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Soda Industry Cashes In on Govt. Food Assistance Programs to Tune of $4 Bilion a Year

Stan Cox, AlterNet — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:03:00 -0700

The debate over dropping junk food from the nation’s biggest nutrition program cuts across the political spectrum in unpredictable ways.

As Congress resumes its wrangling over a long-overdue Farm Bill, conservatives are once again attacking their long-time bête noire, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. They’re threatening SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program and by far the biggest item in the Farm Bill) with everything from mandatory work requirements for participants to deep program-wide budget cuts.

Once the Farm Bill has passed and all the political flatulence has cleared, though, budget hawks and Tea Partiers are unlikely to have succeeded in undermining SNAP. With the economy stagnating, unemployment and inequality festering, employers refusing to pay living wages, and one American in six now facing food insecurity, the bulk of public opinion is behind beefing up food assistance rather than gutting it.

But even among its fans and beneficiaries, there is recognition that SNAP could use some updating, especially with regard to its nutritional impact. So state governments from South Carolina to Maine to Wisconsin are considering legislation that would prohibit the purchase of soft drinks or other junk foods with SNAP credits.

Proposals for deploying food assistance as a tool to influence consumers’ buying decisions are deeply controversial. And the debate over whether or not to drop nutrition-free items from the nation’s biggest nutrition program cuts across the political spectrum in often unpredictable ways.

A sweet deal for Big Soda

Calls for an end to the soft-drink subsidy are coming from academia as well as from statehouses. A 2011 commentary last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association argued,

The government purchases millions of servings of sugar-sweetened beverages for SNAP participants each day. This practice arguably erodes diet quality and promotes chronic illness among individuals who are at increased risk of obesity-related disease because of limited financial resources.

Around the same time, a white paper from the Arizona State School of Nutrition and Health Promotion included this statement:

Restricting options for purchase of unhealthy foods can be a powerful strategy for improving diets of SNAP recipients. There is strong scientific evidence for a restrictive strategy, and there is precedence from other federal programs such as WIC [the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and NSLP [the National School Lunch Program], which limit benefits to the purchase of foods that are considered healthy.

Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has long advocated tight controls on the soft-drink industry, wrote last year, “To do nothing—while sugary drinks fuel an epidemic of obesity and other expensive diseases—would be reckless from a public health and fiscal standpoint.” Meanwhile, Daphne Hernandez, an assistant professor in the Human Development Department at Penn State, stated the case even more bluntly: “Continuing the use of taxpayer dollars to fund the purchase of soda through SNAP undermines the goal of SNAP.”

Advocates for limiting the range of products that benefits can buy have generally focused their efforts on carbonated drinks. For one thing, the sweet sodas make a nice fat target; the manufacturers rake in an estimated $4 billion per year from SNAP sales alone. Their products have a hefty impact, both nutritional and economic, and they could be easily identified and segregated automatically at checkout through SNAP’s electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card.

Joining the chorus of demands for restrictions are some right-wing activists and legislators—people who would not seem to have the nutritional status of SNAP participants uppermost in their minds. Accusing soda manufacturers of “SNAPping up welfare dollars,” David Alamasi of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a scandal-ridden antigovernment group, asserted last month that although he’s “a vocal proponent of Coca-Cola's right to sell any and all of its products,” he doesn’t want them being purchased with what he regards as his money. “When it comes to public assistance,” he stated in a press release, “I want people buying what they need with my money and not what they desire."

Republican legislative proposals in Wisconsin, Florida, and some other states have taken aim at all processed foods that contain more negative than positive nutrition. State senator Ronda Storms introduced Florida’s bill last year. It would have barred consumers from using SNAP benefits to buy "nonstaple, unhealthy foods." Storms told the Los Angeles Times, "If we're going to be cutting services across the board, then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."

Despite support from the ideological Right, Storms’ bill failed thanks to fierce corporate lobbying. The big soft-drink manufacturers, of course, work hard against all such legislation, but so do other corporate interests that rake in SNAP profits. The bill was attacked by lobbyists for the Snack Food Association, Corn Refiners of America, Florida Petroleum Marketers, the Convenience Store Association, and the Frozen Potato Products Institute.

When it comes to nutritional criteria for SNAP-eligible products, both support and opposition can span the full range of political ideologies. Proposed restrictions have been condemned by many food banks and economic-justice organizations, who argue that it’s paternalistic and unfair for the government to try to dictate the food purchases of low-income families while everyone else is left to choose freely. They argue that such reforms would take us back to the bad old days before the EBT card, when people using federal food coupons faced a potentially humiliating ordeal with every trip through the checkout line. Regarding proposed restrictions on Wisconsin’s SNAP-funded program, a food-bank executive argued, "Rather than creating hurdles, the state should make healthy food more affordable."

Most of the opposition to a soda ban among food-rights groups is indeed aimed at protecting the interests of SNAP participants. But in some cases, motives appear to be more problematic. In a 2011 report, the Washington, D.C.-based Food Research and Action Council maintained that purchasing restrictions would have many harmful impacts, among them an increase in “confusion and stigma at grocery check-out, potentially causing a decline in SNAP participation that could worsen food insecurity.” But FRAC, a consistently strong defender of food assistance, itself receives funding from a who’s-who of SNAP’s agribusiness and corporate food beneficiaries, among them the Coca-Cola Company, Pepsico, Inc., Mars Incorporated, the Sara Lee Foundation, and Walmart.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture, which administers federal food programs, has resisted any further tightening of food eligibility, on the grounds that classifying tens of thousands of types of food and keeping up with a constant deluge of new products would be a bureaucratic nightmare. Department researchers claim that “there are no widely accepted standards to judge the ‘healthfulness’ of individual foods”; that the “ingenuity of the food industry to develop new ones (for example, a prohibited candy bar adapted into a chocolate ‘granola bar’)” would always keep junk food a step ahead of any attempted regulation; and that “responsibility for enforcing compliance would rest in the hands of employees at check-out counters in 160,000 stores across the nation,” something considered unworkable.

USDA cites its own studies showing that dropping soda from SNAP would not significantly reduce consumption by low-income families. Most SNAP recipients use cash to buy a portion of their monthly food supply, and if restrictions were imposed, argues USDA, people would simply shift junk food over into their cash budget.

Who’s buying all that junk anyway?

It’s important to note that brisk sales of soda and other junk foods are not linked exclusively or even primarily to poverty. Households with incomes above $70,000 spend about 35 percent more each month on fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, and dairy products than do the lowest-income households; however, they also spend almost 80 percent more on what USDA calls “other foods” – a category that includes mostly less nutritious foods: “frozen prepared meals, ... packaged prepared foods, snack foods, ... , sugar and other sweets, fats and oils,” and, of course, soft drinks.

USDA’s figures show that middle- and upper-income Americans are 14 percent more likely to consume sweets daily and 23 percent more likely to consume salty snacks every day than are food-stamp recipients. Thus, says USDA, “the basis for singling out low-income food stamp recipients and restricting their food choices is not clear.”

But in other contexts, USDA apparently does believe in singling out low-income people. The second and third largest food assistance programs after SNAP—NSLP and WIC—both are designed to steer their recipients toward more nutritious diets. Smaller programs include the SNAP Nutrition Education program; a Community Food Projects Grant Program for low-income areas; the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center, aimed at extending access to nutritious food into urban “food deserts”; and expansion of electronic SNAP benefits in the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program.

Finally, under USDA’s Healthy Initiatives Pilot project, SNAP participants in Hampden County, Massachusetts are having 30 cents added to their monthly benefit for every dollar they spend on fruits and vegetables. There is talk, broadly supported, of extending this incentive to all SNAP participants.

Yet none of these federal nutrition programs is popular with hardline conservatives, because they all would expand food assistance rather than shrinking or eliminating it, and they encourage consumption of healthful foods without explicitly discouraging consumption of unhealthful ones.

“Informal rationing”

People living in poverty today are having to spend a punishing 37 percent of their income just to feed their families. That compares with 9 percent spent by households earning $70,000 or more. For millions of families, losing SNAP would mean coming up short in their struggle to cover rent or house payments, utility bills, transportation costs, and other necessary expenses.

But the fact that more than 15 percent of Americans now depend on SNAP has raised the blood pressure of right-wing lawmakers who resent having to spend tax dollars to help keep Americans fed and housed. The 2013 budget proposed by House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) would strip $135 billion from the program over the next ten years. But such crippling cuts are unlikely. Farm-state members of Congress and their friends in agribusiness, who have been crucial to keeping the program alive for almost fifty years, will continue to protect USDA’s two dozen food assistance programs, among which SNAP is the biggest. SNAP also receives unconditional political support from the big banks, led by JPMorgan Chase, whom the states grant contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to administer the EBT system.

Blocked from completely gutting SNAP, conservatives are resorting to harassment of those who participate in the program. Congressional Republicans are pressing for mandatory enforcement of a work requirement that would apply to all SNAP recipients--this in an economy that is already incapable of providing enough jobs. The Pennsylvania legislature reinstated an "asset test" that would drop from the SNAP rolls low-income recipients who have modest savings. A bill was introduced recently in the North Carolina statehouse that would require criminal background checks on applicants. And the right-wing media are trying to undermine SNAP by falsely claiming that the Obama administration "is promoting food stamps in Mexico."

All of this is part of campaign by Republican lawmakers to hamstring federal assistance programs—an attempted repeat of what they accomplished in the two decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash, when the government erected a series of increasingly stringent bureaucratic hurdles the purpose of which, according to legal scholar David Super, was to achieve “informal rationing” of benefits through the “personal choice model.” In other words, the government makes it such a hassle to obtain assistance that eligible applicants will just decide it's not worth it.

But the deepening of poverty and food insecurity over the past five years prompted the federal government to start tearing down many of those obstacles. For example, most states relaxed SNAP’s eligibility rules, in order to catch families before they fall below the poverty line and exhaust all of their savings. States have developed “SNAP outreach plans” and hired recruiters to let poor and borderline poor families know they are eligible. And some states are allowing food-stamp purchases at farmers' markets.

Alternatives to the soda subsidy

It is those efforts to strengthen food security that are so upsetting to Republicans, and that position puts them badly at odds with public opinion. A study published in last December’s issue of the journal Public Health Nutrition estimates that 77 percent of Americans would like to see SNAP funding either increased or kept steady. When people were asked about a range of possible policy changes, the most popular, with the support of 82 percent of respondents (including 76 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of SNAP participants), was “a proposal to provide additional money to SNAP (Food Stamp) participants that can only be used on fruits, vegetables or other healthful foods.”

A proposal to make sugary drinks ineligible for SNAP purchase was supported by 69 percent of all respondents and by 54 percent of SNAP participants themselves. If the soda ban was linked to a financial incentive to buy more fruits and vegetables, a whopping three-quarters of SNAP participants were in favor of it.

While many economically stressed parents might be relieved to have a new way to deal with their sugar-happy kids—by telling them, “No, don’t put that Mountain Dew in the cart, because our card doesn’t cover it” —people will probably tolerate only so much government intrusion into shopping decisions. And some of the more drastic health-promotion initiatives now under discussion might cross that line.

For example, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine recommends that SNAP benefits pay only for a prescribed list of 28 specific food items. According to PCRM, “SNAP beneficiaries who limit their food purchases to these Healthy Basics and eat no other foods at all can easily achieve nutrition that is complete and superior to that of average Americans.” They are probably right about their list’s healthfulness, but it appears to have been compiled solely on the basis of nutrient concentrations and is bizarrely idiosyncratic. PCRM’s plan would permit SNAP to cover only five grain products: high-fiber bread, brown rice, quinoa, rolled oats and whole-wheat pasta. The only allowable legumes would be black or garbanzo beans, dried red lentils, and (no joke) frozen edamame. But not to worry: balsamic vinegar and cinnamon would also be allowed.

Other groups, in particular the D.C.-based Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, have suggested some much more practical enhancements to SNAP that would amplify the benefits of a soda or junk-food ban.

Protect and, if necessary, augment the program’s current funding.

Make children’s health a stronger focus (an approach suggested by the fact that an astonishing one out of every two young Americans will receive SNAP benefits at some point before turning nineteen).

Expand SNAP access at farmers’ markets, and encourage it by providing free or subsidized wireless terminals to handle the transactions (preferably without a subsidy to JPMorgan).

Reduce the prices of nutrient-dense foods and provide incentives to buy them.

Require stores, if they want to be certified as SNAP retailers, to stock more healthful foods and to market them more effectively.

There is little reason to expect any of these reforms to be adopted in the upcoming Farm Bill; Congressional SNAP supporters will be wholly focused on defending current benefits against cuts. But if individual states continue to propose creative experiments in improved nutrition, expanded access to farmers’ markets, and cutting predatory corporations out of the food chain—and if the feds don’t block those initiatives—more Americans will have a chance to stay better fed until our food economy can be transformed in more fundamental ways.

