From brussel at illinois.edu Fri Jun 1 02:13:18 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 02:13:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: A very long read on Russia US relations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9763B8A4-1D55-4DB0-9CD3-CC601373BC49@illinois.edu> Plenty of useful and interesting facts are presented in ths article, but largely misses the point of the feral antagonism towards Russia and Putin by U.S. politicians, academics and media, namely that Russia is a (potential) global competitor for influence, ideas, resources, and power, something which cannot be countenanced (by our corporate dominated militarized state). On May 31, 2018, at 5:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf] _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Jun 1 02:18:02 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 31 May 2018 21:18:02 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: A very long read on Russia US relations In-Reply-To: <9763B8A4-1D55-4DB0-9CD3-CC601373BC49@illinois.edu> References: <9763B8A4-1D55-4DB0-9CD3-CC601373BC49@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <47699EF6-E841-4B13-AEF1-95D6036D51B6@gmail.com> Exactly. > On May 31, 2018, at 9:13 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Plenty of useful and interesting facts are presented in ths article, but largely misses the point of the feral antagonism towards Russia and Putin by U.S. politicians, academics and media, namely that Russia is a (potential) global competitor for influence, ideas, resources, and power, something which cannot be countenanced (by our corporate dominated militarized state). > >> On May 31, 2018, at 5:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >>> >>> http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf ] >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 03:16:19 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 03:16:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?utf-8?q?Fwd=3A_=5BNew_post=5D_Moreno=3A_Assange?= =?utf-8?q?_Can_Remain_At_Embassy=2C_So_Long_As_He_Doesn=E2=80=99t_Practic?= =?utf-8?q?e_Journalism?= References: <139971992.4702.0@wordpress.com> Message-ID: From: Caitlin Johnstone > Subject: [New post] Moreno: Assange Can Remain At Embassy, So Long As He Doesn’t Practice Journalism Date: May 31, 2018 at 19:23:02 PDT New post on Caitlin Johnstone [https://i1.wp.com/caitlinjohnstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/cropped-caitlinpic1.jpg?resize=32%2C32&ssl=1] [http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/12152988a68a6d4dae7506812444c18f?s=50&d=monsterid&r=G] Moreno: Assange Can Remain At Embassy, So Long As He Doesn’t Practice Journalism by Caitlin Johnstone In 1999 I took a backpack and my life savings to South America, intending to spend six months traversing as much of the continent as I could possibly fit in. I landed in Ecuador and my plans changed almost immediately. I fell in love with the country and its people and ended up spending over half my time there. I arrived a few days after the banks had collapsed in a grim neoliberal foreshadowing as to what was going to happen in the States a decade later. Bank accounts were frozen as the government put salvaging the banks above feeding the people. There was anger and rioting, tear gas and rubber bullets, and a brass band. Always, there was a brass band. Sometimes shirtless, often shoeless, with a few dinged-up instruments creating a wild cacophony of joy to riot to. A tiny country with the equator running through three distinct topographies -- the coast, the alps and the jungle -- its claim to being "el mitad del mundo" rings true. It feels like you are living in the heart of the world. It is life, concentrated. And its people seem more real and more alive than any I have encountered in my many travels. Which is why I was not surprised when this plucky nation knowingly took on the wrath of the western empire in granting Julian Assange political asylum in 2012. While my own sycophantic country Australia pathetically ignored the plight of its own citizen, Ecuador defiantly strode forward, locked eyes with the US-centralized power establishment, and did what no one else was willing to. Granting political asylum to a journalist who is being persecuted for speaking truth to power was the right thing to do, and for a few fine years Ecuador showed the world its soul with this brave act. You can understand my dismay, then, to see President Lenín Moreno flushing it all down the toilet by now telling that same journalist that he will no longer receive political asylum if he ever again speaks truth to power. Ecuador's president Moreno: @JulianAssange will remain isolated indefinitely as he has "surpassed the limits of freedom of expression" (that Moreno invented) and Ecuador will "prevent him speaking about politics... That’s why we cut his communication".https://t.co/bhpeCe8pAP — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 31, 2018 In an interview with German publication Deutsche Welle, Ecuador's president confirmed reports that revoking Assange's political asylum is being actively considered and remains an option on the table, saying that his administration will "take a decision" if the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief refuses to comply with instructions to cease voicing his political opinions online. Saying that Assange's public geopolitical analysis has “surpassed the limits of freedom of expression,” Moreno's conditions on Assange's continued asylum amount to a demand that Assange cease to practice the journalism he was granted political asylum for in the first place. "Let’s not forget the conditions of his asylum prevent him from speaking about politics or intervening in the politics of other countries. That’s why we cut his communication,” Moreno said. WikiLeaks has publicly and repeatedly denied that Assange ever made any agreement to refrain from political commentary as a condition of his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and indeed we have never heard any talk about any such agreement until after Moreno took office last year. Assange has now been in effective isolation without any access to visitors, phone calls or internet for two months, reportedly due to a tweet Assange made criticizing the Spanish government's oppressive response to the Catalan independence movement. Ecuador's previous president, Rafael Correa, has denounced the Moreno administration's isolation of Assange as a form of torture. Claims made by Ecuador's public affairs office that @wikileaks editor @julianassange, arguably the world's best known free speech avtivist, is under a gag agreement, are, perhaps unsurpringly, entirely false. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 28, 2018 So it appears that Assange is being presented with three options: 1. Remain in isolation indefinitely and suffer the gradual decline of body and mind which necessarily comes with it. 2. Come out of isolation on the condition that he cease voicing his political opinions or doing anything which could be perceived as interfering in the affairs of another nation, which would be to cease practicing journalism, and, in a sense, cease being Julian Assange. 3. Be forced out of the embassy. All three options that Assange is being offered result in his being silenced. The police patrolling the embassy have standing orders to arrest him as soon as he sets foot outside regardless of his diplomatic status, the British government has for six years refused to say whether it has received a US extradition request for Assange, and the Trump administration has made no secret about its agenda to arrest Assange and crush WikiLeaks. He either rots in isolation, remains politically silent and inactive, or goes to prison under the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning. WikiLeaks publisher @JulianAssange "surpassed the limits of freedom of expression" by "speaking about politics" says Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno. Let that sink in. #FreeAssange pic.twitter.com/tTUKMLGLWl — #FreeAssange! (tweets by campaign)[⌛] (@JulianAssange) June 1, 2018 The western empire's agenda to silence a dissident journalist, which President Moreno is now fully facilitating, proves beyond a doubt that the world needs the truth-spreading work of WikiLeaks more than ever, and it proves that Ecuador was right to shelter him from persecution in the first place. Walking back on that to fall into imperial sycophancy after all these years is shameful. There are precious few forces in this world that have both the will to do great good and the power to enforce it. Ecuador is one of them. Here's hoping it turns around and shows the world that brave, indomitable spirit I fell in love with in 1999. ________________________ Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing my daily articles is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you'll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. [https://cdn.steemitimages.com/0x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/0x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/0x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/0x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/0x0/https://images.steemitimages.com/0x0/https://steemitimages.com/DQmYCXK2gdaSWuBx3KUJWqt8vcw3bJMrj3TfgF9zVjJeaAM/image.png] Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 Caitlin Johnstone | June 1, 2018 at 2:22 am | Tags: ecuador, embassy, julian assange, Lenin Moreno, wikileaks | Categories: Article, News | URL: https://wp.me/p9tj6M-1dQ Comment See all comments Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Caitlin Johnstone. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/06/01/moreno-assange-can-remain-at-embassy-so-long-as-he-doesnt-practice-journalism/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 11:32:36 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 11:32:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The Real News with Col. Wilkerson on the US in the South China Sea Part 1 Message-ID: AARON MATE: It’s The Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. A long-simmering dispute between the U.S. and China over the South China Sea is intensifying. China has accused the U.S. of what it calls a serious violation of Chinese sovereignty after two U.S. warships passed by the South China Sea islands that China claims as its own. China has built installations and conducted military exercises as part of its claim to 80 percent of South China Sea waters. That claim is disputed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brunei. But since 2010, the U.S. has gotten increasingly involved. And this week, Defense Secretary James Mattis said the U.S. will continue to confront what he called China’s militarization in South China Sea waters. JAMES MATTIS: There had been a promise in 2015 by the President Xi in the Rose Garden, the White House meeting, where he stated they would not be militarizing the Spratly Islands. We have seen the last month they have done exactly that, moving weaponry in that was never there before. We are going out of our way to cooperate with Pacific nations. That’s the way we do business in the world. But we are also going to confront what we believe is out of step with international law, out of step with international tribunals that have spoken on the issue. And part of this is we maintain a very transparent military activity out in the Pacific. AARON MATE: Joining me is Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, now a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary. Welcome, Colonel. If you could explain for us what you see as at stake in this complicated dispute, because it’s not just between the U.S. and the South China Sea- it’s not just between the U.S. and China over the South China Sea, but it also involves many other Pacific nations who are also at odds with China. LARRY WILKERSON: Yes, it does. At the head of that other list of nations, if you will, are a treaty ally with the United States, the Philippines, and another country with whom the United States has had various sorts of relations, of late fairly warm relations, Vietnam. Vietnam, of course, has its own ideas, and in many respects actually started all this by moving out on some of these unclaimed islands, [sealets], if you will, or islets, if you will, and beginning to do things on them. The Chinese picked up on that, and began to do more things. And of course, the Chinese had far more capacity to do these things than the Vietnamese did. So it is a contested thing that the Chinese are doing, but others, others have tried to do it, too, for various reasons. Fishing, possible fossil fuel resources, mineral resources, and so forth. I think China’s principal reason for doing it, we can see quite clearly now, is that they look at the South China Sea much the way we look at the Gulf of Mexico. But even more, if you will, in your face, because they see that as keeping, first of all, us at a distance from them, their very critical element, military elements in Fujian province and on [Hainan] Island, in particular. Getting a standoff distance, if you will, by being further out. And this is the maritime edge, if you will, of their Belt Road Initiative. The big one, of course, the trillion dollar one going across Central Asia. But this is a hedging strategy for that one. A maritime road, also, which we’ve seen recently in the news, really, because China is running railroads to Iran. It’s joining India and other countries in helping Iran do refurbishment of its ports, particularly in Chabahar and Bandar Abbas. So China is breaking out, if you will. It’s very ahistorical in some senses, because China has never been a power projection country. Never been a country that threatened people beyond its borders. It felt pretty content to stay within the Middle Kingdom and stay within the mandate of heaven, if you will, and not to mix with the other barbarians in the world. This is a very different kind of approach for China, and I think it comes along with having funded their military to the point now where their military is becoming somewhat like our own, where it has its own policy agenda, and civilians dare not disregard that policy agenda entirely. So yes, this is an area that presents us with a real challenge, because one, it introduces us to a possible confrontation area with the number one power in the world other than ourselves. And two, it’s fraught with all manner of allied participation, or friendly participation, for various and sundry reasons, most of which are self interest, just as is China’s. But China is much bigger than they are. And so they need us, bilaterally and multilaterally, to be able to stand up to China, whether they’re the Philippines, the Sultan of Brunei, or Vietnam. They need us. AARON MATE: Well, let me ask you, when the U.S. explains its reasons for being engaged in this dispute, of course the U.S. has no territorial claim to South China Sea waters, it cites exactly that. It says that our allies have asked us to intervene. Is that accurate? LARRY WILKERSON: Well, that’s accurate as far as it goes. But it’s rhetoric that covers up the real complexity and the real reason we’re there. And that is true in another place where China seems to be growing beyond its trousers, so to speak. We’re challenging them. This is the case wherever China reaches out and seems to be operating in a way that is inimical to international interests, but most cogently inimical to U.S. interests. We don’t want China having that vast swath of ocean that increases their strategic depth, particularly if someday we feel like we might have to take China on. It also, if you look at it closely, look at the map closely, it also more or less increases the isolation of Taiwan, because you spread China’s defensive perimeter out so far that you push Taiwan deeply into China’s strategic orbit. Of course, that’s what they want. That’s not necessarily what we want. So it’s a dangerous set of circumstances. And every day that goes by I sit and wonder, and I read, like Evan Feigenbaum’s recent long piece on China. Evan’s one of the smartest China heads going. And I’m listening to others who are in the region right now, some in Singapore, some in Burma, Myanmar, some in Sri Lanka, some in India, telling me about what they’re seeing with the land base, based Road initiative of the Chinese. And while I’m very confident that this is a, an initiative that has the chance to be a Marshall Plan times 10, or times 20 the vast sums that are associated with it, and lift maybe a billion people over time into the middle classes and out of poverty. I still see some of the ramifications of it as being increasingly so much in China’s interest and so little in the host country’s interest, if you will, like Sri Lanka, that I’m wondering just how innocent and how positive for the peoples in the region this Chinese initiative is. And so inevitably you see this tension building between the rising power and the status quo power that Graham Allison talked about in his recent book, and it’s worrisome, because we don’t need a war between these two powers. And to come back to your point, the South China Sea is a likely sparking point for such a war. I’ve done these war games. I know what it is to go to the defence of Taiwan, so to speak. I know what it is to take the Chinese on in these waters, and you don’t want to go there. Neither Beijing nor Washington wants to go there, and certainly not Japan, or Indonesia, or Australia, or any of the countries in Southeast Asia or nearby, or in Northeast Asia. You just don’t want to go there. It winds up being nuclear. In every war game I ever fought, it winds up being nuclear. That’s not where the world needs to be going. AARON MATE: All right. We’ll take a break and come back in Part 2. My guest is Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and currently a history professor at the College of William and Mary. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Fri Jun 1 11:41:28 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 06:41:28 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana Message-ID: <59231ec3-ab17-a578-65e7-309d22540d8f@gmail.com> #FamiliesBelongTogether Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 US Attorney's Office in Urbana 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 RSVP here: https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 >From ACLU People Power. They write: We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are carrying out Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. Attorneys. ICE apprehends and separates families while US Attorneys enforce the separation in legal proceedings. We need to stand up against this incompetence and the moral abomination of family separation. We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to hold family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your friends, wheel your stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and make your family's voice heard loud and clear, that #FamiliesBelongTogether. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Fri Jun 1 15:51:10 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2018 10:51:10 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana Message-ID: Sorry to hitch onto this thread. Is AWARE holding regular Ist Saturday of month protest in downtown Champaign tomorrow, June 2? We discussed it at last Sundays AWARE meeting. Attendees were Don, Genevieve, Doug, Anne Bj. (Hope I have names and spelling correct!) Consensus on Sunday seemed to be yes. Question was- is there something else going on downtown that might interfere with protest? Also do we need a flyer? Suggestion on flyer: "Do All Lives Matter?" What about Native Americans? " Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Stuart Levy via Peace-discussDate: Fri, Jun 1, 2018 6:42 AMTo: Peace;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana #FamiliesBelongTogether Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 US Attorney's Office in Urbana 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 RSVP here: https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 From ACLU People Power. They write: We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are carrying out Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. Attorneys. ICE apprehends and separates families while US Attorneys enforce the separation in legal proceedings. We need to stand up against this incompetence and the moral abomination of family separation. We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to hold family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your friends, wheel your stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and make your family's voice heard loud and clear, that #FamiliesBelongTogether. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Fri Jun 1 16:06:00 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 11:06:00 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I assume we are demonstrating in downtown Champaign on Saturday at 2, yes. Has anyone heard of some goings-on that conflict with it? On 06/01/2018 10:51 AM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: > Sorry to hitch onto this thread. Is AWARE holding regular Ist Saturday > of month protest in downtown Champaign tomorrow, June 2? We discussed > it at last Sundays AWARE meeting. Attendees were Don, Genevieve, Doug, > Anne Bj. (Hope I have names and spelling correct!) Consensus on Sunday > seemed to be yes. Question was- is there something else going on > downtown that might interfere with protest? Also do we need a flyer? > Suggestion on flyer: > "Do All Lives Matter?" What about Native Americans? " > > /Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone/ > > ------ Original message------ > *From: *Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss > *Date: *Fri, Jun 1, 2018 6:42 AM > *To: *Peace; > *Cc: * > *Subject:*[Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon > *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana > > #FamiliesBelongTogether > > Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 > US Attorney's Office in Urbana > 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 > > RSVP here: > https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 > > From ACLU People Power. They write: > > We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are > carrying out Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. > Attorneys. ICE apprehends and separates families while US > Attorneys enforce the separation in legal proceedings. We need to > stand up against this incompetence and the moral abomination of > family separation. > > We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers > Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to > hold family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your > friends, wheel your stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and > make your family's voice heard loud and clear, that > #FamiliesBelongTogether. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 16:10:00 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 16:10:00 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana In-Reply-To: References:

Message-ID: My assumption is that we will be holding it per usual Saturday, downtown 2:00 - 4:00pm, whether there is something else or not. The “Mothers against Guns" are holding a memorial in Westlake Park, I believe it is, at 4:00 pm. So I see it as complimentary, and hope Aware people will attend that as well. Provided its not too hot. On Jun 1, 2018, at 09:06, Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss > wrote: I assume we are demonstrating in downtown Champaign on Saturday at 2, yes. Has anyone heard of some goings-on that conflict with it? On 06/01/2018 10:51 AM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: Sorry to hitch onto this thread. Is AWARE holding regular Ist Saturday of month protest in downtown Champaign tomorrow, June 2? We discussed it at last Sundays AWARE meeting. Attendees were Don, Genevieve, Doug, Anne Bj. (Hope I have names and spelling correct!) Consensus on Sunday seemed to be yes. Question was- is there something else going on downtown that might interfere with protest? Also do we need a flyer? Suggestion on flyer: "Do All Lives Matter?" What about Native Americans? " Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss Date: Fri, Jun 1, 2018 6:42 AM To: Peace; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana #FamiliesBelongTogether Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 US Attorney's Office in Urbana 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 RSVP here: https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 From ACLU People Power. They write: We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are carrying out Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. Attorneys. ICE apprehends and separates families while US Attorneys enforce the separation in legal proceedings. We need to stand up against this incompetence and the moral abomination of family separation. We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to hold family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your friends, wheel your stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and make your family's voice heard loud and clear, that #FamiliesBelongTogether. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 17:26:20 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 17:26:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: AWARE Demo. Saturday References: Message-ID: In response to Ann’s question on flyers. Usually they are created by Carl, and printed out by David Green, unless otherwise suggested. The focus is on our “foreign policy of war.” The racism which is related to our wars, primarily in the middle east since 9/11. Most Americans have no idea we are currently conducting eight wars, thus we’re left with little space to go into the history of US imperialism, though it is discussed frequently by Carl and David on the tv programs. A problem is, that we are provoking new wars with Iran, Russia and China. Given they are not small vulnerable nations, its a very dangerous situation. Getting all this info. into a one page flyer isn’t easy, but one Carl and David have managed to do very nicely over the years. Begin forwarded message: From: Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Subject: My assumption is that we will be holding it per usual Saturday, downtown 2:00 - 4:00pm, whether there is something else or not. The “Mothers against Guns" are holding a memorial in Westlake Park, I believe it is, at 4:00 pm. So I see it as complimentary, and hope Aware people will attend that as well. Provided its not too hot. On Jun 1, 2018, at 09:06, Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss > wrote: I assume we are demonstrating in downtown Champaign on Saturday at 2, yes. Has anyone heard of some goings-on that conflict with it? On 06/01/2018 10:51 AM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: Sorry to hitch onto this thread. Is AWARE holding regular Ist Saturday of month protest in downtown Champaign tomorrow, June 2? We discussed it at last Sundays AWARE meeting. Attendees were Don, Genevieve, Doug, Anne Bj. (Hope I have names and spelling correct!) Consensus on Sunday seemed to be yes. Question was- is there something else going on downtown that might interfere with protest? Also do we need a flyer? Suggestion on flyer: "Do All Lives Matter?" What about Native Americans? " Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss Date: Fri, Jun 1, 2018 6:42 AM To: Peace; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana #FamiliesBelongTogether Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 US Attorney's Office in Urbana 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 RSVP here: https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 From ACLU People Power. They write: We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are carrying out Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. Attorneys. ICE apprehends and separates families while US Attorneys enforce the separation in legal proceedings. We need to stand up against this incompetence and the moral abomination of family separation. We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to hold family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your friends, wheel your stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and make your family's voice heard loud and clear, that #FamiliesBelongTogether. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 19:07:22 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 19:07:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The NYT's and the murder that wasn't Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » The New York Times and the murder that wasn’t By Andre Damon 1 June 2018 On Tuesday, the right-wing Ukrainian regime reported that Arkady Babchenko, a Russian journalist living in Kiev and a vocal critic of the Kremlin, had been shot dead in his apartment building. Kiev immediately pointed the finger at Moscow, with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman declaring that “the Russian totalitarian machine” was responsible for the journalist’s murder. Within minutes, the news flashed across the globe, becoming a lead story in major news outlets in Europe and the United States, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the BBC. The Mighty Wurlitzer of American propaganda began belching vast amounts of hot air. In every report, the announcement of the murder was accompanied with the conclusion that the Russian government was behind it: that is, the US media outlets announced a murder mystery and its solution simultaneously. The New York Times’ star reporter, Andrew Higgins, declared, “The killing of the journalist, Arkady Babchenko, a former war correspondent who stirred fury among Russian nationalists with his sharply critical coverage, is the latest in a series of attacks, many of them fatal, on outspoken foes of President Vladimir V. Putin, both inside Russia and beyond.” Higgins, who in 2014 was forced to retract a story featuring falsified photographs of Russian troops entering Ukrainian territory, placed the murder in a long list of alleged crimes by the Putin regime, including the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal earlier this year, and the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014. In their coverage, the Times and other major newspapers relied on a script they have used repeatedly: A prominent critic of the Kremlin dies or is injured abroad, and Moscow is immediately blamed. Any effort by Russia to deny these claims, or even to challenge the accusations, are treated as more evidence of a malevolent Kremlin plot. But at the height of the international furor over the murder, the unexpected took place: the corpse of Babchenko made a dramatic reappearance at a press conference called by the Ukrainian police, and the journalist announced that he had dramatically faked his own death. Looking back on the story, it would not have taken more than a careful examination of the photo of Babchenko’s corpse released by Kiev—which showed the journalist slumped over in a puddle of a liquid resembling ketchup—to know that something was amiss. But the American press responded to the resurrection of Babchenko by trying to find another way to incriminate the Kremlin. Typical was the editorial published by the New York Times Thursday, headlined, “Whatever It Was, We Didn’t Do It.” “After news came from Kiev on Tuesday that a Russian journalist critical of Vladimir Putin had been shot dead, it did not take long for the Kremlin’s denial machinery to shift into high gear,” the Times wrote, complaining that the Kremlin had the audacity to deny that it was complicit in a murder that never took place. In other words, the Times sought to shift the story to the Kremlin’s “denial machine,” instead of what the incident has exposed about the lies peddled by the Times. What really stands exposed is the propaganda machine operated by James Bennet, the editorial page editor of the Times, who manipulates the news in the service of the intelligence agencies to promote war abroad and political repression at home. For Bennet, when one lie is exposed, the time has come to reply with an even bigger lie. Every editorial published in the online edition of the New York Times includes a note that the editorial section “is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.” Nothing could be further from the truth: In fact, they are generally indistinguishable. The Times routinely places stories on its news page that consist entirely of unsubstantiated claims and speculation, which then becomes the basis for the editorials promoting war and domestic repression. For more than a year and a half, the US media has been engaged in a campaign against what they call “fake news” allegedly spread by Russia and its sympathizers. In the name of this campaign, the major media outlets, leading politicians, and the US intelligence agencies have justified the imposition of the most sweeping regime of internet censorship in US history, deleting thousands of social media accounts, silencing oppositional viewpoints, and burying left-wing news sites in search results. But the fraud of Arkady Babchenko’s murder has shown who the real purveyors of “fake news” are: not the oppositional news sites targeted for censorship, but the newsrooms of the mainstream press in New York, Washington and London. Andre Damon WSWS.ORG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidgreen50 at gmail.com Fri Jun 1 20:43:14 2018 From: davidgreen50 at gmail.com (David Green) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 15:43:14 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: AWARE Demo. Saturday In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I have a few of the more general half-page flyer, and many more of the Israel-Iran flyer, all of which I will bring; although I might prefer myself just to hold a sign tomorrow for most of the time. On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 12:26 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > In response to Ann’s question on flyers. > > Usually they are created by Carl, and printed out by David Green, unless > otherwise suggested. > > The focus is on our “foreign policy of war.” The racism which is related > to our wars, primarily in the middle east since 9/11. > > Most Americans have no idea we are currently conducting eight wars, thus > we’re left with little space to go into the history of US imperialism, > though it is discussed frequently by Carl and David on the tv programs. > > A problem is, that we are provoking new wars with Iran, Russia and China. > Given they are not small vulnerable nations, its a very dangerous > situation. Getting all this info. into a one page flyer isn’t easy, but one > Carl and David have managed to do very nicely over the years. > > Begin forwarded message: > > *From: *Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > *Subject: * > > My assumption is that we will be holding it per usual Saturday, downtown > 2:00 - 4:00pm, whether there is something else or not. > > The “Mothers against Guns" are holding a memorial in Westlake Park, I > believe it is, at 4:00 pm. So I see it as complimentary, and hope Aware > people will attend that as well. Provided its not too hot. > > > On Jun 1, 2018, at 09:06, Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > I assume we are demonstrating in downtown Champaign on Saturday at 2, > yes. Has anyone heard of some goings-on that conflict with it? > > On 06/01/2018 10:51 AM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Sorry to hitch onto this thread. Is AWARE holding regular Ist Saturday of > month protest in downtown Champaign tomorrow, June 2? We discussed it at > last Sundays AWARE meeting. Attendees were Don, Genevieve, Doug, Anne Bj. > (Hope I have names and spelling correct!) Consensus on Sunday seemed to be > yes. Question was- is there something else going on downtown that might > interfere with protest? Also do we need a flyer? > Suggestion on flyer: > "Do All Lives Matter?" What about Native Americans? " > > *Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone* > > ------ Original message------ > *From: *Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss > *Date: *Fri, Jun 1, 2018 6:42 AM > *To: *Peace; > *Cc: * > *Subject:*[Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon > *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana > > #FamiliesBelongTogether > > Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 > US Attorney's Office in Urbana > 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 > > RSVP here: > https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 > > From ACLU People Power. They write: > > We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are carrying out > Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. Attorneys. ICE apprehends and > separates families while US Attorneys enforce the separation in legal > proceedings. We need to stand up against this incompetence and the moral > abomination of family separation. > > We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers > Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to hold > family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your friends, wheel your > stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and make your family's voice heard > loud and clear, that #FamiliesBelongTogether. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing listPeace-discuss at lists.chambana.nethttps://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidgreen50 at gmail.com Fri Jun 1 20:45:00 2018 From: davidgreen50 at gmail.com (David Green) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 15:45:00 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: A very long read on Russia US relations In-Reply-To: <47699EF6-E841-4B13-AEF1-95D6036D51B6@gmail.com> References: <9763B8A4-1D55-4DB0-9CD3-CC601373BC49@illinois.edu> <47699EF6-E841-4B13-AEF1-95D6036D51B6@gmail.com> Message-ID: Just to read the author's background, one would assume it's going to be more of an insider/realist analysis, not going beyond the limits of allowable debate. On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 9:18 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Exactly. > > On May 31, 2018, at 9:13 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > Plenty of useful and interesting facts are presented in ths article, but > largely misses the point of the feral antagonism towards Russia and Putin > by U.S. politicians, academics and media, namely that Russia is a > (potential) global competitor for influence, ideas, resources, and power, > something which cannot be countenanced (by our corporate dominated > militarized state). > > On May 31, 2018, at 5:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf] > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 20:51:50 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 20:51:50 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: AWARE Demo. Saturday In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Understood, sounds good. On Jun 1, 2018, at 13:43, David Green > wrote: I have a few of the more general half-page flyer, and many more of the Israel-Iran flyer, all of which I will bring; although I might prefer myself just to hold a sign tomorrow for most of the time. On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 12:26 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: In response to Ann’s question on flyers. Usually they are created by Carl, and printed out by David Green, unless otherwise suggested. The focus is on our “foreign policy of war.” The racism which is related to our wars, primarily in the middle east since 9/11. Most Americans have no idea we are currently conducting eight wars, thus we’re left with little space to go into the history of US imperialism, though it is discussed frequently by Carl and David on the tv programs. A problem is, that we are provoking new wars with Iran, Russia and China. Given they are not small vulnerable nations, its a very dangerous situation. Getting all this info. into a one page flyer isn’t easy, but one Carl and David have managed to do very nicely over the years. Begin forwarded message: From: Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Subject: My assumption is that we will be holding it per usual Saturday, downtown 2:00 - 4:00pm, whether there is something else or not. The “Mothers against Guns" are holding a memorial in Westlake Park, I believe it is, at 4:00 pm. So I see it as complimentary, and hope Aware people will attend that as well. Provided its not too hot. On Jun 1, 2018, at 09:06, Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss > wrote: I assume we are demonstrating in downtown Champaign on Saturday at 2, yes. Has anyone heard of some goings-on that conflict with it? On 06/01/2018 10:51 AM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: Sorry to hitch onto this thread. Is AWARE holding regular Ist Saturday of month protest in downtown Champaign tomorrow, June 2? We discussed it at last Sundays AWARE meeting. Attendees were Don, Genevieve, Doug, Anne Bj. (Hope I have names and spelling correct!) Consensus on Sunday seemed to be yes. Question was- is there something else going on downtown that might interfere with protest? Also do we need a flyer? Suggestion on flyer: "Do All Lives Matter?" What about Native Americans? " Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss Date: Fri, Jun 1, 2018 6:42 AM To: Peace; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] #FamiliesBelongTogether - ACLU rally noon *today* 6/1 at US Attorney's Office in Urbana #FamiliesBelongTogether Rally noon *today*, Friday 6/1 US Attorney's Office in Urbana 201 S Vine St, Suite 226 RSVP here: https://go.peoplepower.org/event/action_attend/14164 From ACLU People Power. They write: We need to raise our voices against the key actors who are carrying out Trump’s family separation order: ICE and U.S. Attorneys. ICE apprehends and separates families while US Attorneys enforce the separation in legal proceedings. We need to stand up against this incompetence and the moral abomination of family separation. We're excited to be partnering with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, MoveOn and many others to hold family-friendly rallies across the country. Bring your friends, wheel your stroller on over, grab your lunch boxes, and make your family's voice heard loud and clear, that #FamiliesBelongTogether. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 21:12:44 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 21:12:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: A very long read on Russia US relations In-Reply-To: References: <9763B8A4-1D55-4DB0-9CD3-CC601373BC49@illinois.edu> <47699EF6-E841-4B13-AEF1-95D6036D51B6@gmail.com> Message-ID: This article came from Raymond Smith, retired Political Officer of the US State Dept., he did two tours in the former Soviet Union, one in the late 70’s and another in the eighty’s. A friend from my past. I first saw an article by Ray posted here by Mort, a couple years ago related to Russia/US relations. Found him on FB, and noted he frequently attempts to convince his friends, former colleagues, at State of the mistakes the US is making in respect to Russia. He is also the person who knew Kargalitsky. I never expect anything from him that would be too radical by US State Dept. terms, because these people fear loss of pension if they step out of line, not to mention condemnation from former colleagues, and we know how things work in academia if one steps out of line, but it does show that there are those scholars who are “irritated” over US propaganda in relation to Russia. Like Ray, they try but not enough from my perspective. On Jun 1, 2018, at 13:45, David Green > wrote: Just to read the author's background, one would assume it's going to be more of an insider/realist analysis, not going beyond the limits of allowable debate. On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 9:18 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: Exactly. On May 31, 2018, at 9:13 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss > wrote: Plenty of useful and interesting facts are presented in ths article, but largely misses the point of the feral antagonism towards Russia and Putin by U.S. politicians, academics and media, namely that Russia is a (potential) global competitor for influence, ideas, resources, and power, something which cannot be countenanced (by our corporate dominated militarized state). On May 31, 2018, at 5:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf] _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 1 22:06:51 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 22:06:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Poland's US Military Base is More About China Than Russia References: <000000000000a0aa53056d9baa7f@google.com> Message-ID: I never would have thought it, but of course it makes sense, all roads or actions by the US one way or another leads to China, and that includes by way of Russia. From: "OrientalReview.org" > Subject: Oriental Review Date: June 1, 2018 at 14:57:13 PDT Oriental Review ________________________________ Poland’s US Military Base Is More About China Than Russia Posted: 01 Jun 2018 05:52 AM PDT Assessing the grand strategic implications if a US base in Poland leads to Washington accepting the Chinese-built Balkan Silk Road’s possible expansion to Warsaw one day, this would clearly result in serious long-term losses for Germany and Russia while being a major victory for the US and China. The post Poland’s US Military Base Is More About China Than Russia appeared first on OrientalReview.org. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now You are subscribed to email updates from OrientalReview.org. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. Email delivery powered by Google Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 2 13:44:30 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2018 13:44:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Google Is Said to Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees v. Illiniwaks Killer Koh College of Law Faculty Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky {now 10,000+ people} Google’s work with the Defense Department on the Maven program, which uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes, roiled the internet giant’s work force. Yeah, notice these 4000+ GooglePeople are certainly far more principled and intelligent than the entire Faculty of the Illiniwaks Killer Koh College of Law put together-- but one: Don’t be evil! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: NYT > Business Day Posted on: Friday, June 01, 2018 2:49 PM Author: DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI Subject: Google Is Said to Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees After employees protested, a Google executive said Friday that the company will not renew a contract to work on artificial intelligence with the Pentagon after it expires next year.Diane Greene, the head of Google’s Cloud business, is said to have told employees that it was backing away from the A.I. work with the military. View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 2 16:45:05 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2018 16:45:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Murdering Marty Lederman for Trump! Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2018 11:44 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: NYT: Murdering Marty Lederman for Trump! "... {Murdering} Martin Lederman {Obomber OLC}...praised {Trumpster OLC} Mr. Engel for emphasizing assessments that the {Syrian} airstrikes were unlikely to escalate into a broader conflict..." LOL on that! For as long as I have known them and dealt with them and refuted them, OLCs-both Democrats and Republicans-- are just a Gang of presidential boot-lickers and butt-kissers. I do not understand how any self-respecting lawyer can go work for OLC. But OLC presidential boot-licking and butt-kissing can get you onto the Ninth Circuit ( Bybee) and the First Circuit (Davey Baron) the most distinguished chair at Berkeley Law (Yoo) and the Deanship of Yale Law School (Killer Koh, whose poo is John Yoo). Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Jun 3 11:25:21 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 11:25:21 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Paul Street puts it all in perspective, from Truthdig Message-ID: It’s “socialism or barbarism.” So wrote the brilliant German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in 1915. The 20th and 21st centuries have borne her out. The list of barbarian horrors that have disfigured the human record under the class rule of capital across the last century is daunting indeed. Now, however, we have to say that Luxemburg put things too gently. Marx and Engels got closer to our contemporary reality in 1848. They wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” about how the long-standing class struggle between producers and appropriators always ends “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” It’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky. To be more precise, its eco-socialism or annihilation as capital turns the planet into a giant greenhouse gas chamber. The earth science is perfectly clear. The “common ruin” of all is precisely where humanity is headed after half a millennium under the rule of a system that relies on permanent unsustainable expansion to avert collapse. “The rich,” the French ecological writer Herve Kempf observed 11 years ago, “are destroying the Earth.” Well, not the earth itself, just the chances for a decent and organized human future. The 21st-century global bourgeoisie isn’t doing this because it is loaded with malevolent ecological Scrooges who need to be visited by ghosts of the environmental Christmas past, present and future. Capitalists are driven to pillage and poison and rape the common good, including the ecological commons, by systemic imperatives compelling them to relentlessly commodify everything under the sun and to drive infinite growth on a finite planet. ADVERTISEMENT [201806 GoFundMe Week4 300x250] For Marx, and I think for any authentic left today, the moral predisposition of bourgeois “elites” was and is of little concern. It’s not about speaking truth to wealth and power. Beseeching our capitalist masters to be nicer and smarter for the common good of all is a fool’s errand. We’re not trying to write a Charles Dickens novel in which rich Mr. Brownlow saves the day for poor Oliver Twist or the bad capitalist Scrooge becomes the good capitalist Scrooge. We know there’s no appealing to capitalist chieftains’ better angels where money and profit are concerned. Real leftists know that five people owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the species while millions starve and lack adequate health care and half the U.S. population is poor or near-poor is capitalism working. We know that giant corporations buying up every last family farm, tapping every new reserve of cheap global labor, raping the Congo’s raw materials in alliance with warlords, purchasing the votes of nearly every elected official, extracting every last fossil fuel and driving the planet past the limits of environmental sustainability is capitalism working. We know that a giant military-industrial complex, generating vast fortunes for the owners and managers of high-tech “defense” (war and empire) firms while schools and public parks and infrastructure and social safety nets are underfunded—we know that that too is capitalism working. I could go on. The only solution, a real left would know, along with Marx, is for workers and citizens to organize collectively to overthrow the amoral profits system and take control of what they produce and how society is organized. Power to the people. Power to the workers. And power to the commons, whose enclosure was and remains among other things the making of modern capitalism and its wage-enslaved working class. That is what I have always understood to be the basic irreducible bottom-line perspective of anything that deserves since the time of Marx to be called “the left.” I’m always amused when I hear mainstream U.S. media reporters, talking heads or pundits refer to “the left” in statements like “the left won’t like Trump’s tax plan” or “the left is gearing up for the 2018 midterms.” What left are they talking about? In the reigning U.S. media-politics culture, “the left” refers first and foremost to the Democratic Party and its many allies at places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, most of academia and a host of other elite sectors and actors. But for anyone who knows anything about the history and meaning of radical movements, calling the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats and their many media allies “the left” is like calling the National Pork Producers Association vegan. As the multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a young CNN town hall questioner last year, “We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.” The Robert Rubin-approved and Goldman Sachs- and Citigroup-backed presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote and spoke with gushing praise for the lords of capital and their supposedly glorious profits system, which he called the source of a “prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.” His policy record as a militantly pro-Wall Street and arch-neoliberal president consistently matched his words. He did more for the nation’s leading financial institutions and corporations than any Republican president could have in the wake of the Great Recession, caused by concentrated wealth. And he was proud of it. “People call me a socialist sometimes,” Obama toldsome top corporate executives at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council with a laugh in late 2013. “But no,” the arch-neoliberal president, TransPacific Partnership advocate and drone war champion said, eliciting chuckles from his ruling-class friends, “you’ve got to meet the real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is. I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace.” The CEOs in attendance got a big chuckle out of what CounterPunch called that “tender ruling class moment.” “Socialists”? The “lying neoliberal warmonger” and arch-corporatist Hillary Clinton recently added those nasty socialists in the Democratic Party to the list of people other than herself and her Wall Street bankrollers that she blames for her defeat in 2016. If socialists in the Iowa Democratic caucuses had properly understood and respected her commitment to what top Democrats oxymoronically called “inclusive capitalism,” Hillary thinks, Trump would not be president. Leftish liberals call for the supposed “party of the people” to abandon its “corporate and cultural elitism” and “return” to its purported grand mission of “fighting for social justice and ensuring that workers get a fair deal.” When, the plaintive progressive cry goes, will they learn how to win? But for the dismal Dems it isn’t about winning; it’s about serving corporate masters. As William Kaufman told Barbara Ehrenreich on Facebook last year, “The Democrats aren’t feckless, inept, or stupid, unable to ‘learn’ what it takes to win. They are corrupt. They do not want to win with an authentically progressive program because it would threaten the economic interests of their main corporate donor base. … The Democrats know exactly what they’re doing. They have a business model: sub-serving the interests of the corporate elite.” The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-apocalyptic right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party. So what if Bernie Sanders, running (imagine!) in accord with majority progressive opinion would have been considerably more likely to defeat Trump than the incredibly unpopular and transparently elitist Hillary Clinton in the general election in 2016? The Democrats preferred handing the presidency and Congress to the Insane Clown President and the ever more radical right over letting a leftish neo-New Dealer into the White House. That was the “Inauthentic Opposition”—as the late Sheldon Wolin called the Democrats in 2008—doing its job. Among other things, Russiagate is the Inauthentic Opposition following its business model and doing its job, working to cover its tracks by throwing the debacle of its corporatist politics down George Orwell’s memory hole and attributing their largely self-made defeat to Russia’s allegedly powerful interference in our supposed democracy. Russiagate is meant to provide corporate Democrats cover not only for 2016 but also for 2018 and 2020. It is meant to create a narrative that lets the Fake Resistance Party continue nominating corporate captive neoliberal shills and imperialists who pretend to be progressive while they are owned by the nation’s own homegrown oligarchs, the real masters of America’s oxymoronic “capitalist democracy.” This year’s crop of Democratic congressional candidates is disturbingly loaded with military and intelligence veterans, a reflection of the Democrats’ determination to run as the true party of empire. As Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano write in their book “The Russians are Coming, Again,” “The scapegoat of Russia functions as a distraction for a ruling class that has lost its legitimacy.” What is the Democrats’ leading cry? That the terrible Trump is truly terrible. And, of course, that is all too terribly true. But after you’ve bemoaned the terribleness of the beastly, orange-tinted Trump for the 10,000th time, are you ready to get serious about the systemic and richly bipartisan, oligarchic context within which he has emerged? “The Trump administration,” my fellow Truthdigger Chris Hedges reminds us: “did not rise … like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count.” Corporate Democrats could well re-elect Trump in 2020. The smart money now is on their running the tepid neoliberal centrist Kamala Harris. Part of what could make her irresistible to the corporate and professional-class know-it-alls atop the party is that she would be a “progressive neoliberal”-bourgeois identity politics double whammy when it comes to keeping their own party’s portside wing at bay. With Obama as their standard bearer, the corporate-war Democrats got to call their progressive critics racists. With Hillary as their candidate, the corporate-war Democrats got to call their progressive critics sexists. With Kamala Harris atop the ticket they could call their disobedient left racists and sexists if progressives dare to publicly notice her captivity to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the Council on Foreign Relations and the military-industrial complex. Not that Sanders, who was the Democrats’ best chance to defeat Trump, is all that “left.” Bernie “F-35” Sanders’ occasional and carefully hedged claims to be a “democratic socialist” were contradicted by his dutiful if quiet embrace of the mass-murderous U.S. military empire. It takes real chutzpah to repeatedly mention Scandinavia as his social-democratic role model without once noting that Sweden, Denmark and Norway spend comparatively tiny percentages of their national budgets on militarism. Failure to tackle the giant U.S. war budget (a vast mechanism of upward wealth transfer) means that you can’t pay for poverty-ending progressive transformation at home. Sanders has never seriously criticized capitalism, the profits system or modern class rule. He has never questioned the underlying and foundational institutional despotism of capital over labor and the commons that makes a mockery of the West’s democratic pretense while placing human life itself at grave peril. Along the way, Sanders has sustained progressives’ deadly attachment to the nation’s narrow and strictly time-staggered election- and candidate-centered politics. “The really critical thing,” the great American radical historian Howard Zinn once sagely wrote, “isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens.” “The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change,” Noam Chomsky told Abby Martin in the fall of 2015, “is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle.” Sanders was and remains about the masters’ election cycle, which is dedicated to the delusional notion that we the people get meaningful democratic input into policy by spending three minutes in a voting booth choosing from among a handful of candidates selected in advance for us by the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money once every two years. The Democrats know that lots of citizens think like Zinn. That’s why they set up Astroturf outfits like Indivisible and Move On and the Town Hall Project. These fake resistance groups masquerade as extra-electoral grass-roots movements, but they’re all about channeling everything into a big get-out-the-vote campaign for candidates affiliated with the not-so-left-most of the two reigning corporate parties. A number of Sanders supporters have migrated into DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, whose popular online “Thanks Capitalism” video defines “socialism” as little more than collective bargaining and civil rights. It says nothing about capitalism’s destruction of livable ecology or about its evil twin, imperialism, whose vast military budgets cancels out social democracy in the “homeland.” The video says nothing about Marx’s and other authentic leftists’ long-standing understanding of socialism as workers’ control. A panoply of outwardly and sometimes substantively progressive advocacy, policy and service organizations can be found across the U.S. But as Les Leopold has noted, they are badly crippled by single-issue-ism, related to do their budgetary dependence on private foundations. “For the last generation,” Leopold wrote last year, “progressives have organized themselves into issue silos, each with its own agenda. Survival depends on fundraising (largely from private foundations) based on the uniqueness of one’s own silo. The net result of this Darwinian struggle is a fractured landscape of activity. The creativity, talent and skill are there in abundance, but the coherence and common purpose among groups is not.” There are multi-issue nonpartisan progressive policy, lobbying and protest groups in the Citizen Action tradition across the nation. Their 501c3 (nonprofit) status prevents them from openly identifying as Democratic Party-affiliated groups, but that is what they are. Real authentic root-and-branch radicals who want to keep their jobs know to tread carefully and watch their backs when they work in the “progressive” nonprofit sector. It’s the same in “higher education” and the so-called labor movement. There are a number of groups that call themselves Marxist in the U.S.—an alphabet soup whose various names and sectarian tendencies can be reviewed on Wikipedia. None of them have anything close to a large membership. Many of them spend more time tearing each other apart in sectarian squabbling than in organizing or inspiring anyone to fight the many manifest evils of capital. Left anarchism seems as fragmented, marginal and sectarian as the Marxist left. We’ve seen hopeful seeds of rank-and-file people’s organizing over the years with developments like the Wisconsin Rebellion before it was electorally co-opted, Occupy, the Fight for $15, the Chicago and subsequent statewide teacher strikes, the Verizon strike, rebellions and the movement against racist police killings—a movement bigger than just the Ford Foundation-funded and Borealis Foundation-coordinated Black Lives Matter brand. There’s been the Malcom X Grassroots Movement, We Charge Genocide, the remarkable Standing Rock moment, the broader struggle against the Dakota Access pipeline, the successful struggle against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the remarkable alternative economy political developments led by black radicals in Jackson, Miss., something that strikes me as the most potentially radical and remarkable development of all so far. Now we have the Poor People’s Campaign, just underway, under the leadership of the Rev. William Barber, who has criticized U.S. militarism and kept Democratic Party politicos off his speaking platforms. Perhaps the PPC can develop in ways that will help us build an authentic radical left—not just another leftish moment that gets folded into a Get Out the Vote for Democrats campaign. To do so, it will need to open its platforms to serious left anti-capitalists. It will have to step further away from the not-so left-most party of capital, the Democrats. It will need to speak less in terms of the immorality of poverty and more in terms of how poverty is rooted in the profits system of class rule and the racism and imperialism that go with capitalism “like white on rice.” “For whatever reason,” a PPC supporter writes me from Pennsylvania, the campaign is “unwilling or unable to name the disease, capitalism. In the absence of this diagnosis,” he says, “I worry that the PPC might be nothing more than a sheepdog for the Democrats in 2018.” For now—and this must change—“the [U.S.] left” is still far too scattered, excessively siloed, overdependent on corporate foundations, overly identity-politicized, excessively episodic, excessively metropolitan and bicoastal, excessively professional and middle-class, insufficiently radical, insufficiently working-class, insufficiently anti-capitalist and insufficiently distanced from the dismal, demobilizing, depressing and dollar-drenched Democratic Party. Noam Chomsky’s judgment five years ago remains all too accurate today: “There is no real left now” in the United States, Chomsky told David Barsamian. “If you are just counting heads,” Chomsky elaborated, “there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they … don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things. We’re not supposed to say it,” he continued, “but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element. It didn’t show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else had to start something new. It was always there and it was there for the long haul. … That mentality is basically missing [now]. And it was during the 1960s, too,” Chomsky said. The absence of a real, dedicated, persistent and serious, adult left is profoundly dangerous. People who are getting shafted and who know it are going to get behind militant and angry politicos seeking to channel their understandable rage. If there’s no effective, durable, organized, intelligent and durable through-thick-and-thin anti-capitalist left around, the job of channeling that popular anger falls by default to the white nationalist racist, nativist and sexist right—the Hitlers, Goebbels, Marine Le Pens, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salivinis, Nigel Farages, David Dukes, Steve Kings, Donald Trumps and Steve Bannons of the world. Resentment abhors a vacuum. At the same time, without a functioning left able to fight and do things for ordinary working and poor people, we will have nothing to defend and sustain our households, families and communities when the next big capitalist meltdown comes—an event that is due in the very near future. Before the coming collapse, Hedges tell us, “We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town.” Hedges’ list of institutions for parallel people’s power should be expanded to cooperative production, under the participatory and self-managed ownership, control and design of the “associated producers” themselves in harmony rather than at war with the natural environment. It’s no small matter, given what we know now to be the essentially ecocidal nature of modern capitalism. “If there is not future for a radical mass movement in our time,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 15 years ago, “there can be no future for humanity itself.” Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation. Paul Street Contributor Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,… [Paul Street] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidgreen50 at gmail.com Sun Jun 3 17:16:05 2018 From: davidgreen50 at gmail.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 12:16:05 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Michael Hudson excerpt Message-ID: I don’t think people realize the radical damage that Obama did to the economy by bailing out the banks and not rolling back the terms of bank credit to keep housing affordable. Obama basically said, “Make housing unaffordable. Make as many junk loans as you want. Don’t worry, because I’ll stand between you and the mob with the pitchforks.” He didn’t jail any bankers. He didn’t regulate them. He created the situation that Trump inherited. Trump has just pushed it to a further degree, with full Democratic support. The Democratic donor class loves Trump. They want him to be reelected because he’s cutting their taxes, he’s deregulating their banks, and he’s essentially deregulated fraud! This leaves the millennials with a problem. How can they cope with a situation where they don’t have anyone representing their interests either in Congress where it’s really the same party now, or with an opportunity to earn enough to get a home mortgage? It’s very hard to earn the money that you need to buy a house anymore. There has to be a god in a machine – *Deus Ex Machina* – meaning rich parents or a rich uncle. *Paul Sliker: So maybe a better investment for millennials would be to organize outside the banks.* Michael Hudson: Well, here’s the other problem: Congress last week deregulated community banks. I’ve worked as a consultant for community banks in Chicago. Their strategy is to make more reckless loans than the commercial banks. So deregulating them enables them to lend at even higher debt to equity ratios. They can set lower down payments, and help bid up the price of real estate even more. So the congressional rewriting of bank regulations last week makes it much harder for millennials to get an apartment, because it will inflate the price of housing with yet more bank credit. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/01/us-vs-china-housing-and-those-millennials/print/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Jun 3 18:24:42 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 18:24:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Francis Boyle sent you a video: "INCOMING: Targeted For Destruction - Prof. Boyle Tells It Like It Is" In-Reply-To: <000000000000299d3a056dc0e26d@google.com> References: <000000000000299d3a056dc0e26d@google.com> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Francis Boyle via YouTube [mailto:noreply at youtube.com] Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2018 1:21 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Subject: Francis Boyle sent you a video: "INCOMING: Targeted For Destruction - Prof. Boyle Tells It Like It Is" [https://www.gstatic.com/youtube/img/branding/youtubelogo/2x/youtubelogo_60.png] [https://yt3.ggpht.com/-w4phvYGWivc/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/_Vq2X19VNEk/s50-c-k-no-mo-rj-c0xffffff/photo.jpg] Francis Boyle has shared a video with you on YouTube [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/diMU7f_RaVI/mqdefault.jpg] INCOMING: Targeted For Destruction - Prof. Boyle Tells It Like It Is by Clean Lens Videos Dr. Francis A Boyle, Professor of International Law, explains the ways that pro-Israel lobbies and academics use blacklisting and claims of"anti-Semitism" to keep legitimate criticism of Israel out of the news and out of most colleges. Help center • Report spam ©2018 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ewj at pigs.ag Sun Jun 3 23:15:36 2018 From: ewj at pigs.ag (ewj) Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 07:15:36 +0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Michael Hudson excerpt In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1528067735090.nwddetjglja1evpefukw1v0i@android.mail.163.com> ah the compulsion to buy a place to live. the lie of the joy of home ownership. On 2018-06-04 01:16 , David Green via Peace-discuss Wrote: I don’t think people realize the radical damage that Obama did to the economy by bailing out the banks and not rolling back the terms of bank credit to keep housing affordable. Obama basically said, “Make housing unaffordable. Make as many junk loans as you want. Don’t worry, because I’ll stand between you and the mob with the pitchforks.” He didn’t jail any bankers. He didn’t regulate them. He created the situation that Trump inherited. Trump has just pushed it to a further degree, with full Democratic support. The Democratic donor class loves Trump. They want him to be reelected because he’s cutting their taxes, he’s deregulating their banks, and he’s essentially deregulated fraud! This leaves the millennials with a problem. How can they cope with a situation where they don’t have anyone representing their interests either in Congress where it’s really the same party now, or with an opportunity to earn enough to get a home mortgage? It’s very hard to earn the money that you need to buy a house anymore. There has to be a god in a machine – Deus Ex Machina – meaning rich parents or a rich uncle. Paul Sliker: So maybe a better investment for millennials would be to organize outside the banks. Michael Hudson: Well, here’s the other problem: Congress last week deregulated community banks. I’ve worked as a consultant for community banks in Chicago. Their strategy is to make more reckless loans than the commercial banks. So deregulating them enables them to lend at even higher debt to equity ratios. They can set lower down payments, and help bid up the price of real estate even more. So the congressional rewriting of bank regulations last week makes it much harder for millennials to get an apartment, because it will inflate the price of housing with yet more bank credit. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/01/us-vs-china-housing-and-those-millennials/print/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Mon Jun 4 02:57:55 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 20:57:55 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so Message-ID: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156331653311678&set=a.10150294029661678.381794.775051677&type=3&theater ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME – AGAIN Steve Bannon is absolutely bonkers with what’s goin’ on in Italy. La Repubblica calls him “the Dark Knight of global populism”. He talked to the paper (portal). Here’s the low down. For Bannon, “Rome is now at the center of world politics” (correct). He has “advised” La Lega’s Salvini, and said they paid due attention. He’s enthusiastic that Lega and 5S “hit the heart of the European beast” (correct), foreign capitals and “foreign opposition media” (FT, Le Monde, etc.). He considers Salvini and Di Maio “heroic” – and the other hero is Berlusconi (not really). On 5S, he says they are “similar to socialist Sanders in the US”, anti-establishment and for transparency. And are allies to Italy’s “Trump” – referring to Salvini. He’s sure “Brussels, the stock market and the financial powers will go through hell” (correct). For Bannon, Italy is “a sleeping giant, with a huge economy” (correct). Brussels and media like the FT are “afraid of Italy” (true – the FT even invoked “barbarians”). He expects a “confederation of free states” to emerge in place of the current EU (not so fast). “The fascists are in Brussels” (relatively correct). And “we are on the right side of history; Merkel and Macron will fall” (not so fast). Trump is “back to his national-populist agenda” and “things could not be better for the US” (incorrect). Especially now that “the military have been sidelined from the administration” (but not the deep state – on the contrary). He thinks Pompeo could become President one day (Lord have mercy). Bannon thinks the Judeo-Christian West must be united – thus no Russia demonization. He stresses Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s (correct). “The problem is Russia is hated by the Democrats because is a nationalist country and they have the Orthodox Church (fundamentally correct). “The real problem is Iran” (ridiculous). Well, as you can see the man IS on a roll. ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Mon Jun 4 13:21:48 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 07:21:48 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A 'doubtless very different' revolution Message-ID: <3B7C3F61-C2B8-4FB5-B58F-C8F27549FD4D@illinois.edu> “It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, in 'After Virtue,' thirty-five years ago -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Jun 4 13:42:10 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 13:42:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Max Blumenthal Reveals Surveillance Program in Yemen Message-ID: Max Blumenthal Reveals Surveillance Program in Yemen Run by Cambridge Analytica Parent Company SCL Group June 1, 2018 BEN NORTON: It’s The Real News. I’m Ben Norton. An explosive new investigative report by the journalist Max Blumenthal exposes how Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL Group ran a counterinsurgency program in Yemen on behalf of a U.S.-based military contractor. Cambridge Analytica was a political data company that dissolved this year after it was exposed that the firm had been hired by the Donald Trump campaign to manipulate the 2016 presidential election. Blumenthal obtained exclusive documents revealing that Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, which is called SCL Group, honed the deceptive tactics that it later used in the 2016 U.S. election first in Yemen, as part of a secret surveillance operation called Project Titania. Max published these leaked documents at his independent investigative journalism website The Grayzone Project, which you can find at GrayzoneProject.com. The surveillance operation run by SCL involved infiltrating local groups and spying on the domestic population using deliberately deceptive tactics. The operatives were instructed to use a, quote, “cover story,” unquote, to gather information. The foreign operatives in Yemen were also told to communicate with the British Embassy and register with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which suggests that the UK government contracted SCL for the surveillance work. The documents furthermore show how SCL exploited local NGOs inside Yemen as part of its surveillant operation. An anonymous source also explained to Max how SCL tried to recruit them to pose as a journalist to infiltrate Iran, another country in the Middle East, in order to spy on the country and collect data. SCL Group specialize in what it openly called, quote, “psychological warfare,” end quote, influence operations, and did contract work with the UK government. Joining us to discuss this is Max Blumenthal. Max is an award-winning investigative journalist and the author of several books. He is also the editor of the independent news website The Grayzone Project. Max published his new report in two parts. You can find both at GrayzoneProject.com. With Max I also cohost the podcast Moderate Rebels, and I contribute to his website The Grayzone Project. Thanks for joining us, Max. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks for having me on. BEN NORTON: So there’s a lot to unpack here. There are a lot of different names that viewers might not be familiar with. Some people might know of Cambridge Analytica because in the past several months there was a big media scandal over its role in infiltrating and influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Before we get to discuss this Yemen operation, this counterinsurgency operation that you exposed, let’s just talk a bit about Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, the SCL Group. Can you explain to the audience what Cambridge Analytica and SCL are? MAX BLUMENTHAL: I would basically describe SCL as a private intelligence operation, or private intelligence agency. They call themselves a data firm, but I think that kind of undersells their ability to conduct not just surveillance, even kind of counterinsurgency operations, as I showed in Project Titania, but also influencing elections. And it’s something that they up until recently were pretty proud of doing. So proud that they boasted of, for example, cultivating anti-Russian sentiment among the Ukrainian population in the contested areas of eastern Ukraine on behalf of the Ukrainian government, and participating in the Ukrainian Color Revolution in 2004, which removed a Russian-oriented government and replaced it in basically, you know, in basically a Western-backed de facto coup with a Western-oriented government. SCL Group was front and center as part, in part of that, in that operation, and they bragged about it on their website. They’ve been active in Kenyan elections. And it was only a matter of time before they-. And you know, they’ve been active in elections around the world, as well as counterinsurgency-style operations, where they collect data on local populations in conflict areas. And they freely acknowledged, I mean, I wouldn’t say this investigation was necessarily explosive. I think it’s really valuable to have these documents. I don’t know if anyone has produced original documents like these that really lay out the plans for what SCL and its other private intelligence partners were doing in conflict zones like Yemen. But SCL has freely acknowledged its work in Syria and Libya and Iran on its website, as well. We just didn’t know what the nature of it was. So what I was able to do is kind of fill in some of the blanks, dot some of the Is and the Ts that were already on the webs-. That were already on the website, and kind of really highlight the use of deception that SCL had perfected in order to insinuate itself into areas that were difficult for its Western clients to, its Western patrons to reach. SCL is the British parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which more Americans would be familiar with. Cambridge Analytica obtained the data through Facebook of 87 million Americans as part of an influence operation that it carried out partly on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign. It was also working with Ted Cruz, and it worked in several campaigns in 2014 in the U.S., and basically was owned by Stephen Bannon and the Mercer operation of reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer, who until recently was the patron of Stephen Bannon and one of the major backers of the whole kind of apparatus that made up the Trump 2016 campaign. Robert Mercer’s daughter Rebecca was a co-owner of Cambridge Analytica, and was involved with SCL Group, and Bannon was also co-owner. So this scandal, naturally, was going to erupt in the Trump era, when Democrats in Congress are really angry about the fact that Donald Trump won it all and were looking into how he did it, and seeking to frame it as this kind of nefarious operation and to paint Trump as a figure without popular support. Well, first they look to Russia. And you know, as we’ve done in interview after interview here, shown that there really wasn’t a whole lot there to demonstrate collusion. So they finally turned to something we have been talking about for over a year, for a while, Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was also involved in Brexit. The oligarchs who started the Brexit campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, and Bannon learned a lot of lessons there. So finally, the Democrats started looking at it. An insider from Cambridge Analytica emerged and detailed a lot of the deceptive practices they used. And then Channel 4 in the UK conducted a sting on Cambridge Analytica. One of their executives was boasting of honey traps, and all kinds of, you know, James Bond villain-style tactics that they pledge to use. And you know, I think what I’ve done with this investigation is show that a lot of the tactics it uses are just good old-fashioned counterinsurgency. I interviewed Yasha Levine, who’s the author of Surveillance Valley, which is a great book on how the Internet grew out of counterinsurgency programs and is used to surveil us. And Yasha said, yeah, this is, a lot of these tactics that are laid out in the documents for Project Titania in Yemen, they look like Vietnam-era counterinsurgency stuff. Nothing particularly significant, but it’s still, you know, pretty sinister. And so when you kind of put all of these different pieces together, and you consider the fact that one organization working with this web of other private intelligence groups is carrying out counterinsurgency, kind of surveillance-style operations, to collect data on people in conflict areas in the Middle East. As one of my sources told me, they’re also posing as journalists to go into areas like Iran, and posing as students, either foreign exchange students or Arabic language students, to collect data in Syria. They’re doing that, and then they’re starting to hone their craft in the West, particularly in the UK and the U.S., through this cutout company, Cambridge Analytica. It really starts to look like a case of blowback, where the tactics that the West is applying against the populations it’s targeting in the third world are coming back to its own elections. And they’re being used to elect, in some cases, extreme right-wing candidates, and to carry out influence operations and covert propaganda against a public that believes that, you know, it’s acting democratically. BEN NORTON: Yeah, so you raise a lot of important points there. And one of the things I want to try to do is help unpack some of these details for viewers. There are a lot of different companies and names and people involved in this. We’ve been talking about SCL, which stands for Strategic Communication Laboratories. That’s the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which you mentioned is, it was co-owned by Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, who backed Donald Trump, also involved in Project Titania, which is this counterinsurgency operation in Yemen. Also involved is a U.S.-based military contractor Archimedes. This is the company that, that, that the SCL Goup was in fact operating on behalf of. And then finally, of course, you mention in your article, and it’s been documented elsewhere, that SCL frequently had contracts with the U.K. government. So we see a web of different operatives here, and we see multiple governments, including the UK and the U.S. involved in some ways. Maybe if not the U.S. government is directly involved, at least the UK government is involved. Can you speak a little bit more about the the kind of web of, or the revolving door, rather, between governments and private interests here, and how companies like SCL, as you mentioned Yasha Levine has documented how these these tech companies often serve as contractors for governments, and they advance those governments’ interests through soft power. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Basically, I obtained the documents that were given to, I suppose, I assume the employees of these two private intelligence firms, SCL, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, and Archimedes. Archimedes appeared to be, SCL appeared to be contracted through Archimedes, and Archimedes was based, I think, in the Bay Area. It’s a U.S.-based company. And the mission, as laid out in these documents which I published in full at GrayzoneProject.com, were instructions for entering Yemen in 2009, which was really the height of the Obama drone assassination program, into the two provinces where the skies were shadowed by U.S. drones and the ground was substantially occupied, or, or featured massive mobilization and organization by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And what SCL seek to do was to gather data on young males, and what attracted them to jihadist activity and then they were going to develop a, what they called, I think, I think they openly said counterpropaganda campaign. But an influencing operation to turn the young males somehow against jihadist recruitment. And this meant that they had to first find local researchers, Yemenis to conduct research on the young males, basically getting them into schools and different community centers to answer questionnaires which SCL and Archimedes had drawn up. And they were specifically ordered, the SCL operatives were specifically ordered to develop a cover story with the local Yemeni researchers, and various cover stories were proposed so that the researchers on the ground, the Yemeni population, would not know that they were carrying out an actual counterinsurgency operation, possibly on behalf of the UK government. All of these operatives from SCL were told to gather at the British embassy in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. So it’s pretty clear that something that the, either the British government or whoever hired SCL was going on, that they sought to conceal-. And this has had really negative ramifications in the past when the element of concealment fell apart. For example, the polio eradication campaign in Pakistan, which was being carried out by the CIA in order to extract the DNA of Osama bin Laden’s family. When the rural population of Pakistan discovered that they, this wasn’t, in fact, a polio eradication program, and that the local Pakistanis were acting as a front for the CIA, jihadist groups declared a boycott, and polio began to spread massively spread all the way into Afghanistan. So you can, you know, you really have a kind of precedent for, for, you know, a critical, for a critical look at a program like this. I mean, there’s a precedent for programs like this doing deep damage to local populations, is what I’m saying. And so, you know, it all goes back to a web of private intelligence operatives. I’ve talked about SCL before, but there’s also Archimedes. I don’t know if this firm still exists, but I found one character in a communication I obtained who was sort of the contact between SCL and Archimedes. His name was Tim Reason. He’s now at another firm I never heard of before called Madison Springfield. Character, you know, there’s there’s very little on this character. I’ve seen him participate in some programs for AFRICOM, which is the U.S. military kind of archipelago of U.S. military bases in Africa. But I know very little about him. I did find him, however, in the HBGary leaks, which were published by WikiLeaks in 2011. And HBGary is another private intelligence firm. And basically, if you go into these leaks, I don’t know any normal people who have time to do this, but I kind of had to do it to produce this investigation, you’re just going to find a bunch of private spies talking to each other about designing competing mass surveillance programs at the dawn of the Arab Spring to spy on Arab youth, gobble up their personal information, and then design influence operations based on what they’ve learned about Arab youth, who are considered sort of a restive population engaged in this revolutionary process that’s overturning governments across the Arab world. So Tim Reason turns up in all of these email threads with different characters from private intelligence firms I’d never heard of before, along with staffers from Apple, who are from the Homeland Security division of Apple. I didn’t know Apple had a Homeland Security division before, or that they were this involved, Google is also involved here, this involved in mass surveillance. And it really it’s just that kind of just scratching the surface. But it’s really a disturbing portrait of this private intelligence web which is carried out, carrying out influence operations, covert propaganda, and mass surveillance completely out of the sight of most of the world’s population by design. And they’re being contracted by governments to do so so the governments don’t have to take any responsibility. I learned about this all thanks to the work of Barrett Brown. And Barrett Brown went to prison for 56 months because he received all of these hacked e-mails from the Anonymous collective, and reported on them. For reporting on them. He went to prison under Obama. And it’s thanks to Barrett Brown, and to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange is now, you know, undergoing horrible conditions at the Ecuadorian embassy in London thanks to pressure from the U.S. and UK government. It’s really thanks to these two that we know about these programs, and that we know about the ROMAS/COIN mass surveillance program that I wrote about that Tim Reason was involved in. So really just by starting this investigation, looking at these SCL documents, I learned about this entire wider web of covert influence operations. And we really have to see Cambridge Analytica as just the tip of the massive iceberg that might represent the greatest threat to whatever’s left of democracy. BEN NORTON: Well, we’ll have to end our conversation there. We were joined by Max Blumenthal. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. He is also the editor of the website The Grayzone Project, which you can find at GrayzoneProject.com. He just published a two-part exposé on the SCL Group, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, exposing how it led a counterinsurgency and surveillance operation in Yemen. Max also mentioned Yasha Levine, and we at The Real News have an interview with Aaron Maté in which Aaron Maté and Yasha Levine discuss Yasha’s new book Surveillance Vally, which is more about all of these issues we discussed today, big tech companies and their relations to governments. But thanks for joining us here at The Real News, Max. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks for having me. BEN NORTON: Reporting for The Real News. I’m Ben Nort -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Mon Jun 4 15:24:47 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 10:24:47 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A 'doubtless very different' revolution Message-ID: <8s26u11um7dphcbml29fc367.1528125661488@email.lge.com> And the article about Cambridge Analytica''s parent group conducting surveillance and interference in other countries that Karen Aram submitted to the peace discuss list just after this, is just one example of the barbarism, immorality etc. in this age. Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discussDate: Mon, Jun 4, 2018 8:22 AMTo: peace-discuss at anti-war.net;Cc: Peace;Subject:[Peace-discuss] A 'doubtless very different' revolution “It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, in 'After Virtue,' thirty-five years ago -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Mon Jun 4 15:24:47 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 10:24:47 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A 'doubtless very different' revolution Message-ID: <8s26u11um7dphcbml29fc367.1528125661488@email.lge.com> And the article about Cambridge Analytica''s parent group conducting surveillance and interference in other countries that Karen Aram submitted to the peace discuss list just after this, is just one example of the barbarism, immorality etc. in this age. Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discussDate: Mon, Jun 4, 2018 8:22 AMTo: peace-discuss at anti-war.net;Cc: Peace;Subject:[Peace-discuss] A 'doubtless very different' revolution “It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, in 'After Virtue,' thirty-five years ago -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidgreen50 at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 19:52:24 2018 From: davidgreen50 at gmail.com (David Green) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 14:52:24 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Very interesting; but the more the word nationalism gets used from various persuasions, whether positively or pejoratively, the less it seems to mean in a consistent way; but nationalism has always been a kind of fiction, as Eric Hobsbawm and others taught us; as well as a political football, perhaps relevant as the World Cup approaches and we see that national identity is a given in the most crass and chauvinistic terms. On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 9:57 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156331653311678&set=a. > 10150294029661678.381794.775051677&type=3&theater > > ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME – AGAIN > > Steve Bannon is absolutely bonkers with what’s goin’ on in Italy. La > Repubblica calls him “the Dark Knight of global populism”. He talked to the > paper (portal). Here’s the low down. > > For Bannon, “Rome is now at the center of world politics” (correct). He > has “advised” La Lega’s Salvini, and said they paid due attention. > > He’s enthusiastic that Lega and 5S “hit the heart of the European beast” > (correct), foreign capitals and “foreign opposition media” (FT, Le Monde, > etc.). He considers Salvini and Di Maio “heroic” – and the other hero is > Berlusconi (not really). On 5S, he says they are “similar to socialist > Sanders in the US”, anti-establishment and for transparency. And are allies > to Italy’s “Trump” – referring to Salvini. > > He’s sure “Brussels, the stock market and the financial powers will go > through hell” (correct). > > For Bannon, Italy is “a sleeping giant, with a huge economy” (correct). > Brussels and media like the FT are “afraid of Italy” (true – the FT even > invoked “barbarians”). > > He expects a “confederation of free states” to emerge in place of the > current EU (not so fast). “The fascists are in Brussels” (relatively > correct). And “we are on the right side of history; Merkel and Macron will > fall” (not so fast). > > Trump is “back to his national-populist agenda” and “things could not be > better for the US” (incorrect). Especially now that “the military have been > sidelined from the administration” (but not the deep state – on the > contrary). He thinks Pompeo could become President one day (Lord have > mercy). > > Bannon thinks the Judeo-Christian West must be united – thus no Russia > demonization. He stresses Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s > (correct). “The problem is Russia is hated by the Democrats because is a > nationalist country and they have the Orthodox Church (fundamentally > correct). “The real problem is Iran” (ridiculous). > > Well, as you can see the man IS on a roll. > > ### > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Jun 5 04:37:17 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 23:37:17 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Democrats sabotage NKorea peace Message-ID: <3A455AA9-8C75-4E08-9B5F-D4659770BE83@gmail.com> > "Democratic Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin was one of seven US Senators to sign a letter to President Trump threatening that Congress will sabotage any deal with North Korea that isn't tough enough. This is yet more proof that both Major Parties are War Parties. We need to run someone against this guy the next time he is up for re-election.” --John McCarthy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Jun 5 04:43:27 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 23:43:27 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?utf-8?q?The_Injustice_of_Reality_Winner?= =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=99s_Year_in_Jail?= Message-ID: <463423BC-A397-4754-A74A-1DB134FA77F8@gmail.com> One year ago, FBI agents arrived at the door of a young woman named Reality Winner. Winner, an Air Force veteran and contractor at the National Security Agency facility in Augusta, Georgia, was accused of leaking a top-secret NSA document describing a Russian hacking operation targeting the U.S. voting system. At the time, President Donald Trump was loudly denouncing claims of Russian hacking as “fake news,” and he had just fired FBI Director James Comey because he wanted to end the investigation into “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia.” The document that Winner is accused of leaking was the subject of an article, published by The Intercept two days after her arrest, detailing the Russian hacking attempt on the cusp of the 2016 election. Winner was interrogated and jailed, charged under the Espionage Act, and denied bail. She remains in jail today. In a piece published by The Intercept on Sunday, the one-year anniversary of Winner’s arrest, Peter Maass compares the punitive treatment of Winner, whose alleged leak alerted the public to the hacking effort, to that of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who is suspected of colluding with Russians and is facing charges of conspiracy, money laundering, bank fraud, and lying to federal investigators — and who received the government’s blessing to spend his recent Christmas holiday at his 10-room Hamptons mansion. Over the past year, The Intercept has been following legal developments in Winner’s case, which has faced setbacks after multiple court rulings have restricted her attorneys’ ability to defend her. (The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, has contributed to her legal defense through its Press Freedom Defense Fund.) Throughout, the fanatical secrecy of the government has been a tremendous hurdle. As James Risen recently argued, it is becoming increasingly clear that the leaking of the NSA report was a vital public service. A May report by the Senate Intelligence Committee noted that state election officials learned about the Russian hacking “from the press or from the public Committee hearing on June 21, 2017.” The Intercept story ran less than three weeks before that hearing. There’s still a lot we don’t know, however, about exactly what local election officials knew about the attacks on their systems, and when they knew it. The Intercept has been investigating. Sam Biddle filed his first report on this on Friday — and there is more to come. If you can, please make a donation to support Reality Winner’s defense. All donations made on this page will be directed to the Press Freedom Defense Fund for Reality Winner. Betsy Reed Editor-in-Chief Whatever You Think of the Trump-Russia Investigation, Whistleblower Reality Winner Deserves Your Support Trevor Timm Hardly anyone from the center to the left supports the former NSA contractor, but they all should. Reality Winner Has Been in Jail for a Year. Her Prosecution Is Unfair and Unprecedented. Peter Maass Winner is accused of leaking a classified NSA document that helped alert Americans to Russian hacking attacks against the U.S. voting system. Here’s the Email Russian Hackers Used to Try to Break Into State Voting Systems Sam Biddle The simplicity of the email, which included a malicious election software manual, is part of the playbook of an advanced attacker, an expert said. More Intercept Coverage First Look to Support Defense of Reality Winner in Espionage Act Prosecution Betsy Reed The Press Freedom Defense Fund opposes prosecution of journalistic sources under the Espionage Act, and The Intercept concludes its review of reporting practices. Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, Ryan Grim A top-secret National Security Agency report details a monthslong Russian hacking effort against the U.S. election infrastructure. Judge Denies Bail for Reality Winner, Accepting Prosecutor’s Dubious Allegations Trevor Timm The judge took many of the prosecution’s charges about Reality Winner’s views at face value — portending a tough road ahead at trial. Senate Report Strongly Implies Russian Hacking Story Was a Public Service — but Whistleblower Reality Winner Remains in Jail James Risen Other outlets reported on Russian intrusion into the U.S. elections system, but The Intercept’s story relied on a leaked document. The Government Is Trying to Make It Impossible for Reality Winner to Defend Herself in Court Trevor Timm The government is imposing secrecy rules that tie the defense team’s hands. How the Interrogation of Reality Winner Reveals the Deceptive Tactics of “Exceedingly Friendly” FBI Agents Peter Maass FBI agents chatted about their love of dogs and their workout routines to entice Winner to talk during a disputed interrogation at her home. Reality Winner Was Not Told She Had the Right to Remain Silent Trevor Timm Lawyers for Reality Winner, the ex-NSA contractor accused of leaking a top-secret document published by The Intercept, want her alleged confession thrown out. James Comey’s Memos Reveal the Reasons Donald Trump Wants to Find Leakers and Put Reporters in Jail James Risen There is a big difference between the kind of leaks Trump usually decries on Twitter and the kind that lead to criminal prosecutions. The Reality Winner Prosecution Relies on Secrecy and Fearmongering Trevor Timm The former NSA contractor’s bail appeal shows how the government is treating her unlike almost anyone ever charged under the Espionage Act. Join us in supporting Reality Winner. All donations made here will be directed to the Press Freedom Defense Fund in support of her defense. The Intercept's mailing address is: First Look Media 114 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Jun 5 05:33:42 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 00:33:42 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Vote against Democrats Message-ID: <24B1C169-17AD-424D-8197-D21627337451@gmail.com> https://news.antiwar.com/2018/06/04/senate-dems-threaten-legislation-to-undermine-north-korea-nuclear-deal/ From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Jun 5 11:09:21 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 11:09:21 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Chomsky's Best Speech 2018 Message-ID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwTQsvhq3ew -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Tue Jun 5 12:47:54 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 07:47:54 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so In-Reply-To: References:

Message-ID: <25387632-E5F5-4836-91D9-587A51E7DF6E@illinois.edu> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Jun 5 13:03:16 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 13:03:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so In-Reply-To: <25387632-E5F5-4836-91D9-587A51E7DF6E@illinois.edu> References:

<25387632-E5F5-4836-91D9-587A51E7DF6E@illinois.edu> Message-ID: [cid:image001.jpg at 01D3FCA3.88A26810] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2018 7:48 AM To: David Green Cc: peace ; Peace Discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so Yes, ‘nationalism’ is being used in two conflicting ways: (1) the interests of a country's elite minority; (2) the interests of the majority, as when we speak of the interests of the nation versus neoliberalism. On Jun 4, 2018, at 2:52 PM, David Green > wrote: Very interesting; but the more the word nationalism gets used from various persuasions, whether positively or pejoratively, the less it seems to mean in a consistent way; but nationalism has always been a kind of fiction, as Eric Hobsbawm and others taught us; as well as a political football, perhaps relevant as the World Cup approaches and we see that national identity is a given in the most crass and chauvinistic terms. On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 9:57 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156331653311678&set=a.10150294029661678.381794.775051677&type=3&theater ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME – AGAIN Steve Bannon is absolutely bonkers with what’s goin’ on in Italy. La Repubblica calls him “the Dark Knight of global populism”. He talked to the paper (portal). Here’s the low down. For Bannon, “Rome is now at the center of world politics” (correct). He has “advised” La Lega’s Salvini, and said they paid due attention. He’s enthusiastic that Lega and 5S “hit the heart of the European beast” (correct), foreign capitals and “foreign opposition media” (FT, Le Monde, etc.). He considers Salvini and Di Maio “heroic” – and the other hero is Berlusconi (not really). On 5S, he says they are “similar to socialist Sanders in the US”, anti-establishment and for transparency. And are allies to Italy’s “Trump” – referring to Salvini. He’s sure “Brussels, the stock market and the financial powers will go through hell” (correct). For Bannon, Italy is “a sleeping giant, with a huge economy” (correct). Brussels and media like the FT are “afraid of Italy” (true – the FT even invoked “barbarians”). He expects a “confederation of free states” to emerge in place of the current EU (not so fast). “The fascists are in Brussels” (relatively correct). And “we are on the right side of history; Merkel and Macron will fall” (not so fast). Trump is “back to his national-populist agenda” and “things could not be better for the US” (incorrect). Especially now that “the military have been sidelined from the administration” (but not the deep state – on the contrary). He thinks Pompeo could become President one day (Lord have mercy). Bannon thinks the Judeo-Christian West must be united – thus no Russia demonization. He stresses Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s (correct). “The problem is Russia is hated by the Democrats because is a nationalist country and they have the Orthodox Church (fundamentally correct). “The real problem is Iran” (ridiculous). Well, as you can see the man IS on a roll. ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 53109 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Tue Jun 5 15:18:44 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 10:18:44 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so In-Reply-To: References:

<25387632-E5F5-4836-91D9-587A51E7DF6E@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <26A1E4FB-CF60-4B33-821E-1890CE186712@illinois.edu> A case of Trump Derangement Syndrome = the view that the weakest president since Coolidge is the problem, encouraged by the political establishment who see that Trump rode in on the populist wave that gave us the Sanders campaign, Brexit, Melenchon & Le Pen, the new Italian government, etc. Sent from my iPhone > On Jun 5, 2018, at 8:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2018 7:48 AM > To: David Green > Cc: peace ; Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so > > Yes, ‘nationalism’ is being used in two conflicting ways: > > (1) the interests of a country's elite minority; (2) the interests of the majority, as when we speak of the interests of the nation versus neoliberalism. > > > On Jun 4, 2018, at 2:52 PM, David Green wrote: > > Very interesting; but the more the word nationalism gets used from various persuasions, whether positively or pejoratively, the less it seems to mean in a consistent way; but nationalism has always been a kind of fiction, as Eric Hobsbawm and others taught us; as well as a political football, perhaps relevant as the World Cup approaches and we see that national identity is a given in the most crass and chauvinistic terms. > > On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 9:57 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156331653311678&set=a.10150294029661678.381794.775051677&type=3&theater > > ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME – AGAIN > > Steve Bannon is absolutely bonkers with what’s goin’ on in Italy. La Repubblica calls him “the Dark Knight of global populism”. He talked to the paper (portal). Here’s the low down. > > For Bannon, “Rome is now at the center of world politics” (correct). He has “advised” La Lega’s Salvini, and said they paid due attention. > > He’s enthusiastic that Lega and 5S “hit the heart of the European beast” (correct), foreign capitals and “foreign opposition media” (FT, Le Monde, etc.). He considers Salvini and Di Maio “heroic” – and the other hero is Berlusconi (not really). On 5S, he says they are “similar to socialist Sanders in the US”, anti-establishment and for transparency. And are allies to Italy’s “Trump” – referring to Salvini. > > He’s sure “Brussels, the stock market and the financial powers will go through hell” (correct). > > For Bannon, Italy is “a sleeping giant, with a huge economy” (correct). Brussels and media like the FT are “afraid of Italy” (true – the FT even invoked “barbarians”). > > He expects a “confederation of free states” to emerge in place of the current EU (not so fast). “The fascists are in Brussels” (relatively correct). And “we are on the right side of history; Merkel and Macron will fall” (not so fast). > > Trump is “back to his national-populist agenda” and “things could not be better for the US” (incorrect). Especially now that “the military have been sidelined from the administration” (but not the deep state – on the contrary). He thinks Pompeo could become President one day (Lord have mercy). > > Bannon thinks the Judeo-Christian West must be united – thus no Russia demonization. He stresses Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s (correct). “The problem is Russia is hated by the Democrats because is a nationalist country and they have the Orthodox Church (fundamentally correct). “The real problem is Iran” (ridiculous). > > Well, as you can see the man IS on a roll. > > ### > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Jun 5 15:26:30 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 15:26:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so In-Reply-To: <26A1E4FB-CF60-4B33-821E-1890CE186712@illinois.edu> References:

<25387632-E5F5-4836-91D9-587A51E7DF6E@illinois.edu> <26A1E4FB-CF60-4B33-821E-1890CE186712@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Stalingrad We got off the boat at the dock Walking into town I was asked Could I lay some flowers At the War Memorial On the Banks of the Volga? Of course I said yes Honored and pleased My Dad had fought the Japanese At Saipan and Tinian and Okinawa Nazis were not his war But we were all Allies together In the Noble Cause to Defeat Fascism As I neared the Statue On the Banks of the Volga Young Komsomol Girl appeared All dressed in white Carrying a wreath of red roses She gave to me A band was playing Joyful, not somber, but subdued Town Elders assembled Sun was shining Most beautiful day On the Banks of the Volga I lay my wreath of roses To the Defenders and Victims of Stalingrad Bowed my head in silent reflection If the Soviets had not held at Stalingrad All Europe today would be speaking German And saluting: Heil Hitler! Deutschland, Deutschland But not Uber Alles My Dad was smiling On the Banks of the Volga [cid:image003.jpg at 01D3FCB7.AAF0AA30] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2018 10:19 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; Karen Aram ; Robert Naiman ; peace ; Peace Discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so A case of Trump Derangement Syndrome = the view that the weakest president since Coolidge is the problem, encouraged by the political establishment who see that Trump rode in on the populist wave that gave us the Sanders campaign, Brexit, Melenchon & Le Pen, the new Italian government, etc. Sent from my iPhone On Jun 5, 2018, at 8:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2018 7:48 AM To: David Green > Cc: peace >; Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Pepe is correct & Bannon mostly so Yes, ‘nationalism’ is being used in two conflicting ways: (1) the interests of a country's elite minority; (2) the interests of the majority, as when we speak of the interests of the nation versus neoliberalism. On Jun 4, 2018, at 2:52 PM, David Green > wrote: Very interesting; but the more the word nationalism gets used from various persuasions, whether positively or pejoratively, the less it seems to mean in a consistent way; but nationalism has always been a kind of fiction, as Eric Hobsbawm and others taught us; as well as a political football, perhaps relevant as the World Cup approaches and we see that national identity is a given in the most crass and chauvinistic terms. On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 9:57 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156331653311678&set=a.10150294029661678.381794.775051677&type=3&theater ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME – AGAIN Steve Bannon is absolutely bonkers with what’s goin’ on in Italy. La Repubblica calls him “the Dark Knight of global populism”. He talked to the paper (portal). Here’s the low down. For Bannon, “Rome is now at the center of world politics” (correct). He has “advised” La Lega’s Salvini, and said they paid due attention. He’s enthusiastic that Lega and 5S “hit the heart of the European beast” (correct), foreign capitals and “foreign opposition media” (FT, Le Monde, etc.). He considers Salvini and Di Maio “heroic” – and the other hero is Berlusconi (not really). On 5S, he says they are “similar to socialist Sanders in the US”, anti-establishment and for transparency. And are allies to Italy’s “Trump” – referring to Salvini. He’s sure “Brussels, the stock market and the financial powers will go through hell” (correct). For Bannon, Italy is “a sleeping giant, with a huge economy” (correct). Brussels and media like the FT are “afraid of Italy” (true – the FT even invoked “barbarians”). He expects a “confederation of free states” to emerge in place of the current EU (not so fast). “The fascists are in Brussels” (relatively correct). And “we are on the right side of history; Merkel and Macron will fall” (not so fast). Trump is “back to his national-populist agenda” and “things could not be better for the US” (incorrect). Especially now that “the military have been sidelined from the administration” (but not the deep state – on the contrary). He thinks Pompeo could become President one day (Lord have mercy). Bannon thinks the Judeo-Christian West must be united – thus no Russia demonization. He stresses Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s (correct). “The problem is Russia is hated by the Democrats because is a nationalist country and they have the Orthodox Church (fundamentally correct). “The real problem is Iran” (ridiculous). Well, as you can see the man IS on a roll. ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 68889 bytes Desc: image003.jpg URL: From divisek at yahoo.com Tue Jun 5 16:55:02 2018 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2018 16:55:02 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Eisenhower Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Deformed American Christianity References: <1825058291.410130.1528217702627.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1825058291.410130.1528217702627@mail.yahoo.com> Eisenhower Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Deformed American Christianity | | | | | | | | | | | Eisenhower Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Deformed Ameri... However much people may debate the history and nature of Christianity, no serious student concludes that it’s a ... | | | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ewj at pigs.ag Tue Jun 5 23:47:21 2018 From: ewj at pigs.ag (ewj) Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2018 07:47:21 +0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Eisenhower Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Deformed American Christianity In-Reply-To: <1825058291.410130.1528217702627@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1825058291.410130.1528217702627.ref@mail.yahoo.com><1825058291.410130.1528217702627@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1528242441011.y5vow2jz4mbgusbvbbjkws01@android.mail.163.com> this so-called american christianity certainly is Not the True Church but.is a kind of dried-out organized religion. The real deal still gets its orders from Jesus and he is still the Prince of Peace. On 2018-06-06 00:55 , Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss Wrote: Eisenhower Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Deformed American Christianity Eisenhower Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Deformed Ameri... However much people may debate the history and nature of Christianity, no serious student concludes that it’s a ... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Wed Jun 6 09:20:09 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2018 04:20:09 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Conservative nationalism? Message-ID: <106B392D-23D3-4C7F-83CA-192D843236ED@illinois.edu> https://www.rt.com/op-ed/428812-donald-trump-sides-europe/ “Virtually all Americans born in the 1940s earned more than their parents; today, it’s less than half. The rust belt revolt that brought both Brexit and Trump reflects rotting factories, dying towns, and a half century of empty promises. Those left behind are very, very angry; Trump is their middle finger. The more he outrages coastal elites, the more his followers gloat they got our goat. Finally, they are being noticed.” —CGE From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Jun 6 11:58:52 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2018 11:58:52 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Dan Glazebrook explains how and why "talks" so often fail... Message-ID: HomeOp-ed Rambouillet ruse? Why Trump could be setting up his North Korea talks to fail [Dan Glazebrook] Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today. Published time: 6 Jun, 2018 09:17 Get short URL [Rambouillet ruse? Why Trump could be setting up his North Korea talks to fail] U.S. President Donald Trump, September 26, 2017 © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters * * * * * * * President Trump has set the bar of success so high for his forthcoming meeting with Kim Jong-un, it is difficult to see how it could possibly be met. As the New York Times noted last month, “To meet his own definition of success, Mr. Trump will have to persuade Mr. Kim to accept ‘complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization’ of North Korea — something that Mr. Kim has shown no willingness to accept in the past, and few believe he will accede to in the future.” Such denuclearization would involve “the actual dismantlement of weapons, the removal of stockpiled uranium and plutonium bomb fuel from the country and a verification program that will be one of the most complex in history, given the vastness of North Korea’s mountains.”Furthermore, Trump has suggested that the North Koreans will gain nothing in return for this one-sided destruction of their defenses, until the process is all-but-complete; as one Trump official toldthe Wall Street Journal, “When the president says that he will not make the mistakes of the past, that means the U.S. will not be making substantial concessions, such as lifting sanctions, until North Korea has substantially dismantled its nuclear programs”. In other words - give up your leverage first; then we’ll see. What Trump appears to seek is nothing less than a completely disarmed Korea that will pave the way for the “Libya solution” his people have openly suggested is the goal. Obviously, North Korea will not go for that. The whole point of their nuclear program has been to ensure that their country avoids the fate of Iraq or Libya; which is why the intelligence community is generally united in their view that it will never be given up. According to Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution, “virtually no North Korea analyst inside or outside of the US government expect Kim Jong-un to relinquish his nuclear weapons”, quoting former CIA analyst Jung Pak that Kim views nuclear weapons as both “vital to the security of his regime and his legitimacy as leader of North Korea”. Read more [FILE PHOTO: A ballistic missile is launched by North Korea during a drill on August 30, 2017. © KCNA]Russia abhors the very idea of a nuclear war between its neighbor North Korea and the US – Putin Meanwhile, the New York Times comments: “ask the people who have seen past peace initiatives whether they think this one will work out any differently, and they have serious doubts that Mr. Kim will give up his nuclear program for any price”, whilst for Stratfor, the complete denuclearization of North Korea is “a lofty goal that will be nearly impossible to ensure”. So what is Trump doing? Surely he knows what he is proposing would be completely unacceptable to any North Korean leader, let alone Kim Jong-un? But maybe this is the point. What if Trump, far from wanting to reach a deal, is actually deliberately pushing a proposal which is supposed to be rejected? After all, so long as he ensures his demands are unacceptable, he can offer the moon in return: recognition, technology, aid, lifting of sanctions, hell - why not? - even the removal of US troops from South Korea. Having such an offer rejected would allow Trump much more readily to be able to paint North Korea as the aggressor - unwilling to compromise, insincere in its desire for peace, etc, etc. This is, after all, a time-honored tactic. In February 1999, in the French town of Rambouillet, a series of meetings were convened between representatives of Kosovo’s multiethnic population and the US with the ostensible aim of resolving the conflict between Kosovan separatists and the Yugoslav government. For its part, the Yugoslavs had proposed a ceasefire, peace talks, the return of displaced citizens, and the establishment of a devolved assembly for the province, with a wide degree of autonomy. This would clearly have gone a long way to addressing the conflict; but that very fact made it completely unacceptable to the US, desperate to justify their coming onslaught against Yugoslavia. Instead, they needed a ‘peace deal’ that would be rejected by the Yugoslavs, who could then be painted as the aggressors, paving the way for war. To this end, the ‘Rambouillet Peace Agreement’ was formulated. The document demanded complete de facto independence for Kosovo, whilst still allowing the province to influence the rest of Yugoslavia by continuing to send representatives to its federal institutions. Yet, just in case even this one-sided arrangement was accepted by the Yugoslavs, in chapter seven of the agreement, the US inserted a crucial clause: that NATO “personnel shall enjoy . . . with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial waters”, whilst at the same time being "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative or criminal, [and] under all circumstances and at all times, immune from [all laws] governing any criminal or disciplinary offences which may be committed by Nato personnel in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”. Read more [North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un]N. Korea’s Kim invited to Russia with official visit In other words, Yugoslavia would have to not only submit to a full-scale occupation by NATO, but also give the occupiers the absolute and unaccountable right to abuse the population at will. Such a demand could never have been accepted by any sovereign country. But that, of course, was the point: this was an agreement penned precisely to be rejected, in order to paint the Serbs as the unreasoning aggressors. It worked perfectly: the ‘agreement’ was duly rejected, and the planned blitzkrieg of Yugoslavia followed, with 78 days of unrelenting aerial bombardment. The same ruse was repeated the following year by US President Bill Clinton. At Palestinian-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, he made a proposal for a ‘final settlement’ of the conflict which allowed Israel to keep 80 percent of their illegal settlements along with sovereignty over a patchwork of roads linking them together and thereby cutting the West Bank into unviable bantustans - with refugees permanently denied the right to return to their homes in Israel. As former US president Jimmy Carter commented, “There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive - but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for failure on Yasir Arafat”. Indeed, through the distortions of Western media, a narrative emerged that Israeli President Ehud Barak himself had made this so-called ‘generous offer’, the spurning of which demonstrated the Palestinians hatred for peace and unwillingness to settle for anything less than driving the Jews into the sea. In fact, the Israeli side themselves had never accepted Clinton’s proposal, and had issued twenty pages of concerns they had with it. On the last of the Clinton-chaired meetings - the one from which Barak’s supposed offer emerged, held in Taba in 2001 - Barak later said that “it was plain to me that there was no chance of reaching a settlement… Therefore I said there would be no negotiations and there would be no delegation and there would be no official discussions and no documentation”. Nevertheless, the official narrative, to this day, recalls that the Palestinians rejected the Israelis’ ‘generous offer’ - and therefore only have themselves to blame for their continued slaughter. The EU set up Yanukovych in the same way. In 2008, the EU and Ukraine agreed to negotiate what was supposed to be a trade agreement. Five years in the making, the EU Association Agreement was finally unveiled in 2013. But by then, the EU had included a clause on defense cooperation with the EU, effectively turning the country into an unofficial NATO member. Such a measure was guaranteed - and designed - to tear apart a country like Ukraine, a multiethnic polity with deep and historic ties to both Russia and Europe, whose unity rested on strict adherence to a policy of neutrality in terms of East-West rivalries. Furthermore, Yanokovych had an explicit democratic mandate for such neutrality, having been elected on precisely this basis. The Association agreement was duly rejected, as it was presumably intended to be - setting the stage for the Western-backed ‘Maidan coup’ and civil war which followed and continues to this day. Read more [North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un inspecting intercontinental ballistic rocket Hwasong-15 on November 30, 2017. © KCNA]No sanctions relief for N. Korea until ‘verifiable & irreversible’ denuclearization – Mattis So Western governments certainly have form in crafting proposals designed to be rejected, in order to justify escalation. And the US has every reason for doing so with North Korea today. Trump’s North Korea policy throughout last year was one of warmongering rhetoric and the ratcheting up of tensions. Whilst this was to some extent successful in bullying China and others into agreeing to harsher sanctions, this ‘consensus’ began to fall apart as Trump’s team stepped up their war talk at the end of the year, with defense secretary Mattis warning of “storm clouds...gathering” and national security advisor McMaster claiming that the odds of war were “increasing every day”. This ramping up of tension did not go down well in either Korea, and rapid moves to de-escalate were undertaken, with North Korean involvement in the winter Olympics a symbolic, but important, signifier of greater North-South cooperation to come. Then, in his New Year address, Kim Jong-un began a diplomatic charm offensive with the South which gained rapid results. A summit was set up between the leaders of the two Koreas, which eventually took place in April when Kim Jong-un became the first North Korean leader to cross the border into the South since the Korean war. The summit agreed to pursue denuclearization of the peninsula and to secure a formal Peace Treaty, with an outline peace arrangement to be reached by the end of the year. This emerging detente between the two Koreas has hugely undermined Trump’s warmongering. In an article entitled “As Two Koreas Talk Peace, Trump’s Bargaining Chips Slip Away”, Mark Landler pointed out that “the talk of peace is likely to weaken the two levers that Mr. Trump used to pressure Mr. Kim… A resumption of regular diplomatic exchanges between the two Koreas, analysts said, will inevitably erode the crippling economic sanctions against the North, while Mr. Trump will find it hard to threaten military action against a country that is extending an olive branch”. Landler went on to quote Jeffrey A. Bader, a former Asia advisor to Barack Obama, that, following the North-South rapprochement, said “It becomes awfully hard for Trump to return to the locked-and-loaded, ‘fire and fury’ phase of the relationship”. Worse, “Inside the White House, some worry that Mr. Kim will use promises of peace to peel South Korea away from the United States and blunt efforts to force him to give up his nuclear weapons”. Read more [North Korean envoy Kim Yong Chol talks with US President Donald Trump. © Leah Millis]Trump ‘did not like’ meeting between North Korean leader & Russian foreign minister Trump, therefore, urgently needs to snuff out this rapprochement if he is to return to the bellicosity that marked his Korea policy hitherto. As Landler wrote, “Mr Kim...made a bold bet on diplomacy” - and Trump needs to ensure that it fails. The best way of doing so is by putting himself at the head of it. If Trump is indeed planning to use the Rambouillet ruse to reignite tensions against the North, it is important that he spin his designed-to-be-rejected offer as somehow incredibly generous. And in recent weeks there have indeed been moves in that direction. First of all, Trump has appeared to accept that denuclearization might not need to happen in one fell swoop, telling reporters that whilst “It would certainly be better if it were all in one…. I don’t think I want to totally commit myself.” Next, Trump went out of his way to guarantee Mr. Kim’s safety. “He will be safe. He will be happy. His country will be rich,” the president said. You can already imagine Trump’s words when his ‘generous offer’ gets rejected: “we offered him security. We offered him prosperity. We offered him phased elimination. And he rejected all of it”. Fascinatingly, it turns out that Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton has actually already suggested precisely the Rambouillet ruse. According to the New York Times, “Two weeks before he was recruited as national security adviser, [Bolton] said a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim was useful only because it would inevitably fail, and then the United States could move swiftly on to the next phase — presumably a military confrontation… ‘It could be a long and unproductive meeting, or it could be a short and unproductive meeting," he said on Fox News. Even among officials who worry about war, there is sympathy for his view that “failing quickly”would be valuable. Meanwhile, Stratfor’s analysis of the likely prospects for the forthcoming summit concluded that “it may also reinforce the idea that if the two leaders can’t negotiate a way out of the conflict, then perhaps a diplomatic solution isn’t possible and talk of a military solution to the United States’ North Korea problem could return...Without some change, we’ll probably find ourselves back on the path to containment, if not on a course toward military action to end the North Korean nuclear and missile program once and for all”. Whether military action is realistically possible against North Korea, however, remains a serious question. Most analysts agree that the fallout from any retaliation - both against the 28,000 US soldiers stationed in South Korea, and against US allies in Seoul and Kyoto - would be unacceptably high. James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, is typical in his view that there are “no military options which would result in fewer than several hundred thousand casualties and perhaps as many as 2m to 3m”. So if war is not on the cards, to what end would Trump seek the rejection of his offer? One answer has already been suggested - to scupper the emerging North-South co-operation that threatens to erode US influence on the peninsula. Summit failure would give Trump a perceived ‘moral right’ to bully the South into ending its outreach and returning to the US position of isolating the North. Read more [© Edgar Su]Pentagon will ‘compete vigorously’ with Beijing in South China Sea – Mattis But another reason could lie in Trump’s trade war with China, the opening shots of which have only just been fired. Any supposed North Korean intransigence could provide Trump with cover for initiating secondary sanctions against North Korea’s supposed ‘allies’. Congressional law already allows Trump to initiate secondary sanctions against anyone trading with the victim of primary sanctions, but with the current atmosphere of rapprochement, it is difficult for Trump to justify using these against China at present. A North Korean ‘walk-out’ would provide the perfect excuse for stepping up economic warfare against China under the guise of sanctioning Korea. Indeed, Trump has already been setting up China as a potential scapegoat for any failure to reach a deal, claiming that Kim’s position had hardened following his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “There was a different attitude by the North Korean folks after that meeting,” Trump told reporters recently, “I can’t say that I’m happy about it.” The entire trajectory of Trump is, after all, not one of conciliation, but of escalation - on all fronts. Escalation against immigrants, against the working class, against Iran, against China, and even against his supposed chums in Moscow. There is absolutely no reason to think that North Korea is some kind of magical exception to this golden rule. Setting up a deal guaranteed to be rejected, but which can be spun as incredibly generous, is, of course, no mean feat. This is especially true given that Kim has now repeatedly stated that he is willing to give up his nuclear weapons. Indeed, this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out: after all, North Korea’s conventional capacity alone - not to mention its mutual defense treaty with China - arguably provides as much deterrence as is necessary to prevent an invasion, as those casualty figures quoted above bear out. In this case, the devil will be in the detail - and more specifically in the timings of the granting of concessions. Trump is likely, in my view, to offer what appear to be very generous concessions, but make them contingent on unacceptably obtrusive verification measures or unachievable levels of ‘proof’ before any of them kick in. Perhaps they will just copy and paste chapter seven of the Rambouillet Agreement in its entirety. A secret clause demanding NATO occupation of all of North Korea would probably do the trick. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Jun 7 12:53:26 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 12:53:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Federal Judge Sides With Philly Over Sanctuary City Policy - NBC 10 Philadelphia Message-ID: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Philadelphia-Judge-Sides-With-City-Over-Sanctuary-Cities-Policy-484706271.html ----------------- This Decision by the Federal District Judge in Philadelphia confirms the advice I gave to Urbana in 2016 and before that in 1986--as well as to Evanston, Oak Park, San Francisco, inter alia, when I served as Counsel to the Original Sanctuary Movement. It rejects the arguments made by Illiniwaks Law Dean Iceman Amar that Sanctuary Cities are illegal and unconstitutional. Just recently, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago agreed with me and not him--thank heavens! fab From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Jun 7 16:29:16 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 11:29:16 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "Donbass, don't tell." [R. Szoke] Message-ID: https://www.rt.com/politics/429005-putin-pledges-help-donbass/ The coup in Kiev - another Obama adminitration crime - was legitimately resisted by Donbass. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Jun 7 18:30:51 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 18:30:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Mass immigration raids shatter Ohio communities Message-ID: I saw officers with assault rifles, dogs and helicopters everywhere” Mass immigration raids shatter Ohio communities By Eric London and Will Morrow 7 June 2018 Family and co-workers of the immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) described Tuesday’s raids in northern Ohio, the largest so far of the Trump era, as “military-style,” “SWAT-like” and “a nightmare.” The coordinated raids targeted workers at the Corso’s Flower and Garden Center nurseries in Castalia and neighboring Sandusky. The World Socialist Web Sitespoke yesterday with children whose parents were arrested, co-workers whose close friends are gone, and young husbands who were separated from their wives. [http://www.wsws.org/asset/81942480-67b2-4e6d-8f04-a3418972f08O/image.jpg?rendition=image480]Mercedes Witnesses described a scene of total criminality. “They came with donuts,” said Mercedes, a Corso’s worker. “They got all of us into the same area telling us they were officials doing a routine inspection. When we all gathered, they encircled us and took the badges out. They had dogs, helicopters, assault rifles and helmets. We were all crying.” Another source told the WSWS that some agents were disguised as construction workers. Nearby residents said they could hear the raid from their homes. Other witnesses said workers who are US citizens denounced immigration agents at the scene, yelling at them and imploring them to stop. Workers said immigration officials detained several US citizen workers to prevent them from calling co-workers and warning them about the raid. Agents also reportedly ordered documented immigrant workers to bring their passports to work from now on. The workers said they would do no such thing. Last night, dozens of devastated family members gathered at a church in nearby Norwalk. For many, it was the first time they had seen each other since the raid. The room was full of people fighting against time and desperate for information, and most had not even spoken to their detained relatives who were shipped to facilities hours away. Not only do family and friends fear separation by deportation, they are also aware of the deadly possibility of being loaded onto unmarked airplanes destined for violent Central American countries devastated by more than a century of US imperialist exploitation, dictatorship and war. An untold number of children are now parentless. Jerry, an 18-year-old US citizen whose mother was taken in the raid, is now responsible for his younger sister and brother, aged 9 and 12. [http://www.wsws.org/asset/612007a7-0331-4386-b3c2-3d04e9a6f20H/image.jpg?rendition=image480]Jerry with his younger brother and sister “When I received that call I rushed over [to Corso’s] to see my mom,” he said. “I couldn’t. I was detained…. An agent told me to pull over. He handcuffed me and wouldn’t let me see my mom. I saw the bus she was in. It was 20 feet away, but it had tinted windows and I couldn’t see in. I’m thinking that my mom saw me but I couldn’t see her. “It was a horrible experience that no one should experience. Just because my mom is an illegal immigrant trying to support her family in this country, it’s horrible. They treated them like they’re worthless. I saw officers with assault rifles, dogs and helicopters everywhere.” Jerry said he had been saving money to go to college by working in construction from a young age. “But now this has happened I’m going to use some of that money to support my brother and sister.” [http://www.wsws.org/asset/7af698ab-ab9f-47bd-b912-b4adbf2933fP/image.jpg?rendition=image480]Flor and her relative Flor, a high school student whose mother was also arrested Tuesday, said, “I was at work. I was getting phone calls and messages from her. I felt bad because I couldn’t answer the phone because I was too busy working. I finally called her back and she was yelling and screaming: ‘They took me! They took me! Immigration got me!’” Corso’s workers also denounced the raids. One worker, Jerome, told the WSWS, “These are good, hardworking people. They are my friends. I knew these people. I go over to their houses and we have parties together. You can’t fault them for trying to better their lives, for coming here. People are starving where they come from. I’d risk my life to come here too.” Another worker said, “It was chaos. It was horrible what happened because people have children and they didn’t know what to do with them. These are hardworking people and it’s not fair. The women were all crying because they have kids too. I’ve known them for years, they’re hardworking and they’re just trying to better their lives.” A third worker said, “Some kids will now be put into foster care. They had dogs here. There was no way for anyone to hide. They don’t deserve it. They work hard for their families. They were good workers, if they saw you needed help they would offer it to you.” Many Corso’s workers reported that they often worked 80 to 90 hours a week. [http://www.wsws.org/asset/b29ae70f-1056-4672-99e7-126e51fe776A/image.jpg?rendition=image480]Families at the Norwalk meeting Ohio ACLU representative J. Bennett Guess gave a statement to the WSWS: “It was abhorrent the way they were detained, especially without regard for the children. Children were left at daycare centers. These are extremely hard working, low-wage workers who are highly exploited. What happened is a travesty of justice. What we are witnessing is the systematic dismantling of due process by every administration, Democratic and Republican alike.” He added that this was of extreme concern for all, regardless of immigration status: “How you treat your non-citizens is how you will treat your citizens.” Many workers have stories of close calls. Some, including a family of five, have moved out of their home for fear they will be hunted down by ICE. Others reported having family who are too afraid to leave their homes. As these horrific scenes play out, both the Democratic and Republican parties are calling for added “border security”—a term which means more ICE and CBP agents patrolling the country and terrorizing immigrants. Earlier this year, the Democrats supported a Trump-backed bill to hand hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding to ICE. Some present at yesterday’s Norwalk meeting said they had family and friends who had previously been deported by the Obama administration. Tuesday’s Gestapo-style raid is a warning to the entire working class. The US government is asserting the “right” to launch military raids on workplaces, dragging workers off the job and shipping them away from their families. What is to stop the government from using the same tactic against striking teachers, hauling them off to detention centers when their strikes are made “illegal” by the corporate-controlled courts? If autoworkers protest workplace injuries or line speed, why wouldn’t the government send police in to arrest the “troublemakers” and try to make the problem disappear? The trade unions have done nothing to oppose the establishment of dictatorial conditions in America’s workplaces. Instead, they pit workers against each other based on poisonous nationalism, telling workers in the US that their enemies are not the corporations and the government but workers in Mexico or China. New, rank-and-file committees must be built to protect even the most basic workplace rights of all workers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 8 00:41:18 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:41:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Attack on Ajamu Baraka at the Left Forum Message-ID: At the recent Left Forum on New York City, a small group of people handed out a flyer attacking Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace for his political orientation on Syria and other issues and held a demonstration at the final plenary session when he started speaking. UNAC has issued the following statement in defense of Ajamu and Black Alliance for Peace, a valued member of UNAC UNAC defense of anti-imperialism 6/6/18 Two organizations used Ajamu Baraka's presence at the recent Left Forum in order to attack anti-imperialism itself. They falsely accuse him of being a defender of genocide and a Donald Trump supporter as a ruse to hide their support of imperialism as carried out not just in Syria but around the world. Ajamu Baraka's history of activism and his role as National Organizer and National Spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) demonstrate a commitment to democracy, justice, and the rights of all people to self-determination. United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) is a partner with BAP on initiatives such as the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases. BAP is also represented on the UNAC Coordinating Committee. The two groups work together because we share the same determination to end U.S. state sponsored violence wherever it is carried out. In just one year since its founding, the Black Alliance for Peace has made great strides in reviving the black radical tradition of opposing "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." While the lies and vitriol directed at Ajamu Baraka were not strictly personal they were in essence attacks carried out against this black led movement as well. BAP's success in a short period of time make it a target of faux leftists whose goal is to legitimize U.S. foreign policy while cynically appearing to oppose it. The attempt to silence a leading black anti-war organization is therefore racist and makes their actions all the more insidious. These organizations reveal themselves to be supporters of the U.S. hegemon, telling slanderous falsehoods in order to hide their true political stance. They have a history of disrupting anti-war actions and forums hosted by UNAC and others whenever an anti-imperialist position on Syria or other issues are being discussed. UNAC stands with everyone who is clear about the necessity of ending the U.S. goal of reaching full spectrum dominance in Syria and everywhere. As such it is vital for us to stand with Black Alliance for Peace and against any effort to denounce its work and its leadership. We encourage other organizations to add their names to this statement or to issue their own statements of support and solidarity. Any U.S. Attack on Syria Is International Gangsterism, by Black Alliance for Peace Recent Statement of the Hands off Syria Coalition, of which UNAC is a founding member -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 8 01:14:59 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 01:14:59 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Ajamu Baraka on Africom Message-ID: https://www.facebook.com/BlackAllianceforPeace/videos/1378909972218424/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Jun 8 15:09:50 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 15:09:50 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The best thing you will hear, from Paul Street, Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon and Chris Hedges Message-ID: https://www.leftforum.org/events/imagining-authentic-21st-century-us-left -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From carl at newsfromneptune.com Sat Jun 9 01:33:07 2018 From: carl at newsfromneptune.com (C. G. Estabrook) Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 20:33:07 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: LBO News from Doug Henwood References: <000000000000fae58d056e2344d4@google.com> Message-ID: Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: > From: LBO News from Doug Henwood > Date: June 8, 2018 at 10:44:04 AM CDT > To: carl at newsfromneptune.com > Subject: LBO News from Doug Henwood > Reply-To: LBO News from Doug Henwood > > > LBO News from Doug Henwood > Contingency: almost every demographic is down > No it’s not a gig economy > Fresh audio product > Contingency: almost every demographic is down > Posted: 07 Jun 2018 07:32 PM PDT > Someone on Twitter, reacting to my last post on contingent employment, wrote this: > > “Contingent workers were more than twice as likely as noncontingent workers to be under age 25.” Profitable corporations are putting lots of young people in incredibly exploitative jobs and making it normal. For the young work is a new hell, and it’s not temporary. > > Workers under the age of 25 are less likely to be contingent than they were 22 years ago. Here’s the detail by demographic group. > > > > The share for workers in the 20–25 age group declined more than the average—especially women. The only groups to see an increase in share were teenage males and, barely, women aged 55–64. > > This is not to say that young workers—or any workers except the professional/managerial elite—have a great thing going. But our critique should be about wages, benefits, working conditions, and our savage lack of a basic welfare state, not about “precarity.” > > > No it’s not a gig economy > Posted: 07 Jun 2018 04:39 PM PDT > Despite the voluble testimony of pundits and bar companions, the world of work is not one of Uber drivers and temp workers. In fact, the share of U.S. employment accounted for by contingent and “alternative” arrangements is lower now than it was in 2005 and 1995. > > That testimony is derived from several original sources. For example, a much ballyhooed 2014 study commissioned by the Freelancers Union—which is not a materially disinterested party—reported that a third of workers are freelancers. The claim of a 2016 paper by Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger that “all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements” was widely quoted and quickly became folk wisdom. That paper was based on an online survey conducted by the RAND Corporation The survey was small—fewer than 4,000 respondents—and its sample wasn’t very representative of the overall population, a flaw the authors corrected through vigorous statistical handiwork. > > Data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics should put an end to this chatter. According to a special edition of their Current Population Survey, a monthly poll of 60,000 households conducted jointly with the Census Bureau, just 3.8% of workers were classed as contingent in May 2017, meaning they don’t expect their job to last a year. That’s down from 4.1% in 2005 and 4.9% in 1995. (Reports from the years before 2017 are here.) Tighter definitions show smaller shares, but also down from earlier years. In 2017, 96.2% of workers were noncontingent, compared with 95.1% 22 years earlier. > > The share of workers in “alternative” arrangements was 10.1%. Of those, 6.9% were independent contractors, 1.7% were on-call, and 1.5% were employed by either temp or contract firms. That means that 89.9% of the workforce has a “traditional” job, down 0.2 point from 1995. > > There’s less of a racial pattern to contingency than one might guess: 3.7% of white workers don’t expect their jobs to last, compared to 4.0% of black workers; 4.9% of Asian, and 5.1% of “Hispanic/Latino.” All these shares are down from 1995. Nor is there a vast gender disparity: 3.9% of women, vs. 3.8% of men are contingent. > > And not all independent contractors are freelancers hanging on by a thread: 39% are in managerial or professional occupations, slightly less than their share of the overall workforce. These would include self-employed doctors or consultants. Reflecting that, independent contractors are more likely to be white and male than nonwhite non-men. Other forms of alternative arrangements show surprisingly little variation by race and gender; nonwhites are more likely to be temp workers, but there’s no gender gap at all. Almost all demographic groups show little change from 1995, and most of those changes are downward. > > Of course, not all contingent workers are consultants or contract programmers. Full-time contingent workers earn 77% as much as noncontingent workers; contingent part-timers earn 89% as much as noncontingent part-timers.. Almost three-quarters—73%—have some kind of employer-provided health insurance, compared to 84% of noncontingents. All in all, 55% of contingent workers would like a traditional job. > > “Alternative” workers are better off. Full-time independent contractors make 96% as much as noncontingent full-timers; contract workers (heavily used in tech) make 22% more. Temp workers—0.9% of the workforce—are much worse off, however, making 41% less than the traditionally employed. About three-quarters of independent contractors have employer-provided health insurance, but only two-thirds of temp workers do. > > None of this is to argue that the world of work is a delight. But we should be clear about what the problems are. Precarity isn’t the major problem in the American labor market. It’s that wages are stagnant or worse, benefits are eroding, and much labor is dull, alienating, pointless, and sometimes dangerous. Many people with normal, full-time jobs have a hard time making ends meet, and most households have little or no savings to fall back on in a crisis. Emphasizing precarity only makes workers feel even more powerless than they are. > > > This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now > > Fresh audio product > Posted: 07 Jun 2018 02:10 PM PDT > Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): > > June 7, 2018 Adam Gaffney (see link for articles) on how to get prescription drug prices down • Barry Eichengreen, author of The Populist Temptation, on the nationalist/xenophobic turn (Trump, Brexit, etc.), and on the future of the U.S. dollar > > > You are subscribed to email updates from LBO News from Doug Henwood. > To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. Email delivery powered by Google > Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Jun 9 14:50:10 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 14:50:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [Women's March on the Pentagon 2018] ~ Cindy Sheehan with Ann Wright and other peace... References: <5e52fe0a6bf011e8be69000af7c25f18-282f49a8@8941bcc9156560f44064cc456d0f9e198e1d1b0ae2e864f13069511f871eb869> Message-ID: Bonnie J. Caracciolo and Emma Leigh Fiala posted in Women's March on the Pentagon 2018. [https://scontent.fbed1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p100x100/34642278_1815982011787665_6690677685519122432_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&_nc_eui2=AeEkWBWsNbJIy7pHIlmiozMHt5MFPXg5N--r7yxGe_anjnniZYsaFZaJpWMMwc9dvpMR7BFwbOE1dSq0lFsNqQpGDXnAinAiiCcQgckfrddfjQ&_nc_ad=z-m&_nc_cid=0&oh=f52773aa9e43ce89b322cedb56488987&oe=5BBC78D8] Bonnie J. Caracciolo June 9 at 7:20am ~ Cindy Sheehan with Ann Wright and other peace activists including Veterans for Peace. August 25, 2007 - Kennebunkport, ME [https://scontent.fbed1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/s200x200/34800542_1819699724749227_2560735028875100160_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&_nc_eui2=AeHxYCJ0O34V6A6R-h1xitiaf3tV73A0_igfDwz2wa4hUoDMSkWbeKA3_IizEb5LuMJWc0bLp6kh_z5iAa02dItNlkObm1jphpx1CRKDWRSc_A&_nc_ad=z-m&_nc_cid=0&oh=6c0585a2755f1054ae711b6e22ad3caf&oe=5BB6B1E7] ~ Cindy Sheehan with Ann Wright and other peace activists including Veterans for Peace. August 25, 2... Reply to this email to comment on this post. This message was sent to karenaram at hotmail.com. If you don't want to receive these emails from Facebook in the future, please unsubscribe. Facebook, Inc., Attention: Community Support, 1 Facebook Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025 [https://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=56e35f049e8b5G59f6997cG56e2d49bc4f09G3f3] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Jun 9 15:06:37 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:06:37 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A most comprehensive AWARE FLYER by Carl Estabrook, Message-ID: General half-page flyer (recto & verso) for distribution at Farmers' Market, monthly demos, etc.] AMERICANS ARE AGAINST U.S. WAR-MAKING ~ DEMAND AN END TO U.S. KILLING IN OUR NAME Obama and Trump were both elected as anti-war candidates. In office, both sent more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to increase the killing ~ The U.S. military is today killing people in seven Mideast and African countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Thousands of U.S. troops are fighting in these countries, although most Americans don’t know that. In addition, the 70,000-member U.S. ‘Special Operations Command’ is active in three-quarters of the countries of the world. Their activities include kidnapping (‘rendition’), torture, and murder. President Obama was elected as an anti-war candidate, but in office he expanded the wars he inherited and vastly increased the war provocations against Russia and Chiina; his drone assassinations were rightly called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” President Trump, who promised caution and non-interventionism in foreign policy - and described Hillary Clinton as a “trigger happy warmonger” - has now done the same things himself. What both men knew is that, in spite of intense media propaganda, most Americans don’t want U.S. troops engaged in foreign wars and don’t see the killing as justified; they had to agree, in order to get elected. *But the ‘one percent’ - the U.S. economic elite - do want the wars.* U.S. presidents have killed more than 20 million people in wars around the world since World War II. That war left the U.S. elite in an unprecedented position of world economic dominance. U.S. wars since then - in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and the Mideast - have had the purpose of “maintaining the disparity,” as U.S. diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1948. Ordinary Americans have paid for these vicious wars, but they haven’t profited from them. Most Americans are not aware of how much of the world is appalled at what the U.S. government has done in our lifetimes. It is a triumph of the American system of propaganda and intellectual control - the most effective in history - that Americans are able to ignore it. For many years the U.S. has attempted to exercise military control over the Mideast and its energy resources. The U.S. doesn’t need oil from the Mideast, but Mideast gas and oil are needed by America’s economic competitors in Europe and Asia, and so control over them gives the U.S. a major advantage over China, Germany, and other countries - a choke-hold which benefits only the American one percent. In 2003 the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq - and killed perhaps a million people - and now has thousands of troops and mercenaries throughout the Mideast. The U.S. government says that we’re fighting terrorism, but we are in fact creating terrorists in response to our invasions, bombing campaigns, and drone assassinations, which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children. AWARE, the ‘Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort’ of Champaign-Urbana, joins other anti-war groups in the United States and around the world to call upon President Trump to ~ (1) establish a foreign policy based on diplomacy, international law, and human rights; ~ (2) end U.S. wars in the Mideast and war provocations against Russia (in Eastern Europe) and China (in the South China Sea), and stop the drone assassinations; ~ (3) cut military spending by at least 50% and close the more than 800 U.S. military bases on foreign soil (Russia has twelve; China has one); bring U.S. troops (and weapons) home from 3/4 of the world’s countries; ~ (4) stop U.S. support for human rights abusers, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia; and ~ (5) lead on global nuclear disarmament. ANTI-WAR ANTI-RACISM EFFORT - on Facebook at ~ U.S. troops & weapons out of the Mideast ~ Medicare for all ~ Universal basic income ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Jun 9 15:17:46 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:17:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Illinois Governor calls for reinstatement of the death penalty Message-ID: Illinois Governor calls for reinstatement of the death penalty By Michael Walters 9 June 2018 Republican Governor Bruce Rauner issued an amendatory veto last month to Illinois state gun control legislation that establishes a 72-hour waiting period for firearm purchases. It would reinstate the death penalty at the state level for murders of two or more people or of police and create a new category of criminal offense called “death penalty murder.” The state of Illinois banned the death penalty in 2011, following an eleven-year moratorium after multiple reports of wrongful convictions emerged. The death penalty remains widely opposed by the state’s residents. The Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly can either accept the changes by a simple majority vote in each of the chambers or override the Governor’s veto by a three-fifths vote in each chamber. A third option is that the veto is not acted on and the bill, with its amendatory veto, dies. Rauner’s amendatory veto is an attempt to force the Democratic-controlled General Assembly to approve even more draconian law-and-order measures in order to get the bill’s gun control measures. The original bill passed by the state legislature called for a 72 hour “cooling-off” period on the sale of assault rifles. In addition to reinstating the death penalty, Rauner’s amendment would expand the waiting period to cover all firearms, ban the sale of firearm enhancements that turn semi-automatic guns into fully automatic guns, and establish a legal path for the courts to seize firearms possessed by people identified by their family members or police as “a danger to themselves or others.” At a May 14 conference, Rauner said: “There are plenty of cases where there’s no doubt who’s guilty, and they deserve to give up their life when they take the life of a police officer, who are our heroes, or they take the life of many people.” Rauner acknowledged the long history of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases in absurd fashion, declaring in his amendment: “[T]he only morally justifiable standard of proof in a death penalty case is ‘beyond all doubt.’” The evidentiary standard for criminal conviction in the United States is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Rauner’s appeal to “beyond all doubt” has no status in US law. Rauner’s effort to reinstate the death penalty in cases where two or more people are murdered and in cases where a police officer is killed echoes various “Blue Lives Matter” laws, proposed in 14 states over the past year, which increase the penalty if the victim is a law enforcement officer. One such bill at the federal level, The Protect and Serve Act of 2018, passed the US House of Representatives 382-35 with the support of 162 of 193 Democrats. The bill calls for a maximum 10-year sentence for anyone who assaults or attempts to assault a law enforcement officer and life imprisonment for murder of a law enforcement officer. Having passed the House, the bill is currently before the US Senate. What is clear is that the billionaire Rauner was using his veto to make a public appeal to the most reactionary elements in the state to vote for him in the upcoming November election. Rauner is seeking re-election against the Democratic Party’s own billionaire candidate, J.B. Pritzker. In the Illinois Republican primary, Rauner narrowly defeated a far-right challenger Jeanne Ives. Ives, who was financed by the far-right activist Uihlein family, appealed to the most reactionary elements within the Republican Party and the financial aristocracy who are angered by Rauner’s inability to deliver on his promises of further deregulating the state, lowering wages and destroying workers’ collective bargaining rights. The Democrats are in no fundamental way opposed to the terms of Rauner’s amendment, as they have elected to open the floor to debate the proposal to bring back the death penalty. Citing their concerns with the lack of time to evaluate the legislation, the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, stated, “We believe that any process by which the government would end a human life should be deliberate and thoughtful, with appropriate safeguards in place, and that the death penalty should be reserved for the most serious offenses and offenders.” When Democratic Governor Pat Quinn signed into law the abolition of the death penalty in 2011, he did so largely as an effort to stem the growing outrage over wrongful convictions and claimed ending the death penalty would improve the fiscal health of the state. From the reinstatement of capital punishment in Illinois in 1977 through 2000, when the moratorium began, the state carried out 12 executions. Over that same period, 20 condemned inmates were taken off death row. Some of these men were exonerated after DNA evidence proved their innocence and other cases collapsed after new trials were ordered by appellate courts. The continued barbaric practice of capital punishment across the US and the effort to revive its use in Illinois in the face popular opposition speaks volumes about the decay of class rule in America. Rauner, and his reactionary call to bring back the death penalty, represents a capitalist class that is openly turning to repressive and authoritarian forms of rule. The few crumbs of progress afforded to the working class, including the abolition of the death penalty, are being clawed back. WSWS.ORG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:27:29 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:27:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Illinois Governor calls for reinstatement of the death penalty In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Citing their concerns with the lack of time to evaluate the legislation, the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, stated, “We believe that any process by which the government would end a human life should be deliberate and thoughtful, with appropriate safeguards in place, and that the death penalty should be reserved for the most serious offenses and offenders.” Yeah, so notice the Illinois States Attorneys support the reinstitution of the death penalty. They are all shameless! They support the death penalty in order to get elected or re-elected, and then to move on from there to some nice cushy judgeship. They are one of the reasons why I nominated Illinois Governor George Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to abolish the death penalty in Illinois and clearing out the Illinois Death Row, 2/3ds of whom were People of Color. He was among the five finalists for that year. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2018 10:18 AM To: Peace-discuss List ; peace Subject: [Peace] Illinois Governor calls for reinstatement of the death penalty Illinois Governor calls for reinstatement of the death penalty By Michael Walters 9 June 2018 Republican Governor Bruce Rauner issued an amendatory veto last month to Illinois state gun control legislation that establishes a 72-hour waiting period for firearm purchases. It would reinstate the death penalty at the state level for murders of two or more people or of police and create a new category of criminal offense called “death penalty murder.” The state of Illinois banned the death penalty in 2011, following an eleven-year moratorium after multiple reports of wrongful convictions emerged. The death penalty remains widely opposed by the state’s residents. The Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly can either accept the changes by a simple majority vote in each of the chambers or override the Governor’s veto by a three-fifths vote in each chamber. A third option is that the veto is not acted on and the bill, with its amendatory veto, dies. Rauner’s amendatory veto is an attempt to force the Democratic-controlled General Assembly to approve even more draconian law-and-order measures in order to get the bill’s gun control measures. The original bill passed by the state legislature called for a 72 hour “cooling-off” period on the sale of assault rifles. In addition to reinstating the death penalty, Rauner’s amendment would expand the waiting period to cover all firearms, ban the sale of firearm enhancements that turn semi-automatic guns into fully automatic guns, and establish a legal path for the courts to seize firearms possessed by people identified by their family members or police as “a danger to themselves or others.” At a May 14 conference, Rauner said: “There are plenty of cases where there’s no doubt who’s guilty, and they deserve to give up their life when they take the life of a police officer, who are our heroes, or they take the life of many people.” Rauner acknowledged the long history of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases in absurd fashion, declaring in his amendment: “[T]he only morally justifiable standard of proof in a death penalty case is ‘beyond all doubt.’” The evidentiary standard for criminal conviction in the United States is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Rauner’s appeal to “beyond all doubt” has no status in US law. Rauner’s effort to reinstate the death penalty in cases where two or more people are murdered and in cases where a police officer is killed echoes various “Blue Lives Matter” laws, proposed in 14 states over the past year, which increase the penalty if the victim is a law enforcement officer. One such bill at the federal level, The Protect and Serve Act of 2018, passed the US House of Representatives 382-35 with the support of 162 of 193 Democrats. The bill calls for a maximum 10-year sentence for anyone who assaults or attempts to assault a law enforcement officer and life imprisonment for murder of a law enforcement officer. Having passed the House, the bill is currently before the US Senate. What is clear is that the billionaire Rauner was using his veto to make a public appeal to the most reactionary elements in the state to vote for him in the upcoming November election. Rauner is seeking re-election against the Democratic Party’s own billionaire candidate, J.B. Pritzker. In the Illinois Republican primary, Rauner narrowly defeated a far-right challenger Jeanne Ives. Ives, who was financed by the far-right activist Uihlein family, appealed to the most reactionary elements within the Republican Party and the financial aristocracy who are angered by Rauner’s inability to deliver on his promises of further deregulating the state, lowering wages and destroying workers’ collective bargaining rights. The Democrats are in no fundamental way opposed to the terms of Rauner’s amendment, as they have elected to open the floor to debate the proposal to bring back the death penalty. Citing their concerns with the lack of time to evaluate the legislation, the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, stated, “We believe that any process by which the government would end a human life should be deliberate and thoughtful, with appropriate safeguards in place, and that the death penalty should be reserved for the most serious offenses and offenders.” When Democratic Governor Pat Quinn signed into law the abolition of the death penalty in 2011, he did so largely as an effort to stem the growing outrage over wrongful convictions and claimed ending the death penalty would improve the fiscal health of the state. From the reinstatement of capital punishment in Illinois in 1977 through 2000, when the moratorium began, the state carried out 12 executions. Over that same period, 20 condemned inmates were taken off death row. Some of these men were exonerated after DNA evidence proved their innocence and other cases collapsed after new trials were ordered by appellate courts. The continued barbaric practice of capital punishment across the US and the effort to revive its use in Illinois in the face popular opposition speaks volumes about the decay of class rule in America. Rauner, and his reactionary call to bring back the death penalty, represents a capitalist class that is openly turning to repressive and authoritarian forms of rule. The few crumbs of progress afforded to the working class, including the abolition of the death penalty, are being clawed back. WSWS.ORG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:29:07 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:29:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2013 10:30 AM To: jmeisner at tribune.com; asweeney at tribune.com; eleventis at tribune.com Subject: 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) [cid:7C86D7CC309F4F66B0455235C1A035F0 at PCSBSse81] 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle nominated retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous, heroic, and principled opposition to the racist and class-based death penalty system in America. The Illinois General Assembly and Governor Pat Quinn recently abolished the death penalty--a life-long objective of Professor Boyle, a Native Illinoisan. See his article "Teaching Against the Death Penalty," 21 J. Development Alternatives & Areas Studies, No. 1 & 2, at 90-96 (March-June 2002), which recounts his experiences at teaching against the death penalty since his arrival at the College of Law in August of 1978. Together with his former student Karen Conti and her late partner Greg Adamski, they served as Co-Counsel to prevent the execution of convicted mass-murderer John Wayne Gacey by then Illinois Governor Jim Edgar. The three of them won a Request for a Stay of Execution by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to Governor Edgar on the grounds that the Illinois lethal injection procedure constituted torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Nevertheless, Governor Edgar violated this Request and illegally tortured Mr. Gacey to death over a period of eighteen minutes. But thanks to Governor George Ryan there had been no similar executions by the State of Illinois for over a decade and now never again! Boyle was elected by the 200,000 members of Amnesty International USA to serve two two- year terms on their Board of Directors from 1988 to 1992. The Nobel Peace Prize Winning Amnesty International is an abolitionist organization that will work to prevent the execution of any human being for any reason. So will Professor Boyle. Amnesty International also opposes the torture of human beings for any reason. So does Professor Boyle. For information : Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Image10.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 19572 bytes Desc: Image10.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:33:55 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:33:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [deathpenaltyusa] Illinois prof again nominates George Ryan for Nobel Peace Prize In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: deathpenaltyusa at yahoogroups.com [mailto:deathpenaltyusa at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sandrine Ageorges-Skinner Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 4:50 PM To: deathpenaltyusa at yahoogroups.com Subject: [deathpenaltyusa] Illinois prof again nominates George Ryan for Nobel Peace Prize Illinois prof again nominates George Ryan for Nobel Peace Prize BY KEVIN McDERMOTT > kmcdermott at post-dispatch.com > 217-782-4912 Posted: Monday, January 31, 2011 2:40 pm SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- Illinois ex-Gov.George Ryan, currently serving a 6-1/2 year prison sentence for corruption, should win the Nobel Peace Prize for freezing all executions in Illinois and commuting the sentences of more than 160 death-row inmates, a University of Illinois law professor says. Professor Francis A. Boyle has made an annual crusade out of attempting to secure the coveted prize for Ryan, a Republican who was convicted in 2006 of using his public office to enrich himself and his associates. As an international law professor, Boyle is allowed to nominate people for the Nobel. ``Thanks to Governor George Ryan there have been no . . . executions by the State of Illinois for over a decade,'' Boyle noted in an email announcing his latest nomination of Ryan. In fact, Ryan's decade-old moratorium on executions laid the groundwork for a bill that passed the Legislature this month to abolish the death penalty in Illinois altogether. Gov. Pat Quinnhasn't yet signed it, but many expect him to. What are Ryan's chances of winning a Nobel? Probably the same as they've been in past years. Certainly, the prize has gone to political prisoners--but to give one to a guy serving an apparently valid sentence for political corruption would raise some eyebrows. Many death penalty opponents who admire what Ryan did say his corruption conviction is a separate and irrelevant thing. Boyle has taken it a step further, claiming (with an unusual theory, and no proof, it should be noted) that Ryan was purposefully prosecuted by the Feds because of his anti-death-penalty work.Here's a 2006 story we did on Boyle's claim. Ryan's wife, Lura Lynn Ryan, has terminal cancer. Ryan has so far been denied a furlough from prison to be with her in their Kankakee, Ill., home. Copyright 2011 www.STLtoday.com http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/article_bfc8ee00-2d7e-11e0-ae18-00127992bc8b.html __._,_.___ Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic Messages in this topic (1) Recent Activity: Visit Your Group MARKETPLACE Get great advice about dogs and cats. Visit the Dog & Cat Answers Center. ________________________________ Stay on top of your group activity without leaving the page you're on - Get the Yahoo! Toolbar now. [Yahoo! Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest * Unsubscribe * Terms of Use . __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:36:32 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:36:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [florida_support] George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize In-Reply-To: <67C7FACF89414B518A8E43371B8D8BC9@siljedmf4rv7q7> References: <67C7FACF89414B518A8E43371B8D8BC9@siljedmf4rv7q7> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: florida_support at yahoogroups.com [mailto:florida_support at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of denmark Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:47 AM To: florida_support at yahoogroups.com Subject: [florida_support] George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize [2010ryan.jpg (14089 bytes)] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - JANUARY 6, 2010 George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Francis A. Boyle, long-standing, distinguished Professor of International Law and Human Rights, announces his nomination of retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. "The lives of about 3297 people on death rows throughout the United States of America stand in the balance. For the sake of them all, I respectfully request that you award the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to George Ryan," Boyle states in nominating Ryan. The former Illinois governor's courageous opposition to the death penalty initiated the groundwork for the Moratorium Movement when in the year 2000 he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium and emptied Illinois' death row, the first such action in this country. Due directly through Gov. Ryan's pioneering efforts, the number of death sentences and the number of executions carried out in this country has reached a historical low, and has given promise to the end of the death penalty in the United States. The year 2009 marked a historical landmark with the publication of The Death Penalty Information Center's report "The Death Penalty in 2009: Year End Report" on December 18, noting that the country is expected to finish 2009 with the fewest death sentences since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Eleven states considered abolishing the death penalty this year, a significant increase in legislative activity from previous years, as the high costs and lack of measurable benefits associated with this punishment troubled lawmakers. In 2009 New Mexico became the 15th American state to repeal the death penalty. According to Boyle: "Nothing could strike a more powerful blow against the death penalty in the United States and around the world" than for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to give their 2010 Award to Ryan. FOR INFORMATION CONTACT: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu __._,_.___ Reply to sender | Reply to group Messages in this topic (2) Recent Activity: * New Members 1 Visit Your Group Start a New Topic MARKETPLACE Going Green: Your Yahoo! Groups resource for green living [Yahoo! Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest * Unsubscribe * Terms of Use . __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15538 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:38:38 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:38:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: denmark [mailto:denmark at online.no] Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:43 PM To: Boyle, Francis ; Dianne ; musserod at bright.net Subject: George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize ----- Original Message ----- From: denmark To: msneed at suntimes.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:42 PM Subject: George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize [Image10a.jpg] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - JANUARY 21, 2009 George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Francis A. Boyle, long-standing Professor of International Law and Human Rights, has nominated retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. George Ryan's courageous opposition to the death penalty initiated the groundwork for the Moratorium Movement when in the year 2000 he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium, the first in this country. The moratorium placed on all executions by the United States Supreme Court in 2007 can directly be attributed to Ryan's principled vision and tireless work to guarantee human rights by abolishing the death penalty both in the United States and around the world. Although the monumental development of a moratorium was a short-lived reality, the number of death sentences and the number of executions carried out in this country have reached a historical low, and has given promise to the end of the death penalty in the United States -- all thanks to the inspired and driven dedication of one man, retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan. In the US 37 executions took place in 2008, marking a 14-year low and continuing a downward trend that began in 2000. 95% of all executions occurred in the South in 2008; 49% were in one state - Texas. As stated by Professor Boyle, "George Ryan is the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America. Thanks to George Ryan, the death penalty is on its last legs here in the United States. It is up to the rest of us to kill it off!" FOR INFORMATION CONTACT: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 11991 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:41:55 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:41:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize In-Reply-To: <09fb01c850b1$fc5cc1f0$2302a8c0@TVROOM> References: <09fb01c850b1$fc5cc1f0$2302a8c0@TVROOM> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Dianne Abshire [mailto:afua at woh.rr.com] Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 4:18 PM To: Boyle, Francis Subject: George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize [cid:image001.jpg at 01D3FFDE.7BCDBDE0] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - JANUARY 6, 2008 George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize University of Illinois Law and Human Rights Professor Francis A. Boyle has nominated George H. Ryan for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. The current growing moratorium movement spreading across the United States is a reality directly connected to Ryan's courageous opposition to the death penalty both in the US and around the world, and to his visionary action to impose the first US moratorium against the death penalty in 2000. Due to George Ryan's commitment to humanitarian principles and his tireless efforts to create dialogue in support of seeking justice for the 3,350 men and women warehoused on death rows throughout the US, the United States Supreme Court has in effect imposed a nation wide moratorium on executions. George Ryan's dream to end governmental killing has temporarily come to fruition. The growing momentum for the outright abolition of the death penalty in the United States is due to the heroic efforts of George H. Ryan. He has done more effective work against the death penalty than the entire American Abolitionist Movement put together. For that reason the world should award him the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. For information contact : Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 19572 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Jun 9 15:44:06 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 15:44:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Former Illinois Governor George Ryan Nominated For The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize In-Reply-To: <04e001c744a0$4eb8ab90$6400a8c0@none5kl5rldjo3> References: <04e001c744a0$4eb8ab90$6400a8c0@none5kl5rldjo3> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: sissel [mailto:denmark at online.no] Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:56 PM To: Rick Halperin ; delliotDC at aol.com; Karl Keys