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The Atomic Bomb, Then and Now |
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Thursday, 07 August 2014 15:28 |
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Kucinich writes: "Our problem isn't simply our nuclear past, but is our present addiction to nuclear weapons which threaten humanity's future."
Dennis Kucinich. (photo: Kucinich.gov)
The Atomic Bomb, Then and Now
By Dennis J. Kucinich, Reader Supported News
07 August 14
 ixty-nine years ago, the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan -- Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 -- killing over a quarter of a million people.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other government leaders said at the time that the atomic bomb was not necessary militarily and that Japan was already facing certain defeat by the US and the Soviet Union.
Despite these warnings, the bombs were used and were wrongfully credited with ending the war. The atomic bomb ushered in an age of warfare that gave nations the ability to annihilate other nations and to commit environmental suicide, as Jonathan Schell related in his masterpiece The Fate of the Earth.
The ability to split the atom also legitimatized a nuclear industry which poisons our land and our water as shown in the new documentary film Hot Water, produced by Liz Rogers and Elizabeth Kucinich, which will be released late 2014.
Two years ago, Congress brought forward a proposal to create a new national park to honor those who developed the bomb. I opposed the bill because I felt the effects of the bomb were nothing to celebrate or glorify and was instrumental in the proposal's defeat in the House in 2012. A transcript of the debate in the house can be found here. In the 2014 Congress, this bill (S. 507 by Senator Cantwell) passed the House, but is unlikely to pass the Senate.
Our problem isn't simply our nuclear past, but is our present addiction to nuclear weapons which threaten humanity's future. Professor Francis A. Boyle observed that in 2013 the Obama administration changed the United States nuclear posture. The United States has historically positioned its nuclear arsenal for the purposes of "deterrence," yet under President Obama's administration they are for brandishing. "In today's security environment" the United States now reserves the right to use nuclear weapons against any country (first strike policy).
Lest anyone forget that nuclear is a big business, the United States is the leader in the global nuclear energy market. Nuclear energy technology is one of our biggest exports and is promoted as a boon to the environment, forget Fukushima. Forget that dozens of nuclear reactors in the US are operating way past their original licensing permits and that the aging reactor vessels are in late stages of embrittlement.
Forget that nuclear utilities are pleading with Wall Street to give them a break. We have come full circle, back to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States struck first with nuclear weapons. The most recent nuclear posture, the White House claimed, is necessary to eventually get rid of nuclear weapons! Read Professor Boyle's analysis and the White House document.
During this time of commemoration of man's inhumanity, visited upon the people of Japan three generations ago, let us resolve that we shall demand leaders who will resist the impulse to solve political and security problems through weapons of mass destruction.
Such leaders already exist in an organization known as the Parliamentarians for Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Disarmament, or PNND. Additionally, The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation promotes citizen action for nuclear abolition.
We must work together to support all efforts to get rid of nuclear weapons, not through appeals to violence but through the instinct to celebrate life. Let us find a path to love so that we can dismantle the destructive forces within our own hearts, which paralyze any sense of compassion necessary for the survival of all life on this planet. Let us build technologies for sustainability, and peace.
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Echoes of Watergate Summer in America's Current Discontent |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 07 August 2014 09:42 |
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Rich writes: "The percentage of American adults who doubt their children will have better lives than they do is at an all-time high (76)."
A demonstration gathers outside the White House in 1974 to support the impeachment if Richard Nixon. (photo: MPI/Getty Images)
Echoes of Watergate Summer in America's Current Discontent
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
07 August 14
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: a poll showing that Americans blame Washington leaders for their lingering economic anxieties, what the new border-security bill means for Republicans, and what to do when political news gets you down.
 new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows an America so discontented with the state of the nation and its leaders that you can’t help but notice some echoes with the disconsolate Watergate summer of 1974, when Nixon resigned the presidency, 40 years ago this month. Are any of the similarities real?
This poll is bleak indeed. The percentage of American adults who doubt their children will have better lives than they do is at an all-time high (76). Nearly four fifths of those polled are discontented with the American political system. With the exception of the military and “high-tech industry,” every other institution, from the Supreme Court to public schools, has lost the confidence of a majority of the public. Obama’s approval rating is 40 percent; Congressional Republicans are at 19 percent; and Congress as a whole is at 14 percent. There is no good news for anyone in the entire survey with the possible exception of Apple.
Perhaps because Rick Perlstein’s new history of American dyspepsia from 1973 to 1976, The Invisible Bridge, is so freshly in my head, it’s hard not to notice similarities to the funk of that era: Vast economic uncertainty; the absence of leadership and governance in a polarized Washington; continued revelations of CIA crimes, from torture to illegal surveillance; the citizenry’s disillusionment with unpopular, failed wars. This week’s Afghanistan tragedy — the killing of the two-star Army general Harold J. Greene, the highest-ranking American casualty abroad since Vietnam — will only further sour an American public that wants us out of there yesterday. It was apparently not a Taliban attack but an inside job within the Afghan army that America has sacrificed so much to train. You begin to wonder if an escape-by-helicopter scenario like our ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 is not in store.
Obama’s approval rating, depressed as it is, is not Nixonian, of course, and Obama is no Nixon, Sarah Palin’s calls for impeachment and John Boehner’s lawsuit notwithstanding. There will always be only one Nixon, the bigoted, paranoid, corrupt, and vindictive character who is now popping back out of the grave with the release of new books anthologizing still more of his often riveting White House recordings, which often sound like a cross between Goodfellas and Samuel Beckett. But if we have no Watergate in Washington this summer, there is at least a delightfully venal political scandal to follow across the Potomac: the corruption trial of the former Virginia governor, Robert McDonnell, and his wife Maureen, accused of taking cash and other trinkets in exchange for promoting the “diet supplements” of a low-rent businessman. This soap opera has everything, from an unidentified “male model” to Bible group meetings to telltale goods bearing brand names like Rolex and Oscar de la Renta. It may not be the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein, but the Washington Post’s ongoing coverage of the McDonnells’ trial offers some of the summer’s most reliable comic relief.
On Friday, House Republicans passed a draconian $694 million border security bill that would speed deportations. (The bill is DOA in the Senate.) On Monday, two DREAMer activists confronted Iowa Republican Steve King for his hard-line opposition to immigration reform. Sitting next to King was Senator Rand Paul, who was captured on-camera darting away from the exchange. How long can Republicans literally run away from Hispanics? And will Paul's dash have any effect on his presidential ambitions?
Republicans can keep running away from Hispanics for two more years — until the presidential election of 2016. They are given that breather because the crucial Senate races of 2014 are, with one exception (Colorado), taking place in states where the number of Hispanic voters is relatively low. After that, there will be a reckoning. It seems that a party that is ostensibly engaged on some kind of self-improvement campaign to learn how to speak to women, blacks, and gays without offending them remains, incredible as it seems, even more backward in speaking to Hispanics. In the Iowa incident, King insulted one of the DREAMer activists by telling her “You’re very good at English.” For his part, Rand Paul, in the words of one reporter, “left his half-eaten hamburger on his plate and was visibly chewing as he stood up” and fled. The video of this incident is reminiscent of the 2006 video of the former Virginia Governor (and presidential aspirant) George Allen insulting a Virginian man of Indian descent by calling him a “macaca” at a campaign event.
That incident essentially ended Allen’s political career. King is a known nut with no aspirations beyond whatever damage he can wreak in Congress. Paul, who at least kept his mouth shut, will not go the way of George Allen. But the Republican party’s march to demographic suicide is, if anything, becoming more determined with each passing month. To understand the political impact of the hard-line border security bill passed by House Republicans under the tutelage of Ted Cruz, one need only turn to The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page: “The GOP again gave the country the impression that its highest policy priority is to deport as many children as rapidly as possible back from wherever they came ... A party whose preoccupation is deporting children is going to alienate many conservatives, never mind minority voters.”