Smashing the Absurd Myth That More Guns Make Us Safer

Sean McElwee, AlterNet — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:32:00 -0700

Why “more guns, less crime?” is the wrong question to ask.

Gun rights advocates are jumping at recent polls showing that gun violence has decreased, and the public is unaware of this phenomenon. Rush Limbaugh argues that, “as America arms up, gun violence goes down,” parroting the infamous book by Dr. John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime. Emily Miller argues in the Washington Times that, liberals have been “muzzled” by the news. But, in fact, research shows that those who oppose gun control ask the wrong questions.

Let’s begin with the question of declining violence and the public’s unawareness of this decline (which has been chalked up to the “liberal media”). It should be chalked up to “media.” As Steven Pinker notes in The Better Angels of Our Nature violence has been declining everywhere, and yet few people are aware because, as much as a despise cliché “if it bleeds, it leads.” People drastically overrate the possibility of their children being kidnapped, for example, because of prominent media coverage. They underrate their child’s chance of drowning in a pool. Sadly, since gun violence is still sexy, it will dwarf coverage of other deaths. All violence has declined, but gun violence still amounts to a good portion of it. And being an economist, it represents a sort of violence which is easy to decrease on the margin: something we can easily reduce without significant harm to society because nothing has addressed it as of yet.

But let’s dig deeper, into the assumption of the gun rights advocates. Do more guns mean less crime? Is the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun? As Jon Stewart brilliantly points out, identifying a bad guy is nearly impossible without gun control. Furthermore, much gun violence is committed by “normal guys” in a violent passion.

Let’s start with Dr. Lott's work, which is still cited and published without even a cursory investigation of its widely known flaws. The research the formed the basis of More Guns, Less Crime has been entirely discredited. In 2005 the National Research Council made up of policy heavyweights including Charles Wellford, James Q. Wilson, Joel Horowitz, Joel Waldfogel, and Steven Levitt, issued its wide ranging report in 2005 concluding that the data provided no reliable and robust support for Lott’s conclusion. Other studies have found that Lott’s research was plagued by simple coding errors. Recent research, performed by Abhay Aneja, John J. Donohue III and Alex Zhang found simple coding errors and flaws Lott’s econometric models. For instance, Lott failed to control for incarceration rates and the size of the local police force. When Aneja et al ran the correct numbers, they concluded that, “with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”

Still, is “More guns, less crime” the question we should really be asking? Most gun control advocates simply want commonsense measures, like getting rid of the gun show loophole, universal background checks and high capacity magazine bans have almost universal public support, especially among responsible gun owners. They have such support for good reason: they actually work.

We know because tons of other countries have reduced their gun violence by reducing guns; Australia is the most recent example. Having a gun in your home makes you vastly more likely to take your own life. A 2006 study published in Public Health finds that, “the proportion of firearm suicides decreased simultaneously with the proportion of households owning firearms. This result is in line with the well-established association between availability of firearms at home and risk of firearm suicide.”

But, in fact, the aggregate number of guns in society isn’t really what we want to control: we want to keep guns out of the hands of those who are violent, criminal or mentally challenged. I don’t have a problem with responsible citizens using guns that they have obtained with a permit, after undergoing a background check and using a gun with only a small magazine capacity. So the real question is not, do more guns lead to more crime, but, do stricter regulations reduce crime? In fact, they do. Here’s a chart from a recent study by the Center for American Progress.

Their finding: “While many factors contribute to the rates of gun violence in any state, our research clearly demonstrates a significant correlation between the strength of a state’s gun laws and the prevalence of gun violence in the state.”

So certainly, violence is down, and often, high levels of gun ownership can exist with low levels of crime (just not often). The real question is: does gun control work. The evidence is in. Now let’s hope the politicians listen.

Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:54:00 -0700

International corporations have no national allegiance, they care only for profit. Meanwhile, people all over the world are becoming increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic.

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course.

Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party — which wants to get out of the European Union — is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip’s overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

12-Year-Old Girl Raped, Video Posted to Facebook by Alleged Attackers

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:49:00 -0700

Three teenagers are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then posting the attack on Facebook.

Did three Chicago youth attack and rape a young girl and then videotape it for the world to see? That’s what prosecutors in Illinois are alleging.

The Associated Press reports that three teenagers are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then posting the attack on Facebook.

Three boys--15-year-old Kenneth Brown and 16-year-old Justin Applewhite and Scandale Fritz--allegedly brought the girl down to the basement of Fritz’s home. Fritz was identified because his face showed up in the video taken.

The video was first posted on Brown’s Facebook account, but was eventually posted to all three of the boys’ pages. They were ordered to be held last Friday for aggravated criminal sexual assault.

The 4 Big Ways That Insatiable Corporate Hunger for Profits Has Devastated American Life -- and the World Along with It

Paul Buchheit, AlterNet — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:11:00 -0700

Big business is making its way around the world like a modern-day Attila the Hun, pillaging and despoiling the planet.

The damage caused by the relentless corporate drive for profits has become more clear in recent years. In the most important areas of American life, devastating changes have occurred:

Health Care: Almost half of the working-age adults in America passed up doctor visits or other medical services because they couldn't afford to pay. The system hasn't supported kids, either. A UNICEF study places the U.S. 26th out of 29 OECD countries in the overall well-being of its children.

Education: Student loan balances increased by 75% between 2007 and 2012.

Household Wealth: Median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households between 2005 and 2009, mainly because of the mortgage banking collapse. Almost half of Americans have ZEROwealth, with their assets surpassed by debt.

Water and Food: Life-giving seeds and drinking water have been increasingly treated as products to be bought and sold.

All these areas of life have been degraded by a free-market system that has thrived on publicly-funded research, infrastructure, and defense. Yet in a brazen show of hypocrisy, major corporations have ignored all the problems they've caused, choosing instead to cut their taxes in half despite doubling their profits, to hold 60% of its cash offshore, to eliminate workers rather than create jobs, and to reduce the pay of their remaining employees.

An Apple executive explained: "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems."

Calling Themselves 'Multinationals': No Allegiance to Anyone

Big business has found its Utopia, a world in which millions of people are willing to work for a fraction of U.S. salaries.

In this dream world of global capitalism, young people are going from zero income on the farm to a few dollars a day on a 12-hour factory shift, and as a result, based on the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.25 per day, they're no longer "in poverty." So the media piles on praise for free markets. The Economist proclaimed that "poverty is declining everywhere." The Washington Post gushed that "a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition."

But the reality is very different. Inequality continues to grow, both between and within countries. Poverty levels haven't changed much in 30 years, with almost half of humanity, up to three billion people, living on less than $2.50 a day. A quarter of the world's children - over 170 million kids under age five - are growing up stunted because of malnutrition.

The World Bank estimates the total cost for a successful attack on malnutrition would be approximately $10.3 to $11.8 billion annually. Apple alone underpaid its 2012 taxes by $11 billion, based on a 35% rate.

It may be time to update the company's quote: "We don't have an obligation to solve the world's problems."

Even if there were no obligation to help solve the world's problems, there IS an obligation to pay for global energy consumption and infrastructure usage and industrial pollution. Yet a review of 25 multinational companies shows clear negligence in meeting that responsibility. The 25 companies, with almost a half-trillion dollars in 2011-12 income, paid just 8% in taxes to the U.S. and 9% to foreign countries. A 35% tax -- paid to ANY country or countries -- would have generated another $90 billion over two years, four times the amount needed to battle malnutrition.

Even Worse Than Not Paying: Making the World Pay for Them

A recent study estimated that toxic pollution affects the health of more than 100 million people, shortening their productive life spans by 12.7 years on average. A related study concluded that in 2010 over 8 million individuals were at risk of exposure to industrial pollutants at 373 toxic waste sites in three low-income countries (India, Indonesia, and the Philippines).

Some of our largest multinational companies hold top positions on the federal contractor misconduct list, which recognizes corporate environmental, ethics, and labor violations. Oil spills are common. Underdeveloped countries like Nigeria have been ravaged by oil production. Big firms are buying up farmland in more than 60 developing countries. Most perversely, multinationals are working hard to pass trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would actually dismantle environmental protections.

Absurd as it once seemed, a 1991 quote from the World Bank's Larry Summers now comes back to haunt us: "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?...I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted."

And as big business makes its way around the world like a modern-day Attila the Hun, pillaging and despoiling, it has the U.S. military covering its back with 900 overseas bases in 130 nations. If one of the countries kicks up a fuss, the corporations can just move on to the next one.

Teen Girl Faces Felony Charge Over Lesbian Relationship, Mom Blames "Religious Zealot Parents"

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:02:00 -0700

Kaitlyn Hunt is facing felony charges of sexual “battery” after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges.

The case of a Florida teenager being prosecuted after she was in a same-sex relationship with a girl three years younger is generating outrage. Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old student, is facing felony charges of sexual “battery” after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges. The case has sparked Internet petitions and and a statement from Anonymous.

Hunt began dating her girlfriend when she was 17. The relationship was reportedly well-known to both sets of parents. When Hunt turned 18, her girlfriend’s parents went to the police and she was arrested on felony charges of “sexual battery on a person 12-16 years old,” according to Think Progress.

Hunt’s mother says the charges are motivated by anti-gay bias on the part of the girlfriends’ parents. “They were out to destroy my daughter, they feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay. They are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter,” Hunt’s mother wrote on Facebook.

Hunt has also run into trouble at the school she attends alongside her girlfriend. The girlfriends’ parents had her expelled, according to Hunt’s mother, despite the fact that a judge refused to order the expulsion. The school board made the decision to keep Hunt out of school for the remaining weeks of her senior year. Hunt is now forced to attend an alternative school for the remainder of the year, though she can attend special senior events at Sebastian River High School.

The state attorney’s office has offered the 18-year-old a plea deal. The deal would result in two years of house arrest and a year of probation, charges that would stay on her adult record. But Think Progress reports that Hunt’s father said his daughter is only willing to plead to a misdemeanor, and that if the State Attorney’s position doesn’t change, “Kaitlyn and her family are prepared to go to trial.”

Facebook groups and Change.org petitions have sprouted up in response to the case. The hacker group Anonymous has also spoken out. They sent a statement to the State Attorney’s office that reads: “Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors. She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement.”

Hunt’s mother told a local ABC affiliate that she hopes the outrage will increase the pressure on the State Attorney’s office to drop the charges.

“She's scared to death, she can't sleep,” the mother told the news outlet.

Virginia GOP Nominee For Attorney General Would Force Women To Report Their Miscarriages To Police -- Or Face 1 Year in Jail

Ian Millhiser, Think Progress — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:09:00 -0700

Virginia GOP nominee for Attorney General would force women to report their miscarriages to police.

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.

And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

Under Obenshain’s bill, which was introduced in 2009,

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Under Virginia law, a Class 1 misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500,” so Obenshain’s bill could lead to a woman who decides to take a day to grieve the loss of a pregnancy she’d hoped to carry to term spending a year of her life in jail for that decision.

Even without Obenshain’s bill, Virginia law already treats many miscarriages as potential crimes. Under existing Virginia law, “[w]hen a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion or when inquiry or investigation by a medical examiner is required, the medical examiner shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall complete and sign the medical certification portion of the fetal death report within twenty-four hours after being notified of a fetal death.” Obsenshain, however, would treat many women as if they were criminal suspects at the moment they are confronted with a deep personal tragedy — and imprison them if they would rather deal with that tragedy privately with their family than share the vulnerable moment after a miscarriage with law enforcement.

Former "Hero" Cop Accused of Raping Women at Gun Point

AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:00 -0700

DeCoatsworth was honored for his valor by the White House.

A former Philadelphia police officer honored by the White House in 2009 faces charges of rape and other crimes, after allegedly forcing women to perform sexual acts at gunpoint.

In 2009, Richard DeCoatsworth was chosen by Vice President Joe Biden to sit next to first lady Michelle Obama during a Presidential address. The officer was praised for his valor. He was shot in the face during a routine traffic stop, but chased down his assailent despite his heavy injury. He retired on disability in 2011, reports WCAU-TV.

DeCoatsworth appears to be charged in two seperate incidents. According to the Daily Mail:

In one case, DeCoatsworth, 27, is accused of holding two women hostage and forcing them to take drugs and engage in sexual acts at gunpoint. In the other case, he’s accused of abusing his girlfriend, police said.

