Bill Ayers

http://shpg.org/387/198005?action_id=1292969&akid=.18168.rLTUtQ&ar=1&rd=1&source=moveon

By Robert C. Koehler

“The easy movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military industrial-complex in operation.”

I was utterly stunned when I read these words of former Wisconsin senator William Proxmire, quoted in an essay by William Hartung, not because of the point he was making — like, what else is new? — but because he said them in . . . 1969.

Oh my God, fifty years ago!

This is basically the span of my adulthood. I was so young and revved up in 1969 — a hippie and idealist, a true believer in social change. We’d just defeated Jim Crow racism and antiwar consciousness was spreading across the nation, soon followed by the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement and environmental awareness. A new day was dawning! I could feel it in every fiber of my being. Even politicians were standing up, being counted.

For an instant, as I read Proxmire’s words, I remembered the bubble before it burst. Then I was overwhelmed with a sense of collective failure. When it comes to the culture of war, nothing has changed. Indeed. military-industrial financial leverage has grown enormously over the last half century, quietly consuming American democracy along the way.

As Hartung writes: “. . . there’s no question that spreading defense jobs around the country gives weapons manufacturers unparalleled influence over key members of Congress, much to their benefit when Pentagon budget time rolls around. In fact, it’s a commonplace for Congress to fund more F-35s, F-18s, and similar weapons systems than the Pentagon even asks for. So much for Congressional oversight.”

So much for hope. So much for any possibility of a sane, nuke-free, united planet. The “world’s greatest democracy” has morphed, over the course of my lifetime, into a money-driven military-industrial monstrosity, waging pointless wars, selling arms to the world, expanding its prison archipelago and generating endless wealth for the powerful — all the while insulated from public scrutiny by the mainstream propaganda industry, which shrugs and calls it all self-defense and situation normal as it serves up endless distractions to Spectator Nation.

But as I reflected on the extent to which money rules — and how we have quietly transitioned as a nation and as a planet to endless war, solely for the benefit of those who profit from it — I saw a light of hope coming from the oddest direction imaginable.

It’s called climate change. It’s called environmental disaster, existential crisis, the creation of an uninhabitable planet. Where “flower power” failed to change the world half a century ago, global warming, melting icecaps and rising oceans — even if they don’t obliterate civilization — will eventually strip money of its power to exploit the planet and do what it wants. Change is coming, no matter how many defense-industry lobbyists there are attempting to shape national politics.

Maybe climate change will “win,” but even if it does, nothing else, as far as I can tell, has the power to force humanity to think so utterly out of the box — by which I mean beyond the borders of nations — and to begin transitioning to a one-planet consciousness.

Here’s where we are today, as reflected in the tweets of Donald Trump: “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe . . . now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?”

This, of course, is the president raging against four newly elected congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — who have had the courage to stand up to him and have pushed for a sane environmental policy called the Green New Deal. His rant reveals caged thinking at its most blatant: thinking trapped in the borders of racism and nationalism, precisely the kind of thinking that has driven 500 years of Western domination and exploitation.

Trump talks and tweets in defiance of the rules that have emerged over the last 50 years, a.k.a., political correctness, the point of which is to hide global exploitation, war profiteering and the death of democracy behind a cliché-ridden cover story of respect for everyone.

The unspoken assumption behind this cliché is that national borders are as basic to the makeup of the planet as oceans, rivers and mountains. Human beings are defined by the nations in which they live and all problems we face are addressed either within the confines of our borders or in a state of national unity in violent opposition to the behavior of a “foreign” nation.

But climate change is a phenomenon that cannot be addressed in such a limited mindset, even though this is how the discussion begins. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, writing last month in The Guardian, noted that the term Green New Deal honors the massive response by FDR to the Great Depression of the ’30s — the New Deal — but pointed out: “An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

“Critics ask, ‘Can we afford it?’ . . . Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.”

While this is absolutely true, Stiglitz doesn’t go far enough. He fails to ponder what it means that this is not a “war” against anything or anyone except the natural consequences of destructive behavior: behavior that is at the foundation of Western, if not global, civilization. Fighting this war is as much a matter of demobilization — reversing courses of action, shrinking our carbon footprint — as it is mobilizing green energy production and rebuilding society around a green consciousness.

And a serious part of this new consciousness must be addressing what it means to live as part of one global community that is in peril from the consequences of exploitative human behavior. This is not a mere moral abstraction, something to do because it’s right and good. We will disappear as a species if we don’t — no matter how much money we have.

We have to start revering the whole planet, indeed, thinking as one planet, and valuing the people on both sides of the border. All of us are equal. At some point, even the war profiteers and the politicians they presume to own must wake up to this.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

THE MOP CLOSET OF AMERICAN HISTORY

By Robert C. Koehler

“They were quiet, and just staring, blankly,” she said. “There were just blank stares and no expressions on their faces.”

Welcome to hell, as presided over by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

This image bears deep reflection. It doesn’t change. Children are taken from their parents, jammed into cages. They have no lives left.

The speaker is Dr. Sara Goza, new president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who recently toured some emigrant detention facilities, including CBP’s Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas. “The first thing that hit me when we walked in the door,” Goza said, according to NBC News, “was the smell. It was the smell of sweat, urine and feces.”

A few days later, combat planes roared over the nation’s capital and Trump supporters cheered wildly, sucked in by the noise and excitement. America is great again, right?

The children in the cages weren’t cheering.

I know, I know. Who cares, right? Out of curiosity the other day I opened one of the right-wing emails that I somehow manage to attract and followed its link to a story at Breitbart: “A majority of Americans want mass deportations of illegal aliens if Congress fails to reach a deal this week that closes loopholes in the country’s asylum system that allow mass flows of foreign nationals to pour through the U.S.-Mexico border.”

This paragraph requires as much reflective groping as the other one. Suddenly the caged hell at the border doesn’t matter; it has no emotional impact. All it took was a different choice of words. When the issue is “illegal aliens” flowing over the border into the Land of the Free . . .

“In addition to costing us money they also cost us resources.” So began one of the thousand-plus comments at the end of the article. “Would California even have had a water crisis if millions of illegal aliens were using water meant for actual Americans?”

And here’s the national divide, defined with a razor cut across the soul. Those damn illegals were drinking water “meant” (can’t you just feel the divine empowerment in this word?) for “actual Americans.” Are the majority of actual Americans really this intellectually and psychologically caged, this trapped in their own ignorance? What’s next, telling the illegals to drink out of the toilet?

This country — the one defined by “actual Americans” endlessly needing to defend themselves against some lesser aspect of humanity — is not the country I believe in, but it’s the one I live in, at least for the moment. Its days are limited, simply because ignorance does not remain bliss for very long. We, by which I mean all of life, will survive and prevail only if we relearn that everything is connected. All people are connected. If we obsess about borders rather than focus on understanding, we will choke and die from the very dehumanization with which we contaminate Planet Earth.

And understanding must begin with knowing there is no such thing as “actual Americans” — there are only actual human beings.

Eerily, the NBC story in which Dr. Goza described the conditions the children she visited were enduring contained this random bit of information: The Central Processing Center that held them is “known as Ursula.” I almost couldn’t believe it, since I had already begun thinking how much this real-life scenario was reminding me of perhaps the most disturbing short story I have ever read in my life. The story is called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The author is Ursula Le Guin.

In this story, Le Guin cracks open the paradox of the human condition. She postulates a utopian city called Omelas, whose residents are joyous, loving and creative, their lives the fulfillment of all human striving. The scenario is seductive, though hardly credible, so the author pauses midway in the story to ask: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

And she tells us about a tiny room — not a cage, exactly, but a tiny closet: “In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket.

“. . . In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops.”

The child, the author explains, has been ripped away from a mother it still remembers and locked in a squalid mop closet. Its absolute misery constitutes the terms of the city’s prosperity and happiness. All the residents of Omelas know about the child; their visit to its cell in early adolescence is a coming-of-age ritual. They leave in tears, but most wind up accepting the bargain: one child’s misery in exchange for the happiness of thousands.

This isn’t exactly the American bargain, but it’s close enough to tear all certainty to pieces. Some of the children who left the Central Processing Center were asked to draw what their time was like at the detention facility. They drew pictures of kids in cages.

Fascinatingly, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has contacted the American Academy of Pediatrics about acquiring these drawings and adding them to its collection. The museum wants to continue “telling the complex and complicated history of the United States and to documenting that history as it unfolds.”

And director emeritus Brent Glass explained to NPR that the museum has a mission “to inspire people to know more about American history and to hopefully create a more humane society.”

You mean inspire actual Americans? Show them the mop closet? That may not be enough. What if we all spent some time living in it?

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

https://portside.org/2019-07-01/they-are-concentration-camps-and-they-are-also-prisons

On the hottest day in French history the French police were dutifully teargassing and attacking peaceful protestors—Yellow Vests in Montpellier, Environmental Activists in Paris protesting capitalist-generated cataclysmic climate collapse.
As the contradictions between neo-liberal economics and human life become more visible, police repression is becoming the new normal.

Link: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/28/hottest-day-history-france-world-told-do-not-look-away-police-tear-gas-climate?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=email_this

By Robert C. Koehler

“These aren’t people. These are animals.”

These words alone set off the alarm — the fascism alarm, you might say. Donald Trump is by no means the sole source of America’s democracy nosedive, but he’s its current, deeply troubling manifestation.

Should I write this week about the wars he wants to wage or the refugee border cages he continues to fill? They’re all connected, by their domination and punishment mindset, their subservience to war profiteering and the geopolitics of empire, their ignorant certainty that American exceptionalism is the cornerstone of national security, their indifference to human suffering andneed.

“We were in American concentration camps. We were held under indefinite detention. We were without due process of law. We were charged without any evidence of being a threat to national security, that we were in an unassimilable race, that we would be a threat to the economy.”

The speaker is Satsuki Ina, a woman who spent part of her childhood at a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II and who, with fellow childhood internees, recently stood in protest at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a U.S. military base slated to become a detention center for 1,400 immigrant children.

“We hear these exact words today regarding innocent people seeking asylum in this country,” she went on. “And unlike 1942, when America turned their back on us while we were disappearing from our homes, our schools, our farms and our jobs, we are here today to speak out, to protest the unjust incarceration of innocent people seeking refuge in this country. We stand with them, and we are saying, ‘Stop repeating history.’”

The only way to avoid repeating history is to face it squarely and atone for it. There’s a hell of a lot of history this country has not yet faced, but the Trump administration, with its blatant disregard for political correctness, is making it front-page news.

Indeed, you might say that Trump the blowhard is at best an amateur fascist, failing, as he so often does, to hide U.S. aggression behind established clichés. Thus, during the Obama administration, border internment wasn’t news at all, but Trump has managed to expose the hellish conditions and the ripped-apart families to the world.

Recently, for instance, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generated some indignant outrage when she tweeted, referencing an article in Esquire, that the United States has created a system of concentration camps to detain the asylum seekers flooding into the country from Central America. That was too much for Liz Cheney, who counter-tweeted: “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

But in point of fact, these are concentration camps. Historian Andrea Pitzer, quoted by Jack Holmes in the Esquire article that AOC cited, defines “a concentration camp system” simply and logically enough as “mass detention of civilians without trial.”

That doesn’t mean they’re the equivalent of Nazi death camps, but the term’s reverberations are legitimately troubling, because the process it defines is the same: dehumanizing a group of people based on race, religion, ethnicity or whatever (“These aren’t people. These are animals”); fomenting fear that their presence constitutes a “national emergency”; conducting mass roundups and detaining the arrestees indefinitely.

What could go wrong?

As Pitzer writes in her book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps: “There’s this crystallization that happens. The longer they’re there, the worse conditions get. That’s just a universal of camps.”

Some of these declining conditions were recently described on Democracy Now! by lawyer Warren Binford, who interviewed children at a detention facility in Clint, Texas: “(V)irtually no one is taking care of these children directly . . . they are locked up in these cells 24 hours a day. There are open toilets in many of these cells. There’s no soap, no way to wash their hands. . . . And many of them are being forced to sleep on concrete because of a shortage of beds and mats and sleeping space. Children described sleeping on concrete floors. They described sleeping on cement blocks.”

And, my God, when the children get sick, they’re placed in quarantine under conditions that are “just horrendous. These very sick children, with high fevers . . . being put on the floor, on mats, largely unsupervised, locked up together for days at a time.”

And Holmes points out: “Another issue is that these camp systems, no matter where they are in the world, tend to fall victim to expanding criteria. The longer they stay open, the more reasons a government finds to put people in them. That’s particularly true if a new regime takes control of an existing system, as the Trump administration did with ours.”

Thus, asylum seekers once had legal rights, but not anymore. As their numbers increased, due primarily to worsening conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (countries the United States helped ravage politically), virtually all the refugees started getting treated as “illegals.” And, writes Holmes: “There is reason to believe the criteria will continue to expand.”

These are American concentration camps, not simply in the tradition of the Japanese-American internment camps or World War II, but in that other tradition as well, across the ocean. They’re not death camps, but they’re evolving, I fear, in much the same moral and political void.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

By Robert C. Koehler

“These aren’t people. These are animals.”

These words alone set off the alarm — the fascism alarm, you might say. Donald Trump is by no means the sole source of America’s democracy nosedive, but he’s its current, deeply troubling manifestation.

Should I write this week about the wars he wants to wage or the refugee border cages he continues to fill? They’re all connected, by their domination and punishment mindset, their subservience to war profiteering and the geopolitics of empire, their ignorant certainty that American exceptionalism is the cornerstone of national security, their indifference to human suffering andneed.

“We were in American concentration camps. We were held under indefinite detention. We were without due process of law. We were charged without any evidence of being a threat to national security, that we were in an unassimilable race, that we would be a threat to the economy.”

The speaker is Satsuki Ina, a woman who spent part of her childhood at a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II and who, with fellow childhood internees, recently stood in protest at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a U.S. military base slated to become a detention center for 1,400 immigrant children.

“We hear these exact words today regarding innocent people seeking asylum in this country,” she went on. “And unlike 1942, when America turned their back on us while we were disappearing from our homes, our schools, our farms and our jobs, we are here today to speak out, to protest the unjust incarceration of innocent people seeking refuge in this country. We stand with them, and we are saying, ‘Stop repeating history.’”

The only way to avoid repeating history is to face it squarely and atone for it. There’s a hell of a lot of history this country has not yet faced, but the Trump administration, with its blatant disregard for political correctness, is making it front-page news.

Indeed, you might say that Trump the blowhard is at best an amateur fascist, failing, as he so often does, to hide U.S. aggression behind established clichés. Thus, during the Obama administration, border internment wasn’t news at all, but Trump has managed to expose the hellish conditions and the ripped-apart families to the world.

Recently, for instance, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generated some indignant outrage when she tweeted, referencing an article in Esquire, that the United States has created a system of concentration camps to detain the asylum seekers flooding into the country from Central America. That was too much for Liz Cheney, who counter-tweeted: “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

But in point of fact, these are concentration camps. Historian Andrea Pitzer, quoted by Jack Holmes in the Esquire article that AOC cited, defines “a concentration camp system” simply and logically enough as “mass detention of civilians without trial.”

That doesn’t mean they’re the equivalent of Nazi death camps, but the term’s reverberations are legitimately troubling, because the process it defines is the same: dehumanizing a group of people based on race, religion, ethnicity or whatever (“These aren’t people. These are animals”); fomenting fear that their presence constitutes a “national emergency”; conducting mass roundups and detaining the arrestees indefinitely.

What could go wrong?

As Pitzer writes in her book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps: “There’s this crystallization that happens. The longer they’re there, the worse conditions get. That’s just a universal of camps.”

Some of these declining conditions were recently described on Democracy Now! by lawyer Warren Binford, who interviewed children at a detention facility in Clint, Texas: “(V)irtually no one is taking care of these children directly . . . they are locked up in these cells 24 hours a day. There are open toilets in many of these cells. There’s no soap, no way to wash their hands. . . . And many of them are being forced to sleep on concrete because of a shortage of beds and mats and sleeping space. Children described sleeping on concrete floors. They described sleeping on cement blocks.”

And, my God, when the children get sick, they’re placed in quarantine under conditions that are “just horrendous. These very sick children, with high fevers . . . being put on the floor, on mats, largely unsupervised, locked up together for days at a time.”

And Holmes points out: “Another issue is that these camp systems, no matter where they are in the world, tend to fall victim to expanding criteria. The longer they stay open, the more reasons a government finds to put people in them. That’s particularly true if a new regime takes control of an existing system, as the Trump administration did with ours.”

Thus, asylum seekers once had legal rights, but not anymore. As their numbers increased, due primarily to worsening conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (countries the United States helped ravage politically), virtually all the refugees started getting treated as “illegals.” And, writes Holmes: “There is reason to believe the criteria will continue to expand.”

These are American concentration camps, not simply in the tradition of the Japanese-American internment camps or World War II, but in that other tradition as well, across the ocean. They’re not death camps, but they’re evolving, I fear, in much the same moral and political void.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.