Friday
Oct022015

REDEYE 10/14/15

Slavery imbedded in Constitution
NYT, 9/18 — To the Editor….
Prof. Sean Wilentz’s essay arguing that the Constitution was not built on slavery…is profoundly mistaken….
…The text of the Constitution as ratified…clearly…sanctions slavery, in the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause….
…By allowing Southern states to count their slaves…for purposes of representation while denying those slaves…civil or human rights, the Constitution granted slaveholders magnified political poser, while creating an incentive to acquire more slaves….
Race-based slavery was this nation’s original sin….That sin could not be expurgated “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
U.S. military arms commanders who sexually abuse boys
NYT, 9/21 — Kabul, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley told his father [that] from his bunk he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it….” [His] father…urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way….
…American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene….
…Instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them…and placing them as the commanders of villages….
“…we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people…” said Dan Quinn, a former…captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did….”
After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.
Shades of 9/11: Petraeus
allies with al Qaeda
le Canard ȇnchainé, 9/9 — …Daesh [ISIS] is not just fighting [Syria’s] Bashar’s army, with the hope of flying the black flags of the Islamic State from Damascus. It must also fight Al-Nosra (a subsidiary of Al Qaeda)….Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are furnishing arms and subsidies to this curious terrorist coalition. And David Petraeus, the former great leader of American forces in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and the former boss of the C.I.A., has just invited the United States to ally itself with these good people, in an interview published on August 31 on the…website “The Daily Beast.”
If this general of lost wars it to be believed, this is price for vanquishing Daesh: hand in hand with Al Qaeda….
U.S.-backed coalition commit genocide
NYT, 9/13 — Hajja, Yemen — The airstrike clammed into L-Sham water-bottling plant…killing 13 workers who were minutes away from heading….
…And it was far away from a military facility…[to] explain the strike as a tragic mistake….
Of the many perils Yemen’s citizens have faced…,with starvation looming and their cities crumbling under heavy weapons, none have been as deadly as the coalition airstrikes….A Saudi-led aerial campaign…has become so broad and vicious that critics accuse the coalition of collectively punishing people living under Houthi control.
…Coalition strikes have ripped through markets, apartment buildings and refugee camps….Human rights groups say such airstrikes amount to war crimes. More than a thousand civilians…have died in the strikes, the toll rising steadily with little international notice or outrage….
…The strikes are crystallizing anger…against Saudi Arabia and its partners, including the United States. The Obama administration had provided military intelligence and logistical assistance to the coalition, and American weapons have been widely used….[including] American-manufactured cluster munitions in the fields of Yemeni farmers….The United States is finalizing a deal to provide more weapons to Saudi Arabia, including missiles for its F-15 fighter jets….
…Locals joke grimly that the coalition has run out of buildings to hit….
The majority of civilians have been killed by coalition warplanes drooping American munitions ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds….
… “They are targeting the whole population,” said Adam Mujahid Abdulla, a 20-year-old survivor….The bomb that struck his house killed seven members of his family….
…Another airstrike sliced through a building of shops and apartments….In the rubble people dug out the remains of…the local barber. “They only found his legs….
The strike’s victims included…a 12-year-old girl who…had been visiting her 85-year-old grandmother….