Local Philadelphia news outlets report that DeCoatsworth has been in trouble before. The Philly Post points out that in 2010 University professor Marc Lamont Hill accused DeCoatsworth of violating his civil rights during a traffic stop. Describing his experience, Lamont Hill movingly wrote about the larger significance of his encounter with the former "hero" cop:

Since the incident, I’ve thought about DeCoatsworth. I’ve wondered if he regretted that night, wishing he could take back his actions now that he has been afforded the luxury of time and reflection. I’ve wondered whether his tragic shooting has put him in a permanent state of trauma, causing him to find danger where there is none. I’ve wondered if he was a good cop at heart, who became cynical and overly aggressive after spending a few short years trying to navigate a broken system.

DeCoatsworth also faced charges of witness intimidation, following allegations that he had, "kidnapped, assaulted, and robbed a Port Richmond man who lived two blocks from him over an unpaid debt," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued

Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:01:00 -0700

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change -- not by magic, but by countless acts of courage, love, and commitment.

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Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better -- a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either -- the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed -- like the neoconservatives themselves -- that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes -- and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.

Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).

If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go -- and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell

Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time, the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear

I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.

This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don't stop there.

After Occupy came Idle No More, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”

The news just came in that we reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.

Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet -- rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries -- notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind -- have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was on its wayto liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of Tunisia and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It won’t.

I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the bookHope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers' Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book,The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June.

Bill Moyers: 12 Ways You Can Avoid Toxic Chemicals

Lauren Feeney, Bill Moyers — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:29:00 -0700

Lead, flame retardants, and BPA are everywhere, but you can limit your exposure.

After watching this week’s interview with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, you’ll probably be wondering what you can do to protect yourself and your family from toxic chemicals. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is become politically involved – join the fight against both chemicals in our environment and money in our political system. In today’s world, it’s virtually impossible to avoid dangerous chemicals, even in your own home, but here are a few simple steps you can take to limit your exposure to known toxins like lead, flame retardants and BPA.

Lead

If you think that lead poisoning is a problem of the past, or one that only affects the urban poor, think again. While it’s true that lead paint has been illegal since the 70s and leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80s, the highly toxic substance still lurks in old homes, parking lots, water pipes, and in products imported from countries that don’t have the same regulations. And while lead poisoning no longer the killer it once was, miniscule amounts of lead can cause neurological damage and behavioral problems in children. According to the CDC, there are currently half a million children with elevated levels of lead in their blood. Here’s what you can do to protect your family from lead poisoning:

1) Find out if there’s lead in your water. A good place to start is with your local government. website. At NYC.gov, for example, you can order a free testing kit. You can also try contacting your local water company, your landlord or a private lab. You may also want to install an NSF-certified water filter on your water tap. Though the EPA has mandated that water systems be tested for lead since 1991, your home’s own internal plumbing could still contain lead, particularly if you live in an older building.

2) Replace old windows. Though lead paint has been illegal since 1978 and has largely been removed from old buildings, in some cases, it was seen as too costly to replace the windows. To have your windows replaced (or to do any sort of renovation on a building that may still contain lead paint), contact an EPA-certified renovator who has been trained to follow lead safety practices. In some cases, your local government may cover the costs.

3) Throw out colorfully-painted toys that were made outside the U.S. or Europe. They may look innocent, but toys, crayons, ceramic and jewelry, particularly those manufactured in China or Mexico, may contain lead, and as any parent knows, children are likely to put these things in their mouths.

4) Dust or vacuum regularly. Even without any obvious source of lead in your home, there may still be lead in the air, particularly if you live in an industrial area or if a neighbor has been renovating an old home. Dust particles containing lead are especially dangerous to babies who crawl around on the floor. It’s also important to keep toys and hands clean.

5) Test the soil. Urban and suburban yards can still contain contaminants from the days when lead paint and gasoline were widespread. Before planting a garden or even letting your kids run around in the yard, make sure the soil is lead-free. Your local public health department may offer free testing; you can also contact a private or university-run lab.

Flame Retardants

The hazards of flame retardants have been known for some time — brominated tris was banned from children’s pajamas back in 1977. And yet, similar chemicals can still be found in everything from couch cushions to television sets. Studies have linked one group of flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, to lower IQs, behavioral problems, early puberty and fertility issues. And the fire-safety benefits of these chemicals are debatable. Here’s what you can to keep toxic flame retardants out of your home:

1) Check the labels on your furniture. The California Furniture Flammability Standard essentially requires that cushioned furniture, children’s car seats, diaper-changing tables and other products containing polyurethane foam are dipped in toxic chemicals. (Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just because you live in one of the other 49 states — because of California’s size, most mass-produced furniture is designed to meet California’s standard). Check the tags for the familiar notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin 117. (The tag is not required though, so just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s safe.) Fortunately, California has proposed changing the rule; until that happens, you can look for products made with wool, cotton or polyester filling instead of polyurethane foam. And if you can’t afford all new eco-friendly furniture, be sure to dust, vacuum and wash your hands regularly — most of the toxins enter the body by swallowing contaminated dust.

2) Check the labels on electronics, too. Flame retardants have long been used in electronic equipment like computers and television sets. Thankfully, that’s slowly changing. As of 2008, the following companies had committed to phasing out all brominated flame retardants: Acer, Apple, Eizo Nanao, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba. To find flame retardant-free versions of everything from refrigerators to nose-hair clippers, check this list created by ChemSec, an environmental non-profit based in Sweden.

3) Beware of fleece pajamas. Though one flame retardant, brominated tris, was banned from children’s pajamas, some sleepwear is still treated with another flame retardant called PROBAN which has been linked to genetic abnormalities and cancer. Check the label — children’s pajamas that DO NOT contain flame retardants must have a tag that reads: “For child’s safety, garment should fit snugly” (the snug fit limits the flow of oxygen in order to prevent fire from spreading, an approved alternative to chemical flame retardants). Cotton and polyester products rarely contain flame retardants, but look out for those cozy fleece footed pajamas — they usually do.

BPA

Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been linked to cancer,asthma, obesity and reproductive issues. And yet, until recently, the chemical was found in, among other things, baby bottles. The FDA finally banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and children’s sippy cups in 2012 — three years after major manufacturers had voluntarily stopped using it. But BPA is still found in other hard plastic containers, the lining of metal cans and the paper that receipts are printed on. It’s difficult to completely avoid BPA — 90 percent of Americans have traces of the chemical in their urine. But here are some things you can do to limit your exposure:

1) When purchasing plastic products — particularly those that come into contact with your food, such as food storage containers, plastic plates and cups, look for those that are clearly marked BPA free. Thanks to vocal consumers, many companies are now manufacturing BPA-free products and marketing them as such.

2) Avoid food containers marked with recycling codes 3 or 7, which may be made with BPA. If your food does come in a container marked 3 or 7, don’t microwave it in that container – chemicals are more likely to leak into your food at high temperatures.

3) Limit your consumption of canned foods, or look for cans marked BPA free — they are rare, but do exist. Eden Organic cans have been BPA free since 1999.

4) BPA is often used in the thermal paper that receipts are printed on. Since it’s impossible to know whether or the receipt you’re being handed has contains BPA, don’t take receipts that you don’t need. If you operate a business that uses receipts, switch to a BPA-free paper manufacturer, such as Appleton Paper, which went BPA-free in 2006.

What is Paper Terrorism? Anti-Gov't Nuts File Tens of Thousands of False Docs as "Sovereign Citizens"

Jillian Rayfield, Salon — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:40:00 -0700

Zealots use fraudulent tax returns, liens and foreclosures to evade laws they find illegitimate.

How do you stop one anti-government extremist from coordinating a trillion dollar “paper terrorism” scheme involving a raft of false financial documents, or deal with another who sues prosecutors for allegedly conspiring against him by using poor grammar?

This is the question that state governments and federal agencies are faced with, ever since a surge of people who consider themselves “sovereign citizens” began acting on their belief that all aspects of law and government are illegitimate. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that in 2011 there were approximately 100,000 “hard-core” believers in sovereign citizen ideology, though it’s a tough number to nail down because the movement is so disparate. For the same reason — and because, by their nature, members of the movement don’t believe in laws — it’s also tough to draft legislation to specifically target those crimes favored by sovereign citizens.

Some of those crimes involve filing fraudulent tax returns, liens and foreclosures, frequently known as “paper terrorism.” In fact, insofar as the sovereign citizen movement has leaders, it’s in the form of so-called “gurus” who peddle materials on how to conduct these schemes. One prominent sovereign leader, Tim Turner — who refers to himself as “president” of the “Republic for the united States of America” [sic] — was recently convicted for “attempting to pay taxes with fictitious financial instruments,” among other things. In addition to his own alleged tax crimes, Turner also purveyed a “series of seminars claiming he could help his clients get out of paying mortgages, credit cards and income tax bills using a series of sovereign tricks,” the SPLC reports.

Another sovereign citizen, David Russell Myrland, he of the particularly bizarre grammar-based conspiracy lawsuit, spent around 20 years illegally practicing law and teaching others to cheat on federal income taxes. In 2012, though, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 months in prison for threatening to kidnap a mayor in Washington state.

These cases sometimes take years to build, and they don’t address the problems that arise with the more common sovereign practice of filing false tax liens (charges imposed on property to ensure tax payments) against public officials, sometimes worth millions of dollars. Usually, these liens are left undiscovered until the official in question goes to take out a mortgage or a loan and finds their credit effectively ruined. Most of the time, sovereign citizens can exploit loopholes in laws that require clerks to process the filings without asking questions.

One way states are addressing the issue is by passing legislation to close that loophole. Indiana is the latest of at least 15 other states to pass a law to allow clerks and state officials to reject fraudulent filings before they can do any damage.

Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, a Republican, told Salon that Indiana’s new law aims to stop two typical types of filings: harassment and “straw man” filings. Harassment filings are those used “usually for a retaliatory purpose,” Lawson said, against an elected official who has confronted the sovereign citizen in some way. In Indiana, there have been two recent harassment filings made against federal judges and one against a local mayor, amounting to millions of dollars in fraudulent liens. “Straw man filings” simply express a sovereign citizen’s contention that the government is illegitimate, and are easy to identify because they are often in all caps and interspersed with colons, make multiple references to the Bible or the Constitution, and generally contain noticeably odd language and punctuation.

In the past, Lawson explained, her office would be able to identify these fraudulent filings, but they “couldn’t question the content” and were still required to process them. At best, the filings clog up the system. At worst, they can seriously damage an official’s finances. “The most effective way to stop these filings is to do it preventively,” Lawson said.

Some states are hoping to prevent these filings in a different way — by enacting tougher penalties that could serve as a deterrent. In New York, a bill would “ensure that appropriate punishments and deterrent exist in relation to the malicious filing of false or fictitious liens against … police officers and elected officials,” by making filing them a felony. The punishment would be a fine of $10,000 per filing and up to a year in prison.

The bill, which was introduced and deferred to the state judiciary committee back in January, was pushed by Orleans County District Attorney Joe Cardone. Cardone told Salon that he had heard about a federal statute that helped crack down on false liens filed against federal officials, “but there was really nothing at the state level.” Though he says the practice hasn’t occurred much in his area, the bill closes a loophole in the system in which “you might have a forgery statute that might cover the situation, but it won’t have as high an offense as this.”

Bill Fulton, a former confidential informant for the FBI on the Schaeffer Cox militia case, who has continued to work with law enforcement on sovereign citizen issues, argued to Salon that the idea behind the New York bill is not to stop them from filing the liens but to prosecute before they can file multiple liens. Under the current law, Fulton said, by the time officials catch on to the lien scam, there could already be 20 to 30 fraudulent filings in the system — which could amount to multiple fraud felonies.

“They’re not going to follow the law, but what it will do is allow law enforcement to deal with them before they clog up the court system and before they cause additional problems,” he said, noting that “sovereign citizens have convinced themselves that this is all legal and this is all OK.” The law would be like “early intervention,” Fulton said. ”If we can get them early enough to discourage them, then hopefully they won’t continue down that path.”

Georgia implemented a similar law in 2012, which went into effect last July. The law, pushed by state Rep. B. J. Pak, a Republican, made it a separate crime to file false liens, punishable by 1 to 10 years in prison, a fine up to $10,000, or both. Pak told Salon that though the law is pretty recent, he hasn’t heard of any filings since it’s gone into effect. “I’m hoping no news is good news, that it’s becoming a deterrent.” He added that the next step might be targeting sovereign citizens that have been filing false foreclosures on homes, which Pak says is in the “same kind of wheelhouse.”

For instance, in Georgia itself, 12 sovereign citizens were indicted in 2011 on several charges related to an alleged scheme to break into unoccupied homes, file the deeds for themselves, and then file additional fraudulent liens and lawsuits against any law enforcement or public official who tried to kick them out.

In these schemes, the “rightful owner has a hard time getting possession of their house; they have to go through this protracted process to determine which deed is real and which is fake,” Pak said.

Though state governments may be able to effectively utilize deterrence to prevent “paper terrorism,” there are still those more disturbing cases in which sovereign citizens have resorted to violence when confronted with law enforcement. In 2010, for example, two sovereign citizens in Arkansas were killed in a shootout with police officers after the two men opened fire with AK-47s during a traffic stop.

That’s why the FBI has labeled sovereign citizens a “domestic terrorist movement,” and it’s why the White House established a new “Interagency Working Group to Counter Online Radicalization to Violence” in February of this year. The group organizes efforts to crack down on potentially violent individuals and movements, like sovereign citizens, ”who use the Internet to recruit others to plan or carry out acts of violence.”

That’s also why local police departments have been taking additional measures to instruct officers on how to deal with sovereign citizens, including hiring specialized trainers like Detectives Rob Finch and Kory Flowers. Finch and Flowers have been making the rounds across the country, training approximately 15,000 police officers and 5,000 public officials in how to recognize and deal with a sovereign citizen who might, when pushed, resort to violence. ”To them, a police officer is just a man in a Halloween costume,” Finch recently told the Los Angeles Times.

Traffic Ticket Camera Company Channels Kafka, Threatening Court Appearances, Even Though "No Such Court Exists"

Courthouse News — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:21:00 -0700

In fact, the plaintiffs say, a state judge has told the city that its system is illegal.

A class action suit claims the City of Center Point and Redflex Traffic Systems illegally ticket drivers by threatening them with a court appearance if they refuse to pay fines, though "no such court exists."

Redflex owns and operates the traffic cameras for Center Point, which photographs cars believed to run red lights or stop signs or speed.

Such traffic-enforcement systems have been challenged, usually unsuccessfully, in courts all over the country.

This one is a bit odd, though. It claims that the law that made the traffic cameras legal also gave ticketed drivers the right to appeal—but there are no courts authorized to hear the appeals, the two named plaintiffs say.

Rhonda Lashon Stubbs and Celeita Snow sued the city and Redflex in Jefferson County Court.

Stubbs's Lexus, license plate IMNGOD, was ticketed twice, allegedly for running the same stop sign on different days. Snow's Mercedes Benz was issued 14 citations.

Snow says she repeatedly requested hearings on her tickets, and the city granted them, then "postponed" them, but never set a new date.

It can't, she says, because there is no court that can hear it.

"Ms. Stubbs paid the Notice of Violation because the Defendants left her with the false impression that the administrative hearing would be binding and would be conducted by the 'Municipal Court,'" the complaint states. "Currently, however, the Defendants strenuously argue that no such court exists. By leaving the Plaintiff with the false impression that she would appear in front of a 'court,' the Notice of Violation carried the full imprimatur of the State of Alabama and misled and intimidated Ms. Stubbs and the Class members into paying the 'fine.'

"Similarly, the Notice of Violation sent to Stubbs and other members of the Class did not explain that the $100 'fine' could not be collected unless the City filed a later, separate civil suit. Neither Ms. Stubbs nor any other Class member was informed that the Notice of Violation was not judicial in nature but was actually a non-binding collection notice."

In fact, the plaintiffs say, a state judge has told the city that its system is illegal.

The complaint states: "On August 17, 2012, an order was entered by Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge David N. Lichtenstein in City of Center Point v. Kenneth Crowder, CV-2012-0929 whereby this Court found that the Alabama District Courts do not have jurisdiction to hear appeals of any matters concerning fines, adjudications, or other action pursuant to Ordinance 2011-02. Therefore, the 'appeal' rights granted in the statute are defective as contrary to the Alabama Constitution.

"As a result of deficiencies in the Statute and Ordinance - as pointed out by Judge Lichtenstein - no meaningful appeal lies from any decision of the hearing officer appointed by the Mayor. Act 2011-580 grants rights of appeal and the Due Process Clause requires the opportunity for meaningful review; absent that, the Statute and the Ordinance are unconstitutional as applied and are due to be stricken."

Every member of the class, in other words, becomes a hero, or victim, of his or her own Kafka novel.

The plaintiffs seek declaratory judgment, costs, and damages for civil rights violations, suppression of material facts, and unlawful debt collection practices.

Their lead counsel is Samuel M. Hill.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) wrote novels and stories in which the hero, often named Josef K., is summoned to appear at a court he cannot reach, for a crime uncertain.

Center Point, pop. 23,000, is a suburb of Birmingham.

The Other IRS Scandal: Outright War Against Marijuana Dispensaries

Clarence Walker, Drug War Chronicle — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:08:00 -0700

"Should the IRS campaign be successful, it will ... eliminate tens of thousands of well paying jobs, [and] destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue."

Dispensaries providing marijuana to doctor-approved patients operate in a number of states, but they are under assault by the federal government. SWAT-style raids by the DEA and finger-wagging press conferences by grim-faced federal prosecutors may garner greater attention, but the assault on medical marijuana providers extends to other branches of the government as well, and moves by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to eliminate dispensaries' ability to take standard business deduction are another very painful arrow in the federal quiver.

The IRS employs Section 280E, a 1982 addition to the tax code that was a response to a drug dealer's successful effort to claim his yacht, weapons purchases, and even illicit bribes as business expenses. Under 280E, individuals involved in the illicit sale of controlled substances -- including marijuana, even medical marijuana in states where it is legal -- cannot claim standard business expenses on their federal taxes.

"The 280E provision which requires certain businesses to pay taxes on their gross income, as opposed to their net income, is aimed at shutting down illicit drug operations, not state-legal medical marijuana dispensaries," said Kris Hermes, spokesman for the medical marijuana defense group Americans for Safe Access." Nonetheless, the Obama Administration is using Section 280E to push these local and state licensed facilities out of business."

The provision can be used to great effect. Oakland's Harborside Health Center was hit with a $2 million IRS assessment in 2011 after the tax agency employed Section 280E against. Harborside is fighting that assessment, even as it continues to try to fend off federal prosecutors' attempts to shut it down by seizing the properties it leases. Similarly, when the feds raided Richard Lee's Oaksterdam University that same year, it wasn't just DEA, but also IRS agents who stormed the premises. Lee said it was because of a 280E-related audit.

The attacks on Harborside and Oaksterdam were part of an IRS campaign of aggressive audits using 280E to deny legitimate business expenses, such as rent, payroll, and all other necessary business expenses. These denials result in astronomical back tax bills for the affected dispensaries, threatening their viability -- and patients' access to their medicine.

"Should the IRS campaign be successful; it will throw millions of patients back in to the hands of street dealers; eliminate tens of thousands of well paying jobs, destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue; enrich the criminal underground; and endanger the safety of communities in the 17 medical cannabis states," said Harborside's Steve DeAngelo as he announced the 280E Reform Project to begin to fight back.

It's going to be an uphill battle. In the last Congress, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) introduced House Bill 1985, the Small Business Tax Equity Act, designed to end the 280E problem for medical marijuana businesses, but it went to the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee, where it was never heard from again.

Still, something needs to happen, said Betty Aldworth, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association, which this year is working with members of Congress to try to find a fix for the 280E problem.

"When Section 280E was created in the 1980s, no one imagined state-legal marijuana providers," Aldworth told the Chronicle. "Whether or not it is part of a larger effort to curtail the development of regulated models for providing marijuana, which is a model that is clearly preferable to leaving this popular and relatively safe medicine (or adult product) in the underground market, these onerous tax rates have severely hampered the development of the regulated market."

It's a brake on the overall economy, Aldworth said.

"Not only has it resulted in stymieing job development, but it also curtails other economic activity such as reinvestment in business and the rippling positive effects of that spending," she argued. "And in many cases, it has created a tax burden that is simply unbearable: many providers have had to close their doors and lay off their staffs because the tax burden was simply too great."

Because of this unintended application of 280E, medical marijuana providers are paying overall taxes at a rate two to three times those of other small businesses, Aldworth said.

"It's important to note that just as they want to apply for licenses, follow regulations, and otherwise participate in the legal business community, state-legal marijuana providers also want to pay their fair share of taxes," she pointed out. "Most small businesses pay an effective tax rate of between 13% and 27% on net income, according to the Small Business Administration. State-legal marijuana providers pay an average effective tax rate of 65-80%. An industry that can provide thousands of jobs is being held back by these crazy tax rates."

While the lobbyists look to Congress for a fix, one academic tax law expert thinks he has hit upon a novel solution, but not everyone agrees.

Benjamin Leff, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law, raised eyebrows at a Harvard University seminar this spring when he presented his report,Tax Planning For Marijuana Dealers, where he suggested that dispensaries get around 280E by registering with the IRS as tax-exempt social welfare organizations, known as 501(c)(3)s or 501(c)(4)s.

The IRS has already ruled that medical marijuana providers can be exempt under 501(c)(3) because its "public policy doctrine" does not allow charitable organizations to have purposes contrary to law, but in the paper, Leff argued that "a state-sanctioned marijuana seller could qualify as tax-exempt under 501(c)(4), since the public policy doctrine only applies to charities, and 501(c)(4) organizations are not charities."

The organization would have to be operated to improve the social and economic conditions of a neighborhood blighted by crime or poverty, by providing job training, employment opportunities, and improved business conditions for commercial development in the neighborhood, just like many existing community economic development corporations that run businesses.

"When taxes get too high, you can drive compliant dispensaries out of business," Leff told the Chronicle.

Americans for Safe Access' Hermes would agree with that, but he's not so sure about Leff's idea.

"The concept of medical marijuana dispensaries registering with the federal government as a 501(c)(4) in order to sidestep section 280E is novel and may be hypothetically valid," he said. "However, the IRS will refuse to grant tax-exempt status to a business that the agency believes is violating federal law. Perhaps, it would be possible for a dispensary to obtain 501(c)(4) status under false pretenses, but such status would not very likely withstand an IRS audit."

There are better ways, he said.

"A much more realistic and sensible approach -- pending a change to the federal classification of marijuana for medical use -- is to amend the tax code to exclude state-lawful medical marijuana businesses from Section 280E," Hermes recommended. "This is the kind of legislation that Congress should pass in order to allow states to implement their own medical marijuana laws, without undue interference by the federal government."

"I agree with everything he said," Leff replied. "But it's not just the Obama administration that is using 280E this way. The Supreme Court has held that there is no exception to the Controlled Substances Act for state-level legal marijuana sales, and since 280E makes references to Schedule I controlled substances, it applies to legal marijuana unless Congress changes the law. I totally agree that Congress should amend 280E to exempt marijuana selling that is legal under state law. Congress could also amend the Controlled Substances Act to remove marijuana from it, which would probably also make sense," he added.

Whether it is by act of Congress, internal policy shifts, or creative thinking by law school professors, some way has to be found to exempt state-permitted medical marijuana providers from the clutches of 280E and its punitive tax burden aimed at dope dealers, or there may not be any medical marijuana providers.

Will Banksters at JPMorgan Chase Finally Pay for Their Misdeeds?

Richard (RJ) Eskow, Campaign for America's Future — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:31:00 -0700

Recent revelations show that Jamie Dimon's bank represents all that is corrupt, contemptible, and criminal about today's megabanks.

Will California Attorney General Kamala Harris hang tough in her new lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, the first to target individual bankers accused of defrauding the public? If so, it would be the first time in five years that executives at a major bank have personally paid a price for their misdeeds.

Weekend at Jamie's

Recent revelations have shown the world that JPMorgan Chase comes as close as any institution in America to embodying all this is corrupt, contemptible, and criminal about today's megabanks. This is gratifying, at least on a personal level, since that was not a popular position when we first started writing about JPM and CEO Jamie Dimon a few years back. In those days Dimon was help up as the "good banker" by the president and the press. His institution was considered well-managed and ethical by some of the more shallow members of the popular press, despite the plethora of scandals and crimes like the Alabama bribery case.

Since then we've had a variety of Chase revelations: the "Burger King kids" details behind its massive foreclosure fraud; its confessed criminal mistreatment of active duty military personnel; its deeds in fraudulently propping up a failed mortgage lender (it was like a financial Weekend at Bernie's); and (speaking of "Bernies") its negligence (at best) in the handling of the fraudulent Madoff accounts, which should have triggered all sorts of red-flag warnings.

Now there's the London Whale scandal and what appears to be a subsequent case of investor deception.

The bank wound up paying a staggering $16 billion in fines and settlements over a four-year period, more than 12 percent of its net income during that time.

The Scandal of Our Time

An ethically healthy society would never have lionized a CEO like Jamie Dimon or an institution like JPMorgan Chase. That's why we've called it "the scandal of our time." What explains Dimon's inability to stem the lawbreaking and correct his organization's broken ethical system? The most generous interpretation is that he's an incompetent manager -- so incompetent that, even after numerous suits, revelations, and settlements, "Jamie didn't know" about all the illegal and unethical behavior that continued unabated in his institution.

