Damn It- Free Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Prison!

Damn It- Free Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Prison! 

Statement by the Committee For International Labor Defense 


Now that the bid by Amnesty International and others internationally seeking to get former President Barack Obama to pardon Leonard Peltier have gone for nought we supporters are between a rockand a hard place. (See below.) The denial notice was for very flimsy reasons despite the fact that even the prosecutor does not know who killed those two FBI agents in a firefight at PIne Ridge. Hell it could have been friendly forces who knows sometimes in a war zone, at that was exactly what that situation was who knows. All we know is that Brother Peltier has spent forty some years behind bars and has a slew of medical problems which would have let Obama pardon just on compassionate grounds. He didn't. Don't expect, we almost have to laugh even sayingsuch a thing, one Donald J.Trump,POTUS, and maybe off to jail himself to pardon Leonard Peltier before his term of office is up.         

Still Leonard Peltier along with Mumia Abu-Jamal and now Reality Leigh Winner are America's best know political prisoners and need to be supported and freed. To that end we in Boston have committed ourselves to as best we are able to continue ot keep the Peltier case in the public eye by holding  periodic vigils calling for his pardon and freedom. We call on all Leonard Peltier supporters to keep his name before the public. Free Leonard Peltier-He Must Not Die In Prison     

Send Cards & Letters

Leonard Peltier
#89637-132
USP Coleman I
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521

Leonard Peltier Denied Clemency by Obama

Web ExclusiveJANUARY 18, 2017

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• Leonard Peltier
• Clemency

The Office of the Pardon Attorney has announced President Obama has denied clemency to imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Peltier is a former member of the American Indian Movement who was convicted of killing two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has long maintained his innocence.

Amnesty International condemned the decision.

“We are deeply saddened by the news that President Obama will not let Leonard go home,” said Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Despite serious concerns about the fairness of legal proceedings that led to his trial and conviction, Peltier was imprisoned for more than 40 years. He has always maintained his innocence. The families of the FBI agents who were killed during the 1975 confrontation between the FBI and American Indian Movement (AIM) members have a right to justice, but justice will not be served by Peltier’s continued imprisonment.”

Peltier’s attorney Martin Garbus appeared on Democracy Now! today.

"I think it’s fair to say that if he doesn’t get commuted by President Obama, he’ll die in jail. He’s a very sick man," Garbus said. "So, Obama’s not granting him clemency is like a sentence of death. Trump ain’t going to do it. And he’s very sick, and he’s not going to live past that time. I don’t want to be negative, but that’s the reality. He’s very sick, and he’s been in prison over 40 years, hard years, six years of solitary."

Garbus was notified of Obama’s decision earlier today. In an email, the Office of the Pardon Attorney wrote: "The application for commutation of sentence of your client, Mr. Leonard Peltier, was carefully considered in this Department and the White House, and the decision was reached that favorable action is not warranted. Your client’s application was therefore denied by the President on January 18, 2017... Under the Constitution, there is no appeal from this decision."

Click to a Leonard Peltier Defense Committee site.

https://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on February 6, 1976, along with Frank Blackhorse, a.k.a. Frank Deluca. The United States presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who said she was Mr. Peltier’s girlfriend and allegedly saw him shoot the agents. In fact, Ms. Poor Bear had never met Mr. Peltier and was not present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements and said the FBI threatened her and coerced her into signing the affidavits.

• Mr. Peltier was extradited to the United States where he was tried in 1977. The trial was held in North Dakota before United States District Judge Paul Benson, a conservative jurist     appointed to the federal bench by Richard M. Nixon. Key witnesses like Myrtle Poor Bear were not allowed to testify and unlike the Robideau/Butler trial in Iowa, evidence regarding violence on Pine Ridge was severely restricted.
• An FBI agent who had previously testified that the agents followed a pick-up truck onto the scene, a vehicle that could not be tied to Mr. Peltier, changed his account, stating that the agents had followed a red and white van onto the scene, a vehicle which Mr. Peltier drove occasionally.
• Three teenaged Native witnesses testified against Mr. Peltier, they all later admitted that the FBI forced them to testify. Still, not one witness identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter.
• The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case claimed that the government had provided the defense with all FBI documents concerning the case. To the contrary, more than 140,000 pages had been withheld in their entirety.
• An FBI ballistics expert testified that a casing found near the agents’ bodies matched the gun tied to Mr. Peltier. However, a ballistic test proving that the casing did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.
• The jury, unaware of the aforementioned facts, found Mr. Peltier guilty. Judge Benson, in turn, sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.
• Following the discovery of new evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Mr. Peltier sought a new     trial. The Eighth Circuit ruled, “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case." Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial.
• During oral argument, the government attorney conceded that the government does not know who shot the agents, stating that Mr. Peltier is equally guilty whether he shot the agents at point-blank range, or participated in the shoot-out from a distance. Mr. Peltier’s co-defendants participated in the shoot-out from a distance, but were acquitted.
• Judge Heaney, who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced firm support for Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict Mr. Peltier, the FBI was equally responsible for the shoot-out, and that Mr. Peltier's release would promote healing with Native Americans.
• Mr. Peltier has served over 29 years in prison and is long overdue for parole. He has received several human rights awards for his good deeds from behind bars which include annual gift drives for the children of Pine Ridge, fund raisers for battered women’s shelters, and donations of his paintings to Native American recovery programs.
• Mr. Peltier suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. Time for justice is short.
• Currently, Mr. Peltier’s attorneys have filed a new round of Freedom of Information Act requests with FBI Headquarters and all FBI field offices in an attempt to secure the release of all files relating to Mr. Peltier and the RESMURS investigation. To date, the FBI has engaged in a number of dilatory tactics in order to avoid the processing of these requests.

**************

Peltier is one of the class-war prisoners to whom the Partisan Defense Committee sends monthly stipends. Google for information on the sipend program. For more information on his case, or to contribute to Peltier's legal defense, write to: 

Mail

Correspondence, donations, merchandise orders
ILPDC
P.O. Box 329
Fargo, ND 58107

Phone

(701) 293-4806

Free Leonard Peltier and all class-war prisoners! 

A View From The Left- We Will Not Forget Philando Castile Killer Cops Walk Again

Workers Vanguard No. 1114	30 June 2017

We Will Not Forget Philando Castile

Killer Cops Walk Again

Millions watched as Philando Castile bled to death last July, his body riddled with bullets fired into his car by a suburban Minneapolis cop. Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, in the car with her daughter, courageously live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting. On June 16, a nearly all-white jury acquitted the killer cop, Jeronimo Yanez, of all charges. Only then was the long-suppressed dash cam video from the police car finally released. It shows Yanez opening fire on Castile through the driver’s window seconds after Castile had politely informed him that he had a gun, which he was licensed to carry. Castile was following the cop’s order to get his ID when Yanez fired off seven bullets. Castile’s last words were, referring to the gun, “I wasn’t reaching for it.”

As Castile’s mother Valerie put it in anguished rage after the verdict: “They murdered my motherfucking son with his seat belt on. So what does that say to you? Now they got free rein to keep killing us any kind of way they want to.” Within the same week as Yanez’s acquittal, another two cops on trial for killing black people also walked. The reason is simple. They are the everyday domestic armed thugs of the American capitalist order, which is rooted in the brutal exploitation of labor and the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of society. Like modern-day slave patrols, the cops are paid to terrorize and oppress. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick posted a picture on Twitter of the virtually identical badges of Southern slave catchers and today’s police, with the apt comment, “Always remember who they are.”

Every black man, woman and child knows that any encounter with a cop is a potential death sentence. After Castile’s shooting, his girlfriend was handcuffed and put in the back of a cop car with her four-year-old daughter, who pleaded, “Mom, please stop saying cuss words and screaming because I don’t want you to get shooted.”

With the acquittal of Yanez, one can hear the echo of the infamous 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision declaring that black people “had no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” And when it comes to the application of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the forces of “law and order” don’t even pretend that a black man might have the same rights as a white man to carry.

Yanez’s defense was that he “feared for his life.” In a country where to be black is to be branded as a dangerous criminal, this same racist alibi has been played over and over again in acquittals of police. The cop who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland claimed he feared for his life in the face of Rice’s pellet gun, as did the Oklahoma police officer who shot Terence Crutcher to death as he stood with hands above his head. When on June 18 Seattle cops shot and killed a pregnant black woman, Charleena Lyles, in her apartment in front of her children, they claimed that she was “threatening.”

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Minneapolis in outrage over Yanez’s acquittal, and protests were held elsewhere in the country. The power of the working class must be mobilized in support of protests against racist cop terror. As we wrote following Castile’s killing in “Black People Under Siege” (WV No. 1093, 29 July 2016):

“A massive show of force based on the mobilization of labor against cop terror would strike some genuine ‘fear of god’ into the police and their capitalist masters. And it would drive home the point that the interests of the working class—white and black, immigrant and native-born—are inseparably linked to the defense of the ghettos and the fight for black freedom. But that means the workers must be mobilized independently of, and in opposition to, all the political parties and agencies of capitalist class rule.”

The power of labor is kept in check by the union misleaders, who support the very capitalist system that the cops “protect and serve” and push the lie that relief can be found in electing Democrats. Under eight years of a Democratic Commander-in-Chief, conditions for black and working people continued to worsen while cops wantonly gunned down black people on the streets. Some 1,100 people were killed by the cops in 2016 alone.

A school cafeteria worker, Castile was himself a member of the Teamsters, one of America’s biggest and potentially most powerful unions. Yet all his local union leaders could offer in their statement after he was gunned down were “thoughts and prayers.” No wonder—the Teamsters organize cops in Minnesota! It is a measure of the utter treachery of the labor tops that they embrace the murderous, racist, strikebreaking cops as “union brothers.” The key to unlocking the social power of the working class is the fight for a class-struggle leadership of labor forged in opposition to the capitalist state. Cops out of the unions!

The bitter truth is that the police cannot be held “accountable” and there will be no end to police terror under capitalism. Only when this brutal system is swept away through proletarian socialist revolution, only when the multiracial working class becomes the new ruling class will there be justice for the exploited and oppressed. The Spartacist League is dedicated to the fight to forge a revolutionary workers party—one that is 70 percent black and minority—committed to the struggle for a workers government. It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to destroy black chattel slavery. And it will take a third American revolution, a workers revolution, to end wage slavery and black oppression. For black liberation through socialist revolution!

[BostonUNAC] REMINDER- Save The Date: Film - "National Bird: Drone Wars" July18

7/6/2017 11:00 PM

Marliyn Levin

To  bcprmembers@yahoogroups.com,    Eastern Mass. No Drones   and 2 others

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REMINDER- Save the Date: Film - "National Bird: Drone Wars"

Why is our government killing thousands of people around the globe they can’t even identify?

See National Bird, a film about the secret US drone assassination program.

Central Square Library
45 Pearl St, Cambridge
Tuesday, July 18, 2017, 7 pm

Directed by Sonia Kennebeck, this powerful documentary follows the dramatic journey of three whistleblowers who are determined to break the silence around one of the most controversial current affairs issues of our time: the hidden U.S. drone war, which has escalated under President Trump.

Plagued by PTSD and guilt over participating in the killing of thousands of faceless people, including children, they courageously decide to speak out publicly, despite the possible severe consequences.  The film also interviews people on the ground in Afghanistan whose families and lives have been shattered by the deaths and lost futures of those who have been injured and terrorized by drones.

After the film there will be a short discussion with suggestions of things we can do to stop this immoral and indefensible form of warfare.

Refreshments served.

Sponsored by Eastern Massachusetts Anti-Drones Network, a task force of UJP (United for Justice with Peace) JusticeWithPeace.org, (617) 776-6524.

Co-sponsored by Mass Peace Action, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade

.

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From Socialist Alternative-Defeat Trumpcare Action Near You! 💪

Defeat Trumpcare Action Near You! 

3:05 PM

  

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Defeat Trumpcare! Find an Action Near YOU!  (see below) Trumpcare isn’t dead, and we need to do everything we can to stop it. The Republicans in Congress are determined to try to get this reactionary legislation passed. Trumpcare is a savage attack on working people and the poor. If passed, it will deny tens of millions access to healthcare and represent one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the working class to the 1% in U.S. history through massive tax cuts for the super-rich and corporations. We need a full mobilization of the opposition to Trumpcare through rallies, protests, and occupations of Republican Senators’ offices. The Republicans are struggling to overcome internal divisions, but we need to keep the pressure up to ensure defeat of Trumpcare. Please chip in $15, $27, or $100 to print thousands of picket signs and to make sure we have a legal fund for any arrests for occupations planned across the country. Movement for the 99% and our partners in Socialist Alternative have initiated a week of action from July 8th to July 15th to #OccupyTrumpcare, culminating in a National Day of Action on Saturday, July 15th. Please join us at the protests, occupations and speak-outs that we’ll be initiating. There is mass opposition across the country, we need all opponents of Trumpcare to unite behind a strategy of mobilizing the full breadth of that opposition. With a well-organized mobilization and an escalating series of mass actions we can help ensure the Republican bill fails. A victory on this issue could help give confidence to the fight for Healthcare for all. To achieve this goals, we have to rely on our own strength, not the corporate-controlled leadership of the Democratic Party. The first step is defeating the Republican agenda and bringing down Trump is to defeat this reactionary legislation once and for all. We need all hands on deck to Defeat Trumpcare! DEFEAT TRUMPCARE ACTIONS: Please chip in $27 or $100 to a legal fund for any arrests for occupations planned across the country. Portland, OR Saturday, July 15 12pm Shemanski Park https://www.facebook.com/events/452571665122374 Chicago, IL Saturday, July 15 2pm U.E. Hall https://www.facebook.com/events/429705760744698/ Madison, WI Saturday, July 15 3pm Wisconsin State House https://www.facebook.com/events/114698932484887 Boston, MA Sunday, July 16 1pm The Democracy Center https://www.facebook.com/events/803774563110835/ Cincinnati, OH Wednesday, July 19 6:30pm Piatt Park https://www.facebook.com/events/312349785873117/ Philadelphia, PA Wednesday, July 19 5:30 pm https://www.facebook.com/events/277993766009219 Worcester, MA Saturday, July 22 12pm Worcester City Hall https://www.facebook.com/events/1961426454146302 Contribute $27

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“Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked”- Tales From The Trump Bunker- "The Emperor Has No Clothes"

“Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked”- Tales From The Trump Bunker- "The Emperor Has No Clothes" 

It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Lyrics

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he's not busy being born
Is busy dying

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you'd just be
One more person crying

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright ma, I'm only sighing

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright ma, I can make it

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say "God bless him"

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he's in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright ma, if I can't please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright ma, it's life, and life only

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

It's Alright, Ma lyrics © Bob Dylan Music Co.

Artist: Bob Dylan

Album: Bringing It All Back Home

Released: 1965

Genre: Folk-rock

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

Maybe it says something about the times we live in, or maybe in this instance happenstance or, hell maybe something in the water but certain things sort of dovetail every now and again. I initially started this commentary segment after having written a longest piece for my brother and his friends as part of a small tribute booklet they were putting together about my and their takes on the Summer of Love, 1967. That event that my brother, Alex, had been knee deep in had always interested me from afar since I was way too young to have appreciated what was happening in San Francisco in those Wild West days. What got him motivated to do the booklet had been an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park where they were celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the events of that summer with a look at the music, fashion, photography and exquisite poster art which was created then just as vivid advertising for concerts and “happenings” but which now is legitimate artful expression.

That project subsequently got me started thinking about the late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, the driving force behind a new way of looking at and presenting journalism which was really much closer to the nub of what real reporting was about. Initially I was interested in some of Thompson’s reportage on what was what in San Francisco as he touched the elbows of those times having spent a fair amount of time working on his seminal book on the Hell’s Angels while all hell was breaking out in Frisco town. Delved into with all hands and legs the high points and the low, the ebb which he located somewhere between the Chicago Democratic Convention fiasco of the summer of 1968 and the hellish Rollins Stones Altamont concert of 1969.     

Here is what is important today though, about how the dots get connected out of seemingly random occurrences. Hunter Thompson also made his mark as a searing no holds barred mano y mano reporter of the rise and fall, of the worthy demise of one Richard Milhous Nixon at one time President of the United States and a common low-life criminal of ill-repute. Needless to say today, the summer of 2107, in the age of one Donald Trump, another President of the United States and common low-life criminal begs the obvious question of what the sorely missed Doctor Gonzo would have made of the whole process of the self-destruction of another American presidency, or a damn good run at self-destruction. So today and maybe occasionally in the future there will be some intertwining of commentary about events fifty years ago and today. Below to catch readers up to speed is the most recent “homage” to Hunter Thompson. And you too I hope will ask the pertinent question. Hunter where are you when we need, desperately need, you.       

*******

Zack James comment, Summer of 2017 

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. (Walking with the king not about walking with any king or Doctor King but being so high on drugs, your choice, that commin clay experiences fall by the way side. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place, where many walked with the king, if you prefer, and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society, in high art society these days) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out loud the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs who like their forbears would stop at nothing he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

“Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked”- Tales From The “Pennsylvania Avenue Bunker”-In Defense Of Science

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

Yeah, the legendary now Nobel Literature Laureate Bob Dylan had it right way back in 1965, in the time of Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States and major war criminal when he wrote as part of the lyrics to the early folk rock song It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) the following “… even the president of the United States must have to sometimes stand naked.” Maybe he was thinking LBJ but somehow the current occupant of the White House seems more appropriate. See it took LBJ almost four years to get down into the bunker and today’s occupant, do I need to mention his name, has gone down into the bowels of the Pennsylvania Avenue bunker after only four months. That is newsworthy, worthy moreover of some extended commentary in this space as we begin the “death watch” that has become something of a familiar part of the modern American presidential landscape.     

My, our, motivation on this site for this new series of commentaries is that we are truly worried about the fate of the Republic, the American Republic, republican government, these days. That overarching fear is something that even in the darkest days of the Lyndon Baine Johnson administration and the criminally dark days of his successor one Richard Milhous Nixon, a lowly common criminal as it turned out we did not see tattering. I have “confessed” elsewhere that I had seriously underestimated the differences between the wretch Hillary Clinton and this sociopath we are contenting with now and that underestimation has only led me to become haunted by the specter of having to fight in the streets to defend the hard-fought democratic gains of the past couple of centuries that are now on the chopping block. We are in hard and troubled times and as much as I like to give conventional bourgeois politics the back of my hand the times demand more-demand some contributions to build the resistance, build it right now as a firewall against the time when these guys come up and out of the bunker one more time. Starting with the commentary below we will occasionally chronicle this cheapjack soap opera unfolds before our disbelieving eyes. I can only add where is “Doctor Gonzo,” the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson when you need him. He would have jackhammered this thing picked lean already. Stay tuned for the, maybe, next four year of the race to the bottom.              

********

In Defense of Science-June 2, 1917

I really, really and truly, believed that somewhere in say the 18^th century we began to put our “faith” increasingly in scientific investigation of whatever ailed us, whatever mysteries of the universe which seemed inexplicable needed some rational explanation. And that was a move forward for humankind.  I was, having been steeped in that tradition, prepared to let fact and figures, real facts and figures, not stuff found on the ground, taken from some fortuneteller’s table (sorry fortunetellers of the world this diatribe is not directed at your profession), or made up to score points in a governmental policy argument drive my own sense of the world. Apparently that admittedly quaint notion has taken a beating of late in many quarters from those who found those “facts” on the ground.

That is the only way to explain the inexplicable announcement by one Donald J. Trump, President of the United States in the year 2017, to take this country, America, out of the Climate Change Accords (I will not preface that title with Paris since it was never about the country where the damn thing was hammered out, and that term is no hyperbole as the infighting was fierce). Apparently the nationalist America First wing of what passes for the White House governing group has won the day based on from all reports bad information, spurious arguments, cooked data and that stuff just mentioned found on the ground. Not on any look at scientific evidence. Of course if the “rapture” is your frame of reference then fact and figures are silly.                  

This is not the place to detail the manifold reasons why an even non-binding treaty should or should not be adhered to but rather what the withdrawal means about a trend that had previously been slowly (and now more rapidly) creeping up on us about the value of the scientific method that guys like Galileo went to the mat trying to defend. Tried to take out of snake charmer realm and put the evidence from nature, society, on firmer footing. Not infallible, or at least I do not believe that was the intent of those who strove to create what we have come to call what seemingly is also a quaint idea-The Enlightenment. Unfortunately that progressive trend is under assault and while if I had my druthers I would prefer to fight from a more socialistic perspective I am more than willing to fight for the heritage of that very Enlightenment that has gotten us pretty far in the past couple of centuries. If you fear for the Republic, the American Republic, then you too should join and built the resistance. The fight is on and you had better start taking an active side before the waters, winds, fires, and the deluge that we will now stand even more defenseless against take us all down.