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Meister: A Halloween invasion from Mars
Guardian columnist Dick Meister is a longtime Bay Area journalist.
"2X2L calling CQ … 2X2L calling CQ, New York … Isn't there anyone on the
air? Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone?"
Millions of Americans — panic-stricken, many of them — waited anxiously
for a response to the message, delivered over the CBS radio network in slow,
flat, mournful tones on the crisp Halloween eve of Oct. 30, 1938.
"Isn't … there … anyone?"
There wasn't. Listeners heard only the slapping sounds of the Hudson River.
Many of New York's residents were dead. The others had fled in panic from
"five great machines," as tall as the tallest of the city's skyscrapers,
that the radio announcer at CQ, New York, had described in the last words he
would ever utter. The metallic monsters had crossed the Hudson "like a man
wading a brook," destroying all who stood in their way.
"Our army is wiped out, artillery, air force — everything wiped out,"
gasped the radio announcer.
It was the War of the Worlds, Mars versus Earth, and the Martians were
winning with horrifying ease. Their giant machines had landed in the New
Jersey village of Grovers Mill, and soon they would be coming to your town,
too … and yours … and yours. Nothing could stop them.
The War of the Worlds had sprung with frightening clarity from the extremely
fertile imagination of Orson Welles and the other young members of the
Mercury Theater of the Air who adopted Wells' novel and dramatized it so
brilliantly — and believably — from the CBS radio studios on that long ago
Halloween eve.
Their use of realistic sounding bulletins and other tools of radio news
departments made it sound as if Martian machines truly were everywhere, and
everywhere invincible.
Studies done at the time show that at least one million of the program's
estimated six million listeners panicked.
"People all over the United States were praying, crying, fleeing frantically
to escape death from the Martians," noted Hadley Cantril, an actual
Princeton professor who directed the most detailed study of the panic that
was caused in part by the pronouncements of "Richard Pierson," a bogus
Princeton professor played by Welles.
"Some ran to rescue loved ones. Others telephoned farewells or warnings,
hurried to inform neighbors … summoned ambulances and police cars … For
weeks after the broadcast, newspapers carried human interest stories
relating the shock and terror of local citizens."
"When the Martians started coming north from Trenton we really got scared,"
a New Jerseyian told one of Professor Cantril's interviewers. "They would
soon be in our town. I drove right through Newberg and never even knew I
went through it … I was going eighty miles an hour most of the way. I
remember not giving a damn, as what difference did it make which way I'd get
killed."
Those who didn't join the streams of cars that clogged the highways clogged
the phone lines or huddled in cellars and living rooms to await the end,
some with pitchfork, shotgun or Bible in hand.
"I knew it was something terrible and I was frightened," a woman recalled.
"When they told us what road to take, and to get up over the hills, and the
children began to cry, the family decided to go. We took blankets and my
granddaughter wanted to take the cat and the canary."
It was an extremely rare occurrence., as Cantril noted: "Probably never
before have so many people in all walks of life and in all parts of the
country become so suddenly and so intensely disturbed …"
And never since then has the country experienced such deep and widespread
fear and anxiety. Not even after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
three years later. Not even in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001.
It was a unique display of widespread panic. Many people actually believed
their very world was coming to an end and there was nothing anyone could do
to stop it.
Welles had made clear at the start that the presentation was fictional. But
radio listeners generally paid little attention to opening announcements,
and many Sunday night listeners commonly turned first to the very popular
Edgar Bergen-Charley McCarthy show that was broadcast over another network
in the same 8 p.m. time slot, turning to the Mercury Theater out of
curiosity only later.
What they heard that Sunday were primarily news reports and commentaries
ingeniously patterned on the real reports and commentaries that were
constantly interrupting programs to report the aggressive actions of Nazi
Germany and other events that would shortly lead to the outbreak of World
War II.
People expected to hear the worst. Most also expected that what they heard
would be accurate, radio having supplanted newspapers as the most trusted
and relied upon of the mass media.
It helped, too, that much of the information was presented by "experts" …
Welles and other make-believe professors from universities around the world,
supposed astronomers, army officers and Red Cross officials, even the
otherwise unidentified "secretary of the interior."
"I believed the broadcast as soon as I heard the professor from Princeton
and the officials in Washington," as one listener recalled.
Even relatively sophisticated and well-informed listeners were fooled by
what Cantril cited as the program's "sheer dramatic excellence."
Events developed slowly, starting with the relatively credible — brief news
bulletins calmly reporting some "atmospheric disturbances," later some
"explosions of incandescent gas," and finally the discovery of what appeared
to be a large meteorite. Only then came the incredible — the discovery that
the "meteorite" was a Martian spaceship, reported in a halting, incredulous
manner by the "reporter" supposedly broadcasting live from Grovers Mill.
The police, the New Jersey State Guard, the army — none could subdue the
invaders. Finally, the "secretary of the interior" announced that man could
do no more, that the only hope for deliverance from the Martians was to
"place our faith in God."
Few listeners were in a position to make independent judgements about
matters Martian. Few knew astronomy, and what standards does one use to
judge an invasion from Mars anyway?
Listeners could easily have turned to other radio networks for the truth, of
course, but many were too caught up in the masterful drama of the CBS
program to think of that.
Even some people who lived near the alleged invasion site were fooled. "I
looked out the window and everything was the same as usual," said one, "so I
thought it hadn't reached our section yet."
The second half of the hour-long broadcast, with "Professor Pierson"
wandering dazedly through the deserted and ravaged streets of New York,
should have made it obvious to even the most gullible that they had been
listening to drama rather than news. Welles, shocked and shaken by the
listener response, followed that quickly with an ad-libbed assurance that it
had all been make-believe.
But by then, many people had left their radios. They had other ways in which
to spend their last hours on earth.
Copyright © 2013 Dick Meister
Meister: The Legislature shows Congress how
Guardian columnist Dick Meister has covered labor and political affairs for more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which contains several hundred of his columns.
Forget for a moment what's happened  or not happened - in Congress. Concentrate instead on what's meanwhile gone on in the State Legislature, much of it for the benefit of California's working people.
The State AFL-CIO cites, for instance, the Legislature's passage this year of more than a dozen decidedly worker-friendly bills sponsored by the labor
federation and strongly backed by the federation's Democratic Party allies in Sacramento.
The most important of the bills will raise the state's minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 an hour by January of 2016. Other key laws:
*Require overtime pay for domestic workers, who are currently excluded from
most labor laws.
*Will make it easier for immigrant workers to get drivers' licenses and
protect them from retaliation when they speak out about poor pay and working
*Should make it easier for workers with criminal records who are denied jobs
despite their rehabilitation.
*Give corporate tax breaks to employers who create jobs.
*Increase the legal protections for the state's notably exploited farm
workers and car wash employees.
*Strengthen current laws that require builders holding state contracts to
pay their crews the prevailing wage for construction work in their areas.
*Encourage Employers and workers "to identify and minimize the risk of
workplace violence."
*Expand the law granting paid family sick leaves to workers caring for ill
parents and children to also include work time lost while caring for sick
parents-in-law, siblings, grandparents and grandchildren.
*Ease the unjust impact of current immigration law enforcement on workers
and families by limiting the state's cooperation with the federal "Secure
Communities" program.
Art Pulaski, the State AFL-CIO's chief officer, rightly claims that with
passage of the laws, California undoubtedly has become "the national leader
in sporting workers and their families."
What's more, says Pulaski, passage of the laws marked a crucial start of
"the essential work of rebuilding the state's middle class."
If only we could expect even a fraction of such important work from our
squabbling federal legislators.
Copyright 2013 Dick Meister
Guardian columnist Dick Meister has covered labor and political affairs for
more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.
Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which contains several
hundred of his columns.
Solomon: Obama will launch a huge propaganda blitz–and may attack Syria even if he loses the vote in Congress
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Information on the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
Grassroots pressure has forced President Obama to seek approval from Congress for an attack on Syria. But Obama is hell-bent on ordering a missile assault on that country, and he has two very important aces in the hole.
The administration is about to launch a ferocious propaganda blitz that will engulf a wide range of U.S. media. And as a fallback, the president is reserving the option of attacking Syria no matter what Congress does.
Until Obama's surprise announcement Saturday that he will formally ask Congress for authorization of military action against Syria, the impassioned pitches from top U.S. officials in late August seemed to be closing arguments before cruise missiles would hit Syrian targets. But the pre-bombing hyper spin has just gotten started.
The official appeals for making war on yet another country will be ferocious. Virtually all the stops will be pulled out; all kinds of media will be targeted; every kind of convoluted argument will be employed.
Hell hath no fury like war-makers scorned. Simmering rage will be palpable from political elites who do not want to see Congress set an unprecedented precedent: thwarting the will of a president who wants Pentagon firepower unleashed on another country.
President Obama and top Democrats such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will twist every arm they can to get a "yes" vote for attacking Syria. Meanwhile, most mainline media pundits, numbingly addicted to war, will often chastise and denigrate foes of authorization.
