Chris Hedges's Blog, page 652

Florida Shooting Suspect Charged With 17 Counts of Murder

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz was formally charged Wednesday with 17 counts of first-degree murder, which could mean a death sentence if he is convicted.

The indictment returned by a grand jury in Fort Lauderdale also charges the 19-year-old with 17 counts of attempted murder for the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in which 17 people died and more than a dozen others were wounded.

Cruz’s public defender has said he will plead guilty if prosecutors take the death penalty off the table, which would mean a life prison sentence. The Broward County state attorney has not announced a decision on the death penalty.

James and Kimberly Snead, the couple who gave Cruz a home after his mother died late last year, testified before the grand jury Wednesday. Both James Snead and the couple’s attorney, Jim Lewis, wore silver “17” pins to honor the victims of the shooting.

The couple is “trying to do the right thing” and is mourning along with the rest of the Parkland community, Lewis said.

“We’ll let justice take its course at this point,” Lewis said. “They still don’t know what happened, why this happened. They don’t have any answers. They feel very badly for everybody.”

Cruz told investigators he took an AR-15 rifle to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Valentine’s Day and started shooting into classrooms.

Jail records released by the Broward Sheriff’s Office show Cruz was being held in solitary confinement. Officers described Cruz as being cooperative but avoiding eye contact.

The report said Cruz “often sits with a blank stare,” appeared to laugh and exhibited “awkward” behavior during and after a visit with an attorney and had one “family visit.” Officers said Cruz also requested a Bible to read in his single-person cell in the infirmary.

In Tallahassee, the Florida House was expected to vote on gun legislation stemming from the school shooting.

The legislation would put some restrictions on rifle sales, provide new mental health programs for schools and improve communication between school districts, law enforcement and state agencies. Democrats’ efforts failed Tuesday to strip the bill of language that would create a program to arm some teachers and school employees who complete law enforcement training.

Two parents who lost children in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings told reporters that all the families of Parkland victims want the legislation to succeed.

Andrew Pollack, who lost his 18-year-old daughter Meadow, and Ryan Petty, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina, said there was enough good in the bill that it should pass.

After visiting the Parkland school Wednesday, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she wants to hear suggestions to improve school safety from students who survived the shooting.

DeVos told reporters that arming some teachers should be considered an option but not a requirement. As a model, she cited a program in Florida’s Polk County where teachers or other employees at two private universities have trained with the sheriff’s office so they can carry concealed weapons on campus.

The Sun Sentinel reported a second student injured in the shooting has filed a letter of intent to sue the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the school system and others. Doctors said one bullet tore through 15-year-old Kyle Laman’s ankle and foot, according to a statement from The Berman Law Group, which is representing the teenager.

“Kyle is still dealing with memories of the terror he felt when his classroom was locked and he was stuck in the hallway during the shooting,” the statement said. “The teacher couldn’t get the door open fast enough. Everyone was running scared. Kyle looked at the gunman staring right back at him, and instinctively jumped for cover.”

Separately, 15-year-old Anthony Borges and his parents have notified county officials of their plan to sue. Anthony was shot five times in his legs and torso and remains hospitalized, his attorney Alex Arreaza said.

___

Farrington reported from Tallahassee, Florida, and Replogle reported from Parkland, Florida. Associated Press writers Freida Frisaro and Jennifer Kay in Miami contributed to this report.

___

Follow the AP’s complete coverage of the Florida school shooting here: https://apnews.com/tag/Floridaschools...

U.S. Should Accept Putin’s Offer to Negotiate on Nukes

On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his state of the nation address. Much of his speech focused on economic issues and proposals to improve the Russian economy and well-being of the Russian people. Putin did, however, devote a portion of his speech to what he called “the most important defense issue.” He was referring to Russia’s next generation of strategic nuclear weapons designed to overcome U.S. missile defense systems and, thereby from his perspective, assure the effectiveness of Russia’s nuclear deterrent force and restore the global strategic balance.

Putin began his remarks on nuclear arms by harking back to the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, a treaty he described as “the cornerstone of the international security system,” due to the limits it placed on missile defense deployments. He recalled Russian efforts, before the U.S. withdrawal and subsequent to it, to dissuade the U.S. from abrogating the treaty, efforts that were all rejected out of hand. He stated, “All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected.”

It is not well understood in the U.S. that there is a strategic relationship between offensive and defensive missiles. Although it is doubtful that missile defenses would ever work as planned, the leaders of a country whose offensive missiles are subject to being destroyed by missile defenses must assume that they would work. In his speech, Putin explained this relationship of defensive and offensive missiles by pointing out that “uncontrolled growth of the number of anti-ballistic missiles” by the U.S. “will result in the complete devaluation of Russia’s nuclear potential.” This situation, Putin argued, requires Russia to build new offensive nuclear arms capable of penetrating the U.S. missile defenses in order to maintain “strategic stability” and not allow the U.S. to develop a perceived first-strike capability.

The U.S. has been dismissive of this Russian concern, arguing that its defenses are only meant to stop attacks from small powers such as North Korea or Iran (although Iran has no nuclear arms). However, it is a clear and often repeated concern of Russia, just as it would be to the U.S. if Russia were placing missile defense installations near the U.S. border and around the world. Putin stated, “Let me recall that the United States is creating a global missile defense system primarily for countering strategic arms that follow ballistic trajectories. These weapons form the backbone of our nuclear deterrence forces, just as other members of the nuclear club.”

Putin mentioned new Russian strategic nuclear weapons that would be fast, powerful and able to evade ballistic missile defenses. One of these new missiles, known as Sarmat, he described as “untroubled by even the most advanced missile defense systems.” He also discussed development of new types of nuclear-powered strategic arms that do not use ballistic trajectories. These he depicted as “invincible against all existing and prospective missile defense and counter-air defense systems.”

Russia’s new strategic weapons systems do not change the balance of power between the U.S. and Russia, though the U.S. may point to them in justifying its own plans to modernize every aspect of its nuclear arsenal at a cost of $1.7 trillion. Russia’s new offensive nuclear weapons will only bring the ongoing nuclear arms race to a position of strategic stability.

The fuel for a new nuclear arms race was already on the fire, and a Russian strategic response was predictable, when the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty and began developing and emplacing missile defense systems globally. The U.S. withdrawal and abrogation of the ABM Treaty may prove to be the greatest strategic blunder of the nuclear age.

New York Times writers Neil MacFarquhar and David Sanger, reporting on the speech, observed that Putin had “threatened the West with a new generation of nuclear weapons. …” But in my reading of the speech, it seemed not to be a threat but rather an announcement that Russia has found a way to assure strategic stability by developing a nuclear force that can’t be destroyed in a U.S. first strike, with the U.S. able to use missile defenses to knock out a Russian retaliatory attack with any of its missiles that survive the initial attack.

Putin offered a critique of the recent U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, saying it lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear arms, including “in response to conventional arms attacks and even to a cyberthreat.” This is a valid critique.

Putin goes on to state: “Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies … will be considered a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.” So long as nuclear weapons exist, this kind of posturing, while unfortunate, is to be expected by the logic of nuclear deterrence and is similar to statements U.S. leaders have made.

Putin became conciliatory near the end of his address, stating, “There is no need to create more threats to the world. Instead, let us sit down at the negotiating table and devise together a new and relevant system of international security and sustainable development for human civilization. We have been saying this all along. All these proposals are still valid. Russia is ready for this.”

The U.S. should take him up on this offer. As the two most powerful nuclear powers on the planet, with enough nuclear weapons to end civilization as we know it and possibly the human species, the two countries need to be engaged in productive and good-faith negotiations to end the nuclear weapons threat to each other and to all humanity.

Putin has opened the door for the two countries to negotiate to resolve their differences.

Now it is up to the U.S. to respond.

The Parkland Shooting Was About More Than Gun Violence

Donald Trump may have startled Republican lawmakers with his sudden and unexpected support for background checks and other gun control measures, but a closer look at his comments to lawmakers reveals his continued adherence to the core of the pro-gun script that he has been following all along.

At his meeting with lawmakers on February 28 Trump buckled down on the idea that the real problem is the existence of gun-free zones, arguing that eliminating gun-free zones “prevent [mass shootings] from ever happening, because [the shooters] are cowards and they’re not going in when they know they’re going to come out dead.”

The president’s repeated efforts to disparage the idea of gun-free zones fit with the earlier call for arming teachers made by Trump and one of his most powerful financial and ideological backers — the dark knight of gun violence, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Meanwhile, Trump has shown no interest in preventing school shootings by hiring more guidance teachers, support staff and psychologists. Trump’s call for a comprehensive gun bill may have made for “captivating” television, but it rattled NRA lobbyists and initiated a tsunami of calls to their allies on Capitol Hill. Nothing surprising to this reaction. It gets worse. Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the NRA, met with Trump a few days after Trump made his remarks and suggested in a tweet that the president had backed away from his apparent embrace of gun control.

Moreover, there is little confidence following Trump’s remarks that Republicans would even remotely endorse legislation for gun control. The NRA “paid $5 million to lobbyists last year” and there is no indication that the time and money spent buying off cowardly politicians will prove ineffectual.

The deeply troubling call for eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers comes at a time when many schools have already been militarized by the presence of police and the increasing criminalization of student behaviors. Suggesting that teachers be armed and turned into potential instruments of violence extends and normalizes the prison as a model for schools and the increasing expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. What is being left out of this tragedy is that the number of police in schools has doubled in the last decade from 20 percent in 1996 to 43 percent today. Moreover, as more police are put in schools, more and more children are brutalized by them. There is no evidence that putting the police in schools has made them any safer. Instead, more and more young people have criminal records, are being suspended, or expelled from school, all in the name of school safety. As  Sam Sinyangwe, the director of the Mapping Police Violence Project, observes:

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders, foolishly imagining that armed teachers would be able to stop a killer with military grade weapons, and disregarding the risk of teachers shooting other students, staff or faculty in the midst of such a chaotic moment.

In addition, the proposal points to the insidious fact that mass shootings and gun violence have become so normalized in the United States that, as Adam Gopnik points out, “we must now be reassured that, when the person with the AR-15 comes to your kid’s school, there’s a plan to cope with him.” Such statements make visible a society rife with the embrace of force and violence. How else to explain the fact that, at the highest levels of government, horrendous acts of violence, such as mass shootings involving school children, are now discussed in terms of containing their effects rather than eliminating their causes.

In this logic the underlying causes of mass shootings and gun killings disappear and the emphasis for dealing with such violence reproduces an act of political and moral irresponsibility in its call to curtail or contain such violence rather than address the underlying causes of it.

We live in an age in which the politics of disposability has merged with what Jeffrey St. Clair has called the spectacle of “American Carnage.” The machineries of social death and misery now drive a mode of casino capitalism in which more and more people are considered waste, expendable and excess. The politics of disposability now couples with acts of extreme violence as pressure grows to exclude more and more people from the zones of visibility, justice and compassion. This is especially true for children. Violence against children in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. As Marian Wright Edelman points out,

A culture of cruelty, silence and indifference to the needs of children, built on the backs of the conservative media politicians and the gun industry and lobby, has become a central and ethically disturbing feature of American society. This is a culture of political corruption and social abandonment that “has a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others.” This culture of violence has a long history in the United States, and has become increasingly legitimated under the Trump regime, a regime in which lawlessness and corruption combine to ignore the needs of children, the poor, elderly, sick and vulnerable. In the age of neoliberal brutality, protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people. As is apparent from its policies, our society no longer views young people as a worthy social investment or the promise of a decent future. On the contrary, as John and Jean Comaroff note in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, instead of becoming a primary register of the dreams of a society, youth have become “creatures of our nightmares, of our social impossibilities, and our existential angst.”

Viewed largely as a liability, the institutions that young people inhabit have been discarded as citadels of critical thinking and social mobility. As a result, such institutions, including schools, have become zones of social abandonment — often modeled after prisons — that appear to exist in a state of perpetual danger and fear, especially for students marginalized by race and class, for whom violence operates routinely and in multiple ways. Children are now defined largely as consumers, clients and fodder for the military or the school-to-prison pipeline. As a result, their safety is now enmeshed with the weaponized discourse of surveillance, and security personnel and police patrol their corridors. Horrific shootings boost the ratings and profit margins of the mainstream press, undercutting these news outlets’ will and ability to use their resources to address the culture and political economy of violence that now amounts to a form of domestic terrorism in the United States.

As Brad Evans and I have argued in Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle, violence has now become the defining organizing principle for society in general. It is also worth noting that the spectacle, marketing and commodification of violence powerfully mediates how the American public both understands the relations of power that benefit from the production of violence at all levels of society and how the visceral suffering that is produced can be neutralized in a culture of immediacy and “alternative facts.”

Of course, this logic is part of the politics of distraction that has become a trademark of the Trump administration. At the same time, it creates more profits for the gun industries and makes clear that most people, including children, have no safe space in the US. The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them. It gets worse. Rather than engage young people and other gun rights advocates in a debate about gun control, some conservatives mimic the discourse of humiliation and lies used relentlessly by Trump in claiming that “bereaved students were being manipulated by sinister forces, or even that they were paid actors.”

As objects of moral and social abandonment, young people are beginning to recognize that the response to their call for safety, well-being and future without fear is cruel and cynical. In addition, their struggle against gun violence makes clear that the Trump administration, the NRA, and the industries that trade in instruments of violence and death, are waging a war against democracy itself. The call to arm teachers also speaks to the Trump administration’s efforts to further militarize and expand the weaponization not only of the armed forces but also of spaces in which large numbers of students congregate. In his call to arm 20 percent of all teachers, Trump is suggesting that 640,000 teachers be trained and given guns. The Washington Post estimates that the costs of training teachers sufficiently could reach as high as $718 million while the cost of providing teachers with firearms could amount to an additional $251 million. According to the Post, “the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm … creeps past $1 billion.” Furthermore, putting 640,000 more guns in schools is not only a reckless suggestion, it also further enriches the profits of gun makers by adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. Why not invest this amount of money in providing support staff and services for students — services that could meaningfully support those facing mental health issues, bullying, homelessness and poverty?

