Toppling the Fossil Fuel Empire

Can You Imagine?fuels-oilLobbystsby MURRAY DOBBIN, Counterpunch

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

– Albert Einstein

[A]s the world struggles with how to deal with the slow motion apocalypse of global climate change it becomes more and more apparent that we are trapped in “the kind of thinking” that got us here. While I don’t want to wear out Einstein’s quotability, his other little piece of wisdom that we need to keep top of mind is this: ”Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Our failure of imagination regarding the ever-increasing production and use of fossil fuels will, over time, kill billions of us and irreversibly change all life on the planet. It is a failure of imagination, not at a policy level but at the level of civilization. It’s not a lack of knowledge — we have a staggering amount of information and analysis, a frightening compendium of what we are doing to ourselves and every other species on the planet. We keep piling it on, study after study, dire warning after dire warning, irrefutable science, actual evidence of melting ice-caps, the virtually unprecedented level of agreement on the part of scientists about where we are headed. Additional information is already hitting up against the principle of diminishing returns.

We have seen especially alarming predictions in the past few months. Two studies released almost simultaneously claim with a high degree of certainty that the glaciers in the western Antarctic are irreversibly melting. The first, by NASA and the University of California-Irvine, examined a group of large glaciers that collectively contain the equivalent of four feet of sea level rise. They are in “continuous and rapid retreat and there is “no [major] obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat.” They have “have passed the point of no return.”

Another study by the University of Washington came to the same conclusion and suggested the melting of the Thwaites Glacier could undermine the rest of the Antarctic ice shield holding 10 to 13 feet of sea level rise. None of this will happen soon and the maximum rise could take centuries, yet Greenland expert and glaciologist Jason Box concludes we have already set in motion 69 feet of sea level rise.

While some of these changes will unfold over decades and centuries, a report from the U.S. National Research Council warns of the distinct possibility of tipping points: “… the scientific community has been paying increasing attention to the possibility that at least some changes will be abrupt, perhaps crossing a threshold or ‘tipping point’ to change so quickly that there will be little time to react.” Another study examining the speed of species extinction says the extinction rate is 1000 times faster than it should be according to historical rates.

One of the major political factors preventing serious consideration of major and rapid policy changes is the sheer power of the fossil fuel industry. Unimaginable wealth translates into unimaginable power worldwide. To imagine bringing the industry to heel in a serious effort to slow climate change, we have to imagine treating the industry like we eventually treated the tobacco industry: as an existential threat to human health. For decades the tobacco giants exerted so much political influence they were virtually untouchable. To the extent that this changed (it is obviously still a health scourge especially in the developing world), it changed because the notion of corporate “rights” was successfully challenged.

Multiply the impact of the tobacco industry by 1,000 and you have some idea of how difficult it will be to escape the political and social conventional thinking that protects the oil “industry” from rational policy. Indeed part of that conventional thinking is seeing the giant corporations involved as just another industry. This actually serves to protect this sociopathic monster because we have rules governing industries and the individual companies that make them up. Companies are “citizens” with rights (thanks to our Charter) and they live forever. They have literally unlimited money to lobby governments for continued subsidies ($2 billion yearly from Ottawa), and tax breaks against subsidies for renewables which could save the planet. Even though 97 per cent of climate scientists agree about climate change, these corporations have the power to trash science and sow doubts about global warming.

The energy giants are protected by rogue governments like those in Alberta and Ottawa. They are permitted to take as much of the stuff out of the ground as fast as they can ship it and sell it, regardless of the global consequences. Like no other sector of the economy (except perhaps nuclear power) they are allowed to externalize hundreds of billions — possibly trillions — in costs they should be paying: air and water pollution costs, health costs, the costs associated with distorting the rest of the economy, the cost of new roads and bridges and freeways and paved-over farm land. We refuse to tax it to cover those costs, and that means ridiculously low prices and little incentive to wean ourselves from its pernicious and deadly effects.

The mega-corporations that peddle fossil fuels and effectively sponsor climate change and the melting of the ice caps are not an “industry.” They are a plague. And indeed their impact is already tantamount to a plague — the fastest rate of species extinction since the end of the dinosaurs — and will over the next hundred years kill exponentially more people than all the plagues in world history combined. Speaking of dinosaurs, if we mobilized to confront the criminal negligence of the fossil fuel empire in the same way we would mobilize to divert a collision-course comet, perhaps we might achieve a realistic sense of the scale of the coming catastrophe and what needs to be done to avoid it.

And it would require us to listen to Einstein’s observation about the need to use a different kind of thinking to solve our problem. No, I mean a really different kind of thinking, the kind of big idea thinking I have referred to in earlier columns. The sooner we begin to think of the fossil fuel empire as a criminal conspiracy and not just another industrial sector, the sooner we will actually get to the point where it is not just acceptable to nationalize and control fossil fuels but necessary for the survival of all life on the planet.

How could this actually happen? What would such a course of action look like? I have no idea. That’s why imagination is more important than knowledge — and why if we don’t begin trying to imagine controlling the private fossil fuel empire it will never happen. And if it doesn’t happen, we condemn our grandchildren and their grandchildren to an unimaginable dystopia. Perhaps a sign that things are moving in the right direction will be when a group of young people make a mock citizens’ arrest of the CEO of an oil company on a charge of species murder. I can hardly wait.

MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years.  He now writes a bi-weekly column for the on-line journals the Tyee and rabble.ca. He can be reached at murraydobbin@shaw.ca

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/01/toppling-the-fossil-fuel-empire/

 



The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities

The Nation [1] / By Stephen F. Cohen [2]

Amassing a few hundred thousand people on the Capital square has become the weapon of choice for the CIA. Read more: http://www.storyleak.com/kiev-protests-another-cia-coordinated-color-revolution.

Read more: http://www.storyleak.com/kiev-protests-another-cia-coordinated-color-revolution.

[F]or weeks, the US-backed regime in Kiev has been committing atrocities against its own citizens in southeastern Ukraine, regions heavily populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. While victimizing a growing number of innocent people, including children, and degrading America’s reputation, these military assaults on cities, captured on video, are generating pressure in Russia on President Vladimir Putin to “save our compatriots.”

The reaction of the Obama administration—as well as the new cold war hawks and establishment media—has been twofold: silence interrupted only by occasional statements excusing and thus encouraging more atrocities by Kiev. Very few Americans (notably, the independent scholar Gordon Hahn) have protested this shameful complicity. We may honorably disagree about the causes and resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, the worst US-Russian confrontation in decades, but not about deeds that are rising to the level of war crimes, if they have not already done so.

* * *

In mid-April, the new Kiev government, predominantly western Ukrainian in composition and outlook, declared an “anti-terrorist operation” against a growing political rebellion in the Southeast. At that time, the rebels were mostly mimicking the initial Maidan protests in Kiev in 2013—demonstrating, issuing defiant proclamations, occupying public buildings and erecting defensive barricades—before Maidan turned ragingly violent and, in February, overthrew Ukraine’s corrupt but legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. (The entire Maidan episode, it will be recalled, had Washington’s enthusiastic political, and perhaps more tangible, support.) Indeed, the precedent for seizing official buildings and demanding the allegiance of local authorities had been set even earlier, in January, in western Ukraine—by pro-Maidan, anti-Yanukovych protesters, some declaring “independence” from his government.

Considering those preceding events, but above all the country’s profound historical divisions, particularly between its western and eastern regions—ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic and political—the rebellion in the Southeast, centered in the industrial Donbass, was not surprising. Nor were its protests against the unconstitutional way (in effect, a coup) the new government had come to power, the Southeast’s sudden loss of effective political representation in the capital and the real prospect of official discrimination. But by declaring an “anti-terrorist operation” against the new protesters, Kiev signaled its intention to “destroy” them, not negotiate with them.

On May 2, in this incendiary atmosphere, a horrific event occurred in the southern city of Odessa, awakening memories of Nazi German extermination squads in Ukraine and other Soviet republics during World War II. An organized pro-Kiev mob chased protesters into a building, set it on fire and tried to block the exits. Some forty people, perhaps many more, perished in the flames or were murdered as they fled the inferno. A still unknown number of other victims were seriously injured.

Members of the infamous Right Sector, a far-right paramilitary organization ideologically aligned with the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, itself a constituent part of Kiev’s coalition government, led the mob. Both are frequently characterized by knowledgeable observers as “neo-fascist” movements. (Hateful ethnic chants by the mob were audible, and swastika-like symbols were found on the scorched building.) Kiev alleged that the victims had themselves accidentally started the fire, but eyewitnesses, television footage and social media videos told the true story, as they have about subsequent atrocities.

Instead of interpreting the Odessa massacre as an imperative for restraint, Kiev intensified its “anti-terrorist operation.” Since May, the regime has sent a growing number of armored personnel carriers, tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships and warplanes to southeastern cities, among them, Slovyansk (Slavyansk in Russian), Mariupol, Krasnoarmeisk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk and Luhansk (Lugansk in Russian). When its regular military units and local police forces turned out to be less than effective, willing or loyal, Kiev hastily mobilized Right Sector and other radical nationalist militias responsible for much of the violence at Maidan into a National Guard to accompany regular detachments—partly to reinforce them, partly, it seems, to enforce Kiev’s commands. Zealous, barely trained and drawn mostly from central and western regions, Kiev’s new recruits have reportedly escalated the ethnic warfare and killing of innocent civilians. (Episodes described as “massacres” soon also occurred in Mariupol and Kramatorsk.)

Initially, the “anti-terrorist” campaign was limited primarily, though not only, to rebel checkpoints on the outskirts of cities. Since May, however, Kiev has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers that have struck residential buildings, shopping malls, parks, schools, kindergartens and hospitals, particularly in Slovyansk and Luhansk. More and more urban areas, neighboring towns and even villages now look and sound like war zones with telltale rubble, destroyed and pockmarked buildings, mangled vehicles, the dead and wounded in streets, wailing mourners and crying children. Conflicting information from Kiev, local resistance leaders and Moscow make it impossible to estimate the number of dead and wounded noncombatants—certainly hundreds. The number continues to grow due also to Kiev’s blockade of cities where essential medicines, food, water, fuel and electricity are scarce, and where wages and pensions are often no longer being paid. The result is an emerging humanitarian catastrophe.

Another effect is clear. Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” tactics have created a reign of terror in the targeted cities. Panicked by shells and mortars exploding on the ground, menacing helicopters and planes flying above and fear of what may come next, families are seeking sanctuary in basements and other darkened shelters. Even The New York Times, which like the mainstream American media generally has deleted the atrocities from its coverage, described survivors in Slovyansk “as if living in the Middle Ages.” Meanwhile, an ever-growing number of refugees, disproportionately women and traumatized children, have been fleeing across the border into Russia. In late June, the UN estimated that as many as 110,000 Ukrainians had already fled across the border to Russia and about half that many to other Ukrainian sanctuaries.

