Bless the Traitors

Chris Hedges

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park. He was present at 6:00 am on October 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning.

Hale’s 2019 booking photo from the Nashville Police Department. Photo via AP

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

U.S.: Gun violence is surging — researchers finally have the money to ask why

Nidhi Subbaraman

Nature | July 21, 2021

People light candles at a memorial to three women who were shot by a gunman at a spa in Atlanta, Georgia, in March. Credit: Chang W. Lee/NYT/Redux/eyevine

Maeve Wallace has studied maternal health in the United States for more than a decade, and a grim statistic haunts her. Five years ago, she published a study showing that being pregnant or recently having had a baby nearly doubles a woman’s risk of being killed¹. More than half of the homicides she tracked, using data from 37 states, were perpetrated with a gun.

In March 2020, she saw something she hadn’t seen before: a funding opportunity from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study deaths and injuries from gun violence. She had mentioned firearms in her studies before. But knowing that the topic is politically fraught, she often tucked related terms and findings deep within her papers and proposals. This time, she says, she felt emboldened to focus on guns specifically, and to ask whether policies that restrict firearms for people convicted of domestic violence would reduce the death rate for new and expecting mothers. Male partners are the killers in nearly half of homicides involving women in the United States. “This call for proposals really motivated me to ask the research questions that I may not have otherwise asked,” says Wallace, an epidemiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

America’s Impressive History of Bioweapons Attacks Against Its Own People

Forget China-bashing conspiracy theories, let’s look at the fogging of SF, the microbial attack on the NYC subway and other unpleasantries perpetrated by the CIA and US military in our not-so-distant past

Lee Camp

MintPress News | July 08, 2021

Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — The Biden Administration, the mainstream media and pretty much all the politicians in our country continue to throw fuel on the Sinophobia fire initially stoked by former President and current Mar-a-lago “fungineer” Donald Trump.
(Word to the wise, “Sinophobia” means anti-China hatred, not anti-cinema hatred as I had thought. So I apologize to all the people who posted a movie review for Fast And Furious 27 and noticed a response comment from me reading “GODDAMN SINOPHOBE!” Under the circumstances, that was an odd thing to yell.)

During the Trump Administration, the Wuhan lab leak theory was called a ridiculous conspiracy that blossomed out of Trump’s racist brain — which it did. It absolutely did. And he should get some credit for that because anyone can be racist but Trump is a racist inventor. He comes up with new and exciting ways to be racist. So he deserves some credit for his innovation.

School Children, Fracking Fumes, Immigrant Parent’s Daughter, Climate Crisis and Billions of Dollar

Countercurrents | June 21, 2021

Media reports from the U.S. tell about environmental incidents and hardship of the common people in the society.

Fracking and Children

A Fort Worth Star-Telegram report (Thousands of Arlington’s schoolchildren are exposed to fracking fumes, report warns, Thu, June 17, 2021) said:

More than half of Arlington’s public school children attend classes within half a mile of a natural gas drilling site, prompting concerns about the effects of fracking on their health, according to a new report published Tuesday.

A year-long investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting — which produces the popular news podcast Reveal — found that more than 30,000 Arlington kids go to school near a drilling site. Up to 7,600 infants and toddlers are dropped off at private daycares within the same half-mile radius of drilling, according to the center’s analysis.

The Disintegrated States of America

USA IN DECLINE

Pepe Escobar

Thankfully, considering its urgent message, Martyanov’s book is finally being widely read. It’s already an Amazon bestseller.

Andrei Martyanov is in a class by himself. A third wave baby boomer, born in the early 1960s in Baku, in the Caucasus, then part of the former USSR, he’s arguably the foremost military analyst in the Russian sphere, living and working in the US, writing in English for a global audience, and always excelling in his Reminiscence of the Future blog.

I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing Martyanov’s previous two books. In Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, nearly three years ago he conclusively proved, among other things, how the missile gap between the US and Russia was a “technological abyss”, and how the Khinzal was “a complete game-changer geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and psychologically”.

He extensively mapped “the final arrival of a completely new paradigm” in warfare and military technology. This review is included in my own Asia Times e-book Shadow play.

Then came The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, where he went one step beyond, explaining how this “revolution”, introduced at the Pentagon by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the de facto inventor of the “pivot to Asia” concept, was in fact designed by Soviet military theoreticians way back in the 1970s, as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution).

A Journal of People report

WATER SCARCITY IN USA

Two Indigenous communities in New Mexico are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a revised federal rule that lifts protections for many streams, creeks and wetlands across the nation, saying the federal government is violating its trust responsibility to Native American tribes.

The pueblos of Jemez and Laguna are the latest to raise concerns over inadequate protections for local water sources in the desert Southwest. The challenge filed last week in federal court follows a similar case brought in 2020 by the Navajo Nation, the nation’s largest Native American tribe, and several environmental groups.

Ultra-Wealthy Evade 20% of Taxable Income

CAPITALISTS IN USA 

POLITSTURM | April 01, 2021

According to new research published in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the wealthiest Americans are more successful at evading taxes than was previously expected. The paper suggests that due to the use of sophisticated techniques, the sampled data of random audits do not capture the true amount of tax evasion. The authors estimate that the top 1% shelter 20% of their taxable income. 

Audit data showed a very small amount of tax evasion for the wealthiest Americans which can be explained by the use of foreign intermediaries (ex. Foreign bank accounts) and pass-through business entities which serve to complicate detection efforts.

FACE OF AN ECONOMY: The homeless and ‘no sit, no lie’ ordinance near Seattle

FACE OF AN ECONOMY 

A Journal of People report

On March 16, 2021, Everett City Council, Washington, a city 30 miles north of Seattle, passed a local ordinance, which will bar people from sitting or lying down in a ten-block belt of the city. The controversial ordinance passed in 5-1 vote.

The ordinance covers a section of the city’s industrial area. Violators will face either a $500 fine or 90 days imprisonment.

The majority of city council members, Everett’s mayor, and the business community in the 10-block area supported the ordinance.

The ordinance, detractors say, criminalizes and discriminates against homeless individuals.

Almost half of Americans think someone else is making the president’s decisions

U.S. POLITICS 

A Journal of People report

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 47% of Likely U.S. Voters believe Biden is really doing the job of president. The same number (47%) says others are making decisions for Biden behind the scenes.

The poll results released on March 16, 2021 raise an eyebrow, given the widespread discussion of Biden’s mental state ahead of November’s election.

The poll responses also raise questions about the role of Kamala Harris, who was so widely disliked as a presidential candidate in her own right that she actually dropped out of the Democratic primaries before states began voting, after Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard exposed some of the stains on the California senator’s record on the debate stage. In a year where the country’s reckoning with police abuses featured front and center among election issues, Harris’ term as California’s top prosecutor suggested she was in every way the wrong woman for the job.

FACE OF A POLITICS: Counting Crowd: A View From U.S.

FACE OF A POLITICS

A Journal of People report

Gatherings in a society tell about the society. It is an issue of politics. To the parties concerned with society, gathering is an issue to examine.

A Los Angeles Times report – “Thousands of pro-Trump crowds have gathered since he took office. No state has had more than California” by Rahul Mukherjee said:

“Despite its reputation as a leader of resistance, California saw more pro-Trump crowds than any other state during the president’s term in office.

“That’s according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project from the University of Connecticut and Harvard University that documents political gatherings of all kinds. By combing news reports and social media, the group has cataloged some 4,500 pro-Trump gatherings nationwide since he took office in 2017. Of those, 417 events were in California. Florida was a distant second, with 253 events.”