One of Many Good Reasons to Attend Tuesday’s Protest Against Governor Snyder
As we reported last week, a Michigan Stand for Democracy protest is planned for Tuesday, September 13, in front of the WOOD-TV 8 facility on College Avenue just north of Cherry Street. The protest will now begin at 6:30 PM.
The event is to protest Governor Snyder’s policies, his presence in Grand Rapids. It will take place during Wood-TV 8 “town hall” broadcast with Snyder.
Here’s a reminder of one of the violations against the democratic process that Snyder and his legislature have perpetrated since his election. It’s an excellent short film that was created by Michigan Forward titled “Dictators Over Communities of Color.” The 7-minute film recaps Snyder’s changes to the Emergency Financial Manager law, and shows in particular how minority communities are being targeted by Public Act 4.
Take a look, and plan to attend the protest at 6:30 PM on September 13.
Erik Prince – Profiting from war and now war games
It is now official. There is a new video game that was approved by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.
MLive posted a story today announcing the release of the new first person shooter video-game, Blackwater. In the brief MLive story it quotes Prince who says his father inspired him to create the game. “He taught me to appreciate the opportunities that America offers to innovators.”
Erik Prince is of course referring to Edgar Prince, founder of the family business and funder of numerous far right causes such as anti-gay, anti-abortion and political entities such as the Council for National Policy and the Free Congress Foundation.
In this case it seems that Erik Prince is suggesting that he is an innovator by licensing a game based on a company he created that was essentially a group of private mercenaries. Not only was Blackwater a private mercenary group, it made most of its money from taxpayer funded government contracts to do work in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The brief Mlive story ends by saying that Prince sold Blackwater, “after it became embroiled in controversy over its role in supporting the U.S. military’s efforts to combat terrorism.”
Such a statement not only sanitizes the role that Blackwater played in the so-called War on Terror, it ignores the facts.
As Jeremy Scahill, author of the best book on Blackwater has noted, the company was charged with murdering numerous Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, Iraq several years ago. Blackwater has also been implicated in killing civilians in Afghanistan and CIA sponsored assassination programs.
The murder of civilians and targeted assassination programs by Blackwater employees in no way should be referred to as “controversy” and lending your name to a first-person shooter video game does not absolve you of crimes against humanity.
Who Justin Amash is spending his weekend with?
There are numerous reasons why I don’t like the Political Polpourri section of the Grand Rapids Press. News should never be sound bites or tidbits, especially when it has to do with politics.
Yesterday’s polpourri got my attention because of the sound bite about 3rd Congressional Representative Justin Amash. The less-than 100-word blurb mentions that Amash will be a speaker at the Liberty Political Action Conference this weekend in Nevada.
The only other information shared was the naming of a few other politicians that will be in attendance and a sentence from the conference website. Oh, and one of the conference sponsors is the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society is not some wishy-washy non-profit organization, they are an anti-government “patriot” groups according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and they make one of their goals the repeal of the civil rights legislation.
But wait it gets better.
Other sponsors of the Liberty Political Action Conference are the anti-union National Right to Work Committee; Freedom Works – a Tea Party affiliated entity that has fought against health care reform, global warming legislation, immigration and taxes; the Future of Freedom Foundation and various companies.
Beyond the politicians that the Press article mentioned there are numerous speakers that are also worth mentioning. First, is Howard Phillips, one of the founding members of the Council for National Policy. The CNP has a long history of supporting ultra-conservative political and religious leaders. Both Richard and Dick DeVos have been members and financial supporters of the CNP for years.
Another speaker is Jack Hunter, known on the air as the “Southern Avenger.” Hunter is a far right radio pundit who is a favorite source for Tea Party listeners and is also a regular guest on the Michael Savage radio show.
A third speaker is Ivan Eland who is with the conservative think tank, The Independent Institute. The Independent Institute is one of those think tanks that denies global warming and has had a cozy relationship to the tobacco industry for years.
There are only a few women presenters at the conference and one of them is Nicole Kurokawa Neily with the Independent Women’s Forum. The Independent Women’s Forum is an anti-feminist entity that receives its’ funding from far right foundations and in 2004 received $10 million grant to IWF for “leadership training, democracy education and coalition building assistance” to women in Iraq.
This is just a sample of who Rep. Justin Amash will be spending the weekend with. Unfortunately, the Grand Rapids Press doesn’t think that such a line-up of far right speakers and organizations is important enough for them to inform their West Michigan audience.
IWW Film Night this Thursday: Capitalism is the Crisis documentary
The 2008 “financial crisis” in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history.
Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their “crisis” through punitive “austerity” programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights.
Austerity was named “Word of the Year” for 2010.
This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and recommends revolutionary paths for the future.
Special attention is devoted to the crisis in Greece, the 2010 G20 Summit protest in Toronto, Canada, and the remarkable surge of solidarity in Madison, Wisconsin.
After the film members of the IWW will facilitate discussion.
Thursday, September 15
7:00 PM
IATSE Labor Hall 931 Bridge St. NW, Grand Rapids
The Lessons of 9/11 – according to Senator Levin
For those who think that Republicans and Democrats are worlds apart on US foreign policy, one only needs to look at how both parties view 9/11.
Virtually no member of Congress would publicly offer a critique of US policy since 9/11, not if they wanted to get re-elected. The virtual consensus in Washington is that the US was totally justified in attacking, invading and occupying Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001.
Afghanistan’s crime was that it would not turn over Osama bin Laden to the US. Indeed, the Taliban government was willing to turn over bin Laden, but to a neutral country to be tried in an international court, according to Noam Chomsky in his book 9 – 11 and former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer’s book Imperial Hubris.
Since the October 2001 US invasion/occupation of Afghanistan, the US has continued to justify its actions because of the claim that al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. However, even General Petraeus admitted during a CNN interview on May 10, 2009, that there was no al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. The US is and has been fighting the nationalist insurgent movement known as the Taliban.
The justification for this ongoing foreign policy that has devastated Iraq, Afghanistan and to a lesser degree Pakistan over the past 10 years not only comes from the more hawkish members of Congress, it is a position that “liberal” members, like Carl Levin, have taken.
Senator Levin recently released a statement for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 entitled, Learning the Lessons of the Post-9/11 Decade. Levin talks about visiting the Pentagon after it was hit 10 years ago and then, “Most important, we’ve severely degraded al Qaeda’s ability to threaten us.” The only evidence that Senator Levin offers on his claim that al Qaeda is weak is the death of bin Laden and a comment from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to say recently that we are “within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda.” While the death of bin Laden may have been a blow to al Qaeda, there is no evidence that they are any less of a threat than before.
Levin goes on to say that the US has improved the intelligence sharing capabilities since 9/11 and that the US borders are more secure. In addition, he says the US must figure out ways to not allow terrorist groups to launder money anonymously, so that they will not be able to buy weapons so easily. This completely ignores the fact that the US is the number one trafficker of weapons worldwide. If this country were serious about weapons falling into the hands of “terrorists,” a serious reduction in arms sales would be in order.
Levin ends his post-9/11 comments by talking about the unity of the American people he felt when President Obama announced that bin Laden had been killed. “The unity we felt that night, joining thousands of people celebrating the news, was just as powerful as the unity we felt at the Pentagon on the day of the attacks. It was a great reminder that, in mourning or celebration, our nation is strongest when it is united.”
Such jingoistic sentiment is fairly meaningless to people in this country who are unemployed or underemployed while the rich get richer and Congress continues to spend more money on war than on social programs and working families.
In addition to what Levin said, it is also worth pointing out what he didn’t say as it relates to 10 years since 9/11. Levin doesn’t mention the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his continued support for government surveillance and the Patriot Act and the ongoing intimidation and abuse of Arab Americans and Americans who are Muslims.
The lesson that we can learn from Senator Levin on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is that he continues to be committed to the imperialist policies of this country.
Never Forget Their Crimes, Always Deny Ours
(This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.)
We are Good
“We must never forget.” So proclaims a solemn parade of United States politicians, pundits, and propagandists preparing for an orgy of narcissistic national self-righteousness, self-pity and patriotism to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11/2001.
“We must never forget” the terrible bright September day a decade ago when a great, democratic, and benevolent nation was attacked by evil people who hated our “freedom.”
We “must never forget” how we were so unjustly assaulted and how we vowed to defend our country and its noble values with a bold and just military response to Evil.
We “must never forget” because we must always be on guard to defend our exceptional nation and its inspiring beliefs and institutions, its excellent “free market” economy and other virtues that make us the greatest nation of all time – “the beacon to the world of how life should be,” as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) described the U.S. in a speech in support of Congress authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq.
We “must never forget” how splendid we are. As Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright once explained, “the United States is good…We try to do our best everywhere.”
Of course, in properly appreciating that goodness, good Americans are expected to dutifully forget the United States’ long record of inflicting massive military mayhem on officially designated enemies and defenseless civilians abroad. Right thinking citizens understand without asking that crimes are committed by evil others, never by noble “America.” Bad things are done by “them,” never by “us.” “They” have malevolent intent but “we” are good, driven by gracious and gallant goals and ideals. The only victims worthy of acknowledgement and compassion are those assaulted by “our” officially designated enemies. The larger number murdered and maimed by us and/or our clients and allies (e.g., Palestinians killed and suffering under U.S.-sponsored Israeli occupation and apartheid and dissidents murdered and muzzled by U.S. client states like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Columbia, and Honduras) do not merit sympathy or consideration. They do not exist.
So Much to Fail to Remember
There is so much we must fail to remember, compared to the only two times the U.S. has been assaulted on its own soil – during the War of 1812 (by the British Empire) and (al Qaeda) on September 11, 2001. (I exempt Pearl Harbor since it took place on Hawaii, stolen from its native inhabitants forty four years prior to the Japanese attack). We are expected to loyally overlook: the United States’ savage racist elimination of native peoples’ and civilizations from “frontier” territory claimed by white settlers (celebrated in Theodore Roosevelt’s multi-volume Winning of the West as a great “feat of power” over dangerous “savages” that furthered the Darwinian “spread of English-speaking people over the world’s waste spaces”); the military theft of much of the American Southwest and California from Mexico during the 1846-1848 Mexican War (the first in which a U.S. army invaded another country and occupied its capital); the U.S. butchering of 600,000 Filipino natives (labeled “niggers,” “Apaches,” and “barbarians” by their “’turkey-shooting” executioners) between 1899 and 1902 (4,300 Americans were lost); the bloody U.S.- re-imposition of de facto slavery and colonial rule on Haiti during and after World War One (justified by “the Negro race’s” inherent unsuitability for democracy, according to Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing); the mass-murderous U.S. atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, justified by Washington as necessary to defeat Japan when the White House and high American military command knew very well that Japan was exhausted and seeking surrender.
“From the end of World War Two through the present,” John Pilger noted in 2007, the U.S. Empire caused “the extinction and suffering of countless human beings. The United States attempted to overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies, and to crush thirty popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, twenty-five countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more” None of this is to be remembered – even registered (see below) – by good Americans.
The officially non-existent victims of American benevolence since 1945 include:
- 3 million mostly peasant Indochinese (chiefly Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians) killed in a massive, multi-pronged U.S. assault between 1962 and 1975 (58,000 U.S. soldiers died in this one-sided attack, encouraging U.S. president Jimmy Carter to claim that “the destruction was mutual” during the so-called Vietnam War).
- Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans killed and maimed by authoritarian governments (including “Third World fascist” regimes in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and paramilitaries funded, supported, and equipped by the U.S.
- 300 Iranian civilian air passengers (including 90 children) blown out of the sky (on Iranian Air Flight 655) by the U.S. Navy in Iranian air space from Iranian territorial waters by the U.S. warship Vincennes on July 3, 1988. (The commander of the Vincennes William C. Rogers III was subsequently rewarded with a Combat Action ribbon and the prestigious Legion of Merit “for exceptionally meritorious conduct.” Scott Lustig, the U.S. air-warfare coordinator who directed the attack received the Navy Commendation Medal. The medal citation noted his ability to “quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure.” The U.S. later settled the incident for $61.1 million in the International Court of Justice).
- More than 1.25 million Iraqis killed, mostly from bombing, so that the U.S. could punish the renegade behavior of its former client Saddam Hussein in the so-called Persian Gulf War of 1991 – an operation that cost the lives of less than 200 U.S. troops. (The body count included many thousands of surrendered troops slaughtered while in full retreat from Kuwait on the infamous “Highway of Death” in the night of February 26-27, 1991, A reporter described the highway scene as “ a blazing Hell” and “a gruesome testament,” noting that “To the east and west across the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing”).
- More than 1 million Iraqis killed by a U.S-imposed weapon of mass destruction called “economic sanctions” between 1991 and March 2003.
- More than 2 million Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis and other predominantly Muslim and Arab people killed in criminal U.S. wars of occupation, revenge, and petroleum-control since 9/11/2011.
“The Price is Worth it”
Last May on the Public Broadcasting System’s “News Hour,” Madeline Albright applauded the death of the former U.S. client Osama bin Laden. The just-murdered bin Laden had “killed not only Americans but a lot of other people,” Albright noted. The PBS anchor interviewing Albright appeared to find nothing remarkable about that comment. It was a telling non-reaction. A reasonably civilized news culture would have been shocked by righteous expressions of concern for innocent victims from a person (Albright) who as Secretary of State said the following to CBS News about the killing of more than half a million Iraqi children by the U.S.-led sanctions: “this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
Beneath that statement lay a deeply racist and imperial mindset that “prices” the lives of Arab children as no greater than those of insects when compared to the need to advance the inherently noble global objectives of America – the inherently excellent nation that, Albright once claimed, “stands taller and sees farther” than all the rest. Seven years after Albright uttered her noxious judgment on national television, the Pentagon’s computer program for estimating civilian deaths likely to result from the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 used an interesting term to designate the ordinary Iraqis to be killed: “bug-splat.”
“Why Didn’t We Attack Sweden?”
One does not exonerate the mass-murderer bin Laden by acknowledging the wisdom of a comment he made after 9/11. If al-Qaeda’s goal was not to punish the U.S. for its imperial role in the oil-rich Middle East but rather to express hatred for Western freedom and democracy, bin Laden asked, then “why didn’t we attack Sweden?” Like many other Western Europeans, after all, Scandinavians enjoy more freedom and democracy than do the corporate-managed residents of the U.S., where policy and society are savagely subordinated to “the unelected dictatorship of money” and politics remain “the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey) in a nation where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth (along with a larger share of the elected officials) and bottom 40 percent owns essentially nothing (0.3 percent of American net worth).
Imperial Revenge
Many U.S. military personnel in the 21st century have described their actions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia as “revenge for 9/11” – a common motivational theme in the preparation of 21st century U.S. imperial gendarmes to kill “Hajis.” American troops, officers, intelligence operatives, and pilots have for a decade now been encouraged to take out their hatred for bin Laden and Muslims more generally on innocent men, women, and children across the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
The American petro-imperial revenge machine reached its gory apex, perhaps, in April of 2004. That’s when the U.S. Marines responded to the killing of four American (Blackwater) mercenaries in the Iraqi city of Fallujah with a quasi-genocidal assault that included the bombing (including hyper-lethal cluster-bombing), mortaring, napalming, gassing, and shooting of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and the targeting of ambulances. U.S. snipers boasted of killing “anyone they could get in their site.” This assault alone considerably out-did al Qaeda’s 9/11 death count.
Blowing Up Afghan Children v. Scaring New Yorkers
Another one of many episodes in the long record of wanton U.S. imperial violence since 9/11 took place in May of 2009. That’s when U.S. air-strikes killed more than 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As the New York Times reported:
“In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi….”
“ ‘ The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,’ Mr. Farahi said.”
“ ‘Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.’ Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.”
U.S. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to apologize for the mass aerial destruction of Afghan children. By contrast, Obama had just offered a full presidential apology to New York City and fired a White House official after that official scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan. The flight had briefly reminded people below of 9/11.
Frightening New Yorkers called for a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Blowing up 93 Afghan children did not elicit an apology. Nobody was fired or disciplined.
No Apologies
Here at least Obama stayed true to one of his campaign statements. During his rock-star visit to adoring crowds in Berlin in the summer of 2008, CNN’s Candy Crowley asked the next president if “there’s anything that’s happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy.” Obama responded bluntly: “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing…I think the war in Iraq was a mistake…But, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards. …The U.S,” Obama made sure to ad, “remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world.”
True to his comment to Crowley, Obama refused (during a June 2009 White House visit by Chile’s president Michele Bachelet) to consider an official U.S. apology for the United States’ central role in Latin America’s Nine Eleven – the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected government and installed the mass-murderous fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Obama justified his refusal with the claim that “I’m interested in going forward, not looking backward,” the same language he used to rationalize not investigating and prosecuting the George Bush II administration’s war and human rights crimes. For good measure, Obama added that “the United States has been an enormous force for good in the world” even if “there have been times where we’ve made mistakes.” Under Obama as under U.S. presidents since Reagan, the White House and Pentagon continue to refuse to apologize for Iranian Flight 655.
