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By Liza Long

17 December 12

@ The Blue Review

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”

“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan-they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an accelerated program for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the charts. When he’s in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the differences between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He’s in a good mood most of the time. But when he’s not, watch out. And it’s impossible to predict what will set him off.

Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district’s most restrictive behavioral program, a contained school environment where children who can’t function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public babysitting from 7:30-1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.

The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, “Look, Mom, I’m really sorry. Can I have video games back today?”

“No way,” I told him. “You cannot act the way you acted this morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that quickly.”

His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “I’m going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself.”

That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite lane, turning left instead of right.

“Where are you taking me?” he said, suddenly worried. “Where are we going?”

“You know where we are going,” I replied.

“No! You can’t do that to me! You’re sending me to hell! You’re sending me straight to hell!”

I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the clinicians who happened to be standing outside. “Call the police,” I said. “Hurry.”

Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I hugged him close so he couldn’t escape from the car. He bit me several times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I’m still stronger than he is, but I won’t be for much longer.

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork-“Were there any difficulties with… at what age did your child… were there any problems with.. has your child ever experienced.. does your child have…”

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

 

For days, my son insisted that I was lying-that I made the whole thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check up on him, he said, “I hate you. And I’m going to get my revenge as soon as I get out of here.”

By day three, he was my calm, sweet boy again, all apologies and promises to get better. I’ve heard those promises for years. I don’t believe them anymore.

On the intake form, under the question, “What are your expectations for treatment?” I wrote, “I need help.”

And I do. This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.

I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys-and their mothers-need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise-in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population.

With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill-Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation’s largest treatment centers in 2011 .

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

By Michael. C. Bender

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — Magazines that fed bullets into the primary firearm used to kill 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school would have been banned under state legislation that the National Rifle Association and gunmakers successfully fought.

The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Adam Lanza, 20, used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle with magazines containing 30 rounds as his main weapon, said Connecticut State Police Lieutenant Paul Vance at a news conference yesterday.

A proposal in March 2011 would have made it a felony to possess magazines with more than 10 bullets and required owners to surrender them to law enforcement or remove them from the state. Opponents sent more than 30,000 e-mails and letters to state lawmakers as part of a campaign organized by the NRA and other gun advocates, said Robert Crook, head of the Hartford- based Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen, which opposed the legislation.

“The legislators got swamped by NRA emails,” said Betty Gallo, who lobbied on behalf of the legislation for Southport- based Connecticut Against Gun Violence. “They were scared of the NRA and the political backlash.”

Proponents abandoned the legislation, which drew opposition from gunmakers including Sturm, Ruger & Co. In addition to the e-mails and letters, more than 300 pro-gun activists, including many NRA members, attended a committee hearing to oppose it, said Gallo, a Hartford-based lobbyist for more than 35 years.

Permissive Laws

The Fairfax, Virginia-based NRA, which describes itself as the nation’s foremost defender of Second Amendment rights, works to defeat gun limits nationally and in states, and has successfully championed permissive firearms laws.

Since a 1994 federal assault-weapon ban expired in 2004, Congress hasn’t enacted major firearms regulations other than a law aimed at improving state reporting for federal background checks. The gun lobby’s power was illustrated during the 2012 presidential campaign when, after mass shootings, neither President Barack Obama nor his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, called for restrictions on gun ownership.

In Newtown, Lanza also had two handguns, a Glock and a Sig Sauer, and fired hundreds of bullets, said Vance. Authorities also took a shotgun from the car he drove, Vance said. The guns belonged to Nancy Lanza, Adam’s mother, according to a law- enforcement official who asked for anonymity because of a continuing investigation.

Magazines’ Role

Both sides in the debate disputed the role of high-capacity magazines in the Dec. 14 school shooting.

Crook said state legislation “wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“We already have a lot of good gun laws on the books,” Crook said. “You can’t control people who have never done anything wrong before and then just go off the deep end.”

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said in an interview that high-capacity magazines “made the crime all the more deadly” and called for limits.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy told reporters today that he supports a ban on high-capacity magazines.

“That is a common-sense piece of legislation that could be taken up in the next legislative session,” said Malloy, a Democrat, at a news conference at the state Capitol.

The media office of the NRA didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment about the shooting or the law, or return phone messages left with an answering service.

Mass Murder

The Connecticut shooting is the latest mass murder in which the gunman’s arsenal included a high-capacity magazine. Connecticut’s bill was written in response to an attack last year in Tuscon, Arizona, that killed six and injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said Gallo. Jared Lee Loughner was sentenced to life in prison for the shootings in which he used a 33-round magazine in a Glock 19.

In July, James Holmes clipped a 100-round drum magazine into the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle police say he fired into a Colorado theater, killing 12 and wounding 58.

“It’s the large capacity weaponry that’s the problem when it comes to mass murder, because of the ability to kill lots of people in a short time without even reloading,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Prohibitions against assault weapons, especially high-capacity magazines, can help.”

Last year, Andrew Jennison, an NRA lobbyist at the time, told Connecticut lawmakers there was “no correlation” between crime and magazine capacity, pointing to the 2007 massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, in which 33 people died. In that shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history, Seung-Hui Cho used 10- and 15- round magazines.

Rapid Loaders

“Even pistols with rapid loaders could have been about as deadly in this situation,” Jennison said, according to a transcript of the committee hearing. “It is the criminal use of firearms, not mere possession of a magazine with an arbitrary number of rounds.”

Connecticut’s gun laws are fifth-strictest among states, according to a 2011 scorecard from the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which describes itself as the country’s largest gun-control lobby.

Connecticut is among six states that require background checks on all handgun sales, according to the San Francisco- based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Gun Seizure

Connecticut has a measure, sometimes referred to as the “turn in your neighbor” law, that lets state police obtain a warrant to confiscate firearms from anyone posing an imminent risk of harming someone. Police obtained nearly 300 warrants and seized more than 2,000 guns in 10 years after the law was passed in 1999, according to a state Office of Legislative Research report.

Still, gun-control advocates couldn’t pass the ban on high- capacity magazines.

Gallo said she counted a majority of the 45-member Judiciary Committee in favor of the bill. After the meeting, Gallo said she could get a commitment from just seven lawmakers to support it. She said she asked the co-chairmen, Senator Eric Coleman and Representative Gerald Fox, not to put the bill up for a vote. Coleman and Fox didn’t return calls seeking comment.

“If we know we’re going to lose, we’re not going to take it to a vote,” said Ron Pinciaro, director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Gun Violence.

James Debney, chief executive office of Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., wrote to Fox before the hearing that the proposal would “drastically impact the numerous firearms companies in Connecticut and across New England.”

Job Loss

“Connecticut cannot afford to lose these jobs,” Debney wrote, adding that 10 of the Springfield, Massachusetts, company’s top 30 suppliers were based in Connecticut.

Jake McGuigan, government-relations director for the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, opposed the bill, pointing to more than 622,000 firearms in the state that could accept high-capacity magazines.

If gun owners weren’t reimbursed, at a cost to the state of at least $29 million, he warned lawmakers of “a class action lawsuit on the taking of that.”

McGuigan also said there would be costs for the state’s $1.3 billion firearms industry. Home to gunmakers Sturm, Ruger & Co., Mossberg Corp. and Colt Defense LLC, Connecticut’s gun industry supports 5,400 jobs and pays $81 million in state taxes, he said.

The bill would restrict the commercial market for those companies, McGuigan said.

Self Defense

“I’m not sure that’s something that we want to do in this economic environment,” he told lawmakers. “I don’t think we want to lose any business, whether it’s five employees or 30 employees or Colt Firearms, which has 1,000 union jobs.”

Michael Fifer, Ruger’s president and chief executive officer, told the committee that high-capacity magazines are needed for self defense.

A third of aggravated assault and robbery victims were attacked by multiple offenders, he said. High-capacity magazines provided more protection to citizens prone to miss their intended target in stressful situations, he said.

“The regulation of magazine capacity will not deter crime, but will instead put law-abiding citizens at risk of harm,” Fifer wrote in a letter to committee members. “The bill, if enacted, also would expose law-abiding citizens to criminal prosecution for unintentionally possessing prohibited magazines — magazines that were legally acquired and that are largely the norm in new firearms manufacturing.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael C. Bender in Tallahassee at mbender10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

“The temptation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine … yet we would be less than human if we did so.”

– NELSON R. MANDELA

As Jews, with our own painful history of oppression, we are compelled to speak out against human rights violations being committed by the State of Israel – in our name – against the Palestinian people.

We note that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) together with the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF), recently met with the South African Presidency and other politicians. We also note, with great concern, the SAJBD and SAZF’s assertion that they represent and speak on behalf of all Jewish South Africans, particularly when it comes to Palestine-Israel.

Let us be clear, the SAJBD and SAZF’s position of supporting Israel at all costs does not represent us. We also appeal to the SAJBD and SAZF to respect one of the hallmarks of Judaism: respectful debate amongst those who hold divergent viewpoints. The SAJBD and SAZF’s position on Israel, and attempts to stifle opposing voices that speak out against Israel, is morally untenable.

The Jewish community is neither homogeneous nor monolithic.  There is a growing number of Jews, in South Africa and around the world, who are organising to form alternative spaces and who unconditionally oppose Israeli policies and practices that shamefully privilege Jews over the indigenous Palestinian people.  In this vein, we support the non-violent campaign of applying Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it abides by international law and respects basic human rights [see www.bdsmovement.net].

We are encouraged that our South African government is joining those countries that are taking a clear stance against Israel’s violations of international law and its acts of violence against the Palestinian people [ see this City Press newspaper article: http://tinyurl.com/buyflps]. We also welcome and support our Department of Trade and Industry’s initiative to prevent the false labelling of Israeli settlement products [see this Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper article: http://tinyurl.com/8ujzk42]. We hope that the ANC and the SA Government goes further and completely bans Israeli settlement products. Israeli settlements are in clear violation of international law and seriously undermine any chance of negotiations and a just peace.

Such positions as those recently taken by our government against Israeli violence and violations of international law, in fact, serve to affirm a proud Jewish tradition of respect for justice and human rights; regardless of race, religion or creed. Such positions connect us to our fellow humanity.

We humbly – and sadly – acknowledge that our voices may not be the dominant ones in our community, but neither were Dietrich Bonnhoefer’s in Nazi Germany nor Beyers Naude’s, Antjie Krog’s, Braam Fischer’s and Joe Slovo’s in Apartheid South Africa.

Our individual consciences, our Jewish tradition and our painful history compel us to declare to the SAJBD, SAZF and to the Israeli government that we will continue to speak out and take a stand for justice and human rights.  Taking such a stand is in the very interests of being Jewish. For when we proclaim “Never Again”, we should mean “Never Again”, unconditionally, and to any human being – including the Palestinians.

Issued by Alan Horwitz for StopTheJNF, a campaign initiated by a group of Jewish South Africans committed to justice and rights for the Palestinian people and Jewish Israelis. Find the original statement and more information here: www.stopthejnfsa.org

Mentioned in the above statement is Joe Slovo: the well-known South African Treason Trialist, founding member of the South African Congress of Democrats, the former South African Communist Party General-Secretary, the Chief of Staff  during the 1980s of the African National Congress’ armed wing (Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)) and a leading NEC member of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Slovo, who was born Jewish, was an outspoken critic of Apartheid South Africa as well as a consistent critic of the Israeli regime – which he also considered an Apartheid state.

