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Nobody Told Us That Oprah Was Going to Air a Special on White Supremacy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35918"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 March 2021 13:17 |
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Moore writes: "A withering, devastating interview with Harry & Meghan via Oprah. The Kingdom which first brought slaves here 400 years ago had their current Royal racism outed in all its glorious brutality last night - just how black will her kids be?"
Michael Moore. (photo: The New York Times)
Nobody Told Us That Oprah Was Going to Air a Special on White Supremacy
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
09 March 21
 withering, devastating interview with Harry & Meghan via Oprah. The Kingdom which first brought slaves here 400 years ago had their current Royal racism outed in all its glorious brutality last night — just how black will her kids be? The Palace refused to provide security for her baby or her husband. Meghan, crushed, depressed, asked to seek help. The Palace — “The Firm” — blocked her from getting mental health services. Meghan, in despair, considered suicide. Harry frightfully saw the deja of this — it was the treatment of his dead mother all over again. So it was time to get out. His father wouldn’t return his calls. This airs today in the UK on Commonwealth Day - yes, that British Commonwealth, in which 40% to 60% of its inhabitants are people of color. None of this comes as a surprise those of color in the Commonwealth. The British press, when referring to Meghan, uses words like monkey, demon seed, straight outta Compton. It’s good to see where our original White Supremacy came from and how the Mother country embraces it to this day.
Nobody told us that Oprah was going to air a special on White Supremacy yesterday on the anniversary of the Selma March. Powerful. And the mental health/suicide discussion was so intense and so helpful, I’m certain it will save lives.
Meghan — observing your wedding in 2018, I remember thinking, oh god, she’ll pay for this. You and Harry conducted what racists saw as a “Black” wedding — complete with an incredible Black American firery preacher giving the sermon and a black gospel choir rockin’ it out. The Royals and the rich sat there stone-faced in the church through it all. I thought, she’s cooked. The press immediately went after you. I’m so sorry. Thank you for the good works you continue to do. Welcome home. It ain’t perfect here. Today the murder trial of the cop who killed George Floyd begins in Minneapolis. There is much for us all to do.
And on this International Women’s Day, congrats on the new baby girl you’ll soon be bringing into this crazy world.
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Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era: And My Own Looming Job Crisis |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568"><span class="small">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 March 2021 13:15 |
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Gordon writes: "A year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop."
Fast food workers rally for better wages. (photo: Jim Weber/AP)
Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era: And My Own Looming Job Crisis
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
09 March 21
Long ago, I first worked as a printer and, after that, a journalist for a small West Coast news service. In the years that followed, I’ve been a freelance editor and writer and would, for decades, be an editor at two publishing houses, Pantheon Books and Metropolitan Books (where I co-ran the American Empire Project). For the last nearly 18-plus years, I’ve also run the website TomDispatch, which turned out to be as close to a 24/7 job as I’ve ever had (though, unlike so many other jobs, a largely self-imposed one). And as I head for the age of 77 in July, I still can’t imagine the idea of “retirement.” Even if TomDispatch were to end, something I don’t expect anytime soon, I think — being a pack rat of the first order — I’d promptly head for the top of my bedroom closet. There, over these many decades, I’ve packed away letters and papers of every sort (including World War II-era documents from my parents). Up there, in garbage bags, are things I wrote from the age of 12 to relatively recently and that people wrote to or for me. There are letters by the hundreds (from the era before emails and texting), my unpublished novels, my earliest journalism, and god knows what else. Somewhere in that mass of material that undoubtedly won’t outlive me, I dream that I might find the inspiration for a new late-in-life career looking back and writing something. But retire? Not work (however I might define that word at any moment)? I truly can’t imagine.
Of course, I’ve had one great luxury most of my life that so many Americans haven’t had. I’ve generally been paid to do what was, to my mind, meaningful work that mattered if not to the world, then at least to my own small universe, the one I inhabit every day. That, I know, has been and remains a luxury of the first order in our American world, a reality the pandemic of the last year-plus has only made worse for so many of us, forced into unwanted, unfunded, unneeded “retirement” in a world from hell. Today, TomDispatch stalwart Rebecca Gordon looks at work itself in the pandemic moment and in the context of a society in which, when you work, with rare exceptions, someone is always making money off you — often to your detriment, often to your bitter disappointment and pain.
She takes up the very nature of work, a subject rarely addressed not just at this website but more generally in this country at a time when the issue of raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour is at least a major point of political contention (and when, for the first time in god knows how long, an American president has come out strongly in favor of union organizing). In a country where work is often hell and inequality at record levels (even as America’s billionaires made an extra $1.3 trillion in the pandemic period), this is certainly a time to consider, once again, the role of work in our lives. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era
And My Own Looming Job Crisis
year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop. Friends knowledgeable on such matters examined photos I took of it and assured me that all the parts were there, so my partner (who puts up with such occasional infatuations) helped me wrangle it into one of our basement rooms and I set about learning to weave.
These days, all I want to do is weave. The loom that’s gripped me, and the pandemic that’s gripped us all, have led me to rethink the role of work (and its subset, paid labor) in human lives. During an enforced enclosure, this 68-year-old has spent a lot of time at home musing on what the pandemic has revealed about how this country values work. Why, for example, do the most “essential” workers so often earn so little — or, in the case of those who cook, clean, and care for the people they live with, nothing at all? What does it mean when conservatives preach the immeasurable value of labor, while insisting that its most basic price in the marketplace shouldn’t rise above $7.25 per hour?
That, after all, is where the federal minimum wage has been stuck since 2009. And that’s where it would probably stay forever, if Republicans like Kansas Senator Roger Marshall had their way. He brags that he put himself through college making $6 an hour and doesn’t understand why people can’t do the same today for $7.25. One likely explanation: the cost of a year at Kansas State University has risen from $898 when he was at school to $10,000 today. Another? At six bucks an hour, he was already making almost twice the minimum wage of his college years, a princely $3.35 an hour.
It’s Definitely Not Art, But Is It Work?
It’s hard to explain the pleasure I’ve gotten from learning the craft of weaving, an activity whose roots extend at least 20,000 years into the past. In truth, I could devote the next (and most likely last) 20 years of my life just to playing with “plain weave,” its simplest form — over-under, over-under — and not even scratch the surface of its possibilities. Day after day, I tromp down to our chilly basement and work with remarkable satisfaction at things as simple as getting a straight horizontal edge across my cloth.
But is what I’m doing actually “work”? Certainly, at the end of a day of bending under the loom to tie things up, of working the treadles to raise and lower different sets of threads, my aging joints are sore. My body knows all too well that I’ve been doing something. But is it work? Heaven knows, I’m not making products crucial to our daily lives or those of others. (We now possess more slightly lopsided cloth napkins than any two-person household could use in a lifetime.) Nor, at my beginner’s level, am I producing anything that could pass for “art.”
I don’t have to weave. I could buy textiles for a lot less than it costs me to make them. But at my age, in pandemic America, I’m lucky. I have the time, money, and freedom from personal responsibilities to be able to immerse myself in making cloth. For me, playing with string is a first-world privilege. It won’t help save humanity from a climate disaster or reduce police violence in communities of color. It won’t even help a union elect an American president, something I was focused on last fall, while working with the hospitality-industry union. It’s not teaching college students to question the world and aspire to living examined lives, something I’ve done in my official work as a part-time professor for the last 15 years. It doesn’t benefit anyone but me.
Nevertheless, what I’m doing certainly does have value for me. It contributes, as philosophers might say, to my human flourishing. When I practice weaving, I’m engaged in something political philosopher Iris Marion Young believed essential to a good life. As she put it, I’m “learning and using satisfying and expansive skills.” Young thought that a good society would offer all its members the opportunity to acquire and deploy such complicated skills in “socially recognized settings.” In other words, a good society would make it possible for people to do work that was both challenging and respected.
Writing in the late 1980s, she took for granted that “welfare capitalism” of Europe, and to a far lesser extent the United States, would provide for people’s basic material needs. Unfortunately, decades later, it’s hard even to teach her critique of such welfare capitalism — a system that sustained lives but didn’t necessarily allow them to flourish — because my students here have never experienced an economic system that assumes any real responsibility for sustaining life. Self-expression and an opportunity to do meaningful work? Pipe dreams if you aren’t already well-off! They’ll settle for jobs that pay the rent, keep the refrigerator stocked, and maybe provide some health benefits as well. That would be heaven enough, they say. And who could blame them when so many jobs on offer will fall far short of even such modest goals?
What I’m not doing when I weave is making money. I’m not one of the roughly 18 million workers in this country who do earn their livings in the textile industry. Such “livings” pay a median wage of about $28,000 a year, which likely makes it hard to keep a roof over your head. Nor am I one of the many millions more who do the same around the world, people like Seak Hong who sews garments and bags for an American company in Cambodia. Describing her life, she told a New York Times reporter, “I feel tired, but I have no choice. I have to work.” Six days a week,
“Ms. Hong wakes up at 4:35 a.m. to catch the truck to work from her village. Her workday begins at 7 and usually lasts nine hours, with a lunch break. During the peak season, which lasts two to three months, she works until 8:30 p.m.”
“Ms. Hong has been in the garment business for 22 years. She earns the equivalent of about $230 a month and supports her father, her sister, her brother (who is on disability) and her 12-year-old son.”
Her sister does the unpaid — but no less crucial — work of tending to her father and brother, the oxen, and their subsistence rice plants.
Hong and her sister are definitely working, one with pay, the other without. They have, as she says, no choice.
Catherine Gamet, who makes handbags in France for Louis Vuitton, is also presumably working to support herself. But hers is an entirely different experience from Hong’s. She loves what she’s been doing for the last 23 years. Interviewed in the same article, she told the Times, “To be able to build bags and all, and to be able to sew behind the machine, to do hand-sewn products, it is my passion.” For Gamet, “The time flies by.”
Both these women have been paid to make bags for more than 20 years, but they’ve experienced their jobs very differently, undoubtedly thanks to the circumstances surrounding their work, rather than the work itself: how much they earn; the time they spend traveling to and from their jobs; the extent to which the “decision” to do a certain kind of work is coerced by fear of poverty. We don’t learn from Hong’s interview how she feels about the work itself. Perhaps she takes pride in what she does. Most people find a way to do that. But we know that making bags is Gamet’s passion. Her work is not merely exhausting, but in Young’s phrase “satisfying and expansive.” The hours she spends on it are lived, not just endured as the price of survival.
Pandemic Relief and Its Discontents
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived at the White House with a commitment to getting a new pandemic relief package through Congress as soon as possible. It appears that they’ll succeed, thanks to the Senate’s budget reconciliation process — a maneuver that bypasses the possibility of a Republican filibuster. Sadly, because resetting the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour doesn’t directly involve taxation or spending, the Senate’s parliamentarian ruled that the reconciliation bill can’t include it.
Several measures contained in the package have aroused conservative mistrust, from the extension of unemployment benefits to new income supplements for families with children. Such measures provoke a Republican fear that somebody, somewhere, might not be working hard enough to “deserve” the benefits Congress is offering or that those benefits might make some workers think twice about sacrificing their time caring for children to earn $7.25 an hour at a soul-deadening job.
As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently observed, Republicans are concerned that such measures might erode respect for the “natural dignity” of work. In an incisive piece, he rebuked Republican senators like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio for responding negatively to proposals to give federal dollars to people raising children. Such a program, they insisted, smacked of — the horror! — “welfare,” while in their view, “an essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work.” Of course, for Lee and Rubio “work” doesn’t include changing diapers, planning and preparing meals, doing laundry, or helping children learn to count, tell time, and tie their shoelaces — unless, of course, the person doing those things is employed by someone else’s family and being paid for it. In that case it qualifies as “work.” Otherwise, it’s merely a form of government-subsidized laziness.
There is, however, one group of people that “pro-family” conservatives have long believed are naturally suited to such activities and who supposedly threaten the well-being of their families if they choose to work for pay instead. I mean, of course, women whose male partners earn enough to guarantee food, clothing, and shelter with a single income. I remember well a 1993 article by Pat Gowens, a founder of Milwaukee’s Welfare Warriors, in the magazine Lesbian Contradiction. She wondered why conservative anti-feminists of that time thought it good if a woman with children had a man to provide those things, but an outrage if she turned to “The Man” for the same aid. In the first case, the woman’s work is considered dignified, sacred, and in tune with the divine plan. Among conservatives, then or now, the second could hardly be dignified with the term “work.”
The distinction they make between private and public paymasters, when it comes to domestic labor contains at least a tacit, though sometimes explicit, racial element. When the program that would come to be known as “welfare” was created as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, it was originally designed to assist respectable white mothers who, through no fault of their own, had lost their husbands to death or desertion. It wasn’t until the 1960s that African American women decided to secure their right to coverage under the same program and built the National Welfare Rights Organization to do so.
The word “welfare” refers, as in the preamble to the Constitution, to human wellbeing. But when Black women started claiming those rights, it suddenly came to signify undeserved handouts. You could say that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House in 1980 in a Cadillac driven by the mythical Black “welfare queen” he continually invoked in his campaign. It would be nice to think that the white resentment harnessed by Reagan culminated (as in “reached its zenith and will now decline”) with Trump’s 2016 election, but, given recent events, that would be unrealistically optimistic.
Reagan began the movement to undermine the access of poor Americans to welfare programs. Ever since, starving the entitlement beast has been the Republican lodestar. In the same period, of course, the wealthier compatriots of those welfare mothers have continued to receive ever more generous “welfare” from the government. Those would include subsidies to giant agriculture, oil-depletion allowances and other subsidies for fossil-fuel companies, the mortgage-interest tax deduction for people with enough money to buy rather than rent their homes, and the massive tax cuts for billionaires of the Trump era. However, it took a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to achieve what Reagan couldn’t, and, as he put it, “end welfare as we know it.”
The Clinton administration used the same Senate reconciliation process in play today for the Biden administration’s Covid-19 relief bill to push through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was more commonly known as “welfare reform.” That act imposed a 32-hour-per-week work or training requirement on mothers who received what came to be known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It also gave “temporary” its deeper meaning by setting a lifetime benefits cap of five years. Meanwhile, that same act proved a bonanza for non-profits and Private Industry Councils that got contracts to administer “job training” programs and were paid to teach women how to wear skirts and apply makeup to impress future employers. In the process, a significant number of unionized city and county workers nationwide were replaced with welfare recipients “earning” their welfare checks by sweeping streets or staffing county offices, often for less than the minimum wage.
In 1997, I was working with Californians for Justice (CFJ), then a new statewide organization dedicated to building political power in poor communities, especially those of color. Given the high unemployment rates in just such communities, our response to Clinton’s welfare reforms was to demand that those affected by them at least be offered state-funded jobs at a living wage. If the government was going to make people work for pay, we reasoned, then it should help provide real well-paying jobs, not bogus “job readiness” programs. We secured sponsors in the state legislature, but I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that our billion-dollar jobs bill never got out of committee in Sacramento.
CFJ’s project led me into an argument with one of my mentors, the founder of the Center for Third World Organizing, Gary Delgado. Why on earth, he asked me, would you campaign to get people jobs? “Jobs are horrible. They’re boring: they waste people’s lives and destroy their bodies.” In other words, Gary was no believer in the inherent dignity of paid work. So, I had to ask myself, why was I?
Among those who have inspired me, Gary wasn’t alone in holding such a low opinion of jobs. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for instance, had been convinced that those whose economic condition forced them to work for a living would have neither the time nor space necessary to live a life of “excellence” (his requirement for human happiness). Economic coercion and a happy life were, in his view, mutually exclusive.
Reevaluating Jobs
One of the lies capitalism tells us is that we should be grateful for our jobs and should think of those who make a profit from our labor not as exploiters but as “job creators.” In truth, however, there’s no creativity involved in paying people less than the value of their work so that you can skim off the difference and claim that you earned it. Even if we accept that there could be creativity in “management” — the effort to organize and divide up work so it’s done efficiently and well — it’s not the “job creators” who do that, but their hirelings. All the employers bring to the game is money.
Take the example of the admirable liberal response to the climate emergency, the Green New Deal. In the moral calculus of capitalism, it’s not enough that shifting to a green economy could promote the general welfare by rebuilding and extending the infrastructure that makes modern life possible and rewarding. It’s not enough that it just might happen in time to save billions of people from fires, floods, hurricanes, or starvation. What matters — the selling point — is that such a conversion would create jobs (along with the factor no one mentions out loud: profits).
Now, I happen to support exactly the kind of work involved in building an economy that could help reverse climate devastation. I agree with Joe Biden’s campaign statement that such an undertaking could offer people jobs with “good wages, benefits, and worker protections.” More than that, such jobs would indeed contribute to a better life for those who do them. As the philosopher Iris Marion Young puts it, they would provide the chance to learn and use “satisfying and expansive skills in a socially recognized setting.” And that would be a very good thing even if no one made a penny of profit in the process.
Now, having finished my paid labor for the day, it’s back to the basement and loom for me.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.
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FOCUS: 50 Years Ago Today, Activists Burglarized the FBI and Exposed Its Undemocratic Abuses |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54333"><span class="small">Chip Gibbons, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 March 2021 12:23 |
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Gibbons writes: "Fifty years ago today, a group of New Left activists executed a daring burglary of an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, exposing the bureau's COINTELPRO operations against the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war activists, and socialists. We should remember these activists today as heroes."
Fred Hampton in 1968 at age twenty-two. (photo: Getty Images)
50 Years Ago Today, Activists Burglarized the FBI and Exposed Its Undemocratic Abuses
By Chip Gibbons, Jacobin
09 March 21
Fifty years ago today, a group of New Left activists executed a daring burglary of an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, exposing the bureau’s COINTELPRO operations against the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war activists, and socialists. We should remember these activists today as heroes.
 n March 8, 1971, much of the nation was transfixed by the “Fight of Century” between Joe Fraiser and Muhammed Ali, both undefeated. Or at least that’s what eight anti-war activists were counting on. The activists, some of whom traced their roots to the Civil Rights Movement, recognized the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a political police that posed an existential threat to the movement.
Knowing the FBI was actively spying on anti-war and civil rights activists was one thing, but proving it was another. Inspired by war resisters who broke into draft boards, and physically seized and destroyed documents in order to impede the US slaughter in Vietnam, the activists thought: Why not break into an FBI office?
The group called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. Though this information wasn’t public, the commission included William C. Davidon, a physics professor and peace activist; John C. Raines, a professor of religion who had also been a participant in the Freedom Rides; his wife Bonnie Raines, who was also a peace activist; and Keith Forsyth, a cab driver.
Originally, they had planned to break into the Philadelphia field office. That was implausible, security too tight. But they soon discovered the FBI had another field office in Media, Pennsylvania. The town’s secluded nature made it ideal for the job. The eight activists cased the building, studied lock picking, and devised a diversion in case police came.
On the night of the break-in, they had some difficulty picking the lock. But they got in — and emptied the building of every single file they could find. When they started going through the files they very early on came across a document that outlined a plan to target the anti-war movement in order to “enhance the paranoia … and … get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
Their suspicions were correct. The FBI was actively trying to destroy the anti-war movement — the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI now had the documents to prove it. And incredibly, they got away with the brazen burglary.
Even though the FBI assigned two hundred agents to solve the mystery of who burglarized the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, the bureau could not find them. Only in 2014, when five of the participants were advised that the statute of limitations had passed, were any of their identities revealed.
The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI gave the documents to the media, yet few were willing to expose the FBI. Most journalists, including those at the New York Times, actually mailed the documents back to the FBI. Only Betty Medsger of the Washington Post was willing to publish the documents. (In 2014, when five of the activists went public, it would again be Medsger who would tell their story).
One of the documents bore a cryptic acronym: COINTELPRO. NBC news correspondent Carl Stern set out on his own quest to discover what exactly COINTELPRO was. He asked officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI, but they were tight-lipped. No one in official Washington would answer his question so he tried a then-novel approach. Stern filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which had only been passed a half decade earlier. The FBI tried to get out of complying with the request, but a judge demanded they turn over the documents.
Two years after the break-in, NBC Nightly News reported to the nation that “the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left.”
A Bureau Tasked With Crushing Dissent
The FBI has engaged in no shortage of villainy in its zealous quest to stamp out domestic dissent. It gathered dossiers on radical activists, carried out wiretaps and break-ins, engaged in mass political surveillance, and even drew up a secret list of tens of thousands of people to be detained in the event of a national emergency primarily on the basis of their political views. Today, the FBI frequently treats certain political points of view as a precursor to terrorism, then calls for preventative policing measures, which are inherently political policing.
Yet in spite of this wide list of FBI crimes none has so captured the public imagination as COINTELPRO. For many, COINTELPRO is treated as synonymous with FBI political policing writ large. But to truly grapple with the sinister nature of COINTELPRO, it is important to understand the details of the program.
COINTELPRO stands for “Counter Intelligence Program.” “Counter intelligence” typically refers to the neutralization of a hostile foreign agent and — generally entails looser adherence to basic constitutional principles than a domestic criminal prosecution. As the Church Committee, a landmark Senate investigation in the abuses of the intelligence agencies triggered in part by the revelations of the Media break-in, stated, these were wartime techniques.
Yet, the committee noted that the full truth was even worse than that. The use of “counter intelligence” was a misnomer. COINTELPRO was in fact a series of domestic covert actions designed to neutralize or disrupt political movements. As the Church Committee put it, the FBI had carried out a “sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”
To prevent the free exercise of disfavored speech, the FBI used tactics that ranged from nuisances, like falsely publicizing that an event had been cancelled, to deadly, like trying to incite violence between the Black Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers. The intent was to sow discord and disunity among the Left.
FBI agents drafted pamphlets attacking one group falsely claiming them to be written by another. Informants frequently and purposefully accused other activists of being informants in order to create an atmosphere of paranoia. “Friendly” media outlets were exploited to see if they would try to undermine claims of police brutality against demonstrators and spread embarrassing stories about activist’s personal “immorality.”
Activists’ personal lives were fair game. The FBI had the Boy Scout chapter of a spouse of a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member disbanded. This program not only destroyed lives — it took them, as seen in the FBI’s role in Fred Hampton’s assassination.
The Church Committee concluded that COINTELPRO had three primary purposes. The first two, protecting national security and preventing violence, were the FBI’s official explanation. While the committee partially accepted this, it also noted that the mission of preventing violence was in contrast to a number of COINTELPRO operations that were clearly designed to incite violence. The committee found that a number of COINTELPRO actions could not rationally be tied to either of the FBI’s two justifications. They argued that the “unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”
The Church Committee found there were five domestic COINTELPRO operations targeting the Communist Party, the SWP, White Hate Groups, “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” and the New Left. (For whatever reason, it did not include the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations against Puerto Rican independence groups.) Others have argued that the FBI’s actions against the American Indian Movement, which technically postdates the FBI’s termination of COINTELPRO, are similar enough in tactics that they should be considered part of the program.
All of these groups were involved in political speech. But as self-appointed guardians of the status quo, the FBI considered it part of their mission to treat these organizations as an enemy within. In fact, that these organizations were engaged in political speech outside the purview of law enforcement is exactly what made them targets for the FBI’s COINTELPRO.
Locking Up Radicals
The FBI had long hunted radical groups like the Communist Party and the SWP. With both organizations, the bureau had worked to find ways to jail its members, including prosecuting its leaders under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government (the SWP was first prosecuted under the Smith Act — a move the Communist Party fully supported at the time, given the SWP’s Trotskyism). During the Second Red Scare, the FBI also sought to use various process crimes, such as perjury or contempt of Congress, as a means of locking up Communist Party members.
By 1956, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and head of domestic intelligence William Sullivan became convinced they were running out of law enforcement options against the Communists. They feared the Supreme Court had become too liberal and was ceasing to rubber stamp political prosecutions. Unable to jail their political enemies, the FBI came up with a plan to neutralize and disrupt their political activities. By its very nature, these activities largely targeted lawful political speech.
The FBI’s definition of anti-communism was broad. Under its Communist Infiltration (COMINFL) program, the bureau targeted people who were likely to be influenced by communists, or were just “fellow travelers.” According to the Church Committee, this included “those taking positions supported by the Communists, such as school integration, increased minority hiring, and opposition to [the House Un-American Activities Committee,” a Congressional committee that for nearly four decades investigated and harassed the political beliefs of radicals and others in their orbit. The FBI used this rationale to target the Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King himself.
The FBI quickly expanded COINTELPRO to two of its other favorite targets. The SWP, like the Communists, cited the Bolshevik Revolution as a key influence. As supporters of Leon Trotsky, the Socialist Workers Party took a different line on the Soviet Union than the Communists. Yet both groups equally supported Cuba’s socialist revolution and struggled with each other over who would lead US solidarity efforts with the island. While the Communists and the SWP may have been at each other throats, the FBI’s COINTELPRO chief would testify before Congress, “I do not think that the Bureau discriminates against subversive organizations.”
Unlike with the Communists, the FBI never claimed the SWP had any connection with a foreign power’s espionage against the United States. Instead, they were upset by the group’s Trotskyist political ideology and its support for the Cuban Revolution and school integration. The Bureau was particularly disturbed that the SWP ran candidates for office, as doing so allowed them to communicate their ideas to the voting public. Much like with the Communist Party COINTELPRO, the FBI used its license to target the SWP to go well beyond party members, in this case attacking many opponents of the Vietnam War who had nothing to do with the party.
FBI field offices in New York City and San Juan opened COINTELPRO operations against Puerto Rican independence groups. In fact, many of the repressive tools created during the McCarthy era were at their inception used to target the Puerto Rican independence movement. The FBI had been carrying out activities against the movement since 1936. It had its own surveillance program just for the island called the “carpetas” program, during which it created dossiers on a hundred thousand Puetro Ricans.
In spite of the fact that the Department of Justice, of which the FBI is a part, was essentially created to respond to Ku Klux Klan terror during Reconstruction, Hoover’s FBI had done little on the subject. When the brutal lynching of Emmet Till sparked national outrage, Hoover claimed there were no federal laws broken and thus the FBI could not intervene — yet in the 1870s, the Department of Justice had brought thousands of indictments against the Klan and obtained hundreds of convictions. Hoover instead put his efforts toward opposing those calling for a federal investigation into Till’s death, believing such calls were part of a Communist plot and thus fell within his view of the FBI’s jurisdiction.
In 1964, the murder of three civil rights activists and other Klan violence became too much to ignore. The federal government was largely controlled by liberals who, in addition to being staunch Cold Warriors, were also civil rights supporters. They and others began to wonder why the FBI couldn’t deploy the same tactics that were used against Communists against the Klan.
Over internal objections, responsibility for investigating Klan violence was removed from the FBI’s law enforcement component and turned over to its intelligence component. While there are a number of reasons for this baffling move (the Ku Klux Klan as a domestic organization engaged in clearly prosecutable criminal conduct was not a typical candidate for a counterintelligence investigation), it must be noted that it was in part influenced by the fact that many in official Washington believed the high degree of collaboration between Southern law enforcement and the Klan made prosecutions impossible. The FBI created a new COINTELPRO targeting white hate groups.
During the Church Committee’s hearings, one of its Klan informants, Gary Rowe, gave chilling testimony claiming that the Birmingham Police had told the Klan they had fifteen minutes to beat up the Freedom Riders. Rowe told the FBI this and they did nothing. Rowe himself participated in this violence and perjured himself in court about it with the FBI’s knowledge.
When Rowe testified he did so wearing a white pillowcase with eyes cut out over his head. He had entered the witness protection program and was unwilling to show his face in public. When the Ku Klux Klan murdered civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo after the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, Rowe was in the car with the shooters. While his testimony put others in jail, they would later claim Rowe fired the fatal shot. Similarly, Rowe later came under suspicion for involvement in the Birmingham Church bombing.
While the full extent of the paid FBI informant’s involvement in actual Klan violence is debated by historians and journalists, Rowe himself confessed to having been involved in the murder of a black man while on the FBI payroll, claiming the bureau asked him to keep his mouth shut.
The FBI’s anti-communist mission had given it wide latitude in operations against those working toward racial justice. Yet in 1967, the FBI created a new COINTELPRO, to target “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups” (the term Black Extremists was also frequently used — a fact that is of particular note given the FBI’s recent designation of “Black Identity Extremists” as a terror threat). Whereas the US Senate found the FBI’s counterintelligence operations against white hate groups were the most narrowly targeted and pertained the closest to those who engaged in violence, they found its operations against “Black extremists” to be the most vicious and violent of any of the COINTELPRO operations.
