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FOCUS: WTF Is Happening in the Oregon Militia Standoff, Explained |
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Sunday, 03 January 2016 11:08 |
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Dickinson writes: "On Saturday night, dozens of white, armed American militants stormed a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon seeking to take a 'hard stand' against federal government 'tyranny.' It's a wild story. Here's what you need to know."
Cliven Bundy's son, Ammon - pictured here, in 2014 - appears to be leading the takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. (photo: George Frey/Getty Images)
WTF Is Happening in the Oregon Militia Standoff, Explained
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
03 January 16
Dozens of white, armed American militants have gathered in the state to take a stand against government "tyranny"
 n Saturday night, dozens of white, armed American militants stormed a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon seeking to take a "hard stand" against federal government "tyranny." It's a wild story. Here's what you need to know.
Q: Where is this?
A: The building seized by the militants is at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge — a remote, marshy oasis in Oregon's high desert famed for its spectacular migratory bird populations. The standoff is in the remote southeast of the state — far closer to the Nevada line (124 miles) and Boise, Idaho (217 miles), than to Portland (305 miles). The closest city is Burns, Oregon, population 2,800, 30 miles to the north.
Q: What sparked the militia takeover?
A: The answer here is complicated. In short, the militants are outraged about a mandatory minimum sentence received for arson by a local rancher and his son.
The ranchers, Dwight Hammond, Jr., 73, and his son Steve, 43, were convicted of federal arson charges, stemming from a pair or fires on federal land near their ranch. The first was reportedly set in 2001 to cover up their illegal poaching of a deer on government property. It burned 139 acres. The second was reportedly set in 2006 as a defensive measure, to protect the ranch from an approaching lightning-sparked wildfire. That arson reportedly endangered volunteer firefighters camped nearby. The government would seek $1 million in damages. (For a deep dive of the backstory read this piece in The Oregonian.)
Q: So some Oregon ranchers got busted for arson. Where's the tyranny?
A: The ranchers' case became a cause celebre in the patriot/militia movement because the pair were sentenced for their arson crimes under a provision of a law called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And they were oddly sentenced twice.
The federal law in question doesn't just deal with terrorism. It created a five-year mandatory-minimum sentence for arson on federal land: "Whoever maliciously damages or destroys... by means of fire...any...real property...owned or possessed by...the United States...shall be imprisoned for not less than 5 years…"
The first federal judge to handle the case concluded that the mandatory sentence was too stiff and gave the pair far lighter sentences, which they served. But the U.S. attorney in the case called foul; the federal government took the rare step of appealing the sentence. In October 2015, the Ninth Circuit imposed the mandatory minimum, ruling that: "given the seriousness of arson, a five-year sentence is not grossly disproportionate to the offense." The ranchers are due back in federal prison Monday to serve out their five years each.
But this odd re-sentencing, under a statute that makes it sound like the cattlemen were being prosecuted for terrorism, inflamed the paranoid passions of the anti-government patriot and militia movements, and brought the militants to Burns for a rally on Saturday.
Q: The Bundys are involved in this, aren't they?
A: Yup. Tensions between Western ranchers and the federal government have been running at a fever pitch since an armed standoff between supporters of Cliven Bundy and the federal Bureau of Land Management. Recall that Bundy does not recognize the claim of the federal government to the land that his cattle roam in Nevada. He owes more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and fines. The feds briefly seized his cattle back in 2014, leading to an armed standoff that the feds chose to de-escalate rather than risk provoking another deadly showdown like occurred at Waco or Ruby Ridge in the 1990s.
Q: So Cliven Bundy is in Oregon?
A: No, but at least two of his sons are. Ammon Bundy appears to be leading the takeover. In a video posted to Facebook, he declares: "We have basically taken over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. And this will become a base place for patriots from all over the country to come and be housed here and to live here. And we're planning on staying here for several years." Calling his group "the point of the spear," Ammon Bundy called on like-minded militants to "bring your arms."
Q: What do the militants want?
A: In a phone in interview with The Oregonian, another Bundy son, Ryan, laid out the militants' demands: that the Hammonds be released and that the surrounding federal lands be ceded to local control. "The best possible outcome is that the ranchers that have been kicked out of the area... will come back and reclaim their land, and the wildlife refuge will be shut down forever and the federal government will relinquish such control," Ryan Bundy said. He added, "What we're doing is not rebellious. What we're doing is in accordance with the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land."
Q: Has the federal government reacted to this latest Bundy provocation?
A: Not yet.
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The Chinese in the US Virgin Islands, Be Concerned |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 03 January 2016 09:27 |
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Kiriakou writes: "A Chinese oil company is poised to take over one of the 10 largest oil refineries in the world - a refinery in a U.S. territory - threatening livelihoods, the environment, and U.S. national security."
John Kiriakou. (photo: AFI Docs)
The Chinese in the US Virgin Islands, Be Concerned
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
03 January 16
 Chinese oil company is poised to take over one of the 10 largest oil refineries in the world – a refinery in a U.S. territory – threatening livelihoods, the environment, and U.S. national security.
The Virgin Islands Senate recently approved the sale of the HOVENSA oil refinery and storage facility for $420 million to ArchLight, the alter ego of Sinopec, a joint venture of China’s second-largest oil conglomerate and the Bank of China. The Chinese aren’t interested in refining any oil there. Instead, they want the accompanying tank farm, which would allow them to store as much as 32 million barrels of refined oil and petrochemicals deliverable to New York or Philadelphia cheaper than from our own U.S. Gulf Coast.
That sounds like a good deal for both American consumers and for Virgin Islanders. But it’s not – for several reasons.
First, the refinery was shuttered and mothballed in 2012. The Chinese want to dismantle it, potentially endangering the fragile Virgin Islands environment, and use only the tank farm. And although the Environmental Protection Agency has mandated a cleanup of the site estimated to cost some $800 million, the Chinese claim they can do it for $30 million. To make matters worse, the Chinese say they would like to put an asphalt plant on the site of the refinery, which would further foul the environment.
Second, an American consortium called VIRSA, Virgin Islands Refining SA, has offered some $2.3 billion for the refinery and the tank farm. They would clean up the site, and reopen and upgrade the refinery, bringing it up to EPA standards. This would create as many as 1,500 new jobs for Virgin Islanders, a dramatic development in a territory with only 40,000 people in the workforce.
Third, the VIRSA offer includes a provision for cheap electricity that would replace the expensive and dirty diesel fuel that the Virgin Islands government currently uses to keep the lights on. The government frequently must borrow from the public employees pension fund to pay for this diesel. Cheap electricity from the refinery would allow the government to render its pension fund whole again, further strengthening its economy over the long term.
Fourth, what happens if there is a spill from the tank farm or from Chinese tankers coming or going from the facility? Can the Chinese company be trusted to pay for and carry out a potentially large-scale cleanup? Or will the Chinese simply have their Virgin Islands limited liability corporations declare bankruptcy and let the Virgin Islands government deal with the disaster?
Finally, and most importantly, there are serious national security issues at play with Chinese ownership of this strategic facility. The U.S. submarine base at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico is closed, and the Virgin Islands government has lobbied the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency to open a submarine base on St. Croix. The area between the St. Croix Airport and the refinery, called Renaissance Park, has a channel 550 feet wide and 75 feet deep that leads to a turning basin. There is no similar facility in the Caribbean. The channel could easily be dredged, allowing the U.S. Navy a new home in the Caribbean. But this prospect of long-term development is rendered moot by a Chinese tank farm offering to create only 100 jobs. To locate a sensitive naval installation next to a Chinese oil facility would be a potential military intelligence disaster.
So who has dropped the ball on this issue? First, it appears that neither the State Department nor the Defense Department has weighed in with the Virgin Islands government. The National Security Council is missing in action. The EPA doesn’t seem to care about the environmental fallout of a Chinese tank farm and asphalt plant in a U.S. environmental paradise. And no member of Congress has made a single statement about the deal, including the Virgin Islands’ representative.
Time is short. It looks like the fix is in. A whole host of leaders from the federal and Virgin Islands governments have to ask themselves if they would rather have a modern American refinery or a Chinese tank farm as a neighbor. If the answer is the former, somebody needs to act quickly.
John Kiriakou is an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Here's Another Sign the Era of Mass Incarceration Is Slowly Coming to an End |
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Sunday, 03 January 2016 09:19 |
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Humphreys writes: "The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released new evidence that mass incarceration continues to unwind in the United States. The rate of U.S. adults under some form of criminal justice supervision declined for the seventh straight year, dropping to a level not seen since 1996."
Mass incarceration continues to unwind. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Here's Another Sign the Era of Mass Incarceration Is Slowly Coming to an End
By Keith Humphreys, The Washington Post
03 January 16
 he Bureau of Justice Statistics has released new evidence that mass incarceration continues to unwind in the United States. The rate of U.S. adults under some form of criminal justice supervision declined for the seventh straight year, dropping to a level not seen since 1996.
The criminal justice supervision rate comprises individuals on probation or parole as well as those incarcerated in local jails or in federal or state prison. A total of 6,851,000 adults were under criminal justice supervision in at the end of 2014, a decline of 52,200 from the year before.
Evaluating change in the criminal justice system as whole is essential for determining whether the nation is truly making progress on reducing mass incarceration. Research on the state and federal prison population has documented a decline for over half a decade, but such data can be misleading if the criminal justice system is playing a shell game -- transferring prisoners to local jails or moving them onto parole.
The new Bureau of Justice System report shows that the correctional system is indeed shrinking across the board rather than simply shifting offenders from one form of supervision to another. Beginning around 2007, the momentum shifted to the growing bipartisan coalition in favor of reducing mass incarceration. Provided the crime rate stays low and public fear of crime along with it, the de-incarceration movement clearly has the wind at its back.
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The Big Blowback: How US Foreign Policy Erodes Democracy Everywhere |
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Sunday, 03 January 2016 09:12 |
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Bello writes: "When the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word 'blowback' to the analysis of Washington's relations with the rest of the world, he did not refer simply to the victims of the US imperial intervention striking back on American soil. More importantly, he saw as the most dangerous blowback the destabilization of American democratic processes by the multiple consequences of Washington's adventures abroad."
The Islamic State group or Daesh is seen as a consequence of U.S. policy in the Middle East. (photo: AFP)
The Big Blowback: How US Foreign Policy Erodes Democracy Everywhere
By Walden Bello, teleSUR
03 January 16
The biggest blowback from U.S. policies abroad has been the erosion of the country’s democratic processes.
 hen the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word “blowback” to the analysis of Washington’s relations with the rest of the world, he did not refer simply to the victims of the US imperial intervention striking back on American soil. More importantly, he saw as the most dangerous blowback the destabilization of American democratic processes by the multiple consequences of Washington’s adventures abroad.
Seen in this light, Donald Trump’s “M&M’s Campaign” (“Ban Mexicans and Muslims”) to clinch the Republican presidential nomination is unquestionably a disturbing blowback from Washington’s policies abroad. Trump launched his campaign with a plan to build a wall along the 2111 km U.S.-Mexico border while deporting, wholesale, undocumented migrants and their families. After the San Bernardino shootings on Dec. 2, where a Muslim couple killed 14 people, Trump has pushed for the U.S. to stop accepting Muslims migrants and visitors to the United States. The two proposals go against the U.S.’s character as a country of migrants, threaten to unleash a tide of hatred against Mexican-Americans and Muslims, and put them on notice that their rights are fragile. They have resonated with large sectors of the Republican base, with extremist rhetoric now a staple not only of the Trump campaign but those of his rivals as well.
The Blowback from Iraq
How U.S. policy created ISIS or ISIL, fear of which now drives U.S. domestic and foreign policy, is relatively well documented. The U.S. invasion of Iraq threw the lid off Iraqi society, which had been a pressure cooker of sectarian rivalries contained by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a Shia-dominated regime took over in Baghdad, an extremist Sunni movement, al-Qaida in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, rose to fight the government and its American sponsors. Zarqawi found many receptive recruits among the hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers in Saddam’s army, which had been disbanded by the Americans shortly after their takeover. Adherents were also nurtured in U.S. prison camps, among them Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After the death in battle of Zarqawi, Al Baghdadi emerged as the leader of the group, which now assumed the name Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
At first, ISIS was seen by western intelligence as focused mainly on establishing a Caliphate in the Middle East, for which it undertook a sophisticated international recruitment campaign via the internet. Then concern developed that ISIS was not simply recruiting young people from Europe and the U.S. to fight in Iraq or Syria but training them to be sent back to perform terrorist acts in their home countries. The Paris massacre in mid-November hat saw a handful of shooters kill some 130 people in a sophisticated coordinated operation hitting seven targets was seen as the “ultimate blowback.” That is, until the San Bernardino shooting two weeks later, which U.S. authorities saw as the most scary blowback of all: shooters carrying out uncoordinated individual actions inspired by Isis propaganda disseminated on the net.
The Mexican Blowback 1: The CIA Connection
The blowback process from Mexico is less well known but equally documented. One trigger was, as in Iraq, political intervention. The Mexican drug syndicates were relatively small-time affairs until the 1980’s. It was the Central Intelligence Agency that made them big-time. In the Reagan administration’s efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, it engaged in unconventional fundraising operations to evade congressional scrutiny. One was the so-called Iran-Contra deal, where top Reagan administration officials facilitated the sale of arms to Iran--then the object of a U-S- arms embargo – then diverted part of the proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista guerrillas known as the “Contras.” Another method was to use Mexican drug syndicates. In her brave expose of the rise of Mexican drug cartel, Narcoland: the Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers, the celebrated Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez writes that when the Boland amendment prohibited use of government money to fund the overthrow of the Sandinistas, the CIA made a deal with the cartel to allow large-scale cocaine sales into the U.S. but on condition that part of the proceeds would be diverted by the cartel to support the Contras. Indeed, CIA complicity in fostering the rise of the Mexican cartel, which eventually displaced the Colombian cartels as the main supplier of cocaine to the U.S. is, in fact, documented not only by Hernandez but by a number of U.S. journalists. Among the key beneficiaries of the CIA connection was the Sinaloa Cartel, which eventually produced the lord of drug lords: “El Chapo” Guzman.
The Mexican Blowback II: NAFTA
The other source of the Mexican blowback was economic. Following the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980’s, the U.S., via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, began an ambitious effort to restructure the Mexican economy along free-market lines. The cutting back of government support for many agricultural services, along with a program of privatization designed to reverse communal ownership of land institutionalized by the Mexican Revolution, resulted in widespread suffering in the countryside, with many peasants thrown off their lands. But even more devastating was Mexico’s integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which quickly became a program for dumping subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural products into Mexico. According to a 2003 report of the Carnegie Endowment, imports of U.S. agricultural products under NAFTA threw 1.3 million farmers out of work. For these peasants, the choice became either the shantytowns of Mexico City or “El Norte,” with vast numbers opting for the latter. By 2006, roughly 10 per cent of Mexico’s population was living in the United States, some 15 per cent of its work force was working there, and one in every seven Mexicans was migrating to the U.S. There was a strong element of truth in the sardonic comment that, owing to NAFTA’s savage impact on peasant agriculture, Mexico’s peasantry simply moved to the United States.
U.S. policies in Mexico and Central America thus had a dramatic dual blowback effect. On one side, the CIA godfathered a powerful cartel whose massive exports of cocaine devastated inner cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. On the other side, US-sponsored structural adjustment and NAFTA ruined Mexican peasant agriculture, leading to the migration of millions to “El Norte,” where they have become scapegoats for the U.S.’s economic troubles. Study after study has refuted claims that migrants take jobs away from the non-migrant workers or that they don’t pay their taxes. Yet, Mexican migrants are continually blamed by opportunistic politicians on the make, like Trump and his Republican colleagues. It is unfortunate that this opportunistic, demagogic game of playing on physical fear (“Muslim terrorists out to take your life”) and economic fear (“Mexican workers out to steal your jobs”), has resonated among many of the country’s white population. Trump, whose anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican rhetoric is most brazen, leads his opponents in the Republican presidential race by a wide margin in the surveys.
Instead of aggressively challenging the Republican candidates’ inflamed rhetoric and pointing to U.S. political and economic programs in the Middle East and Mexico as being responsible for these multiple blowbacks, most liberal leaders are on the defensive. Only Bernie Sanders, among the country’s leading politicians, is pointing to the real roots of America’s foreign policy and domestic crises; in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, continues to push for more military intervention in the Middle East and is reluctant to finger Wall Street as the source of the country’s economic troubles.
The country seems headed towards an even less liberal democratic order than now exists, one marked by more religious intolerance, more restrictions on civil liberties, and more immigration rules designed to keep out migrants. And that, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently warned, was really the ultimate blowback.
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