Catholics for Choice

Key findings include:

• Latinos, Catholic women and Catholic millennials show the largest support for Clinton over Trump.
• Sixty percent of Catholic voters say that the views of the Catholic hierarchy are not important to them when they are deciding who to vote for in the presidential election.
• Six in ten Catholic voters do not feel an obligation to vote the way the bishops recommend.
• Sixty percent of Catholic voters say that abortion can be a moral choice.
• Seventy-two percent believe that abortion should be available to pregnant women who have contracted the Zika virus.
• Seventy percent of Catholics do not think that companies should be allowed to use the owner’s religious beliefs as a reason to deny services to a customer or employee.

Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice said, “The Catholic vote is like a jump ball in basketball—every election it comes into play and both parties try to claim it as their own. As it represents 25 percent of the electorate, considerable effort goes into trying to determine which team will grab it. However, as this new poll shows what we’ve always known: Catholics are concerned with social justice and compassion and do not vote with the bishops, no matter how much the bishops try to project their own beliefs onto this section of the electorate.”

The poll was conducted before the vice presidential debate between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence, where the two squared off on religious liberty and abortion, but in a statement released after the debate Catholics for Choice said, “Catholics act according to their own conscience and they do not stand with the Catholic hierarchy on abortion, access to healthcare or the rise of religious refusals backed by the bishops, and similarly do not think they nor Catholic politicians have an obligation to vote according to the Bishops. In fact, Senator Tim Kaine said it was not the role of a public servant to mandate their faith through government, and on fundamental issues of morality, like abortion, we should let women make those decisions.”

Rhode Island is routinely said to be the most Catholic of the United States.

Bernie Sanders has incredible support in Rhode Island, but one wouldn’t know it from reading the Journal. Has the Journal ever attempted to cover any of the many packed Bernie events throughout the state? Have they covered Sander’s message of justice anywhere near as much as they have covered the billionaire’s message of hate?

The Providence Journal should be more than a soundboard for the company that owns them, Gatehouse Media, and the conservative movement that it supports. Rhode Island is a state whose citizens are fiercely independent and the great majority has had enough with establishment politics and the status quo…

But Trump is not the answer.

The Journal owes it to the people of this state to be cognizant of the fact that Bernie Sanders campaign also is reaching out to people who are tired of  politics as usual. The campaign has attracted not only the millennials, but the disenfranchised: feminists, minorities, moderate Republicans, progressive Democrats, Greens, unaffiliated and many more. Sanders represents all those who are sick and tired of being marginalized while corporate interests take over. It is time that the Journal does its due diligence to make that known to their readers.

Let’s revisit some of the prehistory.  McClendon was among the scam artists who took the White House for a wild ride on the natural-gas bridge to nowhere. Recall Obama’s 2012 State of the Onion address celebrating the founding of Saudi America:

… oil is not enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. [thunderous applause] A strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs. We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years.

McClendon’s scheme was simple:

• Lease land throughout Greater Frackonia.
• Drill in the sweets spots.
• Pretend that the gushing wells are representative.
• Flip the leases before the buyers realize that the productivity of a typical fracked well is far worse and tends to decay by a factor of ten within three years.

Obama bought into McClendon’s scam.  From there it trickled down via Rhode Island’s Congressional delegation, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.  Next, the snake oil flowed to Rhode Island’s Office of Energy Resources, with Commissioner Marion Gold blazing the fracking trail for Team Raimondo.

Janet Fire Wall Coit, hapless director of the Department of Environmental Management, is collateral damage of the tragedy.  She is implicated by the bizarre Rhode Island statute that puts her on the Energy Facility Siting Board and makes her part of the “regulatory” process that will decide the fate of Invenergy’s proposal for a gigawatt fossil fuel power plant in Burrillville.

Recently, Steve Ahlquist raised the question why the siting board is in such a hurry to push through Invenergy’s proposal.  One part of the answer is that McClendon’s gig is up; his co-conspirators know that their time is running out.  The other reason to make haste is Saudi Arabia’s frontal attack on Saudi America by means of the current oversupply of oil, aka Oilmageddon.  The title of this post on DeSmogBlog says it all: “Top Drillers Shut Down U.S. Fracking Operations as Oil Prices Continue to Tank.”  Of course, Chesapeake is one of those.

