The hunger strike at Guantanamo is nearing 100 days long (with the majority of detainees participating). The Nation recounts the words of one hunger striker that "cut to the heart of the [desperation] protest": 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

STEVEN JONAS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Born in 1946, I grew up in New York during the era of Baseball in New York.  We had three major league teams, the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers (both in the National League) and the hated (that is if you rooted for either of the first two) New York Yankees in the American League.  I was born in 1936, the same year that the great “DiMag” (Joe DiMaggio) broke in with the Yankees.  (I did not know it until many years later, but DiMaggio had to endure many an anti-Italian epithet in his early years.)   Although not yet a fan at age 9, in 1946 I was aware of the dash around the bases from first to score on a single by Enos “Country” Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series for them over the Boston Red Sox.  (Slaughter, a Southern racist, would in 1947 feature in Robinson’s baseball life and the movie.) It was also in that year that I became aware of Jackie Robinson, signed by the Dodgers and assigned to play with their top minor league team, the Montreal Royals.  But my knowledge of that fact came from more political than baseball awareness.

I grew up in a left-wing household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (New York City).  I was what was known as “Red Diaper Baby.” (I still have a few friends who shared that moniker.  Unlike too many of our compatriots who chose the easy road to the Right in US politics [and for some, a quite lucrative road it became one might add], some of us did stay true to our birthright, and we, I must say, are proud of it.)  At any rate, in those days, during and just after World War II, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, The Daily Worker, was in my home every day. 

Now, as a kid, I can make no claim to have read the sometimes complex, and sometimes very rapidly shifting news perspectives and political analyses.  But like many a kid, I did read the sports pages.  And so, I read two great sports columnists named Bill Mardo and Lester Rodney.  (I was privileged to meet them many years later at a magnificent three-day sports history symposium to honor the 50^th anniversary of the arrival  of Jackie Robinson in the Big Leagues put on by my good friend and Columbia College classmate, and great U.S. social historian, Prof. Joseph Dorinson of the History Department at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY.  And thanks, Joe, for providing me with some of the material for this column.)  It was through Messrs. Mardo and Rodney that I learned of the campaign for the integration of major league baseball that beginning in the 1930s had been mounted by the Communist Party of the United States, in cooperation with such leading civil rights organizations of the day as the NAACP and A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

(Photo: Baseball Collection)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

                                                                                                                                     Crack Coke: The Real Thing

They're back!

The Koch brothers, according to a right wing publication report on a recent conclave held by the toxic billionaire siblings, will be back trying to buy the election in 2014.

According to The New American Magazine (which has the John Birch Society as the first on its list of "affiliates and friends"), the Koch Brothers recently revealed at their spring meeting of plutocrats (held in Palm Springs) that they are retooling their strategy for heavily investing in buying up the government:

One major change has already taken place at the Koch Brothers' key project, Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Founded in 2004 to educate and motivate concerned citizens about economic policy and political action for lower taxes and less government, in 2012 AFP invested more than $140 million in political ads and door-to-door canvassing efforts with disappointing results. The group’s chief operating officer was terminated along with most of its staff and several fundraisers, but two key Koch employees were placed on its board.

It’s likely that support for the 60 Plus Association will be reduced while funding for Generation Opportunity, geared more to younger voters, and The Libre Initiative, which focuses on Hispanics and Latinos, will be increased in time for the 2014 elections.

The big news, however, is the creation of a new tax-exempt group, the Association for American Innovation, which will be run by a former AFP strategist and will coordinate state efforts to reduce taxes and limit government spending.

In addition, heavy investment will be made in a voter-mining and management software program called Themis in an attempt to catch up with the Democrats’ successful data management strategy that gave them a significant strategic advantage in that party’s messaging during last year’s election campaign. It will likely be managed by a key Koch employee, Kevin Gentry, who will use it to target advertising buys on cable as well as focus on registering new voters and staying in touch with them on an ongoing basis.

The Koch brothers running a new tax-exempt group with another Frank Luntz style misleading name ("Association for American Innovation") that aims to allow multi-billionaires to seize even more of the nation's assets for personal wealth?  This isn't innovation; it's just tax-exempt mugging by another name.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Farleigh Dickinson University conducted a poll released on May 1 that implies that much of the pro-gun sentiment has nothing to do with self-defense, but rather with anti-federal government rage:

Overall, the poll finds that 29 percent of Americans think that an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years, with another five percent unsure. However, these beliefs are conditional on party. Just 18 percent of Democrats think an armed revolution may be necessary, as opposed to 44 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents….

“The differences in views of gun legislation are really a function of differences in what people believe guns are for,” said [Dan] Cassino, [a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson.] “If you truly believe an armed revolution is possible in the near future, you need weapons and you’re going to be wary about government efforts to take them away."

This indication of a rather foreboding simmering of a revolt against the US government was brought to light in a May 1 article by David Sirota on Salon.

But let's be clear that the willingness to take up firearms allegedly "to protect liberties" is occurring after a long right wing-fomented Tea Party siege against a black president. Furthermore, it is – as BuzzFlash at Truthout has often noted – a rebellion of whites who can't separate the image of America as a Caucasian-ruled nation from the legal basis of a democracy as enshrined in the US Constitution.  Theirs is a racist fantasy that a democracy should look like the skin color of the "founding fathers," not about the legal framework of the nation that they created.

(Photo: shoehorn99)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Twelve states are officially backing a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood, and Maine just became the thirteenth.

According to the Bangor Daily News:

Sen. Richard Woodbury, I-Yarmouth, plans to introduce a resolution Tuesday in the Maine Senate that directs the state’s congressional delegation to support a constitutional amendment that would overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United” opinion equating campaign spending with free speech....