Finally, in 1968, the FBI created its final official COINTELPRO operation, this one targeting the New Left. This was the broadest of any of the COINTELPROs. The New Left, at least when used by the FBI, was essentially a meaningless term used to describe everything from opposing the Vietnam War to supporting women’s or gay rights.
Great Personal Risk
COINTELPRO was not a surveillance program. While political surveillance is pernicious in its own right, and the FBI engaged in plenty of it, COINTELPRO was a series of covert actions in which the FBI used wartime techniques against disfavored activist groups. The FBI had no prosecutorial avenues against these groups; by the programs’ very nature, they targeted First Amendment–protected political activity.
In spite of its stated reasoning about national security or preventing violence, the FBI viewed itself as the guardian of the status quo. As a result, the bureau had carte blanche to destroy those who threatened this order. This meant that activists who supported integration or opposed an unjust war were put fully within the FBI’s sights. As a Senate investigation found, “the Bureau’s self-imposed role as protector of the existing political and social order blurred the line between targeting criminal activity and constitutionally protected acts and advocacy.”
The eight anti-war activists who burglarized the FBI building did so at great personal risk. By breaking into the building, the activists risked lengthy prison sentences, something whistleblowers and journalists who challenge the national security state still find themselves risking today. When a film about the break-in, 1971, was screened on Capitol Hill, the late progressive Rep. John Conyers told the audience that a Congressional investigation into the FBI’s domestic intelligence activities was not possible when Hoover was alive — too many feared him.
The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI did not let their fear of Hoover paralyze them from taking action against the bureau’s abuses. They should be remembered as heroes who stood up against the villains of the nation’s secret political police, the FBI.
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RSN: Fukushima Meltdowns Turn Ten, Still Getting Worse |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 09 March 2021 09:11 |
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Boardman writes: "Fukushima Daiichi's multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns started ten years ago. They are not over. They are not even close to over."
A worker at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. (photo: James Martin/CNET)
Fukushima Meltdowns Turn Ten, Still Getting Worse
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
09 March 21
 ukushima Daiichi’s multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns started ten years ago. They are not over. They are not even close to over. Nuclear disasters don’t ever end. The radioactive danger slowly decays over decades, during which it needs constant safety management until radiation measurements are below “acceptable levels.” That’s still not safe.
Fukushima continues to be a low-level nuclear disaster, as it has been for ten years. The initial explosive accident has been mitigated, but the danger has never been fully contained. Recent news from Fukushima is hardly reassuring.
On February 13, a major earthquake hit the region. Not as powerful as the 2001 earthquake that led to the Fukushima meltdowns, the 2021 earthquake nevertheless unsettled the unstable nuclear complex. This caused one or more leaks of radioactive water from the damaged reactors, according to public broadcaster NHK. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns and operates the Fukushima facility promptly denied that there were any new leaks. TEPCO acknowledge radioactive water spilled from the fuel rod storage pools but said that caused no danger to the public. Two days later, TEPCO was reporting: “Currently there are no abnormalities at TEPCO’s nuclear power stations that would have an impact off-site.”
More than a week after the earthquake, TEPCO acknowledged that seismometers at Unit 3 were not working. TEPCO admitted it has been aware of the outage since the previous July.
There is an unknown number of old leaks in the Fukushima containment buildings, dating to the original collapse and since. Clean groundwater infiltrates the reactor buildings, comes into contact with the melted cores, and is contaminated. Some of this contaminated water is collected in tanks above ground at the facility. The rest of the contaminated water filters out of the plant and into the Pacific Ocean. No one has a reliable measurement of the radioactive water draining continuously into the ocean.
Maintaining the coolant water level inside the reactors is critical to prevent further meltdown of the cores at the bottom of the containment structure. TEPCO pumps 3 tons of water per hour into the reactors to cool the fuel debris (a ton of water is about 240 gallons). A week after the earthquake of February 13, TEPCO acknowledged that the water levels in Unit 1 and Unit 3 had dropped by a foot or more and that water levels continue to drop every day. TEPCO does not know why the water level is dropping or where the water is going. TEPCO is responding to the water drop by pumping more water into the reactors to keep the water level up. While this will keep the melted nuclear fuel covered, it will also create more contaminated water for TEPCO to store in surface tanks that are running out of capacity (about 1.37 million tons, or 328 million gallons). Ten days after the earthquake, TEPCO reported that the quake had shifted 53 of them (out of 1,074), but that there were no leaks.
TEPCO did not know whether the water level in Unit 2 was dropping because Unit 2 instruments had been removed.
Another source of contaminated water is the numerous nuclear fuel pools on the site. The stored fuel rods also need to be covered in water to keep from melting down.
On February 28, TEPCO announced it had completed the two-year process of removing 566 fuel assemblies from the fuel pool at the top of the Unit 3 building. The fuel is now stored at ground level in another part of the facility, where it still needs to be cooled to be safe. While this is relatively good news, it is a miniscule part of the decommissioning of the Fukushima plant. Even with Unit 3, the hardest part is ahead: locating and removing the melted nuclear core under water at the bottom of the building.
Media coverage of Fukushima is generally scanty, and much of the mainstream coverage is little more than press-release-based happy talk, like the Washington Post story on March 6 with the headline:
A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles
Little about that headline is based in reality. It is not a decade “after” the nuclear disaster, it is a decade after it began. It is a decade into the disaster, with decades to go before it can be even close to over. Arguably, “contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles,” depending on what that might mean. Contaminated water is hardly the biggest part of the Fukushima clean-up or the most dangerous or the most expensive. Contaminated symbolizes the “sorcerer’s apprentice” aspect of Fukushima in the way it self-multiplies without actually accomplishing anything more than making the situation worse. The Post doesn’t explain what its headline is supposed to mean.
The Japanese government and TEPCO have been trying to dump their radioactive water in the Pacific at least since 2019. They claim that the water will be treated, most but not all radionuclides removed, and that dumping it will be perfectly safe. The Post treats this claim as if it were reasonable, but the Post talks to no nuclear scientists (rather relying on non-nuclear environmentalists for “balance”). As far as this “perfectly safe” dumping goes, the Post quotes unnamed experts as saying, “The only thing holding them back appears to be the Olympics and the bad publicity it could generate before the Games begin in July.”
While outlining the government position in sympathetic details, the Post is more dismissive of the opposition, which is led by the regional fishing industry, which is only halfway recovered from 2011. “Also angry is South Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away across the sea,” snidely reports the Post without mentioning that South Korea has banned Fukushima seafood. The Post also omits Japanese resistance from the Coastal Science and Societies and other environmental organizations, as well as the Catholic bishops of Japan and South Korea.
As for the routine sampling of fish caught off Fukushima, the Post writes rather dismissively: “Tests routinely come back clear, although last month a solitary black rockfish was found to have cesium levels five times the national standard, the first fish to fail the test in 16 months.” Cesium at five times the “safe level?” Not important? Perhaps it’s an anomaly, but the understanding of Fukushima’s radioactive particle is still rudimentary. In 2011 it became well known that Cesium particles spread as far as Tokyo. In 2021, a team of international scientists has announced the discovery of a previously unknown, larger and more radioactive Cesium particle. This Cesium particle was apparently formed in the Fukushima Unit 1 hydrogen explosion and spread to the northwest of the reactor. Ten years later and they’re still discovering what needs to be cleaned up. That’s on land. So how much more is unknown about radioactivity in the ocean?
On March 3, Yonhap News Agency summed up the status of Fukushima radioactive water dumping this way:
A Japanese government official said Wednesday that Tokyo cannot continue to delay the disposal of contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant due to tank storage limits, though it has yet to decide when and how to release it.
There is no plan in place but the government and TEPCO argue that they have to carry it out because they will run out of storage space for contaminated water by the summer of 2022. At the same time, the radiation level at the perimeter of the Fukushima facility is already eight times the “safe level” set by the government.
TEPCO told press that the predominant reason behind the sharp increase in radiation at the plant was X-rays coming from storage tanks holding radioactive water that has been leaking from the Fukushima facility. The water in the tanks contains traces of radioactive strontium along with other substances that react with the materials the tank is composed of, producing X-rays, said officials.
Apparently they didn’t know how the tanks would interact with radioactive materials before they set about filling more than a thousand of them. Or if they did know, they went ahead anyway. That would be consistent with the government’s allowing TEPCO to build the Fukushima plant in 1967 at sea level rather than on a bluff less vulnerable to tsunamis or groundwater flow. And it would be consistent with the government allowing TEPCO to ignore safeguards in the government’s 2002 long-term earthquake assessment.
Nuclear power has always been a corrupt enterprise, but in Japan now that corruption is coming back to hold its perpetrators accountable. On February 19, the Tokyo High Court ordered the government and TEPCO to pay damages of $2.63 million to 43 people who were forced to evacuate from their homes by the Fukushima disaster. The presiding judge called the government’s regulatory inaction “extremely unreasonable.” There are as many as 30 more such suits pending in Japanese courts.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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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esterday, Brazilian Supreme Court judge Luiz Edson Fachin ruled to annul all of former president Lula da Silva’s convictions. Fachin said that the court that convicted Lula in the southern city of Curitiba did not have the legal authority to convict Brazil’s first Workers’ Party (PT) president. As such, he must be retried by a federal court in the capital city of Brasília.
