Chris Hedges's Blog, page 178

Prison Guard Drives Truck Into Crowd of Peaceful Anti-ICE Protesters

On Wednesday night, immigration activists gathered at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., to protest the private facility’s working relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The coalition of advocacy groups was organized by Never Again Action, the same Jewish activist group that led protests at detention centers across the country Sunday.

Protesters, who were sitting at the entry to the facility’s parking lot, knew they were risking arrest by blocking staff attempts to enter the prison, as a tweet from the organizers indicated at the start of the protest. They didn’t expect that anyone would try to run them over.

According to reporting from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the incident started about 9:45 p.m., when a black pickup truck driving at a speed of about 10 to 15 miles per hour swerved toward a group of about 30 protesters. The Washington Post reports that “the protesters shouted as the driver laid on the horn, and the truck briefly stopped. … And then, the driver hit the gas.”

“It was terrifying because we didn’t know what exactly his intention was,” Amy Anthony, a spokesperson for Never Again Action, told the Post.

The Post reports that several protesters were treated at a local hospital, but no one was seriously injured.

Anthony said in the wake of the incident that it is the detainees inside the Wyatt Detention Facility that she is most concerned about. She told the Post, “If this is the way this correctional officer is behaving in public when people are recording, it’s not hard to imagine the behavior is much worse behind the walls in the facility where no one can see what is happening,”

According to protesters, the driver was a correctional officer and employee of Wyatt. Video of the incident backs up their statement, and the driver was wearing a badge and uniform.

“The truck came in and people ran,” Lex Rofeberg, a protester who was not in the car’s path told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, adding, “It was shocking, it was unexpected. …There’s some amount of risk when you go to an action like this. You don’t expect it to unfold like this.”

Anthony also told the Post that no other law enforcement officials intervened or attempted to stop the driver, who then walked into the prison. Other guards used pepper spray on protesters, a group that she says included children and one person in a wheelchair.

Oh my god. An ICE Detention Center guard just drove their truck straight through a line of us sitting peacefully to block the parking lot. There don’t appear to be major injuries, still assessing the situation, police are moving in *on us* now

Google Employees Protest Proposed Contract With ICE, CBP

Employees of Google announced Wednesday they are protesting the tech giant’s expected proposal to work with President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants through cloud computing contracts.

In a detailed Medium post announcing concerns over the contract, the group “No GCP for CPB” laid out its complaints and demands (emphasis in original):

It has recently come to light that CBP is gearing up to request bids on a massive cloud computing contract. The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP’s infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses. It’s time to stand together again and state clearly that we will not work on any such contract. We demand that Google publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE, or ORR with any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses.

“We refuse to be complicit,” the group said.

We won’t be complicit: #NoGCPforCBP

With this petition, we call on Google to publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE or ORR w/ any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses.https://t.co/8RITUXKJBq

— Googlers for Human Rights (@EthicalGooglers) August 14, 2019

The letter was signed, at press time, by “676 Googlers and 48 other supporters.”

As Vox reported Wednesday, employees have been at the forefront of movements against the country’s large tech sector cooperating with CBP and ICE:

In many cases, employees who consider themselves part of the “Tech Won’t Build It” and “No Tech for ICE” movement have been some of the first to raise concerns about their companies’ practices.

The movement to stop tech companies from supplying technology to ICE and other immigration agencies has also been led in part by immigrant and minority advocacy groups like Mijente and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, the latter of which last week helped shut down an Amazon Books store in Manhattan over the company’s ties with ICE.

Other rights groups, including the Texas-based RAICES, applauded the stand taken by the tech giant employees.

“We appreciate the Google workers standing with us,” tweeted RAICES.

Mijente said it hoped that the Google group wouldn’t be the last.

“We encourage tech workers across all of these companies to keep organizing and escalate until their employers stop engaging in human rights abusers,” said Mijente.

The Right Gives Corporations the Help It Denies Poor Immigrants of Color

President Donald Trump’s administration this week announced a set of new rules aimed at significantly curtailing the number of people being granted legal residency in the U.S. According to The Associated Press, the rules include “denying green cards to many migrants who use Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers or other forms of public assistance.”

The rule has been marinating for nearly a year and would affect millions of people, including the children of immigrants. Only those who can demonstrate that they have enough money to satisfy the government may immigrate. In other words, Trump’s vision of legal immigration to the U.S. privileges those who already are privileged.

The new rule is part of a long-standing right-wing gripe about immigrants, both legal and undocumented, using government assistance. Fox News hosts like Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson, who appear to be de facto White House advisers, have long made claims of immigrants being a burden on society. Never mind the fact that, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “individual immigrants use public benefits at lower rates and at lower portions than native-born Americans.” All that matters is furthering the perception that immigrants are a drain on America. The White House under Trump has also worked hard to make that case.

As if to obscure the appalling optics of a policy that explicitly applies a wealth test to those wanting to immigrate to America, Trump’s Acting Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, went as far as rewriting Emma Lazarus’ famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. In an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, host Rachel Martin asked Cuccinelli if Lazarus’ poem, which begins, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” “are also part of the American ethos.” He replied in the affirmative but then rewrote the poem, saying, “Give me your tired, your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

Nowhere in Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus,” is the sentiment Cuccinelli proposes. Quite literally, he and Trump are embodying an un-American ethos in requiring that only those who are independently wealthy qualify for legal residency.

In addition to a class-based attack, the new rule is also unsurprisingly racist, given that nonwhite green card applicants are far likelier to hail from poorer nations compared with white European, Canadian or Australian applicants. Cuccinelli said as much a day later in another interview on CNN, when he explicitly attributed Lazarus’ poem as applying only to “people coming from Europe.”

Democratic Congresswoman Norma Torres of California hit the nail on the head when she explained in a recent interview that the new rule is “just an excuse to rid the country of people who look like me.” She added, “Only someone who has grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth, who has filed [for] bankruptcy so many times and has never had to suffer a consequence of being homeless, of being without a paycheck, without a job because of an illness, only someone like that can put forward a policy like this and think that it’s OK.” Guatemalan-born Torres is the only member of Congress of Central American origin.

But the Trump administration imagines itself innocent against charges of racism. Cuccinelli explained to reporters on Monday that the rule was simply intended to foster “self-reliance and self-sufficiency for those seeking to come to or stay in the United States.”

This is a standard Republican talking point used to slash public funding for services ordinary people rely on and deflect attention from the far larger subsidies, tax breaks and other government largesse aimed at corporations.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently explained how tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry cost the public nearly $40 billion over ten years. Reich also pointed out how a company like Boeing is gifted billions of dollars as incentives to create jobs—but has instead laid off thousands.

The Republican tax reform law of 2017 enriched already-rich corporations with massive tax breaks; many of them then turned around and used the extra cash to buy back their stocks rather than create jobs and open new plants. Republicans never criticize the public subsidy of corporate America or demand it learn self-reliance. Instead, they enable corporate dependence on the Federal Treasury. Self-reliance is only for poor immigrants, not businesses and their rich executives.

Nowhere in Trump’s new immigration rules is an acknowledgment of how many corporate employers rely on their workers receiving public assistance to make ends meet. Walmart is notorious for paying its workers so little that it costs the nation billions of tax dollars in public assistance for Walmart workers. The same is now true for the online retail giant Amazon.

Immigrants who have been forced to use public assistance because of the horribly low wages their employers pay will now be ineligible for legal residency in the U.S. as per Trump’s new rules.

Just a week ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) swept up nearly 700 agricultural workers at plants across Mississippi. As per right-wing logic, the undocumented workers at Koch Foods in Mississippi deserved to be rounded up, detained, and separated from their children. If any of those workers—who put up with years of labor abuses—had been eligible for legal residency but used public assistance to make up for poor wages, they would now be denied green cards under Trump’s new rules.

But neither Koch Foods nor any of the corporations have so far faced legal consequences for employing undocumented workers, even though it was determined that they “willfully and unlawfully” chose to employ undocumented workers (perhaps assuming those workers would be easier to exploit).

Instead, the company held a job fair days after the raids to replace the workers that ICE removed. When asked about separating parents from children, acting ICE Director Mark Albence blamed immigrant parents for the plight of their children, saying, “The parents or the individuals that are breaking the law are ultimately the ones that are responsible for placing their children in this situation.” He had no words of blame for the corporations that broke employment law.