In fact, Slovo publicly exposed and highlighted the shameful military collaborations during the 1970s and 1980s between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa (see this UK Guardian newspaper article: http://tinyurl.com/27et2hy). In an unfinished autobiography, Joe Slovo wrote: “Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization [by Israeli supporters] for … acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified…”.

By Juan Cole

17 December 12

@ Informed Comment

The American obsession with guns and violence is not unique, but it is distinctive. The US ranks 12th in the world for rate of firearm-related deaths. El Salvador, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines and some others are worse. But that is the company the US is in- not, say, relatively peaceful places like Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands.

It turns out that the Newtown shooter used a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle and he had lots of thirty-round high-capacity clips for it. Authorities have revealed that each of the 20 children and six adults he killed was shot multiple times, but given the number of clips Lanza brought with him, the number of victims could have been much, much higher. The Federal ban on weapons such as the Bushmaster, in place 1994-2004, was allowed to lapse by the George W. Bush administration and his Republican Congress, all of whom received massive campaign donations from the gun lobby. There is a Connecticut ban, but the maker of the Bushmaster used a loophole in the poorly written state law to continue to sell the gun in the state. The Bushmaster is manufactured by a subsidiary of the Wall Street hedge fund, Cerberus Capital Management, called the “Freedom Group”- which also owns Remington and DPMS Firearms. It is the largest single maker of semi-automatic rifles in the US, and they are expected to be a major growing profit center in the coming years. The Freedom Group was sued over the Washington, DC, sniper attacks, and paid $500,000 without admitting culpability.

So, the hedge funds are doing us in every which way.

But the weird idea of letting people buy military weaponry at will, with less trouble than you would have to buy a car, is only one manifestation of America’s cult of high-powered weaponry.

In 2011, US corporations sold 75% of all the arms sold in the international weapons market, some $66 billion of the $85 billion trade. Russia was the runner-up with only $4 billion in sales.

Saudi Arabia bought F-15s and Apache and Blackhawk helicopters. Oman bought F-16s. The UAE got a missile shield. And, of course, Israel gets very sophisticated weapons from the US, as well.

The US share of the arms trade to the Middle East has burgeoned so much in the past decade that it now dwarfs the other suppliers, as this chart [pdf] from a Congressional study makes clear.

Graph

The University of Michigan “Correlates of War” project, run by my late colleague David Singer, tried to crunch numbers on potential causes of the wars of the past two centuries. Getting a statistically valid correlation for a cause was almost impossible. But there was one promising lead, as it was explained to me. When countries made large arms purchases, they seemed more likely to go to war in the aftermath. It may be that if you have invested in state of the art weapons, you want to use them before they become antiquated or before your enemies get them too.

So the very worst thing the US could do for Middle East peace is to sell the region billions in new, sophisticated weapons.

Moreover if you give sophisticated conventional weapons to some countries but deny them to their rivals, the rivals will try to level the playing field with unconventional weapons. The US is creating an artificial and unnecessary impetus to nuclear proliferation by this policy.

I first went to Pakistan in 1981. At that time it was not a society with either drugs or guns. But President Ronald Reagan decided to use private Afghan militias to foment a guerrilla war against the Soviets, who sent troops into Afghanistan in late 1979. Reagan ended up sending billions of dollars worth of arms to the Mujahidin annually, and twisting Saudi Arabia’s arm to match what the US sent. The Mujahidin were also encouraged by the US to grow poppies for heroin production so that they could buy even more weapons.

Over the decade of the 1980s, I saw the weapons begin to show up in the markets of Pakistan, and began hearing for the first time about drug addicts (there came to be a million of them by 1990). I had seen the arms market expand in Lebanon in the 1970s, and was alarmed that now it was happening in Pakistan, at that time a relatively peaceful and secure society. The US filled Pakistan up with guns to get at the Soviets, creating a gun culture where such a thing had been rare (with the exception of some Pashtuns who made home-made knock-offs of Western rifles). Ultimately the gun culture promoted by Reagan came back to bite the US on the ass (not to mention Afghanistan and Pakistan!) And not to mention the drugs.

Now the US views Pakistan as peculiarly violent, and pundits often blame it on Islamism. But no, it is just garden-variety Americanism. You’re welcome.

By Patrick Cockburn

16 December 2012

@ The Independent

It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete at the neck of a middle-aged man who has been forced to lie in the street with his head on a concrete block. At the end of the film, a soldier, apparently from the Free Syrian Army, holds up the severed heads by their hair in triumph.

The film is being widely watched on YouTube by Syrians, reinforcing their fears that Syria is imitating Iraq’s descent into murderous warfare in the years after the US invasion in 2003. It fosters a belief among Syria’s non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and Sunnis associated with the government as soldiers or civil servants, that there will be no safe future for them in Syria if the rebels win. In one version of the video, several of which are circulating, the men who are beheaded are identified as officers belonging to the 2.5 million-strong Alawite community. This is the Shia sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and core members of his regime belong. The beheadings, so proudly filmed by the perpetrators, may well convince them that they have no alternative but to fight to the end.

The video underlines a startling contradiction in the policy of the US and its allies. In the past week, 130 countries have recognised the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people. But, at the same time, the US has denounced the al-Nusra Front, the most effective fighting force of the rebels, as being terrorists and an al-Qa’ida affiliate. Paradoxically, the US makes almost exactly same allegations of terrorism against al-Nusra as does the Syrian government. Even more bizarrely, though so many states now recognise the National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, it is unclear if the rebels inside Syria do so. Angry crowds in rebel-held areas of northern Syria on Friday chanted “we are all al-Nusra” as they demonstrated against the US decision.

Videos posted on YouTube play such a central role in the propaganda war in Syria that questions always have to be asked about their authenticity and origin. In the case of the beheading video, the details look all too convincing. Nadim Houry, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch in the Middle East and North Africa, has watched the video many times to identify the circumstances, perpetrators and location where the killings took place. He has no doubts about its overall authenticity, but says that mention of one district suggests it might be in Deir el-Zhor (in eastern Syria). But people in the area immediately north of Homs are adamant the beheadings took place there. The victims have not been identified. The first time a version of the film was shown was on pro-government Sama TV on 26 November, but it has been widely viewed on YouTube in Syria only over the past week.

The film begins by showing two middle-aged men handcuffed together sitting on a settee in a house, surrounded by their captors who sometimes slap and beat them. They are taken outside into the street. A man in a black shirt is manhandled and kicked into lying down with his head on a concrete block. A boy, who looks to be about 11 or 12 years old, cuts at his neck with a machete, but does not quite sever it. Later a man finishes the job and cuts the head off. The second man in a blue shirt is also forced to lie with his head on a block and is beheaded. The heads are brandished in front of the camera and later laid on top of the bodies. The boy smiles as he poses with a rifle beside a headless corpse.

The execution video is very similar to those once made by al-Qa’ida in Iraq to demonstrate their mercilessness towards their enemies. This is scarcely surprising since many of the most experienced al-Nusra fighters boast that they have until recently been fighting the predominantly Shia government of Iraq as part of the local franchise of al-Qa’ida franchise. Their agenda is wholly sectarian, and they have shown greater enthusiasm for slaughtering Shias, often with bombs detonated in the middle of crowds in markets or outside mosques, than for fighting Americans.

The Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, was not always so bloodthirsty or so dominated by the Sunnis who make up 70 per cent of the 23 million-strong Syrian population. At first, demonstrations were peaceful and the central demands of the protesters were for democratic rule and human rights as opposed to a violent, arbitrary and autocratic government. There are Syrians who claim that the people against the regime remains to this day the central feature of the uprising, but there is compelling evidence that the movement has slid towards sectarian Islamic fundamentalism intent on waging holy war.

The execution video is the most graphic illustration of deepening religious bigotry on the part of the rebels, but it is not the only one. Another recent video shows Free Syrian Army fighters burning and desecrating a Shia husseiniyah (a religious meeting house similar to a mosque) in Idlib in northern Syria. They chant prayers of victory as they set fire to the building, set fire to flags used in Shia religious processions and stamp on religious pictures. If the FSA were to repeat this assault on a revered Shia shrine such as the Sayyida Zeinab mosque in Damascus, to which Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims have flooded in the past and which is now almost encircled by rebels, then there could be an explosion of religious hatred and strife between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East. Iraqi observers warn that it was the destruction of the Shia shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, by an al-Qa’ida bomb in 2006 that detonated a sectarian war in which tens of thousands died.

The analogy with Iraq is troubling for the US and British governments. They and their allies are eager for Syria to avoid repeating the disastrous mistakes they made during the Iraqi occupation. Ideally, they would like to remove the regime, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad and the present leadership, but not dissolving the government machinery or introducing revolutionary change as they did in Baghdad by transferring power from the Sunnis to the Shia and the Kurds. This provoked a furious counter-reaction from Baathists and Sunnis who found themselves marginalised and economically impoverished.

Washington wants Assad out, but is having difficulty riding the Sunni revolutionary tiger. The Western powers have long hoped for a split in the Syrian elite, but so far there is little sign of this happening. “If you take defections as a measure of political cohesion, then there haven’t been any serious ones,” said a diplomat in Damascus.

Syria today resembles Iraq nine years ago in another disturbing respect. I have now been in Damascus for 10 days, and every day I am struck by the fact that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is wholly different from the picture given to the world both by foreign leaders and by the foreign media. The last time I felt like this was in Baghdad in late 2003, when every Iraqi knew the US-led occupation was proving a disaster just as George W Bush, Tony Blair and much of the foreign media were painting a picture of progress towards stability and democracy under the wise tutelage of Washington and its carefully chosen Iraqi acolytes.

The picture of Syria most common believed abroad is of the rebels closing in on the capital as the Assad government faces defeat in weeks or, at most, a few months. The Secretary General of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said last week that the regime is “approaching collapse”. The foreign media consensus is that the rebels are making sweeping gains on all fronts and the end may be nigh. But when one reaches Damascus, it is to discover that the best informed Syrians and foreign diplomats say, on the contrary, that the most recent rebel attacks in the capital had been thrown back by a government counteroffensive. They say that the rebel territorial advances, which fuelled speculation abroad that the Syrian government might implode, are partly explained by a new Syrian army strategy to pull back from indefensible outposts and bases and concentrate troops in cities and towns.

At times, Damascus resounds with the boom of artillery fire and the occasional car bomb, but it is not besieged. I drove 160 kilometres north to Homs, Syria’s third largest city with a population of 2.3 million, without difficulty. Homs, once the heart of the uprising, is in the hands of the government, aside from the Old City, which is held by the FSA. Strongholds of the FSA in Damascus have been battered by shellfire and most of their inhabitants have fled to other parts of the capital. The director of the 1,000-bed Tishreen military hospital covering much of southern Syria told me that he received 15 to 20 soldiers wounded every day, of whom about 20 per cent died. This casualty rate indicates sniping, assassinations and small-scale ambushes, but not a fight to the finish.

This does not mean that the government is in a happy position. It has been unable to recapture southern Aleppo or the Old City in Homs. It does not have the troops to garrison permanently parts of Damascus it has retaken. Its overall diplomatic and military position is slowly eroding and the odds against it are lengthening, but it is a long way from total defeat, unless there is direct military intervention by foreign powers, as in Libya or Iraq, and this does not seem likely.

This misperception of the reality on the ground in Syria is fuelled in part by propaganda, but more especially by inaccurate and misleading reporting by the media where bias towards the rebels and against the government is unsurpassed since the height of the Cold War. Exaggerated notions are given of rebel strength and popularity. The Syrian government is partially responsible for this. By excluding all but a few foreign journalists, the regime has created a vacuum of information that is naturally filled by its enemies. In the event, a basically false and propagandistic account of events in Syria has been created by a foreign media credulous in using pro-opposition sources as if they were objective reporting.

The execution video is a case in point. I have not met a Syrian in Damascus who has not seen it. It is having great influence on how Syrians judge their future, but the mainstream media outside Syria has scarcely mentioned it. Some may be repulsed by its casual savagery, but more probably it is not shown because it contradicts so much of what foreign leaders and reporters claim is happening here.

 

The tragic shootings in Connecticut again raise the perennial question ‘Why are human beings violent?’ Are we genetically programmed to be violent? Is violence socially learned? Or are some individuals just ‘psychotic’?

Perhaps the most important question is this: Can we do anything to end human violence?

Because of the death of my two uncles in World War 11, I have been researching the question ‘Why are human beings violent?’ since 1966, including spending 14 years living in seclusion from 1996 to 2010 with Anita McKone, undertaking a deep psychological examination of our own minds.

I have summarized our learning in the document ‘Why Violence?’ – http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence

In essence, human beings are violent because of the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children. And this is in addition to the ‘visible’ violence that we inflict on them consciously.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do everyday, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to itSelf thus destroying its internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what it wants (or ignore it when it does), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as it keeps trying to meet its own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, it is genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine its sense of Self-worth and teach it to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout its childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, parents and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when it expresses its feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when it expresses its feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing its feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing its feelings (e.g. by screaming at it when it cries or gets angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by its feelings (e.g. by hitting it, restraining it or locking it into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress its awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing its awareness of its feelings (rather than being allowed to have its feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed its awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress its awareness of the feelings that would tell it how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and it will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards itself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors – many of them perpetrated in school – that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen.

The tragic reality of human life is that few people value the awesome power of the individual Self with an integrated mind (that is, a mind in which memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing, conscience and other functions work together in an integrated way) because this individual will be decisive in choosing life-enhancing behavioral options (including those at variance with social laws and norms) and will fearlessly resist all efforts to control it or coerce it with violence.

So how do we end up with people like Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and all those other perpetrators of violence, including political leaders who conduct wars and those who perpetrate their violence in our homes and on our streets? We create them.

And can we do anything to end human violence? Yes we can. Each one of us. Here is the formula, briefly stated:

If you want a child who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of itself and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous and powerful, then the child must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage and power.

And if you need an incentive, ask yourself this: Do you think it is possible to successfully tackle the many manifestations of violence – war, terrorism, street violence, the ongoing climate catastrophe, the ongoing exploitation of Africa, Asia and Central/South America … – without addressing its fundamental cause?

It’s a big task. But we have a world to save. Literally.

By Robert J. Burrowes

15 December, 2012

Robert has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach’, State University of New York Press, 1996. His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

 

 

By Finian Cunningham

15 December, 2012

@ PressTV

Barack Obama, America’s Conjurer-in-Chief, is trying to entertain the world with a new smoke-and-mirrors trick, with the announcement that his government is recognizing the Syrian National Coalition as “the sole representative of the Syrian people”.

The chemical weapons trick seems to have fizzled like a damp squib. So, now it’s time for another illusion – the “worthy Syrian opposition”.

This motley crew of treasonous exiles – who mysteriously somehow have bags of money to trot all over the globe from Doha to Cairo, Tokyo to Marrakech – are all of sudden anointed by the American President as the next government of Syria.

Anyone who has read the Doha Protocol that the SNC willingly signed up to while seduced in a luxury hotel last month by their Qatari sponsors should be under no misapprehension. This group of self-serving opportunists has been cobbled together with the sole purpose of selling Syria’s sovereignty to the highest, or even lowest, bidder. The people of Syria have been spared no treachery low enough in the imperialists’ manifesto of regime change, including surrender of wealth, natural resources and all of Syria’s independent foreign policy principles.

Under the regime of the SNC, if it ever gets into power, Syria will become a shell of a once-proud nation, in hock to Western and Persian Gulf investors and schemers, betraying its people and its regional neighbours.

Yet, hey presto, with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Obama declares: “We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population, that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime.”

Cue the arms sales and military logistics floodgates – as already worked out by British General Sir David Richards in secret talks last month in London with his American, French, Turk and Qatari counterparts.

The latest Obama stunt follows the dress rehearsals in previous weeks by Britain, France, Turkey and the Persian Gulf Arab dictators who had already appointed the SNC as the de facto government-in-waiting on behalf of the 25 million Syrians.

The White House joker tried to give his “recognition” wheeze some credibility by demarcating an illusory line between “legitimate” and “renegade” Syrian opposition, by proscribing certain militant groups within Syria as “terrorists”. The Jabhat Al Nusra front, which is said to be linked to Al Qaeda, is henceforth ostracized, at least officially, by Washington.

Of course, Washington had to crank out some rhetorical fog to cover up the glaring contradiction between its decade-long “war on terror” mantra and the fact that Islamic extremists are central to the Western-backed campaign of subversion in Syria.

But this chicanery is fooling no-one who has been accurately following the state terrorist war of aggression in Syria over the past 22 months. No-one, that is, except those perhaps who have been brainwashed by the Western mainstream media echo chambers, which call this campaign of terror afflicting Syria a “pro-democracy uprising”.

Obama’s cynical charade of isolating extremists from supposed worthy opposition belies the fact that Syrian society is being assailed by a gargantuan criminal conspiracy authored, fomented and fuelled by Western governments and their regional proxies. The so-called Syrian rebels are terrorist foot-soldiers of foreign masters.

Think about it. What group claiming to liberate Syria would murder their own compatriots – men, women and children – with such fiendish, unrelenting barbarity?

For Obama to try to make out that the opposition has now been cleansed from extremists – on the basis of his say-so – is transparent nonsense.

Are we expected to believe that the litany of atrocities perpetrated against the Syrian people are all down to “rogue Jihadists”?

Let’s review just some of the low-lights of the putative Syrian liberators:

1. Massacres of whole villages. Just as Obama was sanitizing the opposition, news was coming in of yet another massacre this week in the village of Aqrab. Reports put the number of killed at over 125. Typically, the Western media lie machine was vague in ascribing blame, but past record shows that such atrocities are stock-in-trade of the anti-government foreign militants. On 25 May, the village of Houla, also in Hama Province, was massacred, including 49 children. After initial media misinformation, it turned out that the mass murders were carried out by the Western and Arab-backed mercenaries.

2. No-warning car bombs across Syria in urban areas of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib, Daraa, Homs. The newly American-sanctioned Al Nusra front is said to be based in Aleppo. Are we to believe its operatives can whisk around the entire country of Syria carrying out suicide bombings? Again, as Obama was pronouncing the validity of Syrian opposition, the suburb of Jaramana outside Damascus was attacked with no-warning bombs, killing two and injuring several. Last month, the mainly Christian and Druze community of Jaramana was targeted for the fourth time in as many months with multiple explosions that claimed over 34 lives.

3. Video evidence emerges this week showing Saudi mercenaries recruiting a child to behead what appears to be a captured Syrian soldier as he lay on the street, his neck propped on a concrete block and his hands tied behind his back.

4. Other footage shows foreign militants taking unarmed men out on to a street and executing them one-by-one. In other horrific scenes, Syrian soldiers lying on the ground are seen begging for mercy as gun-toting captors spray them with bullets.

5. Victims of cold-blooded executions are thrown off multi-storey buildings on to the pavement below, their mangled corpses lined up in the gutter for gruesome public display.

6. Mosques and churches are desecrated by being turned into sniper posts by Western-backed mercenaries, from where they shoot randomly at civilians in the streets.

7. Family members are kidnapped for ransom only to find that their loved ones have been slain in the most heinous way.

8. Mortar shells are fired deliberately at civilian apartment blocks by mercenaries who then film the aftermath fabricating that the crimes were committed by the Syrian Army, fabrications which the Western mainstream media peddle in line with their governments’ propaganda.

9. Journalists who are trying to give an accurate account of all of the above and more are targeted and assassinated, including Press TV’s Maya Naser and at least 15 other Syrian media workers.

10. In yet another crime against humanity, it is revealed this week that Saudi Arabia has forced inmates from its seething jails to go and wage “holy war” on the Syrian people.

This is the kind of replete, systematic terrorism that Western, Arab and Turk-backed militants have been engaging in to destroy Syria and to impose a regime that will have nothing to offer the Syrian people except more internecine killing.

This is the kind of mayhem that America’s Conjurer-in-Chief and his band of Western terrorist allies are now trying to dissimulate as being the work of rogue extremists, whom they allegedly do not support.

The deception being engineered here is to create an illusion under the cover of which the Western governments can now proceed “legitimately” with direct military supply to Syrian terrorist “freedom fighters” – as opposed to their erstwhile covert supply of weapons which has so far not succeeded in their criminal plan for regime change.

In the Season of Goodwill, that’s like expecting us to believe that Obama is Santa Claus and Cameron and Hollande are his angelic little helpers.

Finian Cunningham is a frequent contributor to PressTV where this article appeared. Read other articles by Finian.

By Kate Randall

15 December, 2012

@ WSWS.org

A gunman walked into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday morning and opened fire, killing 26, including 20 young children. The shooter was also found dead inside the school of a self-inflicted gunshot.

The horrific event took place at Sandy Hook Elementary, a K-4 school for five- to ten-year-old students. The massacre was the worst in the US since the 2007 rampage at Virginia Tech University, which left 33 dead. The killings follow by less than five months the shooting rampage at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where 12 were killed and 58 injured.

Newtown, a small, affluent New England town about 80 miles northeast of New York City, has been ranked as one of the safest places to live in America. The community attracts families who want to send their children to the town’s well-regarded public schools. Residents, shocked and in mourning, expressed disbelief that this type of tragedy could take place in their town.

The shooter has been tentatively identified by law enforcement officials as 20-year-old Adam Lanza. There was initially some confusion about his identity, as he was carrying the identification of his brother, Ryan Lanza, 24, of Hoboken, New Jersey. Ryan Lanza reportedly told authorities that his brother had a history of mental health issues. The elder brother is not a suspect.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m. Friday morning, local police received a call from Sandy Hook Elementary where the rampage was under way. According to a Connecticut State Police news briefing, the shootings took place in two rooms in a single section of the school.

The Hartford Courant reported that one entire classroom of children was unaccounted for. Eighteen children were pronounced dead at the scene and two died after being transported to the hospital. One wounded victim remained hospitalized as of Friday evening.

Children, who huddled in the corners of classrooms, reported hearing loud booms. Survivors escaped the carnage in groups—holding hands, many crying—escorted from the school by teachers. Students reported that they were told to cover their eyes and not look around, apparently in an effort to prevent them from seeing the dead and wounded.

Six adults were killed, although not necessarily all at Sandy Hook. The school principal, Dawn Hochsprung, was shot and killed at the school. According to a law enforcement official not authorized to speak publicly, kindergarten teacher Nancy Lanza, 52, the shooter’s mother, was among the victims. The body of an as yet unnamed adult male was found at the Newtown home owned by Nancy and Peter Lanza, Adam and Ryan Lanza’s father.

 

At least three weapons were recovered at the school shooting scene, including a .223-caliber assault rifle from the back of a car and two semiautomatic handguns found near Lanza’s body. Witnesses reported that some 100 shots or so were fired.

“It’s not a simplistic scene,” police spokesman Vance commented. “We will be here through the night, through the weekend. There is a great deal of work that has to be done.” He reported that the murder scene was so gruesome that first responders were provided counseling. “This was a tragic, horrific scene they encountered,” he said.

However, virtually nothing in the way of explanation has been offered in the nonstop media coverage of the shootings, or in the various comments of police and government officials, who uniformly term the deadly chain of events as “inexplicable” and “senseless”.

President Barack Obama made a brief statement from the White House Friday afternoon. “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” he said. “And each time I learn the news I react not as a president, but as anybody else would—as a parent.” He made no effort to account for the events, which his own comment acknowledged were a persistent feature of American life.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s comments proceeded along similar lines: “School shootings are always incomprehensible and horrific tragedies,” he said. “But words fail to describe today’s heartbreaking and savage attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School.”

 

What intellectual bankruptcy! No US government official or media personality has the mental capacity or courage to ask why these horrible tragedies occur in America with such heartbreaking predictability. The public has barely adjusted itself to one horror when the next one takes place. Even as the media reports Friday’s incident, everyone knows that it is only a matter of time before the next atrocity.

Details of the tragic events in Connecticut are still emerging. In particular, little is known about what could have driven the shooter to plan and carry out such an atrocity. But statements to the effect that such tragedies are always incomprehensible block any examination of the processes that make possible such an antisocial explosion.

Whatever the immediate personal circumstances of each perpetrator, and such circumstances—psychological alienation, mental illness—of course play a role, the regularity of these mass killings expresses the profound sickness of American society, afflicted by social tensions that can find no progressive outlet.

The same figures that speak of “inexplicable tragedies” preside over extreme levels of violence both at home and abroad. Obama is the first US president to openly claim the right to select and order assassinations, including of US citizens. The ruling elite prosecutes an unending series of wars and military invasions, with hundreds of billions of dollars going to the giant killing machine. How could any expression of violence in America today be entirely “incomprehensible”?

At home, the American population is subjected to a culture of violence, not only in the form of police shootings and brutality, but an assault on democratic rights. While the financial elite continues to amass record profits, growing numbers of working families are plunged into poverty.

On the surface, such social tensions do not seem to be part of the reality of a town like Newtown, Connecticut, but they found terrible expression there Friday.

James Dietter, 26, lives in the neighborhood where one of the victims was found. His mother works in the school system. Dietter told the Hartford Courant. “This is the idyllic New England hamlet… there was a bit of a magical insulation or feeling that tragedy won’t happen here. Now it has, and, unfortunately, I think it is going to define this town.”

By Ralph Nader

15 December, 2012

@ Nader.org

Say what you will about Yoko Ono’s art, there is no denying that she is unique. Who else will put several $100,000 full-page notices in The New York Times displaying only the word “Peace” or “Imagine Peace” in small type with the rest of the page blank? No elaboration, no examples of the ravages of war or mention of people “waging peace” around the country and world. Inscrutable, yes. Effective, who knows, except maybe Yoko Ono?

Well, in the December 10th issue of the Times there appeared a most un-Yoko type message. And this one wasted no space with the headline “Governor Cuomo: Imagine there’s no fracking.” The ad, commissioned by her and her son Sean Lennon, contained a graphic case against fracking designed to get New Yorkers to urge the governor to ban fracking and make permanent the moratorium first established by former N.Y. Governor David Paterson. The moratorium was in place pending further scientific studies regarding the environmental and health impact of drilling deep into the Marcellus Shale deposits underneath a large portion of the state.

The gas companies are putting heavy pressure on Gov. Cuomo to join Pennsylvania, which is already suffering the ravages of fracking. Landowners in Pennsylvania and in other permitted states now realize that their water was contaminated by chemicals used in the fracking process and leaked natural gas from fractured shale deposits.

There also exists a formidable coalition of government officials, physicians, scientists at Cornell, civic groups, farmers and other diverse opponents fighting against this hydrofracking. The relentlessly-factual Walter Hang, President of Toxics Targeting in Ithaca, New York, is one of the most effective environmentalists opposing fracking.

Of course, on the other side are the oil and gas industries pursuing profits, landowners seeking royalties (though the fine print contracts may rise up to bite them), and upstate laborers hoping for employment. The gas industry publicists, who exaggerate the benefits to the local economies, ignore the short-term nature of most of the jobs and the costly toxic air, water and land destruction fracking leaves behind.

The fight against fracking in New York is like the recurrent struggle put on by the taxpayer-subsidized fossil fuel and nuclear industries that want to dominate energy policies in government and push the safer alternatives out of the way because energy efficiency and renewable energy don’t make profits for them. As Yoko and Sean point out, through their new group Artists Against Fracking, by insulating buildings, for example, they could “save far more energy and create far more jobs than fracking can produce, plus save consumers money forever.”

Industry engineering manuals portray the immense complexity of fracturing technology, the huge amount of water used per well, the pipelines and compressor stations, the congested truck traffic, the dozens of chemicals needed in the water to draw out the gas vertically and horizontally under the surface of the land. These materials leave out the emerging, grim reality which is memorably portrayed in the documentary “Gasland” by Josh Fox.