No surprise that all of this coincides with the precipitous drop in Spectra Energy’s stock since the middle of 2014.  This is the corporation that will be the main supplier of fracked gas for Invenergy’s stranded asset-to-be in Burrillville.  Fortunately, Team Raimondo is ready to bail out Spectra by creating a market for its gas and by selling Rhode Island down the “Clear River.”

Guess who will be paying the bill for the construction of this power plant?  We the people of Rhode Island, of course!  It’s joke of cosmic proportions that there will be a 38 Studios hearing to begin at 4:30pm this Thursday in room 101 of the State House.

Thanks, Team Raimondo!   We love you as you step on the gas in Burrillville to create 300 fleeting jobs.  Special thanks also to you, Rhode Island AFL-CIO, for your support for “Clear River” in your October 2015 resolution

Hey, only $2.3 million a job.  How do you beat that?

Note added to original post: Aubrey McClendon, 56, Ex-Chief of Chesapeake Energy, Dies in Crash a Day After Indictment

The headlines say it all:

• Did Bill Clinton violate election rules in Mass.?
• Bill Clinton Appearance Blocks Super Tuesday Voters
• Clintons Show Contempt for Polling Station Laws – and they got away with it!

I was first alerted to this by a fellow RI Bernie Sanders campaign worker, Robert Malin. He shared a video by Angela Garcia (above) which clearly showed that people were irritated, annoyed and put out by Bill Clinton’s poll visit in New Bedford. I contacted Maria Tomassia, chairwoman of the Board of Canvassers of New Bedford, who confirmed that people had to walk longer to get to the polls and that lines were long because people might have wanted to meet Clinton but that there was no impact on voter access. She denied that people had to wait and denied that Bill Clinton was in violation of any election laws.

Afterward New Bedford Bill Clinton continued campaigning for his wife in three additional towns including Boston, Newton and West Roxbury, where he was inside Holy Name Parish School’s gymnasium, a polling location, with Boston Mayor Martin Walsh.

This is election 101, and illegal. In Massachusetts no campaigning is allowed within 150 feet of a polling location. Bill Clinton was caught campaigning within that margin and actually inside a polling place. When you think of all the campaigns that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in, their decision to circumvent election laws was either ignorant or intentional. I think most people would agree that the Clintons are not ignorant.

Hillary won in Massachusetts by less than 1.5 percent, a very small margin. If Sanders had received .75 percent more the state would have been a virtual tie. Could Bill Clinton’s possibly illegal actions have skewed the vote in Hillary Clinton’s favor?

It would be hard for Bernie Sanders to actually dispute the vote count. There is no way of knowing how many votes he might have lost or how many people were swayed by Bill Clinton’s last minute and frankly desperate antics. But this is not how a campaign should be run. Dirty politics can never be accepted. The Clinton’s are once again showing their true colors.

[Lauren Niedel is the RI State Contact for Bernie 2016. To volunteer please contact her at 401-710-7600 or lniedel@gmail.com]

In its latest rating, Politifact analysed the question: “Could methane be worse for the climate than coal?“  They  quote my URI colleague, geoscientist David Fastovsky:

U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez came out in strong support for both raising the minimum wage and for eliminating the tipped minimum wage during a press Q&A at the end of his visit to Gold International Machinery with state Senator Gayle Goldin and US Representative David Cicilline on Friday afternoon. The Secretary was enthusiastic about the economic benefits of raising the minimum wage for both workers and the economy.

“I was recently in Seattle on the first day of the effective date of the new minimum wage in Seattle,” said Perez, “the person who stood right next to me, in addition to the mayor that day, was the head of the Seattle Restaurant Association.”

According to Perez, Seattle “has had the highest minimum wage in the country over the last twelve years, and they have no tipped credit.” He added, “If the opponents were correct, then every time you fly to Seattle, you ought to bring a bagged lunch, because all the restaurants should be going out of business.”

Perez also talked about raising the regular minimum wage, saying that while he and President Obama, “don’t pretend to know what the best wage is for the city of Seattle or the state of Rhode Island… we applaud efforts to go as high as possible.”

The secretary added that “as a result of the low minimum wages across the country we’ve seen a consumption deprived recovery in many circles.”

“When you raise the minimum wage, guess what happens?” asked Perez, “If you’re a restaurant, people have more money to spend. When you raise wages, guess what happens? The economy gets better. We consume more things from manufacturers so places like Gold [International Machinery], they see their business go up.”

Here in Rhode Island there are General Assembly bills currently before the Senate and the House to gradually eliminate the tipped minimum wage. There are also bills to raise the regular minimum wage from $9 to $10.10. At hearings held to discuss the bills, representatives from the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, including Chairman Bob Bacon, have opposed any increases in the minimum wage with questionable economics and threats of robots.

Governor Gina Raimondo, who Labor Secretary Perez seemed to like quite a bit based on comments he made earlier in the day, has called on the General Assembly to raise the minimum wage to $10.10. She has yet to publicly support the elimination of the tipped minimum wage.

Twelve nations are negotiating the terms of the TPP, including the United States, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), TPP “is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement.”

The EFF has identified two main problems, that “leaked draft texts of the agreement show that the IP chapter would have extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate” and that the “entire process has shut out multi-stakeholder participation and is shrouded in secrecy.”

According to Pat Fontes, speaking at the protest, “No one has officially read the TPP.” Everything we know about the deal has been leaked to the public. Even our elected representatives, who will be voting on this trade deal, have not read it or understand what’s inside. In Rhode island, only Representative David Cicilline has come out against the TPP.

“Corporate courts,” says Fontes, “will impose fines that we the taxpayers will have to pay.” Corporations will have the ability to sue governments over laws that prevent companies from making “expected profits.”

Susan Walker, a student in Public Health Policy at Brown University says that “corporations will be helping to make policy.” There will be an impact on public health, as “generic drugs may be eliminated” as new rules governing patents are enacted. “Medicine will never become affordable and generic,” says Walker.

Chris Curry, of RI MoveOn, says that TPP “is based on the assumption that corporate profits take priority over everything else.” If ratified, TPP “will threaten our social safety net, including Social Security and Obamacare” as corporations sue the government over profits lost to these programs.

Barry Schiller of the Sierra Club says that TPP may allow corporations to force the repeal of environmental laws when they are deemed unprofitable.

Everette Aubin said that “TPP will make it impossible to move to green energy. If solar panels interfere with corporate profits, you’ll have to shut it down.”

Occupy Providence’s Randall Rose pointed out that “parts of the TPP are classified and not to be seen by the public until four years after passage.”

“They don’t want people to know about this,” said Rose, adding that since the trade deal NAFTA was passed, Rhode Island “lost more than half of our manufacturing jobs.”

TPP has been described as NAFTA on steroids.

Robert Malin, of the Sierra Club, said that TPP places “corporations above the laws that citizens pass.”

Though TPP is far from a done deal, the New York Times said, “key congressional leaders agreed on Thursday on legislation to give President Obama special authority to finish negotiating [TPP], opening a rare battle that aligns the president with Republicans against a broad coalition of Democrats.”

With a Republican controlled congress and President Obama in agreement, preventing the passage of TPP will require a big effort on the part of opponents.

You can download a fact sheet on TPP prepared by Occupy Providence, here.

It’s historic in the sense that the bar has been set so low.  Yeah, it’s good to see the Obama administration finally wresting power out of the hands of Congress and taking some action, but essentially it’s like trying to put out a house fire with a squirt gun. And at the same time, when we should be using multiple fire hoses, instead we’re worrying about the criminal, in this case the polluter, burning our house down.

Here is my cynical take on this consummately capitalist Climate Action Plan put out by the White House – EPA axis of evil:

1. We’ll build new and retool old coal power plants to run on methane
2. Item (1), pipelines and exports will drive up the price of methane
3. This will bail out Wall Street with its toxic weapons of gas destruction, i.e., its investments in the shale gas industry
4. Meanwhile, we’ll invest billions in chasing fugitive methane
5. Finally, just after the next presidential elections, when the fracking boom goes bust, we’ll have the “best” of all possible worlds:
   1. Virtually nothing invested in renewable energy
   2. Methane and its price up there in the stratosphere
   3. The economy, environment, and future wrecked with one modest plan, but we’ll be fine until the end of the quarter

The story

Let me explain all of the above.  This is what the fracking industry claims:

With a history of 60 years, after nearly a million wells drilled, there are no documented cases that hydrolic fracturing has led to contamination of water.

Yeah, right, and smoking is good for your health!

Of course, nobody cares about the health of people in capitalism’s sacrifice zones, but there is more: the economic weapons of gas destruction.  As Deborah Rogers wrote in Shale and Wall Street:

Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, stated unequivocally in a financial analyst call in 2008:

I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or 10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 mcf [per thousand cubic feet].

I smell a Wall Street bubble, but, dear reader, if you’re not convinced, maybe this —from the same source:— will sound familiar:

Banks no longer held on to mortgages. Instead it became lucrative to make loans, package the mortgages, have a ratings agency pronounce it a safe investment and then flip them to investors, thereby collecting large fees. This is not unlike the land grab which shale operators engaged in by leasing millions of acres of land, drilling a handful of wells and pronouncing the field “proved up” and thereby a “safe” investment, and then flipping such parcels to the highest bidder. This exercise quickly drove prices up.

Let the 99% tremble at the financial revolution. The 1% have nothing to loose but their spoils. Managers of All Capital Markets unite!

The New York Times, already in 2011 knew what’s going down and published industry insider emails that exposed the shale scam; see Drilling Down.  None of this had an impact on the bullish forecasts of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), which has a long history of over-optimistic projections —see page 28 of Drill, Baby, Drill— and breathtaking exaggerations.

This takes care of items 1 through 3 of my Executive Summary for Cynics.  Let’s move on to item 4, fugitive methane.  Almost a year ago, I explained why, in my opinion, the White House Climate Plan was fraudulent.  To sum it up, the fact that methane only produces half the amount of carbon-dioxide per unit energy in the process of burning it is extremely misleading.  It ignores the immediate and present danger of the fugitive methane that escapes during drilling and piping.  Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon-dioxide.  To skip over this vital information is, as last year’s “Climate Action” Plan did, is nothing less than a cover-up of conspiracy to commit a crime against humanity, nay, the biosphere.

As George Zornick writes in The Nation:

Still, one critical concern is that methane affects the atmosphere more quickly—and given the ticking climate clock, it presents a unique danger. “We should and must control carbon dioxide because of its long-term consequences, but the climate system is far more responsive on the short time period to methane,” said Howarth. “And so if we are to slow the warming and avoid these potential tipping points just fifteen or twenty years out, we have to control methane emissions.”

Let’s see what the EPA plan has to say about methane:

We have also analyzed potential upstream net methane emissions impact from natural gas and coal for the impacts analysis. This analysis indicated that any net impacts from methane emissions are likely to be small compared to the CO₂ emissions reduction impacts of shifting power generation from coal-fired steam EGUs [steam generating units] to NGCC [Natural gas combined cycle] units. Further information on our analysis of upstream impacts can be found in the Appendix 3A of the RIA [Regulatory Impact Analysis].

(I can’t help it, but bureaucrats’ salaries are based on the average number of acronyms they pack into one sentence.)

Whom should I believe, Wall Street’s own White House and EPA or a bunch of  “corrupt, grant-chasing” scientists?

Just to get a sense of perspective, it’s helpful to keep in mind that there is an alternative (TIA) to this approach all-of-the-above coming the the rescue of just-more-of-the-same.  Here is one example:

Plans to Convert the 50 United States to Wind, Water, and Sunlight

Local power generation?  That might give Power to the People, who —polluted Heaven forbid!— might decide to run the power grid by means of worker-owned co-ops. That would spoil the business climate for the Vampire Class. What would this do to poor corporations such as National Grid, head-quartered in the United Kingdom?  That’s a no-go, baby!  It does not fit in with our neoliberal, hyper-financialized system operated by our precious, Wall-Street-funded Washington Duopoly.

The only ones who do not seem to understand any of the above are the politicians. And, yes, that includes, our own celebrated Rhode Island congressional delegation — you can hear them hear speak in support of the Meth Bridge to Nowhere.

Of course, none of this is a surprise given the toxic bloom of public servants from Goldman Sachs infesting the White House.  Or to paraphrase Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get politicians to understand something, when their campaign contributions depend upon their not understanding it!

As mentioned, the US Energy Information Administration has a long history of over-optimistic projections.  This is what informed our ElecToon in Chief in the 2012 State of the Onion address:

This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. (Applause.) A strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. (Applause.)

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Energy Information Administration downgraded by 96% its estimate of the amount of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale in California.  The White House continues to blow bubbles for the 1%, and —praise the Lord of Death!— the farcical, all-of-the-above national energy policy rolls on, while 60% of US shale oil goes poof!

Fighting back!

Earlier this month, the Democratic Governors association met in Greenwich, CT.  Tim McKnee of the Connecticut Green Party welcomed protesters of  NOPE, the No Pipeline Expansion grassroots coalition:

Welcome to Greenwich Connecticut!  Welcome to gated communities and billionaires.  I’m not talking lowly millionaires, I’m talking billionaires.  This is so symbolic!  Where are governors meeting?  Not in Bridgeport, CT.  No! Not in Pawtucket, RI.  No!  They are meeting here, where the money is!

Then there was Nick Katkevich of FANG (Fighting Against Natural Gas) with A Message from the Lord of Death

Death is rather silent. That’s why Death has asked me to speak, but it’s quite an honor that the Lord of Death has traveled from the Underworld to be here today.

There is a lot more information about the protest over at with our own Lisa Petrie of Fossil Free RI and Tony Affigne from the Rhode Island Green Party, but I’m going to wrap this up.

Conclusions and Questions

The analysis I presented above may be too cynical and  even totally wrong.  Who knows?  We have to keep in mind that indeed there is a lot we —that includes the deciders the 1% bought for us— do not know.  What we do know is that Sheldon Whitehouse, who, as he admits is not familiar with the details of the Spectra pipeline, nevertheless supports the pipeline expansion project. Indeed,  he and Jack Reed nonetheless blessed the project with their signatures of support.  Neither one of this duo seems to understand that most of the methane escapes at the well.  United with the shale industry informed we decide.  What a marvelous confidence booster!

In spite of the spectacular uncertainties, the execution of grand Climate Inaction Plan announced last summer by the administration is fully underway already.  I forgot to mention that, in addition to our intrepid congressional delegation, also New England’s governors lend their support to the scam; see New England Governors’s commitment to regional cooperation on energy infrastructure issues — appendix B, page 2. Burrilville, RI, be damned!

For war and violence we have the Manhattan Project, and in no time we build enrichment facilities the size of the US car industry.  For war and violence we follow the demands of the One-Percent Doctrine,  but for peaceful purposes and the future of the biosphere we throw caution to the wind, and all we can come up with are squirt guns!

Randy Udall, a couple of months before his death, gave an intriguing presentation about the oil and shale gas boom with which he was intimately familiar. Here are some of his poetic musings:

Does that carbon have any desire? These ancient plankton and little microscopic sea creatures, do they want to be back on the stage again? And what do people want? And then I asked myself can you have cretaceous carbon without have a cretaceous climate? Again, this period in Earth’s history was very warm and sea levels were very high compared to where they are today, hundreds feet higher. The North Pole was as warm as Denver. Can you mine and burn cretaceous carbon without having a cretaceous climate? I think that … maybe it’s not an open question. Maybe we have the answer to that already.

I’ll end with quoting Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.

[L]et’s just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There’s no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that’s the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century.

Oh, oops I forgot this: NOPE is happy to congratulate our own fearless governor.  Keep up the good work for the 1%, Linc!

