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FOCUS: The Secret to Bernie's Campaign |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Friday, 04 September 2015 11:03 |
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Reich writes: "I have no idea whether all this grass-roots activity will take Bernie all the way to the White House, but I do know it's real and it's important - and it's under the radar of Washington insiders and pundits who look only at how many organizers are on a campaign's payroll or how many dollars a campaign has raised."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
The Secret to Bernie's Campaign
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
04 September 15
 hat's the secret of the @berniesanders campaign, beyond Bernie himself? Today I counted another 14 groups that have sprung to life over the last several months -- all appearing in my email or phone mail, or I discover from friends or former students. And all are engaged in one way or another in building support for Bernie around the country,
I'm always wary of "astroturf" groups designed to resemble grass roots, but these are the real thing. I've spoken with several organizers who hadn't had any contact with the official campaign but felt they "had to help organize" for Bernie, as several of them told me.
I have no idea whether all this grass-roots activity will take Bernie all the way to the White House, but I do know it's real and it's important -- and it's under the radar of Washington insiders and pundits who look only at how many organizers are on a campaign's payroll or how many dollars a campaign has raised. The Sanders campaign isn't like any other campaign I've witnessed since Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam War presidential insurgency -- which didn't get McCarthy elected but gave birth to a national grass-roots movement that ultimately ended the war. Peaceful change of the magnitude we need can come about only when millions or people are organized and mobilized to demand it. Bernie's presidential run is catalyzing such a movement.
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NYT Claims US Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Friday, 04 September 2015 09:15 |
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Greenwald writes: "In December 2009 - just weeks after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - President Obama ordered a cruise missile strike on al-Majala in southern Yemen. That strike 'killed 35 women and children.' Among the munitions used in that strike were cluster bombs, including ones designed to scatter 166 'bomblets.'"
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: PBS)
NYT Claims US Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
04 September 15
 he New York Times today has a truly bizarre article regarding the U.S. and cluster bombs. The advocacy group Cluster Munition Coalition just issued its annual report finding that cluster bombs had been used in five countries this year: Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and Sudan. This is what The Paper of Record, in its report by Rick Gladstone, said this morning about the international reaction to that report (emphasis added):
The use of these weapons was criticized by all 117 countries that have joined the treaty, which took effect five years ago. Their use was also criticized by a number of others, including the United States, that have not yet joined the treaty but have abided by its provisions.
As Americans, we should feel proud that our government, though refusing to sign the cluster ban treaty, has nonetheless “abided by its provisions” — if not for the fact that this claim is totally false. The U.S. has long been and remains one of the world’s most aggressive suppliers of cluster munitions, and has used those banned weapons itself in devastating ways.
In December 2009 — just weeks after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — President Obama ordered a cruise missile strike on al-Majala in southern Yemen. That strike “killed 35 women and children.” Among the munitions used in that strike were cluster bombs, including ones designed to scatter 166 “bomblets.”
Although the U.S. at first refused to confirm responsibility, a Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, visited the scene and found irrefutable proof that it was done by the U.S., a finding subsequently confirmed by Amnesty International as well as a cable released by WikiLeaks. As a result of Shaye’s reporting of U.S. responsibility, President Obama demanded that the Yemeni journalist be imprisoned and the Yemeni puppet regime complied; Amnesty’s Philip Luther said at the time that “there are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about U.S. collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen.” So not only did Obama use cluster bombs against Yemeni civilians, but he then forced the imprisonment for years of the Yemeni journalist who reported it.
Five years later, Yemen is again being pummeled by cluster bombs. Human Rights Watch extensively documented last week that the “Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces appear to have used cluster munition rockets in at least seven attacks in Yemen’s northwestern Hajja governorate, killing and wounding dozens of civilians.” You’ll never guess where those cluster bombs came from: “Based on examination of remnants, Human Rights Watch identified the weapons used in all seven attacks as United States-made, ground-launched M26 cluster munition rockets.”
Human Rights Watch headline. (photo: The Intercept)
As Iona Craig reported for The Intercept this week from Yemen, “The American government has also supplied intelligence, in-flight refueling of fighter jets, and weapons [for the “Saudi-led” attack], including, according to rights organizations, banned U.S. cluster munitions.” Indeed, citing the Human Rights Watch findings, the New York Times itself reported in May that “the Saudi-led military coalition fighting a rebel group in Yemen has in the past few weeks used cluster munitions supplied by the United States.” The same article noted:
Both Saudi and American military forces have deployed cluster munitions in Yemen before the most recent conflict, according to human rights groups. In 2009, Saudi warplanes dropped cluster bombs during attacks on the Houthis in Saada, their home province.
