Chris Hedges's Blog, page 199

Congress Hammers Big Tech on Competition, Money, Power

Big Tech faced tough questions this week as federal lawmakers focused on issues of potentially anticompetitive behavior by technology giants and expressed bipartisan skepticism over Facebook’s plan for a new digital currency.

Companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have long enjoyed nearly unbridled growth and a mythic stature as once-scrappy startups — born in garages and a dorm room and a road trip across the United States — that grew up to dominate their rivals. But as they’ve grown more powerful, critics have also grown louder, questioning whether the companies stifle competition and innovation, and if their influence poses a danger to society.

Both Democrats and Republicans had grievances to air, even if there wasn’t much consensus on what to do about them.

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Robert Reich: Big Tech Must Be Broken Up



by Robert Reich

















Elizabeth Warren Declares War on Big Tech



by Naomi LaChance

A Tuesday afternoon panel of the House Judiciary Committee focused on whether it’s time for Congress to rein in these companies, which are among the largest on Earth by several measures. Central to that case is whether their business practices run afoul of century-old laws originally designed to combat railroad and oil monopolies.

For some legislators, mostly Democrats, those laws are in need of updates or at least more stringent enforcement. Ultimately such action could lead to breaking up big online platforms, blocking future acquisitions or imposing other limits on their actions.

Subcommittee chairman David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, charged that technology giants had enjoyed “de facto immunity” thanks to current antitrust doctrine, which typically equates anticompetitive behavior with higher prices for consumers. That allowed them to expand without restraint and to gobble up potential competitors, he argued, creating a “startup kill zone” that prevents smaller companies from challenging incumbents with innovative services and technology.

A panel of four mid-level executives from the companies countered that their firms continue to innovate, that they face vigorous competition on all fronts — including from one another — and, perhaps most of all, that they were not monopolists in any way, shape or form.

Facebook, for instance, has argued that it is not a monopoly because it has many competitors in businesses as diverse as private messaging, photo sharing and online advertising.

So Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado asked Facebook’s head of global policy development, Matt Perault, to name the world’s largest social network by active users. (It is Facebook.) When Perault said he couldn’t, Neguse ticked off four of the six largest — Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp — and had Perault verify that all are owned by Facebook.

“We have a word for that and that word is monopoly, or at least monopoly power,” Neguse said.

The company representatives didn’t help their case by pleading ignorance on multiple occasions. Google’s director of economic policy, Adam Cohen, said he was “not familiar” with how much Google pays Apple for the right to supply the default search engine for Safari on iPhones. (Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said It was $9 billion in 2018 and $12 billion in 2019.) Cohen also said he was “not familiar” with allegations of widespread fraudulent listings on Google Maps.

Amazon also faced some pointed questioning. Cicilline asked Nate Sutton, an associate general counsel at the online retailer, whether it uses the data it collects about popular products to direct consumers to Amazon’s own in-house products.

Sutton said the company doesn’t use third-party sellers’ data to “directly compete” with them. Cicilline, affecting disbelief, twice reminded Sutton that he was under oath. “Amazon is a trillion-dollar company that runs an online platform with real-time data,” he said.

Expert witnesses suggested it might be time to reassess antitrust policy. Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia University who has advocated for more expansive antitrust enforcement, noted concerns about a fall in the number of startups being formed, and wondered aloud whether the U.S. will remain a place where startups thrive and launch new industries.

Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale economics professor, argued that stifled competition has hampered innovation and hurt both smaller businesses and consumers, who have no choice but to surrender their privacy and watch more advertising.

Others, mostly Republicans, rejected what they described as a big-is-bad approach in favor of keeping antitrust enforcers narrowly focused on protecting consumers when there’s clear evidence of harm such as price gouging.

Attorney Maureen Ohlhausen, a former Republican commissioner and acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, said the government can still protect against anticompetitive behavior without “reducing the focus on consumer welfare.” She warned against “drastic” steps such as breakups that carry “serious risk of doing more harm than good for competition and consumers.”

Earlier Tuesday, a Facebook executive appeared before a Senate panel to defend the company’s ambitious plan to create a digital currency and pledged to work with regulators to achieve a system that protects the privacy of users’ data. David Marcus, who leads the Libra project, faced sharp criticism from both Democrats and Republicans.

“Facebook is dangerous,” asserted Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the committee’s senior Democrat. Like a toddler playing with matches, “Facebook has burned down the house over and over,” he told Marcus. “Do you really think people should trust you with their bank accounts and their money?”

Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona said “the core issue here is trust.” Users won’t be able to opt out of providing their personal data when joining the new digital wallet for Libra, McSally said.

Marcus returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to face grilling from House lawmakers.

___

AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon contributed to this article from Washington.

Iran Acknowledges Missing Tanker Was Seized in Persian Gulf

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—Iran said Thursday its Revolutionary Guard seized a foreign oil tanker and its crew of 12 for smuggling fuel out of the country, and hours later released video showing the vessel to be a United Arab Emirates-based ship that had vanished in Iranian waters over the weekend.

The announcement solved one mystery — the fate of the missing ship — but raised a host of other questions and heightened worries about the free flow of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical petroleum shipping routes. One-fifth of global crude exports passes through the strait.

The incident happened with tensions running high between Iran and the United States over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal.

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This Is How War With Iran Is Manufactured



by Ilana Novick

















Donald Trump Owns This Iran Crisis



by Juan Cole

Iranian state television did not at first identify the seized vessel but said it was intercepted on Sunday and was involved in smuggling some 1 million liters (264,000 gallons) of Iranian fuel. Iran did not identify the nationalities of the crew.

Crude prices, which had been falling since last week, ticked higher almost immediately after the announcement.

Iran said the tanker was seized south of its Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Neighboring Qeshm Island has a Revolutionary Guard base on it.

Hours after that initial report, Iranian TV released footage of the ship surrounded by Guard vessels and showed the registration number painted on its bridge, matching that of the UAE-based MT Riah.

The Panamanian-flagged tanker stopped transmitting its location early Sunday near Qeshm Island, according to data on the tracking site Maritime Traffic. However, it often did so over the past two years when nearing Iranian waters, other tracking data shows.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, declined to comment.

It was not immediately clear whether the seizure was a straightforward attempt by Iran to curb oil smuggling or also an effort to assert its authority in the strait and send a message to its rivals in the region. The UAE has long lobbied for tougher U.S. policy toward Iran, though more recently it has called for de-escalation.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that the seized vessel was at best a “small tanker” and that Iranian forces are cracking down on fuel smuggling daily.

“We live in a very dangerous environment. The United States has pushed itself and the rest of the world into probably the brink of an abyss,” he told reporters at the United Nations in New York. Zarif accused the Trump administration of “trying to starve our people” and “deplete our treasury” through sanctions.

Iranian media reported earlier this month that some 8 million liters of government-subsidized Iranian fuel are smuggled daily through Iran’s borders to other countries where prices are much higher.

Analysts at the Israeli-based maritime risk analytics company Windward said that the Riah has been at sea for the past two years and has a pattern of turning off its location transmitters for days at a time, particularly when entering Iranian waters.

The firm said data suggests that for more than two years that the 58-meter (190-foot) Riah had been clandestinely receiving fuel from an unknown source off the UAE coast and delivering it to other tankers, which then take it to Yemen and Somalia.

No distress calls were made from the Riah, and no ship owner reported a missing vessel.

The ship’s registered owner, Dubai-based Prime Tankers LLC, told The Associated Press it had sold the vessel to another company, Mouj Al-Bahar. A man who answered a telephone number registered to the company told the AP it didn’t own any ships.

Officials in the UAE said the ship was neither UAE-owned nor operated and carried no Emirati personnel.

In past weeks, the Persian Gulf region has seen six attacks on oil tankers that the U.S. has blamed on Iran, the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone by Iranian forces and a tense encounter between Iran’s Guard and the British navy. Iran has denied involvement in the attacks or the British naval encounter.

The U.S. has also sent thousands of additional troops and increased its security presence in the region.

Meanwhile, Iran has begun increasing uranium production and enrichment beyond the limits of the 2015 accord in a bid to pressure Europe to find ways around U.S. sanctions.

On Thursday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in a phone conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, urged European signatories of the deal to speed up their efforts to stop U.S. pressure, his website reported. He said efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear activities “are not acceptable under any circumstance.”

___

Karimi reported from Tehran, Iran. Associated Press writers Ian Phillips in New York and Jon Gambrell in Dubai contributed to this report.

Are Veterans Finally Through With Forever War?

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

It is undoubtedly my favorite part of every wedding. That awkward, but strangely forthright moment when the preacher asks the crowd for any objections to the couple’s marriage. No one ever objects, of course, but it’s still a raw, if tense, moment. I just love it.

I suppose we had that ubiquitous ritual in mind back in 2007 when Keith – a close buddy and fellow officer – and I crafted our own plan of objection. The setting was Baghdad, Iraq, at the start of the “surge” and the climax of the bloody civil war the U.S. invasion had unleashed. Just twenty three years old and only eighteen months out of the academy, my clique of officers had already decided the war was a mess, shouldn’t have been fought, and couldn’t be won.

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Liberals' Dangerous Love Affair With the U.S. Military



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

















The National Security State Is Devouring America Whole



by

Me and Keith, though, were undoubtedly the most radical. We both just hated how our squadron’s colonel would hijack the memorial ceremonies held for dead troopers – including three of my own – and use the occasion of his inescapable speech to encourage we mourners to use the latest death as a reason to “rededicate ourselves to the mission and the people of Iraq.” The whole thing was as repulsive as it was repetitive.

So it was that after a particularly depressing ceremony, perhaps our squadron’s tenth or so, that we hatched our little defiant scheme. If (or when) one of us was killed, the other promised – and this was a time and place where promises are sacred – to object, stand up, and announce to the colonel and the crowd that we’d listen to no such bullshit at this particular ceremony, not this time. “Danny didn’t believe in this absurd mission for a minute, he wouldn’t want his death to rededicate us to anything,” Keith would have said! Luckily it never came to that. We both survived, Keith left the army soon after, and I, well, toiled along until something snapped and I chose the road of public dissent. Still, I believe either of us would have actually done it – even if it did mean the end of our respective careers. That’s called brotherhood…and love.

I got to thinking on that when I read a story this week which was both disturbing, refreshing, and sickening all at the same time. A major opinion poll’s results were released which demonstrated that fully two-thirds of post 9/11 veterans now think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “weren’t worth fighting.” That’s a remarkable, and distressing, statistic and one that should give America’s president, legislators, media, and people as a whole, serious pause. Not that it will, mind you, but it should! It’s doubtful that US military combat vets – who are more rural, southern, and conservative than the population at large – have ever so incontrovertibly turned on a war, at least since the very end of Vietnam.

On one level I felt a sense of vindication for my longtime antiwar stances when I read about the study – in the Military Times no less. But that was just ego. Within minutes I was sad, inconsolably and completely melancholy. Because if, as a “filibuster-proof” majority of my fellow veterans (and maybe even our otherwise unhinged president) believes, the Iraq and Afghan wars weren’t worth the sacrifice, then consider the unsettling implications. It would mean, for starters, that the US flushed nearly $5.9 trillion in hard-earned taxpayer cash down the toilet. It means that 7,000 American soldiers and upwards of 244,000 foreign civilians needn’t have lost their ever precious lives. Hundreds of thousands more might not have been injured or maimed. 21 million people wouldn’t have become refugees. The world, so to speak, could’ve been a safer, better place.

Those ever-so-logical conclusions should dismay even the most apathetic American. They should make us all rather sad, but, more importantly, should inform future decisions about the use of military force, the role of America in the world, and just how much foreign policy power to turn over to presidents. Because if we, collectively, don’t learn from our country’s eighteen year, tragic saga, then this republic is, without exaggeration, finished, once and for all. Benjamin Franklin, that confounding Founding Father, wasn’t sure the American people could be trusted to “keep” the republic he and other elites formed. It’d be a devastating catastrophe to prove him right, especially in this time of rising right-wing, strongman populism in the Western world.

So consider this a plea to Congress, to the corporate media establishment, and to all of you: when even traditionally more conservative and martial military veterans raise the antiwar alarm – listen! And next time the American war drums beat, and they undoubtedly will, consider this article encouragement to do what Keith and I promised way back when. Object! Refuse to fight the next ill-advised and unethical war. Remember: to do so demonstrates brotherhood and love. Love of each other and love of country…

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

33 Die as Attacker Ignites Blaze at Japanese Anime Studio

TOKYO—A man screaming “You die!” burst into an animation studio in Kyoto, doused it with a flammable liquid and set it on fire Thursday, killing 33 people in an attack that shocked the country and brought an outpouring of grief from anime fans.

Thirty-six others were injured, some of them critically, in a blaze that sent people scrambling up the stairs toward the roof in a desperate — and futile — attempt to escape what proved to be Japan’s deadliest fire in nearly two decades. Others emerged bleeding, blackened and barefoot.

The suspect, identified only a 41-year-old man who did not work for the studio, was injured and taken to a hospital. Police gave no details on the motive, but a witness told Japanese TV that the attacker angrily complained that something of his had been stolen, possibly by the company.

Most of the victims were employees of Kyoto Animation, which does work on movies and TV productions but is best known for its mega-hit stories featuring high school girls. The tales are so popular that fans make pilgrimages to some of the places depicted.

The blaze started in the three-story building in Japan’s ancient capital after the attacker sprayed an unidentified liquid accelerant, police and fire officials said.

“There was an explosion, then I heard people shouting, some asking for help,” a witness told TBS TV. “Black smoke was rising from windows on upper floors. Ten there was a man struggling to crawl out of the window.”

Japanese media reported the fire might have been set near the front door, forcing people to find other ways out.

The building has a spiral staircase that may have allowed flames and smoke to rise quickly to the top floor, NHK noted. Fire expert Yuji Hasemi at Waseda University told NHK that paper drawings and other documents in the studio also may have contributed to the fire’s rapid spread.

Firefighters found 33 bodies, 20 of them on the third floor and some on the stairs to the roof, where they had apparently collapsed, Kyoto fire official Kazuhiro Hayashi said. Two were found dead on the first floor, 11 others on the second floor, he said.

A witness who saw the attacker being approached by police told Japanese media that the man admitted spreading gasoline and setting the fire with a lighter. She told NHK public television that the man had burns on his arms and legs and complained that something had been stolen from him.

She told Kyodo News that his hair got singed and his legs were exposed because his jeans were burned below the knees.

“He sounded he had a grudge against the society, and he was talking angrily to the policemen, too, though he was struggling with pain,” she told Kyodo News. “He also sounded he had a grudge against Kyoto Animation.”

NHK footage also showed sharp knives police had collected from the scene, though it was not clear if they belonged to the attacker.

Survivors said he was screaming “You die!” as he dumped the liquid, according to Japanese media. They said some of the survivors got splashed with the liquid.

Kyoto Animation, better known as KyoAni, was founded in 1981 as an animation and comic book production studio, and its hits include “Lucky Star” of 2008, “K-On!” in 2011 and “Haruhi Suzumiya” in 2009.

The company does not have a major presence outside Japan, though it was hired to do secondary animation work on a 1998 “Pokemon” feature that appeared in U.S. theaters and a “Winnie the Pooh” video.

“My heart is in extreme pain. Why on earth did such violence have to be used?” company president Hideaki Hatta said. Hatta said the company had received anonymous death threats by email in the past, but he did not link them to Thursday’s attack.

Anime fans expressed anger, prayed and mourned the victims on social media. A cloud-funding site was set up to help the company rebuild.

Fire officials said more than 70 people were in the building at the time.

The death toll exceeded that of a 2016 attack by a man who stabbed and killed 19 people at a nursing home in Tokyo.

A fire in 2001 in Tokyo’s congested Kabukicho entertainment district killed 44 people in the country’s worst known case of arson in modern times. Police never announced an arrest in the setting of the blaze, though five people were convicted of negligence.

No Justice for Eric Garner

What follows is a conversation between activist Kamau Franklin 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.

ERIC GARNER I told you the last time. Please just leave me alone.

NYPD OFFICERS [inaudible]

ERIC GARNER Take – left what? I didn’t sell anything.

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Our Ever-Deadlier Police State



by Chris Hedges

BYSTANDER You tell him fam.

ERIC GARNER I did nothing. We sitting here the whole time, minding our business. Ya’ll touching me. And you want to grab me? [NYPD and GARNER scuffling]

BYSTANDERS Oh! Don’t do that. No! Damn man. Why they doing that to him? [scuffling continues]

ERIC GARNER I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. …

MARC STEINER Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. That video just always shakes me to my core. Eric Garner was killed five years ago today, almost to the hour when we were taping this interview now. The day before the fifth anniversary of the death of Eric Garner at the hands of a police officer on Staten Island, Attorney General Barr through US Attorney for Brooklyn, Richard Donoghue, announced they were dropping the federal civil rights case against New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo. All of us remember Eric Garner crying out, as you’ve just seen on this video, “I can’t breathe,” gasping for breath before he was killed. His death and others like his— Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, all the others— led to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. The lack of justice for this killing and the others like it are what we have to talk about today.

We are joined by Kamau Franklin, who’s an attorney and founder of the community movement Builders, Inc. and joins us from Atlanta. And Kamau, welcome. Good to have you back with us here on The Real News.

KAMAU FRANKLIN Thanks for having me.

MARC STEINER I mean, as I watch this, you know, realizing this announcement came literally a day before the fifth anniversary. It was pretty, I won’t say shocking, but was still stunning to me and stopped me for a moment as I realized what was happening. Talk a bit about why you think what happened, happened.

KAMAU FRANKLIN Well, maybe stunning, but not unexpected, right?

MARC STEINER Right, right.

KAMAU FRANKLIN I think, you know, part of what happened in this case is that this, as you read off some of the names and there are names even before that— Sean Bell— others prior who’ve been killed by the police. And the norm has been that these police officers have either not been indicted, or in the rare cases that they have been, they’ve been acquitted at trials. So I think any organizer, any advocate, any attorney could not look at this and say that this was something that they did not expect based on the history of prosecutors, whether federal or at a state level, bringing charges against the police officers for excessive use of force. And as we say in the organizing and activist community: the system ain’t broke; this is how it is supposed to and/or intended to work.

MARC STEINER Well, I want to come back to that very thought. I want to share, as we’re talking about this, these two videos. The first one we’re going to look at right now is the district attorney announcing that there will be no civil rights trials.

US ATTORNEY RICHARD DONOGHUE While the department does not normally publicly discuss a decision not to bring charges, we felt that this matter is an exception because it means so much to our community and beyond. For the family to suffer as this family has for too long has only compounded the loss. But these unassailable facts are separate and distinct from whether a federal crime has been committed. And the evidence here does not support charging Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo or any other officer with a federal criminal civil rights violation.

MARC STEINER And we’ll explore what those mean in just a moment, but I want to also play at this moment for all of you the video of the family— mother and [daughter] of Eric Garner— and what they had to say after this announcement was made.

GWENN CARR, MOTHER OF ERIC GARNER Five years ago, my son said “I can’t breathe” eleven times. And today we can’t breathe because they have let us down. All the officers who was involved in my son’s death that day need to be off the force. The streets of New York City is not safe with them walking around. Five years ago, it was me. It was my family. Today or tomorrow it could be your family. You killed my son. And you won’t get away with it.

EMERALD SNIPES, DAUGHTER OF ERIC GARNER And they didn’t do they job. We called the Department of Justice. They didn’t do their job. So, no. I’m going to stand outside and I’m gonna scream it. Pantaleo needs to be fired! He needs to be fired! There is no waiting. There is no nothing. The statute of limitations ends tomorrow. Eric died 07/17/2014. We’re 07/16/2019. Five years later, and there’s still no justice. So no, there won’t be no calm. No, there won’t be no peace. No justice, no peace.

MARC STEINER So let’s start, Kamau, with what happened earlier in the first video when the US Attorney said that there’s no federal crime committed, there’s no evidence of a federal crime being committed. So let’s talk about that from your perspective, and what the other side of that story is.

KAMAU FRANKLIN Yeah. I think that’s patently untrue. This was a chargeable offense. The federal prosecutor would have to show that the officer willfully used excessive force in violation of Mr. Garner’s civil rights. I think the video evidence is clear that that officer applied a chokehold to Mr. Garner, took him down on a chokehold, a chokehold which is banned in New York, has been banned for over two decades. After he released the chokehold, he immediately put his knee on top of his neck and his hand on top of his head, applying pressure that continued the same type of pressure that was at when the chokehold was on hold, causing a reaction that led to his death.

The federal prosecutors throughout the history of this case—And this case goes back to the Obama era with Eric Holder and then Brooklyn Federal Attorney Lynch. They had a back and forth about whether or not to prosecute, and Holder wanted to prosecute and Lynch at the time did not. And later when Lynch took Holder’s place, she did decide then to enter into a prosecution stage in this particular case. And obviously after the election of Trump, nothing was done until now at the end of the statute of limitations. And then Barr makes this callous announcement through the Justice Department— Barr being the Attorney General— that they would not bring any civil rights charges against the officer.

MARC STEINER So, you know, before we go to the family and what this portends as well. I mean, staying with us for a moment. It would be easy for us to sit here and go, oh this is Trump putting out his new US Attorney for Brooklyn, this is all Barr’s doing. But the reality is, as you alluded to a moment ago, this does go back to the Obama administration because of the internal arguments there between the Civil Rights Division and the rest of the Justice Department of whether or not to prosecute. And Lynch was there but she came back and became the Attorney General and allowed it to go on, but it still didn’t open it up. So, I mean, I thought—

KAMAU FRANKLIN I think this goes back to, I’m sorry, but this goes back to what we talked about earlier, you know, we can go to the Bush era. You can go back to the Clinton era.

MARC STEINER Right. Right.

KAMAU FRANKLIN The history of federal prosecutions is basically nil. And as we spoke about a little earlier, the last time there was a federal prosecution of this kind of case was over 20 years ago. And that was the Anthony Baez case where he was placed in a chokehold by Officer Francis Livoti and was convicted on civil rights charges. So very similar in some ways to this particular case, but a different outcome.

MARC STEINER So you were involved in that as an organizer back in the late 90s when that happened. So what’s the difference? Is this because the Baez case was just an anomaly, that these things never happen? I mean, you know, the Civil Rights Division got involved when people were killed in the South sometimes doing the Civil Rights Movement, but not much beyond that. Never in the other things that ever happened down there. So was Baez an aberration? And if it was an aberration, what does that mean? What has to change? How do you change it?

KAMAU FRANKLIN I certainly do think it was an aberration. I think the history shows that 20 years later, if no other police officer around the country could be convicted on civil rights charges for killing unarmed black men in particular, then it shows that this was something that took place at a special time, a special place, with the right evidence that allowed this prosecution to go through and for this conviction to happen. But under other circumstances, cases that had videotape evidence, cases that had eyewitness evidence, these types of prosecutions either weren’t pursued at all again, either at the federal level or at the state level. And when they were pursued at the state level, they ended in acquittals either by a jury or by a judge. And that speaks to how the system works.

The system works to protect police officers through the prosecution system, through the judicial system, because these folks work day to day with these police officers. These are the folks who gather evidence for them. These are the folks who they hold up high as the protectors of stopping criminal activity and so forth. And so, the justice system, the so-called justice system, the so-called judicial system, does not want to be seen in their estimation as anti-police. And prefer to be seen as pro-police even if that means that they look anti-black because they can handle an anti-black sentiment, but they can’t handle, in their own estimation, not being considered part of the good ol’ boy system.

MARC STEINER So, I mean, it’s never easy to prosecute and convict police. We saw that happen here in Baltimore with the Freddie Gray instance. We’ve seen it in all the other instances that take place around this country. It’s always a very difficult process. But rising out of this and the other murders that took place at the hands of the police, was the Black Lives Matter movement. And it seems as if—I’m thinking about Garner’s family and how they responded, and it seems as if on a larger national scale since Trump was elected, whatever the juxtaposition of events were or are, that that movement— decentralized as it is and was— isn’t out in force as it was, while these things are still going on.

KAMAU FRANKLIN No, I think that’s correct. I think, you know, I guess there’s a lot of internal struggles that happen in terms of the centralization of that movement or not. And let’s remember the Black Lives Matter movement came from organizers, but it came from folks who were not directly involved in the local organizing at the time that the hashtag took on. And so you had local organizers who were in the street on these cases and who brought the attention needed. And then you had the hashtag that gave it more of a national feeling of resistance through these types of issues and that did involve organizers who then would go on the ground when these cases took place. But I think, you know, again in terms of their own internal contradictions, but I think in addition to that, the not having real clear victories, the election of Trump, really just took the sting out of what would be considered somewhat of an umbrella movement of forces.

And so today I think what you need again is that local organizing that’s done at a fever pitch that really puts some pressure on these police officers and the judicial system. But I just want to say that I don’t know if that’s enough at this stage, right? Because it’s not like that hasn’t been done before. So organizers have been in the streets trying to get justice. We just have a broken—We have a system that was setup to work a certain way, and it protects those police officers, and that’s how that system works. There might be every now and then some individual cases of justice, but it is a hard, long struggle to get real justice out of this system.

MARC STEINER And I think the responses around the country have been very local. I mean, it happened here in Baltimore, other cities I’m aware of, where movements like here when Tyrone West was killed by police officers. His family for the last several years every Wednesday, have had “West Wednesdays” and they’re out in the street reminding people this has happened and we have to change things. And so the question then as we close is, you know, as you look at the anniversary of Eric Garner’s death, we see this horrendous video as Eric Garner died at the hands of the police officers, the movement is still there on some levels. The question is, what is the political response now given the world we’re facing, the election coming up? How do you think all this fits in?

KAMAU FRANKLIN I think a lot of this has to do, I mean, this is a larger question and issue in some ways. But the ideological output of organizers here in the United States is different than other places in the world. And what I mean by that is the sustained, in-the-street movements that folks have in other places is not something that is part and parcel these days to organize our activities. Organizing activities, they may last one or two days. If you get longer than that, you’re lucky.

So I think there’s got to be a better shift. There’s got to be a bringing together of national interests in organizations to really make some hard pushes. But, you know, it’s an uphill battle because again, I think that you’re dealing with a so-called justice system that works to protect the police officers, that works to protect judges, that works to protect criminal investigations on black people and other folks of color, immigrants and so forth, because it feels like it’s protecting white interests in some ways. It feels like it’s protecting moneyed interests in some ways. And that battle is something that is long to be fought, and I don’t see a clear breakthrough coming anytime soon unfortunately.

MARC STEINER And I should have said this at the top, but I did not. Just to remind folks that Officer Pantaleo—The internal investigation was done, the report’s not been released, people are calling on de Blasio— the Mayor of New York— to throw him off the force at the very least. And so, that piece is still happening, and we’ll see what happens with that in the coming week or two when that goes on. And I want to thank you, Kamau Franklin, for taking your time with us once again here at The Real News. And obviously, this is one of the issues that we’re going to stay on top of. Thank you so much.

KAMAU FRANKLIN Thank you. Thank you for having me.

MARC STEINER And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you for joining us. Take care.

Why Are Billionaires Like Jeff Bezos so Obsessed With Space?

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is this year, and it’s worth recalling the memo that then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson wrote to President John F. Kennedy: “If we do not make the strong effort now, the time will soon be reached when the margin of control over space and over men’s minds through space accomplishments will have swung so far on the Russian side that we will not be able to catch up, let alone assume leadership.”

That sense of urgency has shifted over the decades from government to the private sector, where billionaires like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, among others, are displaying profound enthusiasm in regard to the notion of exploiting space. Their interest appears to go well beyond space tourism for the thrill-seeking one-percenters, even though that’s what gets most of the media attention. As Cathal O’Connell reports for Cosmos Magazine, “Already companies are sending up 3D printers to produce replacement tools in space. Next we could see orbiting factories making products for sale on Earth or automated robots constructing satellites the size of a football field.”

If this all seems as exotic as those old 1930s “Flash Gordon” films did to the audiences of the day, recall that the experience of the Apollo 11 moon landing showed that reality has a way of catching up quickly to Hollywood fantasy (it also shows that when sufficient government resources are harnessed to a higher common purpose, good results can happen surprisingly quickly and efficiently). Once the likes of Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others find a way to economically hoist heavy machinery into space (and it is becoming more economic), permanent “off-Earth” manufacturing could become a reality. But this raises an interesting issue: who chooses the technological alternatives that set out our future? Should this decision solely be left in the domain of the private sector? Should space be privatized in this matter? What about NASA? Consider the future: Forget about the threat of moving a Midwestern plant from, say, Ohio, to Mexico or China. Next time, it could be a robot-filled factory in space that takes your job.

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Our Government’s Insane War Machine Is Headed for Space



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To be clear, nobody is suggesting a return to medieval-style craft guilds. At the same time, it is worth noting certain salient aspects about technology: rather than acting in the service of mankind, technology has often been used in a way that creates a momentum of its own that establishes limits or controls what becomes socially possible. It is wrapped in an aura of linear progress and scientific inevitability, conveniently ignoring that its benefits are often skewed most heavily to the power brokers who initiate and champion its use. This is a principle danger of subcontracting space to billionaire plutocrats, whose ambitions and interests might be inconsistent with society’s broader public purpose. This is to say nothing of the increasing de-skilling of labor that could follow, if they are not integrated into this process somehow.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip notes, the government-sponsored race to the moon spurred considerable “advances in computers, miniaturization and software, and found its way into scratch-resistant lenses, heat-reflective emergency blankets and cordless appliances,” all of which had tremendous benefits for society as a whole. But today, the government has largely lost its “moonshot mindset” and space, in turn, has increasingly become the focus of the oligarch class, seeking to enhance profit opportunities as well as exploiting the increasing trend of displacing human labor with machines. This is despite the fact that Professor Seymour Melman’s own research illustrated that if you give workers decision-making power on the shop floor, productivity tends to increase substantially.

Without a doubt, there are many benefits to be derived from the work being done in the cosmos. For example, the microgravity conditions pertaining in space are considered ideal for developing materials, such as protein and virus crystals, observes Sarah Lewin, in a piece discussing the incipient development of “off-Earth manufacturing.” The insights developed by these crystals could enhance drug research and provide useful new therapies and medical treatments for infections and diseases (such as heart disease and organ transplants). Space also enhances the scope for producing high-tech materials, whose production is otherwise adversely affected by the Earth’s gravity, one example being a “fiber-optic cable called ZBLAN, … [which, w]hen manufactured in microgravity… is less likely to develop tiny crystals that increase signal loss. When built without those flaws, the cable can be orders of magnitude better at transmitting light over long distances, such as for telecommunications, lasers and high-speed internet,” according to Lewin.

We shouldn’t be oblivious to the considerable human costs associated with work in the government’s space program—“Microgravity sets our fluids wandering and weakens muscles, radiation tears through DNA and the harsh vacuum outside is an ever-present threat” (to quote Lewin), to say nothing of the risk of death itself—which are mitigated considerably when you can do things with machines alone. At the same time, left unchallenged or unmonitored, these billionaires could use space to quietly initiate further radical changes to our social structures.

It starts with ownership models. There’s an interesting paradox of futuristic 24th-century economic visions in space being built on the 12-to-13th–century ownership models that make up Silicon Valley. Wealth sharing ownership models should be conceived as part of the futuristic vision if we don’t want to be saddled with human wealth disparities reaching factors of 12 or 15 zeros. Ideally, NASA (or some other space agency) should take a leading national developmental role in the production of goods in space, and then subcontract to manufacturers to do the actual production processes, rather than the other way around.

Of course, if the government does ultimately decide that space privatization is not a great thing, no doubt Silicon Valley and its market fundamentalist champions will trot out the line about the inefficient government fighting “technological inevitability”—a typical playbook from the Silicon Valley oligarchs (i.e., you can’t fight technological progress, so let’s just set up something like a Universal Basic Income—UBI—that acts like a painkiller, but masks the symptoms of economic injustice and fails to address the underlying causes of exploitation and inequality). That’s one major risk of “off-Earth” production when it becomes a plaything of the rich alone. That’s to say nothing of the fact that the billionaire class is already benefiting from a long series of government-funded innovations undertaken in the past, as Professor Marianna Mazzucato has illustrated in her work, “The Entrepreneurial State.”

One of which was the government-led (and funded) space program: at its funding peak, the lunar space program employed over 400,000 Americans. The management, national commitment and personal motivation of the participants were just as important as the technology itself in terms of ensuring the program’s success. It’s hard to see that sort of coalescing of interests in the absence of an overriding government stake when it comes to the production of manufactured goods in an environment outside a planetary atmosphere.

There is another unhealthy aspect to uncritically acceding to a paradigm in which supposedly superhuman entrepreneurs are selflessly taking up the baton from a tapped-out public sector. It becomes self-serving for the billionaires, and implicitly justifies and entrenches the economic status quo. As journalist Amanda Schaffer has argued: “If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular, lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less tax dodging.” That self-entitlement also manifests itself in other ways. Just look at the way that Elon Musk treats his own employees to get a better sense of this. Or Jeff Bezos’s labor practices at Amazon.com.

It’s undoubted that orbital manufacturing will yield innovations in technology, medicine and material science in the next few decades. But we should recall that technology doesn’t simply have an autonomous momentum and direction that inexorably leads to social progress. Likewise, it bears recalling (as Professor Seymour Melman once observed) that technology “is applied in accordance with specific social criteria wielded by those with economic decision power in the society.” Melman’s implicit argument is that technology can be used to enhance worker control or to create more yet alienation. The government, therefore, shouldn’t be reduced to the role of passive minority shareholder collecting dividends or royalties from a privately run space enterprise. That’s the old market fundamentalist model that has failed pretty badly on this planet, let alone replicating it in space. So before we get too wrapped up in all of the exciting new goodies that Jeff Bezos and his fellow space enthusiasts can create for us, let’s also ensure that this move to “the final frontier” doesn’t simply become a new form of technological control and enslavement, in which the benefits continue to be distributed in a profoundly illiberal direction as they are here on planet Earth.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

House Blocks Maverick Democrat’s Trump Impeachment Effort

WASHINGTON — The House easily killed a maverick Democrat’s effort Wednesday to impeach President Donald Trump for his recent racial insults against lawmakers of color, a vote that provided an early snapshot of just how divided Democrats are over ousting him as the 2020 presidential and congressional campaigns rev up.

Democrats leaned against the resolution by Texas Rep. Al Green by 137-95. That showed that so far, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has successfully prevented a Democratic stampede toward impeachment before additional evidence is developed that could win over a public that has so far been skeptical about ousting Trump.

Even so, the roll call also showed that the number of Democrats open to impeachment remains substantial and may be growing. About two dozen more conversions would split the party’s 235-member caucus in half over an issue that could potentially dominate next year’s elections. Until now, just over 80 Democrats had publicly said they were open to starting an inquiry over removing Trump.

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Why Are Democrats So Scared of Impeachment?



by Bill Blum

















Ralph Nader: Trump Is the Most Impeachable President in American History



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“There’s a lot of grief, from a lot of different quarters,” Green, speaking to reporters after the vote, said of the reaction he received from colleagues. “But sometimes you just have to take a stand.”

Democrats voting in favor of the impeachment resolution included some of the party’s most outspoken freshmen, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and leaders of House Democrats’ black, Hispanic and liberal caucuses.

As some Democrats feared, the measure’s lopsided 332-95 defeat — the House’s first vote on removing Trump since Democrats took control of the chamber this year — also opened the door for him to claim vindication.

“You see the overwhelming vote against impeachment and that’s the end of it,” Trump told reporters as he arrived in North Carolina for a campaign rally. “Let the Democrats now go back to work,” he said, calling the effort the “most ridiculous project I’ve ever been involved in.”

Green’s resolution did not mention special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Russia to influence that year’s congressional election or whether the president obstructed Mueller’s probe. That inquiry and the questions it raised over Trump’s actions have been the main reasons some Democrats have backed impeachment.

Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters that six House committees are investigating Trump, adding, “That is the serious path we’re on.”

Democrats are eagerly awaiting Mueller’s scheduled public testimony next week to two House committees.

Democrats rejected Trump’s claim that the vote showed he’d been absolved of anything.

“It’s not vindication,” said Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla. “It’s that we believe in an orderly process. We’re putting our faith in the Judiciary Committee and the hearing they’re going to hold,” she said.

Every voting Republican favored derailing Green’s measure.

With Democrats preparing to defend their House majority in next year’s elections, Green’s measure put incumbents in closely divided districts in a difficult spot. Democrats owe their House majority to 39 challengers who won in 2018 in what had been GOP-held districts, places where moderate constituents largely predominate. Many of those voters have little interest in removing Trump from office.

“It’s not ideal for a lot of people to have to take that vote right now,” one of them, Rep. Katie Hill, D-Calif., said of impeachment. She said “if and when” the House votes on impeaching Trump, it should happen when “we can make sure our constituents understand and can get behind” the move.

Recent polling has shown solid majorities of the public oppose impeachment. Even if the Democratic-run House would vote to impeach Trump, the equivalent of filing formal charges, a trial by the Republican-led Senate would all but certainly acquit him, keeping him in office.

Efforts by party leaders to dissuade Green from forcing vulnerable incumbents to take what they viewed as a perilous and divisive vote fell flat. The vote also risked enflaming Democrats’ already raw rift over impeachment, with dozens of the party’s most liberal lawmakers long itching to oust Trump, and Republicans used it to denigrate Democrats’ impeachment talk as an obsession.

“This is all they’ve ever wanted to do from the day of the election” in 2016, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a brief interview.

Green’s measure cites Trump’s recent “racist” comments imploring Democratic congresswomen of color to go back to their native countries. The House voted Tuesday largely along party lines to condemn those statements. His targets were Ocasio-Cortez and Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

All are American and all but Omar were born in the U.S. They’ve also been among the party’s most outspoken advocates of impeachment.

Trump is “unfit to be President, unfit to represent the American values of decency and morality, respectability and civility, honesty and propriety, reputability and integrity, is unfit to defend the ideals that have made America great, unfit to defend liberty and justice for all,” Green’s resolution said.

Mueller’s 448-page report detailed several episodes in which Trump tried to influence his investigation. Mueller said he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction and indicated in a May news conference that it was up to Congress to decide what to do.

Those who support an impeachment inquiry have argued that it would accelerate the process and bolster their arguments in court. Some Democrats are frustrated with the slow pace of their party’s investigations of the president. Democrats have had little success so far in their attempts to investigate beyond what Mueller detailed, as the White House has blocked several witnesses from answering questions.

Green, an eight-term veteran, also forced impeachment votes in 2017 and 2018 and spurned leadership entreaties to hold off both times.

House Holds 2 Trump Officials in Contempt in Census Dispute

WASHINGTON — The Democratic-controlled House voted Wednesday to hold two top Trump administration officials in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas related to a decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The House voted, 230-198, to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt. The vote, a political blow to the Trump administration, is largely symbolic because the Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute the two men.

The action marks an escalation of Democratic efforts to use their House majority to aggressively investigate the inner workings of the Trump administration.

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Trump Administration Seeks to Force Census Citizenship Question



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President Donald Trump abandoned the citizenship question last week after the Supreme Court said the administration’s justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.” Trump directed agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases.

The White House called the vote “ridiculous” and “yet another lawless attempt to harass the president and his administration.”

The Justice and Commerce departments have produced more than 31,000 pages of documents to the House regarding the census issue, and senior officials from both agencies, including Ross, have spoken on the record about the matter, the White House said, adding that Democrats continue to demand documents that the White House contends are subject to executive privilege.

“House Democrats know they have no legal right to these documents, but their shameful and cynical politics know no bounds,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.

Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said the contempt vote was an important step to assert Congress’ constitutional authority to serve as a check on executive power.

“Holding any secretary in criminal contempt of Congress is a serious and sober matter — one that I have done everything in my power to avoid,” Cummings said during House debate. “But in the case of the attorney general and Secretary Ross, they blatantly obstructed our ability to do congressional oversight into the real reason Secretary Ross was trying for the first time in 70 years to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.”

While Ross and other officials have claimed the sole reason they wanted to add the citizenship question was to enforce the Voting Rights Act, “we now know that claim was nothing but a pretext,” Cummings said. “The Supreme Court said that.”

At the direction of Barr and Ross, “the departments of Justice and Commerce have been engaged in a campaign to subvert our laws and the process Congress put in place to maintain the integrity of the census,” Cummings said.

The contempt resolution “is about protecting our democracy, protecting the integrity of this body. It’s bigger than the census,” he said

Ross called the vote a public relations “stunt” that further demonstrates Democrats’ “unending quest to generate headlines instead of operating in good faith with our department.”

Democrats prefer to “play political games rather than help lead the country” and “have made every attempt to ascribe evil motivations to everyday functions of government,” Ross said.

Ross told the oversight committee that the March 2018 decision to add the question was based on a Justice Department request to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Democrats disputed that, citing documents unearthed last month suggesting that a push to draw legislative districts in overtly partisan and racist ways was the real reason the administration wanted to include the question.

Democrats feared that adding the question would reduce participation in immigrant-heavy communities and result in a severe undercount of minority voters. They have pressed for specific documents to determine Ross’ motivation and contend the administration has declined to provide the material despite repeated requests.

“The real issue we should be debating” is why Democrats are afraid to ask how many citizens live in the United States, said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. Contrary to Democrats’ claims, Ross and other officials have cooperated with the oversight panel and provided thousands of documents, Comer said.

“If the Democrats can’t impeach President Trump, they will instead hold his Cabinet in contempt of Congress,” he said. “This is just another episode in political theater.”

In a letter late Wednesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Barr and Ross asked Democrats to postpone the vote, saying they have shown a “clear record of cooperation” with Congress. The contempt vote “is both unnecessarily undermining” relations between the two branches and “degrading” Congress’ “own institutional integrity,” they wrote.

Trump has pledged to “fight all the subpoenas” issued by Congress and says he won’t work on legislative priorities, such as infrastructure, until Congress halts investigations of his administration.

How Corporate Media Are Fueling a New Iran Nuclear Crisis

The U.S. news media’s coverage of the Iran nuclear issue has been woefully off-kilter for many years. Now, however, those same outlets are contributing to the serious crisis building between Washington and Tehran.

Iran has responded to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal by resuming the stockpiling of low enriched uranium, removing the cap on the level of uranium enrichment and resuming work at the Arak nuclear reactor, while making it very clear that those steps would be immediately reversed if the United States agreed to full compliance.

The major fact about Iranian nuclear policy before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was negotiated should shape public understanding of the current conflict: For more than three years, from 2012 to 2015, Iran could have enriched enough uranium at 20% enrichment level for one or more nuclear weapons, but it chose not to do so. Instead, it used the U.S.’s knowledge of that capability as leverage against the U.S. in negotiating what eventually became the JCPOA.

The real nuclear crisis facing the United States is not that of an Iranian regime threatening a nuclear conflict. Rather, it’s a U.S. government policy that rejects the 2015 compromise and seeks to provoke Iran even further.

Yet that’s not the way The New York Times and other news media have covered the story. From the start of the current phase of the conflict, corporate media coverage has overwhelmingly emphasized a presumed new Iranian threat to “break out” in order to obtain the enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.

A July 1 Times story by Rick Gladstone about Iran’s breach of the JCPOA cap on uranium stockpile stated that Iran’s latest move “does not by itself give the country the material to produce a nuclear weapon. … But it is the strongest signal yet that Iran is moving to restore the far larger stockpile that took the United States and five other nations years to persuade Tehran to send abroad.”

In his article, Gladstone went on to challenge Iran’s assertion of its legal right to withdraw from some commitments in the JCPOA a year after Trump had unilaterally withdrawn from the agreement. Iranian leaders, he said, “have sought to justify these steps as a response to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the nuclear accord last year and its reimposition of sanctions.” He claimed that “[W]estern experts on the agreement” had disputed Iran’s reasoning.” But Gladstone cited only one “expert,” Henry Rome of the Eurasia Group, who called the Iranian claim “a unilateral interpretation from the Iranian side of what the nuclear deal means….”

Rome is evidently unfamiliar, however, with the fundamental principle of international law that grants a party to an agreement the inherent right to reduce or terminate the fulfillment of an agreement if there is a “material breach” by another party. In response to an email query for this story, Dr. Richard Falk, a leading scholar on international law, responded to Rome’s statement by commenting, “The U.S. repudiation of the agreement and reimposition of sanctions constitutes without any reasonable doubt, a material breach of the Nuclear Agreement, which relieves Iran of any legal obligations with respect to complying with the treaty.”

David Sanger, who for two decades has served as chief national security correspondent for The New York Times, wrote a story published July 1 that led with the assertion that Iran had “violated a key provision” of the 2015 nuclear deal. Sanger thus ignored the distinction between a response to complete renunciation of the entire deal by the Trump administration and a violation of it. Sanger also called the announcement by foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran’s intention to increase the level of purity of enrichment “a provocative action” that “could move the country closer to possessing fuel that with further processing could be used in a weapon.”

Sanger acknowledged Iran has “consistently denied that it has any intention of making a nuclear weapon,” but asserted, “[A] trove of nuclear-related documents, spirited out of a Tehran warehouse by Israeli agents last year, showed extensive work before 2003 to design a nuclear warhead.”

But the alleged Mossad theft in 2018 of half a ton of purported top-secret Iranian nuclear weapons archive documents from an unguarded shack in Tehran was a highly implausible tale. No evidence was offered to prove that the entire story—and the new documents shown by the Israelis—were not completely fraudulent.

The Associated Press ran a story on May 16 with a lede declaring, “Iran made a veiled threat this week to enrich uranium stocks closer to weapon-grade levels….” Iran had denied that it had ever sought nuclear weapons, the story said, but “Western officials and experts say that prior to the nuclear deal, Iran had a breakout capability of just a few months if it were to decide to build a bomb.”

The Washington Post published its version of the Iranian “breakout capability” threat story July 3. Reporting Iran’s plans to enrich uranium to 20%, the Post explained, “Such a move would mean that Iran could jump to producing weapons-grade uranium more quickly.”

Furthermore, the Post reported, “Experts estimate that before the nuclear deal, the amount of time that Iran needed to accumulate enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb was two or three months.” The JCPOA, on the other hand, “was designed to increase that breakout period to about a year.”

National Public Radio chimed in with its own contribution to the breakout narrative on July 10, quoting John Negroponte, a former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, declaring, “Iran’s newly-announced levels appear modest at the moment, but would become more concerning if there were further increases. Such steps would imply a willingness on Iran’s part to go all the way to construction of a bomb.”

The media narrative about Iran’s resuming uranium enrichment thus suggests that what Americans should be worried about primarily is not the provocative character of the Trump administration’s Iran policy but the threat that Iran will move toward a “breakout” strategy vis-à-vis its nuclear weapons capability.

Iran’s enrichment diplomacy 

The real history of Iran’s uranium enrichment strategy shows, however, that that nation was always aimed at rolling back U.S. financial sanctions and compelling the United States to acknowledge legitimate Iranian interests in the region rather than to fuel a race for a nuclear bomb.

Iran began enriching uranium to 20% in February 2010 for the first time to provide fuel plates for its Tehran Research Reactor, which produces isotopes for cancer treatment. But its overarching objective was to put pressure on the Obama administration, which was seeking to on coerce Iran to give up its nuclear program altogether.

In 2012, Iran began an new phase of diplomatic pressure on the Obama administration by making very large additions to its capabilities for enrichment at 20% while still avoiding converting those capabilities to a higher stockpile of 20% enrichment uranium. Meanwhile, Iran’s government signaled to the United States that it had the option of reversing the increase through an agreement.

The number of centrifuges at the two Iranian enrichment facilities, where 20% enrichment was being carried out, stood at 696 in May 2012. By that August, it had increased to 2,140, according the International Atomic Energy Agency’s August 30, 2012 report. Furthermore, its total production of 20% enriched uranium increased from 143 kg in May to 189.4 kg in August.

But the same IAEA report revealed that Iran’s stockpile of 20% enriched uranium had actually fallen during that period from 101 kg to 91.4 kg. The reason for that seemingly contradictory result was that between May and August 2012, Iran had increased the amount of the 20% enriched uranium it had produced to powder for fuel plates for its Tehran medical reactor instead of adding it to the stockpile. That meant that the enriched uranium was in a form that could not be reconverted easily or quickly to weapons-grade enriched uranium.

Behind that reduction was an even bigger political decision: None of the 1,440 centrifuges added to Iran’s two enrichment facilities during that period was put into operation, as the IAEA report showed.

This all amounted to a clear signal to the Obama administration that Iran was ready to negotiate strict limits on its enrichment if the United States abandoned its zero-enrichment demand. “They are creating tremendous capacity,” a senior U.S. official told The New York Times, “but they are not using it.” The official acknowledged, moreover, that Iran’s enrichment diplomacy gave it “leverage” on U.S. policy.

The widely accepted notion that Iran was prevented only by U.S. pressure from making a breakout bid for a nuclear weapon and that Iran is now once again threatening to do so is central to the present toxic political atmosphere surrounding the Iran nuclear issue.

In fact, by mid-2012 Iran already had what was called a “breakout” capability but chose to use instead to induce the United States to negotiate seriously with Iran.

As the IAEA documented in its August 2012 report, Iran already had produced 189 kg of 20% enriched uranium, which was close to the minimum estimate of what experts believe it would take to produce the 25 kg of 90% enriched uranium needed for a single nuclear weapon. And had Iran actually used the additional 1,440 centrifuges available, Iran could have tripled its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium within a matter of months.

A media crisis on the Iran nuclear issue 

From mid-2012 until the JCOPOA was completed in mid-2015, Iran chose to pursue an agreement with the United States instead of exploiting its capabilities for a breakout. But that pivotal episode in Iran’s past enrichment diplomacy has been ignored by the corporate media. Now the media are once again portraying Iran primarily as the aggressor in the breakout narrative despite the clearly expressed Iranian readiness to reverse the process.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is already preparing for a new confrontation with Iran over its resumption of enrichment even as it planned to add still more onerous sanctions. Hidden near the bottom of its story, The New York Times revealed on July 1 that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies were “beginning to review what steps to take if the president determined that Iran was getting too close to producing a bomb.”

The new nuclear crisis with Iran is being stoked by the corporate media’s collective failure to convey the reality of the situation to the public. Thus, the Trump administration and the media have, to date, successfully made the Iranian government the focus of scrutiny that the public would be well-served to turn on them as well.

Andrea Dworkin: Teller of Hard Truths

When Andrea Dworkin was alive, she despaired that her work would never be given its due. Writing was Dworkin’s life, and she once said, “To communicate and to survive, as a writer and as a woman: the two are one for me.” The publication of a new collection of many of Dworkin’s well-known works of both theory and fiction, “Last Days at Hot Slit,” has, simply by virtue of its publication, stimulated a reassessment of Dworkin’s work by taking her writings seriously—a far cry from the way her books were treated when they were originally published.

Along with a timely introduction to Dworkin’s writing, the book contains excerpts from “Woman Hating” (her first book, published in 1974), her epic analysis, “Pornography: Men Possessing Women,” and her soul-wrenching novel, “Mercy.” Other selections are letters Dworkin wrote to her parents and an unpublished essay called “Goodbye to All This,” a biting retort to the “proud, pro-sex, liberated” women who, in her words, fought “for the right to be humiliated … for the right to be tied up and proud, for the right to be hurt.” “Last Days at Hot Slit” ends with “My Suicide,” a previously unpublished essay written before Dworkin’s death in 2005 from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart.

When we interviewed women about the impact Dworkin’s writing had on their lives and work, Australian novelist, poet and feminist book publisher Sue Hawthorne singled out Dworkin’s fiction:

I recall the visceral response I had to her short story “Slit” and to her book, “Ice and Fire.” But the greatest effect on me was reading “Mercy” … which has the most extraordinary detail about how it feels as a girl and a woman to be sexually violated for a significant part of her life. It is intense and difficult to read. But many significant works of literature are difficult to read. If she were a man, I’m pretty sure “Mercy” would be accorded the same status as James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Reading “Mercy” inspired Hawthorne to write her own novel, “Dark Matters,” about the erasure of lesbians and violence against lesbians, “a book I had to write as an action and in the hope that through fiction I might be able to change the world. At the very least, I should attempt to do so.”

In reading the various reviews and media features that have accompanied this Andrea Dworkin revival, we are struck by how even writers who pen favorable words about her work seem compelled to mention her appearance. The initial sentences of the editor’s preface to “Last Days” highlight Dworkin’s “uniform of denim overalls and sneakers.” Whereas Dworkin’s opponents used her “uniform” to discredit her work and her words, the editors view her legacy more positively. However, an allusion to her attire in an otherwise approving introduction comes across as unwarranted.

Co-editor Johanna Fateman lists in the preface some of the caricatures of Dworkin’s works, yet she doesn’t refute or dispel them. Dworkin, for example, is said to have introduced “a vision of sex that would repel many … a sharply constrained and prescriptive menu of behavior.” Yet many others understand that Dworkin’s “vision of sex,” so powerfully wrought, exposes the granite of women’s suffering. It invites readers to question what sex is in a culture where gonzo pornography and the transformation of prostitution into ordinary work have ruined women’s lives.

Gena Corea, author of the “The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs,” told us that the clarity of “Pornography” prompted “one of Andrea’s insights that will not quit me: When men experience the extreme pleasure of orgasm at the sight of women degraded and less-than-human, the inequality of women is something learned in the very cells of their bodies … Pornographic propaganda against women infiltrates the body, waves of pleasure teaching that women are sub-human,” thereby building “the emotional structure” for the inequality of women. In recent years, Corea has worked with a group of male prisoners who have committed violence against women and underscores the significance of “Pornography” in exploring their crimes.

Commenting on Dworkin’s testimony before the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography, Fateman states in the preface to “Last Days” that Dworkin’s “image would never recover from this strategic alignment with anti-obscenity conservatism.” This is a curious statement. Has Malcolm X’s alignment with the Nation of Islam damaged his image in perpetuity? When the American Civil Liberties Union joined with evangelicals to pass the Prison Rape Elimination Act, did the organization’s collaboration do permanent damage to its image? Rather than “never recover[ing] from this strategic alignment with anti-obscenity conservatism,” Dworkin’s “image,” for many women, was enhanced by her courageous testimony in a government forum that otherwise would never have heard a radical feminist analysis of pornography. Dworkin understood the boundaries of engagement—that a commission appearance is not an alliance and that individuals and groups that strive to advance political change search for ways to act across differences in ideology and tactics.

In a preface to her essay, “Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue,” included in “Letters from the War Zone,” Dworkin responded to these criticisms of collusion with conservatives:

I testified … [because] pro-pornography “feminists” had already testified in other cities. I spoke to the Commission because my friends, feminists who work against pornography, asked me to. … A campaign costing nearly one million dollars would effectively discredit the findings of the Commission by smearing those who oppose pornography, creating a hysteria over censorship, and planting news stories to say that there is no proven relationship between pornography and harm to women and children. … Representatives of Penthouse sat with the ACLU lawyers and so-called feminists organized to defend pornography; and they heckled me during this testimony.

What is missing in “Last Days,” an otherwise laudable testimony to Dworkin’s greatness as a feminist thinker, writer and activist, is a perspective on her political theory and its import. The editors—mainly Fateman—acknowledge Dworkin’s influence. The preface recognizes that Dworkin “helped shape the historic grassroots feminist organizing of the late 70s and 80s; she rallied the forces of the antipornography, antirape and battered women’s movements.” However, there is uneasiness with her uncompromising writing even as it is portrayed as “empty of caveats, equivocation, or the endless positing of one’s subjective limits.” Dworkin understood, as British abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick wrote, that “truth and justice make their best way in the world when they appear in bold and simple majesty.”

Two generations after Dworkin’s first book was published, New Zealand writer Renee Gerlich comments insightfully on Dworkin’s “uncompromising writing”:

Uncompromising refusal is a definitive feature of her work, refusal that stands in direct opposition to the accommodation expected of women. For this, Andrea was monsterized. The smearing of Andrea’s work also acts as a lesson to women including myself. Whatever bravery it took Andrea to confront and reject men’s abuse of women, and however patient, considered and gracious her writing and speaking reveal her to have been, Andrea’s name is associated with an ugly volatility. Her detractors made an example of her, so that other women would not want to do what she did—namely reclaim our own creative energy and love for one another, our clarity of perception and moral instinct, and our ability to speak truthfully and powerfully from the gut. Of course, women can’t be stopped from wanting these freedoms—and Andrea’s work stirs us to claim them and sustains us in this effort.

In the 1980s, Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, along with a dedicated band of radical feminist activists, launched a courageous and groundbreaking civil rights ordinance against pornography. Dworkin, in one of our favorite passages, wrote:

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. … The world is anywhere that thought has consequences. … Creative intelligence is searching intelligence: it demands to know the world, demands its right to consequence. … Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of men, without which they are not really women, they had better not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity.

This insistence on consequence, this attempt to make things real for women, is what Dworkin was most reviled for. She dared to think that she could transform her insights and intelligence into legislation that could help provide some legal means of redress to women who had suffered from pornographic violence. When FACT, the so-called Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, attacked the anti-pornography legislation that was supported by many women’s groups, neighborhood organizations, women in prostitution, survivors of sexual exploitation, lesbians, ethnic and civil rights organizations, and by the hundreds of women who risked public exposure and harassment testifying on behalf of this legislation, the personal and political attacks on Dworkin escalated.

When violence against women can be rationalized or, more to the point, marketed and valorized as “sex,” common agreement falters. Prostitution and pornography are the not-so-popular issues of violence against women, continually depoliticized and reduced to private choices. The endorsing of pornography and prostitution, especially from progressives and champions of women’s human rights—those who should be radical feminist allies, those who should have been Dworkin’s allies—is inexcusable.

When a woman works against pornography and prostitution, her reputation is destroyed, like the women who are exploited in prostitution and pornography. The latter are branded as sluts, whores, hookers, hoes and tarts, while the former are cast as uptight, anti-sex, extremist, fundamentalist, right-wing, conservative, moralistic, anti-feminist, and against a woman’s right to use her body in a self-determined way. If she is a writer, she gets censored from many publications that would be a natural outlet for her work. Rather than they, it is she who is portrayed as censorious and an opponent of free and progressive speech. In contrast, the pornographers and pimps are garlanded as human rights heroes and defenders of free speech.

Over the last several decades, it is Dworkin’s work that has been most influential in bringing pornography and prostitution “out of the closet” of the private sexual realm and into the public forum of male violence against women. From our own work against the global sex industry, we know that there are many who argue that prostitution and pornography can be “made better” for women. These advocates promote a “sustainable prostitution and pornography,” in which women are rendered “safer” for men’s use—in reality, no safety for women at all.

Dworkin knew that there is an urgent need for courage and for the political will to act against the global sexual exploitation of women and children. She possessed that courage and political will. She was among the first to name all practices of sexual exploitation for what they are. Not sex work, but sexual violence. Not human rights, but a human rights violation. Not the product of women’s consent, but the result of women’s compliance with the only options available.

In both the written and spoken word, Dworkin coupled sexual and economic degradation of women with a country’s national and foreign policy. In her 1983 speech to a conference of 500 men that is included in “Last Days,” she underscored the gendered war waged against women and our perpetual wars conducted abroad.

Rape and war are not so different. … [Y]ou’re turned into little soldier boys from the day you are born and everything you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. … Equality is a practice … an action … a way of life. It is a social practice. It is an economic practice. … It is a sexual practice. … It is a political necessity to create equality in institutions. … It cannot coexist with rape … or with pornography … or with prostitution or with economic degradation of women on any level.

Decades since her speech, a team of researchers created the largest global database on the status of women, WomanStats, and compared the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women in those countries. Their findings are profoundly instructive for global security and world peace. Democracies with higher levels of violence against women—including pornography, rape and prostitution—are less stable and are more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to resolve conflict. Their empirical findings simply corroborate the luminous political insights that course through Dworkin’s work.

Dworkin was a teller of truth, a thinker, a writer, an activist and a generous human being. She gave many women the confidence of their convictions that sexual violence is not natural and normal and that in the chronicle of human atrocities, pornography is not trivial or incidental but a gigantic industry— a rotten enterprise—built on male power in which “the degradation of the female is the means of achieving this power.”

May this new collection of Dworkin’s writings, “Last Days at Hot Slit”—a panoply of Dworkin’s hard truths—lead many to reading her complete works.