Hydrofracking, whose side effects haven’t been fully vetted, is a new industrial way of obtaining natural gas. Instead of seeking these deposits, alternative energy sources should be pursued. Think of solar energy, dutifully, naturally providing most of the energy needed, from absolute zero, to make the Earth habitable. The rest is up to Homo sapiens – a species that must be giving Mother Sun the fits over not adapting its energy for efficient, safe daily uses.

We need to remember Ben Franklin, our frugal forebear who coined the phrase “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Today he would say “a trillion BTUs saved is a trillion BTUs earned.” The problem is that reducing waste – and despite progress, we are far less energy efficient than Western Europe or Japan – is not encouraged by present perverse market and regulatory incentives.

Germany is way ahead of us in both energy conservation and renewable energy. There, nuclear power is being phased out. And, price is used to discourage use of fossil fuels. There is also growing support for a carbon tax in this country including some leading corporate chieftains, but the message hasn’t reached the lawmakers in Congress. Too many of them are marinated in oil.

Your tax dollars helped develop fracturing technology which, if not stopped, will unleash its furies all over the world. There are hydrocarbons everywhere. Methane, among other gases, will be released in excess, which is many times worse a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The regulators are not keeping up.

But the sun is everywhere in many forms – solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, passive solar architecture, wind power, wave power, non-corn biomass that doesn’t compete with food supplies and raise food prices. As I said years ago, “If Exxon owned the sun, we’d have solar energy very quickly.”

Therein is the rub. What is best for a planet with a decentralized, job-producing, safe, efficient, inexhaustible form of energy (at least for 3 billion more years) does not yet have the political muscle to go to the top of the U.S.’s energy priority ladder. The concentrated profits and the limited energy infrastructure are in the grip of the Chevrons and the Peabody Coals.

But history is not on their side. Countries with minimal fossils fuels are leading the way with renewables. Post the Fukushima disaster, Japan is upping the ante on conservation and renewables. Climate changes and natural disasters will wake up the rest of the world. Let’s act to make it sooner rather than later.

The latest bulletin (toxicstargeting.com/Marcellus_Shale) from the indefatigable Walter Hang alerts people to protest that the State Department of Health review is now “being conducted in total secrecy without any public participation.” He believes Mr. Cuomo will make his decision within three months and urges you to call the Governor’s office at 518.474.8390 or 212.681.4580.

 

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us” (a novel).

By Marian Wright Edelman

15 December 12

@ Reader Supported News

he horrendous news from Newtown, Connecticut has pierced our hearts. Allegedly, a black-clad man in his 20s armed with two semi-automatic handguns entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School and made an elementary school for kindergartners through fourth graders the scene of the worst mass shooting in a public school in American history. Reportedly, 20 children were shot and killed, and seven adults were shot and killed. We don’t yet know how many were wounded. We do know dozens of parents are experiencing the worst nightmare any parent could imagine. We do know more than 500 young children in the school are traumatized.

Once again we are faced with unspeakable horror from gun violence and once again we are reminded that there is no safe harbor for our children. How young do the victims have to be and how many children need to die before we stop the proliferation of guns in our nation and the killing of innocents? The most recent statistics reveal 2,694 children and teens were killed by gunfire in 2010; 1,773 of them were victims of homicide and 67 of these were elementary school-age children. If those children and teens were still alive they would fill 108 classrooms of 25 each. Since 1979 when gun death data were first collected by age, a shocking 119,079 children and teens have been killed by gun violence. That is more child and youth deaths in America than American battle deaths in World War I (53,402) or in Vietnam (47,434) or in the Korean War (33,739) or in the Iraq War (3,517). Where is our anti-war movement to protect children from pervasive gun violence here at home?

This slaughter of innocents happens because we protect guns before children and other human beings. Our hearts and prayers go out to the parents and teachers and children and the entire Newtown community that has been ripped apart by each bullet shot this morning. We know from past school shootings and the relentless killing of children every day that Newtown families and the community will never be the same. The Newtown families who lost children today will never be the same. The families of the teachers who were killed will never be the same. Every child at the Sandy Hook Elementary School this morning will never be the same.

Each and all of us must do more to stop this intolerable and wanton epidemic of gun violence and demand that our political leaders do more. We can’t just talk about it after every mass shooting and then do nothing until the next mass shooting when we profess shock and talk about it again. The latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke. It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence and proliferation of guns in our nation. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.

We have so much work to do to build safe communities for our children and need leaders at all levels of government who will stand up against the NRA and for every child’s right to live and learn free of gun violence. But that will not happen until mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and neighbors and faith leaders and everybody who believes that children have a right to grow up safely stand up together and make a mighty ruckus as long as necessary to break the gun lobby’s veto on common sense gun policy. Our laws and not the NRA must control who can obtain firearms.

It is way past time to demand enactment of federal gun safety measures, including:

Ending the gun show loophole that allows private dealers to sell guns without a license and avoid required background checks;

Reinstating the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004;

And requiring consumer safety standards for all guns.

Why in the world do we regulate teddy bears and toy guns and not real guns that have snuffed out tens of thousands of child lives? Why are leaders capitulating to the powerful gun lobby over the rights of children and all people to life and safety?

I hope these shocking Connecticut child sacrifices in this holy season will force enough of us at last to stand up, speak out, and organize with urgency and persistence until the president, members of Congress, governors and state legislators put child safety ahead of political expediency. And we must aspire and act together to become the world leader in protecting children against gun violence rather than leading the world in child victims of guns. Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect all our children.

Albert Camus, Nobel Laureate, speaking at a Dominican monastery in 1948 said: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” He described our responsibility as human beings “if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it” and “to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents.” It is time for a critical mass of Americans to refuse to consent to the killing of children by gun violence.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children’s Defense Fund and its Action Council.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.