The same year, United States naval forces fired one or more cruise missiles containing cluster munitions at a suspected Qaeda training camp in southern Yemen.
Reporting from Yemen for Rolling Stone in May, Matthieu Aikins described the ample evidence that U.S.-supplied cluster bombs are being used indiscriminately against civilians. Last month, Mother Jones’ Bryan Schatz wrote an excellent summary of all the ways the U.S. has been central to the horrific Saudi slaughter of Yemeni civilians, including the supplying of cluster munitions.
The U.S. has long been supplying cluster bombs to the Saudis. In August 2013, Foreign Policy noted a Defense Department press release proudly announcing that “the U.S. military [is] selling $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, despite the near-universal revulsion at such weapons.” As the headline of a superb May 2014 Vice article succinctly put it: “U.S. Cluster Bombs Keep Killing Civilians in Yemen”; the on-the-scene reporters, Ben Anderson and Peter Salisbury, provided extensive video and first-hand witness evidence to prove the truth of that statement.
The U.S. use and supply of cluster bombs is long and ugly. In 2006, Israel used American-made cluster munitions to kill hundreds of civilians in Lebanon; Hezbollah reportedly fired them into Northern Israel. The NYT’s Gladstone himself, in a 2014 article, actually noted the massive Israeli usage, though omitted that the weapons came from the U.S.’s re-supplying of the Israeli stockpile (emphasis added):
Israel’s military was widely criticized at home and abroad for its heavy cluster-bomb use in Lebanon, dropping around 1,800 of them, containing more than 1.2 million bomblets, particularly in the final days of the 34-day conflict with Hezbollah. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted a commander of the Israel Defense Forces as saying, “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.”
In that article, designed to warn of the increasing usage of cluster bombs in Syria, Gladstone cryptically noted that “only three other countries have suffered cluster bomb casualties that exceed Syria’s: Laos at 4,837, Vietnam at 2,080, and Iraq at 2,989.” Gladstone coyly doesn’t say, but guess who dropped most of those?
In 2011, The Daily Beast’s Lionel Beehner was shocked by Hillary Clinton’s audacity in condemning Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for using cluster bombs. He noted that the U.S. is “one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cluster bombs”; is “one of the few states, along with Libya, not to sign the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions”; that “American manufacturers love cluster bombs”; and that just “last year, the U.S. Air Force reportedly spent billions of dollars to purchase a batch of 4,600 cluster bombs from Textron, a New England-based arms manufacturer that also supplies munitions to Turkey, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.”
In 2009 and 2010, the Obama administration promulgated guidelines ostensibly to make their usage safer, including banning their sale starting in 2018 unless they have a dud rate of less than 1 percent (unexploded bombs pose massive risk to civilians, particularly children). But as Schatz detailed in a separate article in June, “Activists have reported finding more duds than allowed under the one-percent failure rate rule.” Ample evidence demonstrates these failures. Moreover, as Schatz reports:
The recent HRW reports also call [Textron’s] CBU-105’s performance into question. “What we’re seeing in Yemen is that they’re having trouble meeting this one percent criteria,” says [HRW’s Steve] Goose. “We have a photo with one of the canisters sitting on the ground with four skeets just sitting there. They never deployed.”
All of this makes the New York Times’ cluster bomb exoneration of the U.S. today nothing short of inexcusable. Under the treaty which The Paper of Record today claimed the U.S. honors, “States Parties may not stockpile cluster munitions, and must also destroy their existing stocks within eight years of joining.” The very first article of the Treaty states (emphasis added):
Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: (a) Use cluster munitions; (b) Develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, cluster munitions; (c) Assist, encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention.
The U.S. does not occasionally violate one of those provisions. It continually violates all of them, systematically and as a matter of policy doing exactly that which the treaty expressly bans. For the NYT to tell its readers that the U.S. — one of the leading cluster bomb states on the planet — is actually one of the countries that “have not yet joined the treaty but have abided by its provisions” is nationalistic propaganda of the most extreme kind.
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When You See That Drowned Syrian Boy, You Should See the United States' Shameful Failure |
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Friday, 04 September 2015 08:34 |
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Taub writes: "The death of any child is devastating. But these children's stories are particularly painful to read about, because they carry a reproach for readers like us: We let this happen. We left those innocent children to this fate."
An Italian rescue worker carries a refugee baby saved off the coast of Italy earlier this summer. Photos like this are a reminder that Aylan Kurdi's death was sadly predictable: we already knew that children were making the dangerous crossing. (photo: Giovanni Isolino/AFP/Getty)
When You See That Drowned Syrian Boy, You Should See the United States' Shameful Failure
By Amanda Taub, Vox
04 September 15
he human tragedies of this summer’s refugee crisis are beginning to feel unbearable. Yesterday, photographs of a drowned Syrian toddler whose body washed up on a Turkish beach shocked the world. His name was Aylan Kurdi. He was 3 years old, and his 5-year-old brother is also believed to have died at sea.
And just days earlier, Austrian officials discovered the body of another refugee toddler, a tiny girl no more than 2 years old. She and 70 other people, including three more young children, suffocated in the back of a smuggler's truck, which was then left abandoned by the side of an Austrian highway. They, too, like so many others, were refugees who had hoped to find safety in Europe. Their journey, too, ended in tragedy.
The death of any child is devastating. But these children’s stories are particularly painful to read about, because they carry a reproach for readers like us: We let this happen. We left those innocent children to this fate. We knew refugee children were in danger, and did nothing, and this is the result.
And make no mistake: We did know. As the refugee boats have crossed the Mediterranean, photograph after photograph has showed rescue workers cradling tiny babies and toddlers rescued from the water. We knew desperate families were bringing children on these journeys. We knew they would keep coming, because what could drive a parent to bring a child on such a dangerous crossing except fear that staying behind would be worse? And we knew that if we didn’t do more to help them, many of those children would die — and so would their families.
But apparently those children weren’t dead enough to hold our attention. An infant saved from a boat wasn’t good enough for us: We needed to see one dead on a beach, lying alone, face down, in the surf.
And so the world has treated the refugee crisis as a sort of bureaucratic inconvenience, a problem that someone else really ought to be handling. But the truth is that those are just excuses we tell ourselves to feel better about the fact that we’re not doing the right thing. Because make no mistake: This is a situation where there is a right thing to do. And we are not doing it.
Germany is now beginning to show moral leadership on the refugee crisis, and to call on other countries to come forward and do their part before more children and their families die. But the United States, like much of Europe, has not followed suit. Our silence and inaction are shameful.
To grasp the magnitude of the United States’ failure, you first need to grasp the magnitude of the crisis the world is facing. Approximately 4 million Syrian refugees have fled that country’s years-long civil war, which means that Syrians make up nearly 25 percent of the world’s total refugee population. The vast majority of them are in the Middle East and Turkey, with Turkey alone hosting 1.6 million people.
These camps are the first line of global, Western, and American failure. This summer, the European Union, United States, and Kuwait respectively pledged $1.2 billion, $507 million, and $500 million for aid to refugees. That's good, but it's still far short of the $5.5 billion in aid that the UN says is needed for these refugees, as well as another $2.9 billion for displaced Syrians within Syria. As a result, the camps are often crowded and undersupplied, which leaves the people who live in them cold, hungry, and subject to the ravages of disease.
This summer, hundreds of thousands of refugees have made their way to Europe, with most crossing the Mediterranean in rickety boats and rubber dinghies. Those boats are barely seaworthy, so tragedies are frequent: UNHCR estimates that 2,500 people have died just this summer while attempting to make the crossing. This is the second line of failure, as European policies designed to discourage migration not only fail to help refugees, but make their journey more dangerous.
But many people do successfully cross, contributing to what has become the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. This is the third line of failure, and it is where America's failure in particular is perhaps starkest.
The German government expects 800,000 people to seek asylum there this year, and hundreds of thousands more are expected to seek asylum in other European countries. The United States, by contrast, has resettled 1,434 Syrian refugees over the four years since the conflict began.
Take a moment to consider just how small a number that is: 1,434 people! Nineteen times that many people attended Taylor Swift’s latest concert in Omaha. Ten times that many people ride the city bus line I use for my commute every day.
Those 1,434 people wouldn’t even fill three 747 jets. And 1,434 people is just over half the number of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean this summer during their desperate flight to safety.
Nor do we intend to do much better in the future. The US has pledged to take between 5,000 and 8,000 people by the end of 2016. But that number is still pathetically tiny. Twelve thousand refugees arrived on the shores of the Greek island of Lesvos last Monday alone. The United States taking a fraction of that many over the next 15 months isn't meaningful help — it's just adding insult to injury.
We know what doing the right thing looks like. We're just not doing it.
A refugee father and his baby arrive in Malta after being rescued at sea.
(photo: GIOVANNI ISOLINO/AFP/Getty Images)
Contrast the United States' shameful inaction with Germany's moral leadership in the past few weeks. Germany is receiving such large numbers of refugees so quickly that its government is transforming abandoned big-box stores across the country into emergency refugee shelters that can hold large numbers of people. The influx has provoked xenophobic violence as well as a political backlash against the government for not doing more to keep refugees out, which German leaders have resisted.
The rest of the EU has largely failed to act on the crisis, leaving Germany, along with border countries like Greece and Italy, to handle the problem on its own.
And yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to her great credit, has resisted political pressure to abandon the refugees, and instead insisted publicly that these people are worthy of protection and entitled to help.
To be sure, Germany had to be pushed into that leadership role. Thousands of refugees have already arrived within its borders. It is not resettling them from elsewhere, as the United States has pledged to do. But Merkel's government is not merely doing the minimum it can get away with: Last week it voluntarily suspended an EU regulation that would have allowed Germany to deport Syrian refugees to EU border countries, and will let them stay in Germany instead.
Nor is such generosity limited to Germany. Earlier this week, Iceland made headlines when more than 10,000 people asked their government to take more Syrian refugees than it had pledged to, and offered to open their homes to host them if necessary. Iceland's total population is only about 320,000 people, which means that an astonishing one in 32 citizens personally offered to help.
The United States, by contrast, has about 1,000 times the population of Iceland. This means that, if the US took in Syrian refugees at half the rate that Icelanders have pledged, then it would be able to absorb 5 million refugees, more than the entire population currently in need of assistance.
That is not to argue that the US necessarily should do this — it's difficult to imagine even the logistics of such a thing — but rather to point out how desperately wide the gap is between the responses of countries that are taking moral leadership on the refugee crisis and what America is doing.
America isn't just failing to do the right thing — it's actively embracing that failure
A rescued family carefully hands their toddler to safety after reaching shore.
(photo: Matthew Mirabelli/AFP/Getty Images)
Here in the United States, our politicians have been all too happy to ignore the problem, and the American public has been all too happy to let them.
The fact is that taking in more Syrian refugees is the right thing to do. It would save the lives of desperate people, and ease the burden on our allies, who are struggling to cope with the sudden arrival of thousands of people.
It would not be excessively difficult: This country already has a large, expertly staffed refugee resettlement program that could handle the logistics of resettling Syrians, and a host of private charities that are experienced in helping refugees settle and integrate into communities across the country that could assist them when they arrive. We are the richest country on Earth, and opening our borders to more immigration would help this country to grow even richer. There is no serious argument against taking in more people.
And yet not only are we failing to live up to that moral obligation, we are embracing our failure. Donald Trump has ridden an ugly wave of xenophobia to the top of the polls in the GOP primary, proving that not only do many Americans hold anti-immigrant beliefs but they are proud of them, and thrilled to have them validated by a national political figure. And the Obama administration has failed to show the kind of leadership on this issue that Merkel's government has, instead remaining content to accept a tiny trickle of people and ignore the rest. Apparently, saving children from drowning at sea violates Obama's "don't do stupid shit" foreign policy doctrine.
And so children will continue to drown in the Mediterranean and suffocate in the backs of trucks. And their families will die alongside them. And we will pretend it has nothing to do with us.
But it does. There is a right thing to do here. We're just not doing it.
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Party That Mocked President's Lack of Experience Favors One With No Experience Whatsoever |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 03 September 2015 13:02 |
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Borowitz writes: "Republicans, who mercilessly mocked Barack Obama's lack of government experience before he became President, now favor Presidential candidates with no experience whatsoever, the head of the Republican National Committee has confirmed."
Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina. (photo: Darren McCollester/Andrew Burton/Getty)
Party That Mocked President's Lack of Experience Favors One With No Experience Whatsoever
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
03 September 15
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 epublicans, who mercilessly mocked Barack Obama’s lack of government experience before he became President, now favor Presidential candidates with no experience whatsoever, the head of the Republican National Committee has confirmed.
The R.N.C. chief, Reince Priebus, said that he sees “no contradiction at all” between Republicans’ contempt for Obama’s pre-White House résumé, which included eleven years spent in public office, and their rabid enthusiasm for G.O.P. rising stars Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, whose combined years in public office total zero.
“I think what bothered us Republicans the most about Obama was that he was a community organizer,” Priebus explained. “What does organizing people have to do with running a government?”
In contrast with that dubious credential, he said, Carson is “eminently qualified” to be President because of his experience as a neurosurgeon. “I think if Ben had negotiated with the Iranians we would have gotten a better deal, because he would have known how their brains worked, medically and all,” Priebus argued.
Additionally, the R.N.C. boss said that the billionaire Donald Trump’s experience puts him “leagues ahead” of President Obama. “One of President Obama’s problems is that he is out of touch with reality,” Priebus said. “Donald Trump spent fourteen seasons hosting a reality show.”
As for the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina, Priebus said that the excitement her résumé is generating among the Republican faithful is totally understandable. “Like a lot of Republicans, I’d love to see Carly take on ISIS,” he said. “She’s shown she can destroy a large organization.”
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he may not realize it at the moment, although I suspect she has realized it all along, but Kim Davis just 