There has also been no Republican criticism of government subsidies for farmers and agribusinesses. For decades, farmers have been given billions of dollars in public assistance, almost all of it going to white farmers. Over the past year, as a result of Trump’s trade war with China, the government has approved a massive taxpayer-funded bailout to farmers, which a report pointed out is further enriching already-rich farmers and has gone to almost exclusively white male farmers. Where is the talk of self-reliance and not being a public charge?

In fact, this nation was built on welfare—for white Americans. As Chauncey Devega points out in Salon, “During the 18th and 19th centuries, free land was given to European settlers.” He describes the institution of slavery and the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans as a “de facto intergenerational welfare payment to White America.” Since then, countless other government opportunities and benefits have poured into the hands of white Americans.

One such American has been Trump himself, who, according to a New York Times investigation, “helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions.” The money his family reaped as a result was passed down to Trump himself, who has used government-backed loans and subsidies to build his wealth. America’s largely white, wealthy elite classes have all consistently depended on government assistance but never faced the type of vilification that poor people, people of color and immigrants face.

Ayn Rand, who enshrined selfishness as a virtue and who decried the idea of accepting handouts from anyone, especially the government, was also an immigrant. But the Russian-born author, philosopher and Republican icon is Trump’s favorite type of immigrant—a white one. Therefore, her hypocrisy in relying on government programs such as Social Security is overlooked.

Setting aside the humanitarian concerns around embracing poor immigrants, as Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty encourages, the benefits of immigrants far outweigh the costs to the U.S. economy. Study after study finds that immigrants contribute more than they use. Even the George W. Bush Institute—hardly a left-wing outfit—has concluded the same. Immigrants pay hundreds of billions of dollars in federal, state and local taxes each year—taxes that all residents benefit from.

But in Trump’s America, poor immigrants of color are a strain on America. They are “invaders” who suck up the resources deserved by hard-working white Americans. They must be kept out of the country at all costs and have maximum pain inflicted upon them.

In Trump’s version of America, the Statue of Liberty might say, “only white wealthy immigrants are welcome here.”

The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Is Much Bigger Than Jeffrey Epstein

What follows is a conversation between journalist Whitney Webb and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have you all with us. Jeffrey Epstein is at the top of every news cycle, and dominates our digital social media world. His trafficking of young girls, children to satisfy his and the sexual preferences of so many of the rich and powerful, are the center of all this, as are his connections to that dark world of the unseemly side of the interaction between government, business, and the intelligence world, allegedly. 

Using sex as blackmail is nothing new. It goes back to the early mob, the CIA, and seems to connect the dots to Epstein. That was the story we’re going tell today, written by our guest, who wrote this for Mint Press in the three-part series called Jeffrey Epstein Scandal, Too Big to Fail. The three parts were Hidden in Plain Sight, Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era, and Mega, Maxwells and Massad: The spy story at the heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal. 

Whitney Webb is a Mint Press news journalist based in Chile who has written and contributed to many, many outlets and joins us now from her home there. And welcome. Good to have you with us, Whitney. 

WHITNEY WEBB Hi, thanks so much for the opportunity. 

MARC STEINER So let’s begin this how this sort of journey began for you because it seems that the heart of what you’re doing here is saying what Epstein was accused of doing, what he did is nothing new in our annuls with this history that there’s using sexual blackmail. It goes way back to the mob, to Meyer Lansky, to the founding of the CIA. So talk a little about that, the genesis of this. 

WHITNEY WEBB OK. So what I hope to show in my reporting is that this is not a type of operation or a scandal really that began or ends with Jeffrey Epstein now that he has died. As you mentioned, my report tries to go as far back as possible to really see where these sexual blackmail operations began in the context of this network to which Jeffrey Epstein was later connected. And from my research, it was first pioneered by Meyer Lansky and the national crime syndicate in the late thirties, he was sending Virginia Hill, who’s often been called the mistress of the mob, he was sending her to Mexico to try and lure foreign diplomats and to bug departments and use that for blackmail purposes. Not long after that, Lansky became an associate, well, he was a covert associate at the time with the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. 

When they formed, the OSS formed this alliance, which they said was out of war-time necessity, right, with figures in the criminal underworld, including Lansky and some others, in what was known as Operation Underworld, which was a government operation during the war that was denied for, I think, 40 years. Afterward, that alliance, even though it was supposed to be just for the war, it continued on. It continued to grow and really proliferated, especially after the 1960s when the CIA hired several Lansky associates for assassination teams, especially in relation to their efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba and some other activities. 

And during the same time we also see sexual blackmail operations with a lot of associates of Lansky and powerful people in government take office, and that really began during the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s and the McCarthy era and involved a prominent businessman who was the owner of Schenley liquors, Lewis Rosenstiel, who was a long-time associate of Meyer Lansky. It involved Roy Cohn, who was a general counsel to McCarthy during this time and also J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time and very famous for his interest in acquiring large amounts of blackmail, was also involved in this ring that involved children, specifically boys and it continued for decades and eventually Roy Cohn took it over from Lewis Rosenstiel. 

The relationship between Rosenstiel and Cohn was often described as father and son or that Rosenstiel was his mentor. Cohn eventually took this over what had originally been run out of Lewis Rosenstiel’s personal home and began to run it out of what became a rather infamous suite in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Suite 233, that was sometimes called the Blue Suite, and he would host these sorts of events there with recording equipment and all of that, that were used to blackmail powerful people, first in the McCarthy era, and later on. 

And as I show in part two of my report, these sorts of networks, Roy Cohn was not the only one. There were some other ones that the CIA was running in the late ’70s that were connected to disgraced CIA agent Edwin Wilson. And then after that when, in the 1980s with Iran-Contra and Bill Casey and all of that, there were several other sexual blackmail operations or child trafficking rings that were connected to prominent players in the Iran-Contra scandal. 

MARC STEINER So some of what you’re talking about here, let me just be clear about a couple of things before I ask this next question. What you’ve just described, especially about the blue room and what went on in those places, this is not alleged, there’s these facts. These are things that are corroborated, correct? 

WHITNEY WEBB Right. With the Plaza Hotel, this was actually admitted. Roy Cohn actually admitted this to the face of an NYP detective that was in charge of human trafficking division at the time because Roy Cohn knew he was untouchable because of his extreme connections to the politically powerful, the media and also the criminal underworld. He basically felt like he was immune enough to be able to say that point so blankly for this person’s face. It was also private investigators in New York that looked into Roy Cohn for various reasons, also confirm the existence of this blue suite as it was called. And it was also referenced by Louis Rosenstiel’s ex-wife in divorce filings. And it also came to light during the early 1970s, a committee on crime in New York. 

MARC STEINER So let me then, I want you in a, in a broad sense, say we don’t have like an hour here to do this, but I wish we did because there’s three parts. This is huge. There’s so much to pull out of there. But make for us this moment before I have other questions, the connecting the dots. You talk about Meyer Lansky and Rosenstiel, who owns Schenley Liquors and the connections to Roy Cohn and Maxwell, the man who owned the Fox News and more, and his daughter. 

WHITNEY WEBB Oh, Rupert Murdoch? 

MARC STEINER I meant Maxwell, actually, not Murdoch. I meant Maxwell. 

WHITNEY WEBB Oh, I’m sorry. 

MARC STEINER It was my fault. I misspoke. And then, and so you make these connections between these people that lead you in some senses to Epstein. So what is that arc, can you paint that arc briefly for us? 

WHITNEY WEBB OK. Well there’s actually a whole bunch of different connections to Jeffrey Epstein from here. So basically I talked about the OSS. It’s believed that Donald Barr originally hired Jeffrey Epstein to work in the Dalton School and Donald Barr had previously worked at the OSS. After that, he was hired to work at Bear Stearns. Alan Greenberg was a close friend of Roy Cohn and actually was the honorary chairman of a dinner for him that was honoring Roy Cohn, I believe in 1983, and the other honorary chairmen were other close friends of Roy Cohn, including Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. 

After he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he, according to journalist, Vicky Ward, was a financial bounty hunter of sorts, looking [inaudible] money for governments and powerful people. The Evening Standard of England later reported that during that time Epstein claimed that he was working for the CIA. Vicky Ward later said that one of his clients, during that time was [inaudible]. He was known to be working for the Massad. He was also working for the CIA and he was a major player in this Iran-Contra scandal. Then in 1987, he meets up with Leslie Wexner who has connections to this Meyer Lansky crime syndicate, as I point out in part three. He also meets up with Steve Hoffenberg who he allegedly met through John Mitchell, who was the former attorney general to Richard Nixon, and Mitchell was actually cited as a friend by Craig Spence, a disgraced Washington lobbyist who was also running a sexual blackmail operation with children. That was discovered in the late 80s and Craig Spence, in some similarity to Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead under somewhat mysterious circumstances and his death was ruled a suicide. 

MARC STEINER So far as we know. 

WHITNEY WEBB Right, and that takes us up to 1991, which right after that, that’s the same year that Robert Maxwell died, as well as several other people that were connected to the Promis software scandal, not just Maxwell. That includes Senator Towers also died that year, as did journalist Danny Casolaro, who was investigating that scandal. And even after Robert Maxwell died, his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, moved to New York and began her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And as I point out in part three of my series, Robert Maxwell was known to be an operative for the Massad and did several favors for Israel over the course of his career and was also using the Daily Mirror Group, some of the funding for that, to fund Massad operations in Europe. So the intelligence links, I think, are very clear and that’s just the early history. We’re not even getting in to the 90s yet. And I’m going to be delving more into those connections in part four of my series, which I hope to be out in a few days. 

MARC STEINER I’m looking forward to reading that, but let me just talk about how this all fits together and what it really means. So these last two pieces, I mean, so when you write in the piece, you say Epstein appears to have had ties to Israeli intelligence and has well documented ties to an influential Israeli politicians and the Mega Group. We’ll talk about that. And it was revealed that Epstein had evaded stricter sentencing 2008 due to his links to “intelligence”. It was the Massad ties to Maxwell’s daughter that alleged that Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation was sharing incriminating information with Massad. But one of the things that, in the pieces that you write, you use words like appear instead of like, we know, so what do we know? Talk about how you make these connections and what we really know and what we really don’t know. You know, what’s alleged and what’s real. 

WHITNEY WEBB Okay. Well, I mean there’s a lot of claims I make in the story. So to go over all of them and say, you know, what appears to be, and like definitely what is … What we do know, right, is that our claims that Epstein made in the past, for example, that he worked for the CIA, we know from journalists that are considered reputable sources when covering Epstein, like Vicky Ward for example, that he had working for people like at [inaudible] who are known to have been linked to Massad. We know that his biggest patron, financial patron was Leslie Wexner who has been tied to organized crime syndicates according to a 1985 Columbus, Ohio murder investigation. 

We know that he was recording sexual black—, that Jeffrey Epstein was recording sexual blackmail. We know that Alex Acosta claimed the reason he approved that sweetheart deal was because he had been told that Epstein was linked to intelligence, though he did not specify which intelligence agency and given the network and the associations that I’ve already laid out, which are documented, right, it certainly is an overwhelming amount of evidence, of circumstantial evidence nonetheless, but or of circumstantial evidence, I guess you could say, but the amount of it really makes a convincing case that this is a much larger network that has documented ties to operations involving sexual blackmail that preceded Epstein and that Epstein is more … because of what we know he was doing and we know he had ties to a lot of the people that had been tied to those previous sexual blackmail operations, to me, it really shows that Epstein was carrying on an operation that he did not invent, right? 

This is something that did not begin and did not end with him and he was just perpetuating this and I think that’s why it’s really important once it’s [inaudible] , some of the narratives that have come out around this case, that Epstein was solely responsible for all of this activity and that he had deceived the billionaires who funded him and that this is all to be blamed on a single man. I think if we do that, we’re really doing his victims an injustice because this is something much larger than Epstein. And if the other people and other parties responsible or not pursued or held to account, this is likely to continue well into the future. And because of the, what I would say the disgusting nature of Epstein’s activities, I think most Americans have a vested interest in preventing these type of operations from continuing and especially if intelligence agencies are involved, that suggests that American taxpayer money is being used in some capacity to fund these operations. 

MARC STEINER So, and finally here, I mean there’s two things, there’s so much we could talk about here, but these two things, I mean is it … a conversation I had yesterday is that, was around … conspiracy theories are great, but what we need is real reporting and intelligence work, police work and congressional investigations to see what, where’s the there there and how do you put these dots together so they become fact and not possibilities. And so, and I think that’s the important piece here is I think you made a strong point when you said you can’t just blame this all on one man, Epstein. There are too many other connections out there. 

So where do you take this then? For you, what does this say in the final analysis about what might be going on here? And I know that this is in some ways conjecture and speculation, because even though you find these connections that sometimes there’s nothing really to tie them together in terms of fact yet. So where do you take this? 

WHITNEY WEBB Well, I think there definitely needs to be an independent investigation. I think a lot of the people that are involved in the current investigations, including Bill Barr, I don’t think many Americans should be confident in what he will turn up. 

MARC STEINER You make the Barr/Epstein connection in your third part of your series. 

WHITNEY WEBB Right, yeah. But beyond that, Bill Barr also was known for stonewalling the Church committee in the late 70s, and he was particularly trying to prevent the CIA’s use of sexual blackmail operations from coming to light for the Church committee. I think that is at least like significant as is the fact that he justified the legal pardons of numerous Iran-Contra figures and including, and given the role of many Iran-Contra figures in this network that I describe in my reporting, I don’t really see him as being an impartial investigator here. And also the fact that he worked for the law firm that defended Epstein later on in the 2000s, I think is just, you know- 

MARC STEINER And his father hired Epstein. 

WHITNEY WEBB Right, exactly. And that he’s going to get to the, you know, that Bill Barr will get to the bottom of this. I don’t, I don’t really buy that, so I think there needs to be a more independent investigation. Concerns have also been raised about the fact that, you know, Epstein was trying to blackmail people. Now that blackmail has fallen, whoever raided Epstein’s properties, depending on who’s using that, it could even be Bill Barr that now has control over this blackmail material. It’s hard to know if he will be using it, if that will just go away or Bill Barr will use it for his own political agendas now given his history. So I think that’s something to be concerned about. And also the fact that there may be several members of Congress, if there’s a congressional investigation, that may have been tied up in this, we don’t know all the names. 

A lot of the documents haven’t come out. Now that Epstein is dead, that criminal case will go away. And so a lot of the evidence uncovered during discovery will not be made public. So I think it is necessary for the public to pressure for transparent campaigns and for other conspirators in this, or co-conspirators, what Epstein was doing, especially Blaine Maxwell and Leslie Wexner, that they’d be pursued and questioned by law enforcement. 

MARC STEINER Well, I look forward to talking, greatly, some more with you. And you’ve taken on a lot of very powerful names and people in your piece. I hope you feel safe in what you’re doing. 

WHITNEY WEBB Yeah, I’m not worried. 

MARC STEINER Yeah, but I do look forward to this fourth piece and then maybe we can get the fourth piece, we can have a more lengthy conversation and kind of try to tie these pieces together. And I want to thank you for joining us today and good luck. 

WHITNEY WEBB Absolutely. Thanks again. 

MARC STEINER And I’m Marc Steiner here for the Real News Network. Please let us know what you think. Take care.

Modi Clamps Down on Kashmir, and India Loves Him For It

The achingly beautiful Himalayan valley was flooded with soldiers and roadblocks of razor wire. Phone lines were cut, internet connections switched off, politicians arrested. Public gatherings were banned.

The prime minister of the world’s largest democracy had clamped down on Kashmir to near-totalitarian levels. And Narendra Modi’s country reacted with roaring approval: As he had Kashmir stripped of statehood and its special constitutional status, even some of his political opponents were calling out support.

Modi, a Hindu nationalist by the time he was 10 years old, had upended life in India’s only Muslim-majority state, flexing those nationalist muscles for his millions of followers.

They loved him for it.

“All of Kashmir is ours!” a jubilant middle-aged demonstrator, draped in the saffron-colored scarf of a Hindu, shouted during a New Delhi street celebration just before Parliament voted to end Kashmir’s decades of semi-autonomy.

“Modi has fulfilled another promise,” said a more quiet-spoken supporter, Sushanto Sen, a retired senior manager with an aerospace and defense company, who lives in the crowded north Indian city of Lucknow. “Kashmir is part of India, and whatever rules apply to us should apply to others too.”

To his critics, Modi is an authoritarian manipulator who wants to turn India into an avowedly Hindu nation. But to his supporters, Modi is an incorruptible ascetic unafraid to tell the truth — a man who understands what it means to be poor but, like so many of his supporters, wants India to be treated with respect by the rest of the world.

Indian prime ministers have long been expected to be unapproachable and intellectual. They were people like Indira Gandhi, scion of India’s most powerful family, and Manmohan Singh, with his expressionless face, blue turban and Ph.D. in economics.

Not Modi, who has carefully crafted a different public image. Even as he avoids unscripted moments — he rarely talks to reporters, and most of his appearances are in TV speeches or political rallies — he is still seen by many as an Indian everyman.

Modi is the proud son of a tea-stall owner who became a canny politician and skilled orator and who now, Putin-like, does adventure TV shows like “Man vs. Wild.” (Unlike Putin, though, Modi keeps his shirt on).

He doesn’t lack for confidence.

“I have never experienced fear or nervousness,” he told the show’s host, the British ex-special forces soldier Bear Grylls, with whom he hiked through an Indian tiger reserve carrying a spear fashioned from a knife and a branch, TV cameras in tow. “I am unable to explain to people what nervousness is.”

Born in 1950 to a poor family in a small town in the western state of Gujarat, Modi proudly talks of his humble beginnings, growing up without running water or electric lights.

He has been separated from his wife, to whom he was engaged as a child in an arranged marriage, for decades. He has no children. Unlike most Indian politicians, he has no circle of relatives hovering around him in search of powerful contacts or lucrative government contracts. He has his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and the cause of Hindu nationalism. That is all.

That focus has created an immensely powerful political machine, one that has hobbled the long-dominant Congress party and made Modi, by far, the most powerful politician in India for a generation.

Modi, who first became prime minister in 2014, has reinforced his power with nearly every election since then.

In national voting earlier this year, the BJP took 303 of the 542 seats in the lower house of Parliament. The Congress party, dominated by the Gandhi family since even before independence from Britain in 1947, won just 52. Amit Shah, Modi’s top aide and home minister, told reporters that the BJP had set up more than a million small organizing offices across the country ahead of the elections — five times as many as in 2014.

For the Congress party, the defeat was crushing. It forced Indira Gandhi’s grandson Rahul to quit as party president.

These days, Modi is seen around the world as a pivotal Asian leader. He’s known for welcoming foreign heads of state with bear hugs. He has addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He clearly enjoys seeing himself as the embodiment of an increasingly muscular India.

But just a little over a decade ago he was denied a U.S. visa because of suspicions that he had quietly supported the bloody 2002 anti-Muslim riots that shook Gujarat, the state which he long ran as chief minister.

While government investigators eventually ruled there was no evidence to charge him, the shadow of the riots refuses to go away, particularly among India’s English-speaking elite, who have long viewed him with deep suspicion.

But he quickly turned that shadow against his critics — and the riots into a punchline.

After a top Congress leader called him a “maut ka saudagar” — a merchant of death — Modi began using the line himself.

“Do I look like a merchant of death?” he would ask in speeches, enjoying the thunder of crowds shouting back “No!”

Modi has also faced fierce criticism in recent years. It came amid growing attacks by Hindu mobs against Muslims and Dalits, the low-caste people once known as Untouchables, saying they had killed cows, which devout Hindus see as sacred. Some of these self-styled “gau rakshaks” — cow protectors — have ties to the BJP or other Hindu nationalist groups.

Most often, Modi meets the attacks with silence.

Modi first made a name for himself as a roving organizer for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a Hindu nationalist group with millions of followers that eventually gave rise to the BJP.

Many of his early beliefs were shaped in the RSS, with its heavy emphasis on paramilitary drills, Hindu prayers and personal sacrifice. The current head of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, turned heads last year when he said Muslims were welcome in India, but also insisted that everyone living in India was a Hindu.

Today, Modi’s Hinduism often goes unspoken but is regularly on display. While things like yoga and vegetarianism have little religious connotation in the West, their Hindu connections are clear to Indian voters — especially when practiced by a politician. So when Modi sits in the lotus position in front of TV crews on International Yoga Day, or talks about the benefits of vegetarianism, or names a state water program after the Hindu concept of divine energy, all of India understands the message: Finally, a leader who is openly and proudly Hindu.

One of Modi’s brothers said that his fascination with power reaches back to his childhood, when he first began attending meetings at the local RSS unit, or shakha.

“He liked their discipline and the line of authority,” Somabhai Modi told Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of a Modi biography. “He was always greatly impressed by the fact that only one person gave all the orders in the shakha and everyone followed the command.”

It’s a lesson Modi learned well, cementing his authority at the top of the party since becoming prime minister and sidelining potential rivals.

Shah, his closest aide, is widely seen as the architect of the government’s Hindu agenda. Both men have long argued for the revocation of special status for Kashmir, a mountainous Muslim state of pine forests, clear streams and highly fertile lowland soil.

Its tortured modern history reaches back to partition in 1947, when British India was divided into largely Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan. In the wake of the India-Pakistan war that followed partition, when Pakistan seized control of part of Kashmir, the Indian constitution was amended to give special rights to the state, including its own constitution, limited decision-making powers and laws forbidding non-Kashmiris from settling there.

The state, divided between India and Pakistan but claimed by both, has been wracked by cycles of separatist violence and brutal crackdowns since the late 1980s, when New Delhi rigged local elections and Pakistani weapons and militants began filtering across the border. Some 70,000 people have been killed in the violence.

Over the decades, most special rights had been whittled away. But they remained symbolically powerful across Indian-controlled Kashmir, where most people want independence from India or a merger with Pakistan. The restrictions on the sale of land to non-Kashmiris were particularly important, seen as a way to keep outsiders from swamping the state and changing its nature.

While Kashmir has long seen itself as a suffering stepchild of India, forced to endure the presence of hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers, many Indians — and especially the BJP — saw the region as the ungrateful recipient of those legal protections.

But why bother to take away protections that, for the most part, now mean little? Enter Modi, who said he wanted to bring Kashmir more fully into India, ending the insurgency and jump-starting development.

“A new age has begun,” he said in a nationally televised speech last week, saying the old system had created “secessionism, terrorism, nepotism and widespread corruption.”

To some Modi critics, the timing of the Kashmir decision was about deflecting attention from India’s stumbling economy, with its record unemployment and falling foreign investment. But it could also simply be about power.

“The basic thing is that he wants to convey the message that he is tightening the screws on Kashmir,” said Mukhopadhyay, the Modi biographer. “Modi’s policy has not been aimed at the development of Kashmir but at securing the vote of his core constituency.”

The tightened screws remain. More than a week after the clampdown began, the region’s main city, Srinagar, is a maze of roadblocks and razor wire. Most communications are still shut off. Sporadic protests have flared.

And few in Kashmir are talking about development, or jobs. Most are talking about anger.

“I think this place is going to erupt,” said Shah Faesal, a young Kashmiri politician. “It’s a volcano in the making.”

Hours after speaking to The Associated Press, Press Trust of India reported that Faesal had been detained by security forces.

___

Tim Sullivan has written about India for nearly two decades.

___

Associated Press writers Ashok Sharma, Vineeta Deepak, Emily Schmall and Rishabh R. Jain contributed to this report from New Delhi.

Hickenlooper Ends White House Bid, Mulls Senate Run in Colorado

DENVER—Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Thursday ended his longshot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and said he may run for the Senate in 2020 against a Republican considered one of the most politically vulnerable incumbents.

In a video message, Hickenlooper said he had heard from many in his state urging him to enter the Senate race. “They remind me how much is at stake for our country. And our state. I intend to give that some serious thought,” he said.

Colorado’s shift to the left could put GOP Sen. Cory Gardner in jeopardy, and at least 10 Democrats have launched campaigns, setting up a competitive primary even before Hickenlooper, 67, makes a decision.

Hickenlooper became a political giant in Colorado for his quirky, consensus-driven and unscripted approach to politics. He once jumped out of a plane to promote a ballot measure to increase state spending and he won two statewide elections during years of Republican waves. He also was Denver’s mayor.

He began his White House campaign in March, promising to unite the country. Instead, he quickly became a political punch line. “While this campaign didn’t have the outcome we were hoping for, every moment has been worthwhile,” he tweeted on Thursday.

Founding a series of brewpubs made Hickenlooper a multimillionaire. But shortly before taking his first trip to Iowa as a presidential candidate, he balked on national television at calling himself a capitalist. Then, at a CNN town hall, he recounted how he once took his mother to see a pornographic movie.

With the campaign struggling to raise money, his staff urged Hickenlooper to instead challenge Gardner. But Hickenlooper stayed in and hired another group of aides in a last-ditch effort to turn around his campaign.

He positioned himself as a common-sense candidate who couldn’t be labeled a “socialist” by Republicans. But Hickenlooper couldn’t make his voice heard in the crowded Democratic field of about two dozen candidates.

It didn’t help that, by Hickenlooper’s own admission, he was a mediocre debater and an erratic public speaker. In the end, he could not scrape together enough money for many of his trademark quirky ads, only launching one in which avid beer drinkers toast Hickenlooper by comparing him to favorite brews.

Hickenlooper softened his denials of interest in the Senate in recent weeks as his campaign finances dwindled and pressure increased from other Democrats. He started telling people he’d make a decision by the end of this week.

He even met with Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold, who was mulling a run against Gardner. Griswold last week announced she would not challenge Gardner, and that helped to spark speculation among Colorado Democrats that Hickenlooper would eventually jump in.

If he entered the Democratic primary, Hickenlooper would be “the absolute favorite,” said Mike Stratton, a veteran Democratic strategist in Denver.

But some of Gardner’s challengers have said they don’t intend to step aside even if the former governor runs.

“What I heard Gov. Hickenlooper tell everybody who asked is, he wasn’t cut out to be a senator and didn’t want the job,” said former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, one of the primary contenders, in a radio interview.

Hickenlooper isn’t the first Democratic hopeful to end his 2020 presidential bid. U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell of California announced his departure in July.

___

AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace contributed to this report.

This New York Times Editor’s Demotion Was Long Overdue

The New York Times announced yesterday (The Wrap, 8/13/19) that it had demoted deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman for “recent serious lapses in judgment.” These included a since-deleted tweet from last month that asserted that politicians of color don’t really count as coming from their regions:

Saying @RashidaTlaib (D-Detroit) and @IlhanMN (D-Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying @RepLloydDoggett (D–Austin) is from Texas or @repjohnlewis (D-Atlanta) is from the Deep South. C’mon.

This was followed by a bizarre controversy in which Weisman demanded an “enormous apology” from African-American writer Roxane Gay, who had criticized him for “telling a black woman she isn’t black.” Weisman had chided the progressive Justice Democrats for endorsing a challenger to “an African-American Democrat”; when the challenger, Morgan Harper, pointed out, “I am also black,” Weisman retorted: “@justicedems‘s endorsement included a photo.”

The Times announced that Weisman “will no longer be overseeing the team that covers Congress or be active on social media,” and these are good things. But I would take issue with the idea that his “lapses in judgment” are recent. At FAIR, we’ve been following Weisman’s career for quite some time, and “lapses of judgment” seem to be par for the course for him.

He called opponents of fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal “the political fringes,” “groups more on the fringe” and (in the words of anonymous officials) “a small fringe” (FAIR.org, 2/10/15). At the time, fast track was opposed by a majority of the House of Representatives.


He treated the poor and middle class as interchangeable terms, writing that “President Obama’s push for a new ‘middle-class economics’ [would] help make the politics of rich and poor a central issue,” and presenting Mitt Romney “vowing a campaign to ‘end the scourge of poverty’” as an example of the same phenomenon as “Mitch McConnell…encourag[ing] the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class” (FAIR.org, 1/23/15).
He bemoaned that in 2014, the right-wing Heritage Foundation was becoming “more of a political organization” by hiring staffers “known more for their advocacy journalism than their scholarship” (FAIR.org, 2/24/14). Heritage’s co-founder and first president, Paul Weyrich, used to write for the far-right John Birch Society; other “scholars” at the think tank have included eugenicist Roger Pearson and white supremacist Sam Francis (Extra!, 7–8/96).  
He described tax hikes for the rich as “politically sensitive,” even while claiming that “a majority of voters say the federal budget deficit should be tackled with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases on the rich”—and then substantiated that by citing polling that actually showed a majority wanted more spending and higher taxes on the rich (FAIR.org, 6/7/12).
He called the prospect of an 8 percent cut in US military spending, to roughly $699 billion, a “heavy blow” to “national security”—even though it would leave the United States spending more on war-fighting capacity than the next 11 nations combined (FAIR.org, 6/4/12).
He said that deep cuts in Social Security were something “cognoscenti” knew “both sides will have to eventually accept” (FAIR.org, 4/5/12). (His source to prove the smart set knew the austerity recommendations of the Simpson/Bowles commission would inevitably be implemented? Erskine Bowles.)  
He said Barack Obama’s problem was that he “cares too much about policy details” (FAIR.org, 8/16/09). 
He claimed that the band Fall Out Boy was as popular as Obama (FAIR.org, 10/22/08).

Donald Trump Is Not the First Xenophobe to Lead America

Along rivers prone to overflowing, people sometimes talk of preparing for a 100-year flood — a dangerous surge of muddy, debris-filled water so overwhelming it appears only once a century.

In our political world, we are now seeing a 100-year flood of toxic debris. The sludge washing ashore includes President Trump’s continuing cries of “fake news!” and “traitors”; his rage at immigrants and refugees; his touting of an “invasion” at the southern border; and his recent round of attacks on “the squad,” four young congresswomen of color who, he raged, should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” (Three of them, of course, were born in the United States.) When he talked about the fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a legal immigrant from Somalia, the inflamed crowd at his July 17th reelection rally in North Carolina began spontaneously chanting, “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!”

Donald Trump, of course, has a long history of disliking people of color, going back to the days when he and his father tried to keep them out of their New York real estate dynasty’s apartment buildings. Presidents, however, usually find it politic to keep such feelings under wraps. Nonetheless, Trump’s particular brand of xenophobia, racism, and media hatred isn’t completely unprecedented. The last time we had a similar outpouring from Washington was almost exactly 100 years ago and it, too, involved a flood of angry rhetoric and fear of immigrants — and it included repression on an enormous scale.

Fear of immigrants, 1917 version

The 100-year flood I’m thinking of lasted for three violent years during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson — from early 1917 to early 1920. Except for lynchings in the Jim Crow South, it would prove to be the harshest burst of political repression and fear-mongering in either twentieth- or twenty-first-century America. It began suddenly when the U.S. entered the First World War in support of England and France and against the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Schools, colleges, and universities abruptly stopped teaching the “Kaiser’s tongue” — a move loudly backed by the ever-strident former president Theodore Roosevelt. Iowa forbade the use of German over the telephone or in public. In Shawnee, Oklahoma, a crowd burned German books to mark the Fourth of July. German music being out, marriages took place without Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln. Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel became the Hotel Randolf. Families named Schmidt became Smith and Griescheimer, Gresham. The hamburger became “the liberty sandwich.” German shepherds were redubbed Alsatian shepherds.

My grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Germany and spoke German with his children. Now, however, they were terrified to do so on the street. In his twenties at the time, my father desperately tried to get into the Army, for a uniform was obvious protection from mob violence — and violence there was. In Collinsville, Illinois, for example, a crowd seized Robert Prager, a coal miner, and lynched him because he had been German-born. (He had tried to enlist in the Navy, but was turned down because of his glass eye.) In Washington, when a man failed to stand up as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, a sailor right behind him shot him dead.

Congress rushed the draconian Espionage Act to a vote two months after the country entered the war. It outlawed anything that would “cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military.” There was, however, not the slightest danger of mutiny among American troops sent to the Western Front in France. Many were so eager to fight that their commanders found gung-ho rear-area soldiers “deserting to the front.” Nor was there much danger of espionage. In those years, only 10 people would be charged under the Act with being German agents.

The president who oversaw this particular 100-Year Flood was no Donald Trump, not in his manner anyway. Rabid invective was hardly Woodrow Wilson’s style. He carefully kept his image as an above-the-fray idealist by outsourcing inflammatory rhetoric to others, such as his special emissary to Russia, Elihu Root.

A corporate lawyer and former secretary of war, secretary of state, and senator from New York, Root would prove the prototype of the “wise men” who moved between Wall Street and Washington to form the twentieth-century foreign policy establishment. “Pro-German traitors” were threatening the war effort, Root declared to an audience at New York’s Union League Club in August 1917. “There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason… There are some newspapers published in this city every day the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason.”

Fake news indeed! The actual bullying of those newspapers Wilson left to Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, of Texas. The Espionage Act gave the Post Office great powers over the press. Newspapers were censored, editors jailed, and publications shut down, most famously Max Eastman’s The Masses, the Greenwich Village radical monthly that was one of the liveliest magazines this country has ever seen. Some 75 newspapers and periodicals either had specific issues banned or were forced to close entirely.

As today on the U.S.-Mexico border, vigilante groups sprang up across the country. The largest was the American Protective League, an official auxiliary of the Justice Department, which even enjoyed the franking privilege of sending mail for free. With a membership that swelled to 250,000, its ranks were filled with men too old for the military who still wanted to do battle, at home if not abroad. So they regularly broke up antiwar meetings and, by the tens of thousands, beat up or made citizens’ arrests of suspected draft dodgers.

Such was the frenzy in the air that two policemen in Guthrie, Oklahoma, hearing a man reading something aloud that spoke of abuses and oppression, promptly arrested him. When he protested that it was the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson, one cop responded: “Okay, where is this Jefferson? We want him, too!” When a leftist student at Rutgers University refused to speak at a rally to sell war bonds, he was stripped, blindfolded, covered with molasses and feathers, and paraded through town behind a sign that read: “This is what we do with pro-Germans!”

People who opposed the war were prosecuted by the hundreds. Among them were anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman and her comrade Alexander Berkman, put on trial for organizing against the draft. In court, addressing the “gentlemen of the jury,” Goldman asked, “May there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty?” Her own American patriotism, she explained, was like that of “the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” The jury found her guilty and the pair was sentenced to two years in prison. “It took a world war,” the Wall Street Journal declared, “to put Goldman and Berkman where they should have been years ago.”

As in the age of Trump, deportation was used as a political weapon. The search for radicals who had never bothered to become American citizens lay behind the seizure of thousands of people in the notorious Palmer Raids orchestrated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The government then deported as many of them as they legally could. Goldman and Berkman, for example, were among 249 deportees loaded onto a decrepit former troopship and sent off to Russia.

The ferocity of the moment was so extreme that people were prosecuted for things they said in private. Charles Schoberg, for example, was a 66-year-old cobbler in Covington, Kentucky. Although German-born, he had lived in the United States since childhood and had been both a police officer and city council member. In the spring of 1918, a suspicious local vigilante group, the Citizens Patriotic League, hired a private detective to put a microphone in his shoe shop. An eavesdropping detective, listening in from a nearby building, picked up Schoberg and two friends making sour and critical remarks to each other about the U.S. armed forces. A typical comment was “You can’t hold the Germans back” — not an unreasonable observation at a moment when the Kaiser’s rapidly advancing army looked as if it was about to capture Paris. Schoberg was sentenced to 10 years in prison, one of his friends to seven years, and the other to five.

“The Christian men to whom God… has given the control”

This patriotic delirium, however, was more than just an upwelling of public opinion. It was carefully stoked. Vigilante groups like the one that snooped on Charles Schoberg or the American Protective League were heavily funded by big business. And not because the country’s industrial and political elite particularly cared about catching German spies or outing pro-German Americans. They were focused on crushing the labor movement.

In the early 20th century, American workers and their unions had few legal rights and business wanted to keep it that way. During a coal miners’ strike in 1902, the president of a railroad declared that wages, hours, and union recognition should be decided “not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

As the century went on, those “Christian men” felt increasingly threatened. The public imagination had been captured by the country’s most radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known to all as the Wobblies. It was led by Big Bill Haywood, a charismatic, one-eyed former miner famous both for using his fists in labor struggles and quoting long passages of Shakespeare by heart.

In 1912, Haywood and other Wobblies organized a strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was victorious despite the police and militia murders of several strikers. A Wobbly-organized walkout of New York City hotel and restaurant waiters that same year, though less successful, still caused consternation when some 800 strikers blocked Fifth Avenue, a central artery of American capitalism. The police had to fire their revolvers into the air to disperse them. An uprising of Colorado coal miners saw more than 70 people killed before it ended in December 1914 — and more strikes followed.

The war changed all that, though. Since almost any industry could now be deemed essential to the war effort, the powers that be had the perfect excuse to come down hard on labor. Previously, such battles, though numerous and violent, had been scattershot: the National Guard suppressing one strike, private detectives another, sheriffs’ deputies a third. Now, business had the pretext for a coordinated nationwide crackdown — and had the backing of the White House.

On September 5, 1917, federal agents raided every IWW office in the country as well as the homes of Wobbly activists. From the group’s Chicago headquarters alone, the raiders took five tons of material, including some of the ashes of the martyred Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, shot by a Utah firing squad in 1915 after a murder conviction based on much-disputed evidence.

In police vehicles and sealed boxcars, more than 100 Wobblies were brought to trial in Chicago. With more defendants in the dock than at any other trial in American history, all the accused were found guilty on all counts. The judge passed out sentences totaling 807 years of prison time and fines of more than $2.4 million, which, of course, no Wobbly had the money to pay. Along with his comrades, Big Bill Haywood was packed off by special train to the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. “We never won a hand,” that onetime saloon card dealer wrote to radical journalist John Reed. “The other fellow had the cut, shuffle, and deal all the time.”

The list of violent acts against American labor in these years would prove long indeed, but one of the most egregious was against a veteran Wobbly named Frank Little. He had helped organize a strike in Butte, Montana, after a fire in a local copper mine killed 164 miners. Two months later, on August 1, 1917, six masked men entered the boardinghouse where he was staying and seized the crutches he needed for a broken ankle. They then tied Little, still in his underwear, to the rear bumper of a car and dragged him to a railroad bridge at the edge of town, where they lynched him.

A note pinned to his body read: “Others Take Notice. First and Last Warning.” The police made a conspicuously minimal effort to find the killers. Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall cynically coined a pun on Little’s name. In solving labor problems, he quipped, “A Little hanging goes a long way.”

The real war of 1917 and today

The crackdown — including heavy press censorship — continued after the First World War ended in German defeat and the troops came home, for it had never really been about the war.

Instead, the 100-year flood of vituperation, threats, and arrests was part of another, much longer war, a struggle against those trying to rectify America’s staggering maldistribution of its bounty. In 1915, the richest 1% of the population owned 35.6% of the country’s wealth. The biggest threat to their position was the militant wing of the labor movement, hence the Wobblies were among the greatest victims of repression.

Today, the richest 1% owns an even greater slice of the pie: 40% of national wealth. Sadly, there’s not much of a labor movement left for them to crush, but the wealthy have other targets. Progressives are advocating many measures that would help rectify the gross inequalities of this America of ours, from health insurance for all to free college tuition to bigger taxes on the highest incomes to taxing wealth itself.

Suppressing such efforts is the central aim of Donald Trump and the people around him. And to do so, he has whipped up a new 100-year flood of venom against invasions of undocumented immigrants supposedly ready to steal American jobs, refugees, the “squad,” and black football players who take a knee, among others. His demagoguery has made skillful use of an old American tradition: employing differences of race to make people forget huge differences of wealth. It’s exactly what Southern plantation owners did when they got non-slave-owning whites to join them in fighting for the Confederacy.

Forty-plus percent of the country identifies with Trump, while the rest of us get outraged. He separates children from their parents at the border and puts people in squalid, overcrowded concentration camps and again the country divides into attacking or defending him. The louder the argument, the happier he is, for it keeps the attention off the real war: his ongoing campaign to put yet more wealth not just in the hands of the top 1%, but the top .01%. Americans who forget about this truly do become his apprentices.

While the rest of us are furiously disputing whether he’s a racist or a patriot, he and his friends are quietly reaping the rewards of a tax cut that was a massive giveaway to billionaires, and his administration is fast-tracking oil pipelines, opening up federal land to drilling and mining, boosting for-profit diploma mills that exploit the poor, and putting foxes in charge of every henhouse in sight from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Environmental Protection Administration. These are the issues that the hundred-year flood distracts us from.

Vindicating Tulsi Gabbard on Syrian Use of Chemical Weapons

In the aftermath of the second Democratic primary debate on July 31, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard emerged as the most Googled of all candidates, an indication that her performance (which included a stunning takedown of California Sen. Kamala Harris over her criminal justice record) attracted the attention of many viewers. This heightened level of attention produced blowback, both from Harris, who dismissed Gabbard as “an Assad apologist” (a reference to Syrian President Bashar Assad), and from the mainstream media, typified by CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who alleged that Gabbard—a major in the Hawaiian National Guard, with two tours of duty in the Middle East under her belt—is taking the side of Assad over the U.S. intelligence community and U.N. inspectors when it comes to assigning blame for chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.

“What you are referring to are [sic] cynicism as skepticism that I have expressed, because I’ve served in a war that was caused by people who lied to us, who lied to the American people, who presented false evidence that members of Congress and U.S. senators believed and voted for a war that resulted in the loss of lives of over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform,” Gabbard replied to Cuomo. “It’s our responsibility as lawmakers and as leaders in this country to make sure that our U.S. military is not being activated and deployed to go to war unless we are certain a) that it serves the best interests of the American people; and b) that that action will actually have a positive impact. The questions I’m raising are based on this experience that I’ve had.”

As someone who challenged the position of the U.S. government regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs before the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, I believe that Gabbard’s skepticism over allegations that the Assad government used chemical weapons to attack the towns of Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and Douma in 2018 is well placed.

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Syria Controversy: Don't Believe the Official Narrative



by Max Blumenthal

Gabbard has detailed her concerns about allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria on her campaign website. Her position, and her reliance on the work of Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has published critical assessments of both the Khan Shaykhun and Douma incidents, has drawn the ire of many in the mainstream media and elsewhere, including Eliot Higgins, founder of the website Bellingcat, who published a scathing rebuttal of both Postol’s work and Gabbard’s reliance on it.

My purpose here is not to check the veracity of Postol’s research, rebut Higgins’ claims or fact-check Gabbard’s web page. What I will do, as a veteran Marine Corps intelligence officer and experienced weapons inspector, is throw my weight behind Gabbard’s expression of skepticism.

The chemical incident at Douma on April 7, 2018, has been largely debunked—the initial claims regarding the use of the nerve agent sarin have been shown to be false, and evidence has emerged that indicates that a pair of chlorine tanks claimed to have been dropped by helicopters belonging to the Syrian military as weapons were, in fact, manually placed at the scene by opposition forces. There is no doubt that the initial assessment of the situation used by the U.S. government to justify a military strike in response to the allegations regarding Douma was fundamentally flawed, and that Gabbard—alone among all the Democratic presidential hopefuls—was correct to expressed her doubt over its veracity.

More complicated is the incident that occurred at Khan Shaykhun on April 4, 2017. Here, investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) claim to have uncovered evidence that civilians from Khan Shaykhun were exposed to Sarin. The key question surrounding the Khan Shaykhun incident isn’t whether Sarin was used, but rather who used it. The U.S. government and the OPCW have concluded that the Syrian government is responsible for the attack. Postol, Gabbard and I all have concerns over that conclusion.

No independent investigator has been to the site of the Khan Shaykhun incident, including the OPCW investigators who assert Syrian government responsibility. This is a crucial fact that fundamentally affects how data is evaluated. Khan Shaykhun was, at the time of the alleged attack, under the control of opposition forces loyal to the Nusra Front, an al-Qaida offshoot. Several nongovernmental organizations also were present, including the White Helmets, a civil defense/rescue organization, and the Syrian American Medical Society, or SAMS, which provides volunteer medical care in opposition-controlled Syria. Both the White Helmets and SAMS operated under the auspices of the Nusra Front while working in the Khan Shaykhun region. In conducting its investigation, the OPCW relied exclusively upon the White Helmets and SAMS for information regarding the alleged attack, access to alleged victims of the attack for interviews and medical testing, and physical samples alleged to have been removed from the scene of the attack.

This reality is fatal to the credibility of any finding issued by the OPCW. In my 10-plus years as a weapons inspector in both the former Soviet Union and Iraq, I helped write the book on on-site inspections, including developing initial procedures for establishing chain of custody for chemical samples gathered during an inspection. I can assert, without fear of being contradicted, that there can be no formal, legally binding attribution or conclusion made from evidence that lacks an absolute chain of custody from moment of collection to final analysis. This was the case with the United Nations Special Command (UNSCOM) in Iraq, and with the U.N. mission to investigate alleged chemical weapons incidents in Syria. That mission, which operated in Syria from Aug. 19 through Sept. 30, 2013, is on record as rejecting numerous evidentiary materials on the basis of being unable to “independently verify the information received” or “verify the chain of custody for … sampling.”

The OPCW, however, modified its procedures to allow the introduction of both the White Helmets and SAMS into the evidentiary chain of custody, embracing them as a means of information verification even though OPCW investigators were not part of the initiating processes involved in witness selection and screening. This failure to adhere to fundamentals has cast doubt on the credibility of the OPCW’s findings, if for no other reason than that it allowed an al-Qaida-affiliated entity—the Nusra Front—to fundamentally shape its investigation, thereby opening its conclusions to challenge.

Postol and Higgins expend significant effort on discussing the science of sarin; I take a more basic approach to the Khan Shaykhun incident: How did the sarin get there? The OPCW concludes that “a relatively large bomb” delivered “from a medium or high altitude, of between approximately 4,000 and 10,000 m[eters]” is the probable delivery means of the sarin used at Khan Shaykhun. This assessment is highly problematic, especially because it was impossible for the aircraft the OPCW asserts was used to deliver this bomb—a Syrian air force Su-22—to accomplish this task. If it was impossible for the Syrians to drop a chemical bomb on Khan Shaykhun from an aircraft, then the entire episode, as recounted by the OPCW—based upon evidence provided by the Nusra Front, the White Helmet and SAMS—must be viewed as a fabrication.

The OPCW cites radar maps provided by the United States and France that place an Su-22 aircraft over Khan Shaykhun on the morning of April 4, 2017. “The aircraft was depicted as flying in a circular loop pattern in the vicinity of Kafr Zayta and north-east of Khan Shaykhun,” the OPCW report noted. “The map indicated that the closest to Khan Shaykhun that the aircraft had flown had been approximately 5 [kilometers] away.”

This information conforms with Syrian air force logs provided to the OPCW by the Syrian government, as well as a statement provided by a Syrian pilot who flew the Su-22 aircraft on the morning of April 4; the pilot claimed the closest he had flown to Khan Shaykhun was seven to nine kilometers, while carrying out an attack using conventional munitions near the village of Kafr Zayta, situated approximately eight kilometers southwest of Khan Shaykhun.

The OPCW said it consulted with an unnamed “weapons expert” to determine “the confluence of distance and altitude from which it might be possible to hit Khan Shaykhun with an aerial bomb.” The “expert” concluded that “depending on a number of variables such as altitude, speed and the flight path taken, it would be possible for such an aerial bomb to be dropped on the town from the aforementioned distances.” The OPCW did not provide the variables used by the “expert” in making this determination, or an example by which these variables could produce the outcome claimed.

There is a simple reason why it did not—the “expert” is dead wrong.

A briefing provided by a Russian air force officer directly contradicts the OPCW claims that an Su-22 aircraft dropped a bomb on Khan Shaykhun on the morning in question. For the Su-22 to carry out an attack, the Russian officer noted, it must visually acquire the target and, from an altitude of no more than 4,000 meters, fly directly at the target at a speed of 800 to 1,000 kilometers per hour. Based upon these parameters, the release point of a bomb would be between 1,000 and 5,800 meters distant from the target. Even then, the Su-22 would require an additional three to nine kilometers to make a turn away from the target after dropping the bomb. The radar track used by the OPCW shows an Su-22 aircraft flying west of Khan Shaykhun, on a path parallel to the town. The flight path is not consistent with that needed to deliver a bomb on Khan Shaykhun.

While Western “experts” have dismissed the Russian presentation as a charade, I find it credible. As a former aircrew member of a Marine Corps OA-4 Skyhawk light attack aircraft, which possesses performance characteristics similar to that of the Su-22, I have flown air-to-ground strike missions similar to that claimed for Khan Shaykhun. I could fly the flight profile indicated by the U.S. radar track 100 times, and never get a bomb anywhere near the area where the Khan Shaykhun crater in question is located. This point is furthered by the fact that a basic analysis of the crater puts the azimuth of strike nearly perpendicular to the line of flight of the Su-22 when passing west of the town; for a bomb to have been delivered, the aircraft would have had to significantly depart from its flight path, overflying the target, before turning and resuming its course. The radar shows no such deviation. (The “loops” flown by the aircraft north of Khan Shaykhun could likewise never have provided the direction of attack needed to deliver a bomb to the crater in question.) This is the crux of the problem facing the OPCW—it claims that an aerial bomb loaded with sarin was used to strike Khan Shaykhun, and yet the evidence it provides regarding the presence of the sole vector capable of delivering this weapon—the Syrian Su-22—disproves its case.

The tale of the Syrian Su-22 represents both the alpha and omega of the allegations of Syrian government complicity regarding the use of sarin at Khan Shaykhun. One can debate sarin persistency, alternative vectors for agent delivery and other tangential issues until they are blue in the face. But for the Nusra Front, White Helmet and SAMS narrative to be viable, there must have been an attack by a Syrian air force Su-22 that delivered an aerial bomb to the center of Khan Shaykhun. Yet the evidence provided demonstrates conclusively that this could not have occurred. Based upon this reality, everything that follows must be viewed as a “false flag” incident or, as Gabbard’s website notes, “evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.”

“I believe,” Gabbard states on her website, “that we should all carefully look at the evidence before coming to any conclusions as to whether or not al-Qaeda or the Syrian government were responsible for these particular attacks.” That she has done so with a critical eye is not only commendable, but what one would expect from a soldier who seeks to be the commander in chief of the U.S. military.

That the mainstream media continue to attack Gabbard for her stance on Syria and chemical weapons is indicative of the low bar that exists for American journalism today. That President Trump and all the Democratic presidential candidates have failed to display a modicum of intellectual curiosity about what really happened in Douma and Khan Shaykhun should alarm any American who professes to care about issues of war and peace.

Six Officers Shot by Gunman in Philadelphia Released From Hospital

PHILADELPHIA — The Latest on several police officers shot in Philadelphia (all times local):

10:45 p.m.

Police say all six officers wounded by gunfire from a man who has barricaded himself inside a north Philadelphia building have been released from the hospital.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross says “it’s nothing short of a miracle that we don’t have multiple officers killed today.”

Ross says the situation that began about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday has “gone from a hostage situation to a barricade.”

Sgt. Eric Gripp said the suspect was “still armed and inside” the house. But Ross said police had been able to speak to him and were still trying to get him to surrender. He said the man’s attorney was apparently on the line as well.

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9:45 p.m.

Police say two officers who were in a building with a gunman barricaded inside a northern Philadelphia home have been “safely evacuated” by a police SWAT team.

Sgt. Eric Gripp said shortly after 9:30 p.m. that the suspect was “still armed and inside” the house. There was no immediate word on how the officers were freed. Earlier, six officers were struck by gunfire but were in stable condition and others were injured responding to the scene.

Commissioner Richard Ross said officers were serving a narcotics warrant at the home and had already entered when gunfire erupted. Ross said the gunman fired multiple rounds and officers returned fire. He said many “had to escape through windows and doors to get (away) from a barrage of bullets.”

Ross said officers had been calling the gunman and trying to communicate with him with a bullhorn, but he had not responded.

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8:30 p.m.

Police say an hourslong standoff with a gunman barricaded inside a northern Philadelphia home is continuing into the night as the shooter ignores officers.

Commissioner Richard Ross said during a Wednesday night news conference the “very volatile” situation is still unfolding.

Six officers were struck. All are in stable condition. Ross said other officers were injured responding to the scene.

Ross said officers were serving a narcotics warrant at the home and had already entered when gunfire erupted. Ross said the gunman fired multiple rounds and officers returned fire. He said many “had to escape through windows and doors to get (away) from a barrage of bullets.”

Two officers remained inside the home, but Ross says he believes they are OK.

Ross said officers have been calling the gunman and he has picked up but did not speak to them.

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7:25 p.m.

A Philadelphia Police sergeant said officers are attempting to communicate with a shooter that has fired at police, wounding at least six officers.

Sgt. Eric Gripp tweeted Wednesday evening that police are “imploring him to surrender and avoid further injuries.”

The shooting situation remained active at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Authorities say police were serving a warrant in the Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood before gunfire started around 4:30 p.m. At least six officers have been shot and none of their injuries are considered life-threatening. The officers were taken to hospitals.

A heavy police presence remains in the neighborhood.

Officials said President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr have been briefed on the shooting and are monitoring the situation.

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6:40 p.m.

A Philadelphia Police sergeant says six police officers have been shot and the suspect is still firing at police.

Sgt. Eric Gripp also tweeted Wednesday that additional officers are receiving treatment for injuries that aren’t from gunshots.

Gripp is asking that people continue to stay out of the city’s Nicetown neighborhood.

He also said officers were serving a warrant to a home in the northern Philadelphia neighborhood before shots were fired.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports two officers were trapped inside the house when the shooting first started.

Dozens of police officers on foot are lining streets blocks away, some in cars and some on horses.

President Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting in Philadelphia and continues to monitor the situation.

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6:10 p.m.

A Philadelphia Police sergeant says five police officers have been shot in what’s still an active shooting situation in the city.

Sgt. Eric Gripp tweeted Wednesday shortly before 6 p.m. that all of the injuries are considered non-life threatening.

He also said that the suspect is still firing and warned people to stay out of the Nicetown neighborhood.

The officers have been taken to area hospitals. Temple University Hospital referred questions on the conditions of police officers to police.

A massive police presence remains with dozens of police cars and officers, many of them with their guns drawn.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says numerous agents are responding to the scene to assist Philadelphia police.

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5:45 p.m.

Authorities say several Philadelphia police officers have been shot in an “active and ongoing” shooting situation in the city.

Sgt. Eric Gripp tweeted there was at least one suspect firing at police officers Wednesday afternoon.

A police spokesman confirmed the shooting in the Nicetown section of the city.

Temple University tweeted that it has locked down its Health Sciences Center Campus.

Video shows a massive police presence with dozens of police cars and officers, many of them with guns drawn.

One officer appeared injured and was taken away in a police car. Video also showed two other officers carrying a man and putting them in the back of a car.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says numerous agents are responding to the scene to assist Philadelphia police.

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5:30 p.m.

Authorities say several Philadelphia police officers have been injured in an “active and ongoing” shooting situation in the city.

Sgt. Eric Gripp tweeted there was at least one suspect firing at police officers Wednesday afternoon.

A police spokesman confirmed the shooting in the Nicetown section of the city but offered no other information.

Video shows a massive police presence in a neighborhood with dozens of police cars and officers, many of them with their guns drawn.

One officer appeared injured and was taken away in a police car. Video also showed two other officers carrying a man and putting them in the back of a police car.

It’s unknown if any police officers have been shot.

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5:15 p.m.

Officials say at least one gunman is shooting at police officers in Philadelphia.

A police spokesman confirmed Wednesday afternoon that a gunman was actively shooting at officers in the Nicetown section of the city. The spokesman who was reached on the public affairs phone number offered no other information.

Sgt. Eric Gripp tweeted said there was at least one suspect firing at police officers.

Video shows a massive police presence in a neighborhood with dozens of police cars and officers, many of them with their guns drawn.

One officer appeared injured and was taken away in a police car. Video also showed two other officers carrying a man and putting them in the back of a police car.

It’s unknown if any police officers have been shot.