Evening Blues Preview 3-16-15

This evening's music features "The King of Soul," Sam Cooke.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

ACLU seeks accountability for Obama's fleet of flying death robots:

ACLU files new lawsuit over Obama administration drone 'kill list'

As the US debates expanding its campaign against the Islamic State beyond Iraq and Syria, the leading US civil liberties group is intensifying its efforts to force transparency about lethal US counterterrorism strikes and authorities.

On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will file a disclosure lawsuit for secret Obama administration documents specifying, among other things, the criteria for placement on the so-called “kill list” for drone strikes and other deadly force.

Information sought by the ACLU includes long-secret analyses establishing the legal basis for what the administration terms its “targeted killing program” and the process by which the administration determines that civilians are unlikely to be killed before launching a strike, as well as verification mechanisms afterward to establish if the strike in fact has caused civilian deaths.

The suit, to be filed in a New York federal court, also seeks basic data the Obama administration has withheld about “the number and identities of individuals killed or injured” in counterterrorism strikes, according to the ACLU filing. In February 2013, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who favors the drone strikes, estimated they had killed 4,700 people. ... A November report by the human-rights group Reprieve found that Obama’s drone strikes had killed 1,147 people in pursuit of only 41 men, prompting questions about the rigor of the process employed by the administration to launch attacks. ...

“Over the last few years, the US government has used armed drones to kill thousands of people, including hundreds of civilians. The public should know who the government is killing, and why it’s killing them,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU, told the Guardian.

Could The Use Of Flying Death Robots Be Hurting America's Reputation Worldwide?

Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman in America

Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.

The corporate powers, from Seattle’s mayor to the Chamber of Commerce and the area’s Democratic Party, are determined she be defeated, and these local corporate elites have the national elites behind them. This will be one of the most important elections in the country this year. It will pit a socialist, who refuses all corporate donations—not that she would get many—and who has fearlessly championed the rights of workingmen and workingwomen, rights that are being eviscerated by the corporate machine. The elites cannot let the Sawants of the world proliferate. Corporate power is throwing everything at its disposal—including sponsorship of a rival woman candidate of color—into this election in the city’s 3rd District. ...

I met Sawant in a restaurant a block from City Hall in Seattle. She is as intense as she is articulate. Sawant, born in India, is a leader of the Socialist Alternative Party. She holds a doctorate in economics from North Carolina State University and before her election to the City Council was a professor at a community college. She knows that there will be no genuine reforms, let alone systemic change, without the building of radical mass movements and a viable third party. She is as familiar at Seattle street demonstrations, where she has been arrested, as she is in City Council hearings. If there is any hope left for the absurdist political theater that characterizes election campaigns it is in renegades such as Sawant.

"The idea that things have to get a lot worse to have some sort of awakening and bring about an alternative to this corrupt and defunct corporate political system is inaccurate,” she said to me. “What we need is a big surge for an independent working-class political alternative while people are experiencing a sense of confidence, after decades of bitter defeat. The $15-an-hour victory in Seattle is going nationwide. And while unions are under massive attack, as you see in Wisconsin with Scott Walker, there are also successful labor initiatives getting onto the ballot. Four states—two of them Republican states—increased the minimum wage last year. Occupy and the Black Lives Matter movement have radically shaken U.S. consciousness. Now is the time for us to strike.”

Sawant said it is incumbent upon socialists and the entire U.S. left to swiftly begin the task of building working-class political campaigns independent of the Democratic Party in order to create the space for a viable national party. Efforts to reform the Democratic Party, whose leaders are in the service of the corporate oligarchy, amount to pouring energy into “a black hole,” she said. The Democratic elite dominate Seattle government, and the Democratic elite, as they did with Ralph Nader, have declared war against Sawant. As long as she remains in office she will expose the leaders in the Democratic Party for who they are—corporate puppets.

Ukraine conflict: Vladimir Putin 'was ready for nuclear alert'

Moscow was ready to put its nuclear forces on alert to ensure Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine last year, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in a pre-recorded documentary aired on Sunday.

Putin also said that Russia had saved the life of Ukraine’s former pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovich, who he said had been in danger after ‘revolutionaries’ seized power following weeks of violent street protests in Kiev last year.

“For us it became clear and we received information that there were plans not only for his capture, but, preferably for those who carried out the coup, but also for his physical elimination. As one famous historical figure said: ‘No person, no problem’,” Putin said.

Protests over Yanukovich’s decision to back away from a trade agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Moscow forced him from power in February last year. Yanukovich’s overthrow ultimately prompted Russia to seize and annex the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Why Are US Taxpayers Subsidizing Right-Wing Israeli Settlers?

A few weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu's delivered his controversial address to Congress, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Prime Minister was considering a campaign trip to Hebron, a right-wing settler community in the Israel-occupied West Bank. The proposed March 10 trip to Hebron, which would have been the first by an Israeli PM in more than a decade, raised eyebrows among Israel's political class and inflamed tensions with Palestinian groups. Last week, Netanyahu called it off, citing security threats.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, few politicians have questioned why American taxpayers continue to subsidize the Hebron settlers, accused by international observers of human rights violations that include thefts, battery, and murder. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 45 percent of the settler community's funding came from the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund, whose status as a tax-exempt nonprofit allows Americans to write off donations to the group.

"The Hebron Fund has supported, either directly or indirectly, a wide array of acts that are definitely not charitable," says John Tye, the legal director for the global activist group Avaaz, which last week petitioned the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund's nonprofit status. "They are basically using a small group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to push Palestinians out of their homes. These settlers are arming themselves, they are engaged in military and paramilitary acts, some of them have connections to terrorism, and they are committing a wide range of crimes against Palestinians."

Also of interest:

Guiding Obama Into Global Make-Believe

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mimi's picture

of color (which one - an afro-american one?) up against Sawant. That has lots of potential of being disgusting. If that should be the case, I am engaging in support for Sawant - from far away. I hate the exploitation of conquer and divide communities of "color" that should definitely not let themselves divide by such shenanigans. What Sawants stands for and has worked on so far wouldn't even be called "socialist" in other countries. Any somewhat sane social democrat (and in Europe I think they make a little difference in being a (strict, pure) socialist or a social democrat), would consider her a social democrat and her policy goals "normal" and not left fringe, nor socialist left flank or whatever the leading centrist democrats might call her.

Portuguese Indians are in many areas of Africa considered upper-class people and carrying with them "colonial aristocratic behavior patterns born out of the Portuguese colonist past, that mixed Portuguese with the Indian population and sent their "Indian" colonial bureaucrats not only to and from Goa, but also to Africa. The division between them and Africans has caused problems. There are remnants of that still alive. In the immigrant community of the US that gets lost, but it pops up and people love to exploit that. (Best observed by the American-Indian Dinesh Souza (whose parents were Catholic Goanese and with it originally of portuguese descent) and his attitudes towards Obama and Afro-Americans) So, to me, letting compete an Afro-American woman against one of India among Democratic candidates, to me is just one form of exploiting racial inequities and old hidden racial tensions. Not that I am against supporting an afro-American candidate (will support Edwards in MD), but in this case Sawant has already proven she could move things in the right direction.

An a socialist alternative (or social-democratic alternative to not scare the "socialist-o-phobes") and movement is long overdue, imo.

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gulfgal98's picture

I think this comment is worthy of a diary unto itself as it goes into how deeply those in power are manipulating the system against all of us. The policy message continues to be trumped by identity politics.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy