Thursday, May 17, 2018

Memorial Day VA Privatization Bills-Stop The Privatization Of The Veterans Administration

To  

Two new bills being voted on in the next weeks: 

     In the next two weeks, Congress will vote on a bill that will significantly influence the future of the Veterans Health Administration.  The VA Mission Act of 2018, H.R. 5674, has already been voted out of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, and will reach the full House very soon.  The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee will be voting on a mirror image bill and may receive favorable treatment there.  Then it will be voted on by the full Senate.  Although this bill has been supported by virtually all veterans service organizations (VSOs) , after careful analysis of the bill (please see our website for the full analysis), we believe it should be opposed by every veteran and every American concerned with the delivery of high quality care to veterans, as well as the maintenance and improvement of a healthcare system that can serve as a model for how health care should be delivered.
     Provisions in this bill will open the floodgates for expanded outsourcing of VHA care to the private sector.  The high costs of this outsourcing will threaten VHA care and caregivers, leading to staff layoffs and facility closures.  Because of sequestration, the high cost of this will also pit veteran healthcare against other needed government programs.
     Provisions in the bill will fragment the VHA’s model of integrated care by channeling more veterans into walk-in clinics that are already a subject of controversy in the private sector system.  The bill will create an unaccountable commission that will assess which VHA facilities should be closed.  Although many VSOs believe that this Commission will be subject to public control and can lead to creating expanded facilities and much needed infrastructure repair, we worry that a Commission chosen largely by President Trump and a deeply anti VHA Congress will do just the opposite.  The kind of increased outsourcing of care encouraged by the Act threatens to deprive VHA facilities of patients and staff and justify their closure.
     Veterans service organizations are convinced that these problems are manageable, can be monitored, and even reversed.  We are not so sanguine about the ability to harness the outsourcing of care and protect veterans from predatory providers more interested in getting their hands on taxpayer money than serving vulnerable veterans.
 

Contact your representatives in Congress:

We urge you to contact your lawmakers at 833-480-1637 and ask them to vote against the bill.  If it passes, we also urge you to make sure they monitor the roll out of an experiment that may deliver lower quality care to veterans at higher cost, overburden the private sector healthcare system, pit veterans against private sector patients, and erode a shining model of healthcare that serves not only veterans but all Americans.
Sample Letters HERE







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From Veterans For Peace-Take Action Now-Defend The Palestinian People-No War On The Korean People




www.veteransforpeace.org

 

Veterans Condemn Israeli Slaughter of Unarmed Palestinian Protesters

Israel receives $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid every year, making it the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. U.S. laws, such as the "Leahy Law," the Arms Export Control Act, and the Foreign Assistance Act, are supposed to prevent U.S. weapons from being used by other countries to commit human rights violations. Countries that violate these laws are subject to penalties, including a cut-off of additional weapons.
Furthermore, the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem flies in the face of diplomacy and creates a massive roadblock on a path to peace.  It is outrageous that our government continues to uphold and further such actions.
Israel must be held accountable for its actions!Email Your Congressional Representative Now!

End U.S. Military Exercises in Korea

The announcement of the cancellation of talks between North and South Korea lies solely at the feet of the United States.  The people of Korea have advocated and worked diligently to secure peace and to push for a path of reconciliation.  The United States continues to stand in the way of these efforts.
The United States is holding large scale war exercises in the Korean Peninsula, in the waters surrounding North Korea.  The people of Korea have repeatedly advocated a “Freeze for a Freeze", whereupon the U.S. would cease their military exercises in exchange for a freeze on N. Korea’s nuclear program.  An agreement that almost every other country in the region has supported.
The United States MUST stop being a hindrance for peace and cease their military exercises immediately.
P.S.  If you have not already registered, please come to our Korea Advocacy Days June 11-12
Veterans For Peace appreciates your generous donations.
We also encourage you to join our ranks.



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Mystic Chorale concert, May 19/20 - From Selma to Soweto: Songs of Power, Boston

To  act-ma  
Spring 2018
Mystic Chorale
From Selma to Soweto: Songs of Power
Led by Nick Page

SATURDAY , May 19, 2018, 7:30pm or SUNDAY , May 20, 2018, 3:30pm

Join the 200 singers of the Mystic Chorale singing songs of community, power and hope from the ongoing Civil Rights movements of South Africa and the US. We are thrilled to welcome returning guest, Dr. Ysaye Barnwell , who has spent three decades singing with Sweet Honey In The Rock and building communities of song throughout the world. Her central message—that together our voices matter—is sagely conveyed in the lyrics she wrote for Step by Step : “Many stones can build an arch, singly none.”

We also welcome back South African friends Nthabi Thakadu, Phakamani Pega, and Pumla Bhungane, as well as pianist extraordinaire Jonathan Singleton.

Audience and Chorale alike will enjoy Ysaye’s uplifting song-leading and a rich program that features several contemporary pieces, including one Ysaye wrote especially for Mystic that assures us, “We can rise higher than high, We can rise in love.”

All of the songs—past and present, South African and American—deliver powerful and relevant messages for today’s world!

Advance tickets are $15/ $20 at door.
mysticchorale.org

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Sat 5/19 Boston March Against Monsanto 1pm Park Street

D 
2018 Boston March Against Monsanto - Rally for World Food Justice

Saturday, May 19

1pm: Rally with speakers at Park Street

2:30pm: March

Shut Down Monsanto!
No to GMOs! Ban Genetically Engineered Crops & Foods!
Ban Glyphosate/Roundup! Stop Poisoning the People of the World!
Ban Monopoly Corporate Patenting of Seeds
Protect Biodiversity – Defend Organic Agriculture & Small Farmers
Defend Indigenous Land Rights & National Sovereignty

Sponsored by: Boston March Against Monsanto Organizing Committee, Boston Food for Activists,
Green-Rainbow Party Greater Boston Chapter, Committee for Peace & Human Rights (Park Street Vigil)

https://www.facebook.com/events/1673284626101086/ <https://www.facebook.com/events/1673284626101086/>
https://www.facebook.com/Mamboston2018/ <https://www.facebook.com/Mamboston2018/>

International March Against Monsanto
https://www.march-against-monsanto.com/ <https://www.march-against-monsanto.com/>

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5/19 Rally at Norfolk Prison to Demand Clean Safe Drinking Water!


*/On July 28, 2010, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly declared
that every human being has a fundamental right to the access of clean
safe water and sanitation (HRWS). This fundamental right is recognized
in “International Law through human rights treaties, declarations and
other standards./*

*//*

*/The Color of Water Project Endorses This Action and encourages you to /*

*/​support and /*
*/participat
​e​
in the caravan and rally!/*

*Calling all *water warriors, human rightsactivistsand community members
who have or know families with loved ones incarcerated in Norfolk or any
other prison in USNA to join the

​ *Clean*​
*Water Rights Caravan. *

*
*

The caravan will be gathering on *Saturday May 19, 2018 1:pm at the
Reggie Lewis Center *and leaving for *Norfolk Prison. *We will *rally at
2:30pm *to demand that the administration recognize and respect each
person inside's *human right to clean safe drinking water and
sanitation. *The right**denied them but granted to prison guards and
their dogs!

*/For more information, please call The City School at (617) 822-3075 /*

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From The Archives- Chelsea Manning tells off Harvard & the CIA



FYI, sent by Al Sargis, VFP... 


03 October 2017

Chelsea Manning. (photo: Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images)
Chelsea Manning. (photo: Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images)

Chelsea Manning Tells Off Harvard and the CIA

By Spencer Ackerman 

 
helsea Manning never ended up lecturing at Harvard University after loud objections from the Central Intelligence Agency. But late Monday afternoon, the day she was supposed to begin her fellowship, Manning did talk about surveillance, tech, and social repression down the street—at the similarly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For someone who enlisted in the Army at a young age and spent most of her adult life in a military prison, seeing the prevalence of domestic surveillance and the militarization of policing is “like I’m walking out into the most boring dystopian novel I can imagine,” she told The Daily Beast shortly after her talk. “It feels like American cities, certain parts of them, are occupied by an American force, the police department.”

Having traveled across the East and West Coasts since her release, one of the 21st century’s signature whistleblowers is trying to reconnect with her country and spread an activist message about political engagement. She ran up against an obstacle last month: the current and former intelligence officials who pressed Harvard to reject her fellowship.

Yet the result was an MIT conversation with the ACLU’s Kade Crockford that encouraged the software engineers of tomorrow to think through the applications of their innovations that might aid a more expansive surveillance apparatus—itself a statement of defiance to those who’d rather respectable institutions shun her.

“What’s important here is that the Central Intelligence Agency and associated people in the intelligence community, they think they can stifle dissent, all forms of dissent, all across America and use academic institutions as a battleground,” Manning said.

Last month, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government withdrew a fellowship offer it had extended to Manning. Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director, set off a backlash by resigning his own Harvard fellowship over outrage that “leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk.” Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director, followed up by calling Manning an “American traitor.” (Never mind the fact that Pompeo promoted WikiLeaks, the outlet that published Manning’s leaks, during the 2016 campaign.)

Manning said she couldn’t be bothered by the spymasters’ words. “I’m not going to be afraid and I’m not going to be intimidated,” she added.

Her MIT talk, delivered to about 130 students and other attendees, was the result of a post-Harvard invitation extended by Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Manning reached out through a mutual friend, MIT confirmed. In it, Manning said, she touched on living in the panopticon of prison as a “microcosm” for tech-fueled advancements in repression, “when it comes to facial recognition, surveillance, using databases and techniques to monitor and surveil people,” as well as how she depended on other inmates for support while imprisoned.