It is true, of course, that anti-Kiev rebels in these regions are increasingly well-armed (though lacking the government’s arsenal of heavy and airborne weapons), organized and aggressive, no doubt with some Russian assistance, whether officially sanctioned or not. But calling themselves “self-defense” fighters is not wrong. They did not begin the combat; their land is being invaded and assaulted by a government whose political legitimacy is arguably no greater than their own, two of their large regions having voted overwhelmingly for autonomy referenda; and, unlike actual terrorists, they have not committed acts of war outside their own communities. The French adage suggested by an American observer seems applicable: “This animal is very dangerous. If attacked, it defends itself.”

* * *

Among the crucial questions rarely discussed in the US political-media establishment: What is the role of the “neo-fascist” factor in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” ideology and military operations? Putin’s position, at least until recently—that the entire Ukrainian government is a “neo-fascist junta”—is incorrect. Many members of the ruling coalition and its parliamentary majority are aspiring European-style democrats or moderate nationalists. This may also be true of Ukraine’s newly elected president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Equally untrue, however, are claims by Kiev’s American apologists, including even some academics and liberal intellectuals, that Ukraine’s neo-fascists—or perhaps quasi-fascists—are merely agitated nationalists, “garden-variety Euro-populists,” a “distraction” or lack enough popular support to be significant.

Independent Western scholars have documented the fascist origins, contemporary ideology and declarative symbols of Svoboda and its fellow-traveling Right Sector. Both movements glorify Ukraine’s murderous Nazi collaborators in World War II as inspirational ancestors. Both, to quote Svoboda’s leader Oleh Tyahnybok, call for an ethnically pure nation purged of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including homosexuals, feminists and political leftists. And both hailed the Odessa massacre. According to the website of Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh, it was “another bright day in our national history.” A Svoboda parliamentary deputy added, “Bravo, Odessa…Let the Devils burn in hell.” If more evidence is needed, in December 2012, the European Parliament decried Svoboda’s “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views [that] go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles.” In 2013, the World Jewish Congress denounced Svoboda as “neo-Nazi.” Still worse, observers agree that Right Sector is even more extremist.

Nor do electoral results tell the story. Tyahnybok and Yarosh together received less than 2 percent of the June presidential vote, but historians know that in traumatic times, when, to recall Yeats, “the center cannot hold,” small, determined movements can seize the moment, as did Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Hitler’s Nazis. Indeed, Svoboda and Right Sector already command power and influence far exceeding their popular vote. “Moderates” in the US-backed Kiev government, obliged to both movements for their violence-driven ascent to power, and perhaps for their personal safety, rewarded Svoboda and Right Sector with some five to eight (depending on shifting affiliations) top ministry positions, including ones overseeing national security, military, prosecutorial and educational affairs. Still more, according to the research of Pietro Shakarian, a remarkable young graduate student at the University of Michigan, Svoboda was given five governorships covering about 20 percent of the country. And this does not take into account the role of Right Sector in the “anti-terrorist operation.”

Nor does it consider the political mainstreaming of fascism’s dehumanizing ethos. In December 2012, a Svoboda parliamentary leader anathematized the Ukrainian-born American actress Mila Kunis as “a dirty kike.” Since 2013, pro-Kiev mobs and militias have routinely denigrated ethnic Russians as insects (“Colorado beetles,” whose colors resemble a sacred Russia ornament). More recently, the US-picked prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, referred to resisters in the Southeast as “subhumans.” His defense minister proposed putting them in “filtration camps,” pending deportation, and raising fears of ethnic cleansing. Yulia Tymoshenko—a former prime minister, titular head of Yatsenyuk’s party and runner-up in the May presidential election—was overheard wishing she could “exterminate them all [Ukrainian Russians] with atomic weapons.” “Sterilization” is among the less apocalyptic official musings on the pursuit of a purified Ukraine.

Confronted with such facts, Kiev’s American apologists have conjured up another rationalization. Any neo-fascists in Ukraine, they assure us, are far less dangerous than Putinism’s “clear aspects of fascism.” The allegation is unworthy of serious analysis: However authoritarian Putin may be, there is nothing authentically fascist in his rulership, policies, state ideology or personal conduct.

Indeed, equating Putin with Hitler, as eminent Americans from Hillary Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski to George Will have done, is another example of how our new cold warriors are recklessly damaging US national security in vital areas where Putin’s cooperation is essential. Looking ahead, would-be presidents who make such remarks can hardly expect to be greeted by an open-minded Putin, whose brother died and father was wounded in the Soviet-Nazi war. Moreover, tens of millions of today’s Russians whose family members were killed by actual fascists in that war will regard this defamation of their popular president as sacrilege, as they do the atrocities committed by Kiev.

* * *

And yet, the Obama administration reacts with silence, and worse. Historians will decide what the US government and the “democracy promotion” organizations it funds were doing in Ukraine during the preceding twenty years, but much of Washington’s role in the current crisis has been clear and direct. As the Maidan mass protest against President Yanukovych developed last November-December, Senator John McCain, the high-level State Department policymaker Victoria Nuland and a crew of other US politicians and officials arrived to stand with its leaders, Tyahnybok in the forefront, and declare, “America is with you!” Nuland was then caught on tape plotting with the American ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, to oust Yanukovych’s government and replace him with Yatsenyuk, who soon became, and remains, prime minister.

Meanwhile, President Obama personally warned Yanukovych “not to resort to violence,” as did, repeatedly, Secretary of State John Kerry. But when violent street riots deposed Yanukovych—only hours after a European-brokered, White House–backed compromise that would have left him as president of a reconciliation government until new elections this December, possibly averting the subsequent bloodshed—the administration made a fateful decision. It eagerly embraced the outcome. Obama personally legitimized the coup as a “constitutional process” and invited Yatsenyuk to the White House. The United States has been at least tacitly complicit in what followed, from Putin’s hesitant decision in March to annex Crimea and the rebellion in southeastern Ukraine to the ongoing civil war.

How intimately involved US officials have been in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation” is not known, but certainly the administration has not been discreet. Before and after the military campaign began in earnest, CIA director John Brennan and Vice President Joseph Biden (twice) visited Kiev, followed, it is reported, by a continuing flow of “senior US defense officials,” military equipment and financial assistance to the bankrupt Kiev government. Despite this crucial support, the White House has not compelled Kiev to investigate either the Odessa massacre or the fateful sniper killings of scores of Maidan protesters and policemen on February 18-20, which precipitated Yanukovych’s ouster. (The snipers were initially said to be Yanukovych’s, but evidence later appeared pointing to opposition extremists, possibly Right Sector. Unlike Washington, the Council of Europe has been pressuring Kiev to investigate both events.)

As atrocities and humanitarian disaster grow in Ukraine, both Obama and Kerry have all but vanished as statesmen. Except for periodic banalities asserting the virtuous intentions of Washington and Kiev and alleging Putin’s responsibility for the violence, they have left specific responses to lesser US officials. Not surprisingly, all have told the same Manichean story, from the White House to Foggy Bottom. The State Department’s neocon missionary Nuland, who spent several days at Maidan, for example, assured a congressional committee that she had no evidence of fascist-like elements playing any role there. Ambassador Pyatt, who earlier voiced the same opinion about the Odessa massacre, was even more dismissive, telling obliging New Republic editors that the entire question was “laughable.”

Still more shameful, no American official at any level appears to have issued a meaningful statement of sympathy for civilian victims of the Kiev government, not even those in Odessa. Instead, the administration has been unswervingly indifferent. When asked if her superiors had “any concerns” about the casualties of Kiev’s military campaign, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki has repeatedly answered “no.” Indeed, at the UN Security Council on May 2, US Ambassador Samantha Power, referring explicitly to the “counter-terrorism initiative” and suspending her revered “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, gave Kiev’s leaders a US license to kill. Lauding their “remarkable, almost unimaginable, restraint,” as Obama himself did after Odessa, she continued, “Their response is reasonable, it is proportional, and frankly it is what any one of our countries would have done.” (Since then, the administration has blocked Moscow’s appeal for a UN humanitarian corridor between southeastern Ukraine and Russia.)

Contrary to the incessant administration and media demonizing of Putin and his “agents” in Ukraine, the “anti-terrorist operation” can be ended only where it began—in Washington and Kiev. Leaving aside how much power the new president actually has in Kiev (or over Right Sector militias in the field), Poroshenko’s “peace plan” and June 21 ceasefire may have seemed such an opportunity, except for their two core conditions: Fighters in the Southeast first had to “lay down their arms” and he alone would decide with whom to negotiate peace. The terms seemed more akin to conditions of surrender and reason enough for the ceasefire to fail.

The Obama administration continues to make the situation worse. Despite opposition by several NATO allies and even American corporate heads, the president and his secretary of state, who has spoken throughout this crisis more like a secretary of war than the nation’s top diplomat, have constantly threatened Russia with harsher economic sanctions unless Putin meets one condition or another, most of them improbable. On June 26, Kerry even demanded (“literally”) that the Russian president “in the next few hours…help disarm” resisters in the Southeast, as though they are not motivated by any of Ukraine’s indigenous conflicts but are merely Putin’s private militias.

In fact, from the onset of the crisis, the administration’s actual goal has been unclear, and not only to Moscow. Is it a negotiated compromise, which would have to include a Ukraine with a significantly federalized or decentralized state free to maintain longstanding economic relations with Russia and banned from NATO membership? Is it to bring the entire country exclusively into the West, including into NATO? Is it a vendetta against Putin for all the things he purportedly has and has not done over the years? (Some behavior of Obama and Kerry, seemingly intended to demean and humiliate Putin, suggest an element of this.) Or is it to provoke Russia into a war with the United States and NATO in Ukraine?

Inadvertent or not, the latter outcome remains all too possible. After Russia annexed—or “reunified” with—Crimea in March, Putin, not Kiev or Washington, has demonstrated “remarkable restraint.” But events are making it increasingly difficult for him to do so. Almost daily, Russian state media, particularly television, have featured vivid accounts of Kiev’s military assaults on Ukraine’s eastern cities. The result has been, both in elite and public opinion, widespread indignation and mounting perplexity, even anger, over Putin’s failure to intervene militarily.

We may discount the following indictment by an influential ideologist of Russia’s own ultra-nationalists, who have close ties with Ukraine’s “self-defense” commanders: “Putin betrays not just the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Lugansk but himself, Russia and all of us.” Do not, however, underestimate the significance of an article in the mainstream pro-Kremlin newspaperIzvestia, which asks, while charging the leadership with “ignoring the cries for help,” “Is Russia abandoning the Donbass?” If so, the author warns, the result will be “Russia’s worst nightmare” and relegate it to “the position of a vanquished country.”

Just as significant are similar exhortations by Gennady Zyuganov, leader of Russia’s Communist Party, the second-largest in the country and in parliament. The party also has substantial influence in the military-security elite and even in the Kremlin. Thus, one of Putin’s own aides has publicly urged him to send fighter planes to impose a “no-fly zone”—an American-led UN action in Qaddafi’s Libya that has not been forgotten or forgiven by the Kremlin—and destroy Kiev’s approaching aircraft and land forces. If that happens, US and NATO forces, now being built up in Eastern Europe, might well also intervene, creating a Cuban Missile Crisis–like confrontation. As a former Russian foreign minister admired in the West reminds us, there are “hawks on both sides.”

Little of this is even noted in the United States. In a democratic political system, the establishment media are expected to pierce the official fog of war. In the Ukrainian crisis, however, mainstream American newspapers and television have been almost as slanted and elliptical as White House and State Department statements, obscuring the atrocities, if reporting them at all, and generally relying on information from Washington and Kiev. Most Americans are thereby unknowingly being shamed by the Obama administration’s role. Those who do know but remain silent—in government, think tanks, universities and media—share its complicity.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/silence-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities


On Ramadan, Socialism and the Neighbor’s Beat up Car

By Ramzy Baroud, Cyrano’s Journal Today
FraternalsitepalestiniansDeadWhen I was a child, I obsessed with socialism. It was not only because my father was a self-proclaimed socialist who read every book that a good socialist should read, but also because we lived in a refugee camp in Gaza under the harshest of conditions. Tanks roamed the dusty streets and every aspect of our lives was governed by a most intricate Israeli ‘civil administration’ system – a less distressing phrase for describing military occupation.

Socialism was then an escape to a utopian world where people were treated fairly; where children were not shot and killed on a daily basis; where cheap laborers were no longer despairing men fighting for meager daily wages at some Israeli factory or farm; and where equality was not an abstract notion. But since Gaza had little in terms of ‘means of production’, our socialism was tailored to accommodate every lacking aspect of our lives. Freedom, justice and ending the occupation was our ‘revolutionary socialism’ around which we teenagers in the camp secretly organized and declared strikes on the walls of the camp in red graffiti, and quoted (or misquoted) Marx as we pleased, often times out of context.

And when it was time for prayer, we all went to the mosque. We simply didn’t see a contradiction, nor did we subscribe to (or cared to understand) the inherent conflict between socialist movements and institutionalized religion in the West. True, we declared solidarity with factory workers in Chicago and followed the news of union victories in Britain, but our socialism was mostly south-oriented. It was the revolutionary struggles of Guatemala, South Africa and Algeria that inspired our various socialist movements in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Socialism was a call for freedom first, before it was a call for equitable salaries and improved work conditions.

There was little by way of western-styled ‘atheism’ in our refugee camp. Most of us prayed five times a day, communists and all.

I went to the mosque for prayer as often as I could. I memorized chapters of the Quran at a young age. Starting in the second grade, I joined my peers for classes in Islamic stories taught by a kindly, semi-blind young man named Sheik Azzam. In the stories, those with faith always triumphed in the end. The key to their victories, well, aside from the inevitable divine justice, was their unity and persistence. The characters were often, if not always, poor. The poor always triumphed in Islam, or the way Islam was taught in my refugee camp.

I was a socialist and a Muslim. It was my father, who was sometimes called a ‘communist’ as a slur by some of the camp’s ultra conservatives, who urged me not to miss my prayers, and rewarded me for reading the Quran. He was the same person who shared his treasures of translated Russian and other literature with me, all promising of a revolution, of a better world where a person was not judged based on his or her color, race, sect, religion or nationality. If there was ever an inherit tension in all of this, I didn’t see it. I still don’t.

Naturally, a real socialist must have a nemesis. In many parts of the world, the archenemy is the multinational corporations and, in the US in particular, the use of military-driven foreign policy as a tool to maintain global hegemony; it is globalization used as a platform to enforce a new kind of imperialism that is no longer an exclusive western attribute. For me in the refugee camp, my nemesis was our neighbor Ghassan. He owned a car, a beat up old fiat that was actively decomposing back into its original elements. The color was a rainbow of old paint and rusting metal and its seats were almost entirely bare from any evidence that leather chairs were once attached to the unpleasant iron beneath.

Nonetheless, Ghassan represented a ‘class’ of society that was different than mine. He was a teacher at a United Nations-funded school, who was ‘getting paid in dollars’, and his likes received what was called a ‘pension,’ a seemingly novel concept that Gaza cheap laborers in Israel didn’t enjoy, needless to say comprehended.

Ghassan also prayed at the same mosque as I did. On the main Friday prayer, he wore a white Jalabiya (robe) of white silk, manufactured abroad. He wore authentic Egyptian cologne, and along with his UNRWA colleagues, walked to the mosque with the unabashed grandeur of a feudalist.

In the month of Ramadan, as poor refugee parents struggled to make at least the first few days of the fasting month somewhat special and festive for their children, Ghassan and his clique prepared feasts, shopped for the best vegetables, and adorned their iftar tables with meat, not once a week, but every single day of the entire month. And here is the part that I resented the most: to show gratefulness for how ‘lucky’ and ‘blessed’ they were, the rich refugees would distribute raw meat in carefully sealed bags to the less fortunate since Ramadan is the month of charity. And of course, the most qualified to give charity was a UN teacher paid in dollars and expecting a so-called pension.

Today I chuckle at the naïve notions of that Gaza child. In actuality, Ghassan was slightly less poor than the rest of us. His home was an improved version of the UN’s ‘temporary shelters’ it provided refugees following the Palestinian exile in 1948. He was paid around 400 dollars a month, and his car eventually broke down and was sold to a neighboring mechanic for scrap metal.

Much of this was placed in context later in life when I worked in a rich Arab Gulf country. I spent two Ramadans there. Each year our company provided a ‘Ramadan tent’, not a metaphorical term, but an actual massive tent under which the finest of delicacies, cooked by the best of chefs, was served by cheap laborers who although included fasting Muslims, were not allowed to break their fast until the rest of us did. The fasting men and women thanked God for giving them the strength to fast before they diligently consumed massive amounts of good food until they could hardly move.

Ramadan always takes me back to the refugee camp in Gaza, no matter where I am in the world. And when a TV sheik preaches about what Ramadan is or is not about, I often reflect on what Ramadan has meant to me and my peers in the refugee camp. It was not about feeling the brunt of the poor, for we all were, Ghassan included, poverty-stricken. It was about sharing the hardships of life, a communal struggle against one’s own weaknesses and a month-long introspection to uncover the collective strength of a beleaguered community. Ramadan was an exacting platform through which poverty and deprivation were devalued so that when Ramadan was over, we felt grateful for the little we had, before we resumed our struggle for the rights and freedoms we truly deserved.

Ramzy Baroud is the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).



Freedom Rider: Democratic Blame for SCOTUS Rulings

BARScotus-oligarchy

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

[W]ith corporations firmly in control of the electoral process, and the federal judiciary packed with right-wing judges, all three branches of government are in hostile hands. “Americans are fighting for their lives against corporate greed, white supremacy and misogyny because they are at the mercy of the two conservative political parties which control this country.”

 

“Americans are left with no one in Washington who is willing to fight for their interests.”

June 30, 2014 will go down in history as a day when two truly horrendous Supreme Court decisions were handed down. Both cases will have lasting and devastating impacts on Americans but the Republican right wing is not solely to blame for the damage done.

In Harris v. Quinn [9] the justices ruled that states cannot compel in-home domestic care workers to pay dues for collective bargaining efforts. Workers in Illinois, Missouri, California, Washington, Vermont and Massachusetts will be affected. Most of these workers are women of color with some of the lowest wages in the nation. Collective bargaining is precisely what they need. The decision harkens back to a time when domestic work was originally exempted from Social Security and thereby excluded millions of black people.

As if the union dues ruling wasn’t bad enough, on that same day the court ruled that corporations with a majority of stock owned by five people or less can claim to hold the same religious beliefs that individuals can. In Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby [10] Stores, the court ruled that employers can ignore the Obamacare contraceptive care mandate if they feel that doing so imposes an undue burden on religious belief.

In the 2010 Citizens United campaign contributions case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have free speech and therefore “personhood” rights. The very concept is not only absurd on its face but is also irreconcilable with the rights of living, breathing human beings. It also doesn’t appear to bring with it any of the obligations that real persons are bound to respect. If that were the case, the jails would be full of mortgage defrauders, oil company polluters and the like. Corporations are clearly inconsistent in their desire to be treated like the rest of us.

Reaction to the Hobby Lobby case has been rightly denounced by all but the dead ender right wing fringe. The impact is huge with approximately 52% of American workers employed by companies fitting the Hobby Lobby criteria of personhood. Not only have they lost their right to contraception coverage but to other protections which anyone may claim infringe on religious belief. Misogyny is evident as well, with the religious right clearly making good on their desire to force white women to make more babies. These are serious issues indeed but they don’t speak to the breadth of the problem.

“Corporations with a majority of stock owned by five people or less can claim to hold the same religious beliefs that individuals can.”

In this dystopian world of late stage capitalism, corporations have ever increasing rights and human beings have fewer and fewer. Americans are fighting for their lives against corporate greed, white supremacy and misogyny because they are at the mercy of the two conservative political parties which control this country. The Republicans are true believers in retrograde politics which will undo any and all protections against big corporations, law enforcement and the state itself. Democrats may appear less evil in the beliefs they claim to have but they obviously have no interest in fighting the good fight. They want to be part of the permanent government and that means pleading for corporate money and endlessly finding ways to compromise the interests of voters. Regardless of their true feelings, their unwillingness to fight the power makes them of little use.

The Hobby Lobby decision came about because Democrats never considered true health care reform which would have separated insurance coverage from employment. Instead they colluded with big pharmaceutical and insurance companies to keep the profit motive in health care. This market driven system is responsible for all of this country’s health coverage ills but Obama and rest of the Democratic Party made it clear that a single payer system was never on the agenda.

While the Republicans do away with teacher tenure in California and pass anti labor “right to work” laws like Harris v. Quinn, Democrats join in when there are opportunities for career advancement and big paychecks. Robert Gibbs [11] was president Obama’s first press secretary. Like others before him he leveraged this political position to insure a lucrative living for the rest of his life. His public relations firm, Incite Agency, will take the lead in making the case against teacher tenure, seniority, union rights and other job protections.

He isn’t alone in this effort among Democrats. Former Obama chief of staff and now Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has laid off thousand of teachers and other public school employees and made clear his commitment to privatize education.

“The Hobby Lobby decision came about because Democrats never considered true health care reform which would have separated insurance coverage from employment.”

The Supreme Court shows the rock and hard place where Americans are trapped. We have no one in any of the much vaunted three branches of government who asserts our human and civil rights. Quite the opposite. While Republicans openly campaign against anything that protects minorities and working people, Democrats talk out of both sides of their mouths. They say they want to increase the federal minimum wage [12], but in 2009 and 2010 they had a president in the White House, majorities in Congress and the power to do what they wanted. Apparently they didn’t want to raise the minimum wage very badly because they did nothing of the sort.

While Democrats talk a good game, Republican true believers go for the jugular. They speak openly of impeaching president Obama should they gain control of the Senate in November. In 2008 congressman Dennis Kucinich brought 35 articles of impeachment [13] against George W. Bush but Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders scuttled his plans. The Constitution also allows for a state to call for impeachment. When a Democratic legislator in Washington tried to bring the case for impeaching Bush, his efforts were also squelched. Senator Barack Obama was among those who demurred when Democrats had the chance to delegitimize Republicans for years to come.

The senators deference in his quest to become president has come back to haunt him. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the decisions in both the Harris and Hobby Lobby cases. He and chief justice Roberts are now the villains du jour for Democrats. Unfortunately Democrats in the Senate weren’t interested in keeping them off of the court when they had the opportunity to do so. Senators Barack Obama and John Kerry sat on theSenate Judiciary Committee [14] (which votes Supreme Court nominees up or down. Alito and Roberts were well known members of the right wing Federalist Society but Democrats passed up the opportunity to grill them on their associations. Obama and Kerry could have filibustered these two nominees but instead went along to get along and lobbed softball questions. The rest is history.

Republicans are far right and Democrats are center right. That alignment insures that Americans are left with no one in Washington who is willing to fight for their interests. Democrats will of course use the Hobby Lobby case to help raise money and convince progressives that the barbarians are at the gate when in fact they are all barbarians who must be defeated. There is no lesser evil, just more or less effective malefactors who are all responsible for our ever worsening plight.

http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [15] Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-democratic-blame-scotus-rulings

 

 


Doing the Radical Right’s Dirty Work: Supreme Court’s Latest Blows Against Women and Unions

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

The Supreme Court: The presumption of impartiality rests on the assumption that mere men are above human beliefs and passion or defects, for that matter.

The Supreme Court: The presumption of impartiality rests on the assumption that mere men are above human beliefs and passion, defects, or class ideology. All of these naive assumptions have been resolutely put to rest by the Roberts Court, the most reactionary and partisan court in history.

[O]n the final day of its term, the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing majority has dealt crippling blows to two causes close to the heart of progressives.

It elevated the rights of corporations owned by fundamentalist Christians above the rights of their female employees, saying those businesses don’t have to pay for any contraception in health plans. And it ruled that non-union employees who work at jobs where unions negotiate pay and benefits—for all workers—do not have to pay any union fees akin to union dues.

In both instances, the Court’s right-wing block delivered what have long been goals of two distinct factions of the Republican Party.

For religious conservatives, it said that protecting religious freedom was a higher priority than ensuring women received all reproductive health options. It also said that corporations have First Amendment religious rights protected by the First Amendment, a win for Christian fundamentalists and religious business owners. And for the GOP’s union-busting business wing, epitomized by the Koch brothers’ libertarian political network, it said that union fees could not be collected for electioneering purposes—even if non-union employees at the same work site benefitted from union bargaining.

Rolling Back Women’s Reproductive Rights      

The blow against women came in an Obamacare case, where the five conservative justices held that private employers do not have to include contraceptive coverage in employee health plans if the business owners’ religion is opposed to abortion-related services. The ruling, Burdell v. Hobby Lobby [3], which dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called “extreme” in her comments from the bench and dissent, also affirmed that corporations—not just individuals—possess religious rights and freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

“We must decide whether the challenged HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] regulations substantially burden the exercise of religion, and we hold that they do,” wrote [3] Justice Samual Alito for the majority. “Government action that imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise must serve a compelling government interest, and we assume that the HHS regulations satisfy this requirement. But in order for the HHS mandate to be sustained, it must also constitute the least restrictive means of serving that interest, and the mandate plainly fails that test.”

In other words, Alito said that the part of Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, that requires private employers to provide contraception was too strict. The law exempted religious non-profit organizations—such as Catholic hospitals—that believe birth control is against their beliefs. But that distinction, which treated non-profits differently than private corporations, did not suffice for conservatives who upped the rhetorical ante and argued that anything requiring birth control violated their religious liberty.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing a lengthy minority opinion dissent joined by all the Court’s women justices and Justice Stephen Breyer, was flabbergasted by the right-wingers’ reasoning and historic expansion of corporate constitutional rights under the guise of religious freedom.

“In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs,” her dissent began. “The exemption sought by [Christian businesses] Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would override significant interests of the corporations’ employees and covered dependents. It would deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage that the ACA would otherwise secure.”

Reactions to the decision were immediate. The liberal People for the American Way said, in an e-mail blast, “The Supreme Court just ruled 5-4 that CORPORATIONS have a ‘religious’ right to discriminate against their employees.” The right-wing Independent Women’s Forum said, “This ruling is a victory for anyone who believes in limited government and freedom of conscience rights or religious liberty.”

“Today’s decision not only deprives women of comprehensive healthcare, but it sets a terrifying standard in affirming the “personhood” of corporations. In siding with Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court yet again affirms the personhood of corporations, giving closely-held (i.e. limited number of stockholders) corporations so-called religious liberty and taking religious freedom away from their employees at the expense of women’s health,” said Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal. “This sets a dangerous precedent for the future of religious liberty and women’s rights.”

The ruling comes from several anti-Obamacarre lawsuits filed by conservatives that were consolidated into one case. Two prominent lawsuits brought against Obamacare’s birth control mandate had been dismissed [4] by lower federal circuit courts, but that didn’t stopped Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based crafts supply chain, from filing their own challenge. When another lower federal court sided with Hobby Lobby, that conflict among different federal circuits pushed the case to the Supreme Court.

Hobby Lobby is a large chain of craft stores owned by conservative evangelical Christians. It sued in federal court [5], claiming they should have the right to deny coverage for emergency contraception to over 13,000 employees in 40 states. Its owners, the Green family, claim [5] that Obamacare’s requirement to provide employer-based coverage for contraceptive service violates freedom of religion and speech.

The lawyers carrying the Greens case went further than just raising religious objections. They also cited some of the factually mistaken arguments seen in other anti-abortion fights, referring to emergency contraception as an “abortion-causing drug.” Morning-after pills do not end a pregnancy, but act as daily birth control pills do [6] to prevent fertilization from occurring.

President Obama defended the law’s birth control provision, saying “it is not fair [7]” for religious employers to deny access to contraceptive services to their non-religious employees. In response to Monday’s ruling, it is possible that the White House will seek to create an administrative rule that would cover the cost of contraception denied by these religious employers, lawyers following the case said.

But the issue here is larger than just religious objections to Obamacare. The precedent, as Justice Ginsburg noted, that a corporation can assert religious freedom rights under the First Amendment opens a Pandora’s box of possible resistance to other federal mandates.

UCLA Law School’s Adam Winkler, writing at Huffington Post, said [8] that corporate religious rights under the First Amendment are now more powerful than individual rights of privacy, and asked which issue, after women’s access to contraception, would be targeted by the religious right?

“LGBT people may be next,” he wrote [8]. “Remember a few months ago when Arizona almost adopted a controversial law that would have given business corporations a broad right to use religion to make claims for exemptions from the law? That proposed law was rightly seen as an attack on LGBT rights, as supporters insisted that business owners who object to same-sex marriage shouldn’t be forced to bake cakes, take pictures, or arrange the flowers at such ceremonies. After Hobby Lobby, now all business corporations have a right under federal law to claim religious-based exemptions to all sorts of laws.”

The ruling is the second time that the Court’s so-called conservatives have issued rulings seeking to undercut Obamacare. Its prior ruling that states do not have to expand their Medicaid programs, which offer health care to the poor, has left millions of low-income Americans without preventative health coverage—as opposed to visiting emergency rooms in crises.

The Court’s Sweeping Anti-Labor Ruling

The Court also vastly undercut the political power of public-sector unions on Monday, with the same block of justices limiting which government employees must pay union dues, cutting into unions’ operating funds for lobbying and other political activities. The case, Harris v. Quinn [9], concerned the constitutionality of “agency fees,” which are charged by these unions to all workers in a unionized setting, even non-union members. The rationale is those workers are benefitting from gains won in union-led contract talks.

Here, too, the right-wing majority cited a First Amendment rationale to undermine union organizing.

“This case presents the question whether the First Amendment permits a State to compel personal care providers to subsidize speech on matters of public concern by a union that they do not wish to join or support. We hold that it does not,” Alito, writing for the Court’s five-member, held. “If we accepted Illinois’ argu­ment, we would approve an unprecedented violation of the bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing the dissent, called the majority opinion blatantly political, because the Court had previously upheld the union dues requirement when the funds were used for employment contracts—not lobbying or political advocacy. “The Court upheld the requirement so long as the union was using the money for “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment,” rather than for political or ideological activities.”

For years, Republicans in many states have tried to undermine the financing of unions’ ability to lobby and electioneer by seeking other avenues to undercut union dues. States like California have seen numerous so-called “paycheck protection measures” sponsored by the business sector appear as ballot initiatives, though they are almost always voted down by the state’s electorate. The ruling in Harris v. Quinn may achieve what these ballot measures failed to do: shrink union dues because there’s always a portion of workers who don’t want to pay these union fees, even if reaping the benefits of union advocacy.

The case began with home health care workers in Illinois paid under the state’s Medicaid program, which covers health care for the poor. In 2003, then Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich issued an executive order allowing the Service Employees International Union to exclusively representing the state’s home health workers. In 2009, his successor, Democratic Governor Pat Quinn issued another executive order classifying home care providers as state workers, making them eligible for union representation. A year later, a group of home health workers, led by Pamela Harris, brought a class-action lawsuit claiming that the SEIU’s collective bargaining agreement that required non-union members to pay union fees violated their First Amendment rights.

It’s important to emphasize that this ruling also is anti-women. Not only are a majority of SEIU’s 2.1 million members women working in low-wage jobs—like home health care, but the political agenda of unions like SEIU for these workers was focused on many issues that deeply affect low-income families. These include raising the minimum wage, ensuring sick pay, and benefits like health care. The GOP’s libertarians have long seen government-paid unionized employees as one of the labor movement’s remaining bastions of strength.

SIEU officials reacted with defiance, issuing a statement saying their political efforts would not be silenced.

“No court case is going to stand in the way of home care workers coming together to have a strong voice for good jobs and quality home care,” said[10] SEIU President Mary Kay Henry. “At a time when wages remain stagnant and income inequality is out of control, joining together in a union is the only proven way home care workers have of improving their lives and the lives of the people they care for.”

But labor officials have long feared the implications of this kind of ruling. That’s because it could make Democrats more reliant on Wall Street money for their campaigns than on their traditional allies in unions, which contribute both money and volunteer manpower.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/labor/doing-radical-rights-dirty-work-supreme-courts-latest-blows-against-women-and-unions