Important health information — the the price is right, the cost of reading this is your mind:

According to the Surgeon General cynicism has been linked to dementia.

Fossil Free Rhode Island (FFRI) was available to present it concerns regarding the draft climate bill. Climate research shows that there is a limit to the amount of carbon-dioxide the atmosphere can absorb without causing a climate catastrophe.[1]  What counts is the cumulative total since the beginning of the industrial revolution; when and where do not matter. Generations inhabiting Earth have to live within a fixed carbon-dioxide budget.

Accordingly, a climate bill must contain a limit on emissions and a mechanism to check its observance. The draft climate bill overshoots humanity’s budget by about 25% when scaled to the level of the globe, assuming that people are created equally and live accordingly.

The science is problematic, but global fairness is an issue too. The industrialized nations, mostly in the global north, have vastly over-spent their fair share of the carbon-dioxide budget. We have created the global climate problem and without the admission that we are “carbon debtor” nations a way out of the global climate change problem will remain elusive. The massive walkout at the UN climate talks COP19 in Warsaw in November of 2013 is a reminder of this reality.

There is a third problem.  As some nations reduce their use of fossil fuels, the resulting surplus will be exported to be burned elsewhere.  Indeed, according to the Quarterly Coal Report of US Energy Information Administration coal exports have quadrupled over the last five years. To reverse this, carbon debtor nations must mount a global program to develop and implement carbon-free technologies and carry the burden that they have laid on the world.

This reality exposes as fraudulent major parts of the White House Climate Action Plan which touts natural gas as a “bridge fuel.”  With its life cycle emission likely to exceed that of coal, and with its extraction that poisons the local communities natural gas is a bridge to nowhere. See Howarth et al. in Atmospheric Methane.

Responding to economic pressure to export fossil fuels, the White House aims for fast-track approval of the construction of a facility at Cove Point on Chesapeake Bay to liquefy gas extracted in Appalachia.  See A Big Fracking Lie.

Here in the North-East, there is the Algonquin Gas Transmission Pipeline expansion project.  Spectra Energy’s proposed expansion of this pipeline with a compressor station in Burrilville would, as FFRI’s Nick Katkevich of Providence, RI, said: “expose residents to increased risk of headaches, dizziness, respiratory and cardiovascular problems, and cancer, as well as a greater risk of explosions.” Nick stressed that

kicking our oil, coal and gas addiction isn’t just about global warming, it’s also about protecting our communities from the immediate dangers of extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels.

Among the latest maneuvers that jeopardize environmental safeguards are the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) negotiations.  The realization of such treaties, designed to pamper too-big-to-fail corporations, will compound an already dangerous economic and legal environment.

With the window dressing stripped away, the administration’s business-as-usual approach is painfully obvious.  The State Department’s release of the Keystone XL environmental impact statement is just one dramatic example. As FFRI’s Lisa Petrie of Carolina, RI, put it:

The Keystone XL pipeline will poison our water, impose on indigenous rights and even fails The White House’s own climate test. The Keystone XL Pipeline must be rejected!

While Fossil Free RI appreciates Rep. Handy’s leadership in drafting a bill that is a huge step forward, we stress that it is of essence that a climate bill articulate a global perspective based on morality, economics, and science, the essential elements of the solution of the global climate change problem.  Compromise is not an option and triangulation may provide a sense of accomplishment but it will not suspend the laws of physics.

[1] A longer version of the paper Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature by Hansen et al. is available here.

Our preference is always to capture if we can, because then we can gather intelligence. But a lot of the terrorist networks that target the United States, the most dangerous ones, operate in remote regions and it’s very difficult to capture them.

To reinforce the President’s message, White House Press Secretary, Jay Carnage, declares:

U.S. counter-terrorism operations are precise, they are lawful and they are effective.

To wrap up the media fib-fest, partisans of the In-List —bought from Google for a president’s ransom— receive a message affirming that the Unites States is a the moral leader and savior of the world. The message boosts the confidence of the In-team in their Leader. At the same time, the Out-List team receives a message that the Unites States is a the moral leader and savior of the world. It spells out that the President is weak on defense, asleep at wheel, and puts the Nation at grave risk.

Who is this President? The current one? A previous one or the next specimen? It does not matter. Political theater, designed to make slaughter look respectable, is as old as the hills, but it really thrives in today’s Google-Facebook surveillance state. Performances like this, assisted by mass media that are the envy of the world’s most vicious tyrannies, succeed phenomenally in their goal: only 11 percent of the population thinks that the use of drones should be decreased.

This Thursday (11/14/2013) the Center for Nonviolence & Peace Studies at URI will be screening Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the hidden world of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. With a strong cinematic style, the film blurs the boundaries of documentary and fiction storytelling. Part action film and part detective story, Dirty Wars is a gripping journey into one of the most important and under-reported stories of our time.

Jeremy Scahill is the reluctant star in this film, directed by Richard Rowley. Both risked their lives in its making, and it is not just foreign threats that they had to worry about.

The film —as does the book by the same title— chronicles the expansion of covert US wars and the security state. It focuses on the pervasive abuse of executive privilege, and features the elite military units operated by the White House and its War Lord in Chief.

Dirty Wars documents naked American exceptionalism and wholesale subversion of the Constitution. The film features the Party of Corporate America, represented by a duopoly of alternating right wings, and how it has bought into the idea that “the world is a battlefield” of undeclared wars.

Take this transcript of a conversation between Jeremy Scahill and Ron Wyden, since 2001 a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee:
Scahill: When there is a lethal operation and a high-value person is killed, the President then of course acknowledges that we kill …
Background voice: He can’t confirm that there have been any lethal operations outside of a war zone.

(Oh, oops, Wyden got drowned out, but he’ll be back soon.)

The Unitary Executive is unchecked by law or oversight. Ron Wyden has repeatedly asked the administration for its legal justification of killing of its own citizens without trial. What else can such requests produce but self-serving blather?

A major portion of the film is devoted to the life and death of Anwar al Awlaki, who may be the first American citizen to be assassinated by his own government under the guise of legality. He had not been indicted in any US court and faced no known charges. How would he have surrendered? And to whom? Also his son, a minor and an American citizen, was executed by presidential fiat without due process of law, in a flagrant violation of the Constitution.

The conversation with Wyden continues:
Wyden: It is almost as if there are two different laws in America, and the American people would be extraordinarily surprised if they could see the difference between what they believe a law says and how it has actually been interpreted in secret.
Scahill: You are not permitted to disclose that difference publicly.
Wyden: That is correct.

Is there any doubt that the presidency has become a national security dictatorship, solely guided by what it deems to be in the national interest? Farewell, checks and balances!

Kill-lists are perpetually replaced by kill-lists twice their size, and, without a doubt, blow-back is on the way. As always, the vast majority the victims are non-combatants, pregnant women and children. It makes you wonder with Ecclesiastes:

And look! The tears of the oppressed, But they have no comforter—
On the side of their oppressors there is power, But they have no comforter.
Therefore I praised the dead who were already dead,
More than the living who are still alive.

Violence perpetrated overseas comes home to haunts us, and the police is equipped with imperial war surplus and the mindset that goes with it. This is what we do with peace activists of Disarm Now Plowshares, a group made up of Sacred Heart nuns, Jesuit priests, and their nation-threatening ilk:

Once arrested, the five were cuffed and hooded with sand bags because, the marine in charge testified, “When we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them…, so we did it to them.”

This is what moral bankruptcy looks like at the level of the individual. Nationally, we see racist mass incarceration for profit, hand-outs to war profiteers bought with food stamps plus “change,” child poverty, inner cities worse than war zones; and the list goes on. We are way Beyond Vietnam, and as Martin Luther King said:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Our national priorities reflect the face of spiritual death.

At a global level, when it comes to dealing with the climate catastrophe, how much confidence should we have in our national security dictatorship that occupies the White House? None whatsoever, of course, but let me leave it at this, I’m starting to repeat myself.

I hope you will join us this Thursday, 11/14/2013, for Dirty Wars.