Then she issued a warning to the engineers MIT will matriculate: “While we might be making a piece of software that does one thing, for medicine or marketing or advertising, it can be used in a military context or to suppress dissent. These technological solutions are kind of universal in that sense that they can be misused.”

‘Aiding the Enemy?’

The MIT talk was the latest skirmish in a battle over Manning’s legacy—one that shows no sign of stopping.
“One of the things we wanted to make sure was that it was about the substance of the conversation, we didn’t want this to be just about snubbing Harvard,” Ito explained in introducing one of the first public talks given by a figure who has been defined for seven years mostly by hostile, powerful officials.

Contrary to Pompeo’s invective, a military judge in 2013 specifically acquitted Manning, then known as Bradley, of knowingly “aiding the enemy.” She was convicted of multiple counts of leaking classified information and received a 35-year sentence. After serving seven years, to include pre-trial detention, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in January. She walked free from Fort Leavenworth in May after confinement so severe—it included a yearlong stint in solitary—that a U.N. special rapporteur on torture called it a violation of her “right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of [her] presumption of innocence.”

Manning’s deployment to Iraq and exposure to the material she leaked disillusioned her to the U.S. war effort. She said at her sentencing: “It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.”

Pompeo and Morell made points frequently invoked by Manning’s detractors, and not often carefully. In the wake of her disclosures’ publication by WikiLeaks in 2010, the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the group “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Yet an actual taxonomy of any harm resulting from Manning’s leaks, something that might allow for a balanced assessment of what she did and the punishment she subsequently endured, is not a matter of public knowledge seven years after Manning’s saga began. Detractors in the intelligence agencies say doing so would put more sources and methods at risk, compounding the damage; Manning supporters consider that too convenient, permitting overblown accusations against her to remain in perpetual circulation.

Manning’s defense counsel in her military trial was not permitted to read a classified document assessing the impact of her leaks of thousands of tactical military reports and diplomatic cables.

But BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold obtained the document earlier this year after transparency litigation and wrote that the multi-agency task force found her leaks “largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to U.S. interests.” The 2011-era document found the leaks had potential to “serious[ly] damage… intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population” and would have their greatest likely effect on “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”

Academics and human-rights groups have said that contacts with the U.S., revealed in the diplomatic cables, complicated their jobs and potentially placed them in danger in authoritarian countries. But there remains little certainty over whether those leaks actually led to someone suffering harm.

Evidence the leaks contained about greater civilian deaths and injuries than the Pentagon had disclosed, something Manning’s defenders cite to demonstrate her leaks’ importance, could damage “support for current operations in the region,” the task force found, focusing more on the leaks than on the deaths they revealed.

That matched contemporaneous reporting, which found the Obama administration’s claims about the damage Manning caused exaggerated. A congressional official briefed on the leaks’ impact in 2011 told Reuters they were “embarrassing but not damaging.”

‘An Historic Embarrassment for American Academia’

In a confusing statement following the CIA pressure, Harvard’s Douglas Elmendorf called extending the fellowship to Manning “a mistake.” Elmendorf said the initial invitation to her was defensible but neglected the impact of the “perceived honor that it implies to some people,” which opened up Harvard to criticism for hypocrisy in honoring, among others, Sean Spicer, who repeatedly lied from the White House podium as President Trump’s press secretary. As a consolation, Elmendorf offered Manning a one-day opportunity to “spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.” That isn’t going to happen.

The filmmaker Eugene Jarecki told The Daily Beast that Harvard’s decision was “an historic embarrassment for American academia.”

Jarecki interviewed Manning at a public event on Nantucket shortly after Harvard’s about-face and pronounced himself impressed with her willingness to engage with hard questions.

“She’s a remarkable human being who really is a walking concentration of several-hot button issues in American life,” Jarecki said. “It was both a surprise and no surprise, in a way, to see an institution such as Harvard quake in their boots when Chelsea’s name is mentioned.”

Despite the CIA pressure and Harvard’s acquiescence to it, Manning indicated to The Daily Beast that political activism will be a feature of her unfolding life as a free woman.

In prison, she learned “we are our own political agents,” depending on one another—a message that seems to inform where she’s going next.

“I’m trying to live my life, but I realize I can’t go back to the life I was living before. I need to be with the people I care about, and we need to be with each other. It’s not about me—I’m very concerned about the direction all of us are going in,” she said.

“I think it’s important people understand they have power. Nobody can give them power and give them rights, we need to assert that.”

Out in the tech world, Manning said she got the sense engineers are “expecting someone to tell them what to do” with their innovations, rather than figuring out their social utility through dialogue with their neighbors.

“The reality is people need to... have these conversations in our communities right now. We can’t wait for someone to come up with a final product, idea, [or] solution,” she said. “There’s no roadmap to the future. We have to chart our own course.”
___________________________________________________
Spencer Ackerman is a senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast. The former U.S. national security editor for the Guardian, Ackerman was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team reporting on Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations.