as older retirees in the bulge begin to die off.)

Coincidentally, 2034 is also the year that, if nothing is done by Congress to bolster the Social Security Trust Fund in advance, the Social Security System as currently established under the 1936 Act, will have to draw on just the FICA tax receipts from then current workers. That, we’re told, would mean cutting benefits by some 21%. That’s hardly going bankrupt, but it would be a hard blow for the elderly who depend upon only Social Security benefits to survive on, as they have no retirement savings and no pensions thanks to America’s poverty-level minimum wage and the termination of most traditional pensions. But the countries of Europe, as well as Japan and Taiwan, all face these same issues and have dealt with them, keeping their much more generous systems solvent. Here the story is different.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]en years ago, this temporary shortfall in the Trust Fund and this predictable extra draw on the system’s resources because of the retirement of Baby Boomers could have been dealt with by a few simple tweaks, such as eliminating or even just raising the cap on income subject to the FICA tax (it’s currently capped at the first $127,000 of earnings). But Congress has refused to deal with such a fix, and the longer allegedly people’s deliberative body waits, the more dramatic and costly that fix will have to be. Today, the shortfall could be eliminated by changing the law so that all income — even multi-million-dollar incomes — be made subject to the payroll tax, and by a few smaller tweaks, like adding a transaction tax of perhaps 0.25% to every short-term stock trade — something many countries in Europe (where retirement systems are much better funded) do. Or the amount employers pay into worker accounts could be raised from the current matching 6.2% to 7.2% or 8.2%.

Okay, so we know that Social Security and Medicare, two of the most popular programs of the United States government, are in the gunsights of Republican strategists. Ergo, now is the time to begin building a mass movement to not only defend but to expand those programs, which are actually among the most meager and inadequate of retirement and state-run health programs among all developed nations.

The first step is to begin a campaign to explain to the American people that Social Security and Medicare will not go bust as long as they fight to protect them. Despite the best efforts of conservative and neo-liberal ideologues to pretend that they are doomed by demographics and actuarial tables as if they were private annuities, Social Security and Medicare are in fact purely political constructs and benefits are set and funded by the decisions of elected politicians.

The second step is to explain clearly to all Americans that Social Security and Medicare do not simply benefit the old and the sick. They are there for every worker who becomes disabled or too ill to work anymore. Social Security benefits are also paid to support children when a wage-earning parent dies, or to a widow who may have earned no or only a minimal Social Security benefit while raising a family. Even more importantly, Social Security and Medicare also mean that children and grandchildren do not have to bankrupt themselves or short-change their own children’s future by having to impoverish themselves to support their aging parents and/or grandparents. If you think about it, what working-age person complains the benefit payments to their retired parents or grandparents being too high? And yet that is one of the more obscene tactics opponents of these programs have turned to: trying to stir up an inter-generational war over “entitlements.”

Marches on Washington and state capitals in this movement should not include just older people — they should be packed with young people demanding that grandma and grandpa and mom and dad get the benefits they’ve earned, and that these programs be there for them too, when it’s their turn to need them.

I would say that this movement I’m calling for should also be in defense of Medicaid — the federal/state program that funds medical care for the poor (and also for a huge proportion of the middle class when they need to move into long-term nursing home care), and of welfare for families of the unemployed and those who, despite working at prevailing minimum wages, cannot survive without financial assistance. But the truth is that these programs, as well as Medicare itself, should be replaced with some type of national health program for all, such as they have in the UK and Canada (and virtually all of Europe and much of Asia), and by a federal minimum wage that actually is set high enough to support a family on it (current minimum wages are so low that workers qualify for welfare programs like WIC and Food Stamps, meaning these programs are actually just taxpayer-funded payroll subsidies for greedy employers unwilling to pay their workers a living wage).

It’s easy to make the case that the US has the most costly health system in the world by a factor of two, and still leaves nearly 30 million citizens uninsured and unable to pay to see a doctor, while other developed countries, at a fraction of the cost, have systems that cover all their citizens’ health care costs. It’s easy too to make the case that raising incomes at the bottom is the best way to raise all workers’ incomes since employers have to offer more to attract workers when less skilled workers start to receive more than those skilled workers are currently receiving. It’s a no-brainer.

The challenge, as I see it, is to also make the connection between the coming attacks on these New Deal remnant programs and the vast sums of tax money being annually squandered on the US military’s war machine, a giant funds-sucking monster that currently receives $1.3 trillion, counting the interest on the debt for prior wars and military spending. That is as much as the next eight nations in the world, including China and Russia, spend on their militaries, and it is demonstrably a huge waste.

Are we safer because we spend multiple times what our rivals [actually the rivals of the US plutocracy, not the US people—Eds] spend on our military? Is the US free from the threat of terror because of the endless wars that the US is fighting or providing aid for others to fight (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.)? Clearly not. Would the US be at risk if the military budget were cut by 75%, if its nuclear force was trimmed to a few dozen weapons (pending reaching a global ban on nuclear weapons), if it ceased to have $15-billion aircraft carriers, whose only purpose is engaging in unprovoked wars on third-world countries that pose no threat to the US, and if its bloated officer staff was whittled down to a few generals per military branch? Hardly. We have been terrorized by our government leaders and our compliant corporate media for long enough. It’s time to whittle the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so presciently warned us against down to a size where it would no longer be able to dictate its own budgets, as its military bases and arms manufacturers, situated strategically in every congressional district in the union, currently allow it to do.

Any movement to protect and expand Social Security and to move the US away from its shabby, complicated and cut-prone patchwork health care system of Medicare, Medicaid, employer-based private insurance, charity care and, at least for now, the Affordable Care Act, to some kind of nationalized health system, needs to be independent of the two main political parties. The Republican Party is attempting to eradicate public retirement and public health care programs of all kinds, or at least to convert Social Security into some kind of worker-funded ggovernment-mandated401(k) managed by private firms, and to erase the ACA.

But the Democrats have been treacherous on this. [Surprise!!] The ACA — Obamacare — is with us because President Obama, despite having a mandate and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2009, chose to reject any consideration of a Canadian-style single-payer government medical insurance program, and instead developed an insurance-friendly Rube Goldberg-like government subsidized the program, the ACA, which was immediately slated for death by Republicans and which was doomed by its own internal contradictions which were bound to eventually make it too costly to continue with. Meanwhile, Obama also, early in his first term, created a commission, headed by former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson (famously known for calling Social Security “a cow with 310 million teats”) and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Clinton. They called for raising the retirement age and making Social Security more of a means-tested program — an idea Hillary Clinton also promoted, disastrously, during her losing 2016 presidential campaign.

No, the only way to fight this looming battle for Social Security and health care for all has to be independent of parties, like the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s before it. And it needs to start getting organized now before the Republicans get their shit together on this.

On the bright side, this is a battle that can, if done right, unite in one mass progressive movement the broadest possible spectrum of the American public, bridging distinctions of race, age and gender, where people live (urban, suburban or rural), class (poor, working, middle or even upper-middle income people) and ideology (socialist, Democrat, independent and even many Republicans since everyone needs Social Security and health care).

So who’s on this? We need to get to work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

DAVE LINDORFF—The only way to fight this looming battle for Social Security and health care for all has to be independent of parties, like the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s before it. And it needs to start getting organized now before the Republicans get their shit together on this.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Recent Slaughter in Colorado Highlights the Prairie Dog’s Plight

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

We share this planet; we do not own it.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR THE ANIMALS TODAY?

The penalty for merely annoying humans is death.
Our disrespect for animals' lives is of revolting, sociopathic dimensions. And more often than not the fate of our wildlife is consigned to the whims of agribusiness, corrupt politicians and sadistic morons—their executioners.

by KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

a few isolated islands remain. Despite this, the Redwoods still need to be defended.

The Bison’s range once stretched from Idaho to Virginia, and Minnesota to Texas, and the animals numbered 25-30 million. By 1890, Whites had hunted them down to a few hundred. The famous Yellowstone herd, which is based out of the national park, is descended from just 23 individuals and currently numbers less than 5000. Despite this, the Bison still need to be defended.

Prairie dogs are a keystone species originally found throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states of the US. Though once quite common, over the past century their population has plunged by over 98% due to the activites of the US Occupation, with cascading effects to other fauna and flora. Despite this, they too still need to be defended.

Prairie dogs differ from the Redwood and the Bison in one important aspect: unlike the previous two, they enjoy very little legal protection. Only two of the five species of prairie dog are officially listed as under threat, but these laws are rarely enforced. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has so far turned down all petitions to list the other three species. At the local level, few pro-prairie dog laws exist and in fact some counties actually require the eradication of prairie dogs on private land.

So killing prairie dogs is still a common occurrence. Earlier this month, in Longmont, Colorado, a prairie dog colony was exterminated for no urgent reason and against the wishes of local residents. It was this story that brought the plight of the prairie dogs to my attention and inspired me to investigate further.

Biology and Ecology

Prairie dogs are classified into five different species in the genus Cynomys, of which four are found in the United States: Gunnison’s prairie dog (C. gunnisoni). the white-tailed prairie dog (C. leucurus), the black-tailed prairie dog (C. ludovicianus) and the Utah prairie dog (C. parvidens). The fifth species, the Mexican prairie dog, C. mexicanus, is only found south of the border. Of these, only two have conservation status: the Utah is “threatened” under the US Endangered Species Act and the Mexican is designated “endangered” by CITES.

Prairie dogs are mostly herbivorous, living off of leaves and seeds, though they sometimes also eat insects.

Prairie dogs are a “keystone species,” meaning that they have a disproportionately large effect in their ecosystem relative to their abundance. In fact, over 200 vertebrate species and a number of invertebrate species are directly or indirectly dependent on prairie dogs for their own survival. For example, over 90% of the diet of black-footed ferrets(Mustela nigripes) is prairie dog, and their numbers fell to a low of 18 individuals in 1986due to the decline in their food source.

Additional predators who consume prairie dogs are foxes, coyotes, badgers, eagles, and red-tailed hawks. Still other animals nest or shelter in prairie dog burrows, permanently or temporarily, including burrowing owls, mountain plovers, rattlesnakes, salamanders, turtles and rabbits.

Prairie dogs also have a significant effect on the plants in their range. Their selective foraging promotes a high diversity of plant species, which is appreciated by other browsing herbivores such as Bison and Pronghorn Antelope.

The burrowing activity of the prairie dog positively affects soil structure and health through aeration and by helping rainwater to percolate into it and be retained. This boosts the growth of flowering plants, which in turn benefits insects, birds and other creatures.

Social Life and Language

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]rairie dogs are social animals who live in colonies that people call “towns.” Each town is made up of several to many groups. Each group is comprised of one to several adult females and zero to several adult males plus their offspring. Each group has its own territory which is staunchly defended by males and females alike.

Females are fertile for only about five hours on one day a year in the spring. They bear litters of 4-5 babies and, like cats, there is multiple paternity within each litter. That is, the female can be impregnated by multiple fathers. Though the young reach maturity in three months, about half of them typically die before reaching breeding age themselves.

Within groups, individuals express a variety of social behaviors including chittering, kissing, and in the case of black-tailed prairie dogs, monkey-like communal grooming.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is prairie dog language. Arizona Biologist Con Slobodchikoff has spent many years studying the alarm calls made by Gunnison’s prairie dog and his findings are fascinating.

First, Slobodchikoff noticed that prairie dogs seemed to be making different alarm calls depending on what predator was approaching. So he recorded audio of a variety of calls along with video of the escape responses that followed them. Then he played back the recordings in the field and was able to confirm through observation that calls consistently correlated with responses.

Next, using computer-generated sonograms, he measured the frequency and time values of the pattern of chirps within each call. This was painstaking work, as each individual chirp is only about 1/10th of a second in length. But the labor paid off.

What he found was that alarm calls describe individual predators based not only on species – such as coyote, human, hawk or domestic dog – but had additional signifiers for attributes such as size, shape and color. For example, differently sized and colored dogs got different calls. So did a human wearing a blue shirt versus the same human wearing a yellow shirt. The structures of the calls, then, are analogous to the nouns and adjectives of human language.

Even abstract shapes were greeted by different sounds, as Slobodchikoff found when he presented the prairie dogs with illustrations of a circles, triangles, or a colored oval. In these cases, the prairie dogs were describing to each other things that they had never seen before.

In a further parallel to human language, Slobodchikoff discovered that the same sounds were vocalized with different “dialects” or “accents” by Gunnison’s prairie dogs throughout their range around the Four Corners area. After examining sonograms of the calls of other species of prairie dog, Slobodchikoff tentatively concluded that they contrast enough from each other to constitute separate languages that would be comprehensible only to their native speakers. He compared this to the differences among human languages such as English, Spanish, French, etc.

Slobodchikoff described prairie dog language as, “at the present time, the most sophisticated animal language that has been decoded.”

The War on Prarie Dogs

The vast majority of the Europeans who participated in the invasion of North America did not have the same interest or respect for prairie dogs as Slobodchikoff. Violence has been the far more usual hallmark of interaction.

The main threats to prairie dogs have been agriculture, development and introduced disease. It’s also been common to shoot them for sport as a form of target practice. (They are usually classified in rural communities as "varmints"—thereby free to shoot for kicks with "varmint rifles." Countless generations of hunters have acquired their lethal skill by using "varmints" as living targets. —Editor)

Farmers have long killed prairie dogs because they forage on a wide variety of vegetation in their environs, which includes crops if they are planted in prairie dog territory.

Ranchers have targeted them under the false beliefs that A) domesticated animals break their legs in the holes (which has never been documented) and that B) in competing for vegetation with prairie dogs, domesticated animals suffer. This second point is highly debatable. No real evidence exists proving it. Furthermore, Bison, who have a diet similar to cows, suffered no apparent adversity from sharing habitat with the prairie dog for millennia. In fact, Bison have shown a preference for grazing on the edges of prairie dog towns.

As for development, it’s an unfortunate fact for the prairie dogs that they’ve simply been in the way of urban sprawl. They make their towns on flat, open spaces that are also ideal for houses, malls and parking lots. Prairie dog towns have also fallen victim to resource extraction activities such as fracking and oil-drilling. I didn’t find any references to such in my research, but solar and wind farms would also disrupt or destroy their habitat, of course.

A large number of prairie dogs have died of the plague, which entered the US in 1900. Carried by fleas, it rapidly spread through many wildlife populations. Unfortunately for prairie dogs, they are particularly susceptible and 90-100% in a town die within two weeks of its introduction.

Human extermination of prairie dogs over the last century has been accomplished through land-clearing, firearms, poison, and explosive gas. These methods are variously quick or agonizing, which is to say more or less “humane”.

One of the most brutal methods is to gas them with aluminium phosphide, an inorganic compound that is lethal to most animals including humans. It is sold under various brand names such as Fumitoxin® Weevilcide® and Phostoxin®. Aluminium phosphide is what was used to attack the colony at Longmont, Colorado, on the morning of Friday, November 10^th, 2017.

Tragedy at Longmont

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]eremy Gregory, a prairie dog activist who is executive director of Tindakan, a non-profit seeking solutions for ecological and social justice issues, was present for the mass killing. I contacted him via email and he described the scene and the situation thus:

“Four men working for Rocky Mountain Wildlife Services (not to be confused with the the Dept of Ag’s Wildlife Services but still as vile and heinous) set out to methodically place paper doused in fumitoxen in the homes of over 300 prairie dogs, just so a development company could be spared from humanely relocating them to another place. This colony resided on the edge of open space and habitat to an array of other beautiful and majestic species, some threatened like the burrowing owl and a family of bald eagles. There are also other bird species like falcons and hawks and of course, along with raccoons, fox, coyote… and the list goes on.

“Fumitoxin is a poison that, once ingested, causes that living being to bleed out, destroying the internal organs. It is an inhumane, slow and painful death. This poison has in fact been the contributor to the deaths of people, including two girls recently.

As bad as this is, it’s worse once you know the backstory. This wasn’t a case of prairie dogs being killed for an imminent construction project or agricultural endeavor, as poor as these excuses would be, given our over-built, over-farmed environment. No, apparently the motivation was, at least in part, real life hatred for prairie dogs and the humans who defend them.

Susan Sommers with Prairie Protection Colorado (PPC) filled me in on the details:

The City of Longmont actually has a law on the books that requires developers to “make a good faith effort” to relocate prairie dogs. Doing so is a part of the permitting process for approving new construction. The developer in this instance was Sun Construction, owned by Steve Strong and Andy Welch, who, as we shall see, are the villains in this tale.

Relocating prairie dogs is not easy. Challenge #1 is finding an appropriate chunk of real estate where the prairie dogs will be welcome. Challenge #2 is winning the approval of the County Commissioners of the receiving county. Challenge #3 is the official blessing of Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW), which requires that the developer submit a Wild To Wild Relocation application. Then there are the logistics of the relocation process itself, such as prepping the new spot and trapping the prairie dogs at the old one, etc.

PPC took care of challenge #1: They found enthusiastic hosts at the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, which is actively seeking prairie dogs as part of restoring a healthy prairie ecosystem that could support the reintroduction of black-footed ferrets. Refuge staff “felt confident” that the commissioners of Jefferson County would sign off on the relocation since the refuge is on federal land, which would cover challenge #2.

Unfortunately, this left challenge #3 – submitting the paperwork – in the hands of Sun Construction. First they asked the city for a waiver from the relocation requirement. When the city refused, Sun pulled their application to develop the property, even though this meant giving up on a seven-figure project. This left them legally free to exterminate the prairie dogs.

Which they did, on November 10^th, as told above.

Facebook Adds Insult to Injury

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter the extermination, Prairie Protection Colorado published three different posts about the event on their Facebook page. These posts included Sun Construction’s publicly advertised contact information, including their phone number (303-444-4780), email address (info@sunconstruction.com), and their web address (sunconstruction.com). Also named were Steve Strong and Andy Welch, whose role as owners is also a matter of public record.

Soon afterwards, Facebook deleted one of the posts and sent a warning to PPC that they would unpublish their entire page if they didn’t voluntarily delete any other posts similar to it. So PPC removed the other two posts and reposted new stories without the contact information, along with the following notice:

November 11 at 5:24pm

Facebook has required us to remove several posts due to concerns that they don’t conform to FB’s community standards. We have done so and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our followers.

Two days later, they added:

Sun Construction’s owners are watching this page, and they obviously reported our content to Facebook which resulted in our having to remove posts naming them as the individuals that called for this inhumane and horrific mass annihilation.

Here we see one of the serious issues with using Facebook for political activism. Although social media is de facto the public realm the way it is treated by its users, it is not so de jure, that is, according to the law. In the real world, Strong and Welch might not like having their names trumpeted in the town square, but unless a threat is being made against them or they are being slandered (neither of which was the case with PPC’s posts on Facebook), they have no legal recourse for complaint. They’ve simply got to grin and bear it. Of course, they can also make their case for their actions in the same square. These are basic principles of free speech in an open society (which, yes, is under assault).

Facebook, on the other hand, is a privately owned virtual space that can and does police the speech of its users who have no legal recourse except to its Terms of Service. Whereas US Constitutional free speech has been subject to nearly constant refinement and redefinition through the courts over the decades – and so it is fairly clear at this point what it encompasses, for better or worse – Facebook’s terms are a matter of a corporate caprice, if legally vetted. The terms are interpreted subjectively, by both people and by algorithms.

Yes, algorithms are subjective. Though the term sounds mathematical and connotes precision and even objectivity, any social media algorithm is purely a product of the prejudices, being written and tweaked by people.

All of this is to say that two human beings, Steve Strong and Andy Welch, who orchestrated the painful deaths of close to 300 animals – of a species that has been driven to the edge of extinction – successfully requested that they not be named as the responsible parties in a de facto public forum by appealing to that forum’s “community standards.”

One might wonder which terms the Facebook moderators felt that PPC violated. Did they “bully, intimidate, or harass”? Was it “hate speech”? Or “ misleading, malicious, or discriminatory”? We will probably never know, nor does PPC have a “right” to be informed.

In the real world, PPC certainly did none of those things, and Strong and Welch wouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But Facebook is not the real world and in the realm of social media, there are no rights. Their “community standards” might sound reasonable, but in reality they are no more than mealy-mouthed nonsense, precluding honest discourse and enforcing authoritarian conformity. Note how much of the terminology is borrowed from the language of identity politics, but is here turned on its head and used to protect the actions of the oppressor from the critique of the oppressed. Disgusting.

In the case of PPC and Sun Construction, an unequal power dynamic exists; you have mainstream corporate owners on one hand and marginal, underfunded activists on the other. It is essentially impossible for PPC to “bully” Sun. The same dynamic exists between Facebook itself and its individual users, but to a much greater degree. Sun’s Strong and Welch are, in the end, just individuals and if enough of their community – including friends and family – told them to shape up their act, they just might do it. Facebook, though, is operatively unassailable.

Personally, I think it’s high time to ask whether social media is doing more harm than good. But that’s a topic for another time…

What motivates murder?

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o why did Steve Strong and Andy Welch and Sun Construction kill all the prairie dogs? The way PPC set up the relocation deal financially, it would not have cost more than extermination. But money was clearly not their primary concern since they were willing to let go of a big project rather than take the simple step to save the animals. This is aberrant behavior for Capitalists. When you can’t count on corporations to follow the profit motive, how else do you explain their behavior?

Sommers speculated:

Settler Colonialism” never ended; today’s resource extractors are directly descended from yesterday’s rapacious, Indian-killing pioneers, in spirit if not in blood. The twisted belief that humans have “dominion over creation” is deeply ingrained in the current society, even if that belief is itself relatively recent in the long history of the human species.

What we see in the slaughter of these innocents in Colorado is the same thing that drives the annual massacre of Yellowstone Bison and the continued logging of Redwood trees. Yes, there is greed, but there is more than that, too. There is also naked hatred.

Tindakan’s Gregory had this to say:

“The science is overwhelming that in order to not just survive but flourish, we must find ways to coexist with nature. As Jacques Cousteau proclaimed; without man, nature flourishes yet without nature, man perishes. We have reduced the prairie dog species to less than 2% of it’s original habitat, this in turn adversely affects thousands of other species, which we need for our own survival.”

He is describing our society’s behavior as what it is: suicidal. One could surmise that this is the inevitable outcome of being ecocidal.

These are ugly times. Of course the US has never been pretty – there were no “good old days” for a nation founded on genocide and slavery – but its malice is metastasizing as it stumbles down the inevitable path of its decline. The mean are getting meaner; the angry, angrier; the crazy, crazier. We are living in an era of failing and falling, where institutions and individuals alike are degrading, devolving. What hope, then, is there for the prairie dog and all the other endangered creatures? I won’t guess, but I do know that not fighting for them is choosing spiritual death for ourselves.

Organizations defending the prairie dog:

* Prairie Protection Colorado

* Prairie Dog Coalition (Humane Society of the US)

* North Colorado Prairie Dog Advocates

* Prairie Dog Pals

* Wild Earth Guardians

* Southern Plains Land Trust

* Tindakan

Also Recommended:

* Con Slobodchikoff’s videos about Prairie Dogs: Ecology | Social Life | Language | Conservation

* “Prairie Dog Gone” chapter from Welfare Ranching

APPENDIX

As reported by Esquire Magazine on Apr 23rd—
Of Course Donald Trump Jr. Spent Earth Day Shooting Prairie Dogs.
God bless America.
See the details below. Click on the orange button if you think this is a bad joke. [bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#4a4949″ icon=”arrow” expand_text=”Show More” collapse_text=”Show Less” ]

By Peter Wade, Esquire Magazine

Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the President of the United States of America, spent Earth Day on Saturday shooting bullets at prairie dogs, which is listed as a “species of concern” for endangerment.

Greg Gianforte—the ethical moron sent to Washington by Montanans. And this is the nation that never stops talking about Christian compassion.

Trump Jr. spent the weekend in Montana with Republican candidate for the U.S. House Greg Gianforte, who said of the trip: “As good Montanans, we want to show good hospitality to people. What can be more fun than to spend an afternoon shooting the little rodents.”

It is not illegal to hunt prairie dogs, but it’s also not exactly ethical, the Humane Society told ABC Fox Montana. Besides, just look at how adorable these little critters are.

Now is also an especially inopportune time to hunt prairie dogs, as they are currently in the middle of their breeding season.

“For prairie dogs, March through June is peak breeding season, which means pregnant, adult females will also be at risk. People do not hunt these animals for food or any legitimate wildlife management purposes,” said Lindsey Sterling Krank, director of the Humane Society’s Prairie Dog Coalition in a press release.

In sum, hunting prairie dogs hurts the environment and makes the world a sadder place. Sounds like the perfect hobby for a Trump.

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About the Author

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of Kollibri’s writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press.

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