Needless to say, there are more plausible explanations.

And yet, in those cases where the bank has been called to account with fines and settlements, it has been shareholders and not the wrongdoing bankers themselves,who have paid cost. Ironically, that even happens when the shareholders themselves are the ones who were defrauded. That's why we say that bank fraud is the only crime on Earth in which the victims make restitution on behalf of the wrongdoers.

Is this ugly pattern finally changing?

Meet the Does

Blogger and finance expert Yves Smith thinks so. California Attorney General Kamala Harris is suing JPMorgan Chase and individual bankers (named as "Does 1 through 100") for "commit(ting) debt collection abuses" against Chase credit card holders, "flooding California's courts with... collection lawsuits based on patently insufficient evidence."

The Harris suit calls on the Court to assess $2,500 against each defendant for each violation of "Business and Professions Code section 17200," and an additional $2,500 penalty for each violation perpetrated against a senior citizen or disabled person.

That may not sound like a lot of money for a banker but, as Smith points out, there are more than 100,000 potential violations. Smith writes: "If (Harris) can get the individuals who were supervising the robosigning operations (better yet, the C level execs ultimately responsible) and the complicit law firms, she might bankrupt some well-placed people. This could be extremely entertaining."

Indeed. In fact, I'll buy the popcorn.

Walking the Walk

Fro Yves Smith:

"Now Harris has been widely depicted as an opportunist. But she's kicking up more dirt on the banking front right now than any other official ... This case has enough headline value that Harris might go a few rounds before settling. JP Morgan is known for throwing vast amounts of lawyers at opponents to bury them in legal costs and busywork, so this case, sadly, is unlikely to go to trial. But if she can get the goods on the right sort of DOES, she might make some individuals pay in a serious way, which would have far more deterrent effect.

Adds Smith: "If nothing else, we should applaud what she's so far and press her to keep going."

I generally agree with all of the above. But some of us have been burned by even the most cautious cheerleading for seemingly promising Wall Street investigations and lawsuits. That's especially been true when the actions in question are being conducted by elected officials with any sort of connection to the Obama White House, an institution which has become synonymous with efforts to protect bankers and restrict their punishment to the merely symbolic.

Attorney General Harris is considered close to the president. She's undoubtedly being either cajoled or pressured (or both) to cave on this issue.

Reaching Out

So I'm going to emphasize the words "press her" in Smith's last sentence. If Harris is determined to see this through, her suit is potentially the kind of sea change in banker law enforcement we've been waiting for. But that means she'll need emphatic expressions of support to strengthen her resolve (and to explain to the Administration why she can't and won't back down).

And if this is merely another publicity stunt, she needs to know that a choreographed cave-in will be very poorly received by her constituents.

Harris therefore deserves strong expressions of support, along with statements that citizens expect her to see this action through -- at least far enough to ensure that the malefactors involved pay some personal penalty for their misdeeds.

Is Nestle Involved in Murder Of Colombian Union Leader?

James Bargent, AlterNet — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:24:00 -0700

Luciano Romero's homicide is now taking center stage in a legal battle to define corporate responsibility in conflict zones.

On the night of September 5, 2005, two paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia hijacked Luciano Romero’s taxi as he drove through his home city of Valledupar. They took him to a nearby farm, where they tortured then murdered him. His body was found the next day, dumped behind an army garrison, with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth and 50 stab wounds; one more victim in Colombia’s dirty war against trade unionists.

However, seven years on, and while Romero may only be one of approximately 3,000 victims of that war, his murder is now taking center stage in a legal battle to define corporate responsibility in conflict zones. This battle is taking place not in Colombia, but in Switzerland, home to one of the world’s biggest multi-nationals and Romero’s former employers – Nestle.

The struggle to hold Nestle accountable for its alleged role in Romero’s death began with the 2007 conviction of Romero’s killers – itself a rarity in a country with a 95% impunity rate in unionist murders. When passing sentence, Judge José Nirio Sánchez ordered an investigation into the intellectual authors of the crime that would scrutinize the role of not only the paramilitary warlord who commanded Romero’s killers, but also the management at the Nestle subsidiary where Romero worked.

While that investigation has yet to show any sign of progress, the case has been taken up by Romero’s union, SINALTRAINAL, and human rights group the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). In 2012, the organizations filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland demanding the prosecution of Nestle for Romero’s murder.

The powdered milk factory where Romero worked, CICOLAC, was Nestlé’s first investment in Colombia, when it opened the site in 1944. The multi-national sold CICOLAC in 1982, only to buy it back again in 1998. At the time of Nestlé’s return to Valledupar, the northern state of Cesar, where the city is located, was under the control of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary army.

According to the testimonies of demobilized AUC leaders, the paramilitaries had been invited into the region by members of the region’s economic elite, who were tired of the campaign of constant harassment, kidnappings and extortion waged by leftist guerilla groups. Cesar became a fiefdom of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias ‘Jorge 40,’ a member of Valledupar high society whose paramilitary empire stretched across north east Colombia.

The Cesar paramilitary block commanded by Jorge 40 was financed by the region’s cattle ranchers, dairy farmers and other land owners and economic interests. Among them was CICOLAC – according to AUC Leader Salvatore Mancuso, who named the company in the hearings that followed the demobilization of the AUC in 2006.

The paramilitaries in Cesar employed their favored terror tactics in the battle against the guerrillas, and launched a dirty war against anyone they deemed a guerrilla “collaborator” – community leaders, leftist activists, educators and, above all, unionists.

In 1993, Harry Triana became the first CICOLAC unionist in Valledupar to fall victim to that war when killed in front of his children and work colleagues. The next came in 1996, when José Manuel Becerra Pacheco was beheaded and Alejandro Matias Vanstrahlen was shot. The following year, Toribio De La Hoz was shot while celebrating his 42nd birthday in his home and in 1999 Victor Mieles and his wife were abducted in front of one of Nestlé’s Cesar factories and later murdered.

Despite the violence, Luciano Romero emerged as a leading figure in the local union movement. “He was a person who had really absorbed the union’s values,” said Alfonso Baron, a friend of Romero’s and a local SINALTRAINAL leader who has worked at CICOLAC since 1986. “He was a good friend, a good companion, he showed solidarity and fraternity, he was respectful, a hard worker and he looked out for others.”

However, Romero’s activities soon attracted unwanted attentions. In 1988, the Colombian judicial police abducted Romero and tortured him in a secret prison for a week, according to a legal statement submitted by the unionist. By the late nineties, Romero’s work at the union and social activism had attracted the attentions of the paramilitaries, and he started receiving death threats.

The relationship between Romero and CICOLAC was strained. In 1999, a bomb went off at the factory, injuring one person – Luciano Romero. The company CEO, Carlos Fajardo, accused Romero of planting the bomb. The implication – that Romero was working with guerrillas – did not go unnoticed. It was a slur the union heard time and again from the company management, and especially from Fajardo.

“When someone says we are guerrillas it is dangerous,” said Baron. “In this country saying these things publically is risky because you don’t know who is there, who is listening, who is talking.”

The smear persisted even after Romero’s death but was finally laid to rest by the judge in the trial of Romero’s killers, who dismissed attempts to link Romero to the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) as unfounded.

As well as the accusations the union worked with the guerrillas, Fajardo also hinted at his own connections to the paramilitaries. “To ingratiate himself with the union he would ring us up and warn us to be careful because we’re going to ‘see some things’” said Baron. Fajardo warned union members several times that Romero was on a death list, once saying he could protect the unionist as long as he remained at the company, according to witnesses.

The relationship between Romero and the company began to break down terminally in 2002, when Romero led taut negotiations over an expiring labor agreement. What should have been standard negotiations quickly descended into a crisis. “It was a very tense situation,” said Baron. “The company launched an attack to strip away all our social and economic rights.”

The union began to prepare for a strike. Within days, the paramilitaries began running night patrols and distributing threatening leaflets, and word reached the unionists that if they went on strike they would be killed. Rumors of a death list with Luciano Romero’s name on it began to circulate.

According to witnesses, notorious paramilitaries appeared at the factory when the union was holding protest meetings. Among them was Hughes Rodriguez Fuentes, also known as “Comandante Barbie.”

Rodriguez was a finance chief for the AUC’s Martierres War Front of Cesar – the paramilitary unit that Romero’s assassins belonged to. The authorities in both Colombia and the United States believe he was a trusted ally of Jorge 40, and one of the warlord’s principal money launderers and fund raisers. He was also one of CICOLAC’s milk suppliers, and, according to witnesses, a personal friend of Carlos Fajardo.

During the labor dispute, the CICOLAC management told Rodriguez and the other milk suppliers that the union’s labor demands would push down milk prices while a strike would lead to the closure of the plant.

Also among those CICOLAC milk suppliers was Hernando Molina Araujo, a future Governor of Cesar, whose term was cut short after he conspired with the AUC to assassinate a local university professor. Another was Gustavo Gnecco, member of an infamous family of local power brokers who moved easily between the worlds of legitimate business and the drug trade, politics and paramilitarism.

With tensions building and violence looking likely, the union cancelled the strike. Not long after, Romero was one of nine workers, six of them union leaders, fired by CICOLAC – illegally according to the union. Ten months later, the company fired 99% of the workforce, and sold CICOLAC to DPA – a company jointly owned by Nestle and New Zealand based Fonterra. The workforce for the renamed DPA-CICOLAC was forced to accept reduced terms, and for many of them, temporary contracts. According to Baron, ten years and two rounds of labor negotiations later, workers still earn less than they did in 2002.

Despite the end of the dispute and Romero’s sacking, the threats against the union continued. In 2004, he went into exile through a protection program. However, he returned to Valledupar in 2005. “I would imagine his return was influenced by the emptiness of not being with his family, of not seeing his wife and children,” said Baron. “Being away from your home country is a form of slow death.”

By September, Romero was preparing to denounce Nestle as witness at the Permanent Peoples Tribunal in Switzerland. He was also working on the complaint he had filed against the company for unfair dismissal, and organizing a protest to commemorate the second anniversary of the mass lay off of the CICOLAC workers.

Just days before the protest was scheduled to take place, Jose Ustariz Acuña and Jhonatan David Contrera received orders from their AUC commanders to abduct, interrogate and murder an ELN guerrilla pretending to be a taxi driver by the name of Luciano Romero.

Neither the union nor ECCHR accuse Nestle of ordering Romero’s murder. However, they insist the company is responsible for his death. “The paramilitaries punished us precisely because we made demands of the company,” said Edgar Paez, a member of the union’s national leadership. “They have a very close relationship that does not permit us to exercise our right to organize, to unionize.”

Responsibility not only lies with the CICOLAC management but also with the Nestle parent company, according to Claudia Mueller-Hoff from ECCHR. “They are culpable because of omission, they had a duty to act, they had a duty to protect,” she said. “This risky behavior of the subsidiary is something where the Nestle parent company should have intervened because it was brought to their attention on several occasions.”

Nestle is far from the first multinational to be linked to anti-union violence and paramilitarism in Colombia and there have been investigations into subsidiaries of Chiquita, Drummond and Coca Cola. Mueller-Hoff though, is hoping this case will be different as it has the potential to help define what a company’s obligations are in conflict zones. “Parent companies need to look into their impact worldwide even if it’s an impact that is generated through their subsidiaries,” she said.

Nestle firmly denied it shares responsibility for Romero’s death. In a written statement for AlterNet, the company said: “We have never used violence, nor have we associated with criminals. We have no responsibility whatsoever, directly or indirectly, neither by action nor omission for the murder of Luciano Romero.”

However, Nestle declined to comment on the relationship between the CICOLAC management, the milk suppliers and paramilitaries, or on the accusations of reckless slander against the management, and the events of the labor dispute. It also declined to comment on Salvatore Mancuso’s testimony that CICOLAC had funded the AUC.

Progress in the case has so far been hampered by legal wrangling. In early May, the five Nestle executives named in the complaint avoided the possibility of prosecution when the statute of limitations for the crime expired after the Swiss courts had argued over jurisdiction for a year. “It seems to be an attempt to avoid dealing with the important legal questions at stake,” said Mueller-Hoff. “The Swiss public prosecutor has even fallen behind our relatively modest expectations.”

However, the ECCHR, SINALTRAINAL and Romero’s family are still optimistic the second target of the complaint – Nestle as a company – can still be prosecuted. Under Swiss law, the statute of limitations only begins for a company when it ends the practices it is accused of. According to SINALTRAINAL, this has yet to happen.

While Jorge 40 and the AUC have now demobilized, paramilitary successor groups, often led by former mid-level commanders, continue to terrorize unionists working at Nestle today.

In 2011, Roberto Gonzalez became the 13th Nestle unionist to be murdered when he was shot in the back in Valledupar. In 2012, 23 SINALTRAINAL members who are current or former Nestle workers received death threats.

“Every time there is a labor dispute, there is a leap in paramilitarism,” said Paez. “The threats come, people are followed, there are some really difficult security situations.”

Some of the threats received last year directly referenced protests SINALTRAINAL had led against Nestle, including one promising to “exterminate” the union for their campaign at Nestlé’s Bugalagrande factory. The tone of the threats has changed little since the paramilitary heyday and recipients remain, as in one threat sent by neo-paramilitary group the Urabeños, “guerrilla sons of bitches disguised as unionists.”

Paez believes the links between paramilitarism and the landowning elite who supply DPA-CICOLAC with milk have also changed little. “DPA is still buying milk and they buy this milk from these men, who in some way have connections to paramilitarism,” he said.

While the struggle to hold corporations accountable for their role in Colombia’s dirty war continues, those on the front lines of that war have little doubt as to who it has benefited from the violence. “In Luciano’s case who won?” said Baron. “The state won because there is one man less in the struggle, the company won because they benefited directly and above all, the bosses won because they managed to show that with violence you can bring an end to unionism.”

Meet the Senate's Powerful and Progressive Policy Wonk, Ron Wyden

Joe Conason, AlterNet — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:00:00 -0700

His habitual reaching across the partisan chasm has generated controversy, notably when he floated a Medicare reform plan with House Budget chair Paul Ryan.

Having served in Congress for more than three decades -- and in the upper chamber since 1996 -- Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden has established a reputation as one of the Senate's more serious and diligent members. Over the years on Capitol Hill, he has watched the Republican Party veer constantly further rightward, and yet he continues to believe against all evidence that bipartisan legislative cooperation is possible -- even likely. His habitual reaching across the partisan chasm has generated much controversy, notably when he floated a Medicare reform plan with House Budget chair Paul Ryan.

Meanwhile, Wyden has also accumulated considerable seniority, despite his youthful demeanor (and a new baby at home). With the announced retirement of Democratic Senator of Montana Max Baucus, Wyden is set to replace him as chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee in the next Congress (assuming that Democrats retain control of the Senate). Recently he spoke with The National Memo about the budget, tax reform, health care and other matters of concern to the Finance committee.

Among Wyden's enduring charms is his political optimism. Dismal as Washington's budget debate may be, he perceives an opportunity in the sequester. "At a time when people are talking about hammering (programs like) Meals on Wheels, this critically important program for the most vulnerable seniors as a part of this sequestration process, I think this highlights how important it is to start looking at our real priorities ... Before you cut Meals on Wheels, you ought to be looking at rolling back some of these really offensive, outlandish, special interest tax perks.

"What I and others are hoping is that we can shift the debate away from ... sequestration and talk about what are really core values and particularly core progressive values. ... This is the time when we ought to put values front and center in terms of making sure people understand what our real priorities are, and whether it's tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas or kind of special interest goodies tucked into the tax code. I think that's something you're going to finally see emerge as the heart of this budget debate."

Wyden now says he would like to take the budget fight to the House, whose Republican leaders long complained that the Senate hadn't passed a budget. "The House has passed a budget, the Senate has passed a budget," he noted. "We think our values are much more in line with the American people than what the House is talking about. And the House, after having insisted for literally years on what's called regular order, and passing bills, and having conference committees, now they don't want to do it. ... It's time to have an actual budget conference where people can see in broad daylight some of the differences that are so important to the country."

Asked how he maintains his faith in bipartisanship, Wyden mentions more than once his Republican colleague from Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski, with whom he seeks common ground on issues ranging from clean energy to campaign finance. "She and I produced the first bipartisan campaign finance reform bill in the Senate in a decade. ... What it's about is making sure that before an election, in real time, the American voter knows where money is being raised, and where it is going to; and particularly we blow the whistle on the so-called social welfare organizations, which are really kind of political operations masquerading as social welfare organizations that get tax breaks -- and make it clear that that kind of approach is not going to get in, effect, subsidized by the tax code." But he acknowledges that he and Murkowski cannot currently persuade enough Republicans to vote for a bill to bring transparency and honesty to outfits like Karl Rove's American Crossroads.

Wyden has studied and proposed tax reform for years -- and if Baucus fails to pass a reform bill before retiring, he will face that daunting objective as Finance chair. He says that his model is the 1986 Reagan tax reform bill. "We're spending more than a trillion dollars on these special interest tax breaks, these tax expenditures, and what you ought to do is get rid of them in order to broaden the tax base, and keep progressivity. ... You know, we Democrats really look at these special interest tax breaks, hotwired by these very powerful lobbies. We want to get rid of them. Republicans say, 'Look, we want to have a tax code that is more efficient, we want to encourage growth.' That kind of approach was advanced in 1986 by a big group of liberals and a conservative Republican president.

In the 1986 bill, Wyden says, "there should have been a provision to make it tougher for lobbyists to try to unravel (the reforms) after they got enacted. And frankly this time ... once we really do have tax reform that helps to grow the economy and create more opportunities for the middle class, let's make sure that we do what wasn't done in 1986, and that's make it tougher for the lobbyists to unravel it." He promises to protect the "middle-class deductions" for mortgage payments, health insurance, savings and charitable contributions -- and he says that rather than being "revenue neutral," as Republicans insist, progressive tax reform will inevitably raise revenues.

Wyden's version of tax reform will grow the economy "because it puts more money into the hands of middle-class people." Among other benefits for average taxpayers, he would triple the standard deduction.

Of his abortive Medicare initiative with Ryan, he says that it "provided a way to protect the Medicare guarantee" while holding costs down. But the right wing in the House scuttled that plan, and Wyden dropped his brief partnership with Wisconsin's famed Ayn Rand disciple. Now he intends to focus on chronic care for the elderly, which consumes roughly 70 percent of the Medicare budget and drives higher costs even though treatment is often ineffective.

"So many seniors have these multiple health care conditions, and what we're doing now is so fragmented, and so poorly focused, that we ought to really step back and try to think through what's the best way to efficiently get good quality care to those who need it most. Right now those are the individuals who are the sickest, they are the most expensive to care for, and they arguably get some of the worst care, and that's going to be the reform area that I focus on next."

What he vows, despite constant threats from his Republican colleagues, is to defend Obamacare, despite their concerns about its implementation. "But the bottom line here is, and this needs to be said loud and clear to the far right that wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act and allow the insurance companies to go out and clobber the people with pre-existing conditions ... I don't want to turn back the clock and go back to the days when the health care system in America was just for the healthy and the wealthy."

Towns' Latino Community Totally Unsurprised That Police Beat Man to Death for No Reason and Tried to Cover it Up

Sandy Close and Raj Jayadev, New America Media — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:46:00 -0700

This is only the latest in egregious police abuse in Kern County.

BAKERSFIELD, CA. -- Abusive behavior by law enforcement officers in towns across Kern County and neighboring Tulare County has generated distrust and resignation, especially among Latinos who make up the majority of the region's population.

But national media coverage of the alleged beating death by deputies of David Silva, a 33 year old Latino father of four, in downtown Bakersfield may finally break community apathy, according to some two dozen attendees at a health care fair here interviewed by New America Media.

Less than a week after Silva was beaten allegedly by eight or nine deputies and highway patrol officers, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Fox News had all reported on the incident as well as on an apparent attempt to cover it up when Bakersfield police confiscated the cell phones of several bystanders who had videotaped it.

So had the Spanish-language news outlet Univision, which ran a segment titled "Worst Police Beatings of Latinos."

"This is a really conservative community. Most people will think something like this was bound to happen -- it's been happening in other places. But the country's eye is now on Bakersfield and that could make the difference," said Amy Lopez, 22, a student of dental hygiene at Cal StateBakersfield.

Bill Phelps, who works with South Kern's low-income health plan program HMC, said news of the beatings had "accelerated a huge mistrust of law enforcement across all sectors of the community. Thanks to national media coverage, Kern County is now on the public radar."

Hilary Meeks, a reporter for the Visalia Times, noted that the incident hadn't occurred in a vacuum. "There've been five shootings over the last four years in neighboring Tulare County ... A sheriff's deputy ran over someone two years ago and nothing was done about it. We had a guy killed in Porterville. The court case ended in a hung jury. That was one or two years ago."

At least a third of those interviewed by NAM at the fair, held at the Kern County Fair Grounds on Saturday, had not heard about the Silva incident, although it's been front page news for the Bakersfield Californian's daily website, and on local TV. But recession-related closures of all but one Spanish language news weekly, along with Univision's Bakersfield bureau, has turned the city into something of a media desert, especially for non-English speakers.

"Local awareness will build with more local, state and national media coverage," said El Popular publisher George Comacho, who plans to report on the story next week, especially in the wake of Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood's request on May 14 for an FBI probe into Silva's death.

Linda Vasquez, a 27 year old Cal State Bakersfield student, was as agitated by the cover up as the beating itself. "The part that makes me angry is how they took the phones, because they've done that before." She told a story of how her brother was harassed, and the phone of another family member who recorded the incident was taken by law enforcement. She was not sure whether it was city police or the sheriff's department.

Ali Morris, CEO of the local Black Chamber of Commerce, thinks that even if public pressure mounts over the Silva case it's going to take a lot of time and education to change things for the better. "We have a broken system. In theory everything should work right. We can start attacking it here or there, but it's the system that's broke. It should have never gotten to this point.”

The solution, Morris says, has to come with changes in perception on both law enforcement's side and on the public's side.

"I think both sides are responsible," Morris observed. "The whole police force is at the mercy of one bad officer. At the same time, the police officer wonders why he is putting his life in jeopardy when the people here don't want him there...

"We have to go at this whole thing piece by piece," Morris concluded. "If I didn't have a spiritual foundation I couldn't get through it."

Pablo, another Cal State Bakersfield student who is studying to become a police officer and didn't give his last name, learned about the Silva incident from his criminal justice professor. "There have been a lot of shootings and beatings by law enforcement officials. They should train the police to use non violence or non lethal force," he commented.

Cal State student Amy Lopez said she was frustrated that there hadn't been more public reaction like a student protest. "Something's got to give. I shouldn't leave it up to another group to say something. I should step up and do something."

How the US Turned Three Pacifists Into 'Multiple Felony Saboteurs'

Fran Quigley, AlterNet — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:09:00 -0700

Feds crack down on peaceful anti-nuke protesters who exposed major security lapse at weapons plant.

In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.

Here is how it happened.

In the early morning hours of Saturday June 28, 2012, long-time peace activists Sr. Megan Rice, 82, Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, and Michael Walli, 63, cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons production facility and trespassed onto the property. Y-12, called the Fort Knox of the nuclear weapons industry, stores hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and works on every single one of the thousands of nuclear weapons maintained by the U.S.

Describing themselves as the Transform Now Plowshares, the three came as non-violent protestors to symbolically disarm the weapons. They carried bibles, written statements, peace banners, spray paint, flower, candles, small baby bottles of blood, bread, hammers with biblical verses on them and wire cutters. Their intent was to follow the words of Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Sr. Megan Rice has been a Catholic sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus for over sixty years. Greg Boertje-Obed, a married carpenter who has a college age daughter, is an Army veteran and lives at a Catholic Worker house in Duluth Minnesota. Michael Walli, a two-term Vietnam veteran turned peacemaker, lives at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Washington DC.

In the dark, the three activists cut through a boundary fence which had signs stating “No Trespassing.” The signs indicate that unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

No security arrived to confront them.

So the three climbed up a hill through heavy brush, crossed a road, and kept going until they saw the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF) surrounded by three fences, lit up by blazing lights.

Still no security.

So they cut through the three fences, hung up their peace banners, and spray-painted peace slogans on the HEUMF. Still no security arrived. They began praying and sang songs like “Down by the Riverside” and “Peace is Flowing Like a River.”

When security finally arrived at about 4:30 am, the three surrendered peacefully, were arrested, and jailed.

The next Monday July 30, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli were arraigned and charged with federal trespassing, a misdemeanor charge which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail. Frank Munger, an award-winning journalist with the Knoxville News Sentinel, was the first to publicly wonder, “If unarmed protesters dressed in dark clothing could reach the plant’s core during the cover of dark, it raised questions about the plant’s security against more menacing intruders.”

On Wednesday August 1, all nuclear operations at Y-12 were ordered to be put on hold in order for the plant to focus on security. The “security stand-down” was ordered by security contractor in charge of Y-12, B&W Y-12 (a joint venture of the Babcock and Wilcox Company and Bechtel National Inc.) and supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

On Thursday August 2, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli appeared in court for a pretrial bail hearing. The government asked that all three be detained. One prosecutor called them a potential “danger to the community” and asked that all three be kept in jail until their trial. The US Magistrate allowed them to be released.

Sr. Megan Rice walked out of the jail and promptly admitted to gathered media that the three had indeed gone onto the property and taken action in protest of nuclear weapons. “But we had to — we were doing it because we had to reveal the truth of the criminality which is there, that’s our obligation,” Rice said. She also challenged the entire nuclear weapons industry: “We have the power, and the love, and the strength and the courage to end it and transform the whole project, for which has been expended more than 7.2 trillion dollars,” she said “The truth will heal us and heal our planet, heal our diseases, which result from the disharmony of our planet caused by the worst weapons in the history of mankind, which should not exist. For this we give our lives — for the truth about the terrible existence of these weapons.”

Then the government began increasing the charges against the anti-nuclear peace protestors.

The day after the Magistrate ordered the release of Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli, a Department of Energy (DOE) agent swore out a federal criminal complaint against the three for damage to federal property, a felony punishable by zero to five years in prison, under 18 US Code Section 1363.

The DOE agent admitted the three carried a letter which stated, “We come to the Y-12 facility because our very humanity rejects the designs of nuclearism, empire and war. Our faith in love and nonviolence encourages us to believe that our activity here is necessary; that we come to invite transformation, undo the past and present work of Y-12; disarm and end any further efforts to increase the Y-12 capacity for an economy and social structure based on war-making and empire-building.”

Now, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli were facing one misdemeanor and one felony and up to six years in prison.

But the government did not stop there. The next week, the charges were enlarged yet again.

On Tuesday August 7, the U.S. expanded the charges against the peace activists to three counts. The first was the original charge of damage to Y-12 in violation of 18 US Code 1363, punishable by up to five years in prison. The second was an additional damage to federal property in excess of $1000 in violation of 18 US Code 1361, punishable by up to ten years in prison. The third was a trespassing charge, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison under 42 US Code 2278.

Now they faced up to sixteen years in prison. And the actions of the protestors started to receive national and international attention.

On August 10, 2012, the New York Times ran a picture of Sr. Megan Rice on page one under the headline “The Nun Who Broke into the Nuclear Sanctum.” Citing nuclear experts, the paper of record called their actions “the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex.”

At the end of August 2012, the Inspector General of the Department of Energy issued at comprehensive report on the security breakdown at Y-12. Calling the peace activists trespassers, the report indicated that the three were able to get as far as they did because of “multiple system failures on several levels.” The cited failures included cameras broken for six months, ineptitude in responding to alarms, communication problems, and many other failures of the contractors and the federal monitors. The report concluded that “Ironically, the Y-12 breach may have been an important “wake-up” call regarding the need to correct security issues at the site.”

On October 4, 2012, the defendants announced that they had been advised that, unless they pled guilty to at least one felony and the misdemeanor trespass charge, the U.S. would also charge them with sabotage against the U.S. government, a much more serious charge. Over 3000 people signed a petition to U.S. Attorney General Holder asking him not to charge them with sabotage.

But on December 4, 2012, the U.S. filed a new indictment of the protestors. Count one was the promised new charge of sabotage. Defendants were charged with intending to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States and willful damage of national security premises in violation of 18 US Code 2155, punishable with up to 20 years in prison. Counts two and three were the previous felony property damage charges, with potential prison terms of up to fifteen more years in prison.

Gone entirely was the original misdemeanor charge of trespass. Now Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli faced up to thirty-five years in prison.

In a mere five months, government charges transformed them from misdemeanor trespassers to multiple felony saboteurs.

The government also successfully moved to strip the three from presenting any defenses or testimony about the harmful effects of nuclear weapons. The U.S. Attorney’s office filed a document they called “Motion to Preclude Defendants from Introducing Evidence in Support of Certain Justification Defenses.” In this motion, the U.S. asked the court to bar the peace protestors from being allowed to put on any evidence regarding the illegality of nuclear weapons, the immorality of nuclear weapons, international law, or religious, moral or political beliefs regarding nuclear weapons, the Nuremberg principles developed after WWII, First Amendment protections, necessity or US policy regarding nuclear weapons.

Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli argued against the motion. But, despite powerful testimony by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a declaration from an internationally renowned physician and others, the Court ruled against defendants.

Meanwhile, Congress was looking into the security breach, and media attention to the trial grew with a remarkable story in the Washington Post, with CNN coverage and AP and Reuters joining in.

The trial was held in Knoxville in early May 2012. The three peace activists were convicted on all counts. Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli all took the stand, admitted what they had done, and explained why they did it. The federal manager of Y-12 said the protestors had damaged the credibility of the site in the U.S. and globally and even claimed that their acts had an impact on nuclear deterrence.

As soon as the jury was dismissed, the government moved to jail the protestors because they had been convicted of “crimes of violence.” The government argued that cutting the fences and spray-painting slogans was property damage such as to constitute crimes of violence so the law obligated their incarceration pending sentencing.

The defense pointed out that Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli had remained free since their arrest without incident. The government attorneys argued that two of the protestors had violated their bail by going to a congressional hearing about the Y-12 security problems, an act that had been approved by their parole officers.

The three were immediately jailed. In its decision affirming their incarceration pending their sentencing, the court ruled that both the sabotage and the damage to property convictions were defined by Congress as federal crimes of terrorism. Since the charges carry potential sentences of ten years or more, the Court ruled there was a strong presumption in favor of incarceration which was not outweighed by any unique circumstances that warranted their release pending sentencing.

These non-violent peace activists now sit in jail as federal prisoners, awaiting their sentencing on September 23, 2013.

In ten months, an 82-year-old nun and two pacifists had been successfully transformed by the U.S. government from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism.

Outrageous Attacks on Supporters of Church-State Separation: Death Threats, Murdered Pets, and Vandalized Property

Adam Lee, AlterNet — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:49:00 -0700

The religious right often wages campaigns of harassment, intimidation and outright violence against First Amendment plaintiffs.

When it comes to the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a state religion by the government even if a majority supports it, is something most of us heartedly support.

But not all. The religious right despises the First Amendment, since it's constantly foiled their efforts to inject Christian doctrine into government. And when they've lost in court, religious conservatives in the U.S. have often waged campaigns of threats, harassment and outright violence against First Amendment plaintiffs, in the hopes of intimidating them into backing down and achieving by mob violence what they can't achieve under the law.

Last year, the Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted two public school districts in Pennsylvania, in New Kensington and Connellsville, to demand the removal of large stone Ten Commandments monuments prominently placed on school property. When the schools chose to fight, the FFRF and its local plaintiffs, including current students, filed a lawsuit.

As often happens in these cases, FFRF plaintiffs asked to have their identities concealed because they feared harassment and retaliation from the community. It was a well-founded fear, since some of them had already been receiving threats on social media. On a Facebook page supporting the New Kensington school, one person encouraged others to "slam the shit out of the bitch" who filed the lawsuit. Another commenter asked, "Have the families involved in the lawsuit been identified? I cannot believe anyone living in the community would participate in such a worthless cause. Someone needs to send that group back to Wisconsin with several black eyes!"

Because of threats like this, the court granted the request for anonymity, finding that "this basis upon which the Does fear disclosure is substantial and that there is a substantial public interest in ensuring that litigants not face such retribution in their attempt to seek redress for what they view as a Constitutional violation, a pure legal issue." In response, Republican state representative Tim Krieger filed a bill... that would eliminate the right of plaintiffs to sue anonymously over religious symbols on public property.

Thankfully, Krieger's understanding of federalism is as abysmal as his grasp of the Bill of Rights: the FFRF lawsuit was filed in federal court, where state laws have no effect. Still, the ugly, bullying intent behind his bill is obvious: the unsubtle hope is to encourage bullying and retribution against First Amendment plaintiffs, to "punish" them for standing up for the Constitution.

The story of high school activist Jessica Ahlquist, previously reported by Greta Christina on AlterNet, is another example. After speaking out against an illegal prayer banner in her public school (and winning in court), Ahlquist received vivid, violent threats on social media, and even in a handwritten letter. Some of the threats were so serious she was temporarily given a police escort for protection.

These two stories are just the most recent and high-profile examples of the kind of harassment and intimidation of church-state plaintiffs that's been going on literally for decades. Countless other stories could be cited, like these:

Darla Kay Wynne. A Wiccan living in the town of Great Falls, South Carolina in 2004, Darla Kay Wynne was disturbed by sectarian Christian prayers before town council meetings. On one occasion, when she deliberately came late to avoid the prayer, she was denied the opportunity to speak at the meeting even though she had previously signed up to do so and was listed on the official agenda. When she asked for members of other religions to have an opportunity to give the prayers, that too was denied; the mayor, Henry Starnes, said, "This is the way we've always done things and we're not going to change." When she refused to stand for one of the prayers, several people told her she "wasn't wanted" and "should leave town."

Wynne filed a lawsuit, Wynne v. Town of Great Falls, which she easily won based on existing precedent. In response, as reported by a South Carolina newspaper, The State, someone broke into her home and decapitated her pet parrot, leaving a note next to the body that read, "You're next!" Several of her cats were also killed, and her tiny Yorkshire terrier was beaten.

The Santa Fe Does. In 2000, in the case Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, the Supreme Court struck down student-selected, school-endorsed prayer at high school football games in Santa Fe, Texas. As in FFRF's Pennsylvania cases, the lower courts allowed the plaintiffs to file anonymously to protect them from harassment. The wisdom of that measure was soon demonstrated because employees of the school district apparently spent considerable effort trying to figure out who the plaintiffs were. The judge was forced to issue a further order, threatening criminal contempt if there was "any further attempt on the part of District or school administration... parents, students or anyone else, overtly or covertly to ferret out the identities of the Plaintiffs in this cause, by means of bogus petitions, questionnaires, individual interrogation, or downright 'snooping.'"

The McCollums. Vashti McCollum, her husband John and her son Jim were at the center of one of the earliest and most important First Amendment cases of the 20th century: McCollum vs. Board of Education, a 1948 Supreme Court ruling striking down a "released-time" policy in Illinois that allowed clergy to come to a public school to teach religious education classes to students during the school day.

While the case was going on, the McCollum family was threatened and ostracized by their community. They received harassing and threatening messages, including one that read, "There is no room for you nor yours here. God damn you sons and daughters of bitches.... If you think you can boss us around What fun We are going to have." On one Halloween, a mob broke into the house and threw rotten fruit and vegetables at the family. Vashti was abruptly fired from her job as a phys-ed teacher at the University of Illinois at Champaign. Jim McCollum and his brothers were beaten up while going to and from school. Most shockingly, the McCollum family's cat was lynched and hanged from a tree.

The Bells. In 1981, in the Oklahoma community of Little Axe, school officials allowed a Baptist religious group, the Son Shine Club, to meet in the school building before the start of the day. The buses dropped students off at school 30 minutes before the start of class, and those who didn't want to attend the religious meetings had to wait outside the building, even if it was raining or freezing cold.

Joann Bell and another local parent, Lucille McCord, were both Christians but of different denominations, and didn't want their children exposed to Baptist preaching on school time. When they filed a lawsuit with the help of the ACLU, Bell v. Little Axe, retribution was swift and vicious.

Joann Bell was assaulted by a school employee who smashed her head repeatedly against a car door; he was only fined, and the community rallied around him and raised money to pay the fine. The Bells' home was burned to the ground; fire marshals ruled it to be arson, but no arrest was ever made. McCord's son raised goats, which an unknown person slashed and mutilated with a knife. Both of them received threatening letters, including copies of their own obituaries. The Bells got a phone call from someone who said he would break into Joann Bell's house, tie up her children, rape her in front of them, and then "bring her to Jesus." The local superintendent, Paul Pettigrew, said, "The only people who have been hurt by this thing are the Bells and McCords... They chose to create their own hell on earth."

Although most of these champions of the Constitution persevered through harassment and threats, sadly, that isn't always the case. Sometimes the persecution is too severe to bear, as in the case of the Dobriches, an Orthodox Jewish family who filed a lawsuit in 2005 challenging pervasive Christian influence in their Delaware school district, including explicitly sectarian prayers at parent-teacher meetings and graduation ceremonies, special privileges given to children in Christian clubs, and Bibles handed out at elementary school.

When Mona Dobrich complained on behalf of her son, Alex, a group calling itself the "Stop the ACLU Coalition" publicized the Dobriches' home address and phone number, and they received so many threats, harassing messages and anti-Semitic hate letters that they were essentially hounded out of their community. They ended up moving to another county, and their daughter had to drop out of Columbia University because of the financial strain they were under.

Another church-state plaintiff driven out of her town was Melinda Maddox, a Roman Catholic resident of Brewton, Alabama who joined in a 2001 lawsuit challenging theocratic judge Roy Moore's illegal placement of a Ten Commandments monument in the state judicial building. During her honeymoon, someone shot out the windows of her house; her car was vandalized, and she received violent threats like "You should be hog-tied and thrown in the Escambia River." Her parents, both of whom were battling cancer, received threatening and harassing phone calls as well. When she asked community leaders to condemn the threats, they instead counseled her to drop out of the case. The strain destroyed her marriage and her legal firm, forcing her to relocate to Mobile. In spite of this, she says she would do it all over again.

How a Well-Meaning Progressive Accidentally Launched Powerball Lottery Industry Across America

Matthew Vaz, In These Times — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:05:00 -0700

A proposal for a socially conscious lottery panicked state gambling interests and birthed the 9-figure jackpot.

This article first appeared on In These Times.

Beyond the feel-good story of the New Jersey bodega operator who struck it rich with a lucky ticket, the recent Powerball jackpot of $338 million was actually rather unremarkable. Indeed, both the Powerball and the Mega Millions lotteries have previously seen their jackpots push past the half billion mark. The trend of sky-high jackpots can be traced back 25 years, when America’s state lottery directors banded together to fend off a new federal proposal from Rep. Cardiss Collins.

The Illinois Congresswoman, who died on February 3, is fondly remembered for her time as the lone African-American woman in the House of Representatives and for her unwavering advocacy on behalf of the poor. Yet the Chicago-based icon is less known for her proposal to start a national lottery, which ultimately—and unintentionally—helped lead to our current frenzied practices of jackpot gambling.

In 1985, Collins proposed a national lottery to supplement Social Security and Medicare via federal savings bonds. Instead of a ticket, the bettor would purchase a bond whose serial number would serve as the ticket number. Thus, the millions of lottery losers would have been left holding a savings bond rather than a worthless ticket or a crumpled scratch game card. Collins’ proposal was blocked in the House, but not before it set off a wave of fear and panic among state lottery directors and their corporate contractors, who were quick to take action.

The worry in lottery circles was that a national lottery, with its massive pool of potential bettors, would be able to build far larger jackpots than those offered by the existing state gambling operations. According to the magazine Gaming and Wagering Business, in an effort to “beat the federal government to the punch,” a consortium of several state lotteries “hatched a plan to run a giant multi-state lotto game that would rival Congress’ fledgling plans.” The result was the game Lotto America, which went on sale in February 1988, initially offered in six states and the District of Columbia.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the history of lottery gambling in the United States is the apprehension evinced by ’80s lottery executives as they experimented with new ways to drive up jackpot amounts. “I don’t know if we’d feel comfortable with $40 million jackpots,” Pennsylvania’s lottery director said in 1986. Delaware’s lottery director echoed that sentiment, explaining that “the public might think jackpots of $50 to $100 million were obscene for one person to win.” California’s lottery director summed up the problem: “I hate to use the term morality—but there is an issue involved in excessively large jackpots.” With such concerns in mind, Lotto America initially planned to cap its jackpots at $80 million in order to prevent “grotesque” sums from accumulating.

Yet the evidence was already clear that jackpot size (rather than offering good odds) was the most effective way to attract new bettors, and thus jackpots were left uncapped. Over the next several years, Lotto America added several more states and reduced the odds of winning to ensure that jackpots rolled over week after week, climbing higher and higher. In 1992, the game was renamed Powerball. Four years later Powerball was joined by another multi-state lottery called the Big Game, later renamed Mega Millions. The games eventually agreed to overlap, and now 44 of the 46 lottery jurisdictions in the nation feature multi-state jackpot games. Thus we now have not one, but two de facto national lotteries. The only thing we are lacking is any meaningful national regulatory framework for lottery practices, which are becoming more predatory as they explore new marketing practices and increasingly addictive games such as Quick Draw and video lottery terminals.

A significant cultural shift has taken place in the years since Collins offered a socially responsible framework for government lotteries, and cultural reservations about the concentration of wealth have long since been put aside. In 2012 the Mega Millions jackpot broke $500 million, leaving behind quaint notions that people might take offense at such accumulation. The rise of such gambling forms has co-evolved with the development of an intensely skewed distribution of wealth in this country over the past 30 years. As countless Americans lay down their bets week after week, they are registering their consent for a pattern of wealth distribution that, not long ago, was considered “obscene” or “grotesque.” These acts of betting are small, and most people experience them as inconsequential. But like the jackpots themselves, these small acts accumulate into something significant. The massive civic participation in government lotteries helps provide the cultural foundation for our jackpot way of life.

Inside the Controversy Over Man Charged with Murder for Slipping an Abortion Pill to Pregnant Girlfriend

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:36:00 -0700

Florida man told her it was an antibiotic.

John Andrew Welden is charged with the murder of a person who was never born.

As Tampa’s WFTS-TV news reports, Welden is facing first-degree murder charges for allegedly giving his pregnant girlfriend Remee Lee an abortion pill and telling her it was an antibiotic. Welden worked in his father’s Florida clinic, a “specialty infertility practice.” When Lee began bleeding and experiencing cramps, she went to her local hospital, where doctors informed her the container labeled as amoxicillin was in fact the labor-inducing Cytotec. The fetus died in utero. “I was never going to do anything but go full term with it,” she told reporters this week. “And he didn’t want me to.” It’s an appalling tale, which will once again force us to ponder what constitutes a human life — and when one has taken it.

Very different fetal-homicide laws are on the books in roughly 80 percent of American states. In Arizona, for example, the charge can apply toward “any stage of development” for a fetus, while Arkansas limits it to an “unborn child of 12 weeks or more gestation.” South Dakota stipulates the accused must have known, “or reasonably should have known, that a woman bearing an unborn child was pregnant.”

In Welden’s case, he’s being charged under the Protection of Unborn Children Act. His state has tough laws for killing the unborn that also include DUI manslaughter, vehicular homicide and willful killing. In Ohio, where kidnapping suspect Ariel Castro will stand trial, he faces possible charges of aggravated murder. Castro is accused of allegedly beating one of his reported victims until she miscarried the pregnancies she endured in captivity. Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty has said he will pursue “each act of aggravated murder” — and a conviction could lead to the death penalty.

And in Philadelphia, of course, Kermit Gosnell was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for killing three infants — by severing their spinal cords – who were born live during the late-term abortions he provided. Pennsylvania law has a whole category of offenses, including first- and second-degree murder, for any unborn child “from fertilization until live birth.” What distinguishes the Gosnell case — and has often been lost in all the shouting about it — was that the murder charges were for babies, not fetuses. Yet the issue of what constitutes the taking a life is not always an easy one to discuss or decide.

As much as we need the law to be clear, the reality of life and death is often far more ambiguous. As Jon Hurdle and Trip Gabriel noted this week in the New York Times, much of the furor over cases like Gosnell’s is the question of “why a procedure done to a living baby outside the womb is murder, but destroying a fetus of similar gestation before delivery can be legal.” Remee Lee, meanwhile, was six weeks and five days pregnant when she lost her baby. Should taking a life that wouldn’t have been viable outside the womb carry the same consequences as killing an adult? Would the alleged crime be different if she’d been three months pregnant? Six months? Nine?

I believe that human life begins at conception. I believe that if you force a woman, either by violence or deception, to lose a fetus, you have taken a life. But I also shudder at the prospect of the anti-choice lobby exploiting revolting crimes to prevent women from access to their constitutional right to abortion. We have spent the last several years watching it happen, as abortion opponents have tried to leverage fetal-protection laws to chip away at choice. That’s why we need to continue to be vigilant in articulating the difference between a choice a woman makes and an act of violence against her body and her fetus, an act that robs her of that very freedom she is entitled to. We must be clear that being pro-choice is not tantamount to condoning repulsive, criminal behavior. Remee Lee told reporters this week that she’s grieving because she “dreams of becoming a mom.” And this, she says, “was my chance.”

Can America Come to Terms with Boston Bombing Suspect's Stated Motives?

Ray McGovern, Consortium News — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:15:00 -0700

We must take grievances about America’s Mideast oppression seriously.

Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do they hate us?”

And, if Brennan will listen, remind him of when his high school teachers, the Irish Christian Brothers, taught him the meaning of “handwriting on the wall” in the Book of Daniel and why it became an idiom for predetermined, imminent doom.

CBS senior correspondent John Miller, who before joining CBS served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, broke the handwritten-note story Thursday onCBS This Morning. He described what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scribbled on the side of the boat as he lay bleeding “from multiple gunshot wounds” in the boat. Here, according to Miller’s sources, is what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s note said:

“The [Boston] bombings were in retribution for the U.S. crimes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan [and] that the victims of the Boston bombing were collateral damage, in the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage in U.S. wars around the world. Summing up, that when you attack one Muslim you attack all Muslims.”

My experience with now-CBS-This-Morning’s Charlie Rose is that he does listen closely. Thus, I believe it is to his credit that he seemed determined, with his follow-up question, to drive home what I think is by far the most important point:

Co-anchor Charlie Rose: “Does it [the note] answer questions about motives?”

Miller: “Well it does … there it is in black and white – literally.”

Co-anchor Norah O’Donnell: “But they still believe he was self-radicalized and not part of a larger group, right?”

Miller: “That’s right. …”

Note to CIA Director Brennan

If you didn’t understand much about such motives three years ago, after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to down an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, here’s a chance to learn. I actually felt embarrassed for you when you – then-White House counter-terrorism adviser – were asked on Jan. 7, 2010, two weeks after the almost-catastrophe over Detroit, to explain why people want to kill Americans. I’m sure you remember; it turned out to be Helen Thomas’s swan song.

It took the questioning of the then-89-year old veteran correspondent Thomas to show how little you were willing to share (or how little you knew) about what leads terrorists to do what they do. As her catatonic White House press colleagues took their customary dictation, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.

She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did: “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.” It was a highly revealing dialogue; this is how it went. Remember?

You: “Al-Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al-Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”

Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”

You: “I’m saying it’s because of an al-Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”

Thomas: “Why?”

You: “I think this is a — long issue, but al-Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

Actually, there is a ton of information explaining why people try, for example, to explode bombs in Times Square, in airliners over Detroit, in remote CIA outposts in Afghanistan just to kill Americans, even when it means killing themselves. [See, for example, Consortiumnews.com’s “Answering Helen Thomas on Why.”]

It was painful to watch you suggest on Jan. 7, 2010, that, apparently in some mysterious way, some folks are hard-wired at birth for the “wanton slaughter of innocents,” and your contention that – in the case of Abdulmutallab – al-Qaeda/Persian Gulf was able to jump-start that privileged 23-year old Nigerian, inculcate in him the acquired characteristics of a terrorist, and persuade him to do the bidding of al-Qaeda/Persian Gulf.

Your words were a real stretch as to how the well-heeled Abdulmutallab, without apparent prior terrorist affiliations, was suddenly transformed into an international terrorist ready to die while killing innocents.

Perhaps no one told you that the young Nigerian had particular trouble with Israel’s wanton slaughter of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza the year before, a brutal campaign defended by Washington as justifiable self-defense. You ought to take the time to learn about these things.

Till next time, Ray.

How to Spin This One

An important element in intelligence analysis is to understand the why, what’s the motive. That doesn’t mean you sympathize with what someone did. It does mean that you understand that knowing why is an important starting point for future prevention of similar acts.

Yet, virtually no one in the U.S. political/media hierarchy has dared to discuss, in a candid way, the issue of motivation. All the American people normally get is boilerplate about how al-Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men.

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks. So how will the media spin Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s handwritten note?

Well, we’ve already watched CBS’s Norah O’Donnell come up with the familiar “self-radicalization” shibboleth. She tied the concept to a lack of ties with a larger group, but “self-radicalization” is normally employed to create the impression that hard-wired “violent Muslim extremists” simply look in the mirror one day and say to themselves, My, this looks like a good day to self-radicalize.

Also regularly trotted out is the “homegrown-violent-extremists” moniker employed as recently as Thursday by FBI Director Robert Mueller III in Senate testimony.

Other “mainstream media” and government officials will keep blaming terrorism on Islam, as the Wall Street Journal does Friday in repeating the claim that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI earlier that he and his dead brother “were acting as jihadists motivated by Muslim religious anger at the U.S.” (In other words, pay no heed to what he scribbled on the side of the boat as he thought he was dying.)

Rarely has there been any official or quasi-official acknowledgement of the main problem. But there was a major exception in the fall of 2004 in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board. Directly contradicting what President George W. Bush was saying at the time, the board stated:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.”

That’s not spin. That’s the assessment of professionals who were reading the handwriting on the wall.

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