EU Israel-Palestine Policy Is Out Of Touch With Reality

Alan Hart

In a letter calling on EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini to promote and implement a 2012 plan to mark produce and products for the European market place from the Israeli occupied West Bank, 16 EU foreign ministers stated that what they are requesting is "an important step in the full implementation of EU longstanding policy in relation to the preservation of the two-state solution."

If that's what they truly believe, the 16 who signed the letter - they included the foreign ministers of Britain and France but not Germany - are clearly out of touch with reality because the two-state solution has long been dead, killed by Israel's on-going colonization and ethnic cleansing by stealth.

There are, of course, two other possible explanations.

One is that those who signed the letter (as well as their EU ministerial colleagues who didn't) are entertaining the hope that the Palestine Authority can be bullied and bribed into accepting a two-state solution on Israel's terms - terms which would leave Israel in occupation of large chunks of the West Bank and the Palestinian "state" little more than a collection of disconnected Bantustans, with Israel's various security services still in overall control.

The other possibility is that those who signed the letter (as well as their EU ministerial colleagues who didn't) know that the two-state solution is dead but must go on pretending it isn't because the only alternative if there is ever to be justice for the Palestinians is one state with equal political and human rights of every kind for all. And that is something European governments do not want to think about. Why?

If Zionism does not resort to a final ethnic cleansing, the day is coming when the Arabs of what is today Greater Israel will outnumber the Jews, so one state for all would lead in time to the de-Zionization of it. The end of the Zionist enterprise. That being so the obvious implication is that getting to the point where a one state solution might be possible would require the EU to play its necessary part in putting Israel on notice that unless it ends its defiance of international law and becomes serious about peace on terms the Palestinians could accept, it will be isolated and subjected to sanctions of the kind that played a major role in pushing South Africa's apartheid regime to its end.

In my analysis there is one main reason why European leaders do not want to think about that option. They are frightened, perhaps terrified is a more appropriate term, of being falsely accused of anti-Semitism by Zionism's sickenly self-righteous and deluded leaders who never miss an opportunity to play their Nazi holocaust blackmail card.

They seized the opportunity to play that card again in response to the letter signed by the 16 European foreign ministers, and the first to do so was Avigdor Liberman, still the Zionist state's foreign minister while Prime Minister Netanyahu struggles to complete the business of cobbling together a coalition government.

Evoking the memory of the Nazi holocaust Liberman said this:

"I have a suggestion for them on how to label, They can label all products from Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights with a yellow star. I think that is extremely fitting to the cynical and hypocritical position expressed in this letter." (The yellow star of Nazi Germany was a patch Jews were ordered to sew on their outer garments to mark them out for persecution).

Translated Liberman's message was to the effect that if European leaders go ahead with the plan to label Israeli produce and products from the occupied West Bank they will be regarded as the new Nazis and proof of the truth of what Zionist propaganda has always asserted - that the world has always hated Jews and always will. (This assertion is nonsense of the most diabolical kind but Zionism' s success in promoting it is the reason why most Israeli Jews and very many Jews of the world have closed minds and are beyond reason on the matter of justice for the Palestinians).

It seems to me that if the EU is to have a role in seeking to advance a real peace process, it must begin by issuing what could be called a policy guidelines indicator statement. It would say in the most explicit terms that criticism of, and opposition to, Israel's occupation and on-going colonization of the West Bank is NOT a manifestation of anti-Semitism and is a proper response to Israel's defiance of international law and denial of justice for the Palestinians.

And such a statement could add that the prime cause of the rising, global tide of anti-Israelism and the creeping transformation of it into anti-Semitism is the Zionist state's policies and actions.

However diplomatically it was worded the underlying message of such a policy guidelines indicator statement would be that EU governments were no longer going to allow themselves to be blackmailed by the playing of the Nazi holocaust card into supporting Israel right or wrong.

That's what is needed if the EU is to come to grips with reality on the ground in Israel-Palestine and play its necessary role in stopping the countdown to catastrophe for all.

India Commits Suicide In New Delhi

Samar

Stunned, Speechless or disoriented? I have no clue what to feel about a suicide I saw unfolding on the computer screen in front of me 3 oceans away from where it happened. Gajendra Singh, a farmer from Rajasthan, hanged himself from a tree during an Aam Aadmi Party rally at Jantar Mantar in the heart of New Delhi.

No, I was not in denial like, I knew that more than 600 farmers have killed themselves in Vidarbha, a part of BJP ruled Maharashtra alone. Being in denial was a prerogative of top bureaucrats and their political masters after all, of Alok Ranjan, Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh, a state ruled by opposition Samajvadi Party. Mr. Ranjan while admitting that farmers were in fact committing suicide in Uttar Pradesh claimed that there was no conclusive proof “yet, that any of the suicides that have been reported have anything to do with unseasonal, heavy rains.” That was despite at least 73 recorded suicides from Bundelkhand region alone.

Farmers are committing suicide all around the country. India where 70 % of its population are small time farmers who are desperately trying to keep their to heads up the flooding waters of debt and crop loss are dying like flies around a lighted lamp. Now, India's farmer's suicide epidemic has come to the nation's capital. Now nobody can deny it. Now nobody can ignore it. This is a nation's death.

That is a prerogative of Union Agricultural Minister Radha Mohan Singh too, who even while admitting in Rajya Sabha on March 20, 2015 that the government’s own statistics pegged the numbers of suicides committed by people self employed in farming/agriculture was 14027, 13754 and 11772 respectively for 2011, 2012 and 2013. Specifically attributing less than 10 percent of these suicides to agrarian crisis was his prerogative too. The numbers, as per the National Crime Records Bureau, if you must know, were pegged at 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively.

Hiding why did the rest kill themselves and why these numbers are significantly higher than the corresponding figures of ‘general’ population is a prerogative of his and his government, too. In short, farmers’ suicides is something where political stands don’t emanate not from ideology but the status of being in power or in opposition. Farmers’ suicides are anything from conspiracy to personal distress if you are the regime and failure of the state if in opposition.

I, as thousands of other activists like me, had neither any such prerogative nor any reasons to stay in denial so I was writing, to the best of my capacity to expose the crisis engulfing the peasantry. I was trying, to the best of my capacity again, to bring this to the notice of powers that may. I don’t want to repeat how governments from those of UPA to NDA have devised Kill and Compensate Humiliating Policy, I am not up for that. You can read it here, if you must. All I want to talk about here is Gajendra Singh’s suicide and how it exposes us all.

First, about the suicide that busted the denial from all those in power from the centre to state. It was almost like a competition to defeat others in shamelessness. The account was opened by Somnath Bharti, the Law Minister of AAP’s Delhi government who saw a conspiracy in the suicide and tweeted about the same. He, of course, reneged on that tweet in no time, deleted the same and claimed that the tweet’s second part was targeted at contractual teachers opposing his party’s, and government’s Kisan Rally. It is just that he had to be reminded of his grief, and breaking down, by a fellow activist of his party.

He was matched in shamelessness by Ms. Vasundhara Raje in no time who blamed delayed action by AAP for the death of Gajendra Singh happily forgetting that it was apathetic inaction of her government that had pushed Gajendra Singh against the wall and forced him to take his life. She, in turn, was matched by several Congress leaders who had started blaming Modi regime by then, happily forgetting the fact that the blood of more than a 100,1000 farmers are on the hands of UPA as well as Atal Bihari Vajpayee led NDA regimes.

Let us get back to the suicide of Gajendra Singh and ask ourselves why did he had to die? Let us also ask why AAP’s rally continued well after the attempted suicide and why AAP ‘leaders’ like Asutosh (Gupta) and Kumar Vishwas made insensitive statements about the same?

The answers might seem illusive but they are not, in fact. The answer lies in a simple statement- both the political leadership and the civil society has lost the connect with the people, citizens of the country. It is simple, the self designated ‘largest democracy of the world’ has stopped listening to the democratic and peaceful voices of dissent, and of distress. It would not have been much of an issue had this oblivion limited itself to the regime. But then, it has expanded to us, the people who have organized themselves into a Republic. Are not we the same people who used to complain about the filth, the traffic jams and what not that such protests bring to Delhi? We read about all these suicides but from a distance, didn’t we?

I am ashamed of my republic. I am more so because AAP leadership, that offered a different politics, ended up proving to be worse than the ‘mainstream’ political parties. I am ashamed, more so, of claiming to be a Republic.

Let us accept the fact, that we are a heartless people, a people where a shameless Ashutosh of AAP can try to defend his party’s criminal negligence against an even more shameless BJP (or Congress) for killing a man on camera.

Having said that, the rally of AAP continued for more than an hour after the suicide. Need I say more other than thanking Gajendra Singh, posthumously, for shutting all of them by a single act.

Hillary the Hawk

Charles Davis & Medea Benjamin

Announcing her latest campaign for the presidency, Hillary Clinton declared she was entering the race to be the champion for “everyday Americans.” As a lawmaker and diplomat, however, Clinton has long championed military campaigns that have killed scores of “everyday” people abroad, from Iraq to Yemen. As commander-in-chief, there’s no reason to believe she’d be any less a hawk than she was as the senator who backed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, or the Secretary of State who encouraged Barack Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. If her nomination is as sure a thing as people say, then antiwar organizing needs to start right away.

Hillary has already won the support of those who continually agitate for war. “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, told The New York Times last summer. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he said, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

We’re going to call it what it is: More of the same sort of murderous policies that destroyed Iraq, destabilized Libya, killed women and children with cluster bombs and drones in Yemen, and legitimized the undermining of democracy in Honduras. There’s little chance the Republicans will nominate someone better, but given Clinton’s record as a senator and Secretary of State – the latter giving us a very good idea of how she would approach foreign affairs once in office – it will be hard for them to find anyone much worse.

We know that Clinton is no reliable friend of peace. Today she supports diplomacy with Iran, but back in 2009, as Secretary of State, she was adamant that the U.S. keep open the option of attacking the Islamic Republic over never-proven allegations it was seeking the nuclear weapons that Israel already has. Her attempts to portray herself as an ally of those who are pro-peace, as a sort of reluctant imperialist, is the same sort of co-opting distortion that has helped quiet opposition to President Obama’s pro-war agenda. If anything, Hillary is even more militaristic than the ostensibly reluctant warrior she’s campaigning to replace. Still, that hasn’t stopped her from trying to be all things to all people — even people like us.

Indeed, in March 2003, Clinton did something she will probably never willingly do again: She met with CODEPINK to explain her support for war. “I like pink tulips around this time of the year,” she began, “[they] kind of remind ya that there may be a spring. Well, you guys look like a big bunch of big tulips!” It got progressively more awkward after that. “I admire your willingness to speak out on behalf of the women and children of Iraq,” said Clinton, but, “There is a very easy way to prevent anyone from being put into harm’s way and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm and I have absolutely no belief that he will.”

We thought the easiest way to prevent harming the women, children and other living things in Iraq was to stop a war of aggression ostensibly over weapons of mass destruction that UN inspectors on the ground couldn’t find and which were, in fact, never found because they didn’t exist. Clinton, however, was steadfast: “If Saddam were serious about disarming he would have been much more forthcoming. . . . The very difficult question for all of us is how does one bring about the disarmament of someone with such a proven track record of a commitment, if not an obsession, with weapons of mass destruction?”

Her answer: Destroying Iraq by dropping millions of U.S.-made WMDs, including bombs with depleted uranium that have more than doubled the country’s pre-2003 rate of cancer. Speaking to the women of CODEPINK, Clinton even explicitly defended George W. Bush’s unilateralism, citing her husband’s go-it-alone intervention in Kosovo.

In 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Libya, Clinton was the Obama administration’s most forceful advocate for going above and beyond a no-fly zone to depose Muammar Gaddafi, whose U.S.-trained security forces were killing Libyans with the help of weapons and equipment provided by his erstwhile allies in the US, Britain and France. She even out-hawked Robert Gates, the defense secretary first appointed by George W. Bush who was less than enthusiastic about going to war. When Libyan rebels carried out an extrajudicial execution of their country’s former dictator, her response was sociopathic: “We came, we saw, he died,” she said, smiling and laughing. That sent a message that the U.S. would look the other way at crimes committed by allies against its official enemies; indeed, the same policy of tolerance for friends’ war crimes that arguably led Gaddafi to believe he could get away with killing anyone he labeled “Al Qaeda.”

Libya was part of a pattern for Clinton. On Afghanistan, she advocated a repeat of the surge in Iraq, encouraging President Obama to more than double the number of troops there. Her State Department also provided cover for the expansion of the not-so-covert drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Clinton’s top legal adviser, Harold Koh, exploited his pre-government reputation as an advocate for human rights to declare in a 2010 speech that not only did the government have the right to detain people without charge at Guantanamo Bay, but it can kill them with unmanned aerial vehicles anywhere in the world.

Clinton practiced “soft power” diplomacy too, of course: After Honduran forces trained at the U.S. School of the Americas carried out a coup against elected president Manuel Zelaya, Clinton’s State Department immediately got to work on legitimizing the regime that seized power. As commentator Mark Weisbrot observes, she even said as much in her book, Hard Choices: “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico,” wrote Clinton. “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

The subsequent “free and fair” election would end up being between two candidates who supported a coup opposed by most “everyday people” in Honduras, now one of the most violent, drug-war ravaged countries in the world; she has also called for deporting child refugees fleeing that violence. In Honduras as elsewhere: It seems it’s not the lives of “everyday people” that are of chief concern to politicians like Clinton.

When Barack Obama became president, the anti-war movement became his first casualty – followed by a group of Pakistanis droned to death three days after his inauguration. We should never lose hope that we can bring about positive change, but actually changing the world for the better requires being aware that whoever sits in the White House come January 2017 is not going to be our friend.

Why We Need to Ditch Austerity Policies

Benjamin Dangl

By next year, the richest 1% of the world will own more wealth than the rest of the entire population of the planet, according to Oxfam. This is a staggering figure, almost impossible to comprehend. And yet, this fact alone puts into focus a harsh truth: that we live in a fierce, inhuman, capitalist world where a handful of the richest people get richer and more powerful, even as governments across the globe enact austerity measures against the working class.

It is completely ludicrous that governments are carrying out austerity policies while the global 1% are set to clutch over half of the world’s wealth by next year. But here we are, watching the impossible unfold right in front of our eyes.

In Jamaica, IMF-imposed austerity measures are the most severe on the planet, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. And, of course, the US is largely to blame. The CEPR explained, “through its leadership role in the IMF, the U.S. is imposing unnecessary pain on Jamaica through harsh austerity and a debt trap.” Since 2007, poverty in the country has doubled, with unemployment currently at 14.2 percent.

While the double stranglehold of debt and austerity brings Jamaica to its knees, activists in Spain are also fighting against government cuts. Earlier this year in Madrid, there was a major mobilization against austerity measures imposed by the government, policies which have worsened homelessness and poverty among the poorest. Protesters carried banners reading “Working for a general strike” and ““Bread, work, a roof and dignity.” Between 2012 and 2014, the Spanish government made $162 billion in spending cuts. The country is experiencing an unemployment rate of 23.7 percent; one out of every four members of the workforce in Spain are unemployed, and half of all young people in Spain between ages 16 and 25 are without jobs. But people are fighting back. Protester Antonio Colmenar told reporters, “It is a day to claim our rights.”

While the 1% fills their pockets, protests against austerity have been rocking the globe. In Montreal, Canada, students are leading the charge against cuts in healthcare, education and public services. “Today, we’re proud to launch a raucous spring,” Fannie Poirier, a spokesperson from the student protest committee told the Montreal Gazette in March. “Austerity measures have been presented as the lesser of evils to confront a deficient economy. But what we’re seeing … is a massive impoverishment of the population, full-frontal attacks on working conditions and a loss of security for society’s most vulnerable people.”

Even in Vermont, a US state known for its progressive politics, Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin has been pushing for austerity measures in education, healthcare and among public sector workers. Steve Howard, executive director of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, commented on Shumlin’s moves to NPR, “Before you take money out of the paychecks of snowplow drivers, nursing assistants, custodians and administrative assistants … we believe you have a moral obligation to ask for a greater contribution from a broad-based revenue source paid mostly by the wealthiest Vermonters who have had all the economic gains of the last decade.”

Austerity is trumpeted by many politicians as a necessary, though painful step to ensure long term economic viability. But it’s simply a way of perpetuating, rather than challenging, capitalist business as usual, a business in which the global 1% get richer and richer while schools go without sufficient funding and workers get laid off.

Governments enacting austerity measures are protecting the 1% and global capitalism. And the 1% has more than its fair share of influence in government policy development. Oxfam reports that the global elite “spent $550 million lobbying policy makers in Washington and Brussels during 2013. During the 2012 US election cycle alone, the financial sector provided $571 million in campaign contributions.”

Meanwhile, according the Harvard Business School, CEOs in America currently make 350 times what the average worker makes, and 774 times as much as minimum wage workers. Such a concentration of wealth not only takes place with impunity in America, it is encouraged as part of free market ideology.

Since 1979, Americans have increased productivity by 80 percent. Yet, according to Forbes, income has not increased at the same rate, if it has increased at all. Furthermore, “the rich spend about 17 percent of their income traveling for business and pleasure” while “the lower classes spend about 17 percent of their income on feeding their families.”

Inequality is not a symptom of the ills of global capitalism, it is its fuel. Austerity measures won’t change this; they simply maintain an unjust system that needs to be transformed from the bottom up. The global 1% and their allies in government need to be confronted and overturned. The entire system needs to be overhauled in a way that puts people, not profits and greed, first.

Luckily, there are exciting movements fighting against this upside down world and proposing alternatives, from Greece to Vermont. “I believe in fighting against the system,” Sara, a protester against austerity measures in Germany told reporters. “It won’t change if you don’t do something.”

Fortress Europe’s War on Refugees

Binoy Kampmark

“Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants.” And so, the fantastically venal contributor to Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun Katie Hopkins adds her bit to the migration debate in Europe. “Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit like Bob Geldorf’s Ethiopia circa 1984.”

The loss of almost a thousand EU-bound migrants off the Italian island of Lampedusa over the weekend provoked various reactions, and showed that such humans were not, in fact, durable cockroaches at all. It shocked the humanitarians (“A mass grave is being created in the Mediterranean,” claimed Loris De Filippi, Italian president of Médicins Sans Frontières); it excited the security-minded; and it confused the grey bureaucrats.

A statement from the European Commission insisted that a new migration policy would be embraced mid-May: “What we need is immediate actions to prevent further loss of life as well as a comprehensive approach to managing migration better in all its aspects.” Last year, a critical German President Joachim Gauck suggested that, “A common European refugee policy should ensure that every refugee can make use of his rights: not to be rejected without being heard and to receive protection from prosecution.”

A common policy is exactly what Europe does not have. Morgan Johansson, the Swedish Minister for Justice and Migration, argues that, “More EU countries must take responsibility for the refugee situation.” But countries bearing the brunt of receiving such vast numbers of human cargo are also going cold – in Italy alone 170,100 refugees arrived in 2014. Countries under the false impression they do have a refugee problem, such as Britain, insist on providing mere peanuts to the EU border agency Frontex. The British Home Office has been conspicuously silent on the deaths at sea.

The humanitarian incentive is not popular. While the language of generosity is being encouraged in some quarters, the language of action suggests closing the EU’s external borders. Like drugs to an addict, expanding the scope of rescue missions is deemed an encouragement. Italy, to take one example, scrapped its Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue program last year, seeing as other European countries failed to contribute to the running costs of $9.7 million-a-month. Its replacement, Triton, is a far more limited compromise, and fails to serve its protective functions.

Shades of respectable racism and prejudice are filtering into the foreign policy matrix. While some EU officials insist on the wisdom and humanity of search and rescue, others focus on drawbridges and repulsions. The populists are insinuating themselves into the establishment, and their message is proving popular.

The one thing that is not being considered is the dramatic idea of liberalised borders. For Adam Davidson, writing more broadly on debunking the “myth of the job-stealing immigrant”, few “are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders.” Instead, there are trenchant calls to target the trafficking phenomenon, with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi deeming it a “plague in our continent”. The human factor is thereby ignored, while “business models” become targets of directed policy.

There are some who do concede that this tragedy has its roots in various sources. Migrants and “blowback” are inseparable features of the growing problem, accelerated because of a crippled, and very much failed Libyan state. Deposing Gaddafi gave birth to a broader catastrophe. In such an environment, the trafficking business has thrived.

Officials in Canberra are beaming with pride that they have hit upon the perfect solution. It entails systematic cruelty and smugness from a government that can boast of little else: turning back the boats. Commentators in Europe, notably British ones, have noted Australia’s “naval ‘ring of steel’.” “It’s time to get Australian,” barked Hopkins. “Australians are like British people, but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”

For historian Michael Burleigh, nothing, however miserable, comes close to the watery deaths. Rent poor islands and dump human cargo in processing centres. Tow them back. Buy boats from developing countries to facilitate that task. Make promises of never settling them in Australia.

For retired Australian Major General Jim Molan, borders “can be controlled to the benefit of all, and there is a moral obligation to control them.” That is the attitude of reductionist processes entailing the fantasy of imposing order on chaos, a formalised queue that is simply a form of population control. And it smacks of false moral propriety, ignoring international conventions such as the Refugee Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “The human tragedy is immense and is worsened by Europe’s refusal to learn from its own mistakes and from the efforts of others who have handled similar problems.”

This is not quite gun boats, but it might as well be. Asylum seekers heading for Australia are reconveyed to Indonesia. In some instances, asylum seekers have been kept at sea and given impromptu “processing”. And all of this doesn’t so much suggest the targeting of people traffickers, who continue to conduct their dastardly trade, as it does the embrace of alternative routes. Fortresses simply encourage dangerous rerouting. This “feral” flow, as Hopkins would like to term it, will dictate its natural course, even if the grave’s occupants continue to grow.

Chance Encounters: Videos and Cop Violence

Ruth Fowler

A generation of white people are learning firsthand what people of color already knew: that the cellphone camera is the best defense when it comes to the police. I’m one of these people. I never turn my camera on when I get pulled over by a cop – I’m skinny and white and drive a Hyundai. I feel pretty safe because of it, unless I’m putting myself on the frontline of a protest such as Ferguson where everyone becomes fair game. But I instantly grab my phone when I walk down the street in Venice and I see a young black male with his hands in cuffs, and three police officers standing around him.

Since Rodney King’s beating at the hands of LAPD was caught on camera, video evidence has increasingly been instrumental in empowering victims of crime, particularly amongst the marginalized and oppressed. In recent months videos of Michael Brown, Eric Garner,Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and Eric Harris – all unarmed black males shot dead by the police – have become viral, and in some cases, have been instrumental in bringing their murderers to justice. And in other cases, they have achieved very little except millions of hits and viral internet fame, leading many commentators to note that these videos seem to be commodifying black death, exploiting it, turning it into little more than pornography which desensitizes the public to its horror. Rarely did we see a trigger warning attached to the video of Eric Garner’s death which starts up, unprompted, on whatever social media site we have logged onto, yet compare this laissez faire approach to the hyper-sensitivity surrounding the blocked and censored footage of the deaths of white ISIS victims such as James Foley. In contrast to the relatively easy to locate footage of the recent slaughter of 21 Ethiopian Christians, it’s clear that western audiences are conditioned into considering white lives as more precious than black lives.

There can be no doubt, however, that video evidence has brought the issue of racist policing to the forefront of national consciousness in a manner which is unprecedented since the (supposed) end of Jim Crow. Video provides white America with the incontestable proof that racism – and in particular racist policing – is an enormous problem in the United States. Previously a person of color – indeed, any person – complaining about police misconduct would receive the response that an internal investigation had revealed the claim lacked merit, if it even got that far. Usually a police spokesperson would deny the claim, and that would be the end of that. As Timothy Lynch notes in The LA Times:

“Vincent Bugliosi, the legendary Los Angeles prosecutor who put Charles Manson away, once admitted that most district attorneys have a double standard when it comes to filing criminal complaints against the police. Bugliosi said the unit responsible for investigating officer-involved shootings reviewed hundreds of cases during the 1980s and did not find a single criminal violation. That pattern has held over time. Between 2001 and 2005, there were more than 400 officer-involved shootings reviewed by Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley. No criminal charges were filed.”

He goes on to cite an investigation into the practices of the New Orleans Police Department in 2011 which found that the local commanders’ mishandling of police shooting investigations was “so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects.” In 2012, nearly 300 police officers were acquitted of the extra-judicial killings of black people

Given the lack of an easily accessible national database which records incidences of deaths by police, we have no way of knowing the exact history and progression of police misconduct – whether it’s reached a national crisis, or whether it’s always been this bad and those in power have either failed to notice or act – but it’s also telling that it has only been noted in the last few years, and particularly since the Ferguson protests arrested the world’s attention, that there is no national database. The oft-cited claim that every 28 hours a black person is killed by police has been debunked as oversimplifying a Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report – but the fact remains, in the absence of data from the Department of Justice and with only a small percentage of police abuses being caught on camera, the figure may be much, much higher. According to killedbypolice.net at least 350 people have been killed by U.S. police since January 1, 2015, with at least 1,100 killed in 2014. Stats on race are sketchy, but those that do exist are revealing. According to a USA Today review of the most recent accounts of “justifiable homicide” reported to the FBI, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week during a seven-year period ending in 2012.

As video has become more widely available and the national and international press start to cover deaths which years ago would probably have been unremarked upon, unknown and buried deep in unrecorded history, America has found a channel for its outrage with its chilling visual testimony of white hunters seeking out their black prey. The evidence in front of our faces makes denial – one of the key elements in American racism – harder, but at the end of the day, sharing videos of black death may make the police department sweat a little more, but it does not turn a white viewer noticing a pattern for the first time into someone actively campaigning, and being vocal about, injustice in the US. The white viewer can still press pause on the screen, and close their computer down for the night, neatly evading the horrific daily reality for people of color in this country as just another tragic news item.

Having said this, the numbers of sites dedicated to documenting and educating the public about police abuses – such as ‘Killed by Police’ ‘Cop Block’ and ‘Freethought Project’ – are increasing, and have been instrumental in raising awareness around the importance of video evidence. A recent PBS segment looked at WITNESS, an organization that “teaches citizens around the world to safely and effectively document abuse, so that video is as effective in the courtroom as it is on the web” – neatly highlighting that just because a video has gone viral, does not mean it is admissible in court.

The fact remains video testimony exists in most of the above cases only because of chance – a bystander had a cellphone and the presence of mind to whip it out when they saw a police officer interacting with a black male. Those incidents which aren’t caught on camera must be given more serious scrutiny.

For every Eric Garner, there are twenty Ezell Fords.

No War Crimes Here

Gregory Elich

As a member of a delegation documenting NATO war crimes in 1999, I visited Nish, the third largest city in Yugoslavia. NATO attacked this appealing old city on forty occasions, destroying approximately 120 buildings and damaging more than 3,400.

On the night of our second stop in Nish, we attended a meeting with university professor Jovan Zlatich. During the NATO war, Dr. Zlatich served as commander of the city’s Civil Defense Headquarters. In his discussion of the bombardment of Nish, he focused particular attention on the use of cluster bombs. Nish had the misfortune of being the target of several CBU-87/B cluster bombs, a weapon designed to open at a predetermined height and release 202 bomblets. These smaller bombs burst in a furious repeating series of explosions, spraying thousands of pieces of shrapnel over a wide area. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. While causing relatively minor damage to structures, they inflict frightful damage on human beings.

According to Dr. Miodrag Lazich of the surgical department at Nish University Hospital, “Cluster bombs cause enormous pain. A person standing a meter or two away from the cluster bomb gets the so-called air-blast injuries, coming from a powerful air wave. The body remains mostly intact while internal organs like liver, brains or lungs are imploded inside. Parts of the exploding bombs cause severe injuries to people standing 15 to 20 meters away, ripping apart their limbs or hitting them in the stomach or head.” The starting speed of the explosive charge in a cluster bomb is more than three times that of a bullet fired from an automatic rifle. Consequently, as shrapnel strikes its victim, the combined kinetic energy and explosive power is capable of causing a wound up to thirty times the size of the fragment itself. Because the bomblets are dispersed, they can cover an area as large as three football fields with their deadly rain.

Dr. Zlatich showed us photographs of his city’s cluster bomb victims. We viewed page after page of civilians lying in pools of blood, and then – much worse, pre-autopsy photographs. What cluster bombs do to soft human flesh is beyond anything that can be imagined, and an anguished silence fell over the room as Dr. Zlatich flipped through the photos. Viewing such scenes was unbearable. Finally, Dr. Zlatich looked up at us and softly said, “Western democracy.”

We had the opportunity to visit these sites. On three separate occasions, we walked down Anete Andrejevich Street and talked with residents. It was on this street at shortly after 11:30 AM on May 7 that cluster bombs fell. At one end of Anete Andrejevich Street is a marketplace, and on the day of the bombing the area was busy with shoppers. The street was narrow, lined with buildings that were old and charming. Evidence of the attack was unmistakable. Almost every house was pockmarked, and shrapnel had gouged hundreds of holes in the walls of the more heavily damaged homes. There was no place for pedestrians to hide on that day. One parked car had not moved since the day of the bombing. It was still there, riddled with punctures and resting on flattened tires, its windows covered with plastic. Memorials to the victims were posted at the spots where they had been killed.

Home on Anete Andrejevich Street, pockmarked by cluster bomb fragments. Photo: Gregory Elich.

As cluster bombs descended on this neighborhood, a violent and rapidly repeating series of explosions sounded as the bomblets sprayed razor-sharp shrapnel by the thousands. Seventy-three-year-old Smilja Djurich was inside her home when the attack came. “It went blat-blat-blat,” she recalled. “I didn’t know where I was. I was completely stunned. If I had been in the street, I would have been dead. When it began, we rushed to the cellar. People were screaming afterwards.” She sobbed as she told a reporter, “I survived World War II, but I haven’t seen anything like this.”

A young man was killed near her doorstep, sliced to pieces and lying in a pool of blood. Nearby, an elderly woman, her forehead pierced by shrapnel, was stretched out in the street, a bag of carrots beside her. Zhivorad Ilich was selling onions and eggs on a cardboard box that served as a makeshift stall when flying metal killed him. Slavica Dinich explained how she managed to survive. “We ducked for cover under the bed. One bomb fell through the roof of the upper floor of our house.”

Bozidar Panich reported, “I was in my garden when I heard something crack.” He saw smoke rising from the street. “Then I looked at the sky above and saw a small parachute with a yellow grenade descending toward me. Instinctively, I threw myself to the ground and covered my head with my hands. The bomb landed and exploded beside me so that everything shook. I remember that I was all covered with soil. I ran out into the street to look for my son, who had gone out minutes earlier. On the street, it was chaos. The dead and wounded were lying all over the place…People were crying out for help, in shock, and the cars and roofs of houses were burning.”

At the corner of Jelene Dimitrijevich and Shumatovachka Streets, a memorial for Ljiljana Spasich was posted on a brick wall at the place where she was killed while walking home from the market. Only 26 years-old and seven months pregnant, she was just one month away from completing her fifth and final year at medical school. She had planned her life well, expecting to give birth shortly after graduation. But NATO had other plans for her, and an exploding cluster bomb canister killed both her and her unborn baby.

Memorial to Ljiljana Spasich, posted at the spot where she was killed.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

Accompanying Spasich on that day was her mother-in-law, Simeunka Spasich, who recalled, “We were 300-400 meters from our apartment and some 100 meters from the market when we heard planes. Suddenly, bombs were falling all around us. It was terrible. Explosions, smoke, leaves, branches…I felt a blow on my head, and blood leaking. Then I fainted. Several times I regained consciousness. I looked around me and realized that I was lying in the street, my right leg was broken as well as my right arm. People around me were dead or injured. It was terrible. Right next to me I saw my daughter-in-law Ljiljana, who was lying motionless. She was dead. At that moment, I thought her to be alive, but later they told me she had been killed on the spot, and the child could not have been saved.”

When the ambulance picked up Spasich, she lapsed back into unconsciousness. “I finally gained consciousness at the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade. My left leg was amputated below the knee, and my right hand was seriously injured. I could not move it. I was told that I would have to endure several operations more…My son, who came to visit me, told me that they did not believe I would stay alive, since my intestines had spilled.”

Two memorials to Pordani Seklich were posted on the front door window of the restaurant where she was employed as a waitress. She was in the kitchen when whizzing shrapnel tore through the roof and killed her where she stood. Our hotel, located across the Nishava, overlooked the neighborhood around Anete Andrejevich Street, and we had walked extensively throughout the area. It was an entirely residential neighborhood, with nothing that could be construed as a military target.

Only ten minutes after the cluster bombing of the marketplace neighborhood, a NATO warplane dropped an incendiary cluster bomb on the parking lot of the Clinical Center. A ball of fire engulfed the parking lot, igniting cars and sending thick clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky. Several homes on the adjacent block were damaged. Shrapnel by the hundreds shot through the hospital, causing the roof over the classroom to collapse. It was the everyday routine for staff to meet in the classroom at noon to discuss the war while eating lunch. Had the attack come twenty minutes later, all would have perished. In one room alone, over ninety holes from bomb fragments were counted.

Parking lot of Clinical Center, target of incendiary cluster bomb.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

The incendiary effect of the bomb brought to mind Djakovica, where NATO attacked a column of Albanian refugees who were returning to their homes in Kosovo. According to a wartime report in Jane’s Defence Weekly, the Pentagon was anxious to introduce the newly developed CBU-97 cluster bomb. This weapon was designed to spray shrapnel heated to an intense temperature and ignite everything within its blast radius. The charred remains of the automobiles in the parking lot indicated that this was probably the weapon used at the Clinical Center. Djakovica was another site that served as a testing ground for the CBU-97, where it proved a rousing success, killing 73 civilians and dismembering and incinerating most of them beyond recognition. Survivors of that attack scattered and sought cover in nearby homes. NATO pilots, spotting this, launched missiles on the houses, adding to the death toll.

The photographs I saw of the victims were horrifying. We were later to talk with Albanians in Belgrade who served in the Yugoslav government or held prominent positions in the society. One of them mentioned his anger over the slaughter at Djakovica, as well as other instances where NATO warplanes killed his fellow Albanians. “The man who could command NATO to bomb people is not human. He is an animal. After the bombing of Djakovica, I saw decapitated bodies. I have pictures of that. It is horrible, terrible. I saw people without arms, without feet.”

Office building of So Produkt, a distributor of salt products.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

The state-owned DIN cigarette factory in Nish was one of Yugoslavia’s largest manufacturing facilities, employing 2,500 workers. It was bombed on four occasions. The factory’s deputy managing director, Milovoje Apostolovich, told us that cluster bombs were among the munitions dropped on DIN. Workers found two cluster bomb fragments with messages scrawled on them: “Do you still want to be Serbs?” and “Run faster.” Apostolovich estimated damage to his factory at $35 million. A cigarette factory clearly lacked military utility. The only reason DIN was attacked was because it was the largest employer in Nish. We strolled through the factory’s grounds. A cruise missile had completely flattened the tobacco storehouse. Two of the larger buildings were substantially demolished. Merely to clear away the rubble would be an imposing task. Many of the smaller buildings had also sustained substantial damage. Bricklayers were busily rebuilding the canteen. Across the lane, the façade of the large financial and computer center bore the marks of a cluster bomb, with hundreds of gouged holes spread across its face.

Reconstruction continued at the state-owned DIN until it was made fit for privatization by a new Western-friendly government, as 1,400 employees were thrown out of work. In October 2003, DIN was purchased by Philip Morris, which six years later eliminated a third of the remaining workforce, terming those it laid off as “technological surplus.”

Several requests were filed by various parties with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to investigate NATO war crimes, including the cluster bombing of Nish. Established at the behest of the United States, from which it received the bulk of its funding, the ICTY was not an entirely disinterested party. Compelled to deflect persistent complaints about NATO actions, the ICTY Prosecutor’s Office formed a committee it authorized to conduct an “investigation” to determine if there was a basis for legal action against NATO.

Not surprisingly, the Prosecutor’s committee found no basis to charge NATO for any of its actions. In regard to the cluster bombing of Nish, it correctly pointed out that there is no treaty prohibiting or restricting the use of cluster bombs. The Prosecutor’s office added that it indicted Serbian Krajina leader Milan Martich for launching a cluster bomb missile at Zagreb because it “was not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the civilians of Zagreb.” NATO cluster bombs, evidently by their inherent nature, cannot be so characterized. “There is no indication cluster bombs were used in such a fashion by NATO,” the Prosecutor’s report asserts. The Office “should not commence an investigation into the use of cluster bombs as such by NATO.”

Bridge over the Nishava River.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

The report goes on to explain that military commanders are obliged to “do everything practicable to verify that the objectives to be attacked are military objectives,” and to refrain from striking purely civilian targets. Against all evidence, the Prosecutor’s Office claimed that most of NATO’s targets were “clearly military objectives,” and “military objectives are often located in densely populated areas.”

The evidence for arriving at that determination was clear, according to the Prosecutor’s Office. “It has tended to assume that the NATO and NATO countries’ press statements are generally reliable and that explanations have been honestly given,” despite the fact that when it asked NATO about specific incidents, replies were vague and “failed to address the specific incidents.” Only one conclusion was possible: “On the basis of the information reviewed, however, the committee is of the opinion that neither an in-depth investigation related to the bombing campaign as a whole nor investigations related to specific incidents are justified.”

Try telling Ljiljana Spasich’s widowed husband that his wife and unborn baby were legitimate military targets.

A Paper Peace and Proxy War With Iran

Shamus Cooke

Obama’s foreign policy is bound in a thousand knots, all threatening to unwind. At the same time that the U.S. is engaged in nuclear negotiations with Iran the two are fighting proxy wars against each other in Yemen and Syria.

Which begs the question: are the nuclear talks with Iran really that meaningful, if war is what’s practiced?

Yes, Obama has overcome the objections of the Republicans and the Israeli lobby to pursue the negotiations with Iran. But bombs speak louder than treaties.

Now Obama has turned up the Yemeni war-dial by announcing the U.S. Navy is being parked off the coast of Yemen to tighten the naval blockade, itself an act of war. Interestingly, the media was told explicitly that the U.S. Navy’s presence was directed against Iran to prevent weapon shipments from Iran to the Yemeni Houthis that now rule most of the country.

At the same time that Obama is preventing the Houthis from being armed, he is pouring military hardware into Saudi Arabia, who’s using it to bomb Yemen to smithereens, killing hundreds of civilians in the process (the Saudis recently announced an end to their ineffective bombing campaign).

And for what? The stated goal of the Saudi-U.S. war on Yemen is to re-instate the hated Yemeni dictator, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who has no political legitimacy or socical support inside of Yemen. The Houthis have much broader support than Hadi ever had.

But attacking the Houthis is “necessary” — from the Saudi-U.S. perspective — because the Houthis receive backing from Iran, not because the Houthis are “terrorists.” In fact, the Houthi’s sworn enemy is al-Qaeda, which the Houthis have battled a thousand times more effectively than Obama’s failed drone assassination program that killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians. But instead of helping the Houthis finish off al-Qaeda, Obama is helping Saudi Arabia attack the Houthis.

It’s a terrible misnomer to label the current Yemeni conflict as a Saudi war. The Saudi’s military is completely funded, trained, and directed by the U.S. military. The Saudi military doesn’t sneeze unless it has U.S. permission. And the Saudis would be unable to wage this war without the key additional U.S. support, including refueling Saudi aircraft and directing the warplanes where to bomb.

In short, Obama could end this war with one public statement demanding Saudi Arabia cease and desist. War over.

But instead, the U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen was allowed to deepen into a humanitarian catastrophe. The U.S.-Saudi forces have essentially blockaded the entire country, preventing anything from coming and going in Yemen, meaning that fuel, food, and basic medical supplies are evaporating.

According to an Oxfam spokesperson: “…land, sea and air routes must be re-opened [in Yemen] to allow basic commodities like food, fuel and medical supplies to reach millions in desperate need.”

Which brings us back to Iran. It’s difficult to predict Obama’s intentions in participating in “historic” nuclear talks with Iran, while the Yemen and Syria wars continue. Many have argued that Obama’s Iran policy is part of a fundamental shift in his Middle East policy, which is an attempt to become less dependent on Israel and Saudi Arabia.

But ultimately — as the war in Yemen proves — the U.S. will continue to prioritize Saudi Arabia and Israel over Iran. The reason is simple: U.S. foreign policy depends on allies willing to do basically whatever the U.S. wants, a kind of alliance that is rare and takes years to foster and maintain. Unlike the stalwart Saudis and other Gulf monarchy dictatorships, no one expects the Iranians to become subservient to U.S. foreign policy.

Furthermore, the current “strong allies” of the U.S. all view Iran as an “existential” enemy, by virtue of historic, religious, and most importantly, economic rivalries. Iran is a regional power in a region of competing regional powers, most notably Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel, and all want Iran destroyed so they can scavenge the carcass.

A key reason why Obama’s allies agreed to the ongoing catastrophic proxy war in Syria was that it was viewed as a first step in crushing Iran.  But the Syrian war blow back has sent millions of refugees across the Middle East and fostered the rise of the so-called Islamic State.

And while the Obama administration has hidden his hand in these regional wars, his administration remains the “decider” of Middle East foreign policy. The U.S. is directing its allies in the region after flooding the world with a historic amount of weapons.

According to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy:   “… the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II.”

The Obama administration has been arming Iran’s enemies while speaking soothing rhetoric to mislead the American public into thinking he’s practicing peace. But when actions and words collide so viciously the truth eventually explodes the lie.

The regional wars in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are pushing the entire region even closer to an even-broader regional war with incalculable consequences. Any peace in these circumstances will require a much deeper and concrete proposal than what is being discussed in the Iranian negotiations, the success of which remain in doubt.

Even if a nuclear deal is reached with Iran, the wheels have already been set in motion in the Middle East. There will be no sudden shifts in alliances when there are tens of billions of dollars in arms sales in place and countless diplomatic agreements cemented, and there will be no peace when decrepit regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel are armed to the teeth and hungry for war.

Beyond the Fight for a Minimum Wage

Eoin Higgins

Across the United States, the campaign for raising the minimum wage to 15 dollars is gaining momentum. From cities such as traditionally left wing Olympia, Washington, to more moderate Atlanta, Georgia, activists are pushing for better wages- and they’re starting to win the debate.

But will a higher minimum wage really change that much for the average American? It’s unlikely unless the struggle is broadened beyond the scope of the minimum wage in the United States. To explore this further, let’s start with a hypothetical future scenario of the results of the domestic struggle.

Once the groundswell of activism in favor of the 15-dollar minimum wage becomes too great to ignore, the concept will begin to be taken seriously by leading pundits. Leaders from Socialist Alternative, such as Seattle’s Kshama Sawant, will be ignored in the mainstream media.

Democratic politicians will offer tepid support for some larger raise in the minimum wage that won’t approach 15 dollars. Republicans and Fox News will be predictably rage filled at the prospect of this socialist project.

Inevitably, the call for a rise in the minimum wage will be too loud to ignore and shared by too large a portion of the US population, and political action of some kind will be taken. Inserted into whatever legislation is produced to hike up the minimum wage by however much it is hiked will be a caveat, added at the request of big business, that there not be a raise in the wage for the foreseeable future or some such profit protection.

In the aftermath of the law’s passage, prices will be increased more than needed to cover the wage under the cover of doing just that and those companies that decried the raise will be more profitable than ever. They also, most likely, will have massive subsidies in place to offset their “losses” from having to pay a livable wage as a concession from Congress for treating them so badly.

Even in the unlikely event the capitalist class can’t use subsidies and price increases on the domestic front to make up the profits, and probably even if they can, the squeezing of the international source suppliers will surely continue as well. Profits will be extracted and expanded at any cost.

No matter if things come to pass exactly in this way or not, American capital will not allow its profits to decline due to a wage increase for its workers in America. That much is clear.

Given the historical record of the reactions to possibilities for wealth declination for the rich and moneyed classes in America, a 15-dollar minimum wage will not be a magical salve with which the working class can heal the national wounds of unrestricted, rampant capital.

In every instance that labor has challenged capital in the past century, capital has eventually won out. Whether it’s the rolling back of the mild protections for the working class of the New Deal or the breaking of the unions under Reagan, capital has won far more battles than it has lost.

In fact, many battles “lost” by capital in the last century have since been “won”- it’s not an overstatement to say that the country is at a similar level of economic stratification that it was in the Gilded Age. If you take one step forward for every two steps back enough times, you’ll end up behind where you started.

In that context, then, the fight for the 15-dollar minimum wage needs to be seen as part of a larger struggle. Fighting for the right to have access, through one’s pay, to the necessities of life is important. No less important is ensuring that the power of capital to enforce its will upon the working class is severely curtailed.

The results of a successful fight for a higher minimum wage in the United States for the average American, then, will be positive for a limited time. Soon after any victory, the gains will fall apart in the face of the push of capital to wrench its profits from the working class. This is inevitable as long as capital is allowed to set the rules of engagement for the contest.

The struggle for equality and worker’s rights needs to be seen in a global context. The time when the Western working class could solve its problems without acknowledging the global struggle- if that time ever existed- is long over. Fighting for a higher wage in the United States must be accompanied by fighting for better working conditions and wages globally.