GM kills for profit
NYT, 9/20 — With tough talk that its actions belie, the [U.S.] Justice Department announced…that it was bringing criminal charges against General Motors for “concealing a potentially deadly safety defect” and “misleading consumers regarding the safety” of GM vehicles, which caused or contributed to at least 124 deaths….
GM admitted it knew as early as 2004 that many of its vehicles contained defective ignition switches  — and…had concluded by 2012 that the defective switches could cause airbags to fail. Yet Gm did not recall the 2.6 million affected vehicles until nearly two years later and instead hid the fatal safety defects to increase sales….
All charges against GM will be dropped…and no company officials have been charged with crimes based on GM’s deadly concealment scheme….
…The United States attorney…insisted that GM deserved credit for it “fairly extraordinary” cooperation….
…In case after case…the Justice Department has treated the worst corporate criminals like first-time drug offenders, agreeing to dismiss or not bring charges if the companies clean up their acts.
How the FBI deliberately frames innocent people
The New Yorker, 9/21 — Joseph (the Animal) Barboza was a murderer for hire… [and] ultimately confessed to seven murders….
Barboza became a prized informant: he served as a [U.S.] government witness….When authorities began looking into a 1965 murder that Barboza had participated in, his contacts at the FBI engineered a scheme to protect him. Barboza was never prosecuted;…instead, he took the stand as the government’s star witness and implicated four innocent men in the murder. His FBI handler…boasted…about the ease with which the bureau had set up four “pigeons” for a crime they did not commit. All four men ended up with life sentences. (They were cleared of the murder in 2001, by which time two of them had died in prison.)

Friday
Sep182015

REDEYE 9/30/15

Migrants in Nazi-style camps
NYT, 9/5 —In the Czech Republic, the police hustled more than 200 migrants off a train and wrote identification numbers on their hands with indelible markers…like the tattoos the Nazis put on concentration camp inmates….
“It was horrible when I saw those images of police putting numbers on people’s arms,” said…the chief rabbi of Hungary. “It reminded me of Auschwitz. And then putting them on a train with armed guards to take them to a camp where they are closed in?....There are echoes of the Holocaust….”
…Not since the Jews were rounded up by Nazi Germany have their been as many images coming out of Europe of people locked into trains, babies handed over barbed wire, men in military gear herding large crowds of bedraggled men, women and children….Rabbi Frolich was especially struck by the lies used to manipulate the migrants.
“They tell then that the train was going to Austria and then take them to a camp instead….It is very similar to what happened to the Jews in the 1940s….”
“I cannot call them anything other than concentration camps,” said… [the] coordinator for the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights….”These refugees arrive, in horrible condition, and then you put them in this concentration camp?”
Clinton doubled $2-a-day poverty
NYT Book Review, 9/6 — President Clinton signed the bill, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), on August 22, 1996….
…Studies revealed that the number of “disconnected” single mothers — neither working nor on welfare — had grown substantially since the passage of TANF, rising to one in five single mothers during the mid-2000s….
…A University of Michigan expert on the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation….analyzed the census data,…based on annual interviews with tens of thousands of American households, to determine the growth of the virtually cashless poor since welfare reform. His results were shocking. Since the passage of TANF in 1996, the number of families living in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled, reaching 1.5 million households in early 2011.
U.S. makes killer cluster bombs