We’re now in the dog days of August. Any tips on how to escape the endless onslaught of depressing news in a summer defined by Putin, Gaza, and the do-nothing Congress?
Well, maybe a few personal recommendations. See Richard Linklater’s moving and indelible Boyhood. Watch Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, which consistently makes the horrific funny. And if by some chance you are in New York City, go to the Metropolitan Museum, where two wildly idiosyncratic shows are tucked in among the classics of the permanent collection. In one of them (ending this weekend), you can dive into the obsessiveness of the Anglo-American fashion designer Charles James (1906–1978). You don’t have to know anything about fashion — and I certainly don’t — to appreciate the personal drama of an artist who poured all his creativity into designing and building gowns that were architectural feats. At least as interesting as his designs is the part of the exhibit showcasing his back office documents and scrapbooks, all charting a man who sacrificed his financial and perhaps mental health out of devotion to an evanescent art form. No less involving is the neighboring retrospective of the American photographer Garry Winogrand (1928–1984), another obsessive, some of whose photos of America capture a national angst, from the Mad Men era into the Watergate '70s, that is perhaps even more disturbing than anything we are experiencing in our discontented summer of 2014.
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Putin and the Liberal Interventionist |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 06 August 2014 15:00 |
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Weissman writes: "'I didn't go to foment revolution,' said Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia. 'Obama people don't sponsor color revolutions. Other administrations had done this.' But, he insists, not Barack Obama's. That is a lie."
Michael McFaul. (photo: Mikhail Metzel/AP)
Putin and the Liberal Interventionist
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
06 August 14
  didn’t go to foment revolution,” said Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia. “Obama people don’t sponsor color revolutions. Other administrations had done this.” But, he insists, not Barack Obama’s. That is a lie, as we have seen in Kiev, Cairo, and beyond, and McFaul has to know it, which shows how liberal interventionists overlap with and become every bit as dangerous as the neocons I love to hate.
McFaul was talking here with David Remnick, the eminently liberal editor of The New Yorker and a former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post. Their several conversations form the backbone of Remnick’s latest attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin, which appeared in the magazine’s August 11 edition. Remnick speaks Russian, has an excellent ear for dialogue, and spins a good yarn, even if it remains a hatchet job, reworking for the umpteenth time the standard litany of charges against the Russian leader.
Putin runs an “unimaginably corrupt” system, stealing from public resources to enrich his favored oligarchs, kleptocrats, and former KGB pals, the siloviki. Putin has unleashed a dangerous right-wing nationalism based on blood and soil and blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin gives a platform to anti-Semitic extremists. Putin leads a campaign against homosexuals. Putin controls Russia’s mass media. Putin jails his political opponents. Putin uses covert political and military agents to fund, train, and supply insurgencies in surrounding countries, from the borders of Georgia, to Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic nations.
Remnick supports this portrait of Putin with evidence, anecdote, and a wide range of interviews with Putinistas from a variety of extremist positions. Remnick also concedes that Putin created a “relative atmosphere of stability, in which tens of millions of Russians enjoyed a sense of economic well-being and private liberty,” all unprecedented in Russian history.
But Remnick completely misses the plot in trying to explain Putin’s new anti-Americanism, which is arguably the most important question of all given a possible nuclear conflict over Ukraine. The journalist simply sweeps under the carpet what the U.S. and its European allies have been doing for decades to threaten Russia. Or, worse, he poses pieces of it as merely figments of Putin’s conspiratorial imagination. From hoodwinking Gorbachev and expanding NATO to the East to the “color revolutions” along the borders of the former Soviet Union to the coup in Kiev that the Obama administration put together and about which Ambassador McFaul lied, this is a whole lot of history to ignore. And if such willful ignorance is the best we can get from one of America’s leading liberal intellectuals, Cold War II could become even more dangerous than Cold War I.
McFaul, the liberal interventionist, offers little better. A political science professor at Stanford who advised Obama on Russian and Eurasian affairs before becoming ambassador, McFaul comes across as, in Remnick’s words, “a sunny, eager guy, with a wide-open expression, shaggy blond hair, effortful Russian, and an irrepressible curiosity.” A veteran leader of the anti-Apartheid movement at Stanford, he became a close friend of Susan Rice, now Obama’s National Security Advisor. Like Rice, McFaul was also fascinated by liberation movements in post-colonial Africa.
Studying and doing research in the Soviet Union from the early days of Perestroika in the 1980s, McFaul became friends with many of the “pro-democracy” reformers. He was, says Remnick, “determined to help establish liberal values and institutions – civil society, free speech, democratic norms – in a land that, for a thousand years, had known only absolutism, empire, and the knout.” He was also an incurable romantic high on revolution but completely without any sense of fatalism or irony, both of which pervade Russian culture.
But McFaul’s problem, which the usually perceptive Remnick fails to grasp, was less personal than political. The young scholar was mucking about in someone else’s society, and doing it at a time when Washington was making the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department’s “Democracy Bureaucracy,” and support for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) central features of U.S. foreign policy. McFaul participated in this U.S. government-sanctioned movement. No wonder that, in Remnick’s words, “some Russian officials grew convinced that he was working for Western intelligence, doing what he could to hasten the fall of the Kremlin’s authority. They took his openhearted activism to be a cover for cunning.”
McFaul himself only begins to understand. “Has the U.S. used covert operations to foment regime change? The answer is yes,” he told Remnick. “Serbia is a paradigmatic case: direct money to the opposition to destabilize things, and it was successful.” Given all those who still deny that the Clinton administration covertly funded, trained, and supplied the OTPOR revolutionaries who overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevich, it is good to hear McFaul confirm a truth that the evidence has long supported.
According to Wikileaks documents from the global intelligence firm Stratfor, McFaul then lobbied for the U.S. government to support the OTPOR revolutionaries in creating their Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which would play a major role in American-led destabilization efforts and color revolutions from Eastern Europe to Venezuela to the Arab Awakening.
To his credit, McFaul did raise the right question about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine that the Bush administration backed in 2004. “Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine?” he asked at the time in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Yes,” he replied. “The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities – democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. – but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine.”
McFaul found the meddling a good thing and defied overwhelming evidence to declare Washington innocent of any geostrategic agenda or covert coordination. This year, when Washington put together what organizers spoke of as a second Orange Revolution in Ukraine, McFaul simply denied that Obama people did that sort of thing. Is the liberal interventionist lying to the public, to his students, or mostly to himself?
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
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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A 'Culture of Violence' at Rikers Island |
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Wednesday, 06 August 2014 14:48 |
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Excerpt: "A much-anticipated investigation by the Justice Department has uncovered what amounted to a chamber of horrors at Rikers Island, where teenagers were beaten and battered for minor infractions by correction officers who acted without fear of discovery or punishment by senior officials. "
Inmate workers at Rikers Island. (photo: AP/Bebeto Matthews)
A 'Culture of Violence' at Rikers Island
By New York Times | Editorial
06 August 14
much-anticipated investigation by the Justice Department has uncovered what amounted to a chamber of horrors at Rikers Island, where teenagers were beaten and battered for minor infractions by correction officers who acted without fear of discovery or punishment by senior officials. The report, released on Monday by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, documents “a deep-seated culture of violence” that demands immediate remedial action by New York City, which is now at risk of facing a federal lawsuit if it does not take the steps outlined in the report — which wisely calls for removing adolescents from the jail complex altogether.
The investigation, which focused mainly on conduct from 2011 through 2013, said that the “number of injuries sustained by adolescents is staggering ” and that the youths were in constant danger of physical harm even when they presented no risk to the system or safety of the staff. Nearly 44 percent of the adolescent male population in custody as of October 2012 had been subjected to the use of force by the correctional staff.
Further, the report said, force was routinely used not so much to keep order but for the express purpose of “inflicting injuries and pain.”
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espite what 
