Military Resistance: thomasfbarton@earthlink.net 5.26.19 Print it out: color best. Pass it on.

Military Resistance 17E4

[Thanks to SSG N (ret’d) who sent this in. She writes: “Enlist now! Be cannon fodder!”]

Trump Regimes Newest War Using U.S. Forces In Somalia:“Substantial Involvement By U.S.

Military Personnel On The Ground. Somalia Is An Area Of Authorized

Hostilities”“Occasionally, As We’re Accompanying Somalis Into The Field, U.S. Forces Find

Themselves In Situations Where They Have To Either Defend Themselves Or

Assist A Partner In Defending Themselves”

“There Are Various Orders That Provide U.S. Troops The Authority To Operate In

Somalia”

5.21.19 By: Kyle Rempfer, Military Times [Excerpts]

U.S. government forces and a contractor with an unorthodox investment strategy have fanned out over Somalia to fight al-Shabaab by building a force of local light infantry known as the Danab — and they’re likely to continue doing so for years to come.

In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that extended the U.S. military mission to Somalia for another year, citing the threat from al-Shabaab — a militant group aligned with al-Qaida — as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security."

The move extends a mission that has paired airstrikes with ground operations and nation-building to a noteworthy degree of success.

The military commitment to the country hovers between 500 and 600 troops, but an unknown number of contractors are also used to recruit and train Danab light infantry, also known as the Lightning Brigade. Many of those contractors have worked for a nonprofit that shares leaders with an investment arm that has bought up a significant amount of real estate in Somalia.

Bancroft Global Development works in conflict zones as a nonprofit, but Bancroft Global Investments — a separate legal entity that shares leadership with the nonprofit arm — has made entrepreneurial investments in Somalia and become one of the country’s largest real estate investors and developers.

Bancroft did not return multiple requests for comment, but their connection to the U.S. mission in Somalia was confirmed to Military Times by a U.S. official on background earlier this year, as well as a series of public contracts that show an escalating partnership between the company and the U.S. government.

In May, Bancroft Global Development accepted a more than $730,000 contract for six months of support services. By contrast, Bancroft received about $490,000 for that same type of contract during the previous 12 months.

A former Army Green Beret officer experienced with stability operations said that an arrangement with a nonprofit connected to an investment firm was “strange.”

“I’ve never seen a nonprofit conduct foreign internal defense before,” he said. “You don’t need to be an expert for this raise eyebrows.”

Danab’s success, however, has so far not been replicated within the larger Somali National Army, which remains undermanned, poorly equipped and riddled with corruption. And any efforts to scale Bancroft’s operations and the U.S. military advising could be met with resistance from clans that feel threatened.

The U.S. commitment to Somalia is intended as a whole-of-government approach involving international partners, but “substantial involvement by U.S. military personnel on the ground, particularly the Mogadishu coordination cell," takes the lead on building Somalia’s defense apparatus, the State Department official said.

“Somalia is an area of authorized hostilities,” Marine Maj. Gen. Olson said. Occasionally, as we’re accompanying Somalis into the field, U.S. forces find themselves in situations where they have to either defend themselves or assist a partner in defending themselves.”

There are various orders that provide U.S. troops the authority to operate in Somalia.

Some of those mission names were leaked last year, including several 127 Echo programs, a budgetary authority that allows U.S. troops to control military units from other countries as a sort of “surrogate force.”

U.S. forces operate across the entirety of Somalia, but there are some places where the effort is more mature, Olson said. There has been a longstanding partnership with the Puntland security forces in northern Somalia, he noted, as well as Baledogle Airfield further south.

“Somalia is the size of the East Coast of the United States. So we have forces distributed from the equivalent of Albany, New York to about Tallahassee, Florida," Olson said. "And we have a limited number of assets that support them.”

U.S. troops are sometimes outside the wire, as evidenced by the death of Army Staff Sgt. Alexander Conrad, who was killed by al-Shabaab mortar teams in July 2018.

“Every mission that goes outside the wire is supported to a standard that permits us to react to what that force needs, whether it’s fire support, whether it’s personnel recovery, whether it’s medical support,” Olson said.‘"We carefully examine the minimum force requirements for every single mission, and we help make sure that they’re all supported to the standard.”

AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS

US Military Downplays District Control As Taliban Gains Ground

In Afghanistan:“The Security Situation In

Afghanistan And The Status Of The Districts Is Worse Than Is Being

Reported”“As The Taliban Gains Ground In Afghanistan, The Afghan National

Security Defense Forces Continues To Shrink”

January 31, 2019 BY BILL ROGGIO. Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD’s Long War Journal.

The Taliban has continued to make incremental gains in Afghanistan’s provinces despite an uptick in US airstrikes during the past year.

The US military downplayed the Taliban’s gains, stating that this is “not indicative of effectiveness of the South Asia strategy or progress toward security and stability in Afghanistan.” However, the last commander of US forces said less than two years ago that regaining control of 80 percent of Afghanistan’s territory was crucial to defeating the Taliban.

The Taliban has increased its control or influence by seven districts, or 1.7 percent, since the summer, according to a report by the Special Investigator General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Taliban control of population has also increased by 1.7 percent between July and Oct. 2018.

SIGAR receives its data directly from Resolute Support, NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, and the US Department of Defense. According to Resolute Support, the Afghan government controls or influences 219 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts (53.8 percent), and insurgents (the Taliban) control or influence another 12.3 percent. The remaining 33.9 percent are contested.

FDD’s Long War Journal, which has tracked the status of Afghanistan’s districts since 2014, believes the security situation in Afghanistan and the status of the districts is worse than is being reported by Resolute Support.

LWJ assesses that the Afghan government controls 35.1 percent of Afghanistan’s 407 districts, and the Taliban controls another 13.0 percent. The remaining 49.6 percent are contested, while seven districts (or 1.7%) cannot be accurately assessed at this time.

A major difference in Resolute Support and LWJ’s methodologies is that LWJ does not assess “influence,” as influence is merely a measure of control.

LWJ believes that Resolute Support uses influence to skew the data and provide a rosier picture of the security situation to prop up the Afghan government. On multiple occasions, LWJ has detected Resolute Support gaming the status of districts.

As the Taliban gains ground in Afghanistan, the Afghan National Security Defense Forces continues to shrink.

According to SIGAR, the ANSDF “decreased by 3,635 personnel since last quarter and is at the lowest it has been since the RS (Resolute Support) mission began in January 2015.”

The Taliban has also gained ground despite a marked uptick in US airstrikes. The US military “dropped 6,823 munitions in the first 11 months of 2018,” according to SIGAR. “This year’s figure was already 56% higher than the total number of munitions released in 2017 (4,361), and is more than five times the total in 2016.”

Resolute Support says district control is not important.

Last Resolute Support commander said it was.

Resolute Support is now downplaying the importance of government control of Afghanistan’s districts.

According to SIGAR:

“When providing district and population control data this quarter, DOD and RS reported for the first time that this data is “not indicative of effectiveness of the South Asia strategy or progress toward security and stability in Afghanistan.” DOD and RS also reiterated that there is “some uncertainty in models that produce (the data)” and subjectivity in the assessments that underlie it.”

Yet, General John Nicholson, Resolute Support’s last commander, said in Nov. 2017 that the goal of regaining control of 80 percent of Afghanistan’s territory was crucial to defeating the Taliban.

“This we believe is the critical mass necessary to drive the enemy to irrelevance, meaning they’re living in these remote outlying areas, or they reconcile, or they die,” Nicholson said, according to Reuters.

Resolute Support’s attempt to downplay the importance of Taliban control is contrary to everything known about counterinsurgency.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has been adept at using areas under its control to further its goal of retaking control of the country. In areas the Taliban controls or contests, it raises taxes, produces opium, and recruits, indoctrinates, and trains fighters. It also uses these areas to stage attacks on districts, towns, and cities under government control.

This is not the first time that Resolute Support and the US military have downplayed the Taliban’s control of Afghan districts. In 2016, after SIGAR noted that the Taliban was slowly gaining ground, Nicholson said that “the enemy is primarily in more rural areas that have less impact on the future of the country.”

More than two years later, the Taliban continues to use these “rural areas that have less impact on the future of the country” to make gains.

Taliban Fighters Hid In Sewage Tanker, Used Ladders To Breach

Major Helmand Base Housing Marines And Afghan Forces:

“Taliban Fighters Had Spies On The Base, An Afghan Lieutenant Colonel And

A Sergeant Major, Who Helped The Militants Hide”

May 16 By: Shawn Snow, marinecorpstimes [Excerpts]

The March 1 assault by Taliban fighters against the generally perceived secured major military base in Helmand, Afghanistan, will result in some of the first combat action ribbons for a small group of Marines, whose primary task is advising Afghan forces.

Some of the Marines assigned to the small adviser group, known as Task Force Southwest, aided Afghan forces in repelling the attack on the vitally important Camp Bastion base, which according to the New York Times was stormed by Taliban fighters hiding in sewage tankers and by some militants who used ladders to scale walls and cross turf guarded by dozy patrollers.

The New York Times also reported that Taliban fighters had spies on the base, an Afghan lieutenant colonel and a sergeant major, who helped the militants hide.

The assault by the outnumbered Taliban fighters calls into question the state of disrepair and security of the one of the most important Afghan military bases, which at the height of the war housed thousands of Marines and British troops and served as a focal point for America’s strategy to secure the volatile Helmand province.

A U.S. military official with Resolute Support said the U.S. side of the base was never under any real threat and that the American compound had its security perimeter. More than 20 Afghan forces were killed in the attack, which ended after hours of fighting with the aid of U.S. air support.

But following the breach, the New York Times reported citing American and Afghan officials, Taliban fighters took Afghan troops hostage, forcing them to guide the militants toward the command center where American troops were working.

According to the Times, previous Marine rotations had warned that the Regional Training Center on the base was susceptible to attack.

It’s not the first time Camp Bastion, now known as Camp Shorab, has been breached. But, it is the first major attempt on the military installation since U.S. forces handed control of the base to Afghan forces.

Corruption and poor leadership by Afghan commanders has dogged Afghan forces at the large Helmand base for several years.

A fourth rotation to Afghanistan by Task Force Southwest is currently on deck to deploy to the war-torn region.

U.S. Airforce Aids Taliban:Wipes Out 17 Regime Police; Wounds 14

More

5.18.2019 by Peter Stubley, the Injdependent (UK)

Seventeen Afghan police officers were killed by US airstrikes because of a “miscommunication” during clashes with Taliban forces, according to military officials.

The deadly “friendly fire” incident took place in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province on Thursday evening.

Afghan security forces called in US air support after taking heavy fire from Taliban fighters outside the province’s capital Lashkar Gah.

“Unfortunately, a tragic accident resulted,” said spokesman Colonel Dave Butler. “Afghan security forces as well as Taliban fighters were killed in the strikes.

Another 14 Afghan police officers were injured in the strikes.

The police initially came under fire while attempting to take down a Taliban flag from a nearby water tower, according to a report in the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

After failing to drive back the insurgents, the police called in the airstrikes.

Helmand’s governor, Mohammad Yasin, said Afghan authorities were investigating. In March a similar ”miscommunication” resulted in the death of at least five Afghan soldiers during a US airstrike in neighbouring Uruzgan province.

The number of US airstrikes has risen in the past year, mostly in response to Afghan requests for assistance but also as part of an ongoing campaign against Isis militants in eastern provinces.

IRAQ WAR REPORTS

Rocket Attack Hits Near US Embassy In Baghdad’s Green Zone

5.20.2019 By: Qassim Abdul-Zahra, The Associated Press and Bassem Mroue, The Associated Press [Excerpts]

BAGHDAD — A rocket was fired into the Iraqi capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone Sunday night, landing less than a mile from the sprawling U.S. Embassy, an Iraqi military spokesman said.

The apparent attack, which Iraq’s state-run news agency said did not cause any casualties, came amid heightened tensions across the Persian Gulf, after the White House ordered warships and bombers to the region earlier this month to counter an alleged, unexplained threat from Iran. The U.S. also has ordered nonessential staff out of its diplomatic posts in Iraq.

It was the first such attack since September, when three mortar shells landed in an abandoned lot inside the Green Zone.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack that took place after sunset when many Baghdad residents were indoors breaking their fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Associated Press reporters on the east side of the Tigris River, opposite the Green Zone, heard an explosion, after which alert sirens sounded briefly in Baghdad.

Iraqi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasoul told The Associated Press that a Katyusha rocket fell near the statue of the Unknown Soldier, less than a mile from the U.S. Embassy. He said the military was investigating the cause but that the rocket was believed to have been fired from east Baghdad. The area is home to Iran-backed Shiite militias.

Shortly afterward the rocket launcher was discovered by security forces in the eastern neighborhood of Wihda, according to a security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. The official also said the roads leading to the Green Zone were closed briefly for security reasons before they were reopened as normal.

POLICE WAR REPORTS

TORTURED BY BLUEThe Chicago Police Story

[Book Review]

By Chicago Torture Victims Mark Clements, Marvin Reeves, Ronald Kitchen, in collaboration with Stanley Howard. Balboa Press

Kindle $3.99

Earn a $2.99 creditRead with Our Free App

Hardcover

$36.42 2 Used from $33.0011 New from $27.24

Paperback

$19.99 5 Used from $18.9413 New from $14.73

To Order:https://www.amazon.com/Tortured-Blue-Chicago-Police-

Torture/dp/1982219483/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Tortured+by+Blue&qid=1558622602&s=books&sr=1-1

From: Alan Stolzer, Military Initiative Organizing Committee, who sent this in.]To: Military Resistance Newsletter

Date: May 20, 2019

Tortured by Blue [Book Review]By Alan Stolzer, Military Initiative Organizing Committee

Not only did the Chicago Police Department blatantly, repeatedly and criminally detain, threaten and torture African-American citizens of that city in the early 1980s, they tried covering it up with the aid of Illinois state officials thereby compounding the original crime which was, evidently, not enough for them.

We now have, via Balboa Press and Amazon (at $19.99), a record of these savage proceedings testified to by the victims themselves, a people’s voice if there ever was one.

This book details violence of veteran, white police officers deliberately torturing (the book provides details) of young black men in order to wring confessions from them to crimes they didn’t commit. Once confessions were extracted victims were imprisoned and several placed on Death Row for years before the cop’s crime(s) were exposed by the torture victims themselves.

Most importantly these victims didn’t remain silent. They engaged a community roused by reports from relatives relating the barbarism until justice was in sight; though not totally achieved since some remain in prison still struggling for elusive justice’s attention. Rallies, demos at state and local government offices pressured politicians to the point where the unspeakable could no longer remain known only to a relative few.

Revealing the crimes to their community was brilliant and necessary strategy thereby accomplishing fusion of prisoner-victims with their supporters to help create this unforgettable record now existent for public consumption.

Some of the most stirring chapters in the book depict the formation and activism (all in prison) of the “Death Row 10” principally involved in the exposition of crimes committed against them and the long, difficult but determined road to retribution. Four of the Death Row sentences were commuted by Illinois Governor Ryan in 2000.

Political roadblocks to justice were provided by then Mayor Richard Daley, among others, a series of state attorneys and not least, the now familiar conspiracy/silence of blue, championed by chief torturer, notorious police commander, Jon Burge. It took immense amounts of courage and resolve to struggle against such odds – repeated court appointments/postponements, frequent faulty legal advice/representation, prejudicial hearings - but that’s what took place and at least now in public record, documentation exists as tribute to those who originated and maintained the struggle resulting in this book.

“Tortured By Blue” goes beyond local, isolated crime but reverberates nationally, directly connecting to the unspeakable portion of history that much of white U.S. still won’t admit to nor even recognize. Moreover, in deeper ways, it reflects original sin of slavery by bringing to mind this country’s treatment of captured Africans and the inhumanity that followed.

From the victim’s point of view, the record now stands bare for all – a document from and by the source without hint of intimidation or influence from external elements. That

alone makes it priceless. We now have more than historical reference but a bible of crimes some still unresolved.

MILITARY NEWS

[Thanks to SSG N (ret’d) who sent this in. She writes: “If you really want to know why we’re sent to fight.”

Latest Survey Of Military Housing Shows Dirty And

Unsafe Conditions On More Than 160 Bases:

“In Addition To Battling Mice, Rats, Cockroaches, Mold

Infestation And Crumbling

Construction, Many Reported Extensive Health Problems They

Attribute To Living In The Homes”“More Than 10% Of Respondents Felt That Their Homes Weren’t Worth The

Basic Allowance For Housing Payments Made On Them”

“They Were Charged Outrageous Fees For Problems Not Caused By The

Tenants”

22 May 2019 By Patricia Kime, Military.com [Excerpts]

As Congress and the Defense Department move to improve housing conditions for troops and military families, an advocacy group has released more details on the state of military homes, from those who reside in them.

According to a Military Family Advisory Network (MFAN) survey, more than 16,000 military family members reported dirty and unsafe conditions on more than 160 military bases.

New details from the survey show that 93% of respondents lived in homes managed by just six private companies and 84% of tenants had "very negative, negative or neutral" experiences in base housing, with those who said their feelings were "neutral" providing largely negative feedback regarding repairs and remediation, mold, dirty homes on move-in day and shoddy construction.

On a five-point scale, with 1 being "very negative" and 5 being "very positive," Lincoln Property Company earned the highest satisfaction rating, at 2.57; Balfour Beatty Communities was second with a score of 2.53. They were followed by Lendlease/Winn, 2.46; Michaels Military Housing, 2.44; Corvias, 2.4; and Hunt Companies, 2.34.

The base with the highest satisfaction rate was Naval Base San Diego, with housing managed by Lincoln Property, scoring a 2.94. Tied for the lowest were Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Carson, Colorado, with a score of 2.12. They are managed by Corvias and Balfour Beatty Communities, respectively.

MFAN pointed out, however, that even the highest scores were not at the positive or very positive level.

"Satisfaction rates were not significantly distinctive. None of them had average satisfaction levels at or above neutral," MFAN analysts wrote.

By rank, flag and general officers who took the survey (and there weren’t many, less than 1 percent of respondents) had the highest satisfaction scores, 2.94, and personnel ranked E-4 to E-6 had the lowest, at 2.32. E-4s through E-6s also made up more than half the respondents.

Nearly 57% of those who participated reported problems with maintenance and repairs. Mold was the next most widely reported issue, with nearly 30% reporting problems, and "filth" was third, reported by 25% of respondents.

One military spouse described the condition of the house when the family moved in: "The house was filthy. They had never cleaned it. There was a drawer filled with men’s hair. Like someone cut their hair or shaved their chest in the drawer," the person wrote.

"Carpet was absolutely disgusting, smelled horrific, and I vacuumed two canisters full of white dog hair before moving in our household goods. We don’t have a dog," another wrote.

In addition to battling mice, rats, cockroaches, mold infestation and crumbling construction, many reported extensive health problems they attribute to living in the homes.

"Within weeks of moving into our house, my husband developed asthma. He is a combat vet with eight deployments under his belt, none of which resulted in any respiratory issues.

“Within 2 months of living in our home, all three of my daughters as well as myself suffered chronic sinus infections, swollen lymph nodes, sore throats and bloody noses," wrote the spouse of a senior enlisted Army soldier who lives at West Point, New York.

MFAN executives said the newest report provides clarity on the state of the Defense Department’s Military Housing Privatization Initiative, requested earlier this year by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The survey and detailed responses provided by participants show that housing is a force readiness concern, said Shannon Razsadin, MFAN’s executive director.

"If service members are worried about the safety of their homes, it distracts them from the military mission," she said.

The survey also found that more than 10% of respondents felt that their homes weren’t worth the Basic Allowance for Housing payments made on them and that they were charged outrageous fees for problems not caused by the tenants.

Problems with military housing began garnering national attention following a series of media reports by Reuters in 2018 on mold and lead in some military housing. The Senate held oversight hearings on the problems earlier this year, and many lawmakers have personally toured homes and spoken with the Pentagon to resolve the issues.

Army, Navy and Air Force leaders have inspected thousands of homes, developed a tenants’ bill of rights designed to empower service members when dealing with management companies, withheld utility payments made directly to the companies, and are making plans to hire customer service representatives to advocate for residents.

But for Congress, the Pentagon’s initiatives may not be enough.

On Tuesday, members of the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee said the proposed fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would include initiatives to improve housing and reform the management system.

While subcommittee chairman Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, did not release details of the legislation, he said during a markup of the bill’s personnel section that the bill would "restore accountability and oversight of privatized housing."

"Let me assure you that this subcommittee will not rest until every military family has a safe home to live in. ... Military families deserve safe, high-quality housing commensurate with the sacrifices they make every day for the security of our nation," he said.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, the panel’s ranking Democrat, added that the legislation would reduce the extra housing payments the DoD is required to make to the privatized housing contractors.

"It would allow the services to use the funding to improve housing and incentivize better performance," Gillibrand said.

Razsadin said that the MFAN report shows immediate and long-term changes are needed.

"Military families don’t have high expectations for their homes," she said. "We saw over and over again that basic needs were not being met. Military families believe they are actively being taken advantage of, and they have reported having no recourse."

[Thanks to SSG N (ret’d) who sent this in. She writes: “Drawing bolton as a 7th cavalry soldier by a First Peoples artist. Think about it. ]

FORWARD OBSERVATIONS

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.

“We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”

Frederick Douglass, 1852

It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent, and revolutionary struggle for democracy.”-- V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition; Vol. 22

The Idea That The Two Party Oligarchy Commanding And

Controlling The Government Of The United States Can Be Voted Out Of

Office Is Silly And Senseless:Members Of The Armed Forces Have The

Right And Duty To Aid Civilian Movements To Exterminate The

Dictatorship In Command Of The Government

The idea that the two party oligarchy that commands and controls the government of the United States can be voted out of office is silly and stupid.

Members of the armed forces have the right and duty to defend civilians from dictatorships.

Members of the armed forces have the right and duty to aid civilian movements to exterminate thr dictatorship in command of the government in Washington DC

This applies whether dictatorship is imposed by force or is imposed when those in command of the resources of society use their wealth to buy politicians to control the government.

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[Thanks to Carolyn Birden, who sent in the following:]

Have you seen Michael D.D. White’s article in his blog? http://nationalnotice.blogspot.com/2019/05/everybodys-realizing-it-now-political.html

Good use of stats. He’s WBAI’s new Vice Chair, and a much under-appreciated asset to Pacifica, if I read him correctly.

Carolyn Birden

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Michael D.D. White: http://nationalnotice.blogspot.com/2019/05/everybodys-realizing-it-now-political.html [Excerpts]

“Full disclosure: I am a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries and I worked to set up that forum.

“More recently, Columbia law Professor Tim Wu (author of “The Master Switch,” “The Attention Merchants,” and “The Curse of Bigness”) wrote an op-op in the New York Times that included the following list of things he observed the public wants, but is not getting:

“About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leave attracts 67 percent support.

Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.

The list goes on.

See- Opinion: The Oppression of the Supermajority- The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the thwarting of a largely unified public.

By Tim Wu, March 5, 2019

Professor Wu offered his analysis of why that is. While he acknowledged that we are supposed to have checks and balances to get thoughtful government rather than mob rule, he noted:

“ . . . In our era, it is primarily Congress that prevents popular laws from being passed or getting serious consideration. (Holding an occasional hearing does not count as “doing something.”) Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests. There is no principled defense of this state of affairs — and indeed, no one attempts to offer such a justification. Instead, legislative stagnation is cynically defended by those who benefit from it with an unconvincing invocation of the rigors of our system of checks and balances.

Tim Wu with his list is following also in the footsteps of film maker and political critic Michael Moore (also a library defender) who included a segment in his film “Fahrenheit 11/9" released last fall (pre-election) intended to bring home the realization of how much more to the left the American public is than what the political establishment is providing.

To quote what is included about this 38 minutes into the film:

“There seems to be a misunderstanding about who the real America is. Let me share with you a fact that has never been stated in the press or reported on the nightly news, or even spoken amongst ourselves. The United States of America is a leftist country.

That’s right. Here are the facts. “The vast majority of Americans are pro-choice. [Slide: 71% pro-choice (NBC News/Wall Street Journal, 2018)] [Slide: 82% Equal pay for women (YouGov, 2013)] [Slide: 74% stronger environmental laws (Gallup, 2018)] [Slide: 61% legalized marijuana (Pew, 2018)] [Slide: 61% raise the minimum wage (National Restaurant Association Poll2018)] [Slide: 70% medicare for all (Reuters, 2018)] [Slide: 60% tuition-free public college (Reuters, 2018)] [Slide: 59% free child care (Gallup, 2016)] [Slide: 62% Approve of labor unions (Gallup, 2018)] [Slide: 61% a cut in the military budget (University of Maryland, 2016)] [Slide: 58% Break up the big banks (Progressive Change Institute, 2015)] [Slide: 78% Don’t own a gun (Harvard University, 2016)] [Slide: 75% Immigration is good for the U.S. (Gallup, 2018)]

If America is us and we’re the majority, why is it that we do not hold a single seat of power? Not the White House, not the Senate, not the House, not the Supreme Court.”

MORE

The French Yellow Vests Have Already Succeeded In Shattering

The Capitalist Myth Of ‘Representative Democracy’

Their Uprising Has Unmasked The Lies And Violence Of Republican

Government The Yellow Vests’ Avowed Goal Is To Bring France To A Grinding Halt And

Impose Change From Below.

May 20, 2019 by Richard Greeman, The Bullet - Socialist Project.

Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labour struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center in 1997). He maintains a blog at richardgreeman.org.

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Six months ago, on November 17, 2018, Yellow Vests burst ‘out of nowhere’, with autonomous local units springing up all over France like mushrooms.

The immediate cause was to protest an unfair tax on fuel, but demands expanded quickly...

I am writing you from Montpellier, France, where I am a participant-observer in the Yellow Vest (Gilets jaunes) movement, which is still going strong after six months, despite a dearth of information in the international media.

But why should you take the time to learn more about the Yellow Vests?

The answer is that France has for more than two centuries been the classic model for social innovation, and this unique, original social movement has enormous international significance.

The Yellow Vests have already succeeded in shattering the capitalist myth of ‘representative democracy’ in the age of neoliberalism.

Their uprising has unmasked the lies and violence of republican government, as well as the duplicity of representative institutions like political parties, bureaucratic unions, and the mainstream media.

Moreover, the Yellow Vests represent the first time in history that a spontaneous, self-organized social movement has ever held out for half a year in spite of repression, while retaining its autonomy, resisting cooptation, bureaucratization and sectarian splits.

All the while, standing up to full-scale government repression and targeted propaganda, it poses a real, human alternative to the dehumanization of society under the rule of the capitalist ‘market’.

A Different Kind of Uprising

Six months ago, on November 17, 2018, Yellow Vests burst ‘out of nowhere’, with autonomous local units springing up all over France like mushrooms, demonstrating on traffic circles (roundabouts) and toll-gates, marching every Saturday in cities, including Paris.

But unlike all previous revolts, it was not Paris-centered. The humid November soil from which these mushrooms sprouted was the near-universal frustration of French people at the abject failure of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and other unions to effectively oppose Macron’s steam-roller imposition last Spring of his historic Thatcherite ‘reforms’: an inflexible neoliberal program of cutting benefits, workplace rights, and privatizing or cutting public services, while eliminating the so-called Wealth Tax designed to benefit the poor.

The immediate cause of this spontaneous mass uprising was to protest an unfair tax on fuel (fiscal justice), but the Yellow Vests’ demands quickly expanded to include restoration of public services (transport, hospitals, schools, higher wages, retirement benefits, healthcare for the poor, peasant agriculture, media free of billionaire and government control, and, most remarkably, participatory democracy.

Despite their disruptive tactics, the Yellow Vests were, from the first, wildly popular with average French people (73 per cent approval), and they are still more popular than the Macron government after six months of exhausting, dangerous

occupations of public space, violent weekly protests, and slanderous propaganda against them.

Tired of being lied to, cheated, manipulated, and despised, the Yellow Vests instinctively from the beginning rejected being instrumentalized by the corrupt ‘representative’ institutions of capitalist democracy – including political parties, union bureaucracies, and the media (monopolized by billionaires and subsidized by the government).

Jealous of their autonomy, a concept which radical intellectuals have been exploring for years, the Yellow Vest movement eschewed ‘leaders’ and spokespeople even among their own ranks, and are even now very gradually learning to federate themselves and negotiate convergence with other social movements.

Macron’s Repressive Response

Right from the start, the Yellow Vests’ basically non-violent unauthorized gatherings were met by massive police repression – teargas, flashballs, beatings, 10,000 arrests, immediate drum-head trials, and stiff sentences for minor infractions. The Macron government just passed a new “anti-vandalism” law making it virtually impossible to demonstrate legally.

Macron’s orthodox neoliberal French Republic has arguably become as repressive of domestic opposition as the right-wing ‘populist’ regimes in Poland, Hungary, and Turkey.

Macron’s violent repression of political opposition is responsible for at least two deaths, 23 demonstrators blinded in one eye, and thousands seriously wounded. It has been condemned by the UN and the European Union. But Macron has never acknowledged these injuries, which are rarely shown in the media.

The TV news concentrates on sensational images of the violence (to property) of the Black Block vandals at the fringes of Yellow Vest demonstrations, never on the human victims of systematic government violence.

A popular slogan proclaimed in Magic Marker on a demonstrator’s Yellow Vest reads: “Wake up! Turn off your TV! Join us!”

Since the Yellow Vests have no recognized spokespersons, government propaganda, abetted by the media, has had a free hand to dehumanize them in order to justify treating them inhumanly. Macron, from the height of his monarchical presidency, at first pretended to ignore their uprising, then attempted to buy them off with crumbs (a very few crumbs, which were rejected) and then denounced them as “a hate-filled mob.” (N.B. In real life the Yellow Vests are largely low-income middle-aged folks with families from the provinces whose trademark is friendliness and improvised barbecues.) Yet for Macron and the media they constitute a hard-core conspiracy of “40,000 militants of the extreme right and the extreme left” often characterized as “anti-Semites” who threaten the Republic.

Small wonder that, subjected to increasing violence and continuous slander, the numbers of Yellow Vests willing to go out into the streets to protest every week has

diminished over 27 weeks. But they are still out there, and their favorite chant goes: “Here we are! Here we are! What if Macron doesn’t like it? Here we are!” (On est là! Même si Macron ne veut pas, On est là!).

Finally, Support From Other Groups

Fortunately, in the past few weeks the League for the Rights of Man and other such humanitarian groups have at last turned out to protest police brutality, while committees of artists and academics have signed petitions in support of the Yellow Vests’ struggle for democratic rights, condemning the government and media. At the same time, Yellow Vests are more and more converging with Ecologists (“End of the Month/End of the World/Same Enemy/Same Struggle”), feminists (who play a major role in the movement).

Workers have also played an important role, many of them active as opponents of the bureaucracy in their unions. Red CGT stickers on Yellow Vests are now frequent sights at demos. Philippe Martinez, the General Secretary of the CGT, who has heretofore been sarcastic and negative about the Yellow Vests, has now been forced to admit that the cause of their rise was the failure of the unions, “a reflection of all the union deserts.” He was referring to “small and medium size businesses, retired people, poverty people, jobless people, and lots of women” (the demographic of the Yellow Vests) that the unions have ignored.

The Yellow Vests are still here, in the fray, holding the breach open. The crisis in France is far from over. If and when the other oppressed and angry groups in France – the organized workers, ecologists, North African immigrants, students struggling against Macron’s educational ‘reforms’ – also turn off their TVs and go down into the streets, things could change radically.

The Yellow Vests’ avowed goal is to bring France to a grinding halt and impose change from below.

What if they succeed? We know what the ‘success’ of structured parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain led to. Maybe a horizontal federation of autonomous base-groups attempting to re-invent democracy could do better.

P.S. Latest news: the CGT just held its convention and voted unanimously for “convergence” with the Yellow Vests, something our group in Montpellier has been working toward for months.

On May 18th, for the first time, we are meeting with the other Yellow Vest groups in our region.

“On ne lâche rien!” (Nothing escapes us, we don’t give in). •

MORE

Hedge Fund Billionaires Were Democrats’ Main Bankrollers in

2018:“The Plutocrat Class Maintains An

Iron Grip On American Election Campaigns”

May 15, 2019 By Donald Shaw, Money-in-politics reporter. Co-founder of Sludge/Sludge [Excerpts]

In the 2018 midterms, Democrats benefited more than Republicans from election spending by outside groups for the first time in recent history.

Now, thanks to a new report from Public Citizen, we have a better understanding of where much of that money backing Democrats came from: wealthy individuals who earn their livings as hedge fund founders, bank executives, and other key positions in the financial industry.

The report, named “Plutocrat Politics: How Financial Sector Wealth Fuels Political Ad Spending” and authored by Public Citizen’s Alan Zibel, analyzed the 100 individuals who gave the most money to outside political spending groups in the 2018 cycle and found that about half of that money came from people with financial industry backgrounds.

Roughly three-quarters of the money donated by financial industry donors was spent supporting Democratic candidates.

The finance industry donors in the top 100 gave $264 million to Democrat-supporting outside groups in 2017-18, according to the report.

“By lavishing spending on both Republicans and Democrats, the ultrawealthy receive access and influence to block the aggressive, progressive policy agenda that Americans favor by overwhelming margins,” Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a press statement. “Our democracy can’t function if the plutocrat class maintains an iron grip on American election campaigns.”

While donations to outside spending groups backing Democrats was dominated by individuals from the financial industry, donations to outside groups supporting Republicans came from donors connected to a wider range of industries.

“The financial industry represented 74 percent of funding for pro-Democrat outside spending efforts, followed by inherited wealth (8 percent), technology (6 percent) media (5.5 percent) and real estate (3 percent),” reads the report.

“The sources of funding for pro-Republican outside spending efforts reflected far more industries, including gambling (41 percent), finance (25 percent), industrial supply and distribution (13 percent), energy (6 percent) and technology (2.6 percent).”

Outside groups, which include organizations organized as nonprofits, political action committees, super PACs, and 527s, spend money on elections independently from candidates’ campaigns. These political entities have boomed in popularity since the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections because, unlike candidate’s campaign committees, they are not subject to contribution limits.

The Democratic party has generally been deferential to the finance industry and its policy wishes in recent history, and its dependence on the industry for election funding creates conflicts of interest that make significant change difficult.

Several policies that financial reform advocates have called for would negatively impact the industries tied to the big Democratic donors. For example, establishing a financial transaction tax—a small levy on certain transactions to guard against excess automation and speculation—could hurt Virtu Financial, a high-frequency trading firm that acquired GETCO, whose founder and former board member Daniel Tierney gave $4.3 million to a range of Democratic outside spending groups in 2017-18.

A proposal to close the carried interest loophole that provides a tax break to partners at private equity and hedge funds could directly hit several big Democratic donors, including Baupost Group CEO and portfolio manager Seth Klarman ($5.2 million donated to Democrats), Renaissance Technologies non-executive chairman and advisor James Simons ($20.7 million), and Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein ($6.7 million).

Although the overall amount benefiting Republicans was smaller, several major finance industry donors spent big to back Republicans. Hedge fund owner Kenneth Griffin gave $18.4 million to pro-Republican outside spending groups in 2017-18, including $10 million to the New Republican PAC, a super PAC that spent $29 million on negative ads against former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla). Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman gave $11.8 million to Republican outside spending groups, most of it going to two super PACs that are affiliated with Republican congressional leadership, the Senate Leadership Fund and the National Republican Senate Committee.

“The influence of ultra-wealthy donors makes it harder to advance popular policies such as addressing inequality, imposing wealth taxes, strengthening worker protections, raising the minimum wage, ensuring health care for all and strengthening white collar law enforcement,” Public Citizen writes.

Its solution? “To end the massive influx of corporate and special interest money into our elections, Public Citizen has long championed a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and supports public financing of campaigns.”

MORE

France’s Class Wars:France’s Elites Have Not Felt Such

Fear In Half A Century:“It’s Not The Usual Fear Of Losing An

Election, Or Seeing Their Shares Slide On The Stock Market, But Fear Of Insurrection, Revolt, And Loss Of

Power”“The Pro-Business Daily L’Opinion Revealed On TV That ‘All The Big

Industrial Groups Are Going To Give Out Bonuses, Because They Were Really Scared For A Time That Their Heads

Would End Up On Stakes’”

Chesnot · Getty Images

February 5, 2019 Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert; Le Monde diplomatique. Rimbert is a member of its editorial team. Translated by George Miller

The working class was supposed to have been edged out of active politics, but instead France’s elites have been frightened into making concessions by this winter’s uprising of the yellow vests.

France’s elites have not felt such fear in half a century, and it’s not the usual fear of losing an election, failing to ‘reform’ or seeing their shares slide on the stock market, but fear of insurrection, revolt, and loss of power.

The street protests on 1 December 2018 caused some to feel a sudden chill.

As BFM TV’s star news anchor Ruth Elkrief shuddered: ‘The most urgent thing is for people to go home.’ The channel was showing footage of yellow vest protesters determined to claim a better life for themselves.

A few days later, a journalist from the pro-business daily L’Opinion revealed on TV that ‘all the big industrial groups are going to give out bonuses, because they were really scared for a time that their heads would end up on stakes. So after that terrible Saturday when all the damage was done [1 December], the big firms called Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the head of Medef (France’s largest employers’ federation), and told him to “drop everything! Drop it all, or else...”

They felt physically threatened.’

On the same programme, the head of a polling organisation claimed top bosses were ‘actually very worried’ and said that the atmosphere reminded him of similar events in 1936 and 1968 that he had read about: ‘There comes a time when you say to yourself, “You have to be able to give away large sums to avoid losing what’s most important”‘ At the time of the Popular Front (1936-8), Benoît Frachon, head of the CGT (General Confederation of Labour), reported that during negotiations at Matignon, the French prime minister’s residence, bosses had ‘given in across the board’ after a bout of unofficial strikes and factory occupations.

Such a cave-in of the elite is rare, but it also brings a lesson from history: those who have felt fear do not forgive those who caused it or those who witnessed it (2).

The yellow vest movement has provoked a reaction that has many precedents because it has proved enduring, hard to grasp, leaderless, speaks a language that institutions do not understand, and remains determined despite police repression and popular despite hostile media coverage of damage done on days of mass protest.

“In Times When Social Groups Crystallise And There Is Undisguised Class Struggle, Everyone Has To Choose Sides. The Centre Ground Disappears.

In times when social groups crystallise and there is undisguised class struggle, everyone has to choose sides. The centre ground disappears.

And even the most liberal, educated and distinguished people drop any pretence of peaceful coexistence. Fear robs them of their composure.

Alexis de Tocqueville was similarly affected when he wrote about the events of June 1848 in Paris in his memoirs. Soldiers sent in by the ruling bourgeoisie, who believed that ‘only the cannon can settle our century’s questions’, had massacred impoverished workers (3).

Forgetting his good manners, Tocqueville described the socialist leader Auguste Blanqui as having ‘a dirty look, like a pallid, mouldy corpse. He looked as if he had lived in a sewer and only just come out. He reminded me of a snake having its tail pinched.’

During the Paris Commune in 1871, there was a similar transformation of thought among intellectuals and artists, some of whom had been fair-weather progressives. The poet Leconte de Lisle was infuriated by ‘this league of all the underclass, all the useless people, all the envious, the murderers, the thieves.’ Gustave Flaubert thought that ‘the first remedy should be to end universal suffrage, the disgrace of the human mind.’

Émile Zola, reassured by the punishment that had resulted in 20,000 deaths and almost 40,000 arrests, thought it offered a moral for the working class: ‘The bloodbath they have just experienced was perhaps a horrible necessity to calm some of their fevers’ (4).

Jacques Chirac’s former education minister Luc Ferry, a doctor of philosophy and political science, may have had the outrageous pronouncements of his predecessors in mind when, in a radio interview on 7 January, he called on the forces of law and order to strengthen their response to the yellow vests, saying, ‘They should actually use their weapons for once’ against ‘these thugs, these bastards from the far right or far left or from the suburbs who come looking for a fight with the police.’

Power usually operates through distinct, sometimes competing, sub-groups — senior civil servants, both French and European, intellectuals, bosses, journalists, the conservative right, and the moderate left. Within this cosy framework, turns are taken in power, and these obey certain democratic rituals of elections followed by periods of quiescence. In Lille in 1900, the socialist leader Jules Guesde had already seen through this political game to which the capitalist class owed its longevity in power: ‘It is divided into progressive bourgeoisie and republican bourgeoisie, clerical bourgeoisie and free-thinking bourgeoisie, in such a way that a defeated faction can always be replaced in power by another faction from the same class, which is also (our) enemy. It’s a ship with watertight partitions which can take in water on one side without being any less unsinkable.’ But sometimes the sea gets rough and the vessel’s stability is threatened. In such a situation, squabbles need to be set aside to present a united front and keep it afloat.

That is what the middle class has done when faced with the yellow vests. Its usual spokespeople, who carefully maintain the appearance of a plurality of opinion when times are calm, have unanimously compared protestors to racists, antisemites, homophobes, plotters and troublemakers — but mostly to ignoramuses. ‘Yellow vests, will stupidity win?’ Sébastien Le Foll asked in Le Point (10 January). ‘The real yellow vests’, Bruno Jeudy suggested on BFM TV, ‘are fighting without reflecting, without thinking’ (8 December). ‘The lowest instincts are prevailing, with no regard for the most basic good manners,’ wrote Vincent Trémolet de Villers in Le Figaro (4 December).

‘Troublesome Hicks’

This ‘movement of troublesome Poujadist hicks (Jean Quatremer, Twitter, 29 December) led by a ‘hate-filled minority’ (Denis Olivennes, Marianne, 9 January) is easily described as ‘an outpouring of rage and hate’ (Le Monde editorial, 4 December) in which ‘hordes of losers and looters,’ ‘consumed by resentment as though by lice’ (Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Le Point, 13 December and 10 January), give free rein to their ‘noxious impulses’ (Hervé Gattegno, Le Journal du dimanche, 9 December). ‘How many dead will these new hicks have on their consciences?’ asked Jacques Julliard (Le Figaro, 7 January).

Public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, while concerned about these ‘blind, naked hatreds with a will of their own’ (Le Point, 13 December), still deigned to sign a petition in Le Parisien inviting the yellow vests to ‘turn their anger into debate’ (Le Parisien, 7 December). No luck in getting them to do that so, as Pascal Bruckner said, thank God ‘the police have calmly saved the Republic’ from the ‘barbarians’ and the ‘hooded mob’ (Le Figaro, 10 December).

A whole social universe has banded together, from the Greens to the remnants of the Socialist Party, from the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT) to the presenters on France Inter’s morning show (a ‘partnership of intelligence’ according to the station director), to pillory any politicians who express solidarity with the movement.

They stand accused of undermining democracy and not sharing their fear. Hopefully, these troublemakers could be controlled by the old trick of looking for anything linking any yellow vest spokesperson with any view the far right might have once expressed or defended. But wouldn’t such a line of reasoning mean that violence against journalists had to be encouraged, just because Marine Le Pen called it ‘the very negation of democracy and respect for others, without which there is no constructive exchange, no democratic life, no social life’ (Le Figaro, 17 January)?

‘Down To The Last Euro’

The reflex reactions of the bourgeois bloc that forms Emmanuel Macron’s electoral base were starkly revealed when Le Monde published a sympathetic profile of a family of yellow vests, ‘Arnaud and Jessica: down to the last euro’ (16 December). There were hundreds of angry comments in reaction to the story online: ‘Not a very smart couple... Isn’t true poverty in some cases cultural rather than financial?’ ‘The pathological problem of the poor: their ability to live beyond their means.’ ‘Don’t let’s imagine we can make them researchers, engineers and creatives. Their four children will be just like their parents: a burden on society.’ ‘What do they want the president to do? Go round every day to make sure Jessica takes her pill?’ The journalist who wrote the piece was stunned by this barrage of attacks, with their ‘paternalistic’ overtones (5). But paternalism suggests just a family dispute, while the readers of a reputedly moderate paper were actually sounding the alarm for class war.

The yellow vests movement marks the failure of a project born in the late 1980s and later led by the evangelists of social liberalism, to create a centrist republic in France that

would end ideological upheavals by pushing the working class out of public debate and political institutions (6). The working class, though still the majority of the population, was too fractious, and would have to make space — all the space — for the educated middle class.

France’s ‘turn to rigour’ in 1983, the liberal counter-revolution driven by New Zealand’s Labour Party (1984), and in the late 1990s the third way of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schröder, all seemed to have carried out this plan. As social democracy bedded down in the apparatus of the state and made itself at home in the media and on company boards, it banished its former working-class supporters to the political wilderness. (During the 2016 election campaign in the US, there was little surprise when Hillary Clinton told campaign donors that core Trump supporters were a ‘basket of deplorables’.)

The situation in France is little better. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a socialist who shaped the views of many of Macron’s inner circle, explained in a book in 2002 that his party’s base had to be ‘members of intermediate groups, consisting overwhelmingly of salaried workers, savvy, informed and educated, who form the backbone of our society. They assure its stability, because of their attachment to the “market economy”.’ As for less savvy members of society, their fate was sealed: ‘Of the least well-off group, alas, one cannot always expect peaceful participation in a parliamentary democracy. Not that they are uninterested in history, but their irruptions sometimes manifest with violence’ (7). Those people needed to be considered only once every five years, and then usually to deplore the number of them who voted for the far right. After that, they could return to oblivion and invisibility (when Strauss-Kahn wrote this, road safety laws did not yet compel all drivers to carry a yellow vest in their cars).

The strategy worked.

The French working class was excluded from political representation, and even physically excluded from the centre of France’s big cities: with just 4% of new home-owners from the working class each year, Paris in 2019 is like Versailles in 1789. They are also excluded from the television screen, where 60% of those who appear in news programmes come from the highest qualified 9% of the population (8). As far as Macron is concerned, the working class might as well not exist. He believes Europe is ‘an old continent of petit bourgeois who feel secure living in material comfort’ (9).

But this social world, which was supposed to have been obliterated, deemed too resistant to academic effort and training and therefore responsible for its own fate, has come to life again under the Arc de Triumph and on the Champs-Élysées, and at roundabouts across the country. A confused and perturbed Jean-Éric Schoettl, councillor of state and constitutional expert, described ‘a reversion to a primitive form of class struggle’ in Le Figaro (11 January).

Who’s Right And Who’s Left?

The plan to remove the majority of the population from the political arena may have gone awry, but another item on the ruling class’s agenda is enjoying unexpected success, and that is the blurring of distinction between right and left. The idea, which became

dominant after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was to push any position that challenged the neoliberal ‘circle of reason’ (in the words of essayist Alain Minc) to the discredited extremist margins. Political legitimacy would no longer depend on a vision of the world — capitalist or socialist, nationalist or internationalist, conservative or emancipatory, authoritarian or democratic — but on the dichotomy between those who are reasonable and those who are radical, between open and closed, progressive and populist.

The rejection of the distinction between right and left, which journalists currently blame on the yellow vests, is the working-class version of the bourgeois bloc’s longstanding policy of blurring distinctions.

This winter, demands for tax justice, improved living standards and rejection of state authoritarianism are the focus of attention, but the struggle over employee exploitation and social ownership of the means of production has been almost entirely absent. The reintroduction of the solidarity wealth tax; a return to the 90 km/h speed limit on minor roads; tighter control of politicians’ expenses; a Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (RIC): none of these will challenge the subordination of workers in the workplace, the fundamental division of income or the hollow nature of popular sovereignty in the EU or a globalised world.

Of course, movements learn as they go; they set new objectives as they encounter unexpected obstacles and opportunities. At the time of the Estates General in 1789, there were only a few republicans in the whole of France. Expressing solidarity with the yellow vests is therefore a way to encourage their action in the right direction, towards justice and emancipation, while remaining aware that others are encouraging it in the opposite direction, and counting on social anger benefiting the far right in May’s European elections.

Isolating the yellow vests politically would encourage such an outcome; the authorities and media are trying to make them unacceptable to the progressive middle class by exaggerating the significance of any bigoted statement one of them might make. The possible success of this effort would validate Macron’s strategy since 2017, which has been to reduce political life to a clash between liberals, such as himself, and populists (10). Once this divide has been established, he could condemn his own ‘basket of deplorables’ on the right and the left, relating any domestic challenge to the actions of a ‘populist internationale’, which would lump together Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Matteo Salvini along with Polish conservatives, British socialists, German nationalists and La France Insoumise (the leftwing party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon).

Macron will have to resolve a paradox, though. As his support comes from a narrow social base, he will only be able to implement his ‘reforms’ of unemployment insurance, pensions and public services at the cost of a stronger political authoritarianism, backed by police repression and a nod to the hard right with a ‘big debate about immigration’.

The irony is that, having lectured ‘illiberal’ governments all round the world, Macron may yet borrow most of their playbook.

ANNIVERSARIES

May 1971:Heroic Anniversary:

Military Officers Oppose War On Vietnam

Carl Bunin Peace History May 22-May 29

At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an anti-war newspaper advertisement, signed by 29 U.S. soldiers supporting the Concerned Officers Movement, resulted in controversy.

The group had been formed in 1970 in Washington, D.C. by a small group of junior naval officers opposed to the war.

The newspaper advertisement at Fort Bragg was in support of the group’s members, who had joined with anti-war activist David Harris and others in San Diego to mobilize opposition to the departure of the carrier USS Constellation for Vietnam.

No official action was taken against the military dissidents, though many were forced to resign their commissions.

Evil Anniversary:May 1934: Germany:

“It Is The Aim Of The State Police To Support Zionism And Its Emigration

Policy As Fully As Possible”

From: Human Smoke; The Beginnings of World War II, By Nicholson Baker, Simon & Schuster; New York 2008

REINHARD HEYDRICH, head of the intelligence branch of the German secret police, read a position paper prepared for him concerning Jewish policy. It was May 24, 1934.

“The aim of Jewish policy must be the emigration of all Jews,” the paper said. Jewish “assimilationists”—those who wanted to live their lives as Germans within Germany—should be discouraged; while Zionists—those who wanted to emigrate to Palestine—should be encouraged, according to the memo.

“It is the aim of the State Police to support Zionism and its emigration policy as fully as possible:

“Every authority concerned should, in particular, concentrate their efforts in recognizing the Zionist organizations and in supporting their training and emigration endeavors; at the same time the activities of German-Jewish groups should be restricted in order to force them to abandon the idea of remaining in Germany.”

In this way, Germany would eventually become a country “without a future for the Jews.”

Heydrich, a blond man with a high forehead and long, spidery fingers, began helping Zionist organizations set up agricultural training centers, so that Jews would know how to farm when they reached Palestine.

“Especially After The 1968 Tet Offensive, Antiwar Sentiment

Spread Widely Among The Combat Troops In Vietnam”

“The Main Activities Of Antiwar U.S. Servicepeople In Vietnam

Were Not Peaceful Demonstrations”

“A 1975 Survey Revealed That 75% Of Vietnam Veterans Were Opposed

To The War”“There Is No Contemporaneous

Evidence Of Any Antiwar Activists Spitting On Veterans”

Excerpts from Vietnam And Other American Fantasies; H. Bruce Franklin; University Of Massachusetts Press; Amherst, 2000

The most serious occurred on April 14 at the base of Dau Tieng (east of Tay Ninh, north of Cu Chi), when a unit of the Third Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division defied orders to proceed on a search-and-destroy mission near where another unit had been badly cut up.

The commanding officer ordered other soldiers to fire on the rebels, who returned the fire. One report indicated dozens of men killed or wounded and three helicopters destroyed.

As the Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke has demonstrated in his invaluable 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, the vast majority of returning veterans characterized their reception as friendly.

There is no contemporaneous evidence of any antiwar activists spitting on veterans.

The first allegations of such behavior did not appear until the late 1970s. The spat-upon veteran then became a mythic figure used to build support for military fervor and, later on, the Gulf War, but the myth has become so powerful that many veterans have now come to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it actually happened to them personally. Of course it is possible that isolated instances may have occurred. But if antiwar activists were frequently spitting on veterans or otherwise abusing them, why has nobody ever produced even the tiniest scrap of contemporaneous evidence? According to the myth, spitting on veterans was a regular custom as they arrived from Vietnam at the San Francisco and Los Angeles airports.

We are supposed to believe that these men just back from combat then meekly walked away without attacking or even reporting their persecutors, and that nobody else, including airport security officers, ever noticed what was going on.

For there is not one press report, airport security report, police report, court record, diary entry, video shot, or photograph of a single incident at these airports or anywhere else.

How then to explain the belief now held by many veterans that they were indeed spat upon as they arrived from Vietnam at the San Francisco and Los Angeles airports?

The answer lies in the transformative power of collective national myth over individual memory.

The myth is so strong that it has even determined their memory of where they arrived, for they were flown back not to these civilian airports but to military bases closed to outsiders.

And a 1975 survey revealed that 75 percent of Vietnam veterans were opposed to the war.

Especially after the 1968 Tet offensive, antiwar sentiment spread widely among the combat troops in Vietnam, where peace symbols and antiwar salutes became commonplace.

Some units even organized their own antiwar demonstrations to link up with the movement at home.

For example, to join the November 1969 antiwar Mobilization, a unit stationed at Pleiku fasted against the war and boycotted the Thanksgiving Day dinner.

Of the 141 soldiers classified below the rank of specialist fifth class, only eight showed up for the traditional meal; this “John Turkey Movement” spread to units all over Vietnam.

When Bob Hope introduced General Creighton Abrams, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, to the 30,000 troops assembled for a Christmas show at the sprawling Long Binh base, the entire throng leaped to their feet and held their hands high in the “V” salute of the peace movement.

“The Main Activities Of Antiwar U.S. Servicepeople In Vietnam Were Not Peaceful Demonstrations”.

But the main activities of antiwar U.S. servicepeople in Vietnam were not peaceful demonstrations.

An ongoing dilemma for the antiwar movement back home was the difficulty of finding ways to move beyond verbal protest and symbolic acts to deeds that would actually interfere with the conduct of the war.

The soldiers in Vietnam had no such problem.

Individual acts of rebellion, ranging from desertion and sabotage to injuring and even killing officers who ordered hazardous search-and-destroy missions, merged into mutinies and large-scale resistance.

As early as the spring of 1967, sporadic small-scale mutinies were being reported in the French press but not in the U.S. media — except for the movement’s own press.

The most serious occurred on April 14 at the base of Dau Tieng (east of Tay Ninh, north of Cu Chi), when a unit of the Third Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division defied orders to proceed on a search-and-destroy mission near where another unit had been badly cut up.

The commanding officer ordered other soldiers to fire on the rebels, who returned the fire.

One report indicated dozens of men killed or wounded and three helicopters destroyed.

The base was sealed off and no outside personnel were admitted for three days.

Combat refusal and outright mutinies spread rapidly after the Tet offensive in 1968.

But news about this form of growing GI resistance was kept rather efficiently from most of the American public until August 1969, when correspondents reported firsthand on the unanimous battlefield refusal of a badly mauled infantry company to go back into combat.

During the next two years, the press published numerous reports of entire units refusing direct combat orders, and the public actually got to see two incidents of rebellion on network television.

“A Common And Less Conspicuous Method Of Killing Unpopular Officers: Rifle Fire Often In The Midst Of Combat”

Resistance took another form so widespread that it brought a new word into the English language: “fragging.”

Originally taking its name from fragmentation grenades but soon applied to any means of killing commissioned or noncommissioned officers, fragging developed its own generally understood customs, usages, and ethos.

Officers who aggressively risked or otherwise offended their men were customarily warned once or twice by a nonlethal grenade before being attacked with a booby-trapped or hurled grenade.

By mid-1972, the Pentagon was officially acknowledging 551 incidents of fragging with explosive devices, which had left 86 dead and more than 700 wounded. These figures were no doubt understated, and they did not include a common and less conspicuous method of killing unpopular officers: rifle fire often in the midst of combat.

CLASS WAR REPORTS

Thousands Protest In Algeria, Renewing Call To Postpone July

Vote:Algerians March For 14th

Consecutive Week As Authorities Set Up Fences In Front Of The Capital’s

Grand Post Office.

“Protesters Chanted: ‘Tired Of The Generals!’”

A presidential election is set for July 4, but protesters say a vote will not be valid until new, independent institutions are set up to oversee the process [Ramzi Boudina/Reuters]

[Thanks to Alan Stolzer, Military Initiative Organizing Committee, who sent this in.]

5.24.20 AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Thousands of protesters have rallied in the Algerian capital for a fourteenth consecutive week, demanding the removal of officials associated with former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the postponement of an election scheduled for July.

Police on Friday tightened a security cordon around the iconic Grand Post Office in downtown Algiers where demonstrators had massed in previous weeks.

But that did not prevent people from gathering near the building where they chanted slogans against the country’s powerful army chief, Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaid Salah.

Demonstrators held up placards against Salah, accusing him of attempting to "thwart their revolution".

Protesters chanted: "Tired of the generals!" and "Gaid Salah resign!"

Meanwhile, an activist with Algeria’s Socialist Workers’ Party wrote on Facebook he was being held "with some 20 other citizens in a police van".

"Patrols crisscrossed the city and arrested anyone suspected of joining" protests, said Said Salhi, vice president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights, on Twitter.

Similar protests broke out in Algeria’s other main cities, including Annaba, Oran and Constantine on Friday.

After nearly two decades in power, Bouteflika resigned on April 2 amid a wave of massive protests across the country which were sparked by his decision in February to run for a fifth consecutive term in office.

The protesters want a transitional authority to be set up to review the constitution and allow for free and fair elections to take place.

They are also calling for the removal of Bouteflika’s associates, including Prime Minister Noureddine Bedoui and Interim President Abdelkader Bensalah, who were appointed by the leader days before he stepped down.

While Bensalah and Bedoui have not spoken much in public, Salah has given three speeches in as many days this week.

Salah on Monday warned against calls by protesters to defer the election, set for July 4, saying the election was the best way to get the country out of the current political crisis.

"Holding a presidential election could help Algeria avoid falling into the trap of a constitutional void, with its accompanying dangers and unwelcome consequences," Salah said.

On Tuesday, the 79-year-old army chief called on protesters to "unite" with the army to prevent "instigators" from hijacking the demonstrations, and on Wednesday he reassured the public he had "no political ambition".

A political source told Reuters news agency on Friday the interim government was expected to extend the current transition period to allow for time to prepare for an election. It said the transition period, due to end a few days after the election, could be extended by at least three months.

"Time is running out and organizers have not finished preparations for the vote," the source said.

DANGER: CAPITALISTS AT WORK

Steve Bell; the Gordian

OCCUPATION PALESTINE

Without Explanation, Zionists Tear Down New Palestinian School In Occupied

Jerusalem

MARCH 20, 2019 Telesur

On March 19th, with no advance warning, Israel evacuated a Palestinian school in Shaufat, Occupied East Jerusalem, then demolished it. The school’s principal reports that no official reason has been given.

A Palestinian-owned school building that was under construction, in the Shuafat refugee camp, in occupied East Jerusalem was demolished by Israeli forces’ bulldozers Tuesday.

Eyewitnesses recount dozens of Israeli occupation forces escorting the bulldozers into the refugee camp, while others closed off traffic at the checkpoint near the school.

The Israeli forces then, reportedly, surrounded the al-Razi School from rooftops of nearby buildings while students and faculty were evacuated prior to the demolition. According to multiple witnesses, there were drones observed flying above the two-story school building and rubber-coated steel bullets fired on locals in the camp.

The owner of the demolished school building, Muhammad Alqam, insists that he issued all necessary permits at the Israeli Jerusalem Municipality before beginning construction. Alqam was assured that the area belonged to the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).

There was no prior notice of the demolition before it took place, says Saleh Alqam, principal of the al-Razi school and an official reason for the demolition is yet to be confirmed.

Despite the requisite preparations being carried out, the demolition order was issued, in November, by Israeli authorities.

The United Nations has consistently condemned Israel for the practice of illegal demolition, since 2015.

The al-Razi School had registered about 400 kindergarten and elementary students for the upcoming school year for the new building.

Heroic Zionist Occupation Forces Attack & Capture Unarmed Palestinian Garbage

Truck

May 21, 2019 IMEMC News

Israeli soldiers confiscated, Tuesday, a garbage truck owned by the local council of a Palestinian village, east of Nablus, in northern West Bank.

Media sources said the soldiers stopped a garbage truck operated by workers of Rojeeb Village Council, east of Nablus, and confiscated it.

They added that the soldiers stopped the truck near the dump area, east of Rojeeb village, and alleged that it was closed to Itamar colony.

The soldiers detained the driver and workers for a short while, and released them after confiscating the truck.

To check out what life is like under a murderous military occupation commanded by foreign terrorists, go to:

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/ THE OCCUPIED NATION IS PALESTINE. THE FOREIGN TERRORISTS CALL

THEMSELVES “ISRAELI.”

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DANGER: POLITICIANS AT WORK

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