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MASKING SAVES LIVES

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Top 10 Questions for Neera Tanden – Let's Try Democracy

 Original at:

Top 10 Questions for Neera Tanden – Let's Try Democracy:


Before Neera Tanden can become Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Senators must approve. And before that, they must ask questions. Here are some suggestions for what they should ask.

1. You supported an attack on Libya that proved fraudulently marketed, illegal, and catastrophic in results, after which you argued in an email to your colleagues for trying to force Libya to pay via oil profits for the privilege of having been bombed. You wrote that this would be a good solution to a U.S. budget deficit. One of your colleagues replied that such a policy might create a financial incentive for attacking more countries. What countries, if any, would you most favor attacking and then billing for the service?

2. Reclaiming, thank you, reclaiming my time, what criteria do you think one should use if one were to select the countries most appropriate to attack and then bill for it?

3. You suggested in your email that the U.S. public would better support future wars if the wars’ victims paid for them. You hope to oversee a budget that is tipped more heavily toward militarism than most, and possibly any, other national government on earth. A majority of U.S. discretionary spending goes into militarism. You come to the job from a think tank funded, in part, by weapons companies and foreign dictatorships that do business with those weapons companies — a think tank that has taken very weapons-friendly positions, even refusing to oppose the war on Yemen. How does that qualify you to oversee the sort of conversion to peaceful practices that will be required for survival and prosperity?

4. You suggested in that same email that the alternatives to making countries pay for being bombed would be to cut Headstart or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or Medicaid. How do those alternatives make it onto the list of possibilities, while reducing military spending does not, reducing police and prison and border patrol and ICE and CIA and NSA spending does not, taxing corporations does not, taxing billionaires does not, taxing financial transactions does not, taxing carbon does not?

5. You spent much of your nine years running a think tank courting major corporate donors, and producing corporate-friendly policies. You instructed your staff to check whether content might offend big donors prior to publishing. You even censored major work products to appease big donors, such as deleting a report chapter on New York police abuse of Muslims after Michael Bloomberg chipped in over $1 million. You also censored criticism of the government of Israel and gave a platform in Washington to its leader. You kept much of your think tank’s funding secret, and the reasons why were pretty clear from what became public. How does this qualify you to serve the public in an open and transparent and representative government?

6. You’ve long advocated cutting Social Security, one of the most successful and popular U.S. government programs ever. Is that still your position, and why or why not?

7. You claim that you pushed, while observers say you punched, a reporter for asking Hillary Clinton about her support for the war on Iraq. Can you provide the Senate with guidelines for the sort of questions to which the proper response is physical assault? Does this question qualify? Do you, honestly, right now, want to punch me?

8. You have outraged numerous political opponents, including members of both major political parties in this Senate. Much of what you’ve already been asked about, we only know about because you outraged your own employees. You once outed an anonymous victim of sexual harassment, which shocked and outraged those involved. What qualifies you as the best person to work harmoniously with every agency in the U.S. government?

9. You sought to delegitimize the 2016 U.S. presidential election, not with serious documented complaints, but with baseless claims that the Russian government infiltrated and manipulated the vote counting. Did you believe those claims? Do you believe them now? Do you take any responsibility for the large numbers of other people who believe them now?

10. What would be one example of a situation in which you would choose to become a whistleblower?

Stephen F. Cohen on Russia's democratization and how US meddling undermines it

Thursday, December 24, 2020

London African Gospel Choir perform outside Belmarsh prison in support of Julian Assange.

Twas the Night before Christmas--2020 @ThomasLinkoff

 

From:


@ThomasLinkoff


Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the States,
Children were starving;
no food on their plates.
Facing eviction, families in despair,
Waiting on Congress, who just didn't care.
Leadership nestled snug in their beds,
Only worried about pork for lobbyist friends.



Wednesday, December 23, 2020

The Israeli Apartheid State May Be Reaching A Breaking Point - PopularResistance.Org w/@mikopeled

 

The Israeli Apartheid State May Be Reaching A Breaking Point - PopularResistance.Org

 from @PopularResistance description of the podcast linked above.

Miko Peled is an author, writer, speaker, and human rights activist living in the United States. He is considered by many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine, support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the creation of a single democracy with equal rights in all of historic Palestine. Educated in Jerusalem, Japan and the United States, Peled is also an accomplished professional martial artist. For 23 years, Peled ran a martial arts school that was dedicated to teaching leadership skills and non-violent conflict resolution through martial arts. 

Miko is also a contributor to several online publications (Mint Press, The Electronic Intifada, Democracy Now, Mondoweiss), authors this blog (mikopeled.com), and produces The Miko Peled Podcast, all of which he dedicated to advocating for the creation of one democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. He travels regularly to Palestine where he speaks and works with the popular resistance, the BDS movement, and other justice groups. As a result, he has been arrested several times by the Israeli authorities for his activism.

Read more at MikoPeled.com.

 

 

Monday, December 21, 2020

Laura Poitras: I Am Guilty of Violating the Espionage Act. Journalism Is Not a Crime - The New York Times

Opinion | Laura Poitras: Journalism Is Not a Crime - The New York Times

 

The Justice Department is setting a dangerous precedent that threatens reporters — and the truth.

Ms. Poitras is a filmmaker and journalist who has reported extensively on national security issues. She shared a Pulitzer Prize for public service with The Guardian and The Washington Post for her reporting on the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance program and is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

I am guilty of violating the Espionage Act, Title 18, U.S. Code Sections 793 and 798. If charged and convicted, I could spend the rest of my life in prison.

This is not a hypothetical. Right now, the United States government is prosecuting a publisher under the Espionage Act. The case could set a precedent that would put me and countless other journalists in danger.

I confess that I — alongside journalists at The Guardian, The Washington Post and other news organizations — reported on and published highly classified documents from the National Security Agency provided by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, revealing the government’s global mass surveillance programs. This reporting was widely recognized as a public service.

The Espionage Act defines the unauthorized possession or publication of “national defense” or classified information as a felony. The law was originally enacted during World War I to prosecute “spies and saboteurs.” It does not allow for a public interest defense, which means a jury is barred from taking into account the difference between a whistle-blower exposing government crimes to the press, and a spy selling state secrets to a foreign government.

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Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Espionage Act was rarely used in the context of journalism. The most notable exception is the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 was charged with violating the Espionage Act for providing news organizations, including The Times, with the Pentagon Papers. The charges against Mr. Ellsberg were dropped when the illegal methods of the government’s evidence gathering — breaking into his psychiatrist’s office and warrantless wiretapping — were exposed.

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All this changed after Sept. 11, when the Espionage Act became a tool of the government to selectively prosecute sources and whistle-blowers, and to intimidate journalists and news organizations seeking to publish reports that the government wanted to suppress. During Barack Obama’s presidency alone, the Justice Department prosecuted eight journalism-related Espionage Act cases against sources, more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.

Nicholas Kristof: A behind-the-scenes look at Nicholas Kristof’s gritty journalism, as he travels around the world.

One of the most alarming abuses of the Espionage Act under President Obama was the case of Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst who in 2010 was indicted under the law for disclosing classified information to the Fox News journalist James Rosen. In the Justice Department’s search warrant, Mr. Rosen is described as a possible “co-conspirator.” Mr. Rosen was ultimately not charged, but tragically Mr. Kim pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act and served 10 months in prison. (I co-produced a film about the case.)

Despite this escalation of prosecuting whistle-blowers and sources, the government had never crossed the line to charging journalists or publishers for receiving or releasing classified information — until last year.

That was when the Justice Department indicted Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of WikiLeaks, with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, on top of one earlier count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

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The charges against Mr. Assange date back a decade, to when WikiLeaks, in collaboration with The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and others, published the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and subsequently partnered with The Guardian to publish State Department cables. The indictment describes many activities conducted by news organizations every day, including obtaining and publishing true information of public interest, communication between a publisher and a source, and using encryption tools.

I made a film about Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks called “Risk.” I filmed Mr. Assange for many years, and as the film shows, we had serious disagreements. There are many reasons to be critical of Mr. Assange, and I have not shied away from them. But we should be clear about what he is being prosecuted for and the stakes for press freedom.

WikiLeaks’ publications exposed war crimes, revealed previously undisclosed civilian deaths in American-occupied Iraq, detailed government corruption in Tunisia on the eve of the Arab Spring, and generated countless other reports that dominated the front pages of newspapers around the world throughout 2010 and 2011.

WikiLeaks was responsible for the most unvarnished reporting on American occupations and foreign policy since the start of the “war on terror,” and helped to shift the public consciousness.

None of the architects of the “war on terror,” including the C.I.A.’s torture programs, have been brought to justice. In contrast, Mr. Assange is facing a possible sentence of up to 175 years in prison.

He is detained at Belmarsh, a high-security prison in London, recently under lockdown because of a coronavirus outbreak, and fighting extradition to the United States. A British judge is expected to rule on his extradition on Jan. 4. On Wednesday, 15 members of Britain’s Parliament issued a letter to the secretary of state requesting to meet with Mr. Assange ahead of the extradition decision, citing concerns of press freedom.

I have experienced the chilling effect of the Espionage Act. When I was in contact with Mr. Snowden, then an anonymous whistle-blower, I spoke to one of the best First Amendment lawyers in the country. His response was unnerving. He read the Espionage Act out loud and said it had never been used against a journalist, but there is always a first time. He added that I would be a good candidate because I am a documentary filmmaker without the backing of a news organization.

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It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange’s indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges. It paves the way for the United States government to indict other international journalists and publishers. And it normalizes other countries’ prosecution of journalists from the United States as spies.

To reverse this dangerous precedent, the Justice Department should immediately drop these charges and the president should pardon Mr. Assange.

Since Sept. 11, this country has witnessed an escalating criminalization of whistle-blowing and journalism. If Mr. Assange’s case is allowed to go forward, he will be the first, but not the last. If President-elect Joe Biden wants to restore the “soul of America,” he should begin with unequivocally safeguarding press freedoms under the First Amendment, and push Congress to overturn the Espionage Ac



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    Friday, December 18, 2020

    Force The Vote on Medicare for All Now! SIGN THE PEITION TO GET MEDICARE FOR ALL!

    Force The Vote on Medicare for All Now!:

    We demand that progressives in Congress refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi until she pledges to bring Medicare for all to the floor of the House. Force the vote!

     

    ForceTheVote.Org

    Challenge The System.

    Seattle Police Removing Encampment at Cal Anderson Park | The Seattle Times @MayorJenny

    Seattle police removing encampment at Cal Anderson Park | The Seattle Times

     "...[P]eople keep asking, what are our demands? Our demands are: give us housing or leave us alone.”

     

    Thursday, December 17, 2020

    A Conversation with Issa Amro: A Webinar hosted by Miko Peled [Getting Human Rights for Palestinians]

    Stand With Issa - Friends of Hebron [sign petition supporting Palestinian Issa Amro facing prison for standing against settlers]

    Stand With Issa - Friends of Hebron:

    Sign the petition to keep Human Rights Defender Issa Amro from going to military prison. Call on the UN and EU to tell Israel to drop the baseless, politically motivated charges. Stand With Issa

    Saturday, December 12, 2020

    Leaked Audio Of JOE BIDEN Exposes Disregard for his Base.@jimmy_dore Nails It

    AOC Schooled by NFL Player Justin Jackson for Running Interference for P...

    Stop listening to Obama | Yannick Giovanni Marshall -- Opinions News | Al Jazeera

     

    Stop listening to Obama | Opinions News | Al Jazeera

    The articulation of a programme to divest from an historically anti-Black institution should not be associated with a marketing strategy.

    Former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, November 2, 2020, at Turner Field in Atlanta [File: AP/Brynn Anderson]
    Former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, November 2, 2020, at Turner Field in Atlanta [File:P/Brynn Anderson]

    “If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘Defund the Police’, but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it.”

    The quote above is taken from an interview the former United States President Barack Obama gave to Snapchat show Good Luck America.

    If there must be leaders – and leaders on fairness – they should not be men who once presided over an imperialist state. There is no fairness in drone strikes, deportations and detention, the attempted felling of democratically-elected leaders or being the chief caretaker of colonial land theft and the institutional violence that renders Indigenous and Black populations at the greatest risk of succumbing to poverty and police violence.

    It is problematic for the former president to perform the role of communication sage when his own sloganeering of “hope” and “change” did not prove sufficient to meet the hopes for an end to torture and deaths in custody. Or change in any satisfactory way discriminatory systems of punishment and civil asset forfeiture. Or stymie the efforts of the succeeding, less racial-equity-minded administration to resume a killing spree on death row via the resumption of federal executions or the deliberate mismanagement of a pandemic that disproportionately kills non-white people.

    Problematic, too, is associating activists’ articulation of a programme to immediately divest from and incapacitate a classist and historically anti-Black institution with a marketing strategy.

    Far worse, however, is Obama’s work to reinforce the myth that campaigns for Black survival must, first and foremost, work to present themselves in the best light to invite wider society. Wider society is the problem.

    The course of history is often changed by small groups of like-minded people. The Combahee River Collective, the Black Panthers, MOVE, small cells of enslaved people overthrowing the slave wagon en route to transport them like cargo to a plantation. If these groups abandoned the truth they felt in their bones, if they adjusted their message to accommodate broader swaths of society they would not have been as effective as they were.

    The work of radical Black freedom is directed against dominant society. What that society has been conditioned to find acceptable, what it finds pleasing, what it finds warranted and the limits to what it thinks is possible is our problem. We get to no satisfactory place by conforming or drawing nearer to anti-Black society.

    If all Black movements adjust their language as Obama suggests we should, there would be no record of our truth, nor our fundamental and passionate disagreement with the state of things. Unadulterated radical Black imagining and voicings of a future free from anti-Blackness would be erased from history. The only record we would have of our dissent is sheepish pleadings to a racist society, sanded down to fit inoffensively into fragile liberal ears.

    There exists no audience that would be roused from the edges of their seats by a clever, well-crafted motto. None who were not already elbowing their way to the front lines of struggle as soon as they heard about George Floyd, or Atatiana Jefferson or the Zong massacre. It is not so much that our demands risk losing a big audience, as the big audience window-shops our struggle. We have entirely too much faith in the revolutionary will of those who respond to the ten-thousandth racist murder with “it is so sad”.

    Obama, himself, admitted that he was the kind of person who read Frantz Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks not for what they meant to our lives but to pick up women. In this, he models the fleeting, parasitical interest in the intellectual labour of Black radical thinkers that is not always convertible to useful activism.

    One wonders if Toni Morrison might have wriggled out of their photographed embrace if she knew Obama may have sprayed the CliffsNotes of her novels on himself like cheap cologne.

    The great white whale of support for Black lives will always prove elusive. Polls have shown that the increase in support for the uprising against racist killing is a chimera, vanishing almost as soon as it becomes measurable. Those genuinely affected by George Floyd’s death in a life-changing way are now radical and will not be turned away by what may feel to some as a too-angry chant or too impractical demand.

    Those, on the other hand, who were pushed by the swell of a crowd forced to sit and watch an eight minute and 46-second killing so nakedly discriminatory it debilitated, for a moment, their go-to excuses of “bad apples” and see-through calls for retraining, are now relievedly ebbing away with that crowd back to their settled places of faith in “America, the fundamentally good”. To devote one’s talents to the work of getting them back is a fool’s errand.

    Instead of appealing to the people who can always stomach a bit more anti-Black state violence, it may be better to rally those who have had enough. Those who are not moved due to the efficacy of slogans but by their disgust with institutionalised and constantly legitimated white supremacist violence.

    Liberal support is not indispensable to the cause of Black freedom. In fact, liberalism is one of the most effective tools in keeping Black liberation at bay. It glorifies waiting peacefully for justice. Not even dogs are asked to sit during their abuse.

    And it is liberals Obama has in mind when he speaks about a potential audience. As a man who has had his effigy lynched and is called an American-hating terrorist more than any person alive, he knows better than most that conservatives do not come around no matter how much deference is shown, how many times magnanimity is performed, or how many times a Black hand reaches across to “the other side”.

    Maybe slogans designed to save our lives should not be designed, primarily, for others. Maybe direct and forthright statements have longer longevity, provide better comfort and inspiration to those they are intended to serve than the ones watered down to please an audience ambivalent on the question of justice.

    The black glove-fisted chants of “Black Power” may, in the end, prove to have done more good for the cause of freedom than “keep hope alive”. Maybe #landback addresses a specific injury, agitates for material reparations, and is a necessary cutting through the colonising culture that trained its young to sing “this land is your land, this land is my land”.

    The bugle has sounded but the liberal reinforcements are not coming. Instead, they have pretty much carried on with their lives save the occasional nod to the phrase “the country is going through a racial reckoning”. A phrase that suggests the demand for “accountability” is the equal and opposite reaction to a hemisphere’s half a millennium of anti-Black asphyxiation.

    It is not clear how we would arrive at a criminal justice system that treats everybody fairly in a country where half of the electorate voted for the re-election of a white supremacist administration. Some of these 73 million are senators, wardens, police union presidents, security guards, judges and correctional officers. It is no more likely that they are interested in an equitable society than yesterday’s segregationists and confederates whose monuments they fight to preserve.

    Revolutionaries, when they are white, are held up as models by politicians like Obama. Even when their “snappy slogans” are a good deal more aggressive, polarising and threatening than “Defund the Police”. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” was likely not warmly received by British loyalists and yet he is praised.

    Certainly, the Black people he enslaved and had whipped had just as much right to be just as forceful. Certainly, the protest against the “general warrant” that gave British colonial administrators the right to rampage through settler homes can also be adopted by Black people against the institution these settlers birthed. The one which broke down Breonna Taylor’s door and shot. The one which gropes teenagers against cars and stops and searches the vehicles of Black people who seem to be addicted to having their tail lights out.

    Obama’s implication that substantial change only comes about after a door-knocking campaign and recruitment from those who have shown a passing interest in Black survival is not supported by historical evidence. It is a nationalist myth. One that shouts we are in this together as one American people instead of bearing witness to society as it is: a concatenation of local struggles, warring classes and interests, historical patterns of discrimination, and an entrenched and popular disinterest in justice for Black people.

    The liberals are not coming. Their war horses will never leave the stable no matter how flowery the invitation. We would do well to stop listening to Obama and get on with the business of uncompromising struggle for freedom.


     

     

     

     

    Tuesday, December 08, 2020

    Thursday, December 03, 2020

    From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond - Nancy Fraser

    From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond - American Affairs Journal

     

    "Whoever speaks of “crisis” today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the term’s banalization through endless loose talk. But there is a precise sense in which we do face a crisis today. If we characterize it precisely and identify its distinctive dynamics, we can better determine what is needed to resolve it. On that basis, too, we might glimpse a path that leads beyond the current impasse—through political realignment to societal transformation.?

    Meet The Wrong Type of Jew, The Media Doesn't Want You To Know Exists | ...