=By= Shane Burley

There is a shift across the country to arm campus security. This is intertwined with the growing militarization of police. Portland State University (Portland, Oregon) is one of those places and there is an active student push back against this shift. One of the implications of arming campus security obviously shifts more college finances out of the academic arena, and student services are one of the first things on the budget chopping block. – rw

As the student leaders of the Portland State Student Union, or PSUSU, began leading chants to “disarm” the university, hundreds of students and community leaders had already begun circling the steps of the library. The rally was the meeting point for a planned student and faculty “walkout” on May 10, where more than 400 students promised to leave class to protest the Board of Trustees’ decision to arm campus police officers — which organizers see as just a piece of the larger trend towards the militarization of police officers around the country.

“Our incarceration system is a continuation of slavery,” said Portland Jobs With Justice coalition organizer Andrea Lemoins. “It targets people of color. It targets people in the LGBTQ community. It targets people who are traditionally oppressed, and we are here fighting oppression.”

Portland Jobs With Justice, which is an action coalition of over a hundred community groups and unions, was only one of the dozens of community sponsors that endorsed PSUSU’s campaign to confront the use of lethal armaments on the urban campus for the state university.

The Disarm PSU campaign is just the most recent organizing drive in a sequence of campus movements around the country to confront the increased use of lethal arms on college campuses. According to a U.S. Department of Justice survey of the over 4,000 campus police departments in 2011-2012, around 92 percent of public universities have armed police, as opposed to 38 percent of private schools.

Walking out

One of the first high-profile incidents of campus police violence was the fatal shooting of 43-year-old African American Samuel DuBose on the University of Cincinnati campus in July 2015. While stopped for a missing license plate, DuBose started his engine and put the car in drive. Ray Tensing — a sworn police officer — opened fire, erroneously reporting that the vehicle was dragging him. Tensing was later indicted for murder and manslaughter charges by an investigating grand jury, and a $4.5 million dollar settlement was issued to the DuBose family from the university. This included free college tuition for each of DuBose’s 12 children.

The shooting also prompted the formation of Irate 8 — a University of Cincinnati campus group whose name refers to the percentage of African American students on the campus. The group has instituted a 10-point set of demands on the university, including calling for extra scrutiny on campus police officers and for the university to address the racial disparity in curriculum and staffing.

The arguments against the arming of campus security are based largely on the disproportionate use of force that organizers say has become increasingly common among police departments across the country.

“It poses a disproportionate threat to students of color, people who are houseless, people who suffer from mental illness,” said Olivia Pace, a PSUSU organizer with the Disarm PSU campaign. “They have been criminalized and talked about as people who we need to be protected against, when — in fact — they are a part of our campus community. So, really, [the arming of campus security] poses a threat of violence and fear to those students.”

Critics also argue that the types of crimes committed on campus are not ones where armed police need to intervene. According to the U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security, burglary was the leading crime by a wide margin at PSU between 2011-13. Student groups like PSUSU call for campus security to find alternative solutions that do not rely on lethal force and criminalization to solve issues of safety on public university campuses.

Organizers at the University of California’s Davis campus were among the first to challenge their school’s use of fully-sworn police officers — with access to weapons and the ability to make arrests — following an infamous November 2011 incident, where police pepper sprayed Occupy UC Davis protesters. An August 2015 incident pushed the issue even further, as UC Davis campus police used force to detain a black alumni who was using campus facilities. A campus march called “Divest, Disarm: Davis for Black Lives” was held in November, linking the campaigns to disarm campus police and divest from private prisons with the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.

Similarly, the Campaign for Equitable Policing in Chicago has united students from the University of Chicago and nearby residents, who were troubled by the apparent overreach of campus police into their neighborhoods. In October, they held a community forum to bring together people from the surrounding community to discuss what many call a systemic level of racial profiling.

A student uprising

With its growing and diverse membership of nearly 50 active student organizers — not to mention community and labor support — Disarm PSU is becoming a leader in the movement against campus militarization.

The fight went into high-gear in 2013 when a report from the university’s Presidential Task Force on Campus Safety was published, outlining public safety issues on campus, along with recommendations on how to address them. Even though the report listed violent person-to-person crimes as only a small fraction of campus crimes, the recommendations included bringing sworn police officers to campus that contract with the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau. This would mean that beyond the non-sworn security officers, PSU would bring on fully-registered police officers who carry guns and have the right to arrest. This was recommended despite the fact that PSU is in downtown Portland, where it already has direct access to both of the contracted police departments. Not surprisingly, for many of the concerned students, the task force was comprised of many PSU staff, but only two student delegates.

The Board of Trustees, which student activists say is not directly accountable to staff or students, passed the recommendations and put them into effect last July. The plan went ahead despite overwhelming opposition by two-thirds of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers members on campus, as well as opposition from numerous college departments, such as the Chicano Latino Studies and Black Studies departments.

“The task force recommended having officers who are trained in using firearms because certain situations require them: serving search warrants and performing off-campus welfare checks, to name a few,” said the administration through an FAQ created during the implementation of the police force. It went on to say that in the previous situation, with the campus being tied to the larger cityscape without a barrier, it was unable to meet threats if they were to happen.

In opposition, PSUSU and other campus activists disrupted Board of Trustee meetings by overwhelming the discussion session, forcing trustees to leave the building rather than confront the opposition. Tying together issues like inflated administrative salaries and tuition increases to board decisions, students are calling for the long-term project of dissolving the board in favor of a decision making body that is more accountable to stakeholders.

The May 10 student eruption on campus came after the decision to use armed police was implemented. Over 500 people began a roaming march and speak-out that brought together a diverse set of voices from the campus and surrounding community.

“I support your movement,” mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone told the crowd. “I don’t want militarized police on our campus, and I’m running for mayor right now because I don’t want them in our city.” Iannarone had been running against local Democratic politicians Ted Wheeler and Jules Bailey on a progressive platform addressing issues like the minimum wage and housing insecurity in the city, but ended up finishing third with under 10 percent of the vote.

“We need to de-criminalize poverty in this city,” Iannarone added. “We need to de-criminalize being black or brown in this city.”

PSUSU created the Disarm PSU campaign to maintain a broader look at equity and justice on campus with four key demands: disarming campus police, severing the contracts with the anti-union food service company Aramark, bringing all campus workers up to $15 per hour and lowering tuition costs by cutting the salaries of the highest paid administrative staff.

After speaking in front of the library, the campus security building, and in the Urban Plaza, the protesters moved to the Fourth Avenue Building where they staged a “die in” to confront the increased threat they say armed police present on campus, as well as the economic burden of low-wages and high tuition.

“The students, at their core, want democracy in the university, and that’s not what we have right now with the Board of Trustees model,” said PSUSU organizer Alyssa Pagan. “When we say that we want the campus to not have armed security, the Board of Trustees heard that and didn’t take any action to move in accordance with that. So there’s no system of accountability.”

With support mounting both around Portland’s progressive community to endorse the Disarm PSU campaign, as well as the growing campus movement towards alternative solutions to armed police officers, pressure is forming around the Board of Trustees to reverse its decision. While the board has said that it allowed sufficient time for student and community feedback before reaching its decision, PSUSU activists say the board represents an unelected and unaccountable decision-making body that is not representative of the constituencies comprising the bulk of Portland State University.

“The climate of activism has kind of exploded across the country,” Pace said, refering to the movement to target police violence both on and off campus. “The fight for the de-militarization of the police is something that has really come to the forefront.”

The board finally agreed to sit down with the students on May 25 to hear concerns about tuition, scholarships, diversity and campus police. While many students spoke out, the board has made no promises about changing decisions other than stating publicly that it would “discuss them.”

For the student union, this will be just a piece of a larger set of demands to reshape the college’s priorities in order to align with a more multi-racial, working-class base. This means continuing to confront the Board of Trustees, which many organizers say is the central component that is driving many of the unpopular campus decisions.

“It’s so much more than just disarming campus security,” Pagan said, regarding the growing student movement on the PSU campus. “It’s about a small handful of people who are very wealthy and [who] are serving their business interests on the backs of students.”

 

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Shane Burley is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer based in Portland, Oregon. His work as appeared in places such as In These Times, Truth-Out, Labor Notes, Waging Nonviolence, CounterPunch, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. He contributed a chapter on housing justice movements to the recent AK Press release “The End of the World As We Know It?” and has work in upcoming volumes on social movements. His most recent documentary “Expect Resistance” chronicles the intersection of the housing justice and Occupy Wallstreet movement. His work can be found at ShaneBurley.net, or reach him on Twitter at @shane_burley1.

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=By= Gary Brumback

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are roughly 15,000 publically traded companies and countless millions of people who invest in them. Each of these companies belongs to an industry of companies in similar businesses. Three industries are the subject of this short article; the funeral service industry, the gun industry, and the war industry.

The first provides burial and crematory services and paraphernalia for people no longer living due to nonviolent domestic deaths. The second provides the means to cause violent domestic deaths. The third provides the means to murder people in foreign lands.

The first industry is tangential to the focal point off this article. The other two are the focal point. But to be true to the article’s catchall tile, I feel behooved to say something about investing in the first one, so I will start with it.

Investing in Death from Natural Causes

Funeral homes, crematoriums, and cemeteries, but excluding related costs such as headstones and crypts is a $15 billion a year industry in America. Almost gone are the days of small, family owned funeral homes. They are being gobbled up or swamped by funeral service corporations that promise investors healthy returns, at least if you buy one or more of the “six stocks to die for” as one authoritative source put it.

Investing in Death from Domestic Guns

It is said that Americans have had a love affair with guns and cars for a century. Until recently more people have died from car accidents than from guns. That apparently has changed and not surprisingly since there are more guns than cars in America.

Firearms’ makers and sellers tell investors and Wall Street that massive gun killings are a ripe opportunity for investors. The reason is simple. After a massive, homegrown slaughter the public panics and buys more guns.

Investing in Death by International Murder

Einstein called war an act of murder. I agree and would add that it’s an offensive act more so than a defensive act if you know the true history behind America’s endless wars since her founding. That’s why I call this industry the war industry, not the defense industry. The US government finally got smart and changed the name in 1949 from the Department of War to its current euphemism, the Department of Defense. But let’s not be fooled by our government that is always trying to fool us.

The war industry yields very good ROI’s (return on investments) if one is not squeamish or morally inhibited about investing in merchants of death. And thousands upon thousands of investors aren’t. A writer for Forbes magazine has given five reasons why other industrial sectors aren’t as good as the war industry; its stocks weather economic storms better; it dominates the market “selling Uncle Sam a billion dollars in goods and services every day, seven days a week;” it is “politically protected” (that’s an understatement); its oblivious to any “waning demand;” and its future prospects are more publicly known through news of any impending dips in the defense budget and thus give cautious investors pause to reconsider” (when does that ever happen for more than blip of time?).

 

Protected Investors

We can partly blame the second and third industries’ investors for the consequences of their companies’ miscreant behavior but we can’t sue them for wrongful death and other damages. The reason why dates back over two centuries ago in America’s history when the first state in the union enacted a limited liability law and other states quickly followed suit in a race to the bottom. States initially gave their chartered corporations limited liability only if they provided public services, but with the advent of sham charters, any chartered corporation gets limited liability. That includes the chartered and insulated gun makers and sellers and war contractors.

The war contractors are also shielded from lawsuits for wrongful deaths for two reasons. The foreigners have no standing in our courts and our lawless, criminal, war perpetuating government makes murder by war legal.

Socially Responsible Investing: An Alternative for Morally Minded Investors?

One would think that out of 15,000 publicly traded companies there surely ought to be some socially responsible ones in which to invest. Well, name me one if you find a company that meets all of my seven criteria a company must meet in order to be rightly called socially responsible. A socially responsible company is one that 1) stays financially viable, 2) provides socially beneficial products and/or services, 3) without knowingly causing any physical, psychological, financial or ecological harm, 4) without externalizing costs (e.g., job outsourcing, waste disposal), 5) without seeking or depending on “warfare welfare” or other government favors such as corporate personhood recognition, campaign financing, lobbying, subsidies, revolving doors, laissez-faire regulations, or criminal immunity, 6) conducts business ethically and legally, and 7) treats all stakeholders fairly and with dignity.

The rationale for all but the first criteria is that they are hallmarks of the corpocracy, the Devil’s marriage between big corporations and government. The corpocracy is far more egregious than just being socially irresponsible. It is directly responsible for America being ranked the worst among industrialized nations on various measures such as income inequality and unemployment; for America being the most imperialistic and death dealing nation on the globe; and for America being vulnerable to continuous blowbacks from drone strikes and other forms of unending, devastating and deadly military aggression done solely for profit and power.

Closing Remarks

You know the old saying; “there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes.” I will add two more certainties; 1) America was born in the womb of war and will die in her arms unless the American people rise up to demand the end of the military/political/industrial complex; and 2) people who invest in the gun and war industries are as morally and socially irresponsible as people populating the complex and are not only investors in death but also accomplices of death by murder.

 

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Gary Brumback, PhD is a retired psychologist and Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He is the author of The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch; and America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. His most recent book is Corporate Reckoning Ahead. Gary can be reached at: democracypower@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Gary, or visit Gary’s blog site, www.democracyorcorpocracy.blogspot.com.

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=By= Gary Brumback

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] was prompted to write this article when a twitter contact of mine wondered whether some of my writings about the corpocracy amounted to a conspiracy theory.  Having been a behavioral scientist most of my adult life I know a thing or two about what’s theory and what’s not.  I don’t know how anyone, scientist or lay person, could mistake the corpocracy for a theory. I doubt if any readers of articles published in the alternative news media would confuse the two. Nevertheless, I want to tell you what I have learned over the years.

A Tacit Conspiracy, Not a Public Wedding

I have called America’s corpocracy the “devil’s marriage between big corporations and what should be but isn’t the American peoples’ government. The marriage was not a public wedding by any stretch of the imagination. It was more like a tacit conspiracy between the two partners, with government being the subservient to the other in every respect.

To act together toward common goals is one definition of a “conspiracy,” and one of its synonyms is collusion. What are the conspirators’ goals? To name a few: keeping its marriage intact; staying for a lifetime in public office; protecting corporations’ fraudulent constitutional rights, not citizen rights; maintaining a hands-off policy toward corporate crime and ensuring legislation, regulations, and judicial verdicts that protect corporate interests, not the public’s interests or the general welfare; keeping the government’s plentiful and endless hand outs to corporations; privatizing public services; controlling the mass media; keeping the marketplace free, not fair; and to expanding and protecting a profitable hegemony in other lands (corporations want global markets and politicians want global influence).

Being a conspiracy doesn’t automatically mean the conspirators must operate secretly, although they obviously aren’t going to publicize their conspiring. That being so, how do we know they conspire and collude among themselves? The conspiracy’s goals stated earlier suggest the signs to look for as evidence. We don’t have to look hard. The signs pop up daily it seems, at least when reading the alternative media, not obviously the corpocracy’s mainstream media and propaganda.

Consider some signs from three of America’s industries in their control of “our” government and thus of 99%.of us. The three picked are the most dangerous industries because they are often extremely injurious and deadly in the consequences of their decisions and actions.

The “Defense” Industries

The “defense” industry, bar none, is the most dangerous as it inflicts on humanity destruction and death on a world-wide scale. The industry pushed for preemptive war with Iraq before Bush Jr.’s first administration and then was heavily represented among the war policy makers in the administration. It spends billions of dollars lobbying Congress. It locates facilities in all or almost all Congressional districts to ensure servitude. It makes sure the most compliant politicians chair and sit on influential committees. It persuades Congress to authorize purchase of obsolete, unreliable, and extravagantly expensive weapons. It constantly engages in contract fraud with impunity. Ad infinitum.

Lest we forget the companion gun industry, its lobbyists have basically been assured a carte blanche by “our” government to arm Americans to the teeth with almost any form of firearm.

The Health Care Industries

These industries are a cluster of industries made up of big Pharma, the health insurance industry, and the provider industry, all conspiring with “our” government, to keep Americans in dept and in poor health needing expensive attention. The bête noir of this conglomeration is the pharmaceutical industry. Over the years it has reaped an astounding 7,000 percent return on its investment in lobbying Congress and has gotten in return for its bribery such favorable government actions as defeat of mandatory discount pricing; protection of drug patents in trade agreements; joint research patents with public institutions allowed; Medicare price negotiations with companies prevented; government list of preferred drugs prohibited; availability of generic pediatric drugs delayed; faster government drug safety reviews; company recommended reviewers allowed; bill to make generic drugs more accessible defeated; bigger hurdle before government warning letters issued; approval of some drugs just from animal testing; medical device makers get favorable considerations; unapproved uses of drugs gets journalistic license; restrictions eased on direct-to consumer advertising; tax credits given to makers of orphan drugs; licensing of new sites for making drugs eased; continuous review of approved new sites ended; pre-clinical trial data allowed for patent application; criteria for awarding patents for genes relaxed.;  price control proposals dropped by government; companies allowed to pay fee for faster reviews; faster review of drugs for life-threatening diseases; distribution of drug samples allowed; easier for brand-name makers to sue generic makers; government promotes university-industry partnerships; and  allowed to tap research at subsidized facilities.

The Chemical/Agriculture Industries

I put the chemical and agribusiness industries together because chemicals saturate the food chain and agribusiness thrives on chemicals. There’s an old nostrum that “we are what we eat,” which is why these two industries are so hazardous and potentially deadly, especially with their genetically modified organisms that are an assault on and gamble with nature that may ultimately have dire consequences for our species.

Within this pair of industries is the Monsanto Corporation. Mike Adams, chief contributor and editor of NaturalNews.com, says that “MonSatan—is now the No. 1 most hated corporation in America—and the destructive force behind the lobbying of the USDA, FDA, scientists and politicians that have all betrayed the American people—.”

Monsanto is simply too big and has too many allies outside government (e.g., American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology) and too many friends in government, both at the federal level (e.g., former Monsanto executives appointed to positions with the USDA) and state level (e.g., Secretaries of Agriculture) to be thwarted in its continuing drive to reap profit from its toxic products that threaten the health and lives of animals and humans alike. It was the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 that opened the sluice gate for GMOs by issuing the absurd ruling that nature could be patented. And it will very likely be this same captive, infamous court that bats down all lawsuits against Monsanto and the rest of the chemical and agribusiness industries. But whatever they unlikely lose at the Federal level they can try recouping and conspiring at the state level. “Don’t count Monsanto out” concludes the co-editors of Vanity Fair in a long and detailed expose.

Industries at Large

There are over 100 US industries. Take a random pick. Any industry, besides the three just cited is most likely to be a “card-carrying” member of the conspiratorial corpocracy. Banking industry? Remember the government’s bailouts after the second greatest depression? Remember the bail outs in the auto industry? Energy industry? As I recall oil big wigs were influential in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. I could go on to cite many other industries, but I think my point has already been made. Any industry that is supposedly governed by government regulations, and most if not all are, is ipso facto a conspirator with “our” government. The most flagrant instances are the many times industry representatives ghost write the regulations and/or the regulations, lax or not, are not enforced.

Privatization

The epitome of collusion may be the many instances where corporations buy public services and public land out from under our noses.

Here is a privatization riddle. What a) sorts mail but is not the USPS, b) cuts Social Security checks but is not the SSA, c) counts the census but is not the Bureau of the Census, d) monitors air traffic but is not the FAA, and e) runs space flights but is not NASA? Give up? It is Lockheed Martin, the largest military contractor in the U.S.

Pick any type of public service or public land and you will find some corporate owners. Public schools? Not any longer in many school districts. After Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans privatizers swept in and took over the public schools. Health care industry? Our health care ought to be a human right not to be put on the auction block. Public toll ways?  Not any longer in some states. Law enforcement? In some areas private police have the same authority as deputy sheriffs. And pause on this. The State of Arizona even sold its State Capitol and then leased it back.

Privatization, argue Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich, co-authors of The Fox in the Henhouse, is the private sector’s way to “undercut, limit, shrink, or outright take over any government and any part of the public sector that stands in the way of corporate pursuit of ever larger profits and could be run for profit.”

Conspiracy within a Conspiracy

I suppose there are numerous instances where petty conspiracies arise within one part of the government to spoil or thwart another part. I’m not going to bother trying to ferret them out. Politics as usual is rife with internal rivalries as appointed officials vie for influence.

The conspiracy I have in mind here is within the corporate part of the corpocracy. Probably the most prevalent form of it is the collusion among corporations in fixing prices. Whenever government is lax in stopping the practice it conspires with the price fixers.

In Closing

“Our” government is accountable to no one, a scofflaw committing all sorts of legal and illegal wrong doing daily up to and including murdering people with drone strikes. This government, moreover, in good faith as a conspirator, rarely holds corporations accountable for all sorts of wrongdoing, including defrauding and gouging the government. Is it any wonder then that the two parties to the marriage made in Hell raise Hell with 99% of Americans and the rest of the world?

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Gary Brumback, PhD is a retired psychologist and Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He is the author of The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch; and America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. His most recent book is Corporate Reckoning Ahead. Gary can be reached at: democracypower@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Gary, or visit Gary’s blog site, Democracy or Corpocracy.

 

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Author Name Bio

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WITNESSES TO HISTORY
CALEB MAUPIN

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The US is on a march to war with Russia (and apparently China), and the ballistic missile installations are one important link in the chain. However, the preparation of the soil for war is a larger project that includes squashing the protections against state intrusions into peoples lives (as with surveillance programs) and the squashing of dissent in its various forms. In the US we have an uptick in the monitoring of the population and silencing and punishing whistleblowers. Clearly this is happening in Poland as well. If the state increases the propaganda while silencing dissent to its actions, then the likelihood of mass public dissent drops dramatically. Poland is one nation where this is happening; it certainly is not the only one. -rw

The United States and its NATO allies have recently established ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. The United States claims that these systems are set up for the purpose of protecting Romania and Poland.

However, Russian leaders interpret the systems as a threat to them because these “defense systems” are strike enabling. The new ballistic missile systems enable NATO forces in Poland and Romania to strike Russia with cruise missiles, and then deflect any response.

Russia and China raised similar objections to the missile system being established in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. In Cold War terms, these missile systems give “first strike capability” to the United States and its NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

The installation of the missiles in Poland has been quite unpopular. Naturally, the installation of the system in Poland has been accompanied by a crackdown on political forces that object to it.

Mateusz Piskorski, a Pan-Slavic activist and former member of the Polish parliament has been detained without specific charges. Authorities allege, without citing anything specific, that he has been engaged in espionage.

To anyone trained in criminology or the history of espionage, it should be highly obvious that Piskorski has not engaged in any illegal activity. Piskorski is a well-known political activist. He leads a small political party and runs a Pan-Slavic publishing house. As a well-known public figure, Piskorski is the last person that any intelligence agency would cooperate with. Piskorski has been detained because he is an outspoken critic of NATO and the European Union, and is loudly voicing his opposition to Polish cooperation with hostility to Russia.

Piskorski is not the only one who has been targeted by the pro-NATO government in Poland. On April 1st, the right-wing political party that runs the country passed a sweeping anti-Communist law. The law outlaws displays honoring adherents of the “Anti-Polish Communist Ideology.” The law specifically lists a number of Polish historical figures who cannot legally be honored. Among them are not only leaders of the post-war socialist regime, but also the Dabrowski Brigade of Polish volunteers who fought fascism in Spain, and any members of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, once led by Rosa Luxemburg. A number of anti-Nazi resistance groups, led by Communists, that operated during the Second World War are also outlawed.

On March 31st, four leaders of the Communist Party were convicted of “promoting totalitarianism.” Their crime was operating a website and printing a leftist newspaper. They were sentenced to nine months in prison with hard labor.

The “Law and Justice Party” which leads Poland is leading the crackdown on Communists, leftists, and Pan-Slavists while at the same time allowing Neo-Nazis and other fascists to operate openly. While Communists and Pan-Slavists are forced into the shadows, 400 Neo-Nazis paraded through the streets on April 13th in a public rally.

Imagine if Vladimir Putin were to crackdown on his pro-liberal, western opponents in such a way? In Putin’s Russia, the “Union of Right Forces” and other parties that embrace western ideologies operate openly. Groups promoting free market capitalism, falsifying Russian history and accusing great historical figures of genocide, openly operate all across Russian soil, and often receive western funding as they do so.

The “human rights” allegations against Russia pale in comparison to what is being openly done by the pro-NATO polish regime, as the missile systems are being erected, paving the way to World War Three.

The hypocrisy of western media and the “human rights” NGO noise machine should be very obvious.

Source: New Eastern Outlook

 

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Past in Present Tense

What have we forgotten since the days when MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was taken off the table? We are now at a point where a candidate for President of the U.S. can casually and loudly threaten using nuclear weapons and most seem blasé about the concept.

I recently watched Stanley Kramer’s Cold War classic, “0n the Beach,” where Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins are fated to die along with everyone else after a worldwide nuclear war. It sounded a bit like Revelation chapter nine, verse 15, which predicts that the most destructive war is yet to come. But no, it really reflected Kramer’s anxiety about reckless and feckless leaders and the damage they do. At least the film had Peck and Gardner to console the victims on their final destination.

The US has always needed real or imaginary enemies to make its historic addiction to war more palatable. Nowadays it’s perfectly acceptable to damn Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian but he’s no more authoritarian than some of America’s closest allies.  The problem is that, like the US, he commands thousands of nuclear bombs, a subject about which I’ve been writing since the start of what sounds like another Cold/maybe Hot War era. The hawkish Hillary Clinton compared him to Hitler after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. But Henry Kissinger of all people saw through the hot air emanating from Washington’s inner circles (echoed by an uncritical media) when he wrote that excoriating Putin was no substitute for shaping a sane policy, which our foreign policy elites have regularly disdained to do, especially after past and present incompetents and worse have caused the deaths of some 38,000 US military in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam and 7,000 in Iraq, not to mention millions of innocent Asians and Middle Easterners. No VIP has ever been tried or imprisoned for these deaths.

 

The US noose around Russia began in earnest when our most lethal weaponry began pouring into Russia’s erstwhile satellites adjacent to Russian borders, (great news for Merchants of Death stockholders). US troops are now stationed in the Baltics and Poland targeting Russia and its 8,000 nuclear bombs and history of successfully destroying invaders, even absorbing 27 million deaths fighting and defeating German armies –and thus ironically saving the West from defeat. The new US commander of NATO, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, seemed oblivious to this aspect of Russian history while sworn in recently as NATO’s latest military commander, saying NATO (read the US, its major funder) must be ready to “fight tonight.” How many Americans, “amusing themselves to death” in Neil Postman’s deathless prose, are ready for that? And “tonight,” no less?

For every provocative move by the US and NATO, the Russians have retaliated by recklessly buzzing US naval ships and aircraft. Moscow added that it will send three army divisions to their western borders and, more ominously, nuclear warheads will be placed on its new Iskander missiles and set down near Kaliningrad, close to Lithuania and Poland and targeted at Western Europe just as the US-NATO buildup is aimed at Russia.That’s Russian Roulette and can easily “lead to miscalculation,” noted a NY Times piece.

Igor Ivanov was once Boris Yeltsin’s foreign minister and also worked for Putin and now runs a Russian government think tank. “The risk of confrontation with the use of nuclear weapons in Europe is higher than at any time in the 1980s,” he told the London Express. Both sides, incidentally, are about to conduct war maneuvers much like the darkest Cold War or pre-1914 years.

“This new conflict is shaping up to be extraordinarily dangerous, entailing a broad confrontation that will play out in various proxy theaters around the world and bringing back the ever-present possibility of nuclear war,” warns Samuel Charlap of the Center for American Progress and Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ issue (vol. 72, Issue 3, 2016) devoted to US-Russian relations. “A misreading of this man [Putin] — now one of the most consequential international political figures and challengers to the US-led world order since the end of the Cold War–could have catastrophic consequences.”

As Dmitry Kiselyov, director of a Russian TV network put it, pulling no punches. “Russia is the only country in the world which is realistically capable of turning the US into radioactive ash.” But Dmitry, please bear in mind that the US can play the same game.

Meanwhile, President 0bama has approved all the moves directed at Russia and given a green light to those who want to confront the Chinese, a nuclear power, in the South China Sea, most recently near the Fiery Cross Reef, a miniscule pile of rocks where the Chinese have built an airstrip. Tit for tat, the US aircraft carrier John Stennis, named after the late Mississippi segregationist, was prevented from docking in Hong Kong. The US says its warships are in the region to protect freedom of navigation but China sees it as the US trying to maintain regional hegemony, with force if necessary. So the dangerous game goes on between the three powers until someone either devises a diplomatic solution with people they may not like or we slip mindlessly into a nuclear war. Then a brainy entrepreneur can start selling up-to-date bumper stickers reading “Support 0ur Troops on Fiery Cross Reef”– that is, if anyone is still alive to read it.

While writing this blog Daniel Berrigan, the antiwar, nonviolent Jesuit priest- activist whose life was dedicated to creating “a world uncursed by war and starvation,” and Donald Duncan, the Vietnam Green Beret who turned against his war, had died, Dan in May and Don in March. 0nce discharged, Don joined William Sloane Coffin, Benjamin Spock and David Dellinger in mass rallies where draft cards were burned. He also defended the Green Beret Dr. Howard Levy, who also turned against the war and was jailed by the very liars and murderers whose policies had cost the lives of millions. Had Dan and Don been physically able in our new Cold War-ish atmosphere they would surely be warning Americans that our policies may well force them and their people into yet another calamitous war, but this time a nuclear war brought to you courtesy of our latest generation of American, Chinese and Russian madmen.

 

 

Image credit for screen graphic with the Statue of Liberty: Screen capture from video by Daryl Lawson.

 

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