A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
America’s cities are burning again.
In Minneapolis, after an unarmed and unresisting George Floyd, 46 and black, was killed by a white cop after being arrested for the non-violent alleged crime of trying to pass a fake $20 bill, protests immediately erupted.
Minneapolis cops, with a reputation for violence, responded to the initial protest with tear gas, rubber bullets and physical violence. After that the protests became more determined, leading
By Dave Lindorff
Imperial over-reach was on full display this week as the US government demanded that a pair of US citizens — former Special Forces soldiers leading a 60-man invasion of Venezuela with the goal of fomenting a coup and/or capturing or killing that country’s elected president — be released from arrest and returned to the US.
Bad enough that the US almost certainly knew in advance about this invasion which involved multiple simultaneous border crossings
By Dave Lindorff
The US is heading into uncharted waters as a polity, with the two likely candidates for president this November both clearly suffering from significant cognitive impairment and evidence of continuing mental decline.
Back in 1980, the American voters elected a man, Ronald Reagan, who unbeknownst to them already had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s dementia. By 1984 and his campaign for a second term of office, his White House staff and his wife Nancy
By Laurie Dobson
If you are on the left with nowhere to go, as Laurence O’Donnell explains in a ‘viral’ meme, you have to show that you are capable of not voting.
As Caitlin Johnstone has warned on April 13, in her article, at caitlinjohnstone.com , there will be a barrage of manipulation designed to pressure you to abandon your position.
As Seth
By Ron Ridenour
Entering into the debate on the pages of TCHB, namely pieces by Laurie Dobson (April 9) and Dave Lindorff (April 11), let me start by defining what social democracy is and is not.
Social democracy is not socialism. It is various reforms for improving workers lives so that they will not overthrow capitalism. The Nordic Model grew out of this Great Compromise between social democratic-led trade unions and wealthy property owners a century ago. In
By Dave Lindorff
Two hugely important people were taken down by COVID-19 this past week. Both have left a legacy, the importance of which cannot be ignored.
John Prine
The first struck down last week is one of the greatest modern songwriters of my lifetime, John Prine. One of my favorite musicians, Prine was a humble, funny and extremely deep and sometimes powerfully political folk musician who had the remarkable ability to infuse his songs with all those characteristics
by Kathy Kelly
April 3, 2020
On April 4, 2020, my friend Steve Kelly will begin a third year of imprisonment in Georgia’s Glynn County jail. He turned 70 while in prison, and while he has served multiple prison sentences for protesting nuclear weapons, spending two years in a county jail is unusual even for him. Yet he adamantly urges supporters to focus attention on the nuclear weapons arsenals which he and his companions aim to disarm. “The nukes are not going to go away by themselves,”
By Ron Ridenour
Copenhagen — “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of” Covid-19. For Marx and Engels writing the Communist Manifesto, in 1848, that spectre was communism, their political system of choice. This flaring ghost they described frightened the capitalist class, which endeavored to exorcise its breath.
The contemporary specter (thesis-see note) is a new corona virus, code named COVID-19. The spectre of communism lurks for a rebirth as the capitalist
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Over the course of just a couple of days last week, the backbone of the US Navy’s Pacific fleet was just been shut down for the next month. The enemy that managed to cause this sudden surprise unilateral disarmament of the mighty US Navy’s Pacific Fleet was not Russian or Chinese cyber hackers or a sneak attack by some foreign enemy. Rather, it was just a tiny virus, COVID-19, that infected one crew member on each of two $13-billion Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
The USS Reagan and its carrier group of support vessels is now holed up in Japan with at least two infected crew members on board so far and others being quarantined. Meanwhile, the USS Roosevelt, which had been steaming from the its homeport in San Diego armed to the teeth with attack aircraft, bombs other weapons, towards a mission in the South China Sea, has been urgently rerouted to Guam with an onboard epidemic that has already spread to a total of 38 sailors among it’s “Big Stick” crew of 5000.
This effective sidelining of the US Pacific Fleet’s only two carrier groups by some microscopic specks of inanimate RNA protoplasm, offers a perfect metaphor for the absurdity of the decades-long US misallocation of trillions of dollars to the military in the name of national security.
Clearly, the fact that the Navy, deprived of required air cover for the next month, is in no position to engage in significant military action in the Pacific doesn’t put the US in any jeopardy — only the crews of its two carrier groups, who are at risk a spreading coronavirus infection.
Meanwhile, though, the global pandemic caused by that same virus has infected nearly three-quarters of a million people around the globe and close to 150,000 here in America, which has replaced China as the epicenter of the pandemic. The US economy has already been brought to a screeching halt because of a lockdown of the population in most states and urban centers, while hospitals are being overrun with coronavirus patients and their doctors and nurses in desperate need of scarce ventilators, masks, test kits or just empty hospital beds.
Amid this unprecedented crisis, the Pentagon, Energy Department and other military agencies, are seemingly running on autopilot, continuing to spend over a trillion dollars a year (including $13 billion on yet another new carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, scheduled to be finished and ready for testing later this year), much of it on weapons intended for imagined wars against major powers like Russia and China, or intended for future interventions in countries around the world most Americans cannot even find on a map.
All this spending on arms is happening as it becomes increasingly clear that the biggest threat to the security of the American people is not foreign militaries or terrorist groups, but rather a tiny virus that is completely immune to all the weapons…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-its-a-tiny-virus
March 27, 2020
For the past three years, several dozen New Yorkers have gathered each Saturday at Union Square, at 11:00 a.m. to vigil for peace in Yemen.
Now, however, due to the coronavirus, the vigil for peace is radically altered. Last week, in recognition of the city’s coming shelter in place program, participants were asked to hold individual vigils at their respective homes on the subsequent Saturday mornings. Normally, during the public vigils, one or more participants would provide updates on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the ongoing war, and U.S. complicity. As COVID-19 threatens to engulf war-torn Yemen, it is even more critical to raise awareness of how the war debilitates the country.
If the vigil for peace were to gather in Union Square this Saturday, activists most certainly would draw attention to how Turkish officials indicted 20 Saudi nationals for the murder of the dissident writer, Jamal Khashoggi. Turkey’s investigation of the murder and dismemberment of Mr. Khashoggi indicts 18 people for committing the murder and names two officials for incitement to murder. One of them, General Ahmad Al-Asiri, a close associate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was deputy chief of intelligence when Mr. Khashoggi was murdered.
Numerous news reports over the past five years establish a pattern of Mr. Al-Asiri responding to inquiries about Saudi-led coalition military attacks against Yemen civilians with misleading statements, outright denials and attempted cover-ups.
For example, On August 30th, 2015, according to Human Rights Watch, a Saudi coalition led airstrike attacked the Al-Sham Water Bottling Factory in the outskirts of Abs, in northern Yemen. The strike destroyed the factory and killed 14 workers, including three boys, and wounded 11 more.
Later on August 30, after the airstrike, Gen. Al-Asiri told Reuters that the plant was not a bottling factory, but rather a place where Houthis made explosive devices. However, all of the individuals Human Rights Watch interviewed concurred:
…that plant was being used to bottle water and was not used for any military purposes… A group of international journalists traveled to the site of the blast two days after it was hit and reported that they could not find evidence of any military targets in the area. They said that they carefully examined the site, and took photos and videos of piles of scorched plastic bottles melted together from the heat of the explosion. They could not find any evidence that the factory was being used for military purposes.
Meanwhile, Yemenis were desperately trying to contend with rising cases of cholera caused by shortages of clean water.
In October, 2015, when eyewitnesses declared a hospital in northern Yemen run by Doctors Without Borders was destroyed by Saudi-led coalition warplanes, Gen. Al-Asiri told Reuters coalition jets had been in action over Saada governorate but had not hit the hospital.
On August 15, 2016, a Saudi-led bombing campaign again targeted a hospital in northern Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders. 19 people were killed.
The Abs hospital was bombed two days after Saudi airstrikes attacked a school in northern Yemen, killing ten students and wounding dozens more.
Yet Saudi officials continued to insist they struck military targets only. Commenting on the August 13 school attack, Gen. Al-Asiri said the dead children were evidence the Houthis were recruiting children as guards and fighters.
“We would have hoped,” General Al-Asiri said, that Doctors Without Borders “would take measures to stop the recruitment of children to fight in wars instead of crying over them in the media.”
In one of the deadliest attacks of the war, on October 8, 2016, the Saudi-led military coalition’s fighter jets repeatedly bombed a hall filled with mourners during a funeral for an official in the capital city of Sana. At least 140 people were killed and 550 more were wounded.
General Al-Asiri, still a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, suggested there were other causes for the blast and later reported the coalition had not carried out any strikes near the hall. But outraged U.N. officials, backed up by videos on social media, insisted that airstrikes had massacred the mourners.
The U.S. has steadily sided with Saudi Arabia, including supplying it with weapons, training its armed forces and covering for it in the United Nations Security Council. But “Defense One,” a U.S. news agency intending to provide news and analysis for national security leaders and stakeholders, recently issued a stinging rebuke to the Kingdom’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. They denounced the “humanitarian abomination ushered by Riyadh’s war in Yemen,” and called his leadership “as destabilizing to the Middle East as its Iranian rival.” Defense One urged Washington to discontinue enabling “Riyadh’s most reckless behavior.”
Turkey’s indictment of 20 Saudi nationals for murder and their insistence that Mr. Al-Asiri bears responsibility may help move the court of public opinion to resist all support for the Kingdom’s ongoing war in Yemen.
Particularly now, with intense focus on U.S. health care, it’s timely to recognize that in the past five years U.S. supported Gulf Coalition airstrikes bombed Yemen’s health care facilities 83 times. As parents here care for children during school closures, they should be reminded that since December 13, 2018, eight Yemeni children have been killed or injured every single day. Most of the children killed were playing outdoors with their friends or were on their way to or from school. According to the Yemen Data Project, more than 18,400 civilians have been killed or injured by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies since the initial bombing campaign in 2015.
U.S. national security leaders and stakeholders in war, as they shelter in place, have an extraordinary opportunity to set a new norm and link with the vigil for Peace in Yemen, virtually. And, some may even join Yale students on April 9, from sunrise to sunset, in their National Fast for Peace in Yemen. They invite us to pledge support for Doctors Without Borders and other relief groups in Yemen.
Photo (Bill Ofenloch): Activists practice “physical distancing” at a Saturday morning vigil for Peace in Yemen, Union Square, NYC
Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence