HUDSON VALLEY
ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
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1.
Editor’s Note:
2.
Quotes Of The Month: Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
3.
New Killer Weapon For U.S. Navy
4.
New York Limits Solitary Confinement
5. A Day In The Life Of
Palestinians
6.
U.S Fumes As Latin Nations Advance
7.
U.S. Versus Russia In Ukraine
8. Distorting Russia, Putin,
Sochi And Ukraine
9.
The U.S., Russia And Pussy Riot
10. Poll: U.S. Didn’t Achieve War
Goals
11. Intl. Women’s Day Rally In Mid-Hudson
12. States Pass 52 Anti-Choice Laws
In 2013
13. UN Criticizes Vatican Over Child
Abuse
14. Your Internet Is In Real Danger
15. Anti-Drone Protesters Jailed
16. NSA’s Secret Role In Drone Assassinations
17. A Worker Reads History
18. Youth Plan Mass Keystone Xl
Protest
19. North Carolina Protest Hits
Right Wing
20. Books: Washington’s Gilded Age
21. Books: The Sixth Extinction
22. Tennessee
Workers Reject Uaw
23. Polk Awards To Anti-Spying
Journalists
24. Fracking & Pipelines Undermine New York
25. Fracking Depletes Water Supplies
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1. EDITOR’S NOTE:
1. EDITOR’S NOTE:
Is the Obama Administration launching a new Cold War against
Russia, or more probably simply invigorating the old one that never really
ended against the USSR?
Following Washington’s lead, the U.S. mass media is indulging
in anti-Moscow excesses not seen since the Soviet Union was
dissolved in 1991.
Whether the media is criticizing Russia for supporting Iran
and Syria; demonizing elected President
Putin as a virtual dictator and grossly exaggerating the size of his opposition; spreading false information about the Ukrainian crisis; inventing scare stories about the Olympics; and even propelling the punk rock group Pussy Riot to global fame because its members hate Putin — it sounds like the Cold War is returning.
Putin as a virtual dictator and grossly exaggerating the size of his opposition; spreading false information about the Ukrainian crisis; inventing scare stories about the Olympics; and even propelling the punk rock group Pussy Riot to global fame because its members hate Putin — it sounds like the Cold War is returning.
The flames of continuing crisis in Ukraine are being
vigorously fanned by the U.S., which has spent $5 billion in recent years to
encourage popular opinion in the country to shift away from Russia and toward
Europe. Washington has threatened sanctions against the Kiev government and
sides completely with the anti-Russian protesters, in whose ranks reside a
section of extreme rightists. In our view the U.S. is seeking regime change in Kiev and appears willing to support a coup d'etat to eventually bring NATO to the Russian border.
Because there is much confusion about these issues, we have
published three articles below that provide clarity. We hope you take the time
to read them. The first is “U.S. Versus Russia In Ukraine” from Stratfor, the private intelligence group. Second is “Distorting
Russia, Putin, Sochi,” originally published in The Nation by Stephen F. Cohen, one of the best objective U.S. reporters
about the USSR and now Russia. Third is the “U.S.,
Russia and Pussy Riot” by Christian Caryl, from Foreign Policy.
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2. QUOTES OF THE MONTH: Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Brecht
was one of the great poets, playwrights and theater directors of the 20th
century. He wrote over 50 plays. His best known plays in the U.S. are the
“Three Penny Opera,” “Mother Courage and Her Children,” the “Caucasian Chalk
Circle,” “Saint Joan
of the Stockyards,” and “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” A Marxist, he fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and eventually arrived in the U.S. in 1941. He retuned to Europe in 1947 and two years later settled in East Berlin where he established and directed the famous Berliner Ensemble. Further down we have reprinted his poem, “A Worker Reads History,” article number 17.
·
“Art is not a mirror held up to
reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
·
“When the leaders
speak of peace the common folk know that the war is coming. When the leaders
curse war the mobilization order is already written out.”
·
“On the
wall in chalk it is written: They want war. He who wrote it has already
fallen.”
· “First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.”
·
“Because things are the way they
are, things will not stay the way they are.”
·
“What is the robbing of a bank
compared to the founding of a bank?”
(Note: Brecht
below speaks to those suffering from hunger, oppression and violence.)
·
“Everything
or nothing. All of us or none. One alone his lot can’t better. Either gun or
fetter. Everything or nothing. All of us or none.”
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 |
| The Navy's new "revolutionary" laser. |
The U.S. Navy is getting ready to roll out its Laser Weapon
System this year — a technology the military has touted as
"revolutionizing" modern warfare. The Navy's laser directs a beam of
energy that can burn through a target or fry sensitive electronics.
A prototype of the weapon, which can target
"asymmetrical threats" like drones, boat swarms, and much else is set
to be mounted on the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf later this year, the
Associated Press reported
Feb. 18.
"It fundamentally changes the way we fight," said
Capt. Mike Ziv, program manager for directed energy and electric weapon systems
for the Naval Sea Systems Command. The military has praised the
laser's cost-saving ability — a fraction of what it costs to
fire a missile.
"We're taking the laser weapon system prototype to sea
this year," Military.com reported Navy spokesman Chris Johnson as saying
last month. "We are hoping to develop a system that we can produce and
install aboard future warships."
"The future is here," stated
Peter A. Morrision, program officer for the Office of Naval Research's
Sold-State Laser Technology Maturation Program, as the Navy began
demonstrations of the new technology last spring. "The solid-state laser
is a big step forward to revolutionizing modern warfare with directed energy,
just as gunpowder did in the era of knives and swords."
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4. NEW YORK LIMITS SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
By Donna Lieberman
, NYCLU
Executive Director
The New York Civil Liberties Union and the New York State
Department of Corrections announced Feb. 19 an unprecedented agreement to
reform the way solitary confinement is used in New York's prisons. Effective
immediately, the state is removing children, pregnant women and the
developmentally disabled from solitary confinement.
 |
| New York rally against solitary confinement. |
prisons in our 2012 report "Boxed In," we asked our members and the public to tell the governor and the Department of Corrections to adopt more humane and effective policies. Tens of thousands of you took action. And your voices helped make a difference.
The problem isn't fixed – isolation in prison has
consistently been linked with mental anguish, risk of serious harm and higher
rates of recidivism. But the state and governor have shown they care about
safety and dignity, and have committed to working with the NYCLU and
corrections experts on additional reforms.
The new agreement comes as a result of the NYCLU's
class-action lawsuit, Peoples v. Fischer. Leroy Peoples was sentenced to 36
months in isolation for nonviolent behavior – he was accused of filing a false
legal document. And it wasn't the first time he was sent to isolation. In 2005,
he was sentenced to six months for unauthorized possession of multi-vitamins.
"Life in the box stripped me of my dignity, and made me
feel like a chained dog," he said.
While in confinement, prisoners like Peoples are unable to
access educational programming or even a radio. They live in a space the size
of a parking spot with nothing to do but stare at the wall. Some day they'll return
to their home communities, but how will their experiences in isolation have
damaged them?
There is another way. There are alternatives to isolation
that prioritize the safety of prisoners, prison workers and New York's
communities.
It would be productive to thank Governor Cuomo and
Department of Corrections Commissioner Annucci for doing the right thing, and
urge them to make New York a national leader in the movement toward
alternatives to solitary confinement. https://ssl.capwiz.com/aclu/ny/issues/alert/?alertid=63098886&type=ML&etname=Solitary+2014+Feb&etjid=1281692
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5. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PALESTINIANS
 |
| Palestinian children attempt to block jeep. Only a 15-year-old was arrested. |
The UN has named
2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Here’s
one reason why:
The Negotiations
Affairs Department of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) maintains a
website of daily reports of actions taken against Palestinians by the Israeli
army, police or civilian settlers. Here is the condensed account for Feb. 5.
The website details contain authentication for each episode. You may check any
day at http://www.nad-plo.org/dailyreports.php. After putting in the date you wish, press
“Go” and the address of the report appears just below. Click it, and prepare to
obtain an idea of what Palestinians experience, day after day in their homeland
— the occupied West Bank and virtually imprisoned Gaza.
The toll for a
typical day, Feb. 5, 2014:
·
Israeli
Army opens fire on farmers in al-Shuja’iya
·
Israeli
forces shoot their way onto Khan Yunis farmland and bulldoze crops
·
Night
home invasions – Israeli Army uses explosives to break into home
·
Occupation
settlers beat up and hospitalize Palestinian lorry driver
 |
| Child held for throwing a rock. |
·
Israeli
soldiers abduct two 17-year-old youths
·
Israeli
Army destroys 2 Palestinian homes – injury
·
Israeli
Army forces Palestinian man to destroy his own home
·
Israeli
Army military exercises force 38 Palestinian families out of their homes
·
Night
peace disruption and/or home invasions in 9 towns and villages
·
2
attacks – 25 raids including home invasions – 1 beaten – 2 injured
·
6 acts
of agricultural/economic sabotage
·
18 taken
prisoner – 10 detained – 105 restrictions of movement
·
Home
invasions & occupations: 02:35-04:00,
Rantis - 02:00, Kafr Jamal - 02:00, Huwara - 12:40, Jericho - 00:55-04:15, Jericho.
·
Peace
disruption raids: 09:00, the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound - 15:00, al-Isawiya
- 05:00, Beit Hanina - 12:00,
Jabal al-Mukabir - Sur Baher - al-Isawiya - 01:55, al-Bireh - morning, Ibziq - morning,
al-Malah.
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6. U.S. FUMES AS LATIN NATIONS ADVANCE
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| Leaders of 33 Latin American/Caribbean nations meet outside CELAC conference in Cuba. |
The second summit of the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States (CELAC) took place in Havana, Cuba, January 28-29. The final declaration,
identifying the region as a Zone of Peace, was read by Cuban President and
outgoing CELAC chief Raul Castro.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, attended the conference
and also had a 55-minute private meeting with hospitalized former President
Fidel Castro. Among the international leaders at the summit was Chinese President
Xi Jinping.
A main goal of CELEC is to become an alternative to the
Organization of American States, which was set up in 1948 under the direction
of the U.S. government to combat communist and popular struggles taking place
in the region. In 1962, two years after the Cuban Revolution, Cuba was excluded from the OAS.
Washington, which dominated the OAS for decades, accused
CELEC nations of betraying “democratic principles” by supporting Cuba
during this summit.
Some 33 regional heads of state attended the conference and
condemned Washington's 54-year effort to strangle Cuba economically and to
isolate and overthrow the revolutionary Havana government. In his speech,
Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua thanked and acknowledged the Cuban people and former
President Fidel Castro for helping make the dream of CELAC possible and holding
the Summit in socialist Cuba.
In the last decade, under the guidance of Cuba and
Venezuela, the Latin American and Caribbean nations have been seeking deeper
regional integration, purposely excluding the U.S. and Canada because as
Bolivian President Evo Morales said, “Where there are U.S. military bases
that do not respect democracy, where there is a political empire with its
constraints, there is no development for that country, and especially there is
no social peace.”
 |
| Raul Castro and UN's Ban Ki-moon. |
CELAC has two main purposes:
• To increase regional trade, independence, economic,
social, and cultural development and cooperation, and solidarity among its
members to allow them to defend their economies and natural and human resources.
• To end U.S. and Canadian imperialist interference in the
region, so that the Latin American and Caribbean nations become the legitimate
representatives of their interests and affairs and assert their sovereignty and
self-determination.
Understanding that there can not be peace without social
justice and that social and economic development cannot be achieved without
peace, the second CELAC Summit declared the region a “Zone of Peace” in order
to eradicate war, the threat of force in the region and to peacefully resolve
disputes between the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The
final conference statement declared “the inalienable right of every
state to choose its political, economic, social and cultural system as an
essential condition to guarantee peaceful co-existence among nations."
—
From the Activist Newsletter: Following is additional CELAC
news from Venezuela Analysis:
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, supporting Puerto Rican
independence from Washington, said: “Venezuela has come to Havana with
proposals to declare the region 'free of colonies' and to invite Puerto Rico to
formally join the family.” There was no immediate response from Puerto Rico,
which remains an unincorporated United States territory.
Maduro called on CELAC members to continue on the “path of
unity, freedom and prosperity as Simon Bolivar dreamed.” Other left-wing
leaders joined Maduro in calling for the Falklands/Malvinas to be handed over
to Argentina. They also slammed the U.S. on issues ranging from espionage to
the ongoing embargo on the host country, Cuba.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told the summit: “The
only way to resist and get rid of the [U.S.] empire of capitalism is [regional]
integration. We have to make Latin America and the Caribbean a space of free
men and women.”
Cuban President Raul Castro also called on the US to end its
embargo of his country, and to close the military base at Guantanamo Bay.
Prime Minister Keith Mitchell of Grenada submitted a request
for membership of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
(ALBA). ALBA is a nine-nation anti-imperialist political and economic bloc
first founded by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004.
At the summit, tributes were also paid to Maduro's
predecessor Hugo Chavez, who died in March last year. The summit opened with
one minute of silence for Chavez, a key advocate of CELAC's creation.
President Castro said: “We deeply regret the physical
absence of one of the great leaders of our America, the unforgettable
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an ardent and tireless promoter and fighter
for independence, cooperation, solidarity and integration, Latin American and
Caribbean unity and the very creation of this community.” A museum dedicated to
Chavez in the east of Havana was inaugurated during the conference.
This year's summit ended with Cuba passing the rotating
CELAC presidency to Costa Rica.
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7. U.S. VERSUS RUSSIA IN UKRAINE
 |
| Anti-government protester on streets of Kiev this week. |
By George Friedman
The struggle for some of the most strategic territory in the
world took an interesting twist. We recently discussed what appeared to be
a significant shift in German national strategy in which Berlin seemed to
declare a new doctrine of increased assertiveness in the world —
a shift that followed intense German interest in Ukraine. Last week, U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a now-famous cell phone
conversation, declared her strong contempt for the European Union and its
weakness and counseled the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to proceed
quickly and without the Europeans to piece together a specific
opposition coalition before the Russians saw what was happening and took
action. [From Activist Newsletter: She was recorded as commenting, “Fuck the
E.U.]
This is a new twist not because it makes clear that the
United States is not the only country intercepting phone calls, but because it
puts U.S. policy in Ukraine in a new light and forces us to reconsider U.S.
strategy toward Russia and Germany. Nuland's cell phone conversation is
hardly definitive, but it is an additional indicator of American
strategic thinking.
[From the Activist Newsletter: Who is Virginia Nuland?
According to a recent article by well-known geopolitical analyst, author and
columnist Immanuel Wallerstein, “she is a surviving member of the neocon clique
that surrounded George W. Bush, in whose government she served. Her husband,
Robert Kagan, is one of the best-known ideologues of the neocon group. It is an
interesting question what she is doing in such a key position in the Department
of State of an Obama presidency. The least he and U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry were supposed to do was to remove the neocons from such a role.”]
U.S. foreign policy has evolved during the past few years.
Previously, the United States was focused heavily on the Islamic world
and, more important, tended to regard the use of force as an early option
in the execution of U.S. policy rather than as a last resort. This
was true not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in
Africa and elsewhere. The strategy was successful when its goal was to
destroy an enemy military force. It proved far more difficult to use in
occupying countries and shaping their internal and foreign policies. Military
force has intrinsic limits.
The alternative has been a shift to a balance-of-power
strategy in which the United States relies on the natural schisms that
exist in every region to block the emergence of regional hegemons and contain
unrest and groups that could threaten U.S. interests. The best example of
the old policy is Libya, where the United States directly intervened with air
power and special operations forces on the ground to unseat Muammar Gaddafi.
Western efforts to replace him with a regime favorable to the United
States and its allies have not succeeded. The new strategy can be seen in
Syria, where rather than directly intervening Washington has stood back and
allowed the warring factions to expend their energy on each other, preventing
either side from diverting resources to activities that might challenge U.S.
interests.
 |
| Ukrainian capital became a battlefield last week. |
Russia emerged as a problem for Washington after the Orange
Revolution in 2004, when the United States, supporting anti-Russian
factions in Ukraine, succeeded in crafting a relatively pro-Western,
anti-Russian government. The Russians read this as U.S. intelligence operations
designed to create an anti-Russian Ukraine that, as we have
written, would directly challenge Russian strategic and economic interests.
Moreover, Moscow saw the Orange Revolution (along with the Rose
Revolution) as a dress rehearsal for something that could
occur in Russia next. The Russian response was to use its own covert
capabilities, in conjunction with economic pressure from natural gas
cutoffs, to undermine Ukraine's government and to use its war with Georgia as a
striking reminder of the resurrection of Russian military
capabilities. These moves, plus disappointment with Western aid, allowed a
more pro-Russian government to emerge in Kiev, reducing the
Russians' fears and increasing their confidence. In time, Moscow
became more effective and assertive in playing its cards right in the Middle
East — giving rise to the current situations in Syria and Iran and
elsewhere.
Washington had two options. One was to allow the balance of
power to assert itself, in this case relying on the Europeans to contain the
Russians. The other was to continue to follow the balance of power
model but at a notch higher than pure passivity. As Nuland's call
shows, U.S. confidence in Europe's will for and interest in blocking the
Russians was low; hence a purely passive model would not work. The next step
was the lowest possible level of involvement to contain the Russians and
counter their moves in the Middle East. This meant a very limited and not
too covert support for anti-Russian, pro-European demonstrators — the
re-creation of a pro-Western, anti-Russian government in Ukraine. To
a considerable degree, the U.S. talks with Iran also allow Washington to deny
the Russians an Iranian card, although the Syrian theater still allows the
Kremlin some room to maneuver.
 |
| Presidents Yankovich and Putin. |
Instead, the United States did the same thing that it did
prior to the Orange Revolution: back the type of
intervention that both the human rights advocates and the balance-of-power advocates could support. Giving financial and psychological support to the demonstrators protesting Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich's decision to reject a closer relationship with Europe, and later protesting the government's attempt to suppress the demonstrations, preserved the possibility of regime change in Ukraine, with minimal exposure and risk to the United States.
intervention that both the human rights advocates and the balance-of-power advocates could support. Giving financial and psychological support to the demonstrators protesting Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich's decision to reject a closer relationship with Europe, and later protesting the government's attempt to suppress the demonstrations, preserved the possibility of regime change in Ukraine, with minimal exposure and risk to the United States.
As we said a few weeks ago, it appeared that it was the
Germans who were particularly pressing the issue, and that they were the ones
virtually controlling one of the leaders of the protests, Vitali
Klitschko. The United States appeared to be taking a back seat to Germany.
Indeed, Berlin's statements indicating that it is prepared to take a more
assertive role in the world appeared to be a historic shift in German
foreign policy.
The statements were even more notable since, over
the years, Germany appeared to have been moving closer to Russia on economic
and strategic issues. Neither country was comfortable with U.S.
aggressiveness in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Both countries shared the
need to create new economic relationships in the face of the European
economic crisis and the need to contain the United States. Hence, the
apparent German shift was startling.
What is clear is that the United States was not satisfied
with Germany and the European Union. Logically, this meant that the U.S.
intended to be more aggressive than the Germans in supporting
opponents of the Ukrainian regime. This is a touchy issue for human rights
advocates, or should be. Yanukovich is the elected president of
Ukraine, winner of an election that is generally agreed to have been
honest (even though his constitutional amendments and subsequent
parliamentary elections may not have been). He was acting within his authority
in rejecting the deal with the European Union. If demonstrators can unseat an
elected president because they disagree with his actions, they have set a precedent that
undermines constitutionalism. Even if he was rough in suppressing the
demonstrators, it does not nullify his election.
From a balance of power strategy, however, it makes great
sense. A pro-Western, even ambiguous, Ukraine poses a profound strategic
problem for Russia. It would be as if Texas became pro-Russian, and the
Mississippi River system, oil production, the Midwest and the
Southwest became vulnerable. The Russian ability to engage in Iran or
Syria suddenly contracts. Moscow's focus must be on Ukraine.
Using the demonstrations to create a massive problem for
Russia does two things. It creates a real strategic challenge for the
Russians and forces them on the defensive. Second, it reminds Russia that
Washington has capabilities and options that make challenging Washington difficult.
And it can be framed in a way that human rights advocates will applaud in spite
of the constitutional issues, enemies of the Iranian talks will appreciate and
Central Europeans from Poland to Romania will see as a sign of U.S. commitment
to the region. The United States will re-emerge as an alternative to Germany
and Russia. It is a brilliant stroke.
Its one weakness, if we can call it that, is that it is hard
to see how it can work. Russia has significant economic leverage in
Ukraine, it is not clear that pro-Western demonstrators are in the majority,
and Russian covert capabilities in Ukraine outstrip American capabilities.
The Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service have
been collecting files on Ukrainians for a long time. We would expect
that after the Olympics in Sochi, the Russians could play their trump
cards.
On the other hand, even if the play fails, the United States
will have demonstrated that it is back in the game and that the
Russians should look around their periphery and wonder where the Obama
administration will act next. Putting someone in a defensive crouch does not
require that the first punch work. It is enough for the opponent to
understand that the next punch will come when he is least expecting it.
The mere willingness of the U.S. to engage will change the expectations of
Central Europe, cause tensions between the Central Europeans and the
Germans and create an opening for the United States.
Of course, the question is whether and where the Russians
will answer the Americans, or even if they will consider the U.S.
actions significant at all. In a sense, Syria was Moscow's move and
this is the countermove. The Russians can choose to call the game. They
have many reasons to. Their economy is under pressure. The Germans may not
rally to the United States, but they will not break from it. And if
the United States ups the ante in Central Europe, Russian inroads there will
dissolve.
If the Russians are now an American problem, which they are,
and if the United States is not going to revert to a direct intervention mode,
which it cannot, then this strategy makes sense. At the very least it gives the
Russians a problem and a sense of insecurity that can curb their actions
elsewhere. At best it could create a regime that might not counterbalance
Russia but could make pipelines and ports vulnerable — especially with U.S.
help.
The public interception of Nuland's phone call was not all
that embarrassing. It showed the world that the United States, not Germany, is
leading the way in Ukraine. And it showed the Russians that the Americans
care so little, they will express it on an open cell phone line.
Nuland's obscene dismissal of the European Union and treatment of Russia
as a problem to deal with confirms a U.S. policy: The United States is
not going to war, but passivity is over.
— From Stratfor 2-11-14, http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/new-dimensions-us-foreign-policy-toward-russia
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8. DISTORTING
RUSSIA, PUTIN, SOCHI AND UKRAINE
By Stephen F. Cohen
The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of
Russia, a country still vital to U.S. national security, has been under way for
many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically
inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines — particularly about
the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin — is an
indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.
There are notable exceptions, but a general pattern has
developed. Even in the venerable New
York Times and Washington Post,
news reports, editorials and commentaries no longer adhere rigorously to
traditional journalistic standards, often failing to provide essential facts
and context; to make a clear distinction between reporting and analysis; to
require at least two different political or “expert” views on major developments;
or to publish opposing opinions on their op-ed pages. As a result, American
media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and
scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold
War.
Since the early 2000s, the media have followed a different
leader-centric narrative, also consistent with U.S. policy that devalues
multifaceted analysis for a relentless demonization of Putin, with little
regard for facts. (Was any Soviet Communist leader after Stalin ever so
personally villainized?) If Russia under Yeltsin was presented as having
legitimate politics and national interests, we are now made to believe that
Putin’s Russia has none at all, at home or abroad — even on its own borders, as
in Ukraine.
Russia today has serious problems and many repugnant Kremlin
policies. But anyone relying on mainstream American media will not find there
any of their origins or influences in Yeltsin’s Russia or in provocative U.S.
policies since the 1990s — only in the “autocrat” Putin who, however authoritarian,
in reality lacks such power. Nor is he credited with stabilizing a
disintegrating nuclear-armed country, assisting U.S. security pursuits from
Afghanistan and Syria to Iran or even with granting amnesty, in December, to
more than 1,000 jailed prisoners, including mothers of young children.
Not surprisingly, in January The Wall Street Journal featured the widely discredited former
president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, branding Putin’s government as one
of “deceit, violence and cynicism,” with the Kremlin a “nerve center of the
troubles that bedevil the West.” But wanton Putin-bashing is also the dominant
narrative in centrist, liberal and progressive media, from the Post, Times and The New
Republic to CNN, MSNBC and HBO’s Real
Time With Bill Maher, where Howard Dean, not previously known for his
Russia expertise, recently declared, to the panel’s approval, “Vladimir Putin
is a thug.”
The media therefore eagerly await Putin’s downfall — due to
his “failing economy” (some of its indicators are better than U.S. ones), the
valor of street protesters and other right-minded oppositionists (whose
policies are rarely examined), the defection of his electorate (his approval
ratings remain around 65%) or some welcomed “cataclysm.” Evidently believing,
as does the Times, for example,
that democrats and a “much better future” will succeed Putin (not zealous
ultranationalists growing in the streets and corridors of power), U.S.
commentators remain indifferent to what the hoped-for “destabilization of his
regime” might mean in the world’s largest nuclear country.
Certainly, The New
Republic’s lead writer on Russia, Julia Ioffe, does not explore the
question, or much else of real consequence, in her nearly 10,000-word February
17 cover story. Ioffe’s bannered theme is devoutly Putin-phobic: “He Crushed
His Opposition and Has Nothing to Show for It But a Country That Is Falling
Apart.” Neither sweeping assertion is spelled out or documented. A compilation
of chats with Russian-born Ioffe’s disaffected (but seemingly not “crushed”)
Moscow acquaintances and titillating personal gossip long circulating on the
Internet, the article seems better suited (apart from some factual errors) for
the Russian tabloids, as does Ioffe’s disdain for objectivity. Protest shouts
of “Russia without Putin!” and “Putin is a thief!” were “one of the most
exhilarating moments I’d ever experienced.” So was tweeting “Putin’s fucked,
y’all.” Nor does she forget the hopeful mantra “cataclysm seems closer than
ever now.”
 |
| Los Angles Times' Sochi terrorism "joke." |
. Even before the Games began, the
Overall pre-Sochi coverage was even worse, exploiting the
threat of terrorism so licentiously it seemed pornographic. The Post, long known among
critical-minded Russia-watchers as Pravda
on the Potomac, exemplified the media ethos. A sports columnist and an
editorial page editor turned the Olympics into “a contest of wills” between the
despised Putin’s “thugocracy” and terrorist “insurgents.” The “two warring
parties” were so equated that readers might have wondered which to cheer for.
If nothing else, American journalists gave terrorists an early victory,
tainting “Putin’s Games” and frightening away many foreign spectators,
including some relatives of the athletes.
The Sochi Games will soon pass, triumphantly or tragically,
but the potentially fateful Ukrainian crisis will not. A new Cold War divide
between West and East may now be unfolding, not in Berlin but in the heart of
Russia’s historical civilization. The result could be a permanent confrontation
fraught with instability and the threat of a hot war far worse than the one in
Georgia in 2008. These dangers have been all but ignored in highly selective,
partisan and inflammatory U.S. media accounts, which portray the European Union’s
“Partnership” proposal benignly as Ukraine’s chance for democracy, prosperity
and escape from Russia, thwarted only by a “bullying” Putin and his “cronies”
in Kiev.
Not long ago, committed readers could count on The New York Review of Books for
factually trustworthy alternative perspectives on important historical and
contemporary subjects. But when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, the NYRB has succumbed to the general
media mania. In a January 21 blog post, Amy Knight, a regular contributor and
inveterate Putin-basher, warned the U.S. government against cooperating with
the Kremlin on Sochi security, even suggesting that Putin’s secret services
“might have had an interest in allowing or even facilitating such attacks” as
killed or wounded dozens of Russians in Volgograd in December.
.
Knight’s innuendo prefigured a purported report on Ukraine
by Yale professor Timothy Snyder in the February 20 issue. Omissions of facts,
by journalists or scholars, are no less an untruth than misstatements of fact.
Snyder’s article was full of both, which are widespread in the popular media,
but these are in the esteemed NYRB
and by an acclaimed academic….
Perhaps the largest untruth promoted by Snyder and most U.S.
media is the claim that “Ukraine’s future integration into Europe” is “yearned
for throughout the country.” But every informed observer knows — from Ukraine’s
history, geography, languages, religions, culture, recent politics and opinion
surveys—that the country is deeply divided as to whether it should join Europe
or remain close politically and economically to Russia. There is not one
Ukraine or one “Ukrainian people” but at least two, generally situated in its
Western and Eastern regions.
Such factual distortions point to two flagrant omissions by
Snyder and other U.S. media accounts. The now exceedingly dangerous
confrontation between the two Ukraines was not “ignited,” as the Times claims, by Yanukovych’s
duplicitous negotiating — or by Putin — but by the EU’s reckless ultimatum, in
November, that the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided
country choose between Europe and Russia. Putin’s proposal for a tripartite
arrangement, rarely if ever reported, was flatly rejected by U.S. and E.U. officials.
But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable
conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s
ongoing, U.S.-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s
with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with U.S.-funded NGO political
activities inside Russia, a U.S.-NATO military outpost in Georgia and
missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding
Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December
financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy — is deceitful. The EU’s
“civilizational” proposal, for example, includes “security policy” provisions,
almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.
 |
| State Dept's Nuland offers food to Kiev protesters. |
the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the “leak” and on Nuland’s verbal “gaffe”—“Fuck the E.U.” But the essential revelation was that high-level U.S. officials were plotting to “midwife” a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president — that is, a coup.
Americans are left with a new edition of an old question.
Has Washington’s 20-year winner-take-all approach to post-Soviet Russia shaped
this degraded news coverage, or is official policy shaped by the coverage? Did
Senator John McCain stand in Kiev alongside the well-known leader of an extreme
nationalist party because he was ill informed by the media, or have the media
deleted this part of the story because of McCain’s folly?
And what of Barack Obama’s decision to send only a low-level
delegation, including retired gay athletes, to Sochi? In August, Putin
virtually saved Obama’s presidency by persuading Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad to eliminate his chemical weapons. Putin then helped to facilitate
Obama’s heralded opening to Iran. Should not Obama himself have gone to Sochi —
either out of gratitude to Putin, or to stand with Russia’s leader against
international terrorists who have struck both of our countries? Did he not go
because he was ensnared by his unwise Russia policies, or because the U.S.
media misrepresented the varying reasons cited: the granting of asylum to
Edward Snowden, differences on the Middle East, infringements on gay rights in Russia,
and now Ukraine? Whatever the explanation, as Russian intellectuals say when
faced with two bad alternatives, “Both are worst.”
— Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus at New York
University and Princeton University. His Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives:
From Stalinism to the New Cold War and his The Victims Return: Survivors of the
Gulag After Stalin are now in paperback.
— From The Nation, issue March 3, 2014 http://www.thenation.com/article/178344/distorting-russia#
––––––––––––
9. THE U.S., RUSSIA AND PUSSY RIOT
 |
| Madonna
introduces Pussy Riot members at Amnesty benefit. |
By Christian Caryl
Two of Russia's most famous dissidents visited the United
States recently. I speak, of course, of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina,
members of the feminist conceptual art group known as Pussy Riot who were
recently released from jail by President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. media have
been raving.
"Pussy Riot gals stun Brooklyn crowd with powerful
speech," blared the New York Post
about the duo's recent appearance at a fundraising concert for Amnesty
International. "Pussy Riot stole the show from Madonna" was the
verdict from Time. They put in
a bravado performance on The Colbert
Report and even had the New
Yorker gushing about their presumed artistic achievements. Pretty impressive.
There's just one problem. Most of the adoring coverage of
the two Pussy Riot stars presumes that their protest is having an enormous
impact on the political situation in their home country. If not, why are we
(and Madonna) paying such inordinate attention to them?
In fact, though, there is little evidence that they have any
sort of influence on Russian public opinion at all. Most Russians regard Pussy
Riot with outright hostility. As one recent public opinion survey revealed, the
number of Russians who view the prison sentence the two women received as
either fair or too soft has actually grown in the two years since they went to
jail: The figure is now 66%. (A reminder: Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were
convicted on charges of "hooliganism" after performing an impromptu
anti-Putin concert in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.)
But the overarching sentiment regarding Pussy Riot back home
can probably be characterized more accurately as general indifference. The
broader opposition movement in Russia has never embraced Pussy Riot — perhaps
because members of the group exult in their reputation as radical
avant-gardists, a position that is scarcely calculated to gain much traction
with the country's deeply conservative mainstream. (Tolokonnikova once had
herself photographed having sex with her husband in a museum as part of an edgy
protest against patriarchy, or something.)
Indeed, the remaining members of Pussy Riot have now expelled
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina from the group for sundry minor misdeeds, which
means that the two women now represent the outer fringe of a fringe. [The
Guardian reports that other members of the punk group were highly critical of
the two women for appearing at the Amnesty concert.]
A caption in a fine story by New Republic reporter Julia Ioffe, who shows how other Russian
critics of Putin's regime regard the group as an irrelevant sideshow, makes the
same point: "Pussy Riot, who galvanized Western outrage over Putin's
repressive regime, evokes a more complicated response at home." Andrew
Monaghan of the London think tank Chatham House, who tracks public opinion in
Russia, puts it with rather less understatement: My sense is that most Russians
just don't give a damn….
These days, many Westerners, appalled by Putin's
authoritarian airs, find themselves almost instinctively rooting for the
opposition. Western reporters covered the big anti-Putin protests of 2012 as if
the president's fall from power was just a matter of days — yet here he is,
glibly presiding over the Olympics, and the protesters are nowhere to be seen.
Not only that, his approval rating, now hovering at around 65%, would be the
envy of just about any of his counterparts in the West.
By contrast, the most prominent opposition leader,
corruption fighter Alexey Navalny, scores at 1% percent in most current opinion
polls…. [T]he real opposition in their country today is the Communist Party,
which regularly garners about 20% in elections and opinion surveys and which,
unlike the liberal protesters, has a solid organizational infrastructure across
the country….
— From Foreign Policy, Feb. 5
––––––––––––
10. POLL: U.S. DIDN’T ACHIEVE WAR GOALS
 |
| Washington D.C., 15 days after 9/11, the ANSWER Coalition brought 25,000 to the capital to protest the impending war. They knew then what the opinion polls say most Americans know now after 13 years: They say it was a mistake to go to war and it gained the U.S. nothing. |
After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans do not think the U.S. has achieved its goals in either country, according to poll released Jan. 30 by Pew Research Center and USA Today.
The latest Gallup Poll revealed Feb. 19 that “For the first time since the U.S. initially became involved in Afghanistan in 2001, Americans are as likely to say U.S. military involvement there was a mistake (49%) as to say it was not (48%).
The latest Gallup Poll revealed Feb. 19 that “For the first time since the U.S. initially became involved in Afghanistan in 2001, Americans are as likely to say U.S. military involvement there was a mistake (49%) as to say it was not (48%).
About half of Americans (52%) say the U.S. has mostly failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan while 38% say it has mostly succeeded. Opinions about the U.S. war in Iraq are virtually the same: 52% say the United States has mostly failed in reaching its goals there, while 37% say it has mostly succeeded.
In both cases, evaluations of the wars have turned more negative in recent years. In November 2011, as the U.S. was completing its military withdrawal from Iraq, a majority (56%) thought the U.S. had achieved its goals there.
Similarly, the public’s critical assessment of U.S. achievements in Afghanistan stands in contrast to opinion in June 2011, shortly after Osama bin Laden was killed in neighboring Pakistan. At that time, 58% answered a forward-looking question by saying they thought the U.S. would achieve its goals in that country; the question in the current survey asks whether the U.S. has achieved its goals.
Nearly a month after the U.S. invasion in 2001, 9% of the American people (including the Activist Newsletter and a number of its readers) said it was a mistake, while 89% thought it was correct. (The Newsletter organized two busses full of antiwar activists from the Mid-Hudson region to join the big ANSWER rally in Washington a week before Bush began bombing.
––––––––––––
11. INTL. WOMEN’S DAY RALLY IN MID-HUDSON
By the Activist Newsletter
Hudson Valley readers are invited to attend a Thursday, March 6, public and student meeting to commemorate
International Women’s Day. It will be held at 6:30 p.m. in Lecture Center 108 at SUNY New Paltz.This meeting is sponsored by Mid-Hudson chapter of the national group WORD (Women Organized to Resist and Defend), the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of Amnesty International, and the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. There are dozens of endorsers including New York Civil Liberties Union, Coalition of Labor Union Women (AFL-CIO), Mid-Hudson Valley Planned Parenthood, and United University Professions (SUNY NP chapter), among others.
The speakers list is in formation. Selected so far are Donna Goodman, of the Mid-Hudson WORD chapter, a UUP union delegate and an editor of the Activist Newsletter; Ilgu Ozler, a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at SUNY New Paltz and chair of Mid-Hudson Amnesty; Urban Lyrics (a campus slam poetry group); Himali Gahdhi of Grace Smith House (a women's and children's shelter); and Leah Obias of the Philippina activist organization Damayan. A full listing of speakers and endorsers will be available soon.)
The forum will both celebrate the many advances women have won through struggle and signal the hard work necessary to eliminate the remaining obstacles to full female equality. In addition: “We will call for an end to violence against all women
— in the home, on the street and in all public and private spaces; reproductive
justice for all women — including full access to contraception, abortion,
health care and child care; a living wage for all, and equity in the workplace,
with paid family leave, and an end to sexual harassment at work; and full
equality for women in all areas of society. We stand for full equality and
respect and against racism, sexism, anti-LGBT bigotry, and commercialization of
women in mass media."
This forum will be Mid-Hudson WORD's fourth event in a year and a half, including Women's Day last year and two summer outdoor rallies. For information about this group contact np@defendwomensrights.org. For information about the March 6 event (or for directions or to volunteer) contact Donna Goodman at donna0726@earthlink.net, or Ilgu Ozler at ozleri@newpaltz.edu. Campus map: http://www.newpaltz.edu/map.
––––––––––––
12. STATES PASS 52
ANTI-CHOICE LAWS IN 2013
[Following are some
of the key findings from the new 23rd edition of “Who Decides? The Status of
Women's Reproductive Rights in the United States.” Published by NARAL
Pro-Choice America, this report summarizes the state of women's access to
reproductive health care nationwide, including legislation enacted in 2013.”]
By the Activist
Newsletter as edited from NARAL
In the 2010 elections, anti-choice politicians seized
control of many state legislatures, vowing to focus on the nation’s economic
challenges. Once elected, however, these same lawmakers abandoned their promise
and instead launched a War on Women. Now, for the third straight year, women
have paid the price for this bait-and-switch strategy as anti-choice lawmakers
took every opportunity to restrict further the right to choose.
Among the 52 anti-choice state measures enacted in 2013, the
most prominent trends were: bans on abortion care after 20 weeks; measures
prohibiting insurance coverage of abortion; and laws subjecting abortion
providers to burdensome restrictions not applied to
other medical
professionals. Laws that single out abortion providers particularly threaten
access to abortion care because they reduce further the already declining
number of providers. Already, 87% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider,
according to the Guttmacher Institute.
A total of 24 states
enacted 52 anti-choice measures in 2013. Arkansas enacted the most anti-choice legislation
in 2013,
with 8 laws. Oklahoma enacted 5 anti-choice laws, and Missouri and North Dakota
enacted
4 anti-choice laws. Since 1995, states have enacted 807 anti-choice
measures.
Anti-choice state measures
enacted in 2013 included: • Arkansas,
North Dakota, and Texas enacted bans on abortion care after 20 weeks. •
Arkansas went even further by enacting a ban on abortion care after 12 weeks,
and North Dakota went the furthest by enacting a law to ban abortion as early
as six weeks— before many women even know they are pregnant….
If the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was overturned,
it would open the door for anti-choice lawmakers in state and federal
governments to enact and enforce laws banning abortion. In fact, some states already
have abortion bans on the books, either from before Roe or because they enacted
laws after Roe hoping to prompt the Supreme Court to overturn it.
Currently, these bans are unenforceable; however, if Roe
were overturned they would become enforceable immediately. Still other states
have anti-choice legislatures and governors likely to enact abortion bans if
Roe were overturned.
Continuing the latest trend that began in 2010 of enacting
laws that ban abortion earlier and earlier in
pregnancy, in 2013, North Dakota went the furthest, enacting a “heartbeat” law that makes abortion illegal as early as six weeks. This law is a de facto near-total ban; it takes effect before many women even know they are pregnant. Some 14 states have unconstitutional and unenforceable near-total criminal bans on abortion. They are AL, AZ, AR, DE, LA, MA, MI, MS, ND, NM, OK, VT, WV, WI….
pregnancy, in 2013, North Dakota went the furthest, enacting a “heartbeat” law that makes abortion illegal as early as six weeks. This law is a de facto near-total ban; it takes effect before many women even know they are pregnant. Some 14 states have unconstitutional and unenforceable near-total criminal bans on abortion. They are AL, AZ, AR, DE, LA, MA, MI, MS, ND, NM, OK, VT, WV, WI….
The anti-choice movement has undertaken a campaign to impose
unnecessary and burdensome regulations on abortion providers — but not other
medical professionals — in an obvious attempt to drive doctors out of practice
and make abortion care more expensive and difficult to obtain. Such proposals
are known as TRAP laws: Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers.
Common TRAP regulations include those that limit the
provision of care only to doctors, require doctors to convert their practices
needlessly into mini-hospitals at great expense, limit abortion care to
hospitals or other specialized facilities, rather than physicians’ offices, an
impossibility in many parts of the country, and/or require doctors to have
admitting privileges at a local hospital with nothing requiring facilities to
grant such privileges.
A total of 45 states and the District of Columbia have laws
subjecting abortion providers to burdensome restrictions not imposed on other
medical professionals. These states prohibit some qualified health-care
professionals from providing abortion care. Some 25 of these states restrict
the provision of abortion care — often even in the early stages
of
pregnancy — to hospitals or other
specialized facilities.
New York State, where the bulk of our readers live, was
graded “A” in the NARAL Map. Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) is pro-choice, the
State Senate is mixed-choice, and the Assembly is pro-choice. New York,
however, is not among the 16 states with constitutions that provide greater
protection of a woman’s right to choose than does the federal Constitution. In
addition, 39% of New York counties have no abortion provider.
At the same time, New York law improves women’s access to
emergency contraception (EC); it provides low-income women access to
abortion; provides certain low-income
women increased coverage for Medicaid- funded family-planning services; and
its law protects women seeking reproductive-health care and medical personnel
from blockades and violence.
Further, as progressive as the state is, New York State
allows certain individuals
or entities to refuse to provide women specific
reproductive-health services, information, or referrals; prohibits certain
qualified health-care professionals from providing abortion care, and has an
unconstitutional and unenforceable law that subjects abortion providers to
burdensome restrictions not applied to other medical professionals.
— “Who Decides? The Status of Women's Reproductive Rights in
the United States” is at:
http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/assets/download-files/2014-who-decides.pdf.
For information, http://www.prochoiceny.org @ProChoiceNY.
––––––––––––
13. UN CRITICIZES
VATICAN OVER CHILD ABUSE
By Lizzy Davies and
Henry McDonald
The Vatican has failed to acknowledge the huge scale of
clerical sex abuse and has implemented policies that have led to "the
continuation of the abuse and the impunity of the perpetrators," a UN
panel said on Feb. 5 in a scathing rebuke of the Holy See's handling of the
global scandal.
In grimly worded findings released by the UN Committee on
the Rights of the Child, the watchdog urged the Holy See to "immediately
remove all known and suspected child sexual abusers" from their posts in
the church and hand over the cases to law enforcement authorities in the
countries concerned.
It also asked the Vatican to ensure that an expert
commission set up by Pope Francis last year will "investigate independently"
all cases of child sex abuse and the way in which they are handled by the
Catholic hierarchy. Records concerning past cases should be opened up so that
they can be used to hold the abusers – and those who may have sought to protect
them – accountable, the panel added.
 |
| Man protests outside UN in NYC. (Photo AFP) |
The committee said it was "particularly concerned"
that in dealing with allegations of child sex abuse,
"the Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the church and the protection of the perpetrators above children's best interests, as observed by several national commissions of inquiry."
"the Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the church and the protection of the perpetrators above children's best interests, as observed by several national commissions of inquiry."
The Vatican responded testily to the findings, saying that
though it would submit them "to a thorough study and examination", it
regretted what it perceived to be interference in its affairs. The statement
was thought to refer to the committee's remarks on contraception and abortion.
"The Holy See does … regret to see in some points of
the concluding observations an attempt to interfere with Catholic church
teaching on the dignity of human person and in the exercise of religious
freedom," said a Vatican statement.
"The Holy See reiterates its commitment to defending
and protecting the rights of the child, in line with the principles promoted by
the convention on the rights of the child and according to the moral and
religious values offered by Catholic doctrine."
But the report, the recommendations of which are entirely
non-binding, was welcomed by those who have long found the Vatican's approach
to the scandal wanting.
"This day has been a long time coming, but the
international community is finally holding the Vatican accountable for its role
in enabling and perpetuating sexual violence in the church," said
Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional
Rights. "The whole world will be watching to ensure that the Vatican takes
the concrete steps required by the UN to protect children and end these crimes.
Impunity and cover-up, including at the highest levels of the church, will not
be tolerated."
Barbara Blaine, president of the US-based Survivors Network
of those Abused (Snap), described the report as a "scathing"
indictment of the way the Vatican had handled the scandal.
"It's a wake-up call, not to Catholic officials (who
have known about and concealed abuse for decades and still do) but for secular
officials, especially those in law enforcement, who can and should investigate
Catholic abuses and cover-ups and prosecute the church supervisors who are
still protecting predators and endangering children," she said.
As part of its wide-ranging remit, the UN committee also
expressed concern about how the Holy See's stance on contraception, abortion
and homosexuality was affecting minors.
— From The Guardian, 2-5-14
––––––––––––
14. NET NEUTRALITY IN DANGER
By Sandra Fulton, American Civil Liberties Union
By Sandra Fulton, American Civil Liberties Union
Net neutrality – the principle that Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) must treat all data on the Internet equally – is vital to free
speech. But earlier this month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned
the FCC's net neutrality rules, jeopardizing the openness of the Internet that
we have come to take for granted.
The court ruled that for the FCC to preserve net neutrality,
it must first reclassify the Internet as a "common carrier" – a term
used to describe a utility like plain-old telephone service or an electric
company – so that it can be subject to particular government regulations. On
Feb. 3 we delivered a petition with more than 1 million signatures calling on
them to do just that.
Without strong net neutrality rules, an ISP can interfere
with a user's access to content online – that
could mean, for example, blocking controversial content or discriminating against a competitor's site. We've seen it happen before. In 2007, Verizon Wireless blocked text messages from the reproductive rights group NARAL. That same year, Comcast was caught discriminating against an entire class of online activities by limiting file transfers from customers using popular peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, eDonkey, and Gnutella.
could mean, for example, blocking controversial content or discriminating against a competitor's site. We've seen it happen before. In 2007, Verizon Wireless blocked text messages from the reproductive rights group NARAL. That same year, Comcast was caught discriminating against an entire class of online activities by limiting file transfers from customers using popular peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, eDonkey, and Gnutella.
Net neutrality has benefits beyond free speech, too: It also
promotes innovation by guaranteeing small startups have the same visibility and
access as established corporations, a principle that allowed companies like
Google and Amazon to compete when they began.
Following the ruling, the ACLU, along with Free Press,
Common Cause, DailyKos, Fight for the Future, Sierra Club, and others sent
out petitions calling for the FCC to reclassify the Internet and
reinstate their net neutrality rules. We delivered the signatures this week.
Right now, most Americans have very few options when it
comes to high-quality broadband service, so we can't just decide to vote with
our feet if a company violates "net neutrality." Accordingly, our
broadband providers have the technical means and the financial incentives to
block or slow down controversial content or their competitors, or to give
established players who can afford to pay for the privilege an Internet
"fast lane." Additionally, because the companies have to monitor your
online activity in order to manipulate the data, the lack of neutrality rules
raises profound privacy issues. Let's hope the FCC moves quickly to safeguard
the Internet and assure it remains open and free.
––––––––––––
15. ANTI-DRONE
PROTESTERS JAILED
By David Swanson
Twelve of the Hancock 17 anti-drone protestors were found
guilty of disorderly conduct Feb.7, but were acquitted of trespassing.
The group demonstrated at Hancock Air National Guard Base
near Syracuse, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2012, to bring a “Citizens War Crimes Indictment”
to the base. Drones attacking foreign targets are “piloted” remotely from
Hancock. The demonstrators called for an end to drone warfare and symbolically
blocked the gates.
In passing sentence, Town of DeWitt Court Judge David Gideon
declared: "At some point this has to stop," evidently referring to a
series of drone actions that have taken place outside the gates in recent years.
DeWitt imposed the the maximum sentence —15 days in jail
(starting immediately) and a $250 fine with a $125 court surcharge. He also
imposed a two-year Order of Protection, prohibiting the defendants from going
to the home, school, business or place of employment of Col. Earl A. Evans,
Commander of Hancock's mission support group.
 |
| Protesting outside drone base near Syracuse. |
Considering that the defendants had never met or knew of him
before their arrest, it is clear the intent is to keep people away from the
base.
The defendants were prepared for whatever sentence the judge
imposed. In the words of Ed Kinane, "Any penalty this court can impose on
me is trivial compared to the death sentences imposed on the drone
victims."
Of the five defendants not sentenced, one, is to be sentenced later.
Two others had their cases dismissed on technical grounds, and the remaining
two had plead guilty earlier.
The defendants are part of the Upstate N.Y. Coalition to
Ground the Drones and End the Wars, which seeks to educate the public and
Hancock Air Base personnel about the war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan with
the MQ-9 Reaper Drone piloted from Hancock.
— The Upstate N.Y.Coalition may be reached at http://upstatedroneaction.org/
— From War is a
Crime, Feb. 7, 2014. http://warisacrime.org/
–––––––––––
16. NSA’S SECRET ROLE IN DRONE ASSASSINATIONS
By Jeremy Scahill and
Glenn Greenwald
The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of
electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method
to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results
in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
According to a former drone operator for the military’s
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the
agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and
cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity
with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then
orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person
is believed to be using.
 |
| Long distance killing can be done from U.S. base near Syracuse. |
His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents
previously provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is also supported by a
former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has
become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly
involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.
In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset
of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to
conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in
possession of the device.
The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the
technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of
people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in
Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been
killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic.
One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly
aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the
tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their
identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile
phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends,
children, spouses and family members.
Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting
method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in
order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take
all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a
different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s
how they confuse us.”
As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and
targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be
carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the
former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking
program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing
whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in
fact the intended target of the strike.
“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that
phone is there,” he says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it.
It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious
and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very
shady.”
The former drone operator also says that he personally
participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was known, but
other unknown people nearby were also killed.
“They might have been terrorists,” he says. “Or they could
have been family members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities.”
What’s more, he adds, the NSA often locates drone targets by
analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the
calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program
amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata.
— This important
article is continued on the new website (The Intercept) edited by the three
of the best known anti-surveillance and investigative journalists in the world
— Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. It is at
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/.
Greenwood and Scahill appeared on Democracy Now Feb. 10 and
it is worth watching at http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/10/death_by_metadata_jeremy_scahill_glenn
––––––––––––
17. A WORKER READS
HISTORY
By Bertolt Brecht
(1935, translated by H. R. Hayes)
[Brecht scorned the “Great Man” theory of history, as this
poem makes clear. Many of his other poems and songs chastened cultural,
artistic and political individualism, which became more fashionable in the U.S.
between the two world wars and remains so today.]
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the
legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory. At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.
––––––––––––
18. YOUTH PLAN MASS KEYSTONE XL PROTEST
 |
| Demonstraters carry mock pipeline at earlier mass protest against Tar Sands oil. |
By Peter Rothberg, The
Nation
With President Obama on the cusp of a decision on whether to
approve the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, hundreds of students and young
people are expected to risk arrest in an act of civil disobedience at the White
House March 2 to pressure President Obama to reject the project.
A planned sit-in is expected to be the largest act of civil
disobedience by young people in the recent history of the environmental
movement. The protest, known as “XL Dissent,” is meant to send a clear signal
to President Obama that the youth support that helped elect him sees Keystone
XL as a decision that will define his entire legacy.
“Obama was the first president I voted for, and I want real
climate action and a rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Nick Stracco,
a senior at Tulane University. “The people that voted him into office have made
it absolutely clear what we want, and that’s to reject Keystone XL.”
The Canadian tar sands is one of the largest remaining
deposits of oil in the world, and efforts to extract the resource from a mix of
clay and other materials underneath Canada’s Boreal forest have
created the biggest and most environmentally devastating energy projects on
earth.
The Keystone XL fight has become an iconic issue for
environmentally minded young people across the country, many of whom are
involved in local campaigns to help stop the pipeline or the broader fossil
fuel divestment campaign, which has spread to over 300 universities across the
United States.
As 350.org co-founder
Bill McKibben aptly puts it: "As the fight to stop KXL enters its final stages,
it’s truly inspiring to see young people at the forefront. This pipeline is
scheduled to last 40 years — right through the prime of their lives. President
Obama needs to look them in the face."
The "XL Dissent"protest will begin with a march from Georgetown University to
the White House. After a rally in Lafayette Square, hundreds of students and
young people are expected to risk arrest at the White House fence. The day
before the protest, students will meet for a nonviolent direct action training
and fossil fuel divestment conference.
— An illustrated account of the tar sands region is at http://www.nrdc.org/land/files/TarSandsPipeline4pgr.pdf
––––––––––––
19. NORTH CAROLINA
PROTEST HITS RIGHT WING
By Ari Berman
On February 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina
A&T kicked off the 1960s civil rights movement by trying to eat at a
segregated lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. Two months
later, young activists founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
at Shaw University in Raleigh, which would transform the South through
sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.
With this history, it was fitting that North Carolina’s
Moral Monday movement held a massive "Moral March" in Raleigh Feb. 8 which began at Shaw University, exactly 54 years
after North Carolina’s trailblazing role in the civil rights movement. Tens of
thousands of activists — from all backgrounds, races and causes — marched to the
North Carolina State Capitol. Then they held an exuberant rally protesting the
right-wing policies of the North Carolina government and commemorating the
eighth anniversary of the HKonJ coalition (the acronym stands for Historic
Thousands on Jones Street, where the NC legislature sits).
 |
| Feb. 8 Moral Monday protest in Raleigh. |
Since taking over the legislature in 2010 and the governor’s
mansion in 2012, controlling state government for the first time in over a
century, Republicans eliminated the earned-income tax credit for 900,000 state
residents; refused Medicaid coverage for 500,000; ended federal unemployment
benefits for 170,000; cut pre-K for 30,000 kids while shifting $90 million from
public education to voucher schools; slashed taxes for the top 5% while raising
taxes on the bottom 95%; axed public financing of judicial races; prohibited
death row inmates from challenging racially discriminatory verdicts; passed one
of the country’s most draconian anti-choice laws; and enacted the country’s worst
voter suppression law, which mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting and
eliminates same-day registration, among other things.
The fierce reaction against these policies led to the Moral Monday Movement when nearly 1,000 activists were arrested for nonviolent
civil disobedience inside the North Carolina General Assembly. Rallies were
held in more than 30 cities across the state and the approval ratings of North
Carolina Republicans fell dramatically.
The Moral Monday protests transformed North Carolina
politics in 2013, building a multiracial, The Moral Monday protests transformed North Carolina
politics in 2013, building a multiracial, multi-issue movement centered on
social justice. “We have come to say to the extremists, who ignore the common
good and have chosen the low road, your actions have worked in reverse,” said
Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and the leader of
the Moral Monday movement, in his boisterous keynote speech.
“You may have thought you were going to discourage us, but
instead you have encouraged us. The more you push us back, the more we will
fight to go forward. The more you try to oppress us, the more you will inspire
us.”
If the Feb. 8 rally was any indication, the Moral Monday
movement will be bigger and broader in 2014. An estimated 15,000 activists
attended the HKonJ rally last year, bringing 30 buses; this year, the NC NAACP
estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 people rallied in Raleigh, with 100 buses
converging from all over the state and country. It was the largest civil rights
rally in the South since tens of thousands of voting rights activists marched
from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 in support of the Voting Rights Act.
“This Moral March inaugurates a fresh year of grassroots
empowerment, voter education, litigation and nonviolent direct action,” Barber
said. There will be a new wave of direct action protests when the North
Carolina legislature returns in the spring, a new wave of activists doing voter
mobilization and registration during the “Freedom Summer 2014,” and litigation
challenging North Carolina’s voter suppression bill. The movement will be
active in the streets, in the courtroom and at the ballot box. They will be
focused not just on changing minds, but on changing outcomes.
To that end, the HKonJ coalition called for five demands:
• Secure pro-labor, anti-poverty policies that insure
economic sustainability;
• Provide well-funded, quality public education for all;
• Stand up for the health of every North Carolinian by
promoting health care access and environmental justice across all the state's
communities;
• Address the continuing inequalities in the criminal
justice system and ensure equality under the law for every person, regardless
of race, class, creed, documentation or sexual preference;
• Protect and expand voting rights for people of color,
women, immigrants, the elderly and students to safeguard fair democratic
representation.
— From Huffington Post. The coalition website is at http://www.hkonj.com.
––––––––––––
 |
| Happy days are here again for Mr. Big Bucks. |
GILDED AGE
Reviewed by Walter
Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs December, 2013
“This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!
— in America's Gilded Capital,” By Mark Leibovich, 386 pages, Blue Rider Press.
Ce pays-ci (“this
country here”) is what the denizens of Versailles called their gilded cage in
the reign of Louis XIV. “This town” is the name that members of what was once
called the American Establishment have given their special place on the
Potomac.
In the most
entertaining and depressing book about the U.S. political system published in
many years, Leibovich [chief national correspondent for the N.Y. Times
Magazine] lets readers peep behind the curtain and see what goes on in the
greenrooms and at the parties of the Washington elite.
He reveals
an ugly spectacle: tribunes of the people transform into corporate shills,
money makes the world go round, and insecure arrivistes stroke one another’s
egos as they bathe in a flowing river of narcissism. It turns out that contrary
to the prevalent fears of political polarization, this is a golden age of
bipartisanship.
Not much
happens on the floor of Congress, of course, but when it comes to doing favors
for friends, Washington is enjoying a new Era of Good Feelings, in which
politicians help their colleagues score regardless of their party affiliation.
The Chinese
Communist Party once ordered its cadres to read “The Ancien Régime and the Revolution,” Alexis de Tocqueville’s
account of how the failings of the old elite paved the way for the French
Revolution. But today’s Washington elite is probably too busy imitating the
benighted creatures of Versailles to learn anything useful from their fate.
[From the Activist Newsletter: It’s not a profound book but it’s a quick
read, has some funny vignettes and is quite interesting, especially on how our
political system is controlled by big money corporations and Wall St. Our
favorite quote from the book is a joke attributed to President Reagan about two
Episcopal ministers: “One of the preachers said to the other, ‘Times have
really changed, haven’t they? I never had sex with my wife before we were
married, did you?’ And the other Episcopal priest said, “I don't know. What is
your wife’s maiden name?”’
––––––––––––
21. BOOKS: THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
Reviewed by Casper
Henderson
“The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History”
by Elizabeth
Kolbert, 336 pages, Henry Holt and Co.
One day around 66 million years ago – it was in June or July
if the evidence from fossilized pollen traces has been interpreted correctly –
an asteroid somewhat larger than Manhattan ploughed into the Earth near what is
now Chicxulub in the Yucután Peninsula, Mexico at 45,000 mph.
As it hit with a force equivalent to
more than 100 million megatons of TNT, or about 1,500 times the total
content of the world's present nuclear arsenals, the asteroid sent a
vast cloud of scalding vapor thousands of miles in all directions, and blasted
more than 50 times its own mass of pulverized rock high into the sky where, as
tiny particles, it incandesced and heated the entire atmosphere to several
hundred degrees centigrade, killing almost everything unprotected by soil, rock
or deep water.
At first glance, the footprint of industrialized humanity on
the biosphere may look small compared with that of the Chicxulub asteroid….
What is beyond reasonable doubt is that something big is under way. The best
estimates are that the Earth is losing species at many times the background rate
(the natural churn in which a few species go extinct every year while new ones
evolve), and that 30% to 50% will be functionally extinct by 2050.
The plight of the non-human world has inspired many works of
popular science over the last 20 years or so…. But with extinctions and new
discoveries piling up, there is a need for still more studies.
And in “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the
New Yorker, offers well-composed snapshots of history, theory and observation
that will fascinate, enlighten and appall many readers.
Kolbert begins with a visit to a research station in Costa
Rica, where researchers are documenting the disappearance of the golden frog,
Atelopus zeteki. Amphibians, the class that includes frogs, are the most endangered
group of animals in the world, with an extinction rate as much as 45,000 times
the background rate. In addition to factors such as habitat loss, a kind
of chytrid fungus, inadvertently spread by humans and lethal
to many amphibians, is thought to be to blame.
The book then turns to the development of extinction as an
idea and how it has changed our view of life. In this account the
phenomenon was discovered in the early 19th century by the anatomist Georges
Cuvier, who recognized that enormous teeth and bones recovered from sites in
what is now Ohio belonged not to elephants but to hitherto unknown beasts. The
mastodons, and other strange giants whose remains came across his dissecting
table, had lived in "a world previous to ours," which, Cuvier
suggested, had perished in a great catastrophe.
Charles
Darwin accepted Cuvier's view that the deep past had been filled
with extinctions, but rejected catastrophe as a principal cause in favor of a
gradual, or uniformitarian view of extinction championed by the geologist
Charles Lyell. Only in the 1980s was the hypothesis, proposed by Luis and
Walter Alvarez, that a massive asteroid had caused mass extinction at the end
of the Cretaceous period generally accepted.
Paleontologists came to agree that life was
characterized by long periods of stability occasionally interrupted
by panic. Kolbert's history tour concludes with a look at the far future. Jan
Zalasiewicz, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester, argues
that although our age (for which he champions the term Anthropocene) will
leave a record in the geological strata no thicker than a cigarette paper, its
impact will nevertheless be great.
One of the strengths of “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,”
Kolbert's 2006 book on global warming, was vivid reportage from exotic
locations. The Sixth Extinction shares this characteristic. There are
useful, indeed exemplary, discussions of ocean acidification starting from
readily observable natural effects off the Italian coast, of the fate of
coral from the Great Barrier Reef, of the extent to which tropical forests in
Peru can adapt to rapid change, of habitat fragmentation in the Amazon basin
and beyond, and of the consequences of the mass global transference of
species from one place to another. It is all pretty grim.
Towards the end, Kolbert writes: "We are deciding,
without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways remain open and which
don't." I don't know about you, but I don't recall being
involved in that decision. Indeed, it seems that some
of the most important decisions are being taken by those individuals who
are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep people
in the dark about climate change and who are blocking moves to a
green economy. We need to decide otherwise.
The extinction crisis is so vast and complex that it is
almost repels thought. It is what the cultural critic Timothy Morton calls a
hyperobject. We need a lot more imaginative thinking about the choices we can
make and what comes next, whether it be the "Rambunctious
Garden" of environment writer Emma Marris, the feral landscape
of George
Monbiot or a world utterly transformed by synthetic
biology as envisaged by Craig Venter.
We need new big stories. Is it too much to ask that we should alter Earth with
compassion for the other creatures with whom we share it, and in
celebration of their endless forms?
— Excerpted from The Guardian, Feb. 16. Reviewer Caspar
Henderson wrote “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.”
––––––––––––
22. TENNESSEE WORKERS REJECT UAW
22. TENNESSEE WORKERS REJECT UAW
Edited from Politico and Moon over Alabama
Volkswagen workers
in Chattanooga, Tenn., have rejected the United Auto Workers, shooting down the
union’s hopes of securing a foothold at a foreign-owned auto plant in the
South. The vote was 712 to 626, said the UAW, which blamed the loss on
“politicians and outside special interest groups.”
The vote, announced Feb.
14 after three days of balloting, is a devastating loss for the UAW, whose
membership has plummeted from a high of 1.5 million in 1979 to around 400,000
today. Outgoing UAW President Bob King had staked his legacy on organizing a
Southern auto plant for the first time.
The UAW had
advantages in organizing the Volkswagen plant it probably won’t find elsewhere.
For starters, Volkswagen — under pressure from the powerful German steelworkers’ union, IG Metall, which holds seats on the company’s board — decided
not to resist unionization. The union’s presence would have also allowed the
company to set up a German-style “works council,” in which representatives of
both workers and middle management offer advice to executives on how to best
run the plant.
The workers who
voted against the union were besieged by a right wing anti-union campaign that told
them incorrectly Volkswagen would not build an additional production line there
should the workers vote for the union and thereby for a workers council.
The union has already asked the National labor Relations Board to consider holding another vote due to the fact of interference byRepublican lawmakers.
The union has already asked the National labor Relations Board to consider holding another vote due to the fact of interference byRepublican lawmakers.
New production line
facilities for Volkswagen are decided by the global board in Germany where the
global unions have half minus one of the votes. The Chattanooga plant is now
the only one out of Volkswagen’s over 100 union plants without a works council.
––––––––––––
23. POLK AWARDS TO
ANTI-SPYING JOURNALISTS
By Common Dreams
 |
| MacAskill, Greenwald, and Poitras. |
Announced Feb. 16,
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras of The Guardian newspaper and
Barton Gellman of The Washington Post will receive the George Polk Award for
National Security Reporting, one of 13 categories honored by the annual prizes.
According to Long Island
University, which created and bestows the award, the four journalists earned
the prize by conferring with Edward Snowden to negotiate the release [and
publication] of sensitive documents from the NSA about U.S. global surveillance.
John Darnton, curator
of the awards, said: “In the tradition of George Polk, many of the journalists
we have recognized did more than report news. They heightened public awareness
with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would
not have seen the light of day. Repercussions of the NSA stories in particular
will be with us for years to come.”
––––––––––
24. FRACKING AND PIPELINES UNDERMINE NYS
[New York Gov. Cuomo
has announced he will not make a decision on allowing fracking in the state
until after the November elections. New York State has the strongest movement
against fracking in the U.S., but there is still a good chance Cuomo may
capitulate to Big Business. In addition to fracking, this article points to the
dangers from the construction of pipelines in the state, and notes that you “can’t
frack without a pipeline. There’s no point in drilling if there’s nowhere for
the gas to go.”]
By Ellen Cantarow
For the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens
when big oil and gas corporations
drill where people live. “Fracking” — high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale — has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations have been mining silica, an essential fracking ingredient; and in New York, where one of the most powerful grassroots movements in the state’s long history of dissent has become ground zero for anti-fracking activism across the country. Some of the people I’ve met have become friends. We email, talk by phone, and visit. But until recently I’d always felt at a remove from the dangers they face: contaminated water wells, poisoned air, sick and dying animals, industry-related illnesses. Under Massachusetts, where I live, lie no methane- or oil-rich shale deposits, so there’s no drilling.
drill where people live. “Fracking” — high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale — has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations have been mining silica, an essential fracking ingredient; and in New York, where one of the most powerful grassroots movements in the state’s long history of dissent has become ground zero for anti-fracking activism across the country. Some of the people I’ve met have become friends. We email, talk by phone, and visit. But until recently I’d always felt at a remove from the dangers they face: contaminated water wells, poisoned air, sick and dying animals, industry-related illnesses. Under Massachusetts, where I live, lie no methane- or oil-rich shale deposits, so there’s no drilling.
But this past September, I learned that Spectra Energy, one
of the largest natural gas infrastructure companies in North America, had
proposed changes in a pipeline it owns, the Algonquin, which runs from Texas
into my hometown, Boston. The expanded Algonquin would carry unconventional gas
— gas extracted from deep rock formations like shale — into Massachusetts from
the great Marcellus formation that sprawls along the Appalachian basin from
West Virginia to New York. Suddenly, I’m in the crosshairs of the
fracking industry, too. We all are.
Gas fracked from shale formations goes by several names
(“unconventional gas,” “natural gas,” “shale gas”), but whatever it’s called,
it’s mainly methane. Though we may not know it, fracked gas increasingly fuels
our stoves and furnaces. It also helps to fuel the floods, hurricanes,
droughts, wildfires, and ever-hotter summers that are engulfing the planet. The
industry’s global-warming footprint is actually greater than that of coal. (A
Cornell University study that established this in 2011 has been reconfirmed
since.) Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon
dioxide (CO2) and an ecological nightmare due to its potential for dangerous
leaks.
According to former Mobil Oil executive Lou Allstadt, the
greatest danger of fracking is the methane it adds to the atmosphere through
leaks from wells, pipelines, and other associated infrastructure. The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found leakage rates of 2.3% to 17%
of annual production at gas and oil fields in California, Colorado, and Utah.
Moreover, no technology can guarantee long-term safety decades into the future
when it comes to well casings (there are hundreds of thousands of frack
wells in the U.S. to date) or in the millions of miles of pipelines that
crisscross this country.
The energy industry boasts that fracking is a “bridge” to
renewable energies, but a 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study
found that shale gas development could end up crowding out alternative
energies. That's because as fracking spreads, it drives natural gas prices
down, spurring greater consumer use, and so more fracking. In a country deficient
in regulations and high in corporate pressures on government, this cascade
effect creates enormous disincentives for investment in large alternative
energy programs.
The sorry state of U.S. renewable energy development proves
the case. As the fracking industry has surged, the country continues to lag far
behind Germany and Denmark, the world’s renewable-energy leaders. A
quarter-century after the world’s leading climate change scientist, James
Hansen, first warned Congress about global warming, Americans have only bad
options: coal, shale gas, oil, or nuclear power.
There’s been a great deal of reporting about “the drilling
part” of fracking — the moment when drills penetrate shale and millions of
gallons of chemical-and-sand-laced water are pumped down at high pressure to
fracture the rock. Not so much has been written about all that follows. It’s
the “everything else” that has turned a drilling technology into a
land-and-water-devouring industry so vast that it’s arguably one of the
most pervasive extractive adventures in history.
According to Cornell University’s Anthony Ingraffea, the
co-author of a study that established the global warming footprint of the
industry, fracking “involves much more than
drill-the-well-frack-the-well-connect-the-pipeline-and-go-away.” Almost all
other industries "occur in a zoned industrial area, inside of buildings,
separated from home and farm, separated from schools." By contrast, the
industry spawned by fracking "permits the oil and gas industries to
establish [their infrastructures] next to where we live. They are imposing on
us the requirement to locate our homes, hospitals, and schools inside their
industrial space."
Wells, flanked by batteries of vats, tanks, and diesel
trucks, often stand less than a mile from homes. So do compressor
stations that condense gas for its long journey through pipelines,
and which are known to emit carcinogens and neurotoxins. Radioactive
waste (spewed up in fracking flow-back and drill cuttings) gets dumped on roads
and in ordinary waste sites. Liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals that move
this energy source for export are a constant danger due to explosions, fires, spills,
and leaks. Every part of the fracking colossus, it seems, has its rap
sheet of potential environmental and public health harms.
The letter arrived in the spring of 2011. It offered Leona
Briggs $10,400 to give a group of companies the right to run a pipeline
with an all-American name — the Constitution — through her land. For 50 years Briggs
has lived in the town of Davenport, just south of the Susquehanna River in New
York’s Western Catskills. Maybe she seemed like an easy mark. After all, her
house’s clapboard exterior needs a paint job and she’s living on a meager
Social Security check every month. But she refused.
She treasures her land, her apple trees, the wildlife that
surrounds her. She points toward a tree, a home to an American kestrel. “There
was a whole nest of them in this pine tree out here.” Her voice trembles with
emotion. “My son was born here, my daughter was raised here, my granddaughter
was raised here. It’s home. And they’re gonna take it from us?”
Company representatives began bullying her, she says. If she
didn’t accept, they claimed, they’d reduce the price to $7,100. And if she kept
on being stubborn, they’d finally take what they needed by eminent domain. But
Briggs didn’t budge. “It’s not a money thing. This is our home. I’m 65 years
old. And if that pipeline goes through I can’t live here.”
The Constitution Pipeline would carry shale gas more
than 120 miles from Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna County through New York’s
Schoharie County. This would be the first interstate transmission pipeline in
the region, and at 30 inches in diameter, a big one. Four corporations —
Williams, a Tulsa-based energy infrastructure company, Cabot Oil & Gas,
Piedmont Natural Gas, and WGL Holdings — are the partners. Williams claims the
pipeline “is not designed to facilitate natural gas drilling in New York.” But
it would connect with two others — the Iroquois, running from the Long Island
shore to Canada, and the Tennessee, extending from the Texas and Louisiana Gulf
Coast into Pennsylvania’s frack fields. This link-up, opponents believe, means
that the Constitution would be able to export fracked gas from New York, the
only Marcellus state to have resisted drilling so far.
In 2010, a high-pressure pipeline owned by Pacific Gas and
Electric Company exploded in San Bruno, California, killing eight people and
destroying 38 homes. It was the same size as the proposed Constitution
pipeline. What makes that distant tragedy personal to Briggs is her memory of
two local pipeline explosions. In the town of Blenheim, 22 miles east of her
home, 10 houses were destroyed in 1990 in what a news report called “a cauldron
of fire.” Another pipeline erupted in 2004 right in the village of Davenport.
From her front porch, Briggs could see the flames that destroyed a house and
forced the evacuation of neighbors within a half-mile radius. “That was an 8-inch
pipe,” she says. “What would a 30-inch gas line do out here?”
Carl Weimer, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a
non-profit watchdog organization, says that, on average, there is “a
significant incident — somewhere — about every other day. And someone ends up
in the hospital or dead about every nine or ten days.” This begs the question:
are pipelines carrying shale gas different in their explosive potential than
other pipelines?
“There isn’t any database that allows you to get at that,”
says Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline safety expert and consultant of 40 years’
experience. “If it’s a steel pipeline and it has enough gas in it under enough
pressure, it can leak or rupture.” Many pipelines, says Kuprewicz, aren’t bound
by any safety regulations, and even when they are, enforcement can often be
lax. Where regulations exist, he continues, corporate compliance is uneven.
“Some companies comply with and exceed regulations, others don’t. If I
want to find out about what’s going on, I may [have to] get additional
information via subpoena.”
In 2013 alone, Williams, one of the partners in the
Constitution pipeline, had five incidents, including two major
explosions in New Jersey and Louisiana. These were just the latest in what an
online publication, Natural Gas Watch, calls “a lengthy record of pipeline
safety violations.” As for Cabot, its name has become synonymous with water
contamination in Dimock, Pennsylvania. Even that state’s Department of
Environmental Protection, historically joined at the hip to gas companies,
imposed sanctions on Cabot in 2010. (The corporation later settled with 32 of
36 Dimock families who claimed contamination of their water supplies.)
About 40 miles northeast of Davenport lies the town of
Schoharie, where James and Margaret Bixby live on a well-tended, 150-year-old
farm. The day I visited, their 19-acre pond glimmered in the early fall
sunlight. As we talked, Bixby listed all the wildlife in the area: bear,
raccoon, beavers, muskrats, wood ducks, mallards, mergansers, cranes, skunks,
and Canadian geese. He began telling me about the last of these.
“Pretty soon they’re going to come in by the hundreds, migrating north. A dozen
will stay, hatching their young. We have wild turkeys, just about everything. I
don’t care to live no place else.”
The Bixbys were offered more money than Briggs — more than
$62,000 — for a pipeline right of way and they, too, turned it down. He and his
wife are holding fast and so, he says, are 60 neighbors. “They don’t want it to
bust up this little valley.” Pointing, he added, “There’s gonna be a path
up our woods there as far as you can see, [and] there’s gonna be another one
over there. That’s nothing nice to look at.”
Driving around New York and Pennsylvania you’ll spot odd,
denuded stretches running down hillsides like ski jumps. On the crests of the
hills, the remains of tree lines look like Mohawk haircuts on either side of
shaved pipeline slopes. This is only the most obvious sign of pipeline
environmental degradation. The Constitution pipeline would also impact 37
Catskills trout streams, endangering aquatic life. According to Kate Hudson,
Watershed Program Director at Riverkeeper, one of the state’s most venerable
environmental watchdog organizations, the pipeline would “cross hundreds of streams
and wetlands by literally digging a hole through them…. Any project that
jeopardizes multiple water resources in two states is clearly against the
public's interest.”
Longtime residents aren’t alone in opposing the building of
the Constitution pipeline. This tranquil region has been attracting retirees
like Bob Stack, a former electrical engineer. In 2004, he and his wife, Anne,
bought 97 acres near Leona Briggs’s home. Their dream: to build a straw bale
house, a sustainable structure that uses straw for insulation. No sooner had
engineers visited the land to start planning than the couple got a letter from
Constitution Pipeline LLC. “We were absolutely clueless. We knew nothing about
fracking or about pipelines. Fracking was about as remote from us as oil in
Iraq or someplace else,” says Anne. “We just looked at each other and said,
‘What an outrage!’” The Stacks, who moved east from Nevada, are now living in
limbo.
“Once you have this pulsing fossil fuel energy coming
through, it will… industrialize the Susquehanna River valley,” says Anne Marie
Garti, who in June 2012 co-founded a local activist group, Stop the Pipeline.
(“The unConstitutional Pipeline” reads the organization’s website banner.)
“They’re going to start building factories. There’s an interstate, a railroad,
there’s cheap labor, and there’s a river to dump the toxins in.”
Garti, a small, quietly assertive former interactive
computer software designer, is now a lawyer; her aim: helping people
like Briggs and the Bixbys. She grew up in the town of Delhi, near Briggs’s
home. In 2008, she found herself among a small group of activists who convinced
New York’s then-Governor David Paterson to impose a moratorium on fracking.
Under the measure’s shelter a powerful grassroots anti-fracking movement grew,
using zoning ordinances to ban drilling in municipalities.
Mark Pezzati, a graphic designer, helped get his town,
Andes, in New York’s Delaware County to enact a fracking ban. “Pipeline news
wasn’t high on the radar [then]," he says. "Most people were
concerned about drilling.” In 2010, Pezzati was shocked to discover that a
pipeline called the Millennium had penetrated his state.
 |
| New fracked gas pipeline in Pennsylvania. |
That was when Pezzati and his friends, used to arguing for
bans at town board meetings, came up against the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission (FERC), which, among other responsibilities, regulates interstate
natural gas transmission. It tilts to corporations, and even Garti found the
bureaucratic hurdles it posed daunting. "I have some experience and
training in environmental law and it took me a month to figure out the
intricacies of FERC's process," she told me.
Because FERC refused to disclose the names of landowners in
the pipeline’s path, Garti, Pezzati and about a dozen other volunteers had to
pore over county tax databases, matching names and addresses to the proposed
route. “First we sent letters, then we did door-to-door outreach,” says Garti.
Her basic message to landowners along the right of way: “Just say no.”
“People are kind of impressed that you came all the way to
their house,” Pezzati points out. “There’s not that many landowners in favor.”
Garti attributes local resentment against the pipeline
corporations and their threats to exercise eminent domain to a “fierce”
regional “independence” dating back to the anti-rent struggles of tenant
farmers against wealthy landlords in the nineteenth century. “People don’t like
the idea of somebody coming on their land and taking it from them.”
The activists drafted a letter refusing entry to corporate
representatives and circulated it to local landowners. By October 2012, Stop
the Pipeline was able to marshal a crowd of 800 for a public hearing called by
FERC — “a big crowd for a sparsely populated rural area,” Garti recalls.
The vast majority opposed the pipeline’s construction. By January 2013, 1,000
people had sent in statements of opposition.
The organization has created a website with instructions
about FERC procedures and handouts for local organizing, as well as a list of
organizations opposing the pipeline. These include the Clean Air Council and
Trout Unlimited. Among state and federal agencies expressing concerns to FERC
have been the Army Corps of Engineers and New York State’s Department of
Environmental Conservation, known in earlier fracking battles for its collusion
with the gas industry.
“Just like we have a fracking story that’s different in New
York State, we have a pipeline story that’s different,” says Garti. “The force
of the opposition to pipelines is in New York State. And we have a shot at
winning this thing.”
Having covered the environmental degradation of
Pennsylvania’s shale gas fields, the wastelands that were Wisconsin’s
silica-rich hills, and tiny New York towns where grassroots fracking battles
are ongoing, I now have a sense of what it means to be in the crosshairs of the
fracking industry. But it was nothing compared to how I felt when I learned
Spectra Energy had its sights set on my hometown, Boston.
Fracking isn’t just about drilling and wells and extracting
a difficult energy source at a painful cost to the environment.
Corporations like Spectra have designs on spreading their pipelines through
state after state, through thousands of backyards and farm fields and forests
and watersheds. That means thousands of miles of pipe that may leave
ravaged landscapes, produce methane leaks, and even, perhaps, lead to
catastrophic explosions — and odds are those pipelines are coming to a town near
you.
Spectra’s website explains that the Algonquin pipeline “will
provide the Northeast with a unique opportunity to secure a… domestically
produced source of energy to support its current demand, as well as its future
growth.“ Translation: Spectra aims to expand fracking as long as that’s
possible. And a glance at any industry source like Oil & Gas Journal
shows other corporations hotly pursuing the same goal. (A new New-York-based
group, Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion, is the center of opposition to
this project.)
It remains to be seen whether the people of Massachusetts
will undertake the same type of grassroots efforts, exhibit the same fortitude
as Bob and Anne Stack and Leona Briggs, or demonstrate the same organizing
acumen as Anne Marie Garti and Mark Pezzati. But Massachusetts citizens had
better get organized if they want to stop Spectra Energy and halt its plans to
run the Algonquin all the way from Texas northward to Boston and beyond.
Fracking is on its way to my doorstep — and yours. Who’s going to hold
the line in your town?
— From Tomdispatch, Jan. 30, 2014. Tom Dispatch regular Ellen Cantarow reported on Israel and the West
Bank from 1979 to 2009 for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, Inquiry, and Grand Street, among other publications. For the past
four years she has been writing about the toll the oil and gas industries are
taking on the environment.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175800/tomgram%3A_ellen_cantarow%2C_the_frontlines_of_fracking/#more
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25. FRACKING DEPLETES
WATER SUPPLIES
the country, from
Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011,
three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in
areas experiencing drought, the report by
the Ceres investor network found.
Fracking those wells used 97 billion gallons of water,
raising new concerns about unforeseen costs of America's energy rush.
"Hydraulic fracturing is increasing competitive
pressures for water in some of the country's most water-stressed and
drought-ridden regions," said Mindy Lubber, president of the Ceres green
investors' network.
Without new tougher regulations on water use, she warned
industry could be on a "collision course" with other water users.
It can take millions of gallons of fresh water to frack a
single well, and much of the drilling is tightly concentrated in areas where
water is in chronically short supply, or where there have been multi-year
droughts.
Some oil and gas producers were beginning to recycle water,
especially in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, the report said. But it said
those savings were too little to offset the huge demand for water for fracking
in the coming years.
— From the Guardian, Feb. 5.
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