Even While it Was Happening It Never Happened
Of course, Latin America’s 9/11 never really happened as far as the dominant U.S. political and intellectual culture is concerned. I misspoke when I wrote (above) that “good Americans are expected to forget” (the United States’ long history of murder abroad). The deeper truth is that we are not supposed to ever register any parts of that record in the first place. You have to know that something occurred in the first place to forget it. But in the U.S, and indeed across much of the West, the record of ongoing U.S. criminality is airbrushed out from official history and the mass culture even as it occurs. It is instantaneously tossed down George Orwell’s “memory hole.” As Harold Pinter noted in his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, dominant Western cultural authorities behave as if past U.S. imperial violence did not exist. Even while it was happening,” Pinter added, “it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
If anyone cares, this is how the Nazis dealt with Germany’s imperial crimes: as if they’d never happened. A relentless propaganda campaign claiming (among other things) that poor, persecuted Germany had done nothing to produce its Versailles victim-hood and to provoke hostility and attack from outside helped fuel Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and his scheme to achieve the global hegemony that fell to the American Superpower during and after World War II.
Radical Feminism & Art subject of film this Wednesday 9/14
“Through intimate interviews, art, and rarely seen archival film and video footage, !Women Art Revolution reveals how the Feminist Art Movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times.”
This powerful film that looks at the work of Judy Chicago, the Guerrilla Girls and many more feminists who made radical art in order to challenge patriarchy, racism and war will be show Wednesday, September 14 at 6pm in the Wealthy Theater.
Women Art Revolution is a stark contrast to the superficial, enterprise culture of ArtPrize. A discussion will take place after the film.
Naomi Klein debunks “ethical oil” at Tar Sands Protest
The anti-tar sands oil actions in DC that ended last week did not get the Obama administration to commit to taking a stand against the Keystone pipeline project that would bring the Canadian Tar Sands oil through the US to the Gulf Coast.
Naomi Klein, author of the critical books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, spoke at one anti-Tar Sands rally in DC and exposed the lies that the oil companies, the Canadian and the US governments are spreading about one of the worst environmental projects in modern history.
Anti-Bullying Legislation: Michigan Hate Crime Conference 2011
During the lunch break the speaker was Jamie Nabozny, the subject of the recent documentary Bullied. Before Nabozny spoke, he showed a clip from the documentary, a clip that dealt with the witnesses at his trial.
During his remarks Nabozny addressed several issues around his experience and the realities of bullying in the US. Nabozny stated that prevention was key and that as a society we need to begin as early as pre-school age to teach respect. The speaker stressed the point that many efforts at prevention only exist for a few years, which ultimately is ineffective since there is an ongoing turnover of students and that every generation needs constant anti-bullying education.
Nabozny also said there needs to be a comprehensive response to dealing with bullying. He stated that schools not only need clear policies in place, but there needs to be work done with victims, perpetrators and bystanders. Nabozny said it was obvious that schools work with victims, but he said too often perpetrators and bystanders are ignored.
What the speaker said about perpetrators is that often they themselves are victims of abuse, unstable family circumstances and sometimes they have not come to terms with their own sexual orientation. Nabozny said that some of the guys that bullied him for being gay, later came out as gay, which he suggests is why LGBTQ students are sometimes targeted for harassment and assault. Those who struggle with being public about their identity will sometimes act out against those who are public about being LGBTQ as a way of sending a message that they in no way identify as such.
Nabozny then said that bystanders are also an important population to target. First, it is important to get students who are bystanders involved, because the more they report incidents of bias, harassment or assault, the more likely it is that the school administration will take action. Once bystander students take action it sends a strong message to perpetrators that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated and that there are people who support those who are victims. Nabozny also said that students who are also bystanders to assault and harassment are themselves traumatized, which is yet another reason to empower these students to take action.
Nabozny ended his comments by stating that it is critical that Michigan pass anti-bullying legislation, but he needs to be legislation that is clear and comprehensive so that all public institutions will need to comply and so that there is a strong mechanism of accountability.
Benton Harbor, Governor Snyder and the Whirlpool connection
This new video does a good job of visually communicating what has been happening in Benton Harbor in recent years. The video connects the dots with the organized effort to shift tax money from Benton Harbor to St. Joseph and the power structure in that area, including the Whirlpool Corporation.
The video also makes the link between the de-funding of Benton Harbor, the Snyder imposed Emergency Financial Manager, the new private Golf Course on former public land and the tax breaks that the Whirlpool Corporation has received in recent years.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 