SHIREEN ABU AKLEH, assassinated by Iraeli snipers

Posted on May 16, 2022 by MITCHEL COHEN

Dave Rovics’ haunting song about the City of Jenin.

SHIREEN ABU AKLEH Heroic Palestinian-American journalist with Al Jezeera, assassinated by Israeli snipers as she was conducting interviews in the city of Jenin

Protest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn NY, May 15, 2022

Shireen talks about how she became a journalist (click)

Israel officials make excuses. They lie. They intentionally targeted Shireen. (click)

What the hell are the heads of American non-profits in Jerusalem doing evicting Palestinians from their homes? (click)

Dear Jewish people especially, and all caring people: The Israeli government is committing these atrocities claiming that they are doing so because they are enabled by Jewish acquiescence everywhere, especially in the United States. So let me state as clearly as possible: As Jews — as people — we say a resounding NO, NOT IN MY NAME, and also demand the cut-off all funding by the U.S. government to the state of Israel. ALL OF IT. Not a penny to the state of Israel.

Let me appropriate the words I grew up with: NEVER AGAIN.

Mitchel Cohen, Jewish (and disgusted)
Brooklyn, New York

Posted in COMMENTARY, PALESTINE / ISRAEL, Uncategorized | No Comments »

“The World’s Most Evil Company” May Lose a Few Court Fights—But Will Keep On Poisoning and Killing Millions of People with Its Carcinogenic Pesticide ‘Roundup’

Posted on May 10, 2022 by MITCHEL COHEN

Monsanto (now part of Bayer AB) had to pay $78 million in 2018 and $10 billion more in 2020 to settle 100,000 cancer lawsuits. But that won’t stop a company whose 2021 revenues will top $49.991 billion…which is why Roundup is still being profitably sprayed in 160 countries around the world.

[The following is excerpted from the new edition of my book “The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides,” written and edited by Mitchel Cohen with a forward by Vandana Shiva.—Editors]

A battle royale is ripping through every country against the Monsanto Company’s carcinogenic chemical glyphosate, the primary active ingredient in its most profitable pesticide, “Roundup.” (Monsanto is now owned by the drug and agrochemical multinational corporation, Bayer.)

Advocates of pesticides claim that they increase crop yields, protect the public from insect-borne diseases, and save labor costs by chemically killing “weeds.” Opponents counter that synthetic pesticides harm human beings, animals, beneficial insects, wildlife, and plants;^[1] they pollute drinking water and food chains, increase health-related costs, and represent a contemptuous and colonizer’s approach to life and nature. The production and application of pesticides for corporate profit ignores and, in fact, assaults human health and the ecological balance of the natural environment.

For every environmental movement success in pressuring governments to ban an egregious pesticide, the industry spits out a new one and the cycle begins again. Victories over individual pesticides are undermined by a methodology that examines each chemical in isolation from the others; each corporate polluter is seen as an exception to the rule, a “bad apple” in an otherwise benevolent system. Thus, arsenic begat DDT, DDT begat organophosphates, the first wave of organophosphates begat pyrethroids and glyphosate, and now glyphosate begets dicamba.

Jonathan Latham, co-founder and Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and the Editor of Independent Science News, points out^[2] that, although stopping the applications of glyphosate will be a significant victory, it will not be enough; the chemical corporations’ policies will remain unchanged and they will simply substitute another poison.

]

Movements concerned with stopping the mass applications of pesticides need to go deeper, beyond the usual concerns about a particular chemical or corporation. If each pesticide, banned after years of struggle, is thought of as the exception to the rule, then the system itself is assumed to be fundamentally stable and beneficial, save for those few rotten apples.

The system, though, is fundamentally unstable, unsustainable, and harmful. It reflects—and regurgitates—an approach to nature and to human life in which life is denigrated, and maximization of corporate profits is par for the course (golf courses being one of the prime abusers of pesticides in urban areas).

We will never succeed in saving ourselves, our children and the environment by opposing one pesticide (or pipeline, or corporation) at a time, as corporate capitalism engages in its relentless drive to expand, consolidate smaller companies, centralize production, and exert monopolistic control. Consideration of more radical frameworks and actions is therefore essential if ecological activists are to build upon limited victories and save the interconnected web of life on this planet.

In 2015, rocker Neil Young wrote and belted out the lead song for an album titled, The Monsanto Years:

You never know what the future holds in the shallow soil of Monsanto, Monsanto

The moon is full and the seeds are sown while the farmer toils for Monsanto, Monsanto
When these seeds rise they’re ready for the pesticide
And Roundup comes and brings the poison tide of Monsanto, Monsanto

The farmer knows he’s got to grow what he can sell, Monsanto, Monsanto
So he signs a deal for GMOs that makes life hell with Monsanto, Monsanto
Every year he buys the patented seeds
Poison-ready they’re what the corporation needs, Monsanto

– Lyrics and song by Neil Young,^[3] “The Monsanto Years,” (2015)

Monsanto officials attempted to discredit Neil Young. They investigated him, monitored his communications, and posted internal memos about his social media activity and music. The company did the same with Reuters senior correspondent Carey Gillam, who published devastating investigations of the company’s weedkiller and its links to cancer.^[4]

Neil Young and actress Daryl Hannah with attorney Robert Kennedy Jr. attending Monsanto trial in which plantiffs alleged Roundup caused cancer. [Source: neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org]

And then Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a forty-six-year-old groundskeeper and pest-control manager at Benicia Public School District in Solano County, California, sued Monsanto. Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after he had repeatedly sprayed Roundup, as directed, on school grounds (and thereby unwittingly jeopardized the lives of 5,000 young students in that district as well as his own). After a four-week trial ending on August 10, 2018, a unanimous jury awarded Johnson $289 million.

**Dewayne “Lee” Johnson in court.** [Source: sfchronicle.com]

While San Francisco Superior Court judge Suzanne Bolanos upheld the jury’s verdict finding that Roundup indeed caused Johnson’s cancer, she cut its unprecedented punitive damage award by seventy-five percent.^[5]

Some jurors were so upset by the prospect of having their verdict thrown out that they wrote to Bolanos:

“I urge you to respect and honor our verdict and the six weeks of our lives that we dedicated to this trial,” juror Gary Kitahata wrote. Juror Robert Howard said that the jury paid “studious attention” to the evidence and that any decision to overturn its verdict would shake his confidence in the judicial system.^[6]

“The cause is way bigger than me,” Johnson said. “Hopefully this thing will start to get the attention that it needs to get right.”^[7] Indeed, Johnson’s was the first of what has mushroomed into 125,000 lawsuits against Monsanto over cancers, injuries and deaths caused by Roundup.^[8]

In another legal victory against Monsanto, the Court of Appeal for the State of California affirmed the lower court’s decision, ruling that “Monsanto acted with willful disregard for the safety of others.…Monsanto’s conduct evidenced reckless disregard of the health and safety of the multitude of unsuspecting consumers it kept in the dark [and was] motivated by the desire for sales and profit.”^[9]

Dewayne Johnson’s victory against Monsanto—a David vs. Goliath battle—snapped attention to the issue of toxic pesticides, the corruption of regulatory agencies, and notably, the pesticide horrors that thousands of workers are subjected to on a daily basis. It also opened a window onto the sordid history of the Bayer corporation, its involvement with the Nazis in Germany in World War II, and its medical “experiments” done first on Mexican workers at the border before carrying that “research” over the Atlantic, to use on the Jewish population in Nazi Germany.^[10]

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”

Along the U.S. southern border, agribusiness conglomerates recruit farmworkers from Mexico and Central America to pick crops for low pay, under wretched conditions. Like the crops, the workers are soaked with pesticides. American folksinger Woody Guthrie’s song, “Pastures of Plenty,” depicts those conditions:

It’s a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed

My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road

Out of your Dust Bowl and westward we rolled

And your deserts were hot and your mountain was cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes

Slept on the ground in the light of your moon

On the edge of the city you’ll see us and then

We come with the dust and we go with the wind.^[11]

Every year, there are ten to twenty thousand cases of farmworker poisonings reported, with different chemicals impacting different areas of the body. For example, workers in the citrus industry have higher incidence of gastric cancer, which is caused by phenoxyacetic acid herbicide 2,4-D; the organochlorine insecticide chlordane; and the herbicide triflurin.^[12]

That spraying is intended to kill insects and rodents, but all too often the health of the workers is of secondary concern, when it is considered at all. We can trace the U.S. government’s mass spraying of migrant workers at least as far back as 1917 when, under the guise of protecting the country from the threat of typhus, U.S. Customs agents began delousing Mexicans who were legally crossing the border at the El Paso-Juarez international bridge and into areas of the U.S. that were formerly part of Mexico.

In 1917 alone, 127,000 workers crossing the border were forced to strip naked and given pesticide showers. By the 1920s, the chemical used at the border switched to the notorious cyanide-based Zyklon B, manufactured by the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben. Border agents tested the gas on Mexican workers, with the results sent to the German affiliate where it was used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews in the gas chambers. Like the Mexican workers, the Jews in Germany were similarly considered “vermin.”

A group of people in a room Description automatically generated with low confidence — **Contract Mexican laborers being fumigated with the pesticide DDT in Hidalgo, Texas, in 1956. [Source: zinnedproject.org]**

“All immigrants from the interior of Mexico, and those whom U.S. Customs officials deemed “second-class” residents of Juarez, were required to strip completely, turn in their clothes to be sterilized in a steam dryer and fumigated with hydrocyanic acid, then stand naked before a Customs inspector who would check his or her ‘hairy parts’ — scalp, armpits, chest, genital area — for lice. Those found to have lice would be required to shave their heads and body hair with clippers and bathe with kerosene and vinegar.”^[13]

Historian/musician David Dorado Romo remembers how his great Aunt, Adela Dorado, “would tell our family about the humiliation of having to go through the delousing every eight days just to clean American homes in El Paso. She recalled how on one occasion the U.S. Customs officials put her clothes and shoes through the steam dryer and her shoes melted.”^[14]

In a moment now forgotten from history, one day in 1917 a 17-year-old female migrant, Carmelita Torres, working as a maid in Juarez, crossed the border as she did every day to clean houses and refused to undress and be showered in pesticides. By noon, she was joined by several thousand “refusers” at the border bridge. Carmelita Torres became the Rosa Parks of what would be dubbed “the Bath Riots.”

The Orchestration of Disease—Manufacturing Fear of Immigrants

At the time of the Bath Riots, the mainstream (corporate) press did everything it could to sensationalize the typhus “threat” from Mexican migrants. That disease devastated the Russian working class at the time of the 1917 revolution, along with tens of thousands of Austrian prisoners of war (World War I) in Serbia.^[15]

But in the U.S. that year, there was the small total of only 31 typhus cases overall, and only three typhus-related fatalities in El Paso. While public health was certainly a concern, officials used fear of typhus as a vehicle for fomenting repressive migrant and anti-working-class policies. Today, typhus – caused by a bacterium transmitted by some body lice—is readily treated with oral Ivermectin and clean clothing.

As one of the founding corporations in the IG Farben consortium, Bayer had no compunction about testing drugs on unwilling human subjects, such as prisoners, soldiers, and migrants. The U.S. Holocaust Museum describes Bayer’s involvement in Nazi “medical experiments” on Jews and other prisoners who were deliberately infected against their will with tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other diseases at the Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen concentration camps. Nazi physician Helmuth Vetter, appointed as the German Reich’s chief doctor by Heinrich Himmler, coordinated the experiments.

**Dr. Helmuth Vetter [Source: artsandculture.google.com]**

The Holocaust Museum notes that in Buchenwald, “physicians infected prisoners with typhus in order to test the efficacy of anti-typhus drugs, resulting in high mortality among test prisoners.”^[16] Bayer was central to those “experiments”. The company was particularly active in Auschwitz. “A senior Bayer official oversaw the chemical factory in Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Most of the experiments were conducted in Birkenau in Block 20, the women’s camp hospital. There, Vetter and Auschwitz physicians Eduard Wirths and Friedrich Entress tested Bayer pharmaceuticals on prisoners who suffered from and often had been deliberately infected with tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other diseases.”^[17] Following World War II, Vetter was convicted by an American military tribunal at the Mauthausen Trial, and was executed at Landsberg Prison in February 1949.

**Friedrich Entress [Source: wikipedia.org]**

After the war, some employees of Bayer appeared in the IG Farben trial, one of the Nuremberg Subsequent Tribunals under U.S. jurisdiction. Among them was Fritz ter Meer, who helped to plan the Monowitz camp (Auschwitz III) and IG Farben’s Buna Werke factory at Auschwitz, where medical experimentation had been conducted and where 25,000 forced laborers were deployed. Ter Meer was sentenced to seven years, but was released in 1950 for good behavior. One positive outcome of these subsequent Nuremberg trials was the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, a product of the Nuremberg Doctors’ trial which codified prohibitions against the kinds of involuntary experimentation conducted by Bayer in the concentration camp system.^[18]

**Fritz ter Meer [Source: digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu]**

In the immediate postwar, the victorious allies divided the IG Farben conglomerate into individual companies, but still allowed them to function. Bayer, along with BASF and Hoechst—all part of the IG Farben conglomerate and supporters of the Nazis in World War II—re-emerged as one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

Bayer, however, “did little to come to terms with its Nazi past,” the Holocaust Museum notes, and adds this tidbit: “Fritz ter Meer, convicted of war crimes for his actions at Auschwitz, was elected to Bayer AG’s supervisory board in 1956, a position he retained until 1964.”^[19]

At the U.S. border with Mexico, the U.S. government policy of spraying Mexican workers with toxic pesticides continued apace thru the late 1950s and into the 1960s. The organochloride insecticide DDT became the pesticide of choice, until the movement inspired by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, forced out DDT after a decade of mounting protests.

An Aspirin the Size of the Sun

In June 2018, the U.S. Justice Department approved the $66 billion purchase of Monsanto by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, making Bayer-Monsanto the most powerful agribusiness entity on the planet. It now owns and controls more than 25 percent of the world’s seeds, and more than one third of global herbicide sales.

The Bayer-Monsanto consolidation—one of the rotting legs of what physicist and world ecology advocate Vandana Shiva calls “The Poison Cartel”—came on the heels of the merger of the agricultural divisions of Dow and Dupont (now called Corteva Agriscience), and Syngenta’s merger with ChemChina. (Syngenta itself was the outcome of the consolidation of part of Novartis with AstraZeneca.)

As a result of its acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer—no stranger to protecting itself from condemnations of its dreadful record when it comes to human rights and environmental justice—now has to decide how to proceed with the torrent of lawsuits, which have resulted in penalties and fines soaring into many billions of dollars.^[20] Bayer could not alleviate this headache even by gulping down the adult-size dose of its other famous drug, packaged in its familiar yellow and brown box. To do so would take, in poet Roque Dalton’s verse, “an aspirin the size of the sun.”

By July 2021, the financial pressures on Bayer forced the company to begin pulling Roundup from the shelves of such companies as The Home Depot and Lowe’s; as of 2023, Roundup will no longer be sold to individual gardeners in the U.S.,^[21] a historic victory for enviro-activists and the environment.^[22]

But the Biden administration—like those before it (Republican and Democratic alike)—presses on in defense of Monsanto and its attempt to control the agriculture throughout the globe via genetically engineering the world’s food supply, for which its herbicide, Roundup, has been so destructively designed.

Biden has gone so far as to appoint “Mr. Monsanto”—Tom Vilsack—again, as Agriculture Secretary. (Vilsack served in that same capacity for eight years in the Obama administration, despite much protest from environmental activists.^[23])

This same Poison Cartel has accumulated trillions of dollars by manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs to “save us” from the cancers and neurological diseases their pesticides are causing. The “revolving door” spins freely between corporate interests and regulatory agency apparatchiks no matter which party is in power.^[24] The agencies not only “look the other way” but have now been exposed for having ghost-written Monsanto’s applications for Roundup and other chemicals to those very same agencies.^[25]

The entire planet is awash in chemical pollutants that poison our drinking water, food and soil, human breast milk,^[26] animals, and ecosystems. Our “leaders” have long and storied histories of groveling before and collaborating with the titans of industry, whose propaganda machines promote self-interested assurances that their products are “safe” and environmentally friendly. They know that truthful information, under the right circumstances, can move people to rebel.

So they contaminate the truth, just as they pollute the natural environment, to foster public acceptance of pesticides and genetic engineering of the world’s food supply. Will activists in the United States and other industrial countries be able to force their governments to reverse course? Will they succeed in challenging the corporate quest for ever-increasing profits and control? To do so requires those reading this essay to be reborn as ecology activists who strive to win society to a different way of looking at human interactions with nature—no easy task, in current circumstances —and to take action based on that transformed consciousness.

Key pieces of information regarding the U.S. government’s worldwide advocacy (including the threatened use of its military) on behalf of Monsanto’s patented seeds exploded onto the internet via thousands of cables “liberated” by current political prisoner Julian Assange. The cables Assange published revealed massive U.S. government attempts on behalf of Monsanto, and its patents, to arm-twist countries throughout the world, along with its attempts to squelch opposition to GMOs (genetically modified organisms). The cables showed U.S. diplomats applying financial, diplomatic, and even military pressure on behalf of Monsanto and other biotech corporations.

[Source: tppbadforus.info/Monsanto-with-tpp]

In a 2007 cable marked “confidential,” Craig Stapleton, then U.S. Ambassador to France, advised the U.S. to prepare for economic war with countries unwilling to introduce Monsanto’s GM corn seeds. He called for retaliation, to “make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices. In fact, the pro-biotech side in France…[has] told us retaliation is the only way to begin to turn this issue in France.”^[27] The U.S. diplomatic team recommended that “we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.”^[28]

**Craig Stapleton** [Source: wikipedia.org]

In another cable, this one from Macau and Hong Kong, a U.S. Department of Agriculture director requested $92,000 in U.S. public funds for “media education kits” to combat growing public resistance to genetically engineered foods. It portrays attempts to mandate the labeling of GMOs as a “threat” to U.S. interests, and seeks to “make it much more difficult for mandatory labeling advocates to prevail.”

The cables released by Wikileaks revealed that officials in the Obama administration, particularly in
Hillary Clinton’s State Department, intervened at Monsanto’s request “to undermine legislation that might restrict sales of genetically engineered seeds.” Under Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department was so gung-ho to promote GMOs that Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott called it “the de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel.”

The New York Daily News reported that State Department officials under Hillary Clinton were actively using taxpayer money to promote Monsanto’s controversial GMO seeds around the world.

**Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting Monsanto’s interests in Kenya in 2009. [Source: motherjones.com]**

The fight against GMOs and Roundup is partly a propaganda war; U.S. officials recommended pro-biotech and bio-agriculture DVDs be sent to every high school in Hong Kong.^[29]

The cables reveal the joint strategic planning of Monsanto and the U.S. government. In one series, Monsanto concluded that northern Thailand would be an ideal location to cultivate genetically engineered corn for export to other countries, due to the area’s very low labor and infrastructure costs.

In this cable, one country, Peru, is mentioned as recipient, and the U.S. official suggests that even with transportation expenses across two oceans included, it would nevertheless be more profitable to grow and ship GMO corn from northern Thailand than from neighboring Argentina or Brazil, since U.S. “diplomatic efforts” would be used to drive down the cost of production in northern Thailand. The U.S. would press Thailand to drop its opposition to GM cultivation, and the country would be rewarded. The cables provide a fascinating (and terrfying) glimpse into the seemingly mundane mechanisms of global imperialism on a very localized level.

WikiLeaks “acquired” and published a searchable database and unabridged text of the secret 2015 TransPacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and Trade in Services Agreement.^[30] The rogue publisher exposed the U.S. government’s pressure on other countries to purchase and plant Monsanto’s patented genetically engineered seeds, which required the concomitant purchase of Monsanto’s patented pesticides in order for the crops to grow.

The treaties limited the ability of one country to legally challenge environmental depradation in trade with another, making it abundantly clear that environmental issues could not be successfully addressed in piecemeal fashion, but must be seen as integrated political, technological, economic, and scientifically packaged warfare. To succeed, movements would be compelled to not only examine the dangers of each pesticide du jour, but the underlying mechanisms by which corporations such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Novartis, BASF and other pesticide and pharmaceutical manufacturers come to determine government policies overall, as well as those of global regulatory agencies, which in turn allow them to get away with masking the truth about their products.

Left activists have always exposed the collaboration between government and corporate expansion, but the details revealed by WikiLeaks’ documents are nothing short of astounding. They reveal the need for ecological movements to develop far more radical strategies for dealing with the immense destruction by capitalism in practice, and not just in theory. For this largely unknown contribution by Julian Assange, ecological activists, along with antiwar radicals motivated by Julian’s “collateral damage” video (obtained from Chelsea Manning), owe him a debt of gratitude that can never be fully repaid.

Today, Julian Assange—locked away in a British prison despite judicial findings in his favor—is fighting for his life. The U.S. government seeks to bring this Australian citizen back to the United States for a show trial and then lock him up forever, if they don’t assassinate him en route.^[31] The sacrifices Julian Assange has made are profound, and his contribution to ecological as well as antiwar movements is enormous. It is incumbent on all to demand an end to his incarceration and torment by the U.S. and British governments.^[32]

And yet, despite worldwide exposure of glyphosate’s dangers and its designation as a “probable carcinogen,” only a handful of governments throughout the world joined with environmental activists and health professionals in banning it. We—people who want to breathe clean air, drink pure water, preserve what’s left of the old-growth forests, protect the many species that share this earth with us, and escape from the epidemics of cancer and neurological disorders—need to grasp why government officials ever allowed it at all?

A strategic question: How significant is the fight to ban individual pesticides, since the industry releases new and equally dangerous ones into the environment, to replace the ones being banned or withdrawn?^[33]

The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides encourages readers to think about the weaknesses and contradictions of the process used to approve pesticides. The purported experts have been proven wrong on so many occasions that we’d be fools to take their acceptance of Roundup at face value, especially since many researchers conceal their financial arrangements with corporate funders, thereby biasing the outcome and reporting of their research.^[34]

The 2016 occupation and blockade of an underground oil pipeline under construction at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota offered a wider vision for how to construct effective social movements. The Dakota Access pipeline was to carry oil 1,172 miles from [Canada’s] Bakken oil fields for distribution in the U.S. midwest. More than 10,000 participants took part in an occupation lasting months, and, unlike the politicians in D.C., heroically refused to be divided by the false assurances of those in power.

But even in the face of unprecedented united opposition to the pipeline among Native American tribes and environmental activists, many politicians nonetheless acceded to the assurances of corporate power regarding the safety of their pipelines, just as they had done with regard to pesticides and genetically engineered products.^[35]

Those policies, and the politicians who comply with and promulgate them, betray the public good; corporate donations to their campaigns serve to bribe key legislators and government executives to boost Roundup, despite the dangers. And budget-conscious officials—many of them in thrall to the pesticides industry—have decided that it’s more cost-effective for now to lay off workers and replace their labor-intensive but much safer weeding-by-hand with chemical herbicides like glyphosate. In the short run, this reduces public expenditure, until the outsized health and environmental costs are factored in.

The fight for clean water, soil, and air remains just as necessary today, unfortunately, as it was in 1962, when Rachel Carson issued her call to arms not only against chemical pesticides such as DDT but, lest we forget, a plethora of pollutants including (especially) radiation from atomic bomb tests. Today, sixty years after its publication, Silent Spring’s clarion call to fight the corporate and government polluters and defend the environment is more necessary than ever. And to succeed, mass movements need to draw on the insights, efforts, victories, and sacrifices of prior generations.

The spirits of those who came before lead us to becoming aware of the connections between Roundup and the genetic engineering of agriculture. They also help us to connect the issues of hydrofracking, climate chaos, huge dams, mountaintop removal, nuclear power and weapons, oil and gas pipelines, pollution, factory farming, EMF pollution, and wetlands destruction and flooding.

Industrial capitalism is anti-ecological at its core. Rachel Carson bequeathed us a legacy of courage, which impels us to devise new forms of action not only against individual pesticides, but against the systemic wars initiated by the same corporations and governments for labor, land, resources, and geopolitical control. It’s high time that the Left (and I’m talking about the real Left here, not the media-anointed Left) exposes the integrated nature of these technologies and provides the kind of anti-capitalist leadership needed, one that challenges arch-rightwing forces that are misleading well-meaning people into a void filled with reactionary formulations and strategies.

[This article has been excerpted from the Preface to Mitchel Cohen’s book, The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides. To learn more about the book and its numerous contributors, please click on https://www.ThePoliticsofPesticides.com.]

Some ecologists believe that all organisms, whether “beneficial” to human purposes or not, have an intrinsic right to exist. Thus, the use of the judgment “beneficial” is considered by deep ecologists, for example, to be anathema to ecological vision. ↑
“Unsafe at any Dose? Glyphosate in the Context of Multiple Chemical Safety Failures,” a chapter in this book. ↑
A Monsanto representative had this to say about Neil Young’s song: “Many of us at Monsanto have been and are fans of Neil Young. Unfortunately, for some of us, his current album may fail to reflect our strong beliefs in what we do every day to help make agriculture more sustainable. We recognize there is a lot of misinformation about who we are and what we do—and unfortunately several of those myths seem to be captured in these lyrics.” ↑
Sam Levin, “Revealed: how Monsanto’s ‘intelligence center’ targeted journalists and activists,” The Guardian, Aug. 8, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/monsanto-fusion-center-journalists-roundup-neil-young. Carey Gillam’s exposés can be found on the website “U.S. Right to Know,” https://usrtk.org. Her books include Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2017) and The Monsanto Papers – Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2021). ↑
Paul Elias, Associated Press, October 23, 2018. ↑
Elias, ibid. ↑
Stephanie K. Baer, “A Jury Has Awarded Nearly $290 Million To A Man Who Says A Popular Weed Killer Caused His Cancer.” BuzzFeed News, Aug. 10, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/weed-killer-cancer-jury-verdict ↑
In October 2021, Monsanto – which had been losing case after case – scored a partial win in court against a parent whose child developed cancer as a result of repeated exposures to Roundup. The child’s attorney said the jury doubted that a few exposures to Roundup could have been enough to cause cancer. However, he said the jury did not address the larger question of the alleged carcinogenicity of Roundup overall, and the appeal is currently underway. ↑
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Pilliod-Opinion.pdf ↑
So-called “medical experiments,” often amounting to torture, have been done systematically on women in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, prisoners in the U.S., American Indians, soldiers, Black Americans (Tuskegee being just one example of many, as discussed in later chapters in this book. ↑
© Copyright 1960 (renewed) and 1963 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI). For the full lyrics, see https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pastures_Of_Plenty.htm. ↑
Ariel Wittenberg, “EPA pesticide ban overlooks some farmworkers,” The GreenWire, Sept. 14, 2021. ↑
David Dorado Romo, “Jan. 28, 1917: The Bath Riots,” Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/bath-riots. The other quotes following in this section are taken from that same article. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Microbiology Society, “Typhus in World War I”, https://microbiologysociety.org/publication/past-issues/world-war-i/article/typhus-in-world-war-i.html. ↑
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2126. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Alva and Alberta Pilliod of Livermore, California, were awarded $2 billion. (Andrew Blankstein and Adiel Kaplan, “California jury hits Monsanto with $2 billion judgment in cancer lawsuit,” NBC News, May 13, 2019.) Another jury in 2019 awarded cancer victim Edwin Hardeman $5.3 million in compensation for his illness and $75 million in punitive damages, which are intended to punish a defendant and deter future misconduct. The jury found that punitive damages were required because Monsanto had failed to warn users about its product. A judge later reduced the punitive award to $20 million. (Maura Dolan, “Appeals court upholds $25-million verdict against maker of Roundup,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2021). ↑
“Bayer Confirms End of Sale of Glyphosate-Based Herbicides for U.S. Lawn & Garden Market,” Sustainable Pulse, July 29, 2021. ↑
Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety (CFS). ↑
Madeline Knight, “Biden Chooses Tom “Mr. Monsanto” Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary,” Left Voice, December 23, 2020. ↑
Mitchel Cohen, “Genetic Engineering, Pesticides, and Resistance to the New Colonialism,” Chapter 15, for many more details about the “revolving door”. See also Jordan Schachtel, “The Revolving Door: All 3 FDA-authorized COVID shot companies now employ former FDA commissioners,” in Dossier.substack.com. ↑
Danny Hakim, “Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents,” The New York Times, March 14, 2017. The documents themselves are available at www.poisonpapers.org. Also, “The Poison Papers Expose Decades of Collusion between Industry and Regulators over Hazardous Pesticides and Other Chemicals,” Bioscience Resource Project, July 26, 2017. ↑
A study by Moms Across America in 2014 found glyphosate in breast milk, which was especially alarming (https://www.momsacrossamerica.com /glyphosate_testing_results). It’s also accumulating in soybeans. (See T. Bøhn, et al., “Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate Accumulates in Roundup Ready GM Soybeans,” Food Chemistry 153 (June 2014): 207– 15.) ↑
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07PARIS4723_a.html ↑
Ibid. ↑
Anita Katial, Senior Director Europe Operations at USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), is named as the responsible officer for the pro-biotech propaganda effort on behalf of the U.S. government. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09HONGKONG128_a.html ↑
https://wikileaks.org/tpp-final/ ↑
Julian Borger, “CIA officials under Trump discussed assassinating Julian Assange – report: Mike Pompeo and officials requested ‘options’ for killing Assange following WikiLeaks’ publication of CIA hacking tools, report says.” The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2021. ↑
Many thanks to Patricia Dahl, an organizer with Stand with Assange NY, for outlining some of the secret involvements of the U.S. government with Monsanto and other corporate polluters that were first brought to light by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. See Michael Ratner, Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer (New York: OR Books: 2021), for an extensive first-hand review of the Assange legal case by his chief attorney. ↑
A similar question resonates in this one: How significant is the fight, say, for workers in one shop to fight for and achieve higher wages since capitalism keeps offering new low-waged jobs that desperate people around the world are willing to take, under the coercion of the frequently unbearable costs of daily life? (Karl Marx was one of the first to address this question in a small pamphlet, “Value, Price and Profit.”) ↑
Sheldon Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research, With a foreword by Ralph Nader (2003: Rowman & Littlefield Pubs); also, Krimsky, “Conflicts of Interest In Science: How Corporate-Funded Academic Research Can Threaten Public Health,” (Hot Books, 2019). ↑
The Standing Rock Sioux and environmental advocates won a temporary victory in July 2020 when a judge ordered that the Dakota Access Pipeline must shut down by August 5, 2020 pending a court-ordered environmental review. Microsoft News called this “a major defeat for the Trump administration and the oil companies that have been on the wrong side of history for years.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/victory-for-standing-rock-the-dakota-access-pipeline-must-shut-down-by-august-5/ar-BB16oYiF. However by May of 2021 the environmental review process had still not been completed, and a judge ruled that oil could flow through the pipeline while such review is pending. Meanwhile, in June of 2021 eco-activists in Hubbard County, Minnesota, chained themselves to a semi truck carrying drilling equipment Monday in an attempt to stop construction of Line 3, a $9.3 billion pipeline meant to transport some of the most climate-destructive oil in the world into the states. (Samir Ferdowsi, “Protesters Chained Themselves to a Semi Truck to Stop the Next Big U.S. Oil Pipeline. At least 500 water protectors were arrested protesting the Line 3 pipeline, which will carry toxic tar sands oil from Canada into the U.S.,” Vice News, June 17, 2021). Earlier that month (June 2021), the Biden administration revoked the permit for yet another pipeline subject to mass protests, the Keystone Xl pipeline. ↑

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About the Author

Mitchel Cohen coordinates the No Spray Coalition in New York City, which successfully sued the City government over its indiscriminate spraying of toxic pesticides.

In 1997, he organized the campaign to rid NYC public schools of milk from cows injected with genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone, and in 2001, he ran for Mayor of NYC as one of five Green Party candidates.

He was editor of the national newspaper Green Politix, and of the NY State Green Party newspaper.

Mitchel edited Red Balloon, the journal of the Red Balloon Collective that he co-founded at SUNY Stony Brook. He also chaired WBAI radio’s Local Board.

His writings include: The Social Construction of Neurosis, and numerous other pamphlets under the rubric of Zen-Marxism; What is Direct Action?, a book that draws on personal experiences as well as lessons from Occupy Wall Street; An American in Revolutionary Nicaragua; Listen Bookchin! and two books of poetry, One-Eyed Cat Takes Flight and The Permanent Carnival.

Mitchel can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com.

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HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS, 101: Yellow-Ribboning the Lies: How George Bush Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to America

Posted on March 2, 2022 by MITCHEL COHEN

“The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes.”

– President George H.W. Bush

NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991

On October 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. She was presented as a Kuwaiti war refugee, and testified that she had been a volunteer worker in the al-Adan hospital in Kuwait City and had seen Iraqi soldiers, who had invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, tear fifteen babies from hospital incubators and “leave them on the cold floor to die.”

Television flashed her testimony around the world. It electrified opposition to Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, who was now portrayed by U.S. president George Bush not only as “the Butcher of Baghdad” but — so much for old friends — “a tyrant worse than Hitler.”

Bush quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in one month he referred to “312 premature babies at Kuwait City’s maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor,”(1) and of “babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.” Bush used Nayirah’s testimony to lambaste Senate Democrats still supporting “only” sanctions against Iraq — the blockade of trade which alone would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die of hunger and disease — but who waffled on endorsing the policy Bush wanted to implement: outright bombardment. Republicans and pro-war Democrats used Nayirah’s tale to hammer their fellow politicians into line behind Bush’s war in the Persian Gulf. (2) Continue reading »

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THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF NEUROSIS

Posted on February 9, 2022 by MITCHEL COHEN

by Mitchel Cohen

When 20-year-old Marja announced that she was joining the Red Balloon Collective at SUNY Stony Brook in the mid-1970s, her Long Island suburban mother went ballistic: “This is the freest country in the world. If they don’t like it here, why don’t they go back to Russia?”

Marja’s mom forbade her to get involved with the Red Balloon Collective. She phoned the FBI in Smithtown, Long Island, who told her, “They think they’re Communists, but they’re relatively harmless.”

Harmless? Harumph!

Marja made it clear she was “one of the communards.” Her mother squawked: “What’s the point? You can’t fight City Hall. And don’t sign any lists! The FBI might get hold of it and then you’ll never get a job.”

Posted in ARTICLES, POLITICAL PRISONERS, Uncategorized, ZEN-MARXISM SERIES | No Comments »

LETTER FROM JAILED ATTORNEY STEVEN DONZIGER, IMPRISONED FOR FIGHTING AGAINST CHEVRON’S POISONING OF THE ECUADORAN AMAZON

Posted on November 21, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Mitchel Cohen interviews Steven Donziger, then under house arrest, in July 2021 at rally on his behalf outside his Manhattan apartment.

Dear friends and comrades,

This new message from Steven Donziger contains much information. Also go to freedonziger.com for additional information. If we’re going to overcome the climate catastrophe, we have to be able to hold the petroleum industry accountable and responsible. Please support Steven Donziger and his crucial struggle which is part of our climate justice struggle world-wide.

In solidarity,

Betsy Bowman
President and Research Associate
Center for Global Justice

freedonziger.com

From the belly of the beast: read Steven’s first letter from prison on eve of his appellate argument Nov. 30 to overturn Judge Preska’s “conviction” in a trial found to violate international law.

Donate today to help Steven and the Amazon communities continue their fight for freedom and to hold Chevron accountable for its “Chernobyl” ecological disaster.

I am finally able to write directly from inside the belly of the beast: the federal prison in Danbury, CT. I am now on day 23 of my incarceration, and the experience has been nothing short of mind-blowing. I am living with another person in a 54 sq ft cell; next door is a 37-year-old man, one of the kindest people I have ever met. He was sentenced to a 35-year term for gang violence when he was 19. Three people in my unit of 80 or so men are lifers and have over 30 years in the system.

The length of the sentences for various crimes is astounding. We are unique as a country for the extraordinarily punitive nature of our criminal justice system. And it sickens me to see it from the inside. All of us here are simply raw material for a business built largely on money and politics that has virtually nothing to do with rehabilitation (although there are staff here working miracles against all odds to help inmates adjust to the outside).

This is considered a “low” security prison, but the conditions are extremely limiting. No Internet, almost no newspapers, limited phone calls and email, and almost no contact with the outside world. The food is scarce; no fresh vegetables, little fruit, extremely small portions which forces the mostly impoverished inmates to supplement their diets by buying junk food at the commissary where prices can be 50% higher than the corner store in New York City. It can take weeks for a visitor to get approved; one man has not seen his kids (now aged 5 and 7) in two years because of COVID restrictions. There is a total shortage of staff, programming, and no way to get a college degree. I will only be able to write very infrequently, if at all.

Having said that, please consider this: Chevron and Judges Preska and Kaplan thought they could snuff out my advocacy by dumping me into this place. They could not be more wrong. Not only is the prison bubbling with humanity and kindness, the likes of which one rarely sees on the outside, but the support for me and the affected communities of Ecuador both in my unit and around the world has literally exploded as a result of this obvious act of corporate persecution. I am becoming stronger, more resilient, and more understanding as a person. And I have almost boundless energy to continue the fight as a result of sharing this largely miserable experience with so many people from all walks of life.

I am getting dozens of letters a day from around the world. My friends in the unit love it when the letters come. Some read them and slap their knees with incredulity. How can one prisoner get so much mail? Others remove the stamps to use as “currency,” an off-the-books economic system that allows inmates the autonomy to trade goods and services among themselves.

In the meantime, here is a concrete update on case developments:

My appellate argument to overturn Judge Preska’s “conviction” of me in the Chevron-financed non-jury contempt trial will take place on Nov. 30. This is an extremely accelerated schedule which shows the concern of the court that a great injustice might be taking place. That said, I believe judges in New York generally are closing rank behind Kaplan and Preska because our campaign has been so effective that it has challenged the institutional credibility of the federal judiciary as a whole. While I am always optimistic, I fully expect to lose this appeal and spend the balance of my six-months sentence in prison. That said, my legal team already has decided it is likely we will take the issue off the nation’s first corporate prosecution to the US Supreme Court if necessary.
Our support in Congress is growing by leaps and bounds. A new letter organized by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Chuy Garcia demanding my immediate release is gathering signatures as we speak. The letter urges The Biden administration to “send a clear signal that it stands with communities harmed by pollution and environmental destruction and the lawyers courageous enough to represent them and not the corporations that benefit from polluting the water, air, and land of local people.”
Law students nationwide are preparing to organize a work boycott of the two corporate law firms (Seward and Gibson Dunn) that Chevron has used to try to demonize and prosecute me. The Seward law firm should really be ashamed; that firm has been held by the United Nations to be in violation of multiple provisions of international law by prosecuting me.
Several human rights organizations are launching a campaign on Nov. 29 to demand President Biden pardon me — both because it is the right thing to do to correct the injustice, and also to bring the US government into conformity with international law consistent with the ruling from the United Nations.

Now, the money question. We need more funds to carry forward with these and other important activities. We need to pay people to support themselves to do this vital work. While I am locked up, the campaign must not just continue but also get stronger and more effective. Because of the incredible efforts of so many people, including my wife Laura and legal assistant Matt Burton, we are succeeding. In fact, the day I reported to prison, we gained 20,000 new followers on Twitter and many more on Instagram.

I know many already donated on the financial end. If you are not in a position to help now, please don’t worry; your support is being expressed in so many other ways and is deeply appreciated. But if you can dig deep and match your previous donation, please do. If you have not given, please consider making a donation. We are building this big with the ultimate goal of not only getting me out of this institution as soon as possible but also to put our human rights legal team in a position to finally hold Chevron fully accountable and force it to pay the full amount of the pollution judgment to the Indigenous peoples and farmers in Ecuador’s Amazon. Please contribute $2,500, $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, $15, or whatever you can today.

DONATE $25 NOW
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Thanks again to everybody for jumping into this extraordinary campaign and building this collective action that is literally changing the paradigm of the fossil fuel industry and helping to wake up the world to the promise of what citizen action can accomplish. I wake up each day in prison with a hop in my step because of you and the possibilities we have created together.

In solidarity,
Steven Donziger

Posted in ARTICLES, CIVIL LIBERTIES, ENVIRONMENT, HEROES, LATIN AMERICA, NO SPRAY | No Comments »

AN AMERICAN IN CUBA

Posted on July 25, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Sometimes it indeed feels like we are all Don Quixote, tilting at windmills that never seem to change. And yet, the Cuban revolution has, since 1959, offered a beacon into the darkness …. a hope (hoping against hope) that there can be a place where something of our ideals will not only survive but flourish.

Eight years ago, Monthly Review Press published Nancy Stout’s terrific biography of Cuban Revolutionary hero Celia Sánchez. (One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, Monthly Review Press, 2013, introduction by Alice Walker). Reading about Celia Sánchez gave me the opportunity to revisit an essay I wrote 30 years ago about the Cuban revolution. With all the misrepresentations and lies by the U.S. government regarding Cuba, I thought it would be worth taking a look at what it feels like on the ground in Cuba, with the 1959 Cuban Revolution struggling to fend off the restoration of capitalism.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, I visited Cuba as part of a delegation to the Fourth Conference of Cuban and North American Philosophers, organized by the U.S.-based Radical Philosophy Association. The trip occurred during what Cubans call the “Special Period” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s most important trade partner and benefactor. Continue reading »

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ISRAEL’S BIG LIE: THIS ISN’T SELF-DEFENSE — IT’S A WAR CRIME AIDED AND ABETTED BY THE U.S.

Posted on May 17, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Mitchel Cohen’s report from the “Palestine Lives!” march in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on May 15, 2021, for WBAI radio.

Almost everything said in the U.S. about Israel’s assault on the Palestinians is a lie — because we are implicated

Guest post by Chris Hedges

Published May 15, 2021 in ScheerPost.

main article image Smoke billows after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City targeted the Ansar compound, linked to the Hamas movement, in the Gaza Strip on May 14, 2021. – Israel pounded Gaza and deployed extra troops to the border as Palestinians fired barrages of rockets back, with the death toll in the enclave on the fourth day of conflict climbing to over 100. (MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images)

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.

Israel has made clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high-rises including buildings that housed more than a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East bureau chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, where more than 2 million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation — the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near-constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel. [Note by Mitchel Cohen: I do not agree with Chris Hedges’ perspective on what transpired in Yugoslavia nor his equating of Serbia with the Israeli state. See Mitchel’s NOT ON THE NEWS: AGAINST NATO’S WAR ON YUGOSLAVIA and also BOMBING THE BRIDGE TO THE 21ST CENTURY: Behind NATO’s Bombardment of Yugoslavia.]

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 UN Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once-vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaida, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front. Advertisement:

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second-class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites — there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz — and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects — and this is also true in the United States — always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine antisemitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of antisemitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses.

The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights — including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy of which is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured an unconstitutional invitation from then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.

The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent more than $6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are antisemites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of antisemitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real antisemites.

Racism, including antisemitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off each other. They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological twins.

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cyber-surveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.”

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.'” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21st-century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a columnist at Scheerpost. He is the author of several books, including “America: The Farewell Tour,” “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”

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Could an accident have caused COVID-19? Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory shouldn’t be dismissed

Posted on March 22, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Alison Young provides a nerve-wracking account of failures and releases of dangerous pathogens from biolabs around the world. Still, I am surprised that she doesn’t mention the shutting down of the USAMRID biowar facility at Fort Detrick, MD, in 2019, shortly before the first cases of Covid-19 were observed, along with Fort Detrick’s close association with the lab in Wuhan, experimenting on the same viruses.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/

I have reported on safety lapses at elite U.S. labs. There is no reason to believe they aren’t happening at labs in other countries as well.

Alison Young, Opinion Contributor

Published 4:00 AM EDT Mar. 22, 2021 Updated 9:05 AM EDT Mar. 22, 2021

Clink. Clink. Clink.

On a warm summer evening in July 2014, a laboratory worker on the National Institutes of Health’s sprawling campus just north of Washington, D.C., exited Building 29A toting a cardboard box. Its contents rattled inside – an assortment of fragile glass vials labeled with faded typewriter script: Q fever, rickettsia, and worst of all, four strains of variola – the dreaded virus that causes smallpox.

Highly contagious, variola is one of the deadliest viruses the world has ever known. It could rip through most of the U.S. population and cause a global health disaster if released. It killed as many as three out of every 10 people infected before it was declared eradicated from the planet in 1980.

Clink. Clink.

Nobody has been routinely vaccinated against smallpox in decades, leaving most people in the U.S. and around the world vulnerable to infection. Yet after forgotten specimen vials dating to the 1940s and 1950s were discovered at the NIH in an unlocked cold storage room, nothing was done to ensure their safe transportation. They were allowed to bump around in a cardboard box with dozens of other old biological specimens as a lone laboratory worker walked them to another building about two blocks away, federal records show.

One vial had already shattered.

The world got lucky that day, as it often has when safety breaches occur at biological laboratories in the United States and around the world.

A deadly epidemic wasn’t unleashed. It was only a tissue specimen that broke and nobody got sick.

“Had any of the six glass vials containing the Variola virus been breached, there would have been nothing to contain the agent and prevent its release to the surrounding environment,” according to a joint investigation report by the FBI and federal lab regulators.

“I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.Christopher Black, World Health Organization via AFP

As members of a World Health Organization expert team have made international headlines recently dismissing as “extremely unlikely” the possibility that a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t stop thinking of the hundreds of lab accidents that are secretly occurring just in the United States.

As an investigative reporter, I have spent more than a decade revealing shocking safety breaches that officials at laboratories in our own country don’t want the public to know about.

I have uncovered exotic and deadly bacteria that have hitched rides out of high-security labs on workers’ dirty clothing, silently spreading contagion for weeks. I have revealed how spacesuit-like protective gear and tubes carrying safe oxygen to scientists have torn or broken – repeatedly – and high-tech safety systems have failed dramatically. Vials of viruses and bacteria have gone missing. Researchers bitten by infected lab animals have been allowed to move about in public – rather than being quarantined – while waiting for signs of infection to appear.

These and similar safety lapses are happening with disturbing regularity at elite U.S. labs operated by government agencies, the military, universities and private firms. There is no reason to believe they aren’t happening at labs in other countries as well.

The notion that more than 2.7 million deaths worldwide – so far – could be the result of a lab accident has been met with skepticism and derision by many journalists and scientists who often portray it as a crackpot conspiracy theory fueled by former President Donald Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric. Without question, the lab-leak theory has been politically and racially weaponized in ugly ways. But that rhetoric needs to be separated from legitimate questions about lab safety that are deserving of investigation.

Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth. But those who dare seek answers to reasonable questions about any lab accidents in Wuhan are accused of peddling conspiracies.

Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan may not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor.

These and similar safety lapses are happening with disturbing regularity at elite U.S. labs operated by government agencies, the military, universities and private firms.

No matter what, this is a moment for the U.S. and the world to take a hard look at the safety of biological research labs and the risks they can pose – because problems at these facilities are real.

The WHO scientific team, which is looking for the pandemic’s origin, is expected to release its final report this week detailing findings from their January trip to Wuhan, the city where the first cases of COVID-19 were identified.

Before leaving China last month, Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO scientist leading the team, said the group’s findings suggest it is “extremely unlikely” the pandemic was caused by a laboratory accident at one of Wuhan’s high-containment biological research facilities. Those facilities include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which specializes in coronavirus research, collecting specimens from wild bats in search of new viruses and conducting experiments.

“It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”

Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.

What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.

The risk that a laboratory released virus – carried into the community by a worker who didn’t know they were infected or through the leak of infectious waste – could cause a deadly outbreak has been a growing concern for many years.

In the U.S., scientists and members of Congress – both Democrats and Republicans – and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office have expressed concerns for years. In reports and hearings, they’ve worried that the proliferation of laboratories working with high-risk pathogens is increasing the aggregate threat of a deliberate or accidental lab release causing a catastrophic outbreak.

“The public is concerned about these laboratories because exposing workers and the public to dangerous pathogens, whether deliberate or accidental, can have disastrous consequences,” the GAO’s Nancy Kingsbury told Congress at a hearing in 2014.

If the COVID-19 pandemic were found to have been caused by a lab accident, it would have far-reaching implications for the fragmented and secretive oversight of biological research in the U.S. and worldwide that currently relies heavily on the scientific community to police itself.

The prevailing theory among the WHO expert team and scientists worldwide is that the virus probably evolved in bats – because they are common hosts for many types of coronaviruses – then it spread to another type of animal before jumping to humans. This kind of “spillover” from animals to humans is a common source of new diseases. So far, however, no evidence has been found that directly ties the pandemic virus to an animal source.

Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrive by car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021.HECTOR RETAMAL, AFP via Getty Images

The WHO team also announced that it supported continued investigation of another possibly related theory, one promoted by China, that the virus might have arrived in Wuhan through imported frozen food. The only theory the team said was so unlikely it didn’t merit further investigation was the so-called lab-leak theory.

Within days and with far less fanfare and news coverage, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appeared to walk back the team’s dismissal of the lab accident theory, saying: “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.”

Duct tape, equipment failures and sloppy lab work

Like most people, I hadn’t ever given much thought to the safety of biological research facilities. I just assumed they were impenetrable sterile fortresses, heavily regulated and guarded, equipped with layers of cutting-edge technology and staffed by workers who zealously adhered to safety protocols.

Then in 2007, I started getting the first of many tips about problems inside the labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has an international reputation for operating the world’s premier public health laboratories on its secure headquarters campus in Atlanta. At the time, I was the CDC beat reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

With the help of a tipster, I revealed that the CDC’s then-new $214 million infectious disease lab building – a crown jewel in the nation’s race to defend against the threat of bioterrorism – suffered an hour-long power outage from a lightning strike and the failure of its emergency backup generators. The outage shut down key safety systems in the 368,000-square-foot concrete and glass research tower, known at the agency as Building 18, including specialized air pressure systems that help ensure lethal viruses remain inside individual labs.

CDC’s Building 18 houses numerous labs, including a suite of biosafety level 4 labs. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a dramatic… Kimberly Smith, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

What’s worse, I later obtained internal documents and emails showing the CDC dismissed warnings from the agency’s own engineering staff, years before the lab opened, that the backup power system’s design “gives us no protection whatsoever from many types of failures.”

Following up on another tip, I revealed that scientists in this same troubled building were conducting experiments on a type of dangerous bacteria in a biosafety level 3 lab – the second-highest security level – where the containment door was sealed with duct tape.

The tape was applied around the edges of the door a year earlier, after it was discovered that a malfunctioning ventilation system was pulling potentially contaminated air out of the lab into a “clean” hallway, where others in the building walk around in street clothes and lack any gear to protect against infection. Nine workers who had been in the fallout zone were tested for potential exposure to the highly infectious bacterium that causes Q fever, which is classified as a potential bioterror agent and can cause mild to severe symptoms, including potentially fatal heart problems. No one was infected.

As I stood in front of the duct-taped door on a summer day in 2008, escorted by five CDC officials, the head of the agency’s occupational safety program downplayed the significance of the duct tape. The public was never at any risk, he said, the lab was perfectly safe, and the ventilation system had worked properly in the time since the incident happened a year earlier.

“Then why is the door still sealed with duct tape?” I asked.

“It’s an enhancement,” replied Patrick Stockton, who at the time was the CDC’s safety and occupational health manager. “We could take it off.”

Then why weren’t they removing it?

Think about that: This was a new $214 million federal building that the CDC had touted back then as the world’s most advanced laboratory. And yet the CDC was relying on duct tape to help safeguard against the release of dangerous bioterror bacteria.

In many ways it was emblematic of what my reporting has found over the years about how labs and regulators approach safety.

In the decade that followed, as a member of USA TODAY’s national investigative team, I reported on more incidents at the CDC and scores of other U.S. labs operated by the federal government, universities and private organizations across the country.

At the Tulane National Primate Research Center near New Orleans, a type of deadly bacteria not found in the United States, called Burkholderia pseudomallei, escaped one of the facility’s high-security biosafety level 3 labs in 2014, infecting monkeys that lived in outdoor cages and had not been used in experiments. Federal regulators concluded the bacteria likely was carried out of the lab on workers’ contaminated clothing. The bacteria, which can cause serious illness in people and animals, can colonize soil and water in climates like Louisiana, though testing did not find evidence it had spread into the environment.
At the University of Iowa, records showed that officials in 2014 discovered that a scientist had been conducting experiments with a genetically engineered strain of the MERS virus – which causes a deadly and contagious respiratory disease in humans – without getting approval from the university’s biosafety committee.
Louisiana State University’s AgCenter in Baton Rouge was secretly cited by federal regulators in 2008 for serious biosafety lapses while researching Brucella bacteria, which poses a health and economic threat to livestock. Safety failures resulted in a cow in a nearby pasture – that was not involved in the experiments – becoming infected, federal records showed. LSU also was cited for sending infected cattle to a slaughterhouse where the meat was sold for people to eat.

A particularly alarming string of incidents in 2014 included the CDC potentially exposing dozens of its workers to live anthrax and also having dangerous mix-ups with specimens of Ebola virus and a deadly strain of avian influenza.

Meanwhile, in 2015 it was discovered that biological labs operated at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City had been mistakenly shipping live anthrax spores to labs around the world for a decade, the result of faulty assumptions that the research specimens they were sharing had been effectively killed – when they could actually still grow and kill.

A truck approaches the main gate at the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in the middle of Rush Valley in Utah December 17, 2001.GEORGE FREY, AFP/Getty Images

In an award-winning 2015 USA TODAY investigation called “Biolabs in Your Backyard,” our team revealed that more than 100 U.S. labs working with potential bioterror pathogens had faced secret federal sanctions for safety violations, and that regulators had allowed them to keep conducting experiments while failing inspections, sometimes for years. Among the labs with some of the worst regulatory records, we found, were labs operated by some of the same federal agencies that are charged with regulating laboratory safety.

Laboratory accidents continue to happen across the United States. But the public rarely hears about them because pervasive secrecy obscures failings by labs and also by regulators.

There is no universal, mandatory requirement for reporting lab accidents or lab-associated infections with dangerous pathogens, our USA TODAY investigation found. And even when labs lose their permits to work with dangerous pathogens because of serious safety violations, the government keeps the labs’ names secret, citing security concerns and a federal bioterrorism law.

According to documents I obtained recently using the federal Freedom of Information Act, U.S. laboratories reported more than 450 accidents during 2015 through 2019 while experimenting with some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens – those subject to federal regulation because they “pose a severe threat” to health and also have the potential to be turned into bioweapons. These pathogens, which the U.S. government calls “select agents,” include anthrax, Ebola, plague, deadly strains of avian influenza and types of SARS coronaviruses.

The safety breaches reported to the U.S. Federal Select Agent Program – which is a jointly run by the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture – ranged from animal bites and needle sticks to failures of safety equipment and mistakes that resulted in infectious particles becoming airborne inside labs.

In nearly all reported cases, regulators deemed the breaches serious enough to put workers at risk of becoming infected, the program’s annual reports to Congress show. As a result, more than 660 U.S. scientists and other lab workers involved in the incidents underwent medical assessment or treatment with preventative medications.

The good news is that almost none of these lab workers got sick, according to the reports, which provide only statistics and no personalized details. But a few – without realizing it – became infected, going about their lives at home and in public for months. Their exposures were identified only because their lab happened to conduct annual blood tests, checking for antibodies to research pathogens, something that federal regulators don’t require. Fortunately, the organisms they were working with were types of bacteria that, while dangerous, don’t spread easily from person to person.

But what if a lab worker were unknowingly exposed to something far more contagious, a virus that can infect others before any symptoms appear?

How viruses can escape

There are several ways a pathogen can “escape” a laboratory and cause a public outbreak.

A lab worker can become infected because of a failure in safety equipment or procedures. Sometimes these infections, such as those involving pathogens that spread through contaminated air or through invisible aerosolized droplets, occur without the worker even realizing a safety breach has occurred.

Viruses and bacteria also have the potential to be carried out of labs on contaminated clothing and equipment, or through a mishap in the sterilization of the lab’s solid or liquid waste.

While rare, lab accidents causing documented outbreaks that spread to people or animals have happened.

An influenza epidemic in 1977 that spread throughout the world was found to have been caused by a strain of the virus that appeared to be nearly identical to one that hadn’t circulated since the 1950s. Many scientists believe it was not a naturally occurring outbreak, and that it likely was the result of a stored virus specimen that was released through a laboratory accident or possibly a vaccine development project.

In 2007, herds of cattle in Surrey, U.K., began developing painful blisters on their tongues, lips and feet – and were quickly diagnosed with highly infectious Foot-and-Mouth Disease, one of the most dreaded and economically devastating diseases for livestock owners because it weakens animals’ ability to be used for milk and meat production.

The cattle were sickened by a strain of FMD Virus from a 1967 epidemic – a strain that was being used at a laboratory and vaccine manufacturing complex in Pirbright, not far from where the cattle fell ill. British safety regulators concluded that the outbreak was likely caused by leaking wastewater from the Pirbright facility’s drain pipes, which contaminated nearby soil with live virus and then was picked up on vehicle tires and carried to the herds.

Coronaviruses similar to the one causing the current COVID-19 pandemic have repeatedly escaped labs.

In 2003 and 2004 – in the months after intense international efforts managed to contain the spread of what was then the first type of deadly SARS coronavirus to infect people around the globe – a series of laboratory accidents threatened to reignite the epidemic that had sickened about 8,000 people in 29 countries, killing nearly 800 of them. This coronavirus virus, which emerged in 2002, causes a disease called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, that killed at a higher rate than the similarly named SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

First, a 27-year-old researcher in Singapore working with specimens of West Nile Virus became infected with the SARS virus in a shared laboratory that used “inappropriate” lab safety practices. Investigators concluded the infection was caused by accidental contamination of the researcher’s West Nile Virus specimens with the SARS virus. Both viruses were discovered in a research specimen the scientist had used before becoming ill. Nobody else was sickened.

Then, three months later at a laboratory in Taiwan, a 44-year-old researcher became infected with SARS, likely by cleaning up spilled liquid waste in December 2003. He flew to attend a meeting in Singapore and didn’t show signs of illness until he returned home, developed a fever and was hospitalized. More than 70 people who had contact with him were quarantined.

“In the post-epidemic period the greatest risk from SARS may be through exposure in laboratories where the virus is used or stored,” the WHO said in an update about the Taiwan lab incident in December 2003.

Despite the WHO’s warnings, in April 2004 an outbreak in China began after two researchers working at a virology lab in Beijing became infected by the SARS virus. Before the outbreak was contained, nine people were infected. The mother of one of the researchers died.

It was unclear how the two researchers were exposed. “Neither of the researchers is known to have directly conducted experiments using live SARS coronavirus. However, investigators have serious concerns about biosafety procedures at the Institute – including how and where procedures using SARS coronavirus were carried out, and how and where SARS coronavirus samples were stored,” the WHO said in a May 2004 update after the outbreak had been contained.

No specific accident was identified at the laboratory, the WHO said, “and it is conceivable that an exact answer may never be determined.”

Wuhan lab scientist worried about leak

Against this backdrop, it’s surprising that questions about any lab accidents in Wuhan continue to be dismissed as promoting a conspiracy theory.

When the pandemic first emerged in Wuhan, a lab accident seemed a very real and horrifying possibility to China’s leading coronavirus researcher.

Shi Zhengli, a renowned scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has spent years collecting virus samples from bats and experimenting with SARS-like viruses to determine which might pose the greatest risk to humans.

In an interview with Scientific American, Shi described a frantic review of her lab’s records during the early days of the outbreak to see if there had been any incidents, especially related to the disposal of materials used in experiments. Shi said she was relieved when her lab learned the genetic sequence of the virus sickening people in Wuhan didn’t match any of the viruses her team had collected.

“That really took a load off my mind,” she told the magazine for an article published last year. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Shi has expressed outrage at public speculation since last spring by then-President Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that a lab in Wuhan may be responsible for the pandemic.

Diplomatic cables, first reported by The Washington Post, showed that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2018 raised concerns about safety practices inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where China’s first biosafety level 4 laboratory had recently become operational, enabling the facility to do far more dangerous experiments.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” said one of the cables from January 2018.

In the final days of the Trump administration, Pompeo’s State Department posted on its website a fact sheet titled “Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” The document makes clear that the U.S. government doesn’t know where, when or how the COVID-19 virus was initially transmitted to humans.

But it called for greater scrutiny of information it said the U.S. government has learned about the facility, including that the virology institute has been doing classified research with China’s military since 2017 and that several researchers at the institute became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak. But no details were provided in the fact sheet.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan

We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was among the locations visited recently by the joint China-WHO scientific team looking for the source of the COVID-19 pandemic. Members of the WHO team said they were assured, during conversations with staff at the institute and at other biological labs in Wuhan, that a laboratory accident was extremely unlikely to be the pandemic’s source.

In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.

“We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”

An international group of scientists and researchers has issued an open letter calling for an independent investigation, separate from the WHO effort, which they say has lacked the independence, expertise and access needed to adequately investigate source of the pandemic, including the potential for a lab accident. “Efforts to date do not constitute a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation,” the letter, published by The Wall Street Journal, said.

We may never know whether the COVID-19 pandemic started in one of Wuhan’s laboratories.

But what is known is that as the number of these kinds of high-security labs grows worldwide and more researchers are storing and experimenting with dangerous pathogens, so too does the risk of laboratory accidents causing outbreaks.

That’s why all of us have a stake in knowing what is happening in these labs here in the United States and around the world.

Alison Young is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. During 2009-2019, she was a reporter and member of USA TODAY’s national investigative team. Follow her on Twitter: @alisonannyoung

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

Published 4:00 AM EDT Mar. 22, 2021 Updated 9:05 AM EDT Mar. 22, 2021

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Urgent Open Letter from Doctors and Scientists to the European Medicines Agency regarding COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Concerns

Posted on March 12, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

This appears to be a very formidable letter to the European Medicines Agency vis a vis the mRNA vaccines, because scientists here focus on 7 questions/concerns specific to how the testing was done so as to rule out disastrous implications of those vaccines. They ask whether specific tests were performed by the corporate Vaccine developers to rule out several possibilities in animal studies, and they stick to those technical developmental issues.

I don’t know how the European Medicines Agency responded, nor do I personally have the experience or medical training to analyze the letter’s claims. But because it raises explicit procedural issues in vaccine development and doesn’t veer off into political or rhetorical diatribe, this letter can and should be addressed by medical authorities everywhere.

Gary Null read this letter aloud on his show Friday on WBAI, and it is powerful. I thank Gary Null for calling attention to this.

Mitchel Cohen

Urgent Open Letter from Doctors and Scientists to the European Medicines Agency regarding COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Concerns

From: Doctors for Covid Ethics
To: Emer Cooke, Executive Director, European Medicines Agency, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

28 February 2021

Dear Sirs/Mesdames,

FOR THE URGENT PERSONAL ATTENTION OF: EMER COOKE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE EUROPEAN MEDICINES AGENCY

As physicians and scientists, we are supportive in principle of the use of new medical interventions which are appropriately developed and deployed, having obtained informed consent from the patient. This stance encompasses vaccines in the same way as therapeutics.

We note that a wide range of side effects is being reported following vaccination of previously healthy younger individuals with the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines. Moreover, there have been numerous media reports from around the world of care homes being struck by COVID-19 within days of vaccination of residents. While we recognise that these occurrences might, every one of them, have been unfortunate coincidences, we are concerned that there has been and there continues to be inadequate scrutiny of the possible causes of illness or death under these circumstances, and especially so in the absence of post-mortems examinations.

In particular, we question whether cardinal issues regarding the safety of the vaccines were adequately addressed prior to their approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

As a matter of great urgency, we herewith request that the EMA provide us with responses to the following issues:

1. Following intramuscular injection, it must be expected that the gene-based vaccines will reach the bloodstream and disseminate throughout the body [1]. We request evidence that this possibility was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.

2. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that the vaccines will remain entrapped in the circulation and be taken up by endothelial cells. There is reason to assume that this will happen particularly at sites of slow blood flow, i.e. in small vessels and capillaries [2]. We request evidence that this probability was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.

3. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that during expression of the vaccines� nucleic acids, peptides derived from the spike protein will be presented via the MHC I � pathway at the luminal surface of the cells. Many healthy individuals have CD8-lymphocytes that recognize such peptides, which may be due to prior COVID infection, but also to cross-reactions with other types of Coronavirus [3; 4] [5]. We must assume that these lymphocytes will mount an attack on the respective cells. We request evidence that this probability was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.

4. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that endothelial damage with subsequent triggering of blood coagulation via platelet activation will ensue at countless sites throughout the body. We request evidence that this probability was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.

5. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that this will lead to a drop in platelet counts, appearance of D-dimers in the blood, and to myriad ischaemic lesions throughout the body including in the brain, spinal cord and heart. Bleeding disorders might occur in the wake of this novel type of DIC-syndrome including, amongst other possibilities, profuse bleedings and haemorrhagic stroke. We request evidence that all these possibilities were excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.

6. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on platelets, which results in their activation [6]. Thrombocytopenia has been reported in severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection [7]. Thrombocytopenia has also been reported in vaccinated individuals [8]. We request evidence that the potential danger of platelet activation that would also lead to disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) was excluded with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.

7. The sweeping across the globe of SARS-CoV-2 created a pandemic of illness associated with many deaths. However, by the time of consideration for approval of the vaccines, the health systems of most countries were no longer under imminent threat of being overwhelmed because a growing proportion of the world had already been infected and the worst of the pandemic had already abated. Consequently, we demand conclusive evidence that an actual emergency existed at the time of the EMA granting Conditional Marketing Authorisation to the manufacturers of all three vaccines, to justify their approval for use in humans by the EMA, purportedly because of such an emergency.

Should all such evidence not be available, we demand that approval for use of the gene-based vaccines be withdrawn until all the above issues have been properly addressed by the exercise of due diligence by the EMA.

There are serious concerns, including but not confined to those outlined above, that the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines by the EMA was premature and reckless, and that the administration of the vaccines constituted and still does constitute �human experimentation�, which was and still is in violation of the Nuremberg Code.

In view of the urgency of the situation, we request that you reply to this email within seven days and address all our concerns substantively. Should you choose not to comply with this reasonable request, we will make this letter public.

This email is copied to:

Charles Michel, President of the Council of Europe

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.

Doctors and scientists can sign the open letter by emailing their name, qualifications, areas of expertise, country and any affiliations they would like to cite, to Doctors4CovidEthics@protonmail.com

� References

[1] Hassett, K. J.; Benenato, K. E.; Jacquinet, E.; Lee, A.; Woods, A.; Yuzhakov, O.; Himansu, S.; Deterling, J.; Geilich, B. M.; Ketova, T.; Mihai, C.; Lynn, A.; McFadyen, I.; Moore, M. J.; Senn, J. J.; Stanton, M. G.; Almarsson, �.; Ciaramella, G. and Brito, L. A.(2019).Optimization of Lipid Nanoparticles for Intramuscular Administration of mRNA Vaccines, Molecular therapy. Nucleic acids 15 : 1�11.

[2] Chen, Y. Y.; Syed, A. M.; MacMillan, P.; Rocheleau, J. V. and Chan, W. C. W.(2020). Flow Rate Affects Nanoparticle Uptake into Endothelial Cells, Advanced materials 32 : 1906274.

[3] Grifoni, A.; Weiskopf, D.; Ramirez, S. I.; Mateus, J.; Dan, J. M.; Moderbacher, C. R.; Rawlings, S. A.; Sutherland, A.; Premkumar, L.; Jadi, R. S. and et al.(2020). Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexposed Individuals, Cell 181 : 1489�1501.e15.

[4] Nelde, A.; Bilich, T.; Heitmann, J. S.; Maringer, Y.; Salih, H. R.; Roerden, M.; L�bke, M.; Bauer, J.; Rieth, J.; Wacker, M.; Peter, A.; H�rber, S.; Traenkle, B.; Kaiser, P. D.; Rothbauer, U.; Becker, M.; Junker, D.; Krause, G.; Strengert, M.; Schneiderhan-Marra, N.; Templin, M. F.; Joos, T. O.; Kowalewski, D. J.; Stos-Zweifel, V.; Fehr, M.; Rabsteyn, A.; Mirakaj, V.; Karbach, J.; J�ger, E.; Graf, M.; Gruber, L.-C.; Rachfalski, D.; Preu�, B.; Hagelstein, I.; M�rklin, M.; Bakchoul, T.; Gouttefangeas, C.; Kohlbacher, O.; Klein, R.; Stevanovi , S.; Rammensee, H.-G. and Walz, J. S.(2020). SARS-CoV-2-derived peptides define heterologous and COVID-19-induced T cell recognition, Nature immunology.

[5] Sekine, T.; Perez-Potti, A.; Rivera-Ballesteros, O.; Str�lin, K.; Gorin, J.-B.; Olsson, A.; Llewellyn-Lacey, S.; Kamal, H.; Bogdanovic, G.; Muschiol, S. and et al.(2020). Robust T Cell Immunity in Convalescent Individuals with Asymptomatic or Mild COVID-19, Cell 183 : 158�168.e14.

[6] Zhang, S.; Liu, Y.; Wang, X.; Yang, L.; Li, H.; Wang, Y.; Liu, M.; Zhao, X.; Xie, Y.; Yang, Y.; Zhang, S.; Fan, Z.; Dong, J.; Yuan, Z.; Ding, Z.; Zhang, Y. and Hu, L.(2020). SARS-CoV-2 binds platelet ACE2 to enhance thrombosis in COVID-19, Journal of hematology & oncology 13 : 120.

[7] Lippi, G.; Plebani, M. and Henry, B. M.(2020).Thrombocytopenia is associated with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections: A meta-analysis, Clin. Chim. Acta 506 : 145�148.

[8] Grady, D. (2021). A Few Covid Vaccine Recipients Developed a Rare Blood Disorder, The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2021.

Yours faithfully,

Professsor Sucharit Bhakdi MD, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Former Chair, Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Medical Doctor and Scientist) (Germany and Thailand)

Dr Marco Chiesa MD FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist and Visiting Professor, University College London (Medical Doctor) (United Kingdom and Italy)

Dr C Stephen Frost BSc MBChB Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology, Stockholm, Sweden (Medical Doctor) (United Kingdom and Sweden)

Dr Margareta Griesz-Brisson MD PhD, Consultant Neurologist and Neurophysiologist (studied Medicine in Freiburg, Germany, speciality training for Neurology at New York University, Fellowship in Neurophysiology at Mount Sinai Medical Centre, New York City; PhD in Pharmacology with special interest in chronic low level neurotoxicology and effects of environmental factors on brain health), Medical Director, The London Neurology and Pain Clinic (Medical Doctor and Scientist) (Germany and United Kingdom)

Professor Martin Haditsch MD PhD, Specialist (Austria) in Hygiene and Microbiology, Specialist (Germany) in Microbiology, Virology, Epidemiology/Infectious Diseases, Specialist (Austria) in Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, Medical Director, TravelMedCenter, Leonding, Austria, Medical Director, Labor Hannover MVZ GmbH (Medical Doctor and Scientist) (Austria and Germany)

Professor Stefan Hockertz, Professor of Toxicology and Pharmacologym, European registered Toxicologist, Specialist in Immunology and Immunotoxicology, CEO tpi consult GmbH. (Scientist) (Germany)

Dr Lissa Johnson, BSc BA(Media) MPsych(Clin) PhD, Clinical Psychologist and Behavioural Psychologist, Expertise in the social psychology of torture, atrocity, collective violence and fear propaganda, Former member Australian Psychological Society Public Interest Advisory Group (Clinical Psychologist and Behavioural Scientist) (Australia)

Professor Ulrike K�mmerer PhD, Associate Professor of Experimental Reproductive Immunology and Tumor Biology at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University Hospital of W�rzburg, Germany, Trained molecular virologist (Diploma, PhD-Thesis) and Immunologist (Habilitation), Remains engaged in active laboratory research (Molecular Biology, Cell Biology (Scientist) (Germany)

Associate Professor Michael Palmer MD, Department of Chemistry (studied Medicine and Medical Microbiology in Germany, has taught Biochemistry since 2001 in present university in Canada; focus on Pharmacology, metabolism, biological membranes, computer programming; experimental research focus on bacterial toxins and antibiotics (Daptomycin); has written a textbook on Biochemical Pharmacology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (Medical Doctor and Scientist) (Canada and Germany)

Professor Karina Reiss PhD, Professor of Biochemistry, Christian Albrecht University of Kiel, Expertise in Cell Biology, Biochemistry (Scientist) (Germany)

Professor Andreas S�nnichsen MD, Professor of General Practice and Family Medicine, Department of General Practice and Family Medicine, Center of Public Health, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna (Medical Doctor) (Austria)

Dr Michael Yeadon BSc (Joint Honours in Biochemistry and Toxicology) PhD (Pharmacology), Formerly Vice President & Chief Scientific Officer Allergy & Respiratory, Pfizer Global R&D; Co-founder & CEO, Ziarco Pharma Ltd.; Independent Consultant (Scientist) (United Kingdom)

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ENCOUNTER WITH CHUCK SCHUMER: WHY I AM A GREEN AND NOT A DEMOCRAT

Posted on February 26, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

I wrote this 12 years ago, and it was published in a number of places, including Juan Cole’s blog, https://www.juancole.com/2009/02/cohen-why-i-am-green-not-democrat.html

I think it’s quite relevant today, so ….

Feb 11, 2009

All it takes is dragging myself to one local Democratic Party meeting, even one hosted by a progressive and Green-friendly State Assembly member like Bill Colton (47 A.D. – Bensonhurst), to make me again realize two things:

1) How important regular local meetings are for congealing a “force” to accomplish anything ; and,

2) Why, despite all of our problems, I am a Green and not a Democrat.

I’ve just returned from a “breakfast” at my NY State Assembly representative Bill Colton’s clubhouse. There were around 120 people there, crammed into a bagel-and-cream-cheese fluorescent brunch at $25 a pop.

Also present, every NY Democratic Party politician and his …. I was going to say “mother”, but the 12 on the stage were all men, and all White men until City Council member John Liu joined the dais.

The ostensible purpose was to hear NY State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli speak. THIS, I thought I’d be interested in. I have some very pointed questions about the way NY under Governor Patterson and Mayor Bloomberg is smashing working class people in order to pay off the interest on the debt to the banks.

But no questions were allowed — at least not while I was there.

I left, needing to throw up after Senator Schumer spoke. Didn’t hear our new Congressional rep McCann, nor Boro President Marty Markowitz, nor any of the other bevy of liars and thieves.

It was only out of respect for Bill Colton and the fine work he is doing on the environmental level for our community that I didn’t shout out my questions or comments.

But one fellow did. He was in his 90s, stood up and interrupted Schumer’s speech. Schumer is a consummate schmoozer — man, is he good at it! You’d never know from his talk about his parents in Florida, his youth in East New York where his father was an exterminator (!), how billionaire-banker-friendly his actual voting record is.

As Schumer was peacocking around the stage bragging about how they’d convinced three moderate Republican Senators (2 from Maine, and 1 from Pennsylvania) to join the Democrats in passing the so-called “stimulus” package, otherwise known as “bail out the billionaires”, a 90-year-old grizzled Brooklynite got to his feet and shouted out, “Kill all the Republicans.”

Schumer tried to regain the floor by saying, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” but the elder man said, “I was a kid in 1929 at the Great Depression, and the Republicans did then what the are doing now. I say ‘kill them all’.”

Schumer regained the floor with some witty remark, and went on. I was tempted to shout out, a few minutes later, “Kill the Democrats,” but thought better of it, berated myself for copping out, and left as State Sen. Carl Krueger was about to begin.

Had we been allowed to ask questions, I would have asked:

1) What are you doing about CitiBank’s unilaterally raising its Credit Card rates to 21 percent last week? Here they’re getting billions of working class funds in the bailout pushed by the Democrats, and they accelerate their soaking of working people and those on fixed income and making it HARDER to get credit — exactly the opposite of what the Stimulus package is supposedly designed to do.

2) The transit fare is slated to go up to $3 a ride, to raise $1.2 billion claimed by the MTA as its deficit. Meanwhile, the interest on the MTA’s capital expenditures (NOT operations) — that is, the building of the 2nd Ave. subway, etc. — is $1.5 billion for this year. So the transit fare is being increased to pay the INTEREST to the banks on loans the MTA had taken. At the same time, we’re giving the same banks tens of billions of dollars. Why haven’t the Democrats earmarked the funds they’re paying for bailing out the billionaire shareholders to paying off the bank loans, so that no fare increases and no layoffs would be needed?

3) Why doesn’t the City impose a 5 cents transfer tax on every stock transaction? There are tens of billions of shares traded every day. A puny 5 cent tax would pay off the entire City debt in a month, and add tens of billions of dollars to the City’s coffers, which could be used to make mass transit FREE, AND hire more teachers to reduce class size, AND clean up the environment, AND hire more Parks Dept. workers to remove the artificial turf and restore and maintain natural grass to the City’s parks.

Those are what I was prepared to ask.

I would have also asked something about where NY State invests its pension funds under DiNapoli’s control, but it was just too last minute and it would have been too convoluted.

Feel free to add more to this list, it would help us out the next go ’round.

I’m glad things went so well for Bill Colton and for local Democratic Party chair Mark Treyger (who was my mom’s student years ago in second grade). Maybe they can serve some organic vegetables, fruit and free-trade coffee the next time, and invite local activists like me — and hopefully some women — onto the panels in the future.

Whew, what a welcome moment it was to rush out into the 60 degrees sunlight, breathe deep the glorious Brooklyn air, and remember why I’m a Green and not a Democrat!

From Bensonhurst,
Mitchel Cohen

————————————–

Mitchel Cohen is a member of the Brooklyn Greens / Green Party of NY, coordinates the No Spray Coalition (fighting against pesticides), and currently Chairs the WBAI (99.5 FM) Local Station Board. See also his transgressive pamphlet, “Why I Hate Thanksgiving,” on counterpunch.org. You can email him directly at mitchelcohen@mindspring.com.

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Rainbow over Bensonhurst

Posted on February 23, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

item image #1

Looking east down Bay Parkway from 86 St. in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, February 22, 2021.

Photo by Mitchel Cohen

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet and Founder of City Lights Bookshop, Dies Aged 101

Posted on February 23, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Poet and countercultural pioneer put on trial for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl went on to become a beloved icon of San Francisco

February 23, 2021 Sian Cain The Guardian, by way of Portside.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside his San Francisco store in 1998. Reuters

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, painter and political activist who co-founded the famous City Lights bookshop in San Francisco and became an icon of the city himself, has died aged 101.

Ferlinghetti died at home on Monday night. His son Lorenzo said that the cause was interstitial lung disease.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York in 1919. His father died before he was born and his mother was committed to a mental hospital, leaving him to be raised by his aunt. When he was seven, his aunt, then working as a governess for a wealthy family in Bronxville, abruptly ran off, leaving Ferlinghetti in the care of her employers. After attending university in North Carolina, he became a journalist in 1941, then joined the US navy during the second world war. While studying for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI Bill, he began to write poetry.

Returning to the US in 1951, he was drawn to California as a place to start afresh. “San Francisco had a Mediterranean feeling about it,” he told the New York Times. “I felt it was a little like Dublin when Joyce was there. You could walk down Sackville Street and see everyone of any importance in one walk.”

In 1953, he co-founded the City Lights bookshop and publishing company with friend Peter Dean Martin, who left soon after, with the mission to democratise literature and make it accessible to all. “We were young and foolish,” he told the Guardian in 2019. “And we had no money.”

While most bookshops across the US closed early and on weekends at the time, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night, fostering a countercultural community that attracted the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. City Lights initially focused on selling paperbacks, which were cheaper but looked down on by the literary establishment, and publishing poetry, offbeat and radical books by the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti heard Ginsberg’s seminal poem Howl read for the first time at the Six Gallery in North Beach. The next day, he sent a telegram to Ginsberg: “I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. STOP. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCRIPT OF HOWL?” The epic poem was printed in Britain and shipped to San Francisco, where the copies were seized. Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were arrested on obscenity charges in 1957.

“I wasn’t worried. I was young and foolish. I figured I’d get a lot of reading done in jail and they wouldn’t keep me in there for ever. And, anyway, it really put the book on the map,” Ferlinghetti told the Guardian. Having already sent the poem to the American Civil Liberties Union, “to see if they would defend us if we were busted”, the ACLU successfully defended the poem at a trial that lasted months. The verdict set an important precedent for reducing censorship, and heralded a new freedom for books around the world, while also making both men internationally famous.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (left) and Allen Ginsberg in London in 1965. Photograph: Stroud/Getty Images

He self-identified as a philosophical anarchist, hosting many sit-ins and protests against war at City Lights. He regarded poetry as a powerful social force and not one reserved for the intellectual elite, saying, “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.”

In later decades, Ferlinghetti became an icon of his city. In 1978, when San Francisco was rocked by the double assassination of the city’s mayor, George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk, Ferlinghetti wrote a poem that ran two days later in the San Francisco Examiner. It was titled An Elegy to Dispel Gloom, and he was personally thanked by the city for helping maintain calm. In 1994 a street was named after him, and four years later he was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate.

He remained active in City Lights until the late 2000s, chatting with fans and tourists who popped in just to meet the legend. “When he was still here every day, fixing a lightbulb or some other little thing, he never refused somebody who wanted to talk to him,” Elaine Katzenberger, the current manager of the shop, said. “He usually looked for some commonality to have a little conversation with them.”

Though mostly bed-bound and nearly blind in his later years, he remained busy, publishing his final book, Little Boy, on his 100th birthday. A loosely autobiographical novel, Ferlinghetti refused to describe it as memoir: “I object to using that description. Because a memoir denotes a very genteel type of writing.”

In 2019, San Francisco named 24 March, his birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day to mark his centennial, with celebrations lasting all month. In an interview from his bed to mark the occasion, he told the Guardian that he was still hoping for a political revolution, even though “the United States isn’t ready for a revolution … It would take a whole new generation not devoted to the glorification of the capitalist system … a generation not trapped in the me, me, me.”

When asked whether he was proud of his achievements, Ferlinghetti said: “I don’t know, that word, ‘proud’, is just too egotistic. Happy would be better. Except when you get down to try and define the word happy, then you’re really in trouble.”

In 1958, Ferlinghetti published his own first collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, which sold more than 1m copies. He went on to write more than 50 volumes of poetry, novels and travel journals. As a publisher, he maintained a lifelong focus on poetry and books ignored by the mainstream, even as it became harder in the face of behemoth, profit-driven presses.

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HE HAD A HAMMER: HENRY AARON, PRESENTE!

Posted on January 24, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Henry Aaron passes Babe Ruth’s 714 lifetime home runs in 1974.

Guest post by DAVE ZIRIN

When you write for a living, you invariably pen obituaries in advance so they are ready to be published as soon as the death knell of the famous is sounded. I could never do that with Henry “Hank” Aaron. Even at 86, he seemed so precious that I was in no position to even imagine a world without him. He seemed too important to die, like a monument that people would form a human chain to protect against the hordes determined to tear him down. Aaron was living testimony not only to greatness with a bat but to this country’s racism. His willingness to testify to this reality made him the foe of the darkest corners of this country, from chat rooms to the White House.

What we have lost in Aaron is more than just an all-time baseball player (he is among the best to ever take the field, with a record 25 All-Star selections, more RBIs than any player who ever lived, and a decades-long reign as Home Run King with 755 dingers, even though he never hit more than 47 in a season). We have lost one of our last living links to the Negro Leagues, where Aaron played for several months with the Indianapolis Clowns. We have lost someone who, even though he played much of his career in Atlanta, was a fierce foe of Jim Crowand then the New Jim Crow, with its savage inequities in the criminal justice system. As he once said, with his deep and sincere humility, “Am I a hero? I suppose I am, to some people. If I am, I hope it’s not only for my home runs.… I hope it’s also for my beliefs, my stands, my opinions. Still, I’m not at ease being a hero.”

We also lost someone who could attest like no one else to the racism that runs deep in the marrow of this country and the limits of sports heroism as a vehicle to transcend that racism for the Black athlete. It was Aaron who was mercilessly threatened with murder as he chased down Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs in 1973. Aaron came up just shy, breaking the record in April of 1974. But that meant he received a tonnage of letters that winterthe most anyone in the United States not named Richard Nixon had ever receivedthat alternately pledged support or promised death for him and his family. The latter were the letters Aaron never threw away. These threats were so vicious that Aaron and his family needed bodyguardseven his daughter, who was away from home at the time. The threats were so vicious that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution pre-wrote an obituary to have on file in case of his assassination. Remember, this was just five years after the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, so the idea that greatness could be snuffed out at a moment’s notice was not far from the American imagination.

When Aaron was making his iconic home run trot in 1974 after hitting number 715 off of Al Downing, two young white hippies ran out of the stands to shake his hand, smiles on their faces. They had no idea that Aaron’s bodyguard, Calvin Wardlaw, had his hand on his gun ready to end their lives if the situation went sideways. This should have been his singular moment of unvarnished joyinstead, it was nearly a crime scene. As Aaron said, “It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”

Later in life, Aaron was able to heal, but he was never shy about showing his scars. He was a superstar of uncommon decency who had lived through segregation and Jim Crow only to come out on the other side ready to lend his name and fame to keep the struggle alive. In 2018, he was asked whether he would visit Donald Trump’s White House and he answered simply, “There is no one there that I want to see.” This was a special man, and it is an indelible mark of shame on this country that he wasn’t treasured through every phase of his life. The most we can hope for now is to hold his memory high and stand on his shoulders for the battles to come. As Aaron said, “My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.” Damn right.

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WHAT IF? DID COVID-19 LEAK FROM A BIOLAB?

Posted on January 4, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

This is perhaps the first detailed query in the mainstream corporate press into the possible laboratory origins of Covid-19, emerging from so-called “gain-of-function” experiments done in biological labs. There are several serious omissions pertaining to the transfer of materiel from the U.S.’s biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to Wuhan and elsewhere in the Summer and Fall of 2019. We need to demand independent investigations, some by the U.S. Congress, into the laboratory origins of Covid-19 and their cover-up.

Mitchel Cohen

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

By Nicholson Baker

I.
Flask Monsters

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare. We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become.

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. They’ve made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases — diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003, and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments — “gain of function” experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature. The term gain of function is itself a euphemism; the Obama White House more accurately described this work as “experiments that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” The virologists who carried out these experiments have accomplished amazing feats of genetic transmutation, no question, and there have been very few publicized accidents over the years. But there have been some.

And we were warned, repeatedly. The intentional creation of new microbes that combine virulence with heightened transmissibility “poses extraordinary risks to the public,” wrote infectious-disease experts Marc Lipsitch and Thomas Inglesby in 2014. “A rigorous and transparent risk-assessment process for this work has not yet been established.” That’s still true today. In 2012, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lynn Klotz warned that there was an 80 percent chance, given how many laboratories were then handling virulent viro-varietals, that a leak of a potential pandemic pathogen would occur sometime in the next 12 years.

A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention, I believe, alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe. Continue reading »

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE, Report from NYC DEMO JAN. 3, 2021

Posted on January 4, 2021 by MITCHEL COHEN

Around 65 people turned out in the freezing cold rainy Sