*****The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

*****The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

 

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Kenny Jackman, the well-known classic rock and roll and early 1960s folk music minute blogger and website contributor Frank Jackman’s younger brother, had heard the late “First Lady Of The Mountains” Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe in 2005. At that time he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line (and Kenny maybe a little too had been under the spell of the film The Song Catcher whose soundtrack also had many classic mountain tunes including Iris Dement, the “Arky Angel,” Frank’s Arky Angel anyway performing Pretty Saro , a traditional mountain song probably going back to the old country, the British Isles old country, and Child ballads collected in Cambridge and distilled among the folk who put their own oral tradition take on the material speaking of forlorn love, decked out in poor mountain woman clothing, practical calico brought down at Miller’s General Store and brought to life by primitive seamstress hands, a little ill-fitting, a smudge on her cheek reflecting her dirt-poor work on the played out truck farm keeping the rabbits from devouring the family winter-surviving turnips and eking out whatever nutrients the worked-out land would yield for those who did not move west a couple of generations before when the writing was on the wall for all to see but from their hubris or sloth remained in place and miss the end of Professor Turner’s frontier thesis, sitting on the front porch of a broken down old mountain cabin that had seen better days, the typical dwelling with things scattered all over, old time farm equipment, maybe John Deere when new and prospects seemed reasonable that couple of generations before that they would not have to constantly move west like some forbear parents, but who could tell by the rusted paint peeled off condition, the inevitable 1949 Hudson scavenged for spare parts for the still running 1951 Hudson sitting there looking forlorn like some museum piece dinosaur skeleton gone out of style. A scene replicated all along the ridges of the Appalachian and Ozark ranges).
 

At that time Kenny got into all things Carter Family, at first June’s mother Maybelle and June’s sisters who constituted the second wave of the Carter Family experience then reaching back to the first Clinch Mountain threesome (her, A.P., his wife sister Ruth) once he heard Maybelle performing Blue-Eyed Boy accompanied by her on the mountain harp (that blue-eyed boy so legend had it was a guy whom had had an affair with Ruth, had been scared off, threatened by the rabid A.P., or had just left like so many others drifting west after the land played out, after the romance had nowhere to go, and so the song sung by all three since as rabid as A.P. was he was no fool when it came to staking his claims to songs that were already in the loose public domain, or just ripped some placid no account melody off and threw a variation of the words on the thing and recorded it for the dough).

So Kenny knew the Carter mountain roots unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, a regular Ethan Allan swamp Yankee from out around Marbury a tiny hamlet in the hills and a place where a sizable migration of New Yorkers and Bostonians would wind up when the struggle against the “monster” government in the early 1970s got too intense and they retreated, strategically retreated to hear them tell the tale to “work the land,” and worked the land no more successfully than that primitive mountain woman Iris Dement was portraying but stayed anyway, Jeffrey Salem, a transfer from Norwich College, who had been a classmate of his at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst back in the early 1970s, and a man whose knowledge of mountain music was sincere and deep although in school that knowledge had gone over Kenny’s head anytime Jeffrey mentioned it had “hipped” him to Hazel during his frenzy. He remembered the name if not the work she had done to keep the vanishing mountain traditions alive, keep them alive on the female side almost single-handedly as Norman Blake would do on the male side. Kenny had picked up the CD second-hand in a Harvard Square record shop, really outside of Harvard Square heading toward Central Square on Massachusetts Avenue, one of the few places around before the advent of Amazon.com where one could get an off the mainstream, second-hand recording of anything folk or its derivatives. The shop, really Sandy’s located in case you forgot between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around that town where until recently Sandy had been holding forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home from that CD had knocked him out.

All of this mountain dew business you understand came out of left field for Kenny since he was if anything more of a man of the rock and roll era than Frank who at least had been bitten by that early 1960s folk minute that Kenny was too young for, and which he had winced at every time Frank put on some obscure folk song by guys like Buell Kazee and Hobart Smith on the record player in their shared bedroom (these guys would become living gods when hip urban New Yorkers and dour Boston puritans, kin of Francis Child in their academic appreciation of the ballads headed south, or sent emissaries like the ghosts of the Lomaxes, father and son, to mine the lore and regaled to all things mountain for a minute in that folk minute but for our purposes Kenny would grind his teeth). Later where older brothers Lawrence and Phillip in their turns moved out of the family house and Frank moved up the food chain Kenny as the youngest boy had no one below him in the food chain and in solitude would finally not have to hear the stuff and considered himself lucky, foolish him.)   

 

One of the latter mentioned songs on the CD, Hills Of Home, after repeated playing, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or back in that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story and you can figure it out for yourselves:

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation who were just brushed by the counter-cultural events of the 1960s like older brother Frank had been just brushed by the “beat” uprising of the late 1950s, was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared unlike brother Frank, 4-F, medically unfit for military duty a classification lots of  draft age youth in the holy hell high wire days of the inferno Vietnam War would go to the gates of hell for once the news started seeping back from the mounting body-bag count or from guys who made it back to the “real” world and called the thing by its right name, a horror, by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown Carver (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, a few hundred yards at a time without some aid. Walking a skill, just ask Frank, that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do. This classification system had been the one in place before the lottery, and the last recruitment system in place before the draft was ended, which would presumably have still placed him outside the clutches of the military, unlike Frank’s fate, Frank who had serious problems adjusting to the “real” world before he got sober, and that of Frank’s friend, the late Benjamin Smith who laid down his head in Vietnam for no got purpose no good Benny purpose, except as an added name down on that mirror glass black granite down in D.C.).

So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man brother Frank would do a little later with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his “beat” brothers (and a few sisters) after a reading of On The Road whacked everybody who read the damn thing, including me, with the “get away from home and the nine to five routine bug but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended but that Kenny soberly told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then.

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia hard by the Chesapeake Bay, the place where the U.S. Navy has a big installation and they built big ass war ships although those facts are not part of the story but just to give you a sense of what was what then, at a road-side campsite just outside of town. (Like a lot of military towns, with constant transfers in and out, and migrant labor at harvest farm towns such places are common enough to replace the vagrant real housing which is over-crowded or non-existent.) Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised on the makeshift blackboard menu written in chalk on the wall as he entered the place. When Kenny entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats, usually red-topped, that always accompany the red vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. You know the chalkboard menu listing the daily specials, which turned out to be the same as the items listed on the plastic embossed menu in front of each paper placemat complete with napkin-folded silverware, coffee cup at the ready to answer the inevitable “coffee” call from the professional waitress behind the counter whose seniority gave her that spot which as any professional waitress will tell you is the goldmine in the diner business since those counter stools are usually the preserve of single truckers, or single guys, who for a kind smile or at least no surliness will leave a larger tip than any hard-pressed father with wife and four kids in one of the booths will leave despite a much larger bill. You know too the menu contained “breakfast all day” in honor of the eighteen hours a day on the road truckers who frequent such places (don’t tell the ICC, about the eighteen hours, or the menu for that matter, please), the meatloaf dinner, the turkey dinner, the grandmother-like pot roast diner, and of course no self-respecting diner worthy of the name would leave you without bread pudding, and that settling the nerves second cup of coffee.      

What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit on” (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world attractions). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself, had decided like half of those under about thirty to spent her summer break travelling east from her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana since she had never seen the ocean, had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place. Had drawn that bead knowing with some kind of female knowing that he was not a family man and definitely not a trucker and dressed in his semi-hippie garb (emulating older brother Frank as to dress, flannel shirt despite the horrible humidity saved only by the well-soaked tee-shirt underneath which never got dry down south but always had a slightly musky smell, and damp to the touch, blue jeans not bell-bottomed though, sturdy work boots though clunky lasted longest on those hard asphalt and concrete highways where half the time was spent walking between rides to keep moving, and to keep any nosy coppers from “vagging” you, although with no long hair done up in a ponytail for hitch hike road purposes and no long biblical prophet beard, no way) struck her fancy since he had never talked to a hippie guy before. (Jesus, in 1970, was she kidding.) And as they eyed each other and Fiona came over to his stool disregarding her other family customers in the booths and the evil eye of that inevitable professional waitress with her pencil in her hair, her too tight steam stained uniform who was about to approach Kenny’s spot she asked “coffee.” And, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten. And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were eye-weary Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past, his no hard luck past but his past in any case. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old Carver, a pose that he had learned from Frank who was about fifty times more political than him, lived for it after “Nam” or rather after he settled down and adjusted to the “real” world enough to want to change the thing instead of grouse about it when he was using sweet sister morphine to face that  world (the older brothers and indeed their father never got beyond calling those “stinking” blacks they worked with “n-----s”). And Kenny denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the south, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time what with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. (Frank had had it worse since during his high school time Michael Harrington’s The Other America came out, a  shocking expose of Appalachian poverty, including mention of his father’s birthplace had everybody trying to help out with various book, clothes, and food drives right in Carver High School announced each day for a while over the loud speaker by Mister Thomas, the principal.) And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had what was short hair in the north but longish hair down there and a wisp of a beard from not shaving for few days), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is, vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain from visiting legendary yodeler Jimmy Rodger down in Texas some place. (The first Carter Family combination and Jimmy had been “discovered” at the same Bristol, Tennessee 1920s record sessions by an RCA agent who had conducted these demonstration to expand the audience for records and radios.)  

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” illegal corn liquor that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly by guys who were not practically breast-fed on the stuff. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that Frank had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s and which had driven Kenny up the wall before liberation day when Philip had moved out. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home.

A twangy plainsong plain folk voice brushed by the mountain streams, grabbing that mist between gasps of her breath that spoke of leaving the old country, mostly the British Isles, mostly from the countryside when the fens were hedged in, the common land got sold for grazing, and men, if they were men drifted toward the cities, “drifted” the operative word, just keep moving, keep one jump ahead of whoever was following, leaving  a bunch of generations before, maybe just before the law was ready to set the gallows high, set the noose upon some forbear’s neck for stealing Mister’s pigs, Sir somebody’s wood, the Duke’s deer, poachers all and no respecters of property, maybe a highwayman or con man but in need of quick exit of the clamp would come down and so, desperate, the desperate are always the fodder for leaving when the old home chances ran out of luck headed to the indentured ships, the transport vessels and headed to the new land, the, what did Fitzgerald call it, yeah, the fresh green breast of the new world, where it seemed nobody lived and so the possibilities were endless. But see in that voice there was also this knowledge, not spoken, how could it be too many generations had passed but maybe it was embedded in the DNA by now, that some men, some folk were meant to move, to rumble, tumble, grab this, grab that and then move on, move in that fresh green breast land westward since the harsh seas lay eastward and that noose still held its charms. And so they moved, moved out of East Coast cities (or were forced out, maybe by the same king’s writ that scattered them in the old country) and into the wilderness like some ancient adventurers, some kept pushing west, became rolling stones and some stayed put, some had lost the energy to move west and so stayed put, stayed in ramshackle cabins and shacks letting the farm equipment rust, scavenging for the refuse, stripping the slender leavings, and waited for better times, waited and waited and watched any progeny with any energy head out of the hills to find their own new world, guys like Kenny and Frank’s father who could not get out fast enough whatever sorrows were ahead, and there were sorrows.             

Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So see Kenny really did hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off to head home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown, back to the local business school she was attending and had taken time off from to “find herself” just as Kenny and ten million other generational wanderers were trying like hell to do. Kenny headed west via Denver and the Utahs to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos, splashed by the sea, splashed by the Japan seas, splashed by everything that in his everlasting life needed to be washed clean. They were supposed to meet out there a few months later after she finished up the semester and attended to some family business. They never did, a not so unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her, about that red barn dance night, about that lady of the mountains and that wind-swept mountain coming down the hollows night for a long time after that.]    

  

A View From The Left-Anti-Russia Hysteria and Democrats’ Sour Grapes Down With the Sanctions!

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

Anti-Russia Hysteria and Democrats’ Sour Grapes

Down With the Sanctions!

Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign had two major themes. The first asserted that voters were well on the road to recovery from the ravages of the 2008 recession, an assertion garnished with a sprig of patriotic parsley encapsulated in the slogan “America is great.” The second theme was to question whether a sexist, racist, egomaniacal admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin should be placed in charge of the nuclear launch button. The rather contradictory implication was that he might casually ignite an atomic Armageddon or fail to do so if the annihilation of Russia (and the rest of humanity) rose to the top of the imperialists’ agenda. In the event, a major chunk of the electorate thought the first theme was hogwash, and many were apparently unmoved by the efforts to revive the battle cries of the Cold War and McCarthy eras. In the final analysis, what won the day in the key swing states was the claim by the reactionary Trump that he, and he alone, could provide the personal elixir required to purge the country of the forces that have eroded the good jobs and prosperity that once were the supposed birthright of every white American male.

Since the election, the Democrats have pulled out all the stops in an effort to persuade the world that “we wuz robbed” by an attack of hackers operating under the command of Putin with the intent of undermining “American democracy” by electing his puppet Trump. Their proof: a gilt-edged report prepared by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) that purportedly tracks the chain of command to the Kremlin. Widely accused of playing a role in tipping the election to Trump is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as well as FBI director James Comey. It is as yet unclear if the Pope played any role in this cabal.

These complaints of Russian interference in the presidential election are pretty rich coming from the U.S. rulers. Ever since American imperialism emerged onto the world stage during the 1898 Spanish American War, it has intervened around the world through outright invasion or “regime change.” In the early years of the 20th century, the U.S. routinely dispatched troops to countries across Latin America, including Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. After World War II, Washington was behind the coups that ousted Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy funded groups opposed to Putin during Russia’s 2012 elections, which reportedly has the Russian president still fuming.

The bourgeois media that is now howling about Russian hacking has long promoted the CIA as the pinnacle of veracity. Founded in 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, that agency has provided the lies to justify every one of U.S. imperialism’s unending stream of wars from Korea and Vietnam through Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Including 14 years ago when it provided the “proof” that Saddam Hussein had accrued an arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Instead of providing any actual evidence of Putin’s role in hacking the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman (which John McCain labeled “an act of war”), the intelligence chiefs engaged in some classic bait and switch, directing their main attention to RT, a Russian English-language news outlet that few Americans watch. RT’s coverage of Clinton, the report tells us, “was consistently negative and focused on her leaked emails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health and ties to Islamic extremism.” How was that different from Fox News? The report also has the temerity to complain: “RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt.” Americans hardly need RT to tell them about the depredations of the U.S. economic system, Washington and Wall Street.

Barack Obama, who has evidently been “trumped” by Putin in Syria, was quick to endorse the intelligence findings. At the same time, the president made clear that the full version of the exposé will not be available for popular consumption since it would reveal the ever-so-secret methods employed by U.S. operatives. The FBI managed for a while to maintain a skeptical attitude toward the findings of the CIA and NSA. It recently caved in to pressures to join the chorus, perhaps reflecting its director’s desire to maintain his security clearance. Trump voters are hardly alone in remaining decidedly unconvinced by the supposed revelations, in spite of the patriotic hue and cry.

In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. The responsibility for this quite undemocratic result lies entirely with the U.S. Constitution and its Electoral College, an institution created by the “founding fathers” to give disproportionate power to the slaveowning states. To quote the memorable cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” For our part, as Marxists we are equally opposed to any candidates for public office of the bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens—while fighting against all attacks on the right to vote.

It is immaterial whether the alleged hackers were mobilized by Vladimir Putin or the tooth fairy, as in this instance no attack on voting rights occurred. The real undermining of voting rights in the U.S. starts with mass incarceration, especially of black people and Latinos, and the denial of their right to vote. It continues with the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013 and the subsequent barrage of voter ID laws and other anti-voting measures passed by mostly Republican-controlled statehouses.

Hacking foreign governments is the stock in trade of all spy agencies. The espionage operations of the U.S. imperialists are especially devoted to this pursuit, sparing no one, including loyal allies like German chancellor Angela Merkel. Domestically, especially since 9/11, the U.S. government has arrogated to itself the right to monitor everyone’s emails and other personal communications. At the same time, the “right” to proscribe all leaks and exposures has been a special obsession of the Obama presidency.

In the eyes of liberal pundits who portray skepticism of the recent intelligence report as apostasy, the real “crime against democracy” is that the information gathered by hacking was released to the public. No doubts have been raised about its accuracy or authenticity. The leaks merely revealed a portion of the wheelings, dealings and hypocrisy of Clinton and her campaign staff. As Julian Assange noted during a January 9 press conference: “If WikiLeaks had an effect it’s because people read the words of Hillary Clinton and her team and didn’t like what they saw.” Bourgeois democracy evidently demands that its subjects be kept ignorant of the machinations of their leaders.

Indeed, control of information by the capitalist class—through its control of the education system, the press and mass media—is vital to the normal workings of bourgeois democracy, a fig leaf for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Elections under bourgeois democracy allow the oppressed masses to “choose” who will subjugate them during the next few years. Ultimately, domination by the capitalist rulers is ensured through the armed might of the military, the police and the prisons, which together constitute the core of the capitalist state.

The hysteria the Democrats desire to provoke against the fictional war on democracy is simply to cover with jingoist bluster their failure to retain control of the White House, regain control of the Senate or end the ongoing losses of state legislative seats. This has had some impact on the gullible as many Democratic supporters were reportedly willing to believe that the ballot boxes had been hacked.

The diplomatic sanctions against Russia recently put in place by Obama are the cosmetic and fairly routine measures employed by states to signal their displeasure with each other. Not so those put in place almost three years ago to punish Putin for the actions he took in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Those sanctions have exacerbated Russian economic difficulties that were set off by the decline of world oil prices. All these sanctions are an expression of U.S. imperialism’s diktats and must be opposed.

The confrontation with Putin over Ukraine was touched off by the February 2014 fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev that was engineered by Washington with the assistance of the European Union. With the overwhelming support of the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea, historically part of Russia, Putin moved to reclaim the peninsula the following month, an action we supported. In the ethnically mixed but predominantly Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, militants fighting government and fascist attacks held a referendum that resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of “self-rule.” We defended the right of the population of those areas to conduct the poll and act on the result of the vote. That position is an expression of our support for the democratic right of national self-determination, i.e., the right of peoples to amalgamate or to separate. At the same time, we give no political support to the Great Russian chauvinist rebel leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk, nor to Putin’s repressive capitalist regime.

The imperialist NATO alliance has expanded into East Europe, right up to Russia’s doorstep. U.S. imperialism has also sponsored color “revolutions” to install pro-Washington regimes in several former republics of the USSR. The largest contingent of U.S. tanks since the fall of the Soviet Union is just arriving in northern Germany, to be stationed in the Baltics and East Europe, backed up by troops from Britain, France and Germany. In the 2016 budget, Obama laid the groundwork for spending a trillion dollars to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a stance echoed by Trump.

The belligerence of the U.S. rulers toward Putin’s Russia is rooted in their determination to keep Russia out of the club of imperialist powers. Arising out of capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, post-Soviet Russia inherited a large nuclear arsenal in a country with enormous natural resources. Yet it remains essentially a regional capitalist power. Where imperialist countries are characterized by the export of capital, Russia mainly exports oil and other natural resources as well as armaments. The imperialists intervene militarily throughout the world in their drive to control markets, raw materials and cheap labor. Moscow’s main military campaigns, with the exception of Syria, have been within the borders of the former Soviet Union: above all, two brutal wars in Chechnya to prevent the oppressed Chechens from asserting their right to secede, a right that we support.

Trump is no less committed than the Cold Warriors and neocons—from Hillary Clinton to John McCain—to expanding, prosecuting and enforcing the dominance of U.S. imperialism. That is the real content of Trump’s promise to make America great again. Trump’s obsession is to conduct the orchestra; he cares little about the program as long as it promises to further American might. While his opponents fret about whether “fake news” stories influenced the electorate, Trump wants to throw flag burners in prison, the First Amendment be damned. Meanwhile, he appears intent on acquiring many more megatons of nuclear explosive capacity as he charges off to duel with those he perceives as America’s enemies.

The recent U.S. elections revealed the widespread contempt the citizenry has for the governmental administrators of the capitalist system. However, this is not a threat to that system absent a proletarian-centered social upheaval led by a revolutionary working-class party. The model for such a revolutionary transformation is the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. It is necessary to abandon all illusions in lesser-evil nostrums and commit to the building of a workers party that embraces the traditions and intent of the Bolsheviks to overthrow the imperialist order through international socialist revolution.

Doll’s Story-With The Film Adaptation Of W.R. Burnett’s “The Asphalt Jungle” In Mind

Doll’s Story-With The Film Adaptation Of W.R. Burnett’s “The Asphalt Jungle” In Mind

By Si Landon

“I never had a man who drew an even break, never had a man who drew an honest breathe, never had a man who could go all the way, could take me out of the B-girl tinsel town racket. Dix tried, Dix from back about twenty years ago now tried, tried like hell but he was just a hooligan and how could a girl pin her hopes on such a guy,” pined Doll Savoy, but any surname would do she sure had used enough of them, as a tear formed under her mascara eyes thinking about that big lug who went down in a blaze of nothingness twenty years to the day.

No matter where she was, what guy was paying her bills, who she was fucking or taking around the world she would always shed a tear thinking about Dix, Dix Dixon if you needed a last name and how he came to that terrible end in some horseshit meadow in blue mountain Kentucky where he hailed from, where they were supposed to get a fresh start. Fresh start she said with a shrug and a wicked-edged laugh at the irony of Dix pushing up daisies and leaving her alone to fend for herself back at Tilly’s the biggest “clip joint” west of the Mississippi. Left alone to let some guy pick up her bills for a few months before he blew town, went back to his wife or something. Or she got tired of him, tired of the cheap cons, tired of the tired sex, tired of looney guys and their blow-job desires.

Tonight thought Doll would have no truck with guys paying her bills, guys looking to go around the world, guys looking for a quick blow-job behind the alley to Tilly’s (and the bitch of it was if she wanted to keep her job, wanted to be a Tilly’s B-girl, wanted “the life” at her age then she had better be ready to suck cock as Eddie G., Tilly’s night manager made very clear one night when some jerk complained that she didn’t want to go under the table on him. Yeah, where was a real man like Dix when a girl needed a safe harbor and maybe no loving, a guy like Dix had had all loving bled out of him by the time he was about thirteen, but also no bullshit either. The straightest shooter she had ever known. Hell she had enough love to carry the two of them. Didn’t she prove it riding with him through cop roadblocks and blood so he could get back to that fucking hayseed farm he kept dreaming about going back to, going back to get washed clean like in some old time Bible story. And she didn’t say word one when the coppers came to that bloody horseshit meadow about who he was and where he had been so his kin, that was Dix’s word for his folks could cash in some jewels he had in his pocket and reclaim the old farm lost in some Depression wildness. (She had never taken diamond one from his pocket when he went down to that blaze of nothingness. Yeah she had her own straight-shooter code too.)

Dix’s anniversary always made Doll think about how close they had come to happiness, happiness for her anyway since Dix probably was clear out of happiness as much as he was out of loving. She would have created enough happiness for the two of them. Then as the night got darker and she sat in a push-broom hotel room thinking about her own  place, a flop really with that fucking roll-up bed and that never working stove, drinking her Thompson’s blended. Dix’s drink that was how they got started the night he had come into Benny’s, the clip joint she was working at then, and he noticed that she was drinking the same low blend drink that he was looking to buy.  (When she had her Dix “wanting habits” on she wanted no truck with her place over on Kendall Street that Sal was paying the bills on who knows for how long, probably not long as he kept talking about his wife and how maybe if she would just give him a blow-job now and again they might work things out-never a good sign when a man was talking about some other dame, wife or not, giving him head). So this night she was sitting in this cheap Paradise Hotel broom closet, some name for the hour tricks that kept the place going, drinking her Thompson’s blended and working her way back to those final few days when if things had gone according to plan, according to Doc’s big ass fucking fool-proof plan, she and Dix might have gotten off cheap street. Who knows she might have grown to like that horseshit meadow although she had not lived away from the city for more than three days, the one time when she was a kid and a kindly aunt took her to the mountains outside of Denver where she had grown up.             

Her thoughts always went back to the night when Louie Lomax came into Benny’s looking for Dix. It was early and Dix was sitting at the bar drinking his maybe third shot of Thompson’s and she was getting ready down the other end of the bar for her B-girl chores for the night. She had hoped that she would not have to go out into some guy’s car or to some motel since earlier in the afternoon she and Dix had had a great bout of sex, he seemed to relax for once and seemed to enjoy the sex, liked when she took his cock in her mouth and did him until he cried   “uncle” when after he cummed she kept her mouth on that big thing until he really did cry uncle. That was the first time he said she was alright, was a fit woman for him and she blushed with joy when he uttered those few words. She would omit that afternoon tryst with Dix part when she retailed the story of her lost love to her girlfriends like Dottie although Dottie could probably figure out what kept Dix on her leash even if only for a few days.     

Louie went straight to where Dix was sitting and asked him if he wanted a drink something Louie would not spring for if he wasn’t looking for something. Dix, after Louie left, had told her when she wasn’t hustling some guy for a drink (so-called drink-it was nothing but Lipton’s tea for her at ten bucks a pop-a “clip” no question) that he was going out, going to a meeting with some guy named Doc who was looking for a guy who could throw his weight around (a “hooligan” is what they called them but she didn’t know the term until the coppers ran down his felony sheet and one cop said he was nothing but a hooligan and she asked him what was that-and that was exactly what her big man, six two, two hundred pounds was built for-pushing his weight around).The next morning when Dix woke up he told he in vague terms whether she liked the idea of heading to easy street. She had thought nothing of it, had heard that from a million guys before-usually looking for some quick sex in the meantime, except she privately thrilled that Dix had said “we” would be on easy street. Told her too that Doc had a plan so that the whole crew (Doc, a box man, a wheel, a hooligan-and then a fence) would be on easy street from here on in. (She did not find out who the others were until after the caper had been completed-and Dix was on the run.)      

After that morning she had not seen Dix for several days until one late night she heard a rapping on her door and there was Dix with a small, wiry foreign looking guy bleeding, Doc. The plan had been to rob Kaye’s Jewelry Store, the high-end jewelers, from the inside out. Doc had had it all figured. Had it figured right, they had grabbed half a million, maybe more in precious stones-except he, Doc, had forgotten about the accidental which can monkey up any perfect plan. First “forgot” was that the box man, the guy who blew the safe got shot accidently when he had tumbled to guys inside the building after the safe explosion had set off every alarm system in the area-bringing in every copper. Dix had tried to stop the copper and his gun dropped to the ground shooting both the box man in the stomach and grazing Dix. He had shrugged off the wound as nothing at the time-just like Dix. Then the coppers having sensed that the job, the plan for the job, could only have been hatched by Doc who had just been released from prison started their full-court press. Got to Louie first. Cheapjack stoolie no heart feet of clay Louie turned over Jimmy the wheelman.      

That wasn’t all that went wrong on the caper once the script went awry. A big job like this jewelry caper needed plenty of front money to get the crew gathered and so Doc had turned to Allan Ladd, the big well-known crooked lawyer who fronted for half the mob in town, was their mouthpiece when they got to court (and he got them off a lot-the fix was usually in). Ladd was going to front the dough but it turned out he was keeping half the whores in town under his wings and was broke. He was looking to “steal” the stones by a sleigh of hand and get himself out of hock. What were Doc and his boys going to do-go to the cops and complain. What a laugh. He was working with his own guy who was going to be the stick-up man for Ladd. No go-Dix might have been behind the eight-ball but he was a good hooligan-took his job seriously and he wasted Ladd’s confederate. Another guy gone when Ladd put him in the river face down and with as much remorse as he would have a killing a flea.

Then the coppers came for Ladd, knowing that such a caper could not have been greased without a guy who get the stuff fenced on the quiet-and fast. He bought his own life, bought it cheap when all things were considered, wasn’t built for tough guy prisons anyway. Everybody was out of the paly except Dix and Doc. Some cop had ruffled Doc and that was how Dix and Doc had gotten to Doll’s place. Doc decided to head out of town and try to sell the stuff. Dix, bleeding still from that wound at the jewelry store decided he would blow for home. Without me. I talked him out of that with a quick roll in the hay. Then we were off to hayseed Kentucky. You know the rest as Dix bled away in that horseshit Kentucky meadow. Yeah, Dix never drew an even break. And neither did Doll Savoy.         

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME-Build The Resistance

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

On November 8 the rise of a right-wing nationalist regime in the United States became a realistic possibility, if not now then in the coming years. Such regimes stress nationalist and patriotic themes, play upon and intensify fear of minority ethnicities and/or religions and/or other long-oppressed groups, promise to resolve festering economic problems of ordinary people, and direct the blame for such problems at a convenient scapegoat such as foreigners or immigrants rather than the real causes… Such coalitions have underpinned right-wing nationalist regimes in the past. It is made up of traditional right-wing constituencies suddenly combined with significant parts of the working class. Such a political base, held together by the above themes and promises, can enable a right-wing nationalist regime to emerge in a democratic capitalist system even without the upstart demagogic leader winning an absolute majority.  More

Trump’s Muslim Immigration Executive Order: If We Bombed You, We Ban You

What all seven countries also have in common is that the United States government has violently intervened in them. The U.S. is currently bombing — or has bombed in the recent past — six of them. The U.S. has not bombed Iran, but has a long history of intervention including a recent cyberattack.  It’s like a twisted version of the you-break-it-you-buy-it Pottery Barn rule: If we bomb a country or help destabilize its society, we will then ban its citizens from being able to seek refuge in the United States…  And consider that Iran, where al Qaeda, ISIS, and other anti-American terrorist organizations have no significant foothold, is included — but Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came from and which has been a funding source for extremist groups, is not included.   More

Trump's Visa Ban is about anti-Muslim Bigotry, not Security

Trump will represent this step as being about security, but it is not. Of the 750,000 refugees admitted since 2001, hundreds of thousands of them from the Middle East, virtually no refugees have committed an act of terrorism on US soil (typically they are running away from the violent people). He will say that refugees and immigrants from these countries need to be better vetted, but refugees are already subjected to a rigorous 18-month vetting process.   This measure, if it is taken, is just more racial and religious exclusion, policies we have seen before in the long and rich history of American racism. The 3 million Muslim-Americans are in Trump’s sites. By far the majority of terrorist acts and political violence in the United States is committed by white supremacists.  More

MAKE AMERICA TORTURE AGAIN:

Trump’s administration is working on an executive order that could revive the George W. Bush-era program of detention and interrogation at CIA “black site” prisons overseas. The order also would also set up a review of interrogation policies by senior national security officials...   This order, if issued, would be the first step toward Trump’s realizing his sadistic campaign promise to reinstate waterboarding and even more brutal torture tactics for no other reason than that suspected terrorists “deserve” to be tortured. Reinstating actual torture, thankfully, is not as easy as all that. As the draft order noted, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2016 contained language restricting approved interrogation techniques to those currently outlined in the Army Field Manual. That law “provides a significant statutory barrier to the resumption of the CIA interrogation program,” the draft order noted, somewhat ruefully.  More

Gag Me: Trump's Anti-Abortion Executive Order

President Donald Trump signed an executive order reinstating the global gag rule on overseas discussion of abortion by individuals and organizations receiving federal funding… Since 1973, under the Helms Amendment, it has been illegal to use US government money to directly fund abortions overseas. The global gag rule, introduced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as part of his Mexico City Policy, made discussion of abortion by a group receiving federal support for any purpose illegal…  Implementation of the global gag rule went well beyond abortion to effectively limit all discussions of family planning, including condom use to prevent HIV infection and multiyear spacing of pregnancies to avoid maternal deaths. Organizations as diverse as the World Health Organization, the United Nations Population Fund and Family Health International lost millions of dollars in support from the US government during the years the gag rule was enforced…  Women's health and HIV/AIDS organizations felt, justifiably, that the global gag rule made it impossible to engage in family planning and HIV prevention efforts, and many American groups that accepted US government funds after acceding to the rules were denied access to international meetings, shunned by counterpart non-American groups.   More

A Bad Day for the Environment, with Many More to Come

Tuesday began with news that the Trump Administration had imposed a comprehensive gag order on employees of the Environmental Protection Agency. According to a leaked memo, “no press releases,” “no blog messages,” and “no social media will be going out,” and “no new content can be placed on any website” until further notice—perhaps an attempt to camouflage the other big E.P.A. announcement, which was that the agency’s grants and contracts had been temporarily frozen, effectively halting its work. Then, at nine o’clock, the President had breakfast with a group of beaming auto executives…  Another leaked memo, released on Monday and attributed to Myron Ebell, the veteran climate-change denier overseeing Trump’s E.P.A. transition team, made clear some of the Administration’s first priorities: stopping Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which uses the Clean Air Act to regulate power plants; revising the rules on development in crucial wetlands; and even such granular tasks as reining in efforts to halt the rampant pollution of Chesapeake Bay.   More

Trump Greenlights Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines

President Donald Trump signed executive orders Tuesday morning paving the way for both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipeline projects to move forward. Both projects have been fiercely opposed by indigenous and environmental activists, who have so far been successful in stalling them -- Keystone XL was cancelled by Obama in January 2015, and the Dakota Access pipeline has been on hold since December 4, 2016, when the Army Corps of Engineers denied it a permit to drill under the Missouri River in Cannonball, North Dakota. The DAPL order will have immediate implications in North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, along with native and non-native allies, has been protesting the completion of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the project, has been waiting to complete the final 1,100-foot piece of the pipeline, which threatens both clean water resources and Native American sacred sites in the region.   More

HELP US Defy Trump’s Executive Memo on DAPL

Yesterday we received devastating news of Trump’s intention to resume construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, issued via executive memo.  His decision violates tribal treaties, poses grave environmental risks, and blatantly disrespects all those who fought so hard in the #noDAPL battle.  We will be taking legal action, and we need your help.  The Environmental Impact Statement is still on-going. By leaving your comment, it will help us compound our claim that the pipeline poses grave environmental risks. Do not allow the Department of the Army to withdraw the Notice of Intent to prepare an EIS as President Trump suggests in his memo.

Please click here and show that you #StandWithStandingRock

If Progressives Want to Defeat Trump, They Must Win Back Workers

In particular, we should be extremely worried about how Trump is approaching the loss of manufacturing jobs. The neoliberal fog should not cause us to miss the obvious: Presidents Obama and Clinton did absolutely nothing to stop the hemorrhaging of middle class manufacturing jobs to low wage countries. (U.S. manufacturing fell from 20.1 percent of all jobs in 1980 to only 8.8 percent by 2013.) Not only did Obama and Clinton fail to stop even one factory from moving away, but they truly believed that capital mobility and free trade were good for America and the world. In other words they had sipped plenty of the neoliberal Kool-Aid…  In opposing Trump, we must not slip into defending neoliberalism. It’s not ok for corporations to pack up and leave. We should have some control over our economic lives and not leave all the crucial decisions to Wall Street and their corporate puppets. Trade deals are bad deals unless they enforce the highest health, safety, environmental and labor standards. And those measures must be enforceable by all the parties. The race to the bottom is real and must stop.  More

THE INJUSTICES OF MANNING’S ORDEAL

After overseeing the aggressive prosecution and near-seven-year incarceration of Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, President Obama – in one of his last acts in office – commuted all but four months of her remaining sentence but ignored the fact that he had taken no action on the war crimes that Manning revealed… But there has been no justice for the Iraqis and Afghans whose unjustified deaths and mistreatment were exposed by the then-22-year-old Army private, known at the time as Bradley Manning. An Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning sent hundreds of thousands of classified files, documents and videos, including the “Collateral Murder” video, the “Iraq War Logs,” the “Afghan War Logs” and State Department cables, to WikiLeaks. Many of the items that she transmitted contained evidence of war crimes… The Uniform Code of Military Justice sets forth the duty of a service member to obey lawful orders. But that duty includes the concomitant duty to disobey unlawful orders. An order not to reveal evidence of war crimes would be an unlawful order. Manning had a legal duty to expose the commission of war crimes.   More

A GAME OF RUSSIAN ROULETTE:

Couching opposition to Trump in anti-Russia language will only end up benefiting the Right.

Denouncing opponents as fellow travelers of Putin allows political and media elites to delegitimize critics of the neoliberal order, scrubbing public debate of any mention of the root causes plaguing the advanced capitalist world. It is not austerity that drives opposition to the European Union, but a Russian plot to weaken Western European institutions. It is not the legacy of colonialism that is re-emerging in the program of the European far right, but bad thoughts the Kremlin has put into people’s minds… Worse yet, in some cases it appears the Russia fixation is not merely a distraction, but a deliberate cudgel to use against those who oppose attacks on the welfare state or civil liberties… Thus, not only are wide sectors of the media and political class focusing on Russia to the exclusion of actual issues, those who do focus on actual issues are chastised for not forming a popular front with people like Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham — two men who have yet to locate a country on a map they didn’t wish to bomb.   More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Weapons, Warriors, and Fear as the New Order in America

After the USSR imploded in 1991, dominating the world’s arms trade somehow came to seem so much less evil. In fact, faced with large trade deficits, a powerful military-industrial complex looking for markets, and ever more global military commitments, Washington actively sought to promote and sell American-made weaponry on a remarkable scale. And in that it succeeded admirably.  Today, when it comes to building andexporting murderous weaponry, no other country, not even that evil-empire-substitute, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, comes faintly close.  The U.S. doth bestride the world of arms production and dealing like a colossus. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, U.S. arms contractors sold $209.7 billion in weaponry in 2015, representing 56% of the world’s production.  Of that, $40 billionwas exported to an array of countries, representing “half of all agreements in the worldwide arms bazaar,” as the New York Times put it.  France ($15 billion) was a distant second, with Putin’s Russia ($11 billion) earning a weak third...  Not only has the U.S. come to dominate the arms trade in an almost monopolistic fashion over the last two decades, but it has also become the top exporter of troops globally.  Leaving aside the ongoing, seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to garrison the globe with approximately 800 military bases, while deploying its Special Operations forces to a significant majority of the planet’s countries annually.   More

Dems seek to limit Trump's options for using nuclear weapons

Two Democrats are pushing Congress to restrict President Trump’s ability to launch nuclear weapons, reintroducing a bicameral bill Tuesday that would prohibit the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war by Congress.  “Nuclear war poses the gravest risk to human survival,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “Yet, President Trump has suggested that he would consider launching nuclear attacks against terrorists. Unfortunately, by maintaining the option of using nuclear weapons first in a conflict, U.S. policy provides him with that power.”  Markey and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) have long opposed America's first-strike policy, which says the country reserves the right to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Former President Obama reportedly weighed changing the policy before leaving office, but ultimately did not after advisers argued against it.  More

REP. TULSI GABBARD:

The Syrian People Desperately Want Peace

It is clear now more than ever: this regime change war does not serve America’s interest, and it certainly isn’t in the interest of the Syrian people… Their message to the American people was powerful and consistent: There is no difference between “moderate” rebels and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) or ISIS – they are all the same. This is a war between terrorists under the command of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Syrian government. They cry out for the U.S. and other countries to stop supporting those who are destroying Syria and her people. I heard this message over and over again from those who have suffered and survived unspeakable horrors. They asked that I share their voice with the world; frustrated voices which have not been heard due to the false, one-sided biased reports pushing a narrative that supports this regime change war at the expense of Syrian lives… I return to Washington, DC with even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government. From Iraq to Libya and now in Syria, the U.S. has waged wars of regime change, each resulting in unimaginable suffering, devastating loss of life, and the strengthening of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. I call upon Congress and the new Administration to answer the pleas of the Syrian people immediately and support the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.   More

The Stop Arming Terrorists Act (H.R.6504) has only 5 co-sponsors, none from Massachusetts

Death of the Syrian ‘Moderate’ Fantasy

Washington think-tank warriors and editorial writers have long looked to the FSA as America’s natural allies in the Syrian conflict — so-called “moderates” unblemished by the Assad regime’s cruel record of repression, or the Islamists’ preference for cutting the throats of apostates… On Tuesday, the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate that rebranded itself last year as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), attacked the FSA in Idlib and Aleppo provinces with heavy artillery, suicide bombs, and even cyber attacks. Within a day, they largely succeeded in wiping out local FSA forces… Similar debacles, complete with weapons transfers to extremists, have taken place many times over the past few years. In September 2013, FSA forces in the northern city of Raqqa surrendered abjectly to Islamists, despite outnumbering them. One top rebel commander said, “There is no such thing as the FSA [here]. We are all Al Qaeda now. Half of the FSA has been devoured by ISIS, and the other half joined Jabhat al-Nusra.”  … In 2015, former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who has long advocated a more muscular policy of arming moderate rebels against the Assad regime, confessed that the strategy had backfired..  “For a long time,” Ford said, “we have looked the other way while the Nusra Front and armed groups on the ground, some of whom are getting help from us, have coordinated in military operations against the regime. I think the days of us looking the other way are finished.”   More

PATRICK COCKBURN: Misreporting in Syria and Iraq

The nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria has been the reporting of the siege of East Aleppo, which began in earnest in July and ended in December, when Syrian government forces took control of the last rebel-held areas and more than 100,000 civilians were evacuated. During the bombardment, TV networks and many newspapers appeared to lose interest in whether any given report was true or false and instead competed with one another to publicise the most eye-catching atrocity story even when there was little evidence that it had taken place…  All wars always produce phony atrocity stories – along with real atrocities. But in the Syrian case fabricated news and one-sided reporting have taken over the news agenda to a degree probably not seen since the First World War…   The real reason that reporting of the Syrian conflict has been so inadequate is that Western news organisations have almost entirely outsourced their coverage to the rebel side.   More

Donald Trump eyes establishment of safe zones in Syria

The safe-zone mandate was tucked into the text of a draft executive order by Mr. Trump obtained by several news outlets* that establishes curbs on the flow of refugees from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other conflict zones from migrating to the United States. The order also institutes a revamped screening process for all U.S. immigrants… As president, Barack Obama resisted calls for the safe zones along the borders of Syria, designed to be a protective shield for Syrian refugees fleeing the violence, for fear that the U.S. would be forced to defend the zones in a war in which Syrian rebels, Islamic State militants, Kurdish militias and soldiers from Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Turkey and Iraq are all involved…  On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump backed safe zones, as did his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.   More

Democrats urged Obama to cease Yemen war role before Trump took over

Twenty-five House Democrats unsuccessfully wrote to President Barack Obama earlier this month to urge him to end US support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen before Donald Trump took over.  The Jan. 13 letter, led by habitual Yemen war critics Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and John Conyers, D-Mich., raises concerns that the United States is abetting “war crimes” by supporting Riyadh’s imprecise bombing campaign. It goes on to argue that the fight against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels is doing little more than fueling terrorism. “These airstrikes — which have killed children, women, doctors, newlyweds and funeral mourners — are likely war crimes,” the letter states. “We respectfully ask you to do the right thing before you leave office and stop the US refueling of Coalition aircraft that strike civilian targets in Yemen.”   More

Signers included McGovern and Capuano