Rouge Forum Dispatch: Trigger Warning.
We Say Fight Back!
Conference: Commemorating Violent Conflicts and Building Sustainable Peace
“Commemorating Violent Conflicts and Building Sustainable Peace”
An International Conference at Kent State University
Commemorating the May 4, 1970 shooting by the Ohio National Guard of
Kent State Students during a demonstration against the US wars in Vietnam
and Cambodia and the occupation of the Kent State campus
by the Ohio National Guard
Kent, OH, USA, October 24-26, 2019
The School of Peace and Conflict Studies of Kent State University
The Peace History Society, The Peace Studies Section of the International Studies Association
The conference will open on Thursday evening October 24, 2019 with a reception and speaker. Friday and Saturday during the day (Oct. 24 and 25) will be devoted to concurrent panels and paper presentations on the various conference themes. Please refer to the Call for Papers for details. Submission of paper abstracts are due by February 15, 2019 and must be uploaded through the conference website on the International Studies Association platform. www.kent.edu/spcs/conference-commemorating-violent-conflicts-and-building-sustainable-peace
www.facebook.com/TheHamptonInstitute/videos/910288692454668/?t
One Dead, 47 Injured in France Amid Protests Against Fuel Prices – Reports
Unions and political parties have used social networks to call for mass protest throughout France against the rising price of petrol.
At least 47 people were injured during protests targeting the increase in fuel prices, which took place on Saturday throughout France.
According to the French radio station France info, three people were seriously injured in traffic accidents.
One person was knocked down and killed in the southeastern French Isere department amid protests against fuel price hikes, local media reported on Saturday.
According to BFMTV, the accident occurred in Isere’s Pont-de-Beauvoisin commune. A female driver panicked as the traffic was blocked by scores of protesters, and bumped into the crowd, fatally injuring a woman, aged around 50 years. The driver was detained.
There are plans to block the main transport highways, and in some places to block access to petrol stations and suburban supermarkets. sputniknews.com/europe/201811171069890268-france-taxes-fuel/
www.facebook.com/CareyWedler/videos/347028889408808/?t=72
www.facebook.com/SputnikNews/videos/714796108899582/?t=16
The Little Red Schoolhouse
The Free Speech Crisis on Campus Is Worse than People Think
A new moral culture
If you were a time traveler from 10 years ago—maybe even five years ago—you’d probably have trouble following some of that. What’s a microaggression? What’s woke? And how could a New York Times op-ed lead to that kind of uproar on campus? But if you’ve been around, and if you’ve been following the happenings on American college campuses, you’re familiar by now with conflicts like this and the new moral terminology guiding the campus activists. In the last few years we’ve seen professors such as Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State College surrounded by angry, cursing students, with Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, soon leaving their positions as the masters of one of Yale’s residential colleges and Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, leaving Evergreen entirely. We’ve heard about microaggressions, said to be small slights that over time do great harm to disadvantaged groups; trigger warnings, which some students demand before they are exposed to course material that might be disturbing; and safe spaces, where people can go to be free of ideas that challenge leftist identity politics. We’ve heard claims that speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we’ve seen activists use actual violence to stop it —and to defend this as self-defense—when administrators fail to do so. quillette.com/2018/11/14/the-free-speech-crisis-on-campus-is-worse-than-people-think/?fbclid=IwAR1VrfO4tEcHl3OmTRDxXlx8LHZMgpaFtuXGFHa5vMTo_4qrQsS8-17SIrc
University alerts students to danger of leftwing essay
Prevent critics slam Reading for labelling ‘mainstream’ academic text as extremist (Norm above)
An essay by a prominent leftwing academic that examines the ethics of socialist revolution has been targeted by a leading university using the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.
Students at the University of Reading have been told to take care when reading an essay by the late Professor Norman Geras, in order to avoid falling foul of Prevent.
Third-year politics undergraduates have been warned not to access it on personal devices, to read it only in a secure setting, and not to leave it lying around where it might be spotted “inadvertently or otherwise, by those who are not prepared to view it”. The alert came after the text was flagged by the university as “sensitive” under the Prevent programme.
The essay, listed as “essential” reading for the university’s Justice and Injustice politics module last year, is titled Our Morals: The Ethics of Revolution. Geras was professor emeritus of government at the University of Manchester until his death in 2013. He rejected terrorism but argued that violence could be justified in the case of grave social injustices.
Waqas Tufail, a senior lecturer in criminology at Leeds Beckett University who wrote a report about Prevent last year, described the case at Reading as “hugely concerning”. Another Prevent expert, Fahid Qurashi of Staffordshire University, said the move showed how anti-terrorism legislation is “being applied far beyond its purview”. www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/11/reading-university-warns-danger-left-wing-essay?fbclid=IwAR2tK83mNbVImookz0E0kAOQxaWsPrd4p81IgPTKy1y_2d1uq_ay6OMW6rU
Developer Moores in last-minute SDSU money move (add Enron’s Steve Peace)
Ex-Padres owner John Moores, long a lurker around the margins of San Diego State University’s attempts to take control of the city-owned acreage formerly known as Qualcomm Stadium, has finally outed himself.
On November 2, four days before the election that will decide the outcome of the university’s battle with an investor group known as SoccerCity for development rights to the property, Moores personally produced $98,500 for Friends of SDSU, the political committee waging a ballot campaign on behalf of the school’s takeover of the land.
The same day, disclosure filings show, Kara M. Kratzer, listed as a Rancho Santa Fe homemaker, came up with the same. Her husband John Kratzer is CEO of Moores-owned JMI Realty. Since August 2, records show JMI, hired by SDSU as a consultant to the project, has given a total of $122,000 to the pro-SDSU committee.
Moores has a controversial history as an SDSU benefactor, having cultivated university officials as far back as ex-president Steve Weber and his second in command, then-SDSU vice-president Sally Roush, with sizable dollops of cash for the school’s athletic programs.
Two decades ago, in December 1997, Weber first approached Moores with a proposal for SDSU to share ownership of a new Padres stadium and ancillary real estate development, similar in outline to that currently proposed by the university.
“This letter is to introduce the concept of a public/private partnership, which would enable the financing and constructing of a baseball stadium for the San Diego Padres,” Weber wrote Moores. “The partnership would be between you and San Diego State University, with whom you have obviously established a history of philanthropy.”
The racist “Aztec” moniker retained by SDSU by vote of a Secret “Committee” despite faculty vote.
Weber plied Moores with the notion of leveraging his charity for personal financial advantage.
“The partnership also assumes that whatever personal stake you intend to contribute to the baseball stadium is significantly stretched by the multiple tax advantages associated with a charitable contribution.
“With this contribution, and assuming naming-rights revenue and sufficient operating income, SDSU would seek to purchase a site and secure construction financing either as a governmental agency, through one of our existing nonprofit corporations, or through a newly established nonprofit.”
To avoid detailed scrutiny of the arrangement, Weber argued for avoiding any say in the matter by the city’s electorate. “Under such a scenario, a public vote would not be required. The stadium would be leased back to the Padres, and the site would be available for joint use for our educational programs.”
No deal materialized, and a year later with the assistance of then-city manager Jack McGrory, mayor Susan Golding, and Union-Tribune owner Helen Copley, Moores mounted a successful 1998 ballot bid to build a downtown ballpark with public money.
“The city and its redevelopment arm, the Centre City Development Corp., will contribute $275 million to the project, largely through the issuance of bonds,” Copley’s Union-Tribune reported a week before the November election on the project.
“The bonds will be paid off with hotel-room taxes and new property taxes created by the project,” the paper asserted. By 2015, however, city taxpayers found themselves on the hook for paying down the enormous debt, plus interest.
Flash forward to April 2016.
The Chargers having forsaken Qualcomm Stadium Moores and his JMI Realty launched another attempt to latch on to the aging venue’s real estate.
“The JMI team (represented by President John Kratzer and Steve Peace), working in concert with Steve Black of Cisterra Development, another prominent San Diego developer (and SDSU alumni), will unveil their proposal to develop the Qualcomm Stadium site into a civic gem that all SDSU alumni and San Diego County residents will claim proudly,” read the invitation JMI’s presentation held at SDSU’s Corky McMillin Center for Real Estate.
Moores himself, caught up in the twin scandals of the city council’s Valerie Stallings influence-peddling affair and financial shenanigans at his fraud-tainted Peregrine Systems, along with a messy divorce battle, was no longer being publicly mentioned by the university as a partner in the future Mission Valley deal.
“Look, take my name off stuff. I don’t want my name used in affiliation with the university if it’s going to be a lightning rod for controversy,” then–Padres vice chairman Bob Vizas quoted Moores as saying in October 2002 after a student newspaper columnist questioned the propriety of the mega-millionaire’s $30 million of SDSU donations.
“A university spokesman noted that a plaque honoring the Mooreses on the school’s baseball stadium, along with several plaques naming other benefactors, had recently been removed for cleaning,” the L.A. Times reported.
“Spokesman Jack Beresford said he did not know when or whether they would be replaced. www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2018/nov/05/ticker-developer-moores-last-sdsu-money-move/
Dear School Administrators, Please Stop Taking Away Teacher Planning Periods
Please. Just please.
Dear School Administrators,
I realize that it’s been a while since you’ve been in the classroom, and you may have forgotten the sacred nature of teacher planning time. You’ve most likely buried the memory of having only 20–30 minutes of free time during the day. You know, the time used to plan lessons, go to the bathroom, eat lunch, call parents, cry if you need to, and clean out your inbox.
So I’m writing to remind you that teacher planning time is our lifeline to surviving the teaching day. Taking it away is like draining the oxygen from our lungs. When it’s stolen regularly, oxygen depletion settles in, and you’ll find yourself with frazzled, fatigued, and frustrated teachers.
As teachers, we feel disrespected when you take this time from us. It communicates that you don’t think we have anything better to do or that this time is optional—which it isn’t. Maybe if you knew how much this planning time contributed to the quality of our teaching, student assessment, professional development, relationships, extracurricular participation, and personal health, you’d feel differently about asking us to skip it or cut it short. Here are some of the vital reasons we need this time. www.weareteachers.com/i-need-my-planning-periods/?fbclid=IwAR0mi4-OZeOsiRhvaXnzj-XwNxlxx6v1RmLYb9C55PSDgIwas7o3QkI4JlI#.W_DkzwCIFsM.facebook
Paradise Educators Hold Class
Teachers from Children’s Community Charter School in the fire-ravaged town of Paradise wanted to help their students maintain some sense of normalcy and routine, in addition to continuing their lessons.
So Annie Finney, second grade teacher and president of the Children’s Community Charter School Teachers Association, along with fellow teachers and CCCSTA members Sheri Eichar and Brittany Bentz decided to organize a “school day” on Nov. 16 for about 25 first- to third-grade students in a public library in nearby Chico.
The children’s section of the library buzzed with laughter and excited conversation—the sounds of school—and hugs and smiles greeted every student who arrived.
“You came to school!” Finney said, greeting third-grade student C.J. Ryder. “Thank you for coming here today. We are blessed to be together again!”
Jamie Ryder, C.J.’s mom, said that getting together for class meant a lot to her son and his classmates, who were chased from their normal lives when the devastating Camp Fire burned nearly all of Paradise to the ground. Eichar estimates that 90 percent of the students lost their homes as well as their school, which was destroyed by the fire. “It’s awesome for these kids to get back a little bit of what they had,” Ryder said. “We’ve had so much support.”
Eichar has already been teaching class to 10 of her students in her kitchen. The day after the the students were chased from their homes, she used Facebook to talk about a book they had been reading just a day earlier, before the skies filled with smoke and lives changed forever. She, Finney and Bentz have been in contact over Facebook with all of their students, and organized relief supplies for their families.
Just before “class time,” a donor from Oregon delivered a truck full of suitcases to Eichar, which she distributed to families in need. For those who literally escaped with the clothes they were wearing, this luggage meant no longer carrying their few items in plastic garbage bags and the familiar feeling of having a place for their things. californiaeducator.org/2018/11/16/paradise-educators-hold-class/?fbclid=IwAR1SuYZxdRTEBAJ2qIMe34nCJnqRAZmNfNR673ghToRtU4ypG6_OR5zr7Xw
Borrowers Face Hazy Path as Program to Forgive Student Loans Stalls Under Betsy DeVos
The students attended institutions with pragmatic names like the Minnesota School of Business and others whose branding evoked ivy-draped buildings and leafy quads, like Corinthian Colleges. Tens of thousands of them say they are alike in one respect: They were victims of fraud, left with useless degrees and crushing debts.
Now the government program meant to forgive the federal loans of cheated students has all but stopped functioning.
No Education Department employees are devoted full time to investigating borrowers’ complaints, according to three people familiar with the agency’s operations. Instead, the agency’s staff has fought in court to reduce the amount of relief granted to some students and to halt a rule change intended to speed other claims along.
That has left more than 100,000 claims for relief in limbo, according to the Education Department’s most recent data.
It’s just dream-crushing,” said Meaghan Bauer, who owes $45,000 for her time at the New England Institute of Art. The for-profit school, in Brookline, Mass., closed last year and was sued on fraud charges by the state attorney general in July.
“I can’t afford to go back to school,” Ms. Bauer, 27, said. “Will I ever be able to buy a house? Or get married? I spent so much time working on a useless degree, and it could ruin me financially for the rest of my life.”
The relief program, called borrower defense, became a popular way for students to seek debt forgiveness after several major for-profit schools went bust in recent years. During the Obama administration, the Education Department approved about 30,000 claims, more than half of them in the final two weeks before the new administration took over. All of those borrowers had their loans fully forgiven. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/business/student-loans-betsy-devos.html
Texas Students Will Soon Learn Slavery Played A Central Role In The Civil War!!!
Texas’ Board of Education voted Friday to change the way its students learn about the Civil War. Beginning in the 2019-2020 school year, students will be taught that slavery played a “central role” in the war.
The state’s previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery, in that order. In September, the board’s Democrats proposed listing slavery as the only cause.
“What the use of ‘states’ rights’ is doing is essentially blanketing, or skirting, the real foundational issue, which is slavery,” Democratic board member Marisa Perez-Diaz, from San Antonio, said at a Tuesday board meeting.
Republican board member David Bradley, from Beaumont, argued for keeping the other causes in the curriculum. He said, “Each state had differences and made individual decisions as to whether or not to join into the conflict, correct? I mean, that’s the definition of states’ rights.”
In the end, the Republican-led board landed on a compromise: Students will be taught about “the central role of the expansion of slavery in causing sectionalism, disagreements over states’ rights and the Civil War.”
Houston Democrat Lawrenche Allen Jr., the board’s only African-American member, helped write the new language. He believes it draws a straighter line between slavery and the Civil War than the previous standards did.
“I don’t think we really have that as a consensus in our state,” he said Friday. “And so if we can’t drive it to a consensus in our state, we need to let our students look at it from all points of view.”
The board also decided to keep Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller in the curriculum, reversing a decision that made headlines in September. Clinton and Keller were initially removed, along with other historical figures, in an effort to “streamline” the state’s social studies standards.
The approved curriculum still lists only one cause for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “the rejection of the existence of the state of Israel by the Arab league and a majority of Arab nations.”
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
www.facebook.com/mcrdsd/videos/2023494347940601/?t=52
US Military Faces a Crisis and Needs More Money (For WW3), Report to Congress Warns
Rising risks: America’s ability to defend itself, its allies and its interests “is increasingly in doubt,” the report says. Shifting regional military balances in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East are undermining the confidence of U.S. allies and emboldening adversaries, raising the likelihood of military conflict.
“The U.S. military could suffer unacceptably high casualties and loss of major capital assets in its next conflict. It might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia. The United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously,” the panel warns. Resource shortfalls and other factors also threaten the military’s ability to meet other goals, such as being able to defeat a major power while maintaining deterrence in other parts of the globe.
Big budget questions: The commission says that, despite a $716 billion overall defense budget — “four times the size of China’s and more than 10 times that of Russia,” The Washington Post notes — the military “unequivocally” does not have the resources it needs to carry out the new National Defense Strategy. And it says that money saved by planned Pentagon reforms won’t be enough to properly fund the new approach. www.thefiscaltimes.com/2018/11/14/US-Military-Faces-Crisis-and-Needs-More-Money-Report-Congress-Warns
Three Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’ Today
Still think globalization will bring peace? They thought that in 1914, too.
First, peace is always more fragile than it seems. In 1914, Europe had not experienced an all-out, continental conflict since the end of the Napoleonic wars a century earlier. Some observers believed that a return to such catastrophic bloodletting had become almost impossible. The British author Norman Angell would immortalize himself by suggesting, just a few years before World War I, that what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete. War, he argued, had become futile because peace and the growing economic and financial linkages between the major European states were producing so much prosperity. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-11/100-years-after-world-war-i-there-s-reason-to-fear?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=181112&utm_campaign=sharetheview
Mattis defends border deployment, likens it to 1916 effort against Pancho Villa (forgetting that the US Invaded Mexico)
Defense Secretary James Mattis on Wednesday defended the deployment of active duty troops to the U.S. border with Mexico, arguing that it is providing wartime training, The Associated Press reported.
Mattis pushed back on critics who have said that the 5,800-troop deployment — ordered by President Trump late last month ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections — was weighing on the military’s combat readiness.
…The Pentagon has been unable to provide a cost estimate for the deployment, but estimates from outside organizations puts the figure somewhere between $42 million and $110 million if Trump follows through with threats to send up to 15,000 service members.
Roughly 2,100 National Guard troops were already at the border as part of Operation Guardian Support, which began in April. That operation is estimated to cost $182 million, the Pentagon said in May.
Mattis would not provide an estimate of how much the current mission will cost, saying that preliminary figures are “not anywhere near right.” thehill.com/policy/defense/416822-mattis-likens-border-deployment-to-1916-effort-to-counter-pancho-villa
U.S. Has Spent Six Trillion Dollars on Wars That Killed Half a Million People Since 9/11, Report Says
The United States has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published its annual “Costs of War” report Wednesday, taking into consideration the Pentagon’s spending and its Overseas Contingency Operations account, as well as “war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans’ care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security.”
The final count revealed, “The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans.”
“In sum, high costs in war and war-related spending pose a national security concern because they are unsustainable,” the report concluded. “The public would be better served by increased transparency and by the development of a comprehensive strategy to end the wars and deal with other urgent national security priorities.”
…Wednesday’s report found that the “US military is conducting counterterror activities in 76 countries, or about 39 percent of the world’s nations, vastly expanding [its mission] across the globe.” In addition, these operations “have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad.”
Overall, researchers estimated that “between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.” This toll “does not include the more than 500,000 deaths from the war in Syria, raging since 2011” when a West-backed rebel and jihadi uprising challenged the government, an ally of Russia and Iran. That same year, the U.S.-led NATO Western military alliance intervened in Libya and helped insurgents overthrow longtime leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, leaving the nation in an ongoing state of civil war. www.newsweek.com/us-spent-six-trillion-wars-killed-half-million-1215588?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=NewsweekFacebookSF&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3DmrcqTdG0t-_0xptOEElX6RqAil84MTDzFGVM5OtiyMmIyVzlF9g7dHY
The VA building above was built improperly from the start
GI Bill benefits delayed for student vets
A problem with federal payments to veterans receiving GI Bill benefits has impacted several students at Colorado Mesa University, but they won’t be dropped from the student rolls for failure to pay tuition and housing costs, said Amanda Herron, CMU’s veterans benefits and services coordinator.
That’s because the university, fully aware of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs payment issues, is giving the students — about 30 of them — more time to pay.
“We made it so that they will not be penalized for not paying their tuition on time,” Herron said. “Some of them, we’re giving them until the end of the semester since they still have not been paid. It’s affecting veterans and dependents alike.”
At issue is a computer problem in the VA’s Education Services office.
The agency says that because of changes this summer as to how veteran GI Bill benefits are calculated, its computer system bogged down, resulting in tens of thousands of veteran students nationwide seeing payments that were weeks, and in some cases, months behind.
“Education Services continues to experience a higher than normal pending claims inventory, which is causing processing and payment delays for some GI Bill students,” www.gjsentinel.com/news/western_colorado/gi-bill-benefits-delayed-for-student-vets/article_f5c28c62-e966-11e8-8570-10604b9f1ff4.html
‘It’s A Scandal’ — Inside The Fight To Hold The Military Accountable For Medical Malpractice
“I feel like my life has been stolen from me because people failed to do their job.”
“Somebody sentenced me to an early death, and they could have prolonged it a lot longer. I’m being taken from my children, my two daughters, and my wife. I’m being taken from the plans I had for the next 15 years in the military, everything.”
…the Feres Doctrine was established in 1950 by the Supreme Court in Feres vs. United States, a case involving the Federal Tort Claims Act that allows citizens to sue the government for negligence or wrongdoing. In Feres, the Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the widow of Army Lt. Rudolph Feres, who died in 1947 when his barracks caught fire due to a defective heating system, ruling that the federal government could not be held liable “for injuries to members of the armed forces arising from activities incident to military service.”
In layman’s terms, the Feres Doctrine prohibits troops and their families from suing the military for injury or death brought on by their service. taskandpurpose.com/feres-doctrine-military-medical-malpractice/?bsft_eid=82d2fc1f-222d-4617-94cc-5d2c46849037&bsft_pid=3ddfd580-04bc-4406-a483-a75d9b9ed31d&utm_campaign=tp_daily_friday_pm&utm_source=blueshift&utm_medium=email&utm_content=tp_daily_pm_ricks&bsft_clkid=6704f377-4818-473f-b3dd-54d8a412c29a&bsft_uid=7c674a6c-ae11-4ec4-84f1-aef0c34e44e5&bsft_mid=054241e0-4322-447a-82d3-491ae136b7d6&bsft_pp=1
‘I Got Him With My Hunting Knife’: SEAL Allegedly Texted Photo Cradling ISIS Fighter’s Head
NAVAL BASE SAN DIEGO — Navy SEAL Chief Edward “Eddie” Gallagher allegedly texted a photo of himself cradling a dead ISIS fighter’s head in one hand while holding a knife in the other and boasted that he “got him with my hunting knife,” Navy prosecutors said Wednesday.
In an Article 32 hearing before Navy Judge Advocate Capt. Arthur Record, prosecutors introduced a large binder of eyewitness statements, video interviews, photographs, and text messages to establish that Gallagher’s case should be referred to court-martial. The preliminary hearing only requires probable cause of a crime for a hearing officer to determine whether to recommend a full trial.
Gallagher, a 19-year veteran of the Navy, has been charged with four counts of violating military law, the most serious of which is premeditated murder. On or about May 3, 2017, according to the charge sheet, Gallagher allegedly murdered a wounded ISIS fighter by stabbing him in the neck and body with a knife.
Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Joe Warpinski was the only witness called by the government team, led by Navy Cmdr. Christopher Czaplak.
Warpinski, who has been investigating the case since April, told the hearing officer he had taken sworn testimony from 9 members of Gallagher’s unit, SEAL Team 7 Alpha Platoon. According to Warpinski, the platoon was operating in Mosul alongside the Iraqi Emergency Response Division when the alleged murder occurred. taskandpurpose.com/seal-chief-gallagher-isis-execution/?bsft_eid=6bf83495-323c-4e87-a849-2a6f864fd212&bsft_pid=c872068f-ffb2-4bd0-891d-1b90afcbb2e4&utm_campaign=tp_daily_thursday_pm&utm_source=blueshift&utm_medium=email&utm_content=tp_daily_pm_ricks&bsft_clkid=ca0f7b44-7eb8-4e55-9bb4-aeb56304dbb2&bsft_uid=7c674a6c-ae11-4ec4-84f1-aef0c34e44e5&bsft_mid=7538849b-e44f-4a0a-9c15-791a9eb9158b&bsft_pp=1
Murder charges filed against Navy, Marine special operators in incident that killed Green Beret in Africa
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Two Navy SEALs and two Marine Raiders will face murder charges in the June 2017 death of an Army Special Forces staff sergeant in Mali.
The four personnel face UCMJ charges that include felony murder, involuntary manslaughter, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, hazing and burglary in the strangulation death of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, according to a release from Navy Region Mid-Atlantic public affairs.
An Article 32 preliminary hearing for all four accused is scheduled for Dec. 10. None of those charged were named in the release.
Redacted charge sheet information reveals previously undisclosed details about the alleged incident.
Whereas previous accounts only noted that the two SEALs had assaulted Melgar, charge sheets indicate that the two Marine Raiders, identified only as a staff sergeant and a gunnery sergeant, were allegedly involved in the direct assault as well.
All four individuals are being accused of driving to the Marines’ quarters to get duct tape, driving to the quarters shared by Melgar and the SEALs, then breaking down Melgar’s locked door, restraining him and binding him with duct tape and strangling him by using a chokehold.
Each has been charged with conspiracy for allegedly sharing information with each other about what they told investigators, omitting information such as the use of duct tape and the Marines’ presence in the room, and disposing of alcohol kept in the quarters. www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/11/15/murder-charges-filed-against-navy-marine-special-operators-in-incident-that-killed-green-beret-in-africa/
Hillary Will Run Again
Reinventing herself as a liberal firebrand, Mrs. Clinton will easily capture the 2020 nomination.
Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994. True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House. www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-will-run-again-1541963599
November 1979, 444 days, pretty good documentary on Iran Hostage Crisis.
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Misremembering Vietnam
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nPJgeg6hpA
Making America’s Wars Great Again
The Pentagon Whitewashes a Troubling Past
By Arnold R. IsaacsHere’s a paradox of the last few decades: as American military power has been less and less effective in achieving Washington’s goals, the rhetoric surrounding that power has grown more and more boastful.
The cliché that our armed forces are the best and mightiest in the world — even if the U.S. military hasn’t won any of its significant wars in the last 50 years — resonates in President Trump’s promise to make America great again. Many Americans, clearly including him, associate that slogan with military power. And we don’t just want to be greater again in the future; we also want to have been greater in the past than we really were. To that end, we regularly forget some facts and invent others that will make our history more comfortable to remember.
The Vietnam War was obviously one of the most disastrous of this country’s past mistakes — and the Pentagon’s “50th Vietnam War commemoration” is a near-perfect example of how both national and military leaders and a willing public have avoided facing important truths about Vietnam and American wars ever since. That’s not just a matter of inaccurate storytelling. It’s dangerous because refusing to recognize past mistakes makes it easier to commit future ones. For that reason, the selective history the Pentagon has been putting out on Vietnam for more than six years, and what that story tells us about the military leadership’s institutional memory, is worth a critical look.
The commemoration website’s historical material — principally a set of fact sheets and an extensive “interactive timeline” — is laced with factual mistakes, errors of both omission and commission. Its history drastically minimizes or more often completely ignores facts that reveal America’s policy and moral failures, its missteps on the ground, and its complicity (along with the enemy’s) in massive civilian suffering not just in Vietnam but in Laos and Cambodia, too. Opposition to the war at home is largely scrubbed out of the record as well.
Perhaps more telling than the misstatements has been the prolonged failure to correct faulty entries that have remained unchanged for years even though the site’s administrators were well aware of them.
Back in 2014, following a critical TomDispatch article by Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, and pressure from other critics, officials did revise a few items. Those included the My Lai massacre (though the site still does not use the word “massacre” for the murder by U.S. troops of more than 500 civilians, including women and children) and the naval clashes in the Tonkin Gulf that led to the first U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam. But no more corrections followed, leaving a startling range of wrong or misleading statements untouched.
In its most noticeable distortion, the site virtually ignores the domestic debate on the war and the divisions it caused in American society. As of this writing, the 30-year (1945-1975) timeline still includes only terse one-line entries for each of the massive national antiwar protests of October and November 1969. The wave of demonstrations in May 1970 following the U.S. “incursion” in Cambodia gets a somewhat more detailed entry, mentioning the deaths of protesters killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio and by police gunfire at Jackson State College in Mississippi.
Aside from those, though, most other important moments in the peace movement are missing from the timeline altogether. The massive 1965 and 1967 protest marches outside the Pentagon are nowhere mentioned. Nor are the chaotic protests the following year outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Although the Vietnam veterans’ experience is billed as the central theme of the commemoration, veterans who came to oppose the war were also blanked out of its story until just days ago, when officials at the commemoration’s History and Legacy branch learned that I was working on the present article. Only then did the site managers insert a new entry on the dramatic week-long protest in April 1971, when hundreds of disillusioned vets threw away their decorations in front of the U.S. Capitol — an event previously not mentioned in the timeline at all.
The Vietnam Wars: A Primer Online Free
The Vietnam Wars 1954-1980 and Beyond
Why Vietnam?
Imperialism:
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
Ford Prepares for Mass Layoffs After Losing $1 Billion to Trump’s Trade Tariffs, Report Says
Ford is having a bad year in 2018. Its stock is down 29%, and the tariffs imposed by President Trump have reportedly cost the company $1 billion, as the company is in the midst of a reorganization. Now, the company is announcing layoffs.
Jim Hackett, Ford’s CEO, is working to engineer a $25.5 billion restructuring of the automaker, hoping to cut costs and remain competitive, the Wall Street Journal reports. But auto sales are down, and one reason is the trade tariffs that Trump has imposed on metals and other goods. According to Bloomberg, Hackett has said they have already cost the company $1 billion in profit and could do “more damage” if the disputes aren’t resolved quickly.
Ford, the No. 2 U.S. automaker by sales, is making aggressive job cuts as part of that reorganization, NBC News reported. While the company hasn’t said how many jobs will be lost, a report from Morgan Stanley estimates “a global headcount reduction of approximately 12 percent,” or 24,000 of Ford’s 202,000 workers worldwide.”
While reports have indicated that the job cuts are likely to come early next year, The Kansas City Star reported Tuesday that Ford has temporarily halted production of transit vans in Claycomo, Mo. The move is intended to prevent a build-up in Ford’s inventories of the vans, but it will leave 2,000 workers idle between Oct. 22 and Nov. 4. finance.yahoo.com/news/ford-prepares-mass-layoffs-losing-002618564.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb&fbclid=IwAR3_EueXG_Tyn2aImxelTc-3X5-MzaR_zC8REjJzXq6LhFhcTkUIAf9ifU8
How temp workers became the norm in America
Bought a vehicle lately? Ever wonder who assembled it? It turns out that on factory lines across the country, temporary workers are welding, testing and operating machines alongside permanent auto workers — and in many cases making half the money. For them, “temp” does not necessarily stand for temporary; in this context it can mean perma-temp status.
Take the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi. Every day, as it churns out hundreds of vehicles — Altima sedans, Murano SUVs, Titan and Frontier pickups, and cargo vans — it’s impossible to spot who the actual temps are. Every worker wears standard-issue Nissan garb, red top, gray bottom. Still, wages rates are far from uniform.
“There’s some people got seven or eight years on them and still under temp status,” says night-shift line worker Eric Hearn, who spent two years as a contracted temp before graduating to permanent worker status….
(The) shift is evident at the Nissan plant where the difference in pay between permanent and temp workers is stark. The longest-serving Nissan factory workers with more than a decade’s experience make $25 per hour, according to several interviews with current and former assembly line employees. (Nationally, the average hourly wage for motor vehicle plant workers in September 2018 was $27.64). Workers say that’s far more than the $14-17/hourly wage for non-permanent plant workers employed by Nissan’s main contract staffing agency, Kelly Services (of Kelly Girl fame). Many contract workers have years of experience at the same exact assembly line. …
It would not be unusual for 20 to 30 percent … to be temps.”
“The auto industry has been known for quite a while to be a pretty heavy user of temporary services,” said labor economist Susan Houseman, vice president and research director at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “It would not be unusual for 20 to even 30 percent of the production line to be temps.”
Houseman maintains regular contract with auto firms in Michigan, and said automakers maintain “target percentages” of contract workers in their plants. The key reason, in her view, is not simply to cut labor costs but provide a labor-force shock absorber when business goes up and down.
“It makes it easier to flex up their workforce when they need more workers,” she said. “And then when demand drops, they lay off their temps first, and hold onto their core workers.”
Upjohn Institute research found the trend was particularly pronounced during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. While overall employment in the economy fell about 5 percent, temp help jobs plummeted 30 percent, Upjohn found in a study based on private-sector data. www.marketplace.org/2018/11/13/business/divided-decade/how-great-recession-helped-normalize-use-temp-workers
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above, one of thousands of Detroit ruins
Detroit kids’ lead poisoning rates higher than Flint
Detroit had Michigan’s highest proportion of children test positive for lead poisoning in 2016 — 8.8 percent of kids tested — including one ZIP code where 22 percent were found to have lead poisoning.
Data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services show children are being sickened by lead in counties from Manistee to Hillsdale and St. Clair, though the rates of lead poisoning in Flint continue to improve.
Just 1.8 percent tested positive for lead poisoning in Genesee County, where hundreds of Flint children were exposed to lead-tainted water after the city switched its water source in 2014.
High blood lead levels can lead to developmental problems, behavioral disorders and learning difficulties, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a common problem nationwide in cities that have large numbers of homes built before 1978, when lead-based paints were banned from use in housing.
Under federal guidelines, medical intervention is recommended for children 6 and younger who have blood lead levels higher than 5 micrograms per deciliter.
Statewide, the percentage of children tested who were found to have elevated blood levels increased from 3.4 percent in 2015 to 3.6 percent last year. It was the state’s first increase, according to records dating back to 1998. www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2017/11/14/lead-poisoning-children-detroit/107683688/?from=new-cookie&fbclid=IwAR2VpTI3LSK99gp6NiGWH3AF1SFgqco9-COUDFnPI87ZMFqjWbII5kwxJkI
Scientist: PFAS has been contaminating Michigan population for years
– Angry and frightened.
Those are not words one often hears from a state government scientist.
But that’s how a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official said he felt after realizing — eight years ago — the scope and strength of the state’s problems with PFAS chemicals, which have contaminated water supplies and endangered the health of residents at sites around the state.
“In 2010, I began to feel that I was at the edge of the abyss looking into hell with the weight of the world on my shoulders,” Robert Delaney testified Tuesday at a PFAS meeting in Grand Rapids organized by U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich..
However, “my fear and anger turned to conviction and determination,” Delaney said at Grand Valley State University.
Delaney, a geologist and veteran DEQ specialist, began raising concerns about the threat of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in 2010. In 2012, he said, he sent former department director Dan Wyant a 93-page report that detailed the threat to Michigan’s drinking water and residents. That report was largely ignored and not made public until 2017.
Delaney testified he made recommendations in the report about how to limit public exposure to PFAS chemicals, but “I didn’t get any feedback until this year on it.” He said he was “just trying to get somebody to listen,” but Wyant — who resigned in 2016 in the wake of the Flint lead-in-drinking-water crisis — “really didn’t understand environmental science or issues.”
Wyant did not respond to an email and a phone message left at his Cassopolis office.
Despite the inaction on Delaney’s report, Michigan is now seen as a leader in confronting what is a nationwide problem after Gov Rick Snyder issued a November 2017 executive order to create a PFAS action response team. www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/11/13/delaney-pfas-michigan/1986891002/
Bankrupt Sears wants to give executives $19 million in bonuses
Sears is seeking court approval to pay executives as much as $19 million in quarterly bonuses while the company struggles to restructure in bankruptcy.
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason
Assange Is Secretly Charged in U.S., Prosecutors Mistakenly Reveal
The Justice Department has secretly filed criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, a person familiar with the case said, a drastic escalation of the government’s yearslong battle with him and his anti-secrecy group.
Top Justice Department officials told prosecutors over the summer that they could start drafting a complaint against Mr. Assange, current and former law enforcement officials said. The charges came to light late Thursday through an unrelated court filing in which prosecutors inadvertently mentioned them.
“The court filing was made in error,” said Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia. “That was not the intended name for this filing.”
Mr. Assange has lived for years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and would have to be arrested and extradited if he were to face charges in federal court, altogether a multistep diplomatic and legal process. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Young Marxists are going missing in China after protesting for workers
Fear is sweeping through the campuses of China’s elite universities following a nationwide government crackdown aimed at silencing left-wing student activists, who had been campaigning for greater rights and protections for ordinary workers.
Fascists march in Warsaw for Polish Independence Day in one of ‘world’s biggest’ far-right gatherings
One participant interviewed on state television says he was taking part ‘to remove Jewry from power’
Earlier in the day, President Andrzej Duda attended several official ceremonies alongside European Union President Donald Tusk, a former Polish prime minister.
Poland has seen a surge in nationalist thinking and activity since the collapse of communism, following years of living behind the iron curtain. The country is believed to have the fifth highest number of far-right activists in the world, behind Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the United States.
In the 2015 election, anti-EU populist nationalist party the League of Polish Families performed well, seemingly emboldening those with far-right leanings.
The march and the accompanying media attention has overshadowed the official state observances and other patriotic events.
Some participants expressed sympathy for xenophobic or white supremacist ideas, with one banner reading: “White Europe of brotherly nations.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poland-independence-day-march-warsaw-far-right-fascists-a8050181.html?fbclid=IwAR0rWRxO5gWZ3rtoGSE4VRQK5r4U6QLCBJGXLnqYHUzCLRuaAsX8ovYO-Qw
US Ally Khmer Rouge’s Slaughter in Cambodia Is Ruled a Genocide
Many of the foot soldiers for the Khmer Rouge remain in Cambodia’s remote reaches, each with a chronicle of the horror-soaked years in which Pol Pot and his Communist disciples turned the country into a deadly laboratory for agrarian totalitarianism.
Mea Chrun, a former bodyguard in the Khmer Rouge, lives in the jungle-choked hills of northern Cambodia, in Anlong Veng. He is matter-of-fact about the weight of the slaughter. “I think that one million people were killed,” he said. “Don’t say three million.”
On Friday morning — four decades after a total of at least 1.7 million people, a fifth of Cambodia’s population, were culled by execution, overwork, disease and famine — an international tribunal for the first time declared that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against the Muslim Cham minority and Vietnamese.
The panel also issued guilty verdicts against the two most senior surviving members of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, now 92 and 87 respectively.
Mr. Nuon Chea was found guilty of genocide against both the Cham and Vietnamese, and Mr. Khieu Samphan against just the Vietnamese. The pair were found guilty of various crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. And they were sentenced to life imprisonment, the same sentence they had received in an earlier trial.
…With Friday’s judgment, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has made clear he would prefer the tribunal to cease its high-profile work. But others would like trials to extend to many lower-ranking officials who are believed to have carried out some of the Khmer Rouge’s most horrific crimes.
Mr. Hun Sen, a onetime Khmer Rouge cadre who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades, had opposed the formation of the tribunal in the first place. Rather than put Mr. Khieu Samphan and Mr. Nuon Chea on trial, he said in 1998, they should be greeted with “bouquets of flowers, not with prisons and handcuffs.”
…Many of the Khmer Rouge’s most fervent ideologues were foreign-educated. Mr. Khieu Samphan studied political science at the Sorbonne, while Mr. Nuon Chea went to college in Thailand. The support they garnered, however, came from Cambodia’s young, rural base, which had suffered from years of civil war and American bombardment as the Vietnam War spilled over the border.
Who Supported the Khmer Rouge?
With the conviction last summer of former Khmer Rouge officials Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea for crimes against humanity, the subject of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 received a small amount of attention in the Western mass media. What the media failed to mention was how the Khmer Rouge was maintained as a military and political force long after its fall from power. Nor has it been suggested why, at Western insistence, the scope of investigations at the tribunal would exclude the period after 1979….
According to journalist Elizabeth Becker, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski “himself claims that he concocted the idea of persuading Thailand to cooperate fully with China in its efforts to rebuild the Khmer Rouge.” Brzezinski said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Khmer Rouge government-in-exile of Democratic Kampuchea]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” In fact, U.S. support went well beyond encouraging others to rebuild the Khmer Rouge. www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/16/who-supported-the-khmer-rouge/
If fascism was a person—How Trump Is Worse Than Nixon
The current president is pushing closer to fascism than even the man behind Watergate.
The big question is whether there will turn out to be a major difference between the two men when it comes to honoring the decisions of the law, or of the public. Nixon shied from challenging John F. Kennedy’s narrow electoral victory in 1960 not out of magnanimity but because he concluded he couldn’t make the charge of fraud stick. Mr. Trump, as we’re seeing, needs no evidence before charging election fraud.
When the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the White House tapes, he obeyed. And after Republican elders went to the White House to tell him that he lacked the political support to survive as president, Nixon yielded to their implication that he should leave office. Nearly impossible as it is to imagine a similar scene involving the current president and his pusillanimous party, Mr. Trump has given us reason to wonder whether he would defer to legal findings against him or even to a re-election loss in 2020 — if, that is, he’s still in office then. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/trump-worse-nixon.html
Trump Picks Mar-a-Lago Member/Handbag Designer for Ambassador to South Africa
To be fair, almost all of Donald Trump’s high-level officials believe that the primary purpose of their office is to enrich themselves. But if there’s one group of people that has disproportionately benefitted from the ex-beauty pageant owner’s presidency, it’s people who share his last name. If there’s another, it would be the members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s “winter White House” where he regularly entertains heads of state.
Since Trump took office in 2017—at which point the membership fee to join the private club doubled to $200,000—paying customers have gotten front-row seats to dinnertime North Korea strategy sessions, selfies with the guy carrying the nuclear codes, and, in some cases, free rein to (allegedly!) secretly run a federal agency. More publicly, Trump has so far nominated four club members to represent the U.S. as ambassadors abroad, most recently Lana Marks, who, as the White House announced late Wednesday, is the president’s pick for envoy to South Africa.
What are Marks’s qualifications to serve as an ambassador? It may surprise you to hear that they’re a bit thin! Although the Palm Beach-based designer was born and raised in South Africa and attended the University of the Witwatersrand, she has zero diplomatic experience or training. Professionally, she’s a luxury-handbag designer known for products made with exotic animal skins, such as alligator and ostrich, which can be sold for between $19,000 and $400,000 a pop; the concept, per CNN, was born when “Marks couldn’t find a bag to match the suit she planned to wear to a birthday celebration for Queen Elizabeth.” According to the Palm Beach Daily, she’s known to be “like Trump, a relentless self-promotor.” And that’s not where the similarities end! www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/lana-marks-mar-a-lago-south-africa?utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=vf&mbid=social_facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0m87dtwfsB0WRIj7VI25FYTTbnao7NhGJVBqi3Zs6beRU6nKe-IBsEGXQ
Solidarity For Never
Court records: Fear of factory floor fed UAW corruption
The top echelon of the United Auto Workers was so corrupt officials committed crimes out of fear they would lose six-figure jobs, travel perks and expense accounts and be forced to return to the factory floor, according to federal court filings.
Former UAW leaders described a culture of blind obedience during a widespread conspiracy involving the union, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and the jointly operated UAW-Chrysler National Training Center.
Details of life within the top ranks of the UAW emerged in court filings as three people convicted in the corruption scandal face sentencing Wednesday and as prosecutors signal more people could soon be charged with crimes.
The trio includes Clarkston resident Keith Mickens, 65, the right-hand man of former UAW Vice President General Holiefield. Mickens struck a plea deal with prosecutors in April, admitting he bought more than $7,000 worth of personal items with money from Fiat Chrysler that was supposed to help train blue-collar workers and used more money to help Holiefield buy a pool.
In all, Mickens approved more than $700,000 in illegal payments from Fiat Chrysler to Holiefield and Holiefield’s wife Monica Morgan, part of a broader plan by the automaker to keep labor leaders “fat, dumb and happy,” according to the government.
“The culture of the UAW staff at the NTC under the Holiefield administration was one that you were expected to do what your superiors asked of you,” Mickens’ lawyer Robert Sheehan wrote in a court filing. “The consequences of a failure to do as you have been told would have quickly led you back into a factory and to be ostracized by UAW leadership.”
Prosecutors want U.S. District Judge Paul Borman to sentence Mickens, who was paid $127,569, to spend 16 months in federal prison. His lawyer is pushing for probation.
“This investigation and prosecution has revealed that there was a culture of corruption in the senior leadership of the United Auto Workers union,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David Gardey wrote in Mickens’ sentencing memorandum. “Leaders of the UAW viewed the National Training Center as a mechanism to take apparently unlimited and illegal payments from Fiat Chrysler for their own personal benefit, for the benefit of the union itself, and for their own lavish entertainment.” www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/2018/11/05/court-records-show-fear-factory-floor-fed-uaw-corruption/1890512002/
Disgraced pioneering (Quisling Rat)UAW official faces reckoning
A United Auto Workers official who betrayed rank-and-file workers by pocketing as much as $15,000 in bribes from Fiat Chrysler executives during a conspiracy to keep labor leaders” fat, dumb and happy” was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days in federal prison.
The sentencing by U.S. District Judge Paul Borman caps a steep fall for Virdell King, 66, of Detroit, the first African-American woman elected president of a UAW/Fiat Chrysler local who sat on the prestigious committee that negotiated bargaining agreements with the automaker impacting more than 45,000 workers.
King was the first UAW official to cooperate with an ongoing investigation that started at least three years ago and provided invaluable insight into a conspiracy involving Fiat Chrysler executives bribing labor leaders to “grease the skids” of labor negotiations, prosecutors said.
Her ongoing assistance has led to criminal charges against four people so far, including convicted Fiat Chrysler Vice President Alphons Iacobelli. King also has helped investigators open a new line of inquiry involving UAW officials spending more than $1 million of member dues and automaker money on condominiums, liquor, food and golf in Palm Springs, California. www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/2018/11/13/disgraced-united-auto-workers-official-sentenced-scandal-involving-fiat-chrysler/1976182002/
‘You no longer represent symbol of hope,’ Amnesty International strips Aung San Suu Kyi of highest honour
Amnesty International on Monday stripped Aung San Suu Kyi of its highest honour over the de facto Myanmar leader’s “indifference” to the atrocities against Rohingya Muslims
Amnesty International on Monday stripped Aung San Suu Kyi of its highest honour over the de facto Myanmar leader’s “indifference” to the atrocities committed by the military against Rohingya Muslims.
It was the latest in a string of awards the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner lost since Myanmar’s military drove 720,000 Rohingya out of the Buddhist majority country in what the United Nations has called an act of genocide.
The London-based global human rights organisation said it was revoking the Ambassador of Conscience Award it gave Suu Kyi in 2009 while she was still under house arrest. www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/you-no-longer-represent-symbol-of-hope-amnesty-international-strips-aung-san-suu-kyi-of-highest-honour/story-aT9mne1bpxNQjTCzeNSNQO.html?fbclid=IwAR27G0xjSmkGDJuDsURPIL7dy3bnIywytQ9r6s65vJuqSn4-5dq6Kg7q4Cw
Spy versus Spy
Secret CIA Document Shows Plan to Test Drugs on Prisoners
Thanks to an ACLU victory in federal court, we know much more about how CIA doctors violated the medical oath to “do no harm.”
One of the most important lessons of the CIA’s torture program is the way it corrupted virtually every individual and institution associated with it. Over the years, we have learned how lawyers twisted the law and psychologists betrayed their ethical obligations in order to enable the brutal and unlawful torture of prisoners.
Now we’ve won the release of a 90-page account of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services role in the CIA torture program — a secret history written by the top CIA medical official, whose identity remains classified.
The history reveals that CIA doctors were hunting for a “truth serum” to use on prisoners as part of a previously secret effort called Project Medication. The CIA studied records of old Soviet drug experiments as well as the CIA’s notorious and discredited MK-Ultra program, which involved human experimentation with LSD and other drugs on unwitting subjects. The CIA doctors involved in Project Medication wanted to use Versed, a psychoactive drug similar to some of those used in MK-Ultra, on prisoners.
The CIA ignored lessons from its own history. After MK-Ultra was shut down, the CIA director testified in 1977, “It is totally abhorrent to me to think of using humans as guinea pigs.” But decades later, the agency decided to experiment on humans again, testing pseudoscientific theories of “learned helplessness” on its prisoners. www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/torture/secret-cia-document-shows-plan-test-drugs-prisoners?fbclid=IwAR2Yz9u6nnC8e0a0DiyPqqFkIGGWZcRegqdlNtxhGGEFt-fPdDwHM2KqVc0
FOIA 101: Tips and Tricks to Make You a Transparency Master
Whether it’s your first request or your first request *today,* it never hurts to go over the basics. MuckRock’s compiled a lot of FOIA advice over the years, and with this project, it’s all in one place.
Intermediate/Advanced
Dealing with excessive redactions
FOIA inspiration from #IRE2017
How to get a faster FOIA response
Tips for better FOIA appeals
Searching for specific sections of records
What to do about “Still Interested” letters
What the 2016 FOIA reforms mean for requesters
www.muckrock.com/project/foia-101-tips-and-tricks-to-make-you-a-transparency-master-234/
The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
Unexplained brain injuries afflicted dozens of American diplomats and spies. What happened?
Victims felt bursts of sound and pressure that left them dizzy and racked with headaches. No known cause seemed to fit.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/the-mystery-of-the-havana-syndrome
The Magical Mystery Tour
U.S. Bishops Had a Plan to Curb Sex Abuse. Rome Ordered Them to Wait.
Facing a reignited crisis of credibility over child sexual abuse, the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States came to a meeting in Baltimore on Monday prepared to show that they could hold themselves accountable.
But in a last-minute surprise, the Vatican instructed the bishops to delay voting on a package of corrective measures until next year, when Pope Francis plans to hold a summit in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis for bishops from around the world.
Many of the more than 350 American bishops gathered in Baltimore appeared stunned when they learned of the change of plans in the first few minutes of the meeting.
They had come to Baltimore wanting to prove that they had heard their parishioners’ cries of despair and calls for change. Suddenly, the Vatican appeared to be standing in the way, dealing the bishops another public relations nightmare.
“We are not ourselves happy about this,” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said at a midday news conference. “We are working very well to move to action, and we’ll do it. We just have a bump in the road.”
The order from Rome is the latest twist in a long power struggle between the American bishops and the Vatican over how to respond to the abuse crisis. For nearly three decades and three papacies, the United States has been the focal point of the crisis, and the American bishops have been pushed to the forefront of the church’s response.
The Vatican also applied the brakes in 2002 when the Americans took steps that had not been adopted by the global church, like establishing a “zero tolerance” standard for abusive priests and a national review board made up of laypeople. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/us-bishops-sex-abuse-vatican.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
‘The whole town is gone.’ Drone video (linked)reveals the scale of fire destruction in Paradise
www.facebook.com/birdcams/videos/10155543613402727/?t=36
Trump Suggests Not Raking Leaves Is Bigger Cause of California Wildfires Than Climate Change
President Donald Trump spoke about the fires during an interview Friday with Fox News’ Chris Wallace a day before he was expected to travel to the state to see the damage himself. Trump summarized in the interview, which airs Sunday on Fox, his thoughts about the fire by saying that if the land had been managed better “you wouldn’t have the fires.”
The president said he had seen the firemen at work and saw them raking under trees near the flames of the fires. Trump said that had the areas around the trees been raked out earlier, there would have been no fire burning…
When Wallace asked Trump what he thought about the argument that climate change may have contributed to the fires Trump said, “Maybe it contributes a little bit. The big problem we have is management.”
“You need forest management, it has to be, I’m not saying that in a negative way…. I’m just saying the facts, and I’ve really learned a lot,” Trump said. www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-california-wildfires-how-star-blame-climate-change-leaves-raking-1220377?fbclid=IwAR1fYb3WZX_h-vIkJA-PYc_D0npQTTsKhu8ZxM8gr0up8OTPncjXsVj8F2E
Trump Administration a ‘Shitshow in a Dumpster Fire,’ Says George Conway About Turning Down Justice Department Appointment
Attorney George Conway described the Trump administration as a “shitshow in a dumpster fire” as a reason he did not take a post in the Justice Department last year.
Conway, who is married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, spoke to Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery in an episode released Friday to discuss his newly formed Checks and Balances, a group of conservative lawyers who came together to defend the Constitution. He also talked about why conservatives have looked the other way regarding some of President Donald Trump’s public statements and why he did not “feel comfortable being a Republican anymore.”
In explaining how he almost joined the Justice Department, Conway also cited some of Trump’s perceived missteps involving the Russia investigation as a reason for stepping aside from a possible job.
“The administration is like a shitshow in a dumpster fire,” Conway said. “And then you got the [James] Comey firing. And then you have him going on TV saying I had Russia on my mind…I’m going to be in the middle of a department he’s at war with. Why would anybody want to do this?” www.newsweek.com/trump-shitshow-dumpster-fire-conway-justice-1219567?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=NewsweekFacebookSF&fbclid=IwAR3-K7TPKo_cuDb03tcseltsKp6dihrUgwu3BDr2a4ZKjeEkhR-dIOx_56Q
San Diego Del, November 2018. San Diego Reader.
EWR + H
So Long
Zhores Medvedev, 93, Dissident Scientist Who Felt Moscow’s Boot, Is Dead
Zhores A. Medvedev, the Soviet biologist, writer and dissident who was declared insane, confined to a mental institution and stripped of his citizenship in the 1970s after attacking a Stalinist pseudoscience, died on Thursday at his home in London, where he had lived for decades. He had turned 93 the day before.
Dr. Medvedev’s twin brother, the historian Roy Medvedev, told the Russian news media that the cause was a heart attack. He said his family had celebrated Dr. Medvedev’s birthday on Wednesday.
“He had never complained about his heart,” he told RBC, a Russian news agency. “Three ambulances came, but they weren’t able to save him.”
With Roy Medvedev, the physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, the author Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and others, Dr. Medvedev was a central figure in the seething intellectual dissidence that exposed, largely through underground literature known as samizdat, the repression of ideas, science and human rights in the Soviet Union.
Dr. Medvedev played a large role in discrediting the doctrines of Stalin’s director of biology, Trofim D. Lysenko, who was behind a pseudoscience known as Lysenkoism. He also gave the world shocking accounts of the Soviet practice of committing political dissenters to mental instituti, campaigned for greater freedoms for Soviet scientists and writers to study and travel abroad, and exposed a 1957 nuclear disaster in the Urals, one of the worst of the nuclear age.
Dr. Medvedev was an authority on biochemistry, gerontology and molecular evolution and wrote many scientific papers as well as biographies of Soviet leaders and dissidents, and books on the hazards of nuclear power.
A son of a Leningrad State University Marxist philosopher who was arrested in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and died in Siberia, Dr. Medvedev remained loyal to his country and to the Communist Party. But he fell into disfavor with the Soviet authorities in the 1960s by openly opposing Lysenko in the last years of his reign of power.
For decades, that reign had corrupted Soviet agricultural sciences, contributed to disastrous crop failures and famines after the forced collectivization of farms, and led to the imprisonment, expulsion and deaths of hundreds of his academic and political opponents. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/obituaries/zhores-medvedev-dead.html
Stan Lee’s Powerful 1968 Essay About the Evils of Racism Is Still Necessary Today
Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them—to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are. The bigot is an unreasoning hater—one who hates blindly, fanatically, indiscriminately. If his hang-up is black men, he hates ALL black men. If a redhead once offended him, he hates ALL redheads. If some foreigner beat him to a job, he’s down on ALL foreigners. He hates people he’s never seen—people he’s never known—with equal intensity—with equal venom.
Now, we’re not trying to say it’s unreasonable for one human being to bug another. But, although anyone has the right to dislike another individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an entire nation—to vilify an entire religion. Sooner or later, we must learn to judge each other on our own merits. Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill out hearts with tolerance. For then, and only then, will we be truly worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God–a God who calls us ALL—His children. www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a25022397/stan-lee-marvel-racism-1968-essay/?fbclid=IwAR0ZXkFPjQxWZCovmh22Zs4OqE2usxxdcfJQfTS9Y22Rqqlfy_cAdu78ZCU