When combined with a culture of fear and a massive government investment in a carceral state, the politics of disposability eerily echoes the damaging legacy of a fascist past in the US, with its celebration of violence, concentration of power in the hands of the few, massive inequities in wealth and militarization of all aspects of society. There is no defense for weapons of war to be sold as commodities either to children or anyone else. Gun violence in the US is not simply about a growing culture of violence, it is about the emergence of a form of domestic terrorism in which fear, mistrust, lies, corruption and financial gain become more important than the values, social relations and institutions that write children into the script of democracy and give them hope for a decent future.

A war culture now permeates American society — extending from sports events and Hollywood films to the ongoing militarization of the police and the criminalization of everyday behaviors such as violating a dress code or doodling on a desk. War has become a permanent element of everyday life, deeply etched into our national ideals and social relations. And those responsible for the bloodshed it produces appear immune from social criticism and policies that limit their power.

This debate about school shootings is not simply about gun violence; it is about a neoliberal order that has tipped over into authoritarianism, one for which the highest measure of how a society judges itself ethically and politically is no longer about how it treats its children. Violence on a grand scale certainly has produced a high sense of moral outrage within the US public at times, but not over the fate of young people.

People in the US need a new language to talk about violence in order to capture its many registers and the threads that tie them together. Under such circumstances, school violence cannot be understood outside of the deeply inordinate influence of money and power in US politics. The call to model schools after prisons would have to be examined against the rise of the punishing state and the Trump administration’s celebration of a “law and order” regime. The anger fueling what might be called white rage would have to be analyzed against the gutting of jobs, wages, pensions, health care benefits and the massive growth of inequality in wealth and power in the United States.

US society has become an abyss in which violence, disposability and the logic of social abandonment and terminal exclusion work against the interests of most children and for the interests of the rich and powerful. Weapons now operate in the service of what might be called the necro-power of casino capitalism. How else to explain the fact that there are more than 13,000 homicides a year in the United States, or that on average, seven teens are killed with guns daily. Yet the response on the part of politicians is either silence and inaction, or a more aggressive push to put more guns in circulation?

A cult of militarism has dragged extreme violence into the very soul of the US and has become a source of pride rather than alarm and anger. This depraved transformation is accelerated by a crisis of agency in which every relation is reduced to an exchange relation, one in which, as political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, “everything from learning to eating become matters of speculative investments — ranked, rated, balanced in your portfolio.” When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence, unsympathetic to the growing multitudes of disposable individuals and groups, and unmoved by a culture of deepening collective cynicism. Casino capitalism has numbed large segments of the American public into moral and political callousness. One consequence is an indifference to a society in which the killing of children is routine.

Mass shootings and gun violence in the US cannot be abstracted from what I call the death of the social, which involves the collapse of an investment in the public good, the ongoing destruction of democratic values, and the undermining of the common good. A toxic mix of rugged individualism, untrammeled self-interest, privatization, commodification and culture of fear now shapes American society, leaving most people isolated, unaware of the broader systemic forces shaping their lives, and trapped in a landscape of uncertainty and precarity that makes them vulnerable to having their anxieties, anger and rage misdirected.

All too often, the only discourse available for them to deal with their problems is provided by the disingenuous vocabulary of fear and security delivered in the call for gun ownership, the allure of violence as an antidote to their individual and collective anxieties, and a hateful appeal to racism, Islamophobia and demonization.

The hijacking of freedom and individual responsibility by extremists is corrosive and rots society from within, making people susceptible to what C.W. Mills describes as “organized irresponsibility” in his book The Politics of Truth. The right-wing attack on the welfare state, community and democracy functions to dissolve crucial solidarities and bonds of social obligation, and undermines mutual responsibilities. In the absence of the discourse of community, compassion and mutual respect, fear and violence have become the new currency mediating social relations at all levels of society. In a society in which the war of all against all prevails, the call for more guns is symptomatic of the shredding of the social fabric, the hardening of society, the evisceration of public trust, and a ratcheting up of a political and economic investment by the ruling elite in the machinery of cruelty, inequality and militarism.

Violence in the United States is part of a wider politics of disposability in which the machineries of social and political death accelerate the suffering, hardships and misery of children. For too long, youth have been written out of the script of justice and democracy. Gun violence, mass shootings and state violence are simply the most visible elements of a society that organizes almost every aspect of civil society for the production of terror and fear, and which views young people within the specter of uselessness and indifference.

Fortunately, the students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, shunning the coarse language used by apologists for systemic violence while embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle. These young people are refusing to privatize hope or allow the ethical imagination and their sense of moral outrage and social responsibility to be tranquilized. They are not only outraged over the brutal actions of the defenders of gun violence, they feel betrayed. Betrayed, because they have learned that the power of the gun industries and the politicians who defend them do not consider their lives worthy of protection, hope and a future free of violence. They recognize that US society is unusually violent and that they are a target. Moreover, they are arguing convincingly that mass shooting in the United States have a direct correlation with the astronomical number of guns present in this country. But there is more at stake here than an epidemic of gun violence, there is the central idea of the US as defined by carnage — violence that extends from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery to the rise of mass incarceration and the instances of state violence now sweeping across the US.

At least for the moment, young people are refusing to live with a modern system of violence that functions as a form of domestic terrorism. Engaged in a form of productive unsettling and collective dissent, they are fighting back, holding power accountable and giving birth to a vibrant form of political struggle. The distinctiveness of this generation of survivors is clear in their use of social media, their willingness to speak out, their planned marches, their civic courage, and their unwillingness to continue to live with the fear and insecurity that have shaped most of their lives. Hopefully, this moment will transform itself into a movement.

 

‘Failed Leadership’ Put Veterans at Risk, Report Says

WASHINGTON—A stinging internal investigation finds “failed leadership at multiple levels” at the Veterans Administration during the Obama administration that put patients at a major hospital at risk. It’s another blow to current Secretary David Shulkin, who also served at the agency then and now is fighting to keep his job.

The 150-page report released Wednesday by the VA internal watchdog offers new details to its preliminary finding last April of patient safety issues at the Washington, D.C., medical center.

Painting a grim picture of communications breakdowns, chaos and spending waste at the government’s second largest department, the report found that at least three VA program offices directly under Shulkin’s watch knew of “serious, persistent deficiencies” when he was VA undersecretary of health from 2015 to 2016, but stopped short of saying whether he was told about them.

Shulkin, who was elevated to VA secretary last year by President Donald Trump, told government investigators that he did “not recall” ever being notified of problems.

Declaring the problems “systemic,” Shulkin told reporters that he was not aware of the problems at the Washington hospital. He pledged wide-scale change across VA, including unannounced audits of its more than 1,700 medical facilities from health experts in the private sector, immediate hiring to fill vacancies at local hospitals and plans in the coming months to streamline bureaucracy and improve communication.

“This is the start of a restructuring effort for the Department of Veterans Affairs,” he said. “Not to act when you identify systemic failures I think would be negligent.”

Shulkin has been struggling to keep a grip on his job since a blistering report by the inspector general last month concluded that he had violated ethics rules by improperly accepting Wimbledon tennis tickets and that his then chief of staff had doctored emails to justify his wife traveling to Europe with him at taxpayer expense.

He also faces a rebellion among some VA staff and has issued a sharp warning to them: Get back in line or get out. “I suspect that people are right now making decisions on whether they want to be a part of this team or not,” he said last month.

The latest IG investigation found poor accounting procedures leading to taxpayer waste, citing at least $92 million in overpriced medical supplies, along with a threat of data breaches as reams of patients’ sensitive health information sat in 1,300 unsecured boxes.

No patient died as a result of the patient safety issues at the Washington facility dating back to at least 2013, which resulted in costly hospitalizations, “prolonged or unnecessary anesthesia” while medical staff scrambled to find needed equipment at the last minute, as well as delays and cancellations of medical procedures. The report also noted improvements made at the Washington facility since the IG’s first report in April, when Shulkin replaced the medical center’s director and pledged broader improvements.

Still, VA inspector general Michael Missal cautioned of potential problems without stronger oversight across the VA network of more than 1,700 facilities.

“Failed leadership at multiple levels within VA put patients and assets at the DC VA Medical Center at unnecessary risk and resulted in a breakdown of core services,” Missal said. “It created a climate of complacency … That there was no finding of patient harm was largely due to the efforts of many dedicated health care providers that overcame service deficiencies to ensure patients received needed care.”

In the report, Shulkin responded that he had expected issues involving patient harm or operational deficiencies to be raised through the “usual” communication process, originating from the local level and regional office to VA headquarters in Washington — and that it apparently didn’t happen.

While the IG did not make specific conclusions on whether Shulkin actually was warned by direct subordinates, it broadly faulted an “unwillingness or inability of leaders to take responsibility for the effectiveness of their programs and operations,” and cited a “sense of futility” at multiple levels in bringing about improvements.

“It was difficult to pinpoint precisely how the conditions described in this report could have persisted at the medical center for so many years,” Missal wrote.

“Senior leaders at all levels had a responsibility to ensure that patients were not placed at risk,” he said.

Shulkin has maintained White House support despite the travel controversy. He has acknowledged some mistakes in the handling of the trip and said he relied too much on the judgment of his staff to ensure full compliance with travel policies. He has since said he reimbursed the $4,000 plane ticket for his wife. His chief of staff, Vivieca Wright Simpson, has left the agency.

Several major veterans organizations are standing behind him as the best guardian of the VA amid a planned overhaul of the Veterans Choice program, a Trump campaign priority aimed at expanding private care outside the VA system.

The NRA’s Real Mission

After the usual shock and horror, my reaction after hearing about the latest United States mass shooting perpetrated by a demented white male with an assault weapon was, sad to say, “Here we go again.” I waited for the standard cycle to run its depressing course.

The venues and details are different each time, of course, but the story is always the same: a demented psychopath with weaponry and ammunition made available to him through loose gun laws. He wreaks mass-murderous havoc on soft-target innocents. Often the shooter dies, too. Sometimes—like the teenage Nikolas Cruz, who is alleged to have killed 14 of his fellow high school students in Parkland, Fla., three weeks ago—the mass murderer lives.

First come the ghastly details of murder, maiming and mayhem. Then come the breathless reports on the shooter and his history, the press conference with the authorities, the statements of dismay, condolence and prayer from the governor, the president and other public personalities and officials.

And then comes the debate. Liberals and moderates in media and politics advocate gun control, pointing out the obvious fact that military-style assault weapons magnify psycho-killer body counts to a horrifying degree and have no place in a civilized society.

Liberals call for elementary restrictions, such as banning assault weapons and more stringent background checks. Gun control advocates note that other nations do not experience the astronomically high levels of gun violence and murder rates that plague the U.S., thanks in great part to the civilized gun laws they have in place. This “left” opinion is, and has long been, shared by most of the populace.

We learn again that the really big bloodbaths are just the tip of the U.S. gun-slaughter iceberg. Multiple-death gun incidents occur with shocking regularity in a nation saturated by lethal firearms. As The Guardian reported last fall after the record-setting massacre in Las Vegas, “No other developed nation comes close to the rate of gun violence in America. Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every adult. Data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive reveals a shocking human toll: there is a mass shooting—defined as four or more people shot in one incident, not including the shooter—every 9 out of 10 days on average.”

Led by the powerful National Rifle Association, the right pushes back. It’s time, pro-gun politicos say, for prayers, mourning and healing, not for “politicizing a great tragedy.” Many “conservatives” blame the bloodbath on sheer evil. The more sophisticated “conservatives” say it’s a mental health issue, not a gun policy problem: “Guns don’t massacre people, crazy people do.” We are expected to think they seriously believe that diminutive and cowardly psychotics like James Holmes, Adam Lanza and Dylann Roof could have shed the same amount of blood with a machete as they did with guns.

Some on the right advance the dangerous notion that more people should be armed and ready to fight it out with mass shooters. The solution, these reactionaries think (or claim to think) is more high-power guns in circulation, not fewer. (The ridiculous Trump-approved call for teachers to be armed has never been run up the right-wing flagpole with such amplification as it has in the wake of the Parkland killings.)

The post-shooting argument ends in stalemate and nothingness. Another momentary upsurge of domestic popular revulsion against American gun madness gives way to resignation and retreat. We count the days until the next big gun massacre.

Could the aftermath of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School be different? It seemed possible. It sparked a more impressive and potentially influential wave of gun-control activism than have high-profile mass shootings of the last two-plus decades. As The New York Times reported in a recent Page 1, above-the-fold news story:

“The mass shooting … in Parkland, Fl., has thrust gun rights into the midterm campaign, scrambling traditions in both parties as the debate shifts toward firearms restrictions. … A host of House Republicans and a handful of the party’s governors are beginning to distance themselves from their party’s gun-rights orthodoxy, signaling an openness to restrictions that reflects the rising anger among suburban voters. …. Democrats are under even more pressure from within to recalibrate their position on the issue. Even as they attempt to reclaim governorships and congressional seats in red-tinged regions, moderates recognize that bearing the mark of the N.R.A. could be fatal in their primaries … the grim spectacle of [repeated mass shootings] … by individuals wielding military-style semiautomatic rifles has mobilized gun control advocates in a new way—and pushed even red- and purple-state Democrats to move abruptly in their direction. …”

Popular support for gun control usually rises a bit after mass shootings. But Parkland was different. As Politico reported, “Support for stricter gun laws has spiked in polls conducted after the fatal South Florida school shooting, hitting its highest level in at least a quarter-century. … The percentage of Americans [68 percent] who want more restrictive gun laws is greater now than after any other recent shooting” (emphasis added).

No less an NRA-backer than President Donald Trump was moved to sound as though he’d been turned into a gun control advocate. In an hourlong televised White House gathering with congressional representatives, Trump freaked out Republicans by voicing openness to a variety of Democratic Party gun proposals. He appeared to embrace a reform package including a prohibition (supported by 77 percent of Americans) on bump stock devices that “turn legal weapons into machine guns” (Trump’s words); the raising of the minimum age for legal assault weapon purchase from 18 to 21 (supported by 81 percent); a significantly improved system of background checks (supported by 88 percent). It sounded as though Trump was ready to call for bringing back an assault weapon ban, which is backed by just over two-thirds (68 percent) of the populace. “Take the guns first, then go to court,” Trump said on the topic of crazy people with weapons.

But then the NRA and Republican Party rebelled, calling Trump’s liberal gun rant “surreal” and an un-American threat to “freedom” and “due process.” Trump huddled in the Oval Office with NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and top NRA lobbyist Chris Cox. LaPierre certainly reminded Trump of the significant backing the NRA gave Trump in 2016—and of the remarkable passion with which its “14 million members” will resist even the slightest abridgement of their cherished “right to bear arms.”

The NRA intervention seems to have worked. So what if 68 percent of Americans want gun control? On Thursday night, NRA leaders triumphantly tweeted that “POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control.” By Friday, a White House official told reporters it was unlikely the president would push for raising the minimum age for purchasing assault weapons because of a “lack of support” for such a change. Trump’s scowling press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced that “nothing had changed” in the president’s views on policy. Thrown into full scramble mode by Trump’s strange spasm of liberal-sounding comments, the White House failed to deliver on its promise of a comprehensive gun policy package by the end of the week.

Reporters were confused. “Nothing had changed” from what? A CNN report Friday was titled “No One Knows Where Trump is on Guns—Perhaps Including Trump.”

Beneath Trump’s mixed messages and the by now standard, new-normal White House dysfunction lie some harsh political realities. Given the intense personal, cultural and political hold that guns possess for much of the Republican Party and Trump’s heartland, white-nationalist base, a drift left on gun policy could cost the president support from a significant component of the small but so far durable group of Americans (from 32 percent to 40 percent of the U.S. populace, depending on which poll you consult) that has backed him no matter how idiotic, dangerous and clueless he has shown himself to be.

What has been different about the latest mass shooting and its aftermath? Part of it may simply be about cumulative effect, as the sheer number of these soul-numbing and nation-disgracing incidents pile up on top of each other: Columbine (a high school attacked by neo-Nazi students); Virginia Tech (a college); Aurora, Colo. (a movie theater); Sandy Hook (an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.); Charleston, S.C. (a black church); Orlando, Fla. (a gay dance club); Sutherland Springs, Texas (a white church); Las Vegas (an outdoor concert); and now Parkland.

Another part has to with the age of the people murdered. The killing of the young in and around their schools is a particularly ghastly crime. It is precisely the sort of thing no civilized society tolerates. The younger and more defenseless the victims, perhaps, the more hideous the violation. But unlike the young Sandy Hook survivors, the surviving Parkland students were old enough to take up the cause of gun control on their own. Student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have emerged as some of those most compelling and eloquent gun policy reform advocates in history. They’ve inspired fellow high school and junior high school students to walk out, march, protest and pressure policymakers across the county.

Another factor, perhaps, is the graphic failure of local and federal authorities to pick up and act upon clear signs that Nikolas Cruz was a menace to his fellow students. This malfunction exposed the pathetic weakness (in many states and locales) of the supposedly stern regulations the NRA claims are already in place to restrict Americans’ holy Second Amendment right to own weapons of mass slaughter.

Also relevant, perhaps, is the political timing and context. The latest assault weapon massacre has taken place as the primary campaigns for the midterm elections are starting to heat up against the backdrop of an epically unpopular and maddening presidency.

There’s another twist to the Parkland story: It elicited some strange and revealing comments from the NRA’s longtime CEO, Wayne LaPierre. He responded to the renewed and escalated calls for gun reform by going to the Conservative Political Action Conference to give a classically hard-right and paranoid-sounding speech denouncing liberal and moderate gun control advocates as radical socialists. LaPierre concluded his unhinged oration with the same ridiculous advice he gave in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre five years ago: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

This time though, LaPierre went beyond the gun issue to tackle other and, he felt, related aspects of government and society. He worried about national intelligence leaks and alleged liberal media bias. He criticized the FBI. He trumpeted “free market capitalism” as the source of America’s “greatness.” He railed against American universities he accused of advancing a socialist revolution by assigning the teachings of Karl Marx. He manically claimed that “during the last decade, the Obama decade … a tidal wave of new European-style socialists … seized control of the Democratic Party … a party that is now infested with saboteurs who don’t believe in capitalism, who don’t believe in the Constitution, who don’t believe in freedom, and who don’t believe in America as we know it. Obama may be [gone] but their Utopian dream marches on. President Trump’s election, while crucial, can’t turn away the wave of these new European-style socialists bearing down upon us … How about Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio, Andrew Cuomo, Cory Booker, Christopher Murphy and Keith Ellison? … They hide behind labels like ‘Democrat,’ ‘left-wing,’ and ‘progressive’ to make their socialist agenda more palatable, and that’s terrifying” (emphasis added).

LaPierre warned that America is moving toward “a growing socialist state. … What [gun control advocates] want are more restrictions on the law-abiding,” he said; “they hate individual freedom … their solution is to make you, all of you, less free. … If they seize power … our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever.”

LaPierre’s neo-McCarthyite take on the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party and on the standard mild liberal and moderate calls for a glimmer of gun sanity was, of course, ridiculous. But for many of us on the actual left (something rather different than the positions of Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, et al.), the NRA boss was ironically correct to frame the gun issue in broad systemic and ideological terms. That’s because the gun madness that plagues America is fundamentally rooted in the nation’s atomizing, alienating and dehumanizing system of savage capitalism (which keeps the U.S. further from socialism than any rich country on the planet). A recent World Socialist Web Site reflection by Patrick Martin reminds us that “this latest massacre, like all the previous episodes of mass killings, is a manifestation of the extreme dysfunctionality of American society.” Further:

“The brutal harshness of every-day American life extracts a terrible toll in human suffering. Loneliness and alienation underlie the depressive illnesses that afflict so many millions of Americans. The social despair leads all too frequently to suicidal impulses. But it also erupts in episodes of homicidal violence … the Parkland tragedy exposes and refutes the ruling class’ delusionary evasion of the terrible truth about the state of this country. … American capitalism has produced a society in which the killing of children as they attend school has become a common occurrence.”

It isn’t just about anomie. As Chris Hedges recently noted in Truthdig, guns provide millions of capitalism’s victims a way to feel powerful in a society that has turned them into marginal and surplus Americans:

“The gun culture permits a dispossessed public, sheared of economic and political power, to buy a firearm and revel in feelings of omnipotence. A gun reminds Americans that they are divine agents of purification, anointed by God and Western civilization to remake the world in their own image. … As jobs and manufacturing are shipped overseas, communities crumble, despair grips much of the country and chronic poverty plagues American families, the gun seems to be the last tangible relic of a free and mythic America. It offers the illusion of power, protection and freedom. This is why the powerless will not give it up.”

How darkly appropriate it is that Stephen Paddock—a multimillionaire poker aficionado and former Lockheed Martin auditor—set a new single-shooter body-count record in Las Vegas, the world’s gambling capital, last fall. The madness related by Martin and Hedges is precisely what the arch-capitalist Casino Society created by America’s vanguard “free market” neoliberalism has wrought.

It is a perfect match for the NRA’s dream of a nation in which every (white) household is stocked with the latest tools of rapid-fire mass killing. This dream, or nightmare, is perhaps the epitome and embodiment of the capitalist vision of possessive individualism: Each against all; divide and conquer. The idea is to turn as many American households as possible into atomized self-defense and survival units—to create a nation of armed Robinson Crusoes, each stuck on his own little island. The citizenry of such a nation never joins hands in defense and advance of democracy, social justice, peace, ecological sanity and civil and human rights—the common good. It never demands something better than inadequate wages, savage socioeconomic and racial inequality, environmental ruin, abject plutocracy, rampant sexism, virulent racism and endless war.

The arch-neoliberal NRA vision of widely weaponized, possessive individualism claims to advance popular “freedom” from “big government,” but the real goal and result is very different. It is dedicated to starving the liberating and egalitarian—the parts of government that provide safety, security and inclusion for the poor and working-class majority while helping to distribute wealth and power downward to the people. It feeds and expands the repressive and regressive “right hand of the state”: the parts of government that concentrate wealth and power further upward while punishing the poor, oppressing and excluding minorities, waging permanent war, imprisoning, criminally marking, surveilling and generally repressing the majority nonaffluent populace.

The logical outcome is a vast, militarized police state: Hobbesian chaos leading to authoritarian state power in the name of law and order. Beneath the multimillionaire LaPierre’s warnings against alleged creeping authoritarian socialism, one can discern the real trajectory he and his “freedom”-touting, right-wing ilk want to put America on—toward fascism.

It isn’t just about class. The people who are most repressed, tortured, incarcerated and branded by the right-handed state that LaPierre promotes in the name of liberty are very disproportionately black, Latino and Native American. The massacres typically carried out by crazed white males become a pretext for the strengthening of a police and mass-incarceration state that is fundamentally committed to—and largely rooted in—the white-supremacist project of keeping blacks, Latinos and Native Americans down in their socioeconomic and related geographic places. The NRA is all about guns for white people above all. And many of the white people who cling to their guns as prized and precious possessions across a “gunfighter nation” forged in violent racial conquest see their weapons as protection not against the actual rulers of America—Bernie Sanders’ “billionaire class”—but rather, as Hedges observes, against “the black and brown underclass, an underclass many whites are convinced will threaten them as society breaks down.”

Will the nation tighten its gun laws in the wake of the Parkland massacre? If the nation were a democracy, based on majority rule, that would be a done deal. Two-thirds of the nation’s registered voters support stricter gun control. Just a quarter of the electorate opposes gun reform.

But so what? On guns, as on so many other key issues (take the “Dreamers” and the border wall, for just two among many examples), alas, the nation is not a functioning democracy—not even close. The majority does not rule; an oligarchy of concentrated wealth does. The majority doesn’t have democracy so much as it has, to quote George Carlin, “owners.” If the owners thought that widespread gun ownership threatened their rule with an armed uprising, Hedges rightly notes, “a draconian form of gun control would instantly be law.” But the masters, hidden and guarded in gated enclaves of sumptuous hyperopulence, fear no such thing. They are content to let the carnage continue as the news cycle moves off guns until the next massacre.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for serious reform this time.

Don’t Let These 4 Myths Keep You From Buying an Electric Car

China produced 680,000 electric vehicles last year, as much as the rest of the world combined. But by 2020 the Chinese hope to make and sell 2 million EV’s a year, and to go on up from there. The Chinese Communist Party is determined to reduce air pollution and cut China’s vast carbon footprint, for reasons of domestic harmony and international standing. And if the CCP wants to do it, it probably can. Chinese EVs have the potential to dominate the world market. That sort of development could accelerate China’s rise to the biggest world economy and the dominant superpower over the next two decades.

Making EVs on this scale has an impact on the rest of the world. Not only will other countries import electric cars from China, but the more it makes and sells the cheaper and better they will become. We are looking at everyone’s future here, not just China’s.

The propaganda against EVs from Big Oil is relentless and there are many misconceptions out there intended to discourage consumers from getting an electric vehicle. Here are 4 of the most pervasive and most pernicious myths:

1. Electric cars don’t have pick-up for merging on the highway. That is ridiculous. The Chevy Bolt, the Tesla 3, the Nissan Leaf all have plenty of pick-up and in fact the Teslas are almost like race cars. They handle nicely.

2. Electric cars have limited range and might leave you on the side of the road. Well, look, they do have a range. But the current generation get something on the order of 250 miles on a charge and 95% of the trips you make are more like 5 miles unless you are a long distance commuter. If you need to go farther than 250 miles, rent a car or take a bus. It likely isn’t that often. I used mine to commute into work in Ann Arbor when the ranges weren’t nearly as good, and never had any problems getting around town. Besides, the Tesla 3 in particular charges quickly and there are an increasing number of charging stations.

3. Driving an electric car just shifts carbon dioxide emissions from the exhaust pipe to the smokestack. This allegation is just untrue. All electric cars on the road today are less polluting than all gasoline and diesel cars, even in dirty grid states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But there is more. The US in the past decade has gone from getting 8% of its electricity from renewables to 18%. As more wind and solar projects come on line, that percentage will rapidly increase (Iowa electricity is already 33% wind). Over the time you own the car, your electricity source will get cleaner. All the coal plants will soon be closed. And there is yet more. If you are a homeowner, you can put solar panels on your roof and fuel the car from them. The combined EV-panels will get paid off more quickly by saving on electricity and gas bills, and you’ll be driving on sunshine.

4. EVs are expensive. Sure they are for a lot of people, but they now range in the US market from $23,000 on up. Middle class families buy cars in that range all the time. You may be eligible for a tax break of several thousand dollars from your state or the Federal government, in addition. And, remember that the fuel is virtually free. The average American spends on the order of $2,000 a year on gasoline or other automotive fuel, which over a decade would be $20,000. In other words your $25,000 gasoline car is actually $45,000 over ten years. But especially if you have solar panels, your EV fuel costs are nothing, and they are negligible even if you don’t. And remember, your gasoline car is causing extreme weather, which could hit your house and family and be very, very expensive. Your EV isn’t endangering your life savings in the same way. It is much, much cheaper.

Besides, the cars will rapidly come down in price.

——–

Administration Sues California Over State Sanctuary Laws

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration on Tuesday sued to block California laws that extend protections to people living in the U.S. illegally, the most aggressive move yet in its push to force so-called sanctuary cities and states to cooperate with immigration authorities. California officials remained characteristically defiant, vowing to defend their landmark legislation.

The Justice Department argued a trio of state laws that, among other things, bar police from asking people about their citizenship status or participating in federal immigration enforcement activities are unconstitutional and have kept federal agents from doing their jobs. The lawsuit named as defendants the state of California, Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

“I say, bring it on,” said California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat who wrote the sanctuary state bill.

It is the latest salvo in an escalating feud between the Trump administration and California, which has resisted the president on issues like taxes and marijuana policy and defiantly refuses to help federal agents detain and deport undocumented immigrants. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has said it will increase its presence in California, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to cut off funding to jurisdictions that won’t cooperate.

The lawsuit was filed as the Justice Department is also reviewing Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s decision to warn of an immigration sweep in advance, which ICE said allowed hundreds of immigrants to elude detention. Schaaf said Tuesday the city would “continue to inform all residents about their constitutional rights.”

The state laws being challenged were a response to President Donald Trump’s hawkish immigration policies and widespread fear in immigrant communities following a campaign in which he promised to sharply ramp up the deportation of people living in the U.S. illegally. The decision to sue California shows Sessions and Trump remain aligned on this priority, even as their relationship has recently deteriorated, with Trump attacking his attorney general and Sessions pushing back.

Brown mimicked Trump on Twitter Tuesday night, writing: “At a time of unprecedented political turmoil, Jeff Sessions has come to California to further divide and polarize America. Jeff, these political stunts may be the norm in Washington, but they don’t work here. SAD!!!”

One of California’s laws prohibits employers from letting immigration agents enter worksites or view employee files without a subpoena or warrant, an effort to prevent workplace raids. Another stops local governments from contracting with for-profit companies and ICE to hold immigrants. Justice Department officials, speaking to reporters Tuesday, said that violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which renders invalid state laws that conflict with federal ones.

The Supreme Court reinforced the federal government’s primacy in enforcing immigration law when it blocked much of Arizona’s tough 2010 immigration law on similar grounds. The high court found several key provisions undermined federal immigration law, though it upheld a provision requiring officers, while enforcing other laws, to question the immigration status of people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Sessions planned to discuss the lawsuit Wednesday at an annual gathering of law enforcement officers in Sacramento.

“The Department of Justice and the Trump administration are going to fight these unjust, unfair and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed on you,” he said in prepared remarks. “I believe that we are going to win.”

Sessions has blamed sanctuary city policies for crime and gang violence and announced in July that cities and states could only receive certain grants if they cooperate with immigration agents. California is suing to force the administration to release one such grant. The state wants a judge to certify that its laws are in compliance with federal immigration law.

Defenders of sanctuary policies say they increase public safety by promoting trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement, while allowing police resources to be used to fight other crimes.

“We’re in the business of public safety, not deportation,” said Becerra, who insisted the state is on strong legal footing when it comes to dealing with immigration officials. “When people feel confident to come forward to report crimes in our communities or to participate in policing efforts without fear of deportation, they are more likely to cooperate with the criminal justice system altogether.”

Sessions’ audience Wednesday includes members of the California Peace Officers’ Association and groups representing police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys, narcotics investigators and the California Highway Patrol.

The groups’ members have often been split on sanctuary policies. None of the groups favored the state law restricting cooperation with immigration officials, but only the California State Sheriffs’ Association was actively opposed and some individual officials voiced support.

Protesters from labor unions, the Democratic Party and immigrant rights organizations planned to rally along with some state and local elected officials outside the hotel where Sessions will speak.

Becerra, a Democrat who is up for election in November, has been sharply critical of Republicans Trump and Sessions, particularly on immigration policies. He will speak to the same conference later Wednesday.

__

Associated Press writers Jonathan Cooper and Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento contributed to this report. Thompson reported from Sacramento.

California’s Democratic Primary and the Sham of Elections

The recent California Democrats State Convention denied Sen. Dianne Feinstein an endorsement for a fifth full term, although the party machine and her bank account are still in her favor. There are signs of dissent and youthful unrest among Democrats, and not just in California, though anyone hoping to reform that party must first break the death grip of the old guard.

Reformers also will inherit clever partisan maneuvers that became quicksand and Machiavellian inspirations that became institutional iron traps. Here is a cautionary tale, as written in an ancient psalm: “They dig a pit and make it deep, and fall into the hole that they have made.”

Shortly before California’s Proposition 14 appeared on the ballot in June 2010, the topic of the top-two primary system came up at a dinner party where I was a guest.

An active member of the Democratic Party expressed enthusiasm for Proposition 14, saying it would make it tougher for third parties to “distract voters,” in her words.

“You are making an argument against democracy,” I said. The room’s microclimate got chilly, and we exchanged a few words of sharp disagreement.

As noted by David Dayen in The Intercept, “Winnowing the large fields in House races was a theme of the party convention, with its leaders openly stating a desire to thin the ranks. That’s because of the state’s top-two primary, where the leading two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party. It could set up situations in swing races with lots of Democrats running where they cancel each other out, leading to two Republicans competing in November.”

Regardless of party? Well, not quite. The top-two primary system was designed to favor the corporate duopoly. “Progressives” in the Democratic Party who favored Proposition 14 now have to live with the consequences. At least some of them thought they were playing 3-D chess against insurgent candidates and parties. Now, in at least some races, they may be reduced to inner-party ritual suicide while playing a partisan checkers game that seemed like a good idea to them in 2010.

If leading Democrats in California really want to make elections fair and democratic, they would endorse and campaign in earnest for instant-runoff voting, or ranked-choice voting. So why don’t they? Career politicians in the big corporate parties don’t really want the competition. They would prefer to continue framing opposition candidates and parties as “spoilers.” They prefer to pose as pragmatists and lament “wasted votes”—namely, the votes they can never gain by honest elections.

When such career politicians and their publicists also have the gall to give us advice on “swing states” and “strategic voting,” they deserve Bronx cheers. If something has to give, it is their corrupt “bipartisan” electoral system, and not our votes. We do not need civics lessons from politicians who claim every vote counts but lose their minds when our votes count against them.

Because they work in earnest to disenfranchise voters who oppose their public policies, they also teach the useful lesson that a social revolution may be necessary to gain a truly democratic republic.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have their two-party system, but we cannot have both. The actual party of peace, economic democracy and ecological sanity is still a work in progress, including many Green Party voters and supporters of democratic socialism.

The parties of corporate dictatorship will not reform themselves out of sheer goodwill. Only steady resistance will break their grip on power. Whether on election days or in the social movements that go over, under and around their corporate obstacle course, our voice and our message are growing clearer and stronger:

Not one cent for the parties of corporate dictatorship, not one vote for the parties of war and empire.

North Korea Reportedly Open to Disarmament Talks With U.S.

SEOUL, South Korea—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has expressed a willingness to discuss nuclear disarmament with the United States and impose a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests during such talks, a senior South Korean official said Tuesday after returning from the North.

Kim also agreed to meet with South Korea’s president at a tense border village in late April, presidential national security director Chung Eui-yong said after talks with Kim in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital.

North Korea’s reported willingness to hold a “candid dialogue” with the United States to discuss denuclearization and establish diplomatic relations follows a year of increased fears of war on the Korean Peninsula, with Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump exchanging fiery rhetoric and crude insults over Kim’s barrage of weapons tests.

The Trump administration also pushed through some of the harshest sanctions the already hugely sanctioned North has yet faced.

Trump tweeted Tuesday that “possible progress” was being made in the talks with North Korea, and that all sides were making serious efforts. He added: “May be false hope, but the U.S. is ready to go hard in either direction!”

There is still skepticism whether the developments will help establish genuine peace between the Koreas, which have a long history of failing to follow through with major rapprochement agreements. The United States has made it clear that it doesn’t want empty talks with North Korea and that all options, including military measures, remain on the table.

The North has repeatedly said in the past that it won’t negotiate over its nuclear program and vowed to bolster its nuclear and missile arsenals. Its apparent about-face might be an attempt to win concessions as its economy struggles under the weight of sanctions, some analysts said, or a way to buy time to better develop nuclear missiles targeting the mainland United States.

Many experts believe North Korea won’t easily give up a nuclear program that it has doggedly developed, despite years of escalating international pressure, to cope with what it claims is U.S. hostility.

Chung led a 10-member South Korean delegation on a two-day visit to North Korea. They were the first South Korean officials to meet the young North Korean leader since he took power after his dictator father’s death in late 2011. Chung’s trip also was the first known high-level visit by South Korean officials to North Korea in about 11 years.

Related Articles









Daniel Ellsberg on Dismantling the Doomsday Machine



by















Are You Listening, America?



by Scott Ritter

It followed a series of cooperative steps taken by the Koreas during last month’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics hosted by South Korea.

If talks with the United States happen, Chung said North Korea “made it clear that it won’t resume strategic provocations like additional nuclear tests or test-launches of ballistic missiles” while the talks continue.

North Korea told the South Korean envoys that it would not need to keep its nuclear weapons if military threats against it are removed and it receives a credible security guarantee, Chung said. He said the North promised not to use its nuclear and conventional weapons against South Korea.

Kim also said he “understands” that contentious annual military drills by the U.S. and South Korea will take place in April at a scale similar to previous years and expressed hope that they could be modified once the situation on the Korean Peninsula stabilizes, according to a senior South Korean presidential official, who didn’t want to be named, citing office rules.

Chung said the two Koreas agreed to hold their summit at a Seoul-controlled facility inside the border village. He also said Kim and liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in will establish a “hotline” communication channel between them to lower military tensions, and would speak together before the planned summit.

If realized, the summit between the countries’ leaders would be the third-ever since the Koreas’ 1945 division. The two past summits, in 2000 and 2007, were both in Pyongyang and were held between Kim’s late father, Kim Jong Il, and two liberal South Korean presidents. They resulted in a series of cooperative projects that were scuttled during subsequent conservative administrations in South Korea.

Analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Korea’s Sejong Institute said the agreements “potentially pave the way for meaningful dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang” and could offer an opportunity to stably manage the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile programs.

“Getting North Korea to agree to halt additional nuclear weapons and missile tests while the dialogue goes on is the biggest achievement of the visit to Pyongyang by the South Korean presidential envoys,” he said.

Afghanistan: Mission Impossible

There are reports the U.S. Army is readying about a thousand additional troops for deployment to Afghanistan where they will link up with some 14,000 other U.S. service members tasked with an unachievable mission.

At the same time, this news was drowned out by the latest catastrophic attack, a horrific bombing that left more than 100 dead — The United States Central Command Commander General Votel was even nearby — in the very center of a “secure” district of Kabul.

The persistence of such violence after 16 years of U.S. intervention raises serious questions about the need for and ability of the United States military to address what is at root an internal Afghan security problem increasingly disconnected from core American security interests.

I am no stranger to these un-winnable crusades. In early 2011, my own unit flew into Kandahar—part of the last few thousand troops authorized under the Obama “surge.”

This talk of reinforcement, escalation, and “surging” is nothing new. It is history repeating itself.

These next 1,000 soldiers will enter the Afghan maelstrom as no less than the fifth surge attempted by military and political “strategists” who are clearly out of ideas (perhaps because there is no military solution to a fundamentally political problem).

The first was in 2008, as the Taliban overran key rural districts, President George W. Bush “quietly surged” a couple more combat brigades — some 8,000 soldiers — into Afghanistan just before leaving office. Shortly after taking over in 2009, President Obama ordered in 21,000 more troops.

Next, after at least three strategy reviews, Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 additional reinforcements. At peak strength, more than 100,000 American troops fought there. After several drawdowns, Obama left office with troop numbers hovering around 10,000.

Trump then entered office, and though his original “instinct” was to “pull out,” he caved to the generals and instead proclaimed a “new” strategy of escalation  — 4,000 or 5,000 more service members.

Which brings us to the present potential escalation of 1,000 more brave troopers in a paltry “Surge 5.0.”

According to a recent Washington Post report, the extra 1,000 troops will contribute to the current American “strategy” to “bolster” Afghan troops so they can “pound” the Taliban in this spring’s fighting season.

How, a reasonable observer might ask, will a now grand total of 15,000 U.S. troops suddenly “pound” the Taliban when more than 100,000 of America’s finest failed to do so in 2011-12?

Leaving aside the bellicose rhetoric, let’s examine a few difficult, inconvenient facts presented by Washington’s own Congressional Research Service report:

A record number of Afghan provinces and districts are under the control of or contested by the Taliban at present — this after over 16 years of U.S. efforts.


Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) combat deaths hit 6,700 in 2016—a rate in which U.S. commanders have labeled as “unsustainable.”


The Taliban has always and will always be able to count on a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan. That’s a formula for perpetual insurgency.


Afghanistan’s economy still cannot support itself. In any given year foreign military and aid accounts for about 95 percent of total GDP, which means Afghan security is unsustainable without U.S. taxpayers funding a significant portion (forever?).


Despite two decades of on-again, off-again drug eradication efforts, in 2017, Afghan opium production reached record levels. The resultant heroin cash windfall funds not only the Taliban, but also “poppy palaces,” mansions built by crooked government officials.


Both the 2009 and 2014 Afghan presidential elections were highly corrupt and tainted. The very legitimacy of our partnered Afghan government is dubious at best.


The U.S. has attempted to foist a powerful presidency and central government on an Afghan society that has been historically built around rural autonomy and devolution. Perhaps Washington will one day recognize the reason Afghanistan has been ungoverned for centuries is because it is ungovernable, not because America’s presence has been lacking.

Furthermore, the legal basis of the conflict is questionable. American soldiers are fighting in undeclared wars authorized by the vague, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

That AUMF — which authorized the use force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the [9/11 attacks], or harbored such organizations or persons” — seems wholly inadequate to justify nearly a decade and a half of nation building.

For starters, the vast majority of “Taliban” fighters in Afghanistan today are Islamist nationalists who seek only to expel foreign troops from their lands. They have little to no connection to 9/11 and present no transnational terror threat to the United States. Just as disturbingly, 18-year-old U.S. military recruits patrolling Afghanistan today were toddlers on 9/11.

Some military and congressional hawks might then point to the new ISIS franchise — the “Khorasan province” of the caliphate — entrenched in Eastern Afghanistan.

Except Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, neither the Mesopotamian nor Afghan variety, even existed in 2001, so they can hardly fall under the existing AUMF umbrella.

Congress has a constitutional and ethical duty to either: 1) draft, outline and pass into law a new comprehensive AUMF covering contemporary operations in Afghanistan; or 2) bring American servicemen and women home before any more are killed in a fruitless conflict which is patently not a vital strategic interest.

President Trump’s White House is now the third administration to implement a surge and ask the impossible of those in uniform.

It is long past time to stop believing in surges, leadership changes, and other tired old approaches from the interventionist Washington elite. In Afghanistan policy there is, truly, nothing new under the sun.

Prudent foreign policy realism demands strategists who recognize that there are some wars that just can’t be won, at least within sustainable commitment and costs. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has said as much, admitting “there are problems that are maybe both intractable and of marginal interest to the American people, that do not justify investments of blood and treasure.”

I’d agree, and, in this case, when it comes to Afghanistan — just as in Vietnam — perhaps the more salient question isn’t whether the war is winnable, but, rather, if it is worth fighting at all.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.