But we have a real chance to prevent a U.S. attack. One cogent argument after another, from intelligence veterans and policy analysts and weapons experts, has debunked the messaging for war on Syria. And some members of Congress — not nearly enough, but some — have begun to speak up with cogent opposition.
One of NPR's inside-the-box hosts of "All Things Considered" on August 30 asked Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) about the Obama administration's claim that missile strikes on Syria would be "a limited action" and not "war." Congresswoman Lofgren replied: "I think that anyone who argues that shooting missiles and dropping bombs on another country is not an act of war has got some further education warranted. If somebody shot cruise missiles at Washington for only one day, we would still consider it an act of war, wouldn't we?"
Not many members of Congress have Lofgren's clarity, and many of their votes on authorization are up for grabs. Each of us can help affect the outcome by demanding that our senators and representative oppose the war resolution. We should make our voices heard in all sorts of public venues.
The president's move for a congressional vote should cause a major escalation of anti-war activism. A straw in the wind: during just a few hours after Obama's announcement on Saturday afternoon, nearly 10,000 people took the initiative via RootsAction.org to email members of Congress with a "No Attack on Syria" message.
National opinion polling and momentum inside Congress indicate that we can defeat Obama's war resolution. It'll be a tremendous fight, but we can prevail.
But even if Obama loses the vote in Congress, there's a very real danger that he will proceed with ordering an attack on Syria.
Burying the lead almost a dozen paragraphs into a September 1 news story, the New York Times mentioned in passing: "White House officials indicated that Mr. Obama might still authorize force even if Congress rejected it."
A careful reading of Obama's Rose Garden announcement on Saturday verifies that he never quite said he will abide by the decision of Congress if it refuses to approve an attack on Syria. Instead, the president filled his statement with hedging phrases, detouring around any such commitment with words like these:
* "I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. … And I'm prepared to give that order. But … I'm also mindful that I'm the President of the world's oldest constitutional democracy."
* "I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress."
* "Over the last several days, we've heard from members of Congress who want their voices to be heard. I absolutely agree. So this morning, I spoke with all four congressional leaders, and they've agreed to schedule a debate and then a vote as soon as Congress comes back into session."
* "And all of us should be accountable as we move forward, and that can only be accomplished with a vote."
* "I'm ready to act in the face of this outrage. Today I'm asking Congress to send a message to the world that we are ready to move forward together as one nation."
At the grassroots, people across the United States will be working very hard to prevent congressional approval of an attack on Syria. That activism is imperative. But we should also understand that Obama has not committed himself to abide by the decision that Congress makes.
(Bruce B. Brugmann edits and writes the bruce blog on the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012.)
Extra! Extra! Calling all Nebraska Cornhuskers!
How to watch the Nebraska vs. Wyoming game at 5 p.m today on 403 cable and at the Final Final bar in SF (Saturday, Aug. 31, 2013). Plus: Some inside Nebraska football.
Well, today, first game day at the University of Nebraska/Lincoln, I got out my red Nebraska cap and my white sweat socks with a red trim and the former Jean Dibble got out her red Nebraska sweater.
Today is the opening game of the season for the Nebraska Cornhuskers and we planned to watch the game. We faithfully watched every game last year and we planned to do so again this year. Jean and I are both graduates of the University of Nebraska. I was editor for a semester in the spring of 1956 of the Daily Nebraskan (known affectionately in my day as the Rag) and we plan to return in October for a grand reunion of the Rag staffs through the years. Our grandson Nicholas Perez of Santa Barbara is a sophomore mechanical engineering student and has season tickets. And so we became even more faithful fans.
Normally, the opening game is a breeze for the Cornhuskers, but the opening game of the 1955 season, when I was the sports editor of the Rag, was a classic Nebraska loss in a state where NU football losses aren't tolerated. Nebraska played terribly and lost, 6-0, to the University of Hawaii at Memorial Stadium in a game so humiliating that the Cornhuskers never got closer than Hawaii's 13-yard line.
Immediately, the Nebraska press and the sports writers across the state erupted virtually in unison and started pounding on Bill Glassford, the coach, and kept piling on with increasing ferocity for the rest of the season.
The most virulent were the local sports editors, Dick Becker of the Lincoln Journal and Don Bryant of the Lincoln Star, operating with the power and safety of a joint operating agreement (JOA). (The JOA monopoly was soon to be declared illegal with President Kennedy's famous federal antitrust case against the JOA papers in Tucson, Arizona. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the JOA was a prima facie violation of antitrust law because it pooled profits, fixed prices, and shared markets. The JOA publishers, including the Lee chain that owned the morning Star and the Seacrest family that then owned the afternoon Journal, lobbied Congress and President Nixon to legalize retroactively JOAs with special interest legislation.)
I called Becker and Bryant the Bobbsey Twins of the Journal-Star, countered them whack for whack and defended Glassford with facts and gusto .After all, he was a solid coach with a decent 5-5 season, won second place in the tough Big Seven conference and went on to play in the Orange Bowl. I was surprised to find that I was about the only sports writer in the state to support Glassford.
Sadly, this was Glassford's last season and the end of his coaching career. However, a couple of coaches later, along came Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne and national champsionships and five decades of sold out crowds in Memorial Stadium. Later, I felt that I had been the precursor to Wes "Scoop" Nisker, a Nebraska native from Norfolk, and his famous motto he laid out as a newsman on KSAN radio in San Francsico during the during the dark days of Nixon and Vietnam. "If you don't like the news," Scoop would say, "go out and make some of your own." Perhaps, I later mused, this unlikely game in this unlikely place was the unlikely start of my career in fighting for the underdog and promoting alternative journalism.with the Bay Guardian.
But I digress. Updating my research from last year, this is how to watch today's game.
Nebraska is now a member of the Big Ten conference and so its games are shown on the Big Ten Network (BTN, cable station 403 in San Francisco.) Today's game will be broadcast at 7 p.m. Nebraska time, 5 p.m. California time.
And then there's the Nebraska bar in San Francisco, aptly called Final Final, the lively neighborhood sports bar at 2990 Baker Street, across from the Presidio. The bar is real Nebraska. It is owned by Arnie Prien, who comes from Lyons, Nebraska, and graduated from the university in 1964. He has been running Final Final for the past 36 years and loyally broadcasts Nebraska football games every Saturday on his premier giant screen.
The NU faithful, he told me, come from all over the Bay Area to see the games and enjoy Husker camaraderie. (I have always been leery of the alleged Herb Caen rule: never check the item, you might lose it.) So I called Final Final this morning to check. The game, I am happy to report, is on the big screen today at 5 p.m and the suggestion is to come an hour or so early for a seat and first shot at the free pop corn and inexpensive beer.
Final Final got its name from the days when the soldiers got their final drink before heading back to their barracks at the Presidio after a night on the town. This is most ironic, since the Lincolnites of my era suffered under strict drinking laws, which meant that one could not get a hard drink nor cocktail in a public bar but only in the sanctuary of the private University Club in the Stuart Building. And then only if one kept a bottle in a private locker.
There is no place like Nebraska. Especially in San Francisco. Go Big Red. b3
Final Final. 2990 Baker St. San Francisco 94123. 415-931-7800. Nebraska vs. Wyoming, 5 p.m.
P.S. The NU alumni site lists three other "watch sites" in the Bay Area. Jack's Brewing Company in Fremont. Legends and Heroes in Concord. And Knuckles Sports Bar in Monterey.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails b3, writes and edits the bruce blog on the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, l966-2013. He can be reached at bruce@sfbg.com.)
Solomon: What the assault on whistleblowers has to do with Syria
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Information about the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
Without whistleblowers, the mainline media outlets are more transfixed than ever with telling the official story. And at a time like this, the official story is all about spinning for war on Syria.
Every president who wants to launch another war can't abide whistleblowers. They might interfere with the careful omissions, distortions and outright lies of war propaganda, which requires that truth be held in a kind of preventative detention.
By mid-week, media adrenalin was at fever pitch as news reports cited high-level sources explaining when the U.S. missile attacks on Syria were likely to begin, how long they might last, what their goals would be. But what about other (potential) sources who have documents and other information that contradict the official story?
It's never easy for whistleblowers to take the risk of exposing secret realities. At times like these, it's especially difficult — and especially vital — for whistleblowers to take the chance.
When independent journalist I.F. Stone said "All governments lie and nothing they say should be believed," he was warning against the automatic acceptance of any government claim. That warning becomes most crucial when a launch of war is imminent. That's when, more than ever, we need whistleblowers who can leak information that refutes the official line.
There has been a pernicious method to the madness of the Obama administration's double-barreled assault on whistleblowers and journalism. Committed to a state of ongoing war, Obama has overseen more prosecutions of whistleblowers than all other presidents combined — while also subjecting journalists to ramped-up surveillance and threats, whether grabbing the call records of 20 telephone lines of The Associated Press or pushing to imprison New York Times reporter James Risen for not revealing a source.
The vengeful treatment of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, the all-out effort to grab Edward Snowden and less-publicized prosecutions such as the vendetta against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake are all part of a government strategy that aims to shut down unauthorized pipelines of information to journalists — and therefore to the public. When secret information is blocked, what's left is the official story, pulling out all the stops for war.
From the false Tonkin Gulf narrative in 1964 that boosted the Vietnam War to the fabricated baby-incubators-in-Kuwait tale in 1990 that helped launch the Gulf War to the reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction early in this century, countless deaths and unfathomable suffering have resulted from the failure of potential whistleblowers to step forward in a timely and forthright way — and the failure of journalists to challenge falsehoods in high government places.
There are no "good old days" to point to, no eras when an abundance of whistleblowers and gutsy reporters thoroughly alerted the public and subdued the power of Washington's war-makers. But we're now living in a notably — and tragically — fearful era. Potential whistleblowers have more reason to be frightened than ever, and mainline journalists rarely seem willing to challenge addiction to war.
Every time a president has decided to go to war against yet another country, the momentum has been unstoppable. Today, the craven foreshadow the dead. The key problems, as usual, revolve around undue deference to authority — obedience in the interests of expediency — resulting in a huge loss of lives and a tremendous waste of resources that should be going to sustain human life instead of destroying it.
With war at the top of Washington's agenda, this is a time to make our voices heard. (To email your senators and representative, expressing opposition to an attack on Syria, click here.) A loud and sustained outcry against the war momentum is essential — and so is support for whistleblowers.
As a practical matter, real journalism can't function without whistleblowers. Democracy can't function without real journalism. And we can't stop the warfare state without democracy. In the long run, the struggles for peace and democracy are one and the same.
(Bruce B. Brugmann edits and writes the Bruce blog for the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large and former editor and former co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012.)
Solomon: You failed to break the spirit of Bradley Manning: An open letter to President Obama
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Information on the documentary based on the book is at WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
As commander in chief, you've been responsible for the treatment of the most high-profile whistleblower in the history of the U.S. armed forces. Under your command, the United States military tried — and failed — to crush the spirit of Bradley Manning.
Your failure became evident after the sentencing on Wednesday, when a statement from Bradley Manning was read aloud to the world. The statement began: "The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We've been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life. I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country."
From the outset, your administration set out to destroy Bradley Manning. As his biographer Chase Madar wrote in The Nation, "Upon his arrest in May 2010, he was locked up in punitive isolation for two months in Iraq and Kuwait, then nine more months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Prohibited from lying down during the day or exercising, he was forced to respond every five of his waking minutes to a guard's question: 'Are you OK?' In his final weeks of isolation, Manning was deprived of all clothing beyond a tear-proof smock and forced to stand at attention every night in the nude."
More than nine months after Manning's arrest, at a news conference you defended this treatment — which the State Department's chief spokesman, P.J. Crowley, had just lambasted as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." (Crowley swiftly lost his job.) Later, the UN special rapporteur on torture issued a report on the treatment of Manning: "at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading."
At a fundraiser on April 21, 2011, when asked about Manning, you flatly said: "He broke the law." His trial would not begin for two more years.
Bradley Manning's statement after sentencing on Wednesday said: "It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability."
Public accountability is essential to democracy. We can't have meaningful "consent of the governed" without informed consent. We can't have moral responsibility without challenging official hypocrisies and atrocities.
Bradley Manning clearly understood that. He didn't just follow orders or turn his head at the sight of unconscionable policies of the U.S. government. Finding himself in a situation where he could shatter the numbed complacency that is the foundation of war, he cared — and he took action as a whistleblower.
After being sentenced to many years in prison, Manning conveyed to the American public an acute understanding of our present historic moment: "In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
"Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission."
Clearly, Mr. President, you have sought to make an example of Bradley Manning with categorical condemnation and harsh punishment. You seem not to grasp that he has indeed become an example — an inspiring example of stellar courage and idealism, which millions of Americans now want to emulate.
From the White House, we continue to get puffed-up sugar-coated versions of history, past and present. In sharp contrast, Bradley Manning offers profound insights in his post-sentencing statement: "Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light. As the late Howard Zinn once said, 'There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.'"
Imagine. After more than three years in prison, undergoing methodical abuse and then the ordeal of a long military trial followed by the pronouncement of a 35-year prison sentence, Bradley Manning has emerged with his solid humanistic voice not only intact, but actually stronger than ever!
He acknowledged, "I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others."
And then Bradley Manning concluded his statement by addressing you directly as president of the United States: "If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."
You failed to break the spirit of Bradley Manning. And that spirit will continue to inspire.
Solomon: Oiling the war machinery, from Oslo to Heathrow to Washington
In Oslo, the world's most important peace prize has been hijacked for war.
In London, government authority has just fired a new shot at freedom of the press.
And in Washington, the Obama administration continues to escalate its attacks on whistleblowers, journalism and civil liberties.
As a nation at peace becomes a fading memory, so does privacy. Commitments to idealism — seeking real alternatives to war and upholding democratic values — are under constant assault from the peaks of power.
Normalizing endless war and shameless surveillance, Uncle Sam and Big Brother are no longer just close. They're the same, with a vast global reach.
Last week, I met with the Research Director of the Nobel Committee at its headquarters in Oslo. We sat at one end of a long polished conference table, next to boxes of petitions signed by 100,000 people urging that the Nobel Peace Prize go to Bradley Manning.
The Nobel official, Asle Toje, remained polite but frosty when I urged — as I had two hours earlier at a news conference — that the Nobel Committee show independence from the U.S. government by awarding the Peace Prize to Manning. Four years after the prize went to President Obama, his leadership for perpetual war is incontrovertible — while Manning's brave whistleblowing for peace is inspiring.
In recent times, I pointed out, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to some dissenters who were anathema to their governments' leaders — but not to any recipient who profoundly displeased the U.S. government. Toje responded by mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., a rejoinder that struck me as odd; King received the prize 49 years ago, and more than two years passed after then until, in April 1967, he angered the White House with his first full-throated denunciation of the Vietnam War.
I motioned to the stacks of the petition, which has included personal comments from tens of thousands of signers — reflecting deep distrust of the present-day Nobel Peace Prize, especially after Obama won it in 2009 while massively escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
We were in the grand and ornate building that has housed the Nobel Committee for more than a hundred years. Outside, a bust of Alfred Nobel graces the front entrance, and just across a small traffic circle is the U.S. Embassy, an imposing dark gray presence with several stories, hundreds of windows on each of its three sides and plenty of electronic gear on its roof. (That intersection is widely understood to be a base for American surveillance operations.) More than ever in recent years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee building's physical proximity to the U.S. Embassy is an apt metaphor for its political alignment.
Over the weekend, the British government showed more toxic aspects of its "special relationship" with the U.S. government. As the Guardian reported, "The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programs by the U.S. National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow Airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro." David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, "was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. … Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and game consoles."
Assaulting press freedom is part of a comprehensive agenda that President Obama is now pursuing more flagrantly than ever. From seizing phone records of AP reporters to spying on a Fox News reporter to successfully fighting for a federal court decision to compel reporter James Risen to reveal his source for a New York Times story, Obama's war on journalism is serving executive impunity — for surveillance that fundamentally violates the Fourth Amendment and for perpetual war that, by force of arms and force of example, pushes the world into further bloody chaos.
The destructive effects of these policies are countless. And along the way, for the Nobel Committee, more than ever, war is peace. Across the globe, aligned with and/or intimidated by official Washington, many governments are enablers of an American warfare/surveillance multinational state. And in Washington, at the top of the government, when it comes to civil liberties and war and so much more, the moral compass has gone due south.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails b3, edits and writes the Bruce Blog for the Bay Guardian. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher, 1966-2013.)
Dick Meister: Still dreaming of justice
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website,www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.
Think back to Aug. 28, 1963. More than a quarter-million labor and civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. march onto the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand good jobs at decent wages and strict enforcement and expansion of the laws guaranteeing meaningful civil and economic rights to all Americans.
The demands, spelled out in Dr. King's famous "I have a Dream" speech that day, will be forcefully raised once again by a fiftieth anniversary March from the Lincoln Memorial to the King Memorial on the Mall this August 24.
The 2013 march has been called for very good reason: The need for greatly strengthened labor and civil rights is at least as urgent today as it was in 1963. By any measure, the 1963 March was a huge success. It had a direct and strong influence on the enactment a year later of laws prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and the passage two years later of the Voting Rights Act that enabled many African -Americans to freely cast ballots for the first time.
But despite the successes that followed the march, the nation once again faces severe economic and social problems. Consider:
*Voter suppression has become a serious problem once more, with several
states imposing new restrictions on the right to vote that have been upheld
in court.
*Unemployment remains notably high, particularly among African-American
workers, and young workers generally, even as a great need for workers to
rebuild the nation's crumbling transportation and energy infrastructure
continues to mount.
*Jobless workers now, as then, need much more government aid, with
unemployment insurance payments averaging only $300 a week. Many workers
who manage to find jobs are able to work only part-time or only temporarily,
and for less pay than they made on previous jobs.
*Millions of women workers face blatant job discrimination, as do older
workers, the young and African-American workers in general. They often are
paid less than others doing the same work, and often are denied promotions
that they've earned. Women sometimes face sexual harassment as well.
*Millions of workers, male and female alike, are forced to live on
poverty-level pay, including those workers making the grossly inadequate
federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Many of the country's fast-food
workers are lucky if they make even that.
*Millions lack paid sick leave needed to care for sick children and other
family members and to keep them from having to work when ill and endanger
the health of others as well as themselves.
*Public employees, who perform some of the country's most vital work, are
under steady attack by politicians and others who seize on them as
scapegoats by blaming the workers, many of them women and people of color,
for the economic problems that beset government at all levels. They strive
mightily to cut the employees 'pay and pensions and other benefits and mute
their political and economic voices.
*Income inequality is a severe problem. The gap between the haves and
have-nots is downright spectacular. A recent study by the Economic Policy
Institute showed, for instance, that the CEOs of major companies make on
average about 273 times more than the average worker. That's right
average executive pay is almost three times the average pay of ordinary
workers. Are those who direct work really worth so much more than those who
actually do the work?
*Thousands of workers are endangered by lax enforcement of job safety laws,
thousands shortchanged by employers who fail to pay them what they've been
promised and clearly earned.
*Anti-labor employers openly violate laws that promise workers the right of
unionization that would enable them to effectively try to improve their
inadequate pay and working conditions. That's one of the key reasons the
share of workers in unions has declined to a 97-year low of barely 11
percent.
*Despite the rise of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union, the
men, women -and too often children — who harvest the food that sustains us
all are barely surviving on their poverty level wages.
*Free trade agreements and the offshoring of U.S. jobs have led to the loss
of millions of domestic jobs.
President Clayola Brown of the AFL-CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, a key
2013 march sponsor named for the leader of the 1963 march, notes that as in
1963, "the job situation is deplorable. Today, we have 30-year-old people
who have never had a full-time job in their lives."
Brown will be among the thousands of union and civil rights advocates who,
like the marchers 50 years ago, are expected to gather on the National
Mall Aug. 24 to raise their demands for justice, as they march from one to
the other of the sculpted likenesses of two of the greatest advocates of
social and economic justice who've ever lived.
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and
politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website,
www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than
350 of his columns. Copyright 2013 Dick Meister.
(Bruce B. Brugmann writes and edits the Bruce Blog on the San Francisco Bay Guardian website. He is the editor at large and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble of the SF Bay Guardian, 1966-2012.)
Solomon: Memo from Oslo: If peace is prized, a Nobel for Bradley Manning
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."
Oslo, Norway: The headquarters of the Nobel Committee is in downtown Oslo on a street named after Henrik Ibsen, whose play "An Enemy of the People" has remained as current as dawn light falling on the Nobel building and then, hours later, on a Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning's trial enters a new stage — defense testimony in the sentencing phase.
Ibsen's play tells of mendacity and greed in high places: dangerous threats to public health. You might call the protagonist a whistleblower. He's a physician who can't pretend that he hasn't seen evidence; he rejects all the pleas and threats to stay quiet, to keep secret what the public has a right to know. He could be content to take an easy way, to let others suffer and die. But he refuses to just follow orders. He will save lives. There will be some dire consequences for him.
The respectable authorities know when they've had enough. Thought crimes can be trivial but are apt to become intolerable if they lead to active transgressions. In the last act, our hero recounts: "They insulted me and called me an enemy of the people." Ostracized and condemned, he offers final defiant words before the curtain comes down: "I have made a great discovery. … It is this, let me tell you — that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."
Alone, Bradley Manning will stand as a military judge proclaims a prison sentence
As I write these words early Monday, sky is starting to lighten over Oslo. This afternoon I'll carry several thousand pages of a petition — filled with the names of more than 100,000 signers, along with individual comments from tens of thousands of them — to an appointment with the Research Director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The petition urges that Bradley Manning be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like so many other people, the signers share the belief of Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire who wrote this summer: "I can think of no one more deserving."
Opening heart and mind to moral responsibility — seeing an opportunity to provide the crucial fuel of information for democracy and compassion — Bradley Manning lifted a shroud and illuminated terrible actions of the USA's warfare state. He chose courage on behalf of humanity. He refused to just follow orders.
"If there's one thing to learn from the last ten years, it's that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money," Bradley Manning biographer Chase Madar wrote. "And though information is powerless on its own, it is still a necessary precondition for any democratic state to function."
Bradley Manning recognized that necessary precondition. He took profound action to nurture its possibilities on behalf of democracy and peace.
No doubt a Nobel Peace Prize for Bradley Manning is a very long longshot. After all, four years ago, the Nobel Committee gave that award to President Obama, while he was escalating the war in Afghanistan, and since then Obama's dedication to perpetual war has become ever more clear.
Now, the Nobel Committee and its Peace Prize are in dire need of rehabilitation. In truth, the Nobel Peace Prize needs Bradley Manning much more than the other way around.
No one can doubt the sincere dedication of Bradley Manning to human rights and peace. But on Henrik Ibsen Street in Oslo, the office of the Nobel Committee is under a war cloud of its own making.
(Bruce B. Brugmann edits and writes the Bruce blog. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and the former editor of the Guardian co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble 1966-2012.)
Solomon: The moral verdict on Bradley Manning
The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.
In lockstep with administrators of the nation's war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant's culpability weighed heavy.
"Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house," another defendant, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial, 45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good order.
"We could not, so help us God, do otherwise," wrote Berrigan, one of the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on, removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. "For we are sick at heart…"
On the surface, many differences protrude between those nine draft-files-burning radical Catholics and Bradley Manning. But I wonder. Ten souls saw cruelties of war and could no longer just watch.
"I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy," Manning wrote in an online chat. Minutes later he added: "I think I've been traumatized too much by reality, to care about consequences of shattering the fantasy." And he also wrote: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
Those words came seven weeks after the world was able to watch the "Collateral Murder" video that Manning had provided to WikiLeaks. And those words came just days before military police arrived to arrest him on May 29, 2010.
Since then, huge numbers of people around the world have come to see Bradley Manning as personification of moral courage. During the last several months I've read thousands of moving comments online at ManningNobel.org, posted by signers of the petition urging that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The comments are often stunning with heartfelt intensity of wounded idealism, anger and hope.
No verdict handed down by the military judge can change the moral verdict that has emerged from people all over the world, reciprocating what Bradley Manning expressed online a few days before his arrest: "I can't separate myself from others." And: "I feel connected to everybody … like they were distant family."
The problem for the U.S. government was not that Bradley Manning felt that way. The problem came when he acted that way. Caring was one thing. Acting on the caring, with empathy propelling solidarity, was another.
Days ago, in closing argument, the prosecutor at Fort Meade thundered: "He was not a whistleblower, he was a traitor."
But a "traitor" to what? To the United States … only if the United States is to be a warfare state, where we "cannot make informed decisions as a public." Only if we obey orders to separate ourselves from the humanity of others. Only if authoritative, numbing myths are to trump empathy and hide painful truth.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails b3, writes and edits the bruce blog on the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife, Jean Dibble, 1966-2012).
Solomon: Obama's escalating war on freedom of the press
The part of the First Amendment that prohibits "abridging the freedom … of the press" is now up against the wall, as the Obama administration continues to assault the kind of journalism that can expose government secrets.
Last Friday the administration got what it wanted — an ice-cold chilling effect — from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on the case of New York Times reporter James Risen. The court "delivered a blow to investigative journalism in America by ruling that reporters have no First Amendment protection that would safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in the event of a criminal trial," the Guardian reported.
The Executive Branch fought for that ruling — and is now celebrating. "We agree with the decision," said a Justice Department spokesman. "We are examining the next steps in the prosecution of this case." The Risen case, and potentially many others, are now under the ominous shadow of the Appeals Court's pronouncement: "There is no First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a reporter from being compelled to testify … in criminal proceedings."
At the Freedom of the Press Foundation, co-founder Trevor Timm calls the court ruling "the most significant reporter's privilege decision in decades" and asserts that the court "eviscerated that privilege." He's not exaggerating. Press freedom is at stake.
Journalists who can be compelled to violate the confidentiality of their sources, or otherwise go to prison, are reduced to doing little more than providing stenographic services to pass along the official story. That's what the White House wants.
The federal Fourth Circuit covers the geographical area where most of the U.S. government's intelligence, surveillance and top-level military agencies — including the NSA and CIA — are headquartered. The ruling "pretty much guts national security journalism in the states in which it matters," Marcy Wheeler writes.
That court decision came seven days after the Justice Department released its "News Media Policies" report announcing "significant revisions to the Department's policies regarding investigations that involve members of the news media." The report offered assurances that "members of the news media will not be subject to prosecution based solely on newsgathering activities." (Hey thanks!) But the document quickly added that the government will take such action "as a last resort" when seeking information that is "essential to a successful investigation or prosecution."
Translation: We won't prosecute journalists for doing their jobs unless we really want to.
Over the weekend, some news accounts described Friday's court decision as bad timing for Attorney General Eric Holder, who has scrambled in recent weeks to soothe anger at the Justice Department's surveillance of journalists. "The ruling was awkwardly timed for the Obama administration," the New York Times reported. But the ruling wasn't just "awkwardly timed" — it was revealing, and it underscored just how hostile the Obama White House has become toward freedom of the press.
News broke in May that the Justice Department had seized records of calls on more than 20 phone lines used by Associated Press reporters over a two-month period and had also done intensive surveillance of a Fox News reporter that included obtaining phone records and reading his emails. Since then, the Obama administration tried to defuse the explosive reaction without actually retreating from its offensive against press freedom.
At a news conference two months ago, when President Obama refused to say a critical word about his Justice Department's targeted surveillance of reporters, he touted plans to reintroduce a bill for a federal shield law so journalists can protect their sources. But Obama didn't mention that he has insisted on a "national security exception" that would make such a law approximately worthless for reporters doing the kind of reporting that has resulted in government surveillance — and has sometimes landed them in federal court.
Obama's current notion of a potential shield law would leave his administration fully able to block protection of journalistic sources. In a mid-May article — headlined "White House Shield Bill Could Actually Make It Easier for the Government to Get Journalists' Sources" — the Freedom of the Press Foundation shed light on the duplicity: As a supposed concession to press freedom, the president was calling for reintroduction of a 2009 Senate bill that "would not have helped the Associated Press in this case, and worse, it would actually make it easier for the Justice Department to subpoena journalists covering national security issues."
Whether hyping a scenario for a shield law or citing new Justice Department guidelines for news media policies, the cranked-up spin from the administration's PR machinery does not change the fact that Obama is doubling down on a commitment to routine surveillance of everyone, along with extreme measures specifically aimed at journalists — and whistleblowers.
The administration's efforts to quash press freedom are in sync with its unrelenting persecution of whistleblowers. The purpose is to further choke off the flow of crucial information to the public, making informed "consent of the governed" impossible while imposing massive surveillance and other violations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Behind the assault on civil liberties is maintenance of a warfare state with huge corporate military contracts and endless war. The whole agenda is repugnant and completely unacceptable.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his emails and blogs b3, edits and writes the Bruce blog on the Guardian website at SFBG.com. He is the editor at large and former co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012.)
Solomon: The portrait of a leaker as a young man
Painted by Robert Shetterly for his Americans Who Tell The Truth Project.
A Portrait of the Leaker as a Young Man
By Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters With America's Warfare State."
Why have Edward Snowden's actions resonated so powerfully for so many people?
The huge political impacts of the leaked NSA documents account for just part of the explanation. Snowden's choice was ultimately personal. He decided to take big risks on behalf of big truths; he showed how easy and hazardous such a step can be. He blew the whistle not only on the NSA's Big Brother surveillance but also on the fear, constantly in our midst, that routinely induces conformity.
Like Bradley Manning and other whistleblowers before him, Snowden has massively undermined the standard rationales for obedience to illegitimate authority. Few of us may be in a position to have such enormous impacts by opting for courage over fear and truth over secrecy—but we know that we could be doing more, taking more risks for good reasons—if only we were willing, if only fear of reprisals and other consequences didn't clear the way for the bandwagon of the military-industrial-surveillance state.
Near the end of Franz Kafka's The Trial, the man in a parable spends many years sitting outside an open door till, near death, after becoming too weak to possibly enter, he's told by the doorkeeper: "Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it."
That's what Martin Luther King Jr. was driving at when he said, in his first high-risk speech denouncing the Vietnam War: "In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity."
Edward Snowden was not too late. He refused to allow opportunity to be lost. He walked through the entrance meant only for him.
When people say "I am Bradley Manning," or "I am Edward Snowden," it can be more than an expression of solidarity. It can also be a statement of aspiration—to take ideals for democracy more seriously and to act on them with more courage.
The artist Robert Shetterly has combined his compelling new portrait of Edward Snowden with words from Snowden that are at the heart of what's at stake: "The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the 'consent of the governed' is meaningless. . . The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed." Like the painting of Snowden, the quote conveys a deep mix of idealism, vulnerability and determination.
Edward Snowden has taken idealism seriously enough to risk the rest of his life, a choice that is to his eternal credit and to the world's vast benefit. His decision to resist any and all cynicism is gripping and unsettling. It tells us, personally and politically, to raise our standards, lift our eyes and go higher into our better possibilities.
[This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.]
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his emails and blogs B3, writes and edits the bruce blog on the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com He is the editor at large and was editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian, 1966-2012), He can be reached at bruce@sfbg.com b3
Solomon: Denouncing NSA surveillance isn't enough–we need the power to stop it!
For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.
Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers — past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient.
For a moment, walk a mile in the iron-heeled shoes of the military-industrial-digital complex. Its leaders don't like clarity about what they're doing, and they certainly don't like being exposed or denounced — but right now the surveillance state is in no danger of losing what it needs to keep going: power.
The huge digi-tech firms and the government have become mutual tools for gaining humungous profits and tightening political control. The partnerships are deeply enmeshed in military and surveillance realms, whether cruise missiles and drones or vast metadata records and capacities to squirrel away trillions of emails
At the core of the surveillance state is the hollowness of its democratic pretenses. Only with authentic democracy can we save ourselves from devastating evisceration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
The enormous corporate leverage over government policies doesn't change the fact that the nexus of the surveillance state — and the only organization with enough potential torque to reverse its anti-democratic trajectory — is government itself.
The necessity is to subdue the corporate-military forces that have so extensively hijacked the government. To do that, we'll need to accomplish what progressives are currently ill-positioned for: democratic mobilization to challenge the surveillance state's hold on power.
These days, progressives are way too deferential and nice to elected Democrats who should be confronted for their active or passive complicity with abysmal policies of the Obama White House. An example is Al Franken, senator from Minnesota, who declared his support for the NSA surveillance program last month: "I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people."
The right-wing Tea Party types realized years ago what progressive activists and groups are much less likely to face — that namby-pamby "lobbying" gets much weaker results than identifying crucial issues and making clear a willingness to mount primary challenges.
Progressives should be turning up the heat and building electoral capacities. But right now, many Democrats in Congress are cakewalking toward re-election in progressive districts where they should be on the defensive for their anemic "opposition" to — or outright support for — NSA surveillance.
Meanwhile, such officials with national profiles should encounter progressive pushback wherever they go. A step in that direction will happen just north of the Golden Gate Bridge this weekend, when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi appears as guest of honor to raise money for the party (up to $32,400 per couple) at a Marin County reception. There will also be a different kind of reception that Pelosi hadn't been counting on — a picket line challenging her steadfast support for NSA surveillance.
In the first days of this week, upwards of 20,000 people responded to a RootsAction.org action alert by sending their senators and representative an email urging an end to the Insider Threat Program — the creepily Orwellian concoction that, as McClatchy news service revealed last month, "requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions."
Messages to Congress members, vocal protests and many other forms of public outcry are important — but they should lay the groundwork for much stronger actions to wrest control of the government away from the military-industrial-digital complex. That may seem impossible, but it's certainly imperative: if we're going to prevent the destruction of civil liberties. In the long run, denunciations of the surveillance state will mean little unless we can build the political capacity to end it.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his name B3 in his emails and blogs, writes and edits the Bruce blog at SFBG.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and the former editor and the former co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be reached at bruce@sfbg.com.)
Dick Meister: Celebrating July Fourth with the enemy
By Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a veteran Guardian columnist and freelance writer.
The Fourth of July, as we all know, is Independence Day. Hurray for George
Washington and the revolutionaries, down with King George and the British.
That sort of thing.
But have you ever wondered what it's like on the other side? Have you ever
celebrated the Fourth across the border in Canada, in that territory settled
by pro-British "Loyalists" who fled the United States after the
Revolutionary War? It is a most peculiar experience for one accustomed to
the American way of viewing the events of 1776.
My wife Gerry and I observed the Fourth on the other side a few years back
— in Fredericton, the beautiful little capital of New Brunswick, named in
honor of King George's second son, Frederic. Going into Fredericton meant
going into the camp of a former enemy — a friend now, but a former enemy
who openly hails the "Loyalists" who fought for them against us. I mean
people who opposed our revolution and never even said they were sorry.
Our first stop was the hallowed Loyalist Cemetery near the banks of the
Saint John River at the far end of Waterloo Row, burial ground of
Fredericton's revered founders — anti-American tories, the lot of them. We
trudged down a muddy path to a ring of trees around a swampy grass clearing
in which the tory heroes lay, prepared to utter a revolutionary sentiment or
two over them in honor of the holiday.
We managed to get a quick look at a couple of thin, well-worn, tottering
slate headstones — but that was all. Before we could even open our mouths,
they struck — angry swarms of dread North woods mosquitoes. Backwards we
dashed. Quickly. Very quickly. We slapped at each other as we squished
awkwardly over the wet ground, batting mosquitoes off hair, face, neck,
arms, clothes. Much buzzing. Much stinging. They were everywhere. The
tories' revenge. For days afterward, we bore the swollen red marks of the
Loyalists.
More insults were to come, in the Legislative Assembly chambers downtown.
The chambers are elegant: ornately carved desks, elaborately patterned silk
wall covering, thick crimson carpeting. But look up on the walls, in the
places of honor on either side of the Speaker's chair. To the left there's a
portrait of George III, the very monarch we made a revolution against, to
the right a portrait of his queen, Charlotte — and both painted by no less
a master than Joshua Reynolds.
George is in fact treated much better in New Brunswick than he generally is
in Great Britain. Historians there ridicule him for being a bit of a loon
and for such loony acts as overtaxing the American colonists and
overreacting to their protests by then waging war against them. In
Fredericton, they think George did the right thing.
In the United States, of course, we celebrate the end of colonialism. But in
Fredericton they seem to yearn for its return. Union Jacks fly from staffs
all over town and portraits of Queen Elizabeth and her consort hang in
government and private buildings everywhere. Ceremonial guards outside City
Hall wear the white pith helmets, long crimson jackets and black uniform
trousers of the British colonial soldier.
Just behind City Hall stand the restored quarters of the British garrison
that was stationed in the city for more than a century, one of the buildings
now housing a museum full of anti-revolutionary twaddle. Captions below
portraits of leading Loyalists praise them for "faith, courage, sacrifices"
against Yankees, who are for the most part described as violent, crude, rude
and vulgar. Here, too, a portrait of George III hangs in a place of honor.
Among the Loyalists singled out is that other fine fellow, Benedict Arnold,
who lived in New Brunswick before slinking off to Mother England in 1791. At
least the museum keepers have the decency to own up to Arnold's "reputation
for crookedness."
Loyalists also are favorites in New Brunswick's neighboring province of Nova
Scotia, particularly in the capital of Halifax. There, the American
revolutionaries are portrayed as bad guys who would have made Nova Scotia a
U.S. colony if the British hadn't beefed up their garrison on Citadel Hill,
a massive fortress that towers high above the city, guarding every access,
be it by land or by sea.
The champion Loyalist stronghold is the New Brunswick city of Saint John.
"Loyalist City," it's called. It has a Loyalist Burial Ground, naturally,
but also a Loyalist Trail, Loyalist Apartments, Loyalist Coin & Collectibles
shop, Loyalist Pub and, among many other things loyalistic, Loyalist Days,
an annual week-long festival honoring Saint John's founders. At a high point
in the festival 100 or so appropriately costumed Loyalists — "His Majesty's
Loyal Troops" — fend off a brigade of actors portraying American rebels
attempting to "capture" Saint John.
The latter-day Loyalists claimed to like us nevertheless. In Fredericton,
for instance, a half-dozen U.S. flags fluttered smartly outside the Lord
Beaverbrook Hotel, the city's finest, and the marquee proclaimed, "We Salute
our American Friends. Happy 4th of July."
Sure thing. But watch out for the mosquitoes.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, or B3 as he signs his emails and blogs, is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be reached at the Bruce blog at sfbg.com.)
The Fourth of July: Remembering the good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, circa 1940s to 1950s
By Bruce B. Brugmann
(Note: In July of 1972, when the Bay Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)
Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.
The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.
The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.
Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, Elmer Menage, and the rest of the neighborhood gang would race out of their houses to catch the action. Some had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you'd gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for.)
Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.
"The trick," he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, "is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That's how you get the biggest clatter."
So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.
It was glorious stuff – not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that's another story for my coming Halloween blog.
Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer "Shene" Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don't recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don't think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Lyon County Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have "a safe and sane Fourth of July."
Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher's dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).
We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can't remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.
Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.
The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn't be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we'd been on the scene. My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann's Drugstore, "Where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902″) and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he'd say, and walk away shaking his head.
In any event, firecrackers weren't much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.
There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms beer at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.
Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.
In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: "Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let's give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…")
Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, " Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway? I can beat the hell out of any of you." And the crowd would roar back in glee.)
One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of local variety shows. "It's great to be in Rock Rapids," he would say expansively, "because it's always been known as the 'Gateway to Magnolia." (Magnolia, he didn't need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams' hometown: his "Sackamenna," as Caen would say. Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city "direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa."
For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a "town team," and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.
I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.
Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn't make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.
Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn't come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher's mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30's, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.
Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even good enough to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Reporter, "fisticuffs erupted at home plate." When the dust cleared, Jammer had a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch cafe, John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can't remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.
At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on their lawns. Those who didn't have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis' place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche's farm.
A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.
Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.
Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.
Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.
P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular on the evening of the Fourth of July.
From any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.
And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and the Mission Rock restaurant.
The action is informal but fiery, fast, and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and gingerly patrol the perimeter but don't bother anybody. I go every year. I think it's the best show in town. B3.
Normon Solomon: Terminal
Maria Poblet
Edward Snowden has provided, in my estimation and that of many others, a valuable journalistic and public service. And he has accomplished what he said he wanted to do: start a public debate on the NSA and its heretofore unknown amassing of our emails and phone messages, et al. Here's how you can help him.
Solomon: David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bill Keller wish Snowden had just followed orders
Edward Snowden's disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, "have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.
Agencies like the NSA and CIA — and private contractors like Booz Allen — can't be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.
With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, "in charge of materials procurement," goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he explains that "my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating." And he adds: "When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains."
That's what Booz Allen and similar outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.
But despite the best efforts of those contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as the Times put it, an "anti-authority spirit" might not fit "the security bureaucracy."
In the long run, Edward Snowden didn't fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.
Like the NSA and its contractors, the U.S. military is in constant need of personnel. "According to his superiors . . . Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq," biographer Chase Madar writes in The Passion of Bradley Manning. "However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed . . . to Iraq as an intelligence analyst."
In their own ways, with very different backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They worked for "the security bureaucracy," but as time went on they found a higher calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a right to know.
This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.
What a contrast with New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden's revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.
Brooks denounced Snowden as "a traitor" during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: "He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It's not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public. We have — actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition."
Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the conformist gospel: "When you work for an institution, any institution, a company, a faculty, you don't get to violate the rules of that institution and decide for your own self what you're going to do in a unilateral way that no one else can reverse. And that's exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose."
In sync with such bombast, Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller have promoted a notably gutless argument for embracing the NSA's newly revealed surveillance programs. Friedman wrote (on June 12) and Keller agreed (June 17) that our government is correct to curtail privacy rights against surveillance — because if we fully retained those rights and then a big terrorist attack happened, the damage to civil liberties would be worse.
What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives for civil liberties.
Solomon: The pursuit of Edward Snowden: Washington in a rage, striving to run the world
Rarely has any American provoked such fury in Washington's high places. So far, Edward Snowden has outsmarted the smartest guys in the echo chamber — and he has proceeded with the kind of moral clarity that U.S. officials seem to find unfathomable.
Bipartisan condemnations of Snowden are escalating from Capitol Hill and the Obama administration. More of the NSA's massive surveillance program is now visible in the light of day — which is exactly what it can't stand.
The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?
The same government that continues to expand its invasive dragnet of surveillance, all over the United States and the rest of the world, is now asserting its prerogative to drag Snowden back to the USA from anywhere on the planet. It's not only about punishing him and discouraging other potential whistleblowers. Top U.S. officials are also determined to — quite literally — silence Snowden's voice, as Bradley Manning's voice has been nearly silenced behind prison walls.
The sunshine of information, the beacon of principled risk-takers, the illumination of government actions that can't stand the light of day — these correctives are anathema to U.S. authorities who insist that really informative whistleblowers belong in solitary confinement. A big problem for those authorities is that so many people crave the sunny beacons of illumination.
On Sunday night, more than 15,000 Americans took action to send a clear message to the White House. The subject line said "Mr. President, hands off Edward Snowden," and the email message read: "I urge you in the strongest terms to do nothing to interfere with the travels or political asylum process of Edward Snowden. The U.S. government must not engage in abduction or any other form of foul play against Mr. Snowden."
As the Obama White House weighs its options, the limits are practical and political. Surveillance and military capacities are inseparable, and they're certainly huge, but constraints may cause major frustration. Sunday on CNN, anchor Don Lemon cited the fabled Navy Seals and said such commandos ought to be able to capture Snowden, pronto.
The state of surveillance and perpetual war are one and the same. The U.S. government's rationale for pervasive snooping is the "war on terror," the warfare state under whatever name.
Too rarely mentioned is the combination of nonviolence and idealism that has been integral to the courageous whistleblowing by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. Right now, one is on a perilous journey across the globe in search of political asylum, while the other is locked up in a prison and confined to a military trial excluding the human dimensions of the case. At a time of Big Brother and endless war, Snowden and Manning have bravely insisted that a truly better world is possible.
Meanwhile, top policymakers in Washington seem bent on running as much of the world as possible. Their pursuit of Edward Snowden has evolved into a frenzied rage.
Those at the top of the U.S. government insist that Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning have betrayed it. But that's backward. Putting its money on vast secrecy and military violence instead of democracy, the government has betrayed Snowden and Manning and the rest of us.
Trying to put a stop to all that secrecy and violence, we have no assurance of success. But continuing to try is a prerequisite for realistic hope.
A few months before the invasion of Iraq, looking out at Baghdad from an upper story of a hotel, I thought of something Albert Camus once wrote. "And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions."
Edward Snowden's honorable course has led him to this historic moment. The U.S. government is eager to pay him back with retribution and solitary. But many people in the United States and around the world are responding with love and solidarity.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails b3, is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian. He is the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian, 1966-2012. He can be reached at bruce@sfbg.com)
Solomon: Uncle Sam and Corporate Tech: Domestic Partners Raising Digital Big Brother
A terrible formula has taken hold: warfare state + corporate digital power = surveillance state.
"National security" agencies and major tech sectors have teamed up to make Big Brother a reality. "Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors," the New York Times noted. The synergy is great for war-crazed snoops in Washington and profit-crazed moguls in Silicon Valley, but poisonous for civil liberties and democracy.
"Much of the coverage of the NSA spying scandal has underplayed crucial context: The capacity of the government to engage in constant surreptitious monitoring of all civilians has been greatly enhanced by the commercialization of the Internet," media analyst Robert McChesney pointed out recently.
Overall, he said, "the commercialized Internet, far from producing competition, has generated the greatest wave of monopoly in the history of capitalism." And the concentration of online digital power is, to put it mildly, user-friendly for the surveillance state.
It's a truly odious and destructive mix — a government bent on perpetual war and a digital tech industry dominated by a few huge firms with an insatiable drive to maximize profits. Those companies have a lot to offer the government, and vice versa.
"The giant monopolistic firms that rule the Internet — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Version, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft — all have tremendous incentive to collect information on people," McChesney said. "There is a great deal of profit for these firms and others to work closely with the national security apparatus, and almost no incentive to refuse to participate. In short, there is a military-digital complex deeply embedded into the political economy and outside any credible review process by elected representatives, not to mention the public."
Central pieces of the puzzle — routinely left out of mainline media coverage — have to do with key forces at work. Why such resolve in Washington's highest places for the vast surveillance that's integral to the warfare state?
What has not changed is the profusion of corporations making a killing from the warfare state in tandem with Washington's quest for geopolitical positioning, access to fossil fuels and other raw materials — and access to markets for U.S.-based industries ranging from financial services to fast food.
Let's give credit to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for candor as he wrote approvingly in his book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree:" "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
I recently had a brief on-air exchange with Friedman, live on KQED Radio in San Francisco.
Solomon: "I think it's unfortunate the sensibility that Thomas Friedman, who's a very smart guy, has brought to bear in so many realms. For instance, we heard a few minutes ago, asked about Iraq and the lessons to be drawn — quote, 'We overpaid for it.' 'We overpaid for it.' Which is sort of what you might call jingo-narcissism, to coin a term. Just the dire shortage of remorse, particularly given Thomas Friedman's very large role in cheering on, with his usual caveats, but cheering on the invasion of Iraq before it took place. Full disclosure, this is Norman Solomon, I chronicled his critique in my book War Made Easy, his critique of foreign policy, and he did cheerlead — in his sort of kind of erudite glib way, he did cheerlead the invasion of Iraq before it took place. Just as, as I chronicle in the book, he was gleeful in his columns about the bombing of Serbia, including Belgrade, civilian areas, just chortled and very very gleeful about that bombing. One other point I'd like to make. His recent column about NSA surveillance is absolutely a formula for throwing away the First Amendment gradually in stages. The idea that somehow we should relinquish the sacred Fourth Amendment, a little bit at a time, maybe not a little bit at a time, because if there's terrorism that takes places in a big way again in this country then hold onto your hats — I mean, that is formulaic as an excuse, may I say a bit of a craven way, to accept this attack on our civil liberties."
Host: "Norman, let me thank you for the call and get a response from Tom Friedman."
Friedman: "Well first of all, I would invite, I wrote a book called "Longitudes and Attitudes" that has all my columns leading up to the Iraq War. And what you'll find if you read those columns is someone agonizing over a very very difficult decision. To call it cheerleading is just stupid and obnoxious. Okay. Number one. And on the question of the Fourth Amendment, as has been pointed out, there actually has been no case of abuse that has been reported so far with this program. Believe me, if there were one, two, ten or twenty, then I think we'd be having a very different debate. And so to simply — he says I'm dismissing the Fourth Amendment, which is ludicrous, I'm terribly agonized over this whole business — but to simply blithely say, 'Oh, you're just trying to use the threat of another terrorist attack,' as if that isn't a live possibility, as if we haven't had three or four real examples of people trying to do things that had they gotten through I think would have led to even worse restrictions on privacy and civil liberties."
Well, that's Thomas Friedman, in sync with the downward spiral of fear, threats, militarism and corporate consolidation. What a contrast with the clarity from Robert McChesney.
A week before the Guardian began breaking stories about NSA surveillance, McChesney appeared on FAIR's "CounterSpin" radio program to talk about the findings in his new book "Digital Disconnect." He warned that we "have an economy dominated by a handful of monopolistic giants working hand in hand with a national security state that's completely off-limits to public review, to monitor the population." And he said: "It's not a tenable situation for a free society."
Thunder from West Portal: Quentin Kopp savages the Warriors' Embarcadero Wall and its $220 million taxpayer subsidy
(Scroll down to read Kopp's column from the Westside Observer)
When then State Sen. Quentin Kopp was appointed to the bench in San Mateo County, some of his fellow judges took him out to lunch. "We hope you realize you have now given up your First Amendment rights," he was told.
Judge Kopp did as he was told and kept silent for years on the bench on the many issues he felt strongly about and would have taken on in the public arena. Today, however, he is retired, given up judicial restraint, and is back in action exercising his First Amendment rights with gusto. Operating from a desk in the office of Atty. Peter Bagatelos in West Portal, Kopp blasted the scavengers on behalf of an initiative aimed at upending the scavenger monopoly and controlling rates (he was right.) He has fired away at the RosePak/Willie Brown/Chinatown power structure on the Central Freeway.
He regularly blasts Mayor Lee for "compliancy" on big development, District Attorney for any number of misdemeanors and indiscretions, and former Sup. Sean Elsbernd for being Sean Elsbernd.
Now, in the current edition of the Westside Observer, Kopp has hit his stride with an acidic but well argued column titled appropriately, "The Art of Picking the Public Purse."
His lead: "It's all privately funded! Those aren't my words; those are the words of the billionaire owners of the San Francisco Warriors and compliant Mayor Edward Lee respecting the proposed (and financially complicated) Warriors proposal to build a mammoth sports and entertainment arena on San Francisco Piers 30-32."
Kopp wryly urges his readers to forget that the proposed project, "with Lee as the spear carrier (proudly proclaiming that the wrongly placed arena would be his 'legacy') would, if ever built, be higher than the "hated Embarcadero Freeway, which many San Franciscans spent years detesting and attempting to eliminate."
Instead, he said taxpayers should concentrate on the "taxpayer subsidy of up to $200,000 (including interest) to the Warriors." And he lays out the arguments and stats that demolish the Warriors' line that "it's all privately funded." Warming up, Kopp writes that the Warriors demand that Piers 30-32 be fully reconstructed, at Port cost, to a standard that will support the immense 19,000-seat arena. The reconstruction cost is an estimated $120,000,000. Every single penny of such $120,000,000 is public money, i.e. the Port. The Port must borrow the money to reconstruct those piers.
"From whom? The Warriors, of course, and for the privilege of borrowing such money (for the Warriors' benefit), the Port will pay the Warriors an exorbitant 13% per year as interest."
More: "the port must sell the Warriors an enormously valuable piece of public land across the Embarcadero (Seawall 330) for a highrise hotel, condominium and retail development (b3: gulp)." Still more: "under the proposed Warriors' deal, the $120,000,000 borrowing would be approved by a simple majority of the Board of Supervisors. The San Francisco Giants in 1996 and the San Francisco 49ers in 1971 were not afraid to secure voter/taxpayers approval. Maybe Lee and the Warriors are afraid the truth is that $120,000,000 is needed for the extraordinary cost of bearing the proposed arena's weight, and supporting facilities the Warriors want to build on a platform over San Francisco Bay (b3: gulp again.)" You get the idea.
Kopp's arguments cry for an independent analysis by Harvey Rose, the city's respected budget analysis, who did a prescient assessment of the costs of the America's Cup project. Kopp's columns, along with the excellent reporting of Patrick Monette-Shaw on Laguna Honda and George Wooding on the Ethics Commission and others, demonstrate that the Westside Observer under Editor Doug Comstock and Publisher Mitch Bull has become a sharp critic of City Hall from a neighborhood point of view and the best neighborhood paper in town.
Click here to read Kopp in full: http://westsideobserver.com/columns/quentin11.html#jun13
The paper is distributed monthly West of Twin Peaks but you can see it easily by going to the Observer's website at westsideobserver.com b3
(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails b3, writes and edits the Bruce blog at the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He is now off to attend his 60th reunion of the dream high school class of 1953 in Rock Rapids, Iowa. He will keep you posted.)
Bully for the ACLU! It went after the real lawbreakers
Scroll down to read the ACLU complaint in the New York Times story
For me, the crucial question was not whether Edward J. Snowden broke the law but whether the U.S. government had broken the law in secretly setting up and secretly expanding what the American Civil Liberties Union called its "dragnet"collection of logs of domestic phone calls.
The ACLU, filing on Tuesday one of its most important lawsuits ever, stated that "this practice is akin to snatching every American's address book, with annotations detailing who we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where. It gives the U.S. government a comprehensive record of our associations our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations."
The suit stated that this mass tracking violates the Patriot Act and the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The ACLU asked for the court to stop the Obama Administration from the practice and expunge the records.
"Every American" needs to read the ACLU suit embedded in the New York Times story. Let's get our priorities straight and go after the real lawbreakers. Bully for the ACLU. b3
Click here to read the Times story and complaint.
Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails B3, is the editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He writes and edits the Bruce Blog on the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012.
Tonight: Watch Amy Goodman discuss NSA leaks on MSNBC's Chris Hayes show at 5:40 p.m.
democracynow.org
TONIGHT: Watch Amy Goodman Discuss NSA Leaks on MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes at 5:40 pm
Watch Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman tonight at 5:40pm on MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes. She will discuss the NSA leak and Edward Snowden.
In the meantime, see all of Democracy Now!'s coverage of the National Security Agency including interviews with NSA whistleblowers William Binney, Thomas Drake and Russell Tice, as well as reporter Glenn Greenwald, who exposed the secret PRISM spy operation, among other revelations.
Solomon: Historic challenge to support the moral actions of Edward Snowden
In Washington, where the state of war and the surveillance state are one and the same, top officials have begun to call for Edward Snowden's head. His moral action of whistleblowing — a clarion call for democracy — now awaits our responses.
After nearly 12 years of the "war on terror," the revelations of recent days are a tremendous challenge to the established order: nonstop warfare, intensifying secrecy and dominant power that equate safe governance with Orwellian surveillance.
In the highest places, there is more than a wisp of panic in rarefied air. It's not just the National Security Agency that stands exposed; it's the repressive arrogance perched on the pyramid of power.
Back here on the ground, so many people — appalled by Uncle Sam's continual morph into Big Brother — have been pushing against the walls of anti-democratic secrecy. Those walls rarely budge, and at times they seem to be closing in, even literally for some (as in the case of heroic whistleblower Bradley Manning). But all the collective pushing has cumulative effects.
In recent days, as news exploded about NSA surveillance, a breakthrough came into sight. Current history may not be an immovable wall; it may be on a hinge. And if we push hard enough, together, there's no telling what might be possible or achieved.
The gratitude that so many of us now feel toward Edward Snowden raises the question: How can we truly express our appreciation?
A first step is to thank him — publicly and emphatically. You can do that by clicking here to sign the "Thank NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden" petition, which my colleagues at RootsAction.org will send directly to him, including the individual comments.
But of course saying thank-you is just one small step onto a crucial path. As Snowden faces extradition and vengeful prosecution from the U.S. government, active support will be vital — in the weeks, months and years ahead.
Signing the thank-you petition, I ventured some optimism: "What you've done will inspire kindred spirits around the world to take moral action despite the risks." Bravery for principle can be very contagious.
Edward Snowden has taken nonviolent action to help counter the U.S. government's one-two punch of extreme secrecy and massive violence. The process has summoned the kind of doublespeak that usually accompanies what cannot stand the light of day.
So, when Snowden's employer Booz Allen put out a statement Sunday night, it was riddled with official indignation, declaring: "News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm."
What are the "code of conduct" and "core values" of this huge NSA contractor? The conduct of stealthy assistance to the U.S. national security state as it methodically violates civil liberties, and the values of doing just about anything to amass vast corporate profits.
The corporate-government warfare state is enraged that Edward Snowden has broken through with conduct and values that are 180 degrees in a different direction. "I'm not going to hide," he told the Washington Post on Sunday. "Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."
When a Post reporter asked whether his revelations would change anything, Snowden replied: "I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state."
And, when the Post asked about threats to "national security," Snowden offered an assessment light-years ahead of mainline media's conventional wisdom: "We managed to survive greater threats in our history . . . than a few disorganized terrorist groups and rogue states without resorting to these sorts of programs. It is not that I do not value intelligence, but that I oppose . . . omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance. . . . That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs."
Profoundly, in the early summer of 2013, with his actions and words, Edward Snowden has given aid and comfort to grassroots efforts for democracy. What we do with his brave gift will be our choice.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, or b3 as he signs his blogs and emails, writes and edits the Bruce blog on the San Francisco Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be reached at bruce@sfbg.com.)
Solomon: An open letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee
Dear Senator Feinstein:
On Thursday, when you responded to news about massive ongoing surveillance of phone records of people in the United States, you slipped past the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you seem to be in the habit of treating the Bill of Rights as merely advisory.
The Constitution doesn't get any better than this: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The greatness of the Fourth Amendment explains why so many Americans took it to heart in civics class, and why so many of us treasure it today. But along with other high-ranking members of Congress and the president of the United States, you have continued to chip away at this sacred bedrock of civil liberties.
As The Guardian reported the night before your sudden news conference, the leaked secret court order "shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing."
One of the most chilling parts of that just-revealed Surveillance Court order can be found at the bottom of the first page, where it says "Declassify on: 12 April 2038."
Apparently you thought — or at least hoped — that we, the people of the United States, wouldn't find out for 25 years. And the fact that we learned about this extreme violation of our rights in 2013 instead of 2038 seems to bother you a lot.
Rather than call for protection of the Fourth Amendment, you want authorities to catch and punish whoever leaked this secret order. You seem to fear that people can actually discover what their own government is doing to them with vast surveillance.
Meanwhile, the Executive Branch is being run by kindred spirits, as hostile to the First Amendment as to the Fourth. On Thursday night, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement saying the "unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation."
That statement from Clapper is utter and complete hogwash. Whoever leaked the four-page Surveillance Court document to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian deserves a medal and an honorary parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Nation's Capital. The only "threats" assisted by disclosure of that document are the possibilities of meaningful public discourse and informed consent of the governed.
Let's be candid about the most clear and present danger to our country's democratic values. The poisonous danger is spewing from arrogance of power in the highest places. The antidotes depend on transparency of sunlight that only whistleblowers, a free press and an engaged citizenry can bring.
As Greenwald tweeted after your news conference: "The reason there are leakers is precisely because the govt is filled with people like Dianne Feinstein who do horrendous things in secret." And, he pointed out, "The real story isn't just the spying itself: it's that we have this massive, ubiquitous Surveillance State, operating in total secrecy."
Obviously, you like it that way, and so do most other members of the Senate and House. And so does the president. You're all playing abhorrent roles, maintaining a destructive siege of precious civil liberties. While building a surveillance state, you are patting citizens on the head and telling them not to worry.
Perhaps you should have a conversation with Al Gore and ask about his statement: "Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" Actually, many millions of Americans understand that the blanket surveillance is obscenely outrageous.
As a constituent, I would like to offer an invitation. A short drive from your mansion overlooking San Francisco Bay, hundreds of us will be meeting June 11 at a public forum on "Disappearing Civil Liberties in the United States." (You'd be welcome to my time on the panel.) One of the speakers, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, could explain to you how the assaults on civil liberties and the wars you keep supporting go hand in hand, undermining the Constitution and causing untold misery.
Senator Feinstein, your energetic contempt for the Bill of Rights is serving a bipartisan power structure that threatens to crush our democratic possibilities.
A huge number of people in California and around the country will oppose your efforts for the surveillance state at every turn.
(Bruce B. Brugmann, or b3 as he signs his blogs and emails, writes and edits the Bruce blog on the website of the San Francisco Bay Guardian at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be contacted at bruce@sfbg.com.) b3