NYT, 9/4 — Cluster bombs, the widely outlawed munitions that kill and maim indiscriminately, were used this year in five countries, none of which have…signed the treaty banning the weapons….
…117 countries…have joined the treaty….
The treaty prohibits all use of cluster munitions and sets deadlines for the destruction of stockpiles and the clearance of areas contaminated by unexploded cluster bomblets, which can be deadly if disturbed.
The United States, which has not signed the treaty, still produces and exports cluster munitions.
U.S. general still runs Afghan war
NYT, 9/11 — Gen. John Campbell holds several titles: top NATO commander in Afghanistan [but]….
Lately Afghans…describe…yet another: minister of defense of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan….No other American commander…has had as much power within the Afghan military establishment and top government echelons….
…At a time when Afghan forces…are supposed to be running the war, and eight months after the official end of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan, General Campbell’s prominent role is…being widely taken as a sign that the fight against the Taliban is not going well…One Western diplomat…[said “The American combat role may be over, but you still have an American general running the war….”
Afghan officials said…the Americans [have] greatly increased airstrikes…in crisis spots. “He is bossy and he doesn’t even try to hide it,” said an Afghan security official of General Campbell….
That role…has extended to taking part in day-to-day Afghan military decisions….
…He has advocated a long-term American presence and even an expanded one….
In recent weeks General Campbell has presided over one of the biggest American military interventions:…the heavy aerial bombardment of Musa Oala, after the Taliban took it from Afghan forces.
Officials…said that…bombs dropped there were so large that they obliterated entire buildings. “It was a big building…which…completely vanished from the earth, and buried everyone in it,” said…a member of parliament….
Western and Afghan officials have described an aggressive pattern of American strikes under General Campbell that has…seemed to outstrip the terms set in the security agreement between the United States and Afghanistan.
Georgia: ‘pay up or go to jail’
…In a small-town Georgia court…the…judge threaten[ed] to jail traffic violators who could not come up with an immediate payment toward their fines….
Judge…Diment…said to one defendant… “until you get $300 here tonight, you won’t be able to leave….”
To another defendant,…who…had been unemployed for two years…Judge Diment said. “You’re going to have to figure out how to get this paid….Or you’re going to go to jail….Neither defendant had a lawyer….
…A lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights…has been fighting what it calls “debtor’s prison” cases throughout Georgia….Judge Diment demanded immediate payments ranging from $20 to more than $1,000. One woman…has already spent a month in jail but was ordered to remain incarcerated until she made a $500 payment….
In July, a man who…worked only a few days every other week asked to convert his court debt to community service. Judge Dement refused….
Iraq: ‘demolish what U.S. set up’
NYT, 9/1 — For five Fridays…thousands of mostly, but not entirely, youthful and secular Iraqis have gathered in central Baghdad…to demand change….
…The protests have evolved into a broader rebuke of the political establishment….
“The people are tired. Lack of services. Corruption. Electricity….The demonstrations represent a popular reckoning with the American legacy here, with the corrupt and dysfunctional political system that has been in place since United States forces invaded in 2003….
…When the American bombs began falling, Mr. Abdulrahman said, “It was terrifying….They knocked out Saddam and brought a hundred Saddams.”
His friend…said emphatically, “This protest was established to demolish what the Americans set up….”
…”The politicians…,” Abdulsadr Aboud, 65, said….”stole our money….They didn’t give a share of the oil to the people.”

Thursday
Sep032015

REDEYE 9/16/15

Stalin exposed ‘American Exceptionalism’
Addicting Info, By Nathaniel Downes, 8/18 — Republican candidates…have…bat[ed] about the term “American Exceptionalism” multiple times. They…proclaim it as a status of greatness….The credit the term to Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat’s...book Democracy in America [but] the phrase…does not appear anywhere within that book. In fact, the term does not exist anywhere, until 1929.
In 1929, the phrase first appeared in a letter….to one of the leaders of the Communist Party USA Jay Lovestone….from the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin.
[Lovestone] sent Stalin an explanation as to why….America was an exception to the economic rules that the Bolsheviks had built their own models upon, that the usual rhetoric and explanations did not resonate with the United States.
Joseph Stalin replied…that there was an “American Exceptionalism” in place….Not that America was “exceptional,” but that America viewed itself as the Exception to the established order….Joseph Stalin believed that eventually it too would discover that the same rules over the economy still applied — a prophecy which came true only weeks later when the crash led to the Great Depression
The Soviet leader strongly felt tha the United States would eventually turn imperialistic, and become a military menace to the world in order to prove its exceptionalism.
…The phrase had been forgotten,…if not for the New York Times. In 1980…[it]ran a piece using the term pleading with…President Carter and…Ronald Reagan to defend that exception, saying it made the United States unique….
…[In] 2011…it began appearing in every political campaign speech almost overnight…
After 2010, it appeared on average five times per day within major publications or speeches, and the rate continues to accelerate….
So, this little letter from Joseph Stalin, criticizing America’s arrogance to believe… [it was]above any rules, is now being batted about as a positive thing….
…It underscores that America is not exceptional, but…[is] deathly afraid….Hav[ing] lost…status in the world through…wars against unarmed nations and revealed…as…the world’s bully, American Exceptionalism means…an admission of…fear to the end of Pax America.
…The father of American Exceptionalism, Joseph Stalin, has gotten the last laugh….
American Exceptionalism indeed.
U.S. air strikes murder civilians
NYT, 8/15 — An air strike by the American-led military coalition in northern Syria this week killed eight civilians, including two women and five children….
The strike left a yawning crater strewed with mortar shells….The explosions also caused the roofs of nearby homes to collapse….
“My brother lost his five daughters and I lost my wife,” Maan Amouri said….Monitoring groups say the United States and its allies regularly underreport the civilian toll of the air campaign….
[They] say that the command’s figures are a gross understatement and that coalition strikes…have taken a much higher toll….
…Ossama Suleiman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights….[said] 181 civilians have died because of coalition strikes….The deadliest case…was in the village of Bir Mahle on May 1…said to have killed over 60 people, including dozens of women and children….One of Mr. Amouri’s sons…[said] five of his daughters, aged 4 to 10, were killed when the blast collapsed his house’s roof.
U.S. drone killers reap profits
GW, 8/7 — The…U.S. military has hired hundreds of private-sector contractors to the heart of its drone operations….
…It has long been known that U.S…firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations….Companies that…reap the benefits include BAE Systems and Edward Snowden’s former employer Booz Allen Hamilton.
The U.S. dependence on armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has attracted close scrutiny…because of the notorious 2007 incident in which employees of…Blackwater killed 14 civilians in Baghdad
Israel’s Natanyahu rewards those who burn babies alive
GW, 8/7 — The condemnations…ring hollow. Binyamin Natanyahu denounced the arson attack by Jewish settlers on the West Bank…in which…a baby just 18 months old was burned to death….
The words sound empty…because…it is not a freak event….The Israeli human rights groups that monitor their country’s 48-year occupation of the West Bank…[said]…”Violence by settlers against Palestinians is part of the daily routine of the occupation….”
…This attack was the eighth time since 2012 that settlers have torched inhabited buildings. There have been dozens of assaults on property….In most…cases they didn’t find the perpetrators, despite having the best intelligence agencies on the planet,” [said the director of B’Tselem]….referring to the culture of impunity that has always protected the settlers….
Netanyahu….stung by the protests at Bet El…announced construction of another 300 units in Bet El and 504 in East Jerusalem. He did not punish the settlers for their behavior: he rewarded it.
Slavery reaps profits in ‘Deep North’
NYT, 8/24 — …Rhode Island history involved the state’s preeminence in the slave trade….More than half of the slaving voyages from the United States left from [its] ports….Contrary to the popular image of the South,…Rhode Island has been called “the Deep North….”
…The Episcopal diocese…was steeped in the trans-Atlantic slave trade….The church…supported slavery and profited from it…even after…slavery had been banned in the state. Among the…Episcopalian slaveholders were Thomas Jefferson…and George Washington….
The [New England] region’s economy was inseparable from the slave trade…the earliest settlers bartered Native Americans they had captured for slaves brought from Africa…Merchants and suppliers…who grew wealthy from the slave trade founded Ivy League colleges….Between 1725 and 1807, more than 1,000 slaving voyages — about 58 percent of the total from the United States — left from Providence, Newport and Bristol. Those vessels brought more than 100,000 Africans to the Americas….
…By the middle of the 18th century…about 10 percent of Rhode Islanders were enslaved….The profits from the slave trade by James DeWolf — speaker of the Rhode Island House, United States senator, banker… — were so vast that…in 1837 he was the second-richest man in the United States.

Thursday
Aug132015

REDEYE 9/2/15

A-bomb ‘a pleasant way to die’?
NYT, 8/2 — …The atom-bombing of Nagasaki and its agonizing aftermath killed more than 70,000 civilians on the day and more in the long term….
What it must have been like for people who were unlucky enough not to be killed instantly: “A woman who covered her eyes from the flash lowered her hands to find that the skin of her face had melted into her palms”; “Hundreds…were missing body parts and others were so badly burned that even though they were naked Yoshida couldn’t tell if they were men or women. He saw one person whose eyeballs hung down his face, the sockets empty.”
Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of he Manhattan Project, which had developed the atom bomb, testified before the United States Senate that the death from high-dose radiation was “without undue suffering” and indeed “a very pleasant way to die.”
Many survivors died later…of radiation sickness. Their hair would fall out, they would be covered in purple spots, their skin would rot. And those who survived the first wave of sickness after the war had a much higher chance of dying of leukemia or other cancers even decades later.
What made things worse for Japanese doctors who tried to ease the suffering of atom-bomb victims is that information about the bomb and its effects wee censored by the American administration occupying Japan….Films and photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as medical data, were confiscated by American authorities….
…Atom-bomb victims…found it hard to find marriage partners because people were afraid of passing genetic diseases to their offspring.
A-bombs dropped to scare Soviets
NYT, 8/8 — Many Americans believe [the] government’s official narrative: that the two bombs dropped…led to Japan’s surrender. But it is now well known that the surrender was prompted…by the Soviet Union’s decision to join the Allies in the war against Japan. Just 11 hours before the Nagasaki bombing, 1.5 million Soviet troops crossed into the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, in northern China, and attacked the…Japanese Army there on three fronts.
Clintons ‘dead broke’ at $139 million
NYT — Hillary Rodham Clinton…and former President Bill Clinton earned $139 million in adjusted gross income from 2007 to 2014….she…earned nearly $10 million in speaking fees in 2013….
The Clintons have grown immensely better off in the 15 years since they left the White House….
Mrs. Clinton has devoted a fair amount of time…to showing she understands the needs of working-class Americans, who have not seen their wages grow in years, and those struggling in the post-recession job market….
…Mrs. Clinton said last year that she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House….
Mrs. Clinton’s…standard [speaker’s fee] was $225,000.
She gave three speeches to Goldman Sachs in 2013 and was paid…$675,000;…her husband was paid $200,000 for a speech in New York….
Besides his royalties from his books and his peaking fees, Mr. Clinton earned nearly $20 million between 2011 and 2014 for advising or consulting companies.
U.S. deports kids
GW, 7/24 — U.S. border patrol agents…deport[ed] thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children from 2009 to 2014….
…U.S. Customs and Border Protection repatriated 93% of unaccompanied children under the age of 14 from Mexico and Canada without documenting how they decided the children would be safe when the return to their home countries.
Higher wages, empty promises
NYT, 7/26 — There’s a certain euphoria among minimum-wage workers these days….but…will the promise of better pay actually become a reality?....
With a vast underground economy where workers are routinely aid in cash, Southern California has long been considered an epicenter of age theft….
…More than one-quarter of all low-wage workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City [have]…been paid less than the legal minimum wage in…a 2009 study.
In California, there is a claim about wage theft filed every four minutes….Even when the state rules that an employer violated minimum wage laws, employees don’t receive the money….
“We’ve had an existing wage theft crisis for a while, and if we don’t address that the increase is just an empty promise and unfulfilled dream,” said…the project director of the UCLA Labor Center.
Clinton’s jailed millions
NYT, 7/16 — Former President Bill Clinton’s…anti-crime legislation that he long considered one of his top accomplishments....played a significant part in warping sentencing standards and leading to an era of mass incarceration….
The law Mr. Clinton signed in 1994 committed…putting 100,000 more police officers on the street….
More than 2.2 million people are behind bars, nearly double the total incarcerated when Mr. Clinton took office. Although the United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has more than 20 percent of its prison population.

Thursday
Jul302015

REDEYE 8/12/15

Racist kkkops kill three per day
GW, 7/10 — Police in the U.S. are killing people at a rate that would result in 1,100 fatalities by the end of this year, according to a Guardian investigation that recorded an average of three killed per day in the first half of 2015.
…Deaths caused by law enforcement…this year, found 547 people had been killed by 30 June….478 of those were shot, 31 died after being shocked by a Taser, 16…after being truck by police vehicles, and 19 died after altercations in custody.
Adjusted to reflect the U.S. population,…black people are being killed by police at more than twice the rate of white…people.
A-bomb testing threatens 53,000
GW, 7/10 — …Above a giant dome…rests America’s cold war legacy…: 84,000 cubic metres of radioactive debris left after 12 years of nuclear tests in the 1940s and ’50s….People here call it the Tomb….The effects of climate change could tear the concrete mantle wide open, releasing its contents into the ocean….
Enewetak and the…Bikini atoll were the main sites of America’s Pacific Proving Grounds for atomic explosions….
…In total, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated on Enewetak and Bikini…equal to 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day over 12 years. The detonations blanketed the islands with irradiated debris — including plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years….
In 1980…the…people of Enewetak were allowed to return to the atoll….Today the U.S. says that the jurisdiction for the dome and its toxic contents lies with the Marshal islands….
The Marshallese, a country with a population of 53,000…is incapable of dealing with the potential radioactive catastrophe left by the Americans….
Many people fear the Dome will break open….As catastrophic weather events become more frequent…typhoons could destroy…the cement panels or inundate the island….
“Why Enewetak? Why not Nevada?” asks [Enewetak senator Jack] Ading. “I know why. Because they don’t want the…nuclear waste in their backyard. The least they could have done is correct their mistake.”
Wage slavery: 84 percent of world lives below U.S. poverty line
NYT, 7/9 — …Barely 16 percent of he world’s population [were] living above the official United States poverty line — $23,021 for a family of four in 2011….
The Pew Research Center concluded that more than half the world’s population remains “low-income,” while another 15 percent are…called “poor….”
The global poor [are] defined as those who lived on $2 a day or less….
The report defined as “middle” or “upper-middle” income those who lived on $10 to $50 a day. Fewer than one-fourth of the world’s population met that criteria….
Rulers enabled Bosnian massacre
GW, 7/10 — The fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia 20 years ago, prompting the worst massacre in Europe since [Hitler’s]… Third Reich, was a key element of strategy pursued by Britain, the U.S. and France….
Eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb death squads…[in] a UN “safe area.” The act has been declared a genocide by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague….
New…evidence…show[s] that the British, U.S. and French governments accepted that Srebrenica and two other UN-protected areas were “untenable”…and were ready to cede Srebrenica to the Serbs….
Western powers were also aware of…a Bosnian Serb military directive ordering “permanent removal” of Muslims from the safe areas.
Black, Latin kids most poverty-stricken
NYT, 7/15 — Black children were almost four times as likely as white children to be living in poverty in 2013….according to…the Pew Research Center….
About 38.3 percent of black children lived in poverty in 2013, nearly four times the rate for white children….About 30.4 percent of Hispanic children…live in poverty….
The number of black children in poverty appears to have overtaken the number of poor white children, even though white children far outnumber black children in the American population….
A household in poverty in 2013 was defined as a family of four, two of whose members were children, living on an annual income of less than $23,624….
[One] reason…black children were lagging was the unemployment rate, which has been consistently higher for African-Americans….as children are more likely to be poor if their parents are unemployed.
“Arab Spring”? U.S. finances Egypt’s police state
NYT, 7/16 — For decades, Egypt’s authoritarian leaders used the Emergency Law to oppress and intimidate government critics under the guise of national security….
Egypt is already a police state. Recent drafts of the counterterrorism law…make it even more repressive….
Obama administration officials and congressional lawmakers have been all too willing to overlook the abuses because they see Egypt as an indispensable ally….In recent weeks, House and Senate members passed versions of the foreign aid bill…[allotting] the annual $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt….
Lawmakers have become complicit in Egypt’s repression.

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