In March, independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn “Citizens United.” The proposed amendment would “expressly exclude for-profit corporations from the rights given to natural persons by the Constitution of the United States, prohibit corporate spending in all elections, and affirm the authority of Congress and the states to regulate corporations and to regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures.”

Despite having a Tea Party governor, Maine is one of the leaders in transparent elections and reducing the impact of big money on the political process. However, in 2011, the US Supreme Court gutted a key element of the Maine Clean Election Act.

(Photo: occupyreno_media)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT 

It's about time Paul Krugman took a victory lap – and he does in his Monday New York Times column:

But just look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.

Is the story really that simple, and would it really be that easy to end the scourge of unemployment? Yes — but powerful people don’t want to believe it. Some of them have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins (even if the sinners then and the sufferers now are very different groups of people). Some of them see the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net. And just about everyone in the policy elite takes cues from a wealthy minority that isn’t actually feeling much pain.

What has happened now, however, is that the drive for austerity has lost its intellectual fig leaf, and stands exposed as the expression of prejudice, opportunism and class interest it always was. And maybe, just maybe, that sudden exposure will give us a chance to start doing something about the depression we’re in.

Krugman's boasting is long over due, but in specific, this time comes from the most unlikely of sources: a Univeristy of Massachusetts graduate economic student who discovered major statistical errors in the primary research paper (authored by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff) used by advocates to justify austerity measures.

Thomas Herndon, the graduate student who received the excel spread sheet after much persistence that Reinhart and Rogoff used to justify their pro-austerity theory, does not accept the viewpoint that the errors were minor:

(Photo: Wikipedia)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Of Thursday's dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library, NPR headlines an article that details how President "Obama's Bush Library Speech Leaves Iraq And More Unspoken."

Most Americans of both parties have, over the years, appeared to have adopted the attitude that the stolen election of 2000 is something the nation has gotten over.  But it's hard not to underscore that the George W. Bush presidential library is really a fraud.  

After all, Bush was never elected president.  On the 10th anniversary of his anointment by the Supreme Court, and particularly by the stay of the Florida state-mandated recount by Antonin Scalia – a long-time buddy of Dick Cheney and rabid right wing partisan.  In 2010, Eric Alterman recounted just some of the machinations that led to an election that was stolen even before the votes were cast (which was done with a number of voter suppression strategies, including the purging of tens of thousands of largely minority voters in Florida  done by a firm called ChoicePoint) on the tenth anniversary of the legalized putsch.

The coup was openly revealed in Scalia's infamous stay of a state-mandated recount (Bush, by the way, as governor of Texas signed a bill that would have made a recount in Florida automatic if the vote were as close in Texas as it officially was in the Sunshine State) when he stated that a recount "threatens irreperable harm to [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election."  In short, Scalia is saying that if Bush lost after a recount it would hurt his reputation as president since the Supreme Court would install him in the White House no matter what the voters decided in Florida. (Remember that Al Gore won the national popular vote by more than 540,000 votes.)

(Photography: @ LaRsNoW @)

 MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

There are few Americans -- if any but extremist Armageddon (of any religion) and anti-government militia supporters -- who feel anything but the deepest of sorrow for the victims of the Boston Marathon apparent religious act of terrorism – conducted by what appear to be a radicalized permanent resident and his younger brother, an American citizen. It was -- as was 9/11 --  a heinous, shocking act.

But the insightful Juan Cole puts into perspective that most followers of Islam are peaceful people.  The Jihadists and their networks compose a small percentage of believers in the Islamic faith.

Perhaps it is a little too early to start comparing the death tolls caused by different religious faiths in the last 100 years, but Cole takes a stab at it -- and this is what he finds. In the 20th Century, of the estimated (and this is hardly a firm figure, understated if anything) 120 million people who were killed in wars and war-like acts (terrorism is war, generally upon civilians, by a non nation-state) only a small fraction of that figure was the result of Muslim killings. Cole offers a chart that visually displays the dramatic lopsided accountability of Christian nations: mostly those located in Europe plus the US and Canada.

Many Americans will react with dismay that Cole is setting the record straight.  But it is vital to point out that he condemns terrorism and war for empire of any sort.  He is simply pointing out that to think that Christianity and Christian nations are more virtuous and less blood thirsty than followers of Islam is statistically incorrect.  As Cole concludes in his commentary on relative blood lust in the name of a divine force or nationhood,

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

In its metro section, The New York Times (NYT) revealed the growing yawning gap between the wealthy barons of the Big Apple and nearly half of the city's citizens, who are barely surviving.

The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.

That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.

Now, as the US has slowly climbed out of an economic collapse caused by the financial manipulations of a large segment of the one percent, the wealthy are increasing their control of US assets.  Meanwhile, the safety net for those in need is cut in the name of austerity.  That is why the NYT reports:

“Coinciding with the end of the slump in the job market is the end of the recession-related expansion of the safety net,” Dr. Levitan [director of poverty research for the Center for Economic Opportunity and author of the study] wrote, which could reduce food stamp benefits on top of cutbacks in unemployment insurance, tax credits and the payroll tax rate.

And the future is not bright for the New Yorkers who are the modern version of the Dickensian poor who walked like shadows amidst the rich who controlled the assets of the Britain at that dark time of the dawn of the industrial revolution:

More New Yorkers were poor in 2011 — 19.3 percent by the federal rate and 21.3 percent by the city’s standard — compared with 16.8 and 19.8 percent in 2007, before the recession. Still, while the city’s measure is the highest since it was first calculated in 2005, the official rate is lower in New York than in many other major cities.

While the center’s annual report, to be released this week, suggested that a better job market may have reversed the rising poverty in 2012, its outlook for this year and beyond was more problematic.

Of course, this doesn't include the working class or middle class who are just making it in the costly city of New York.

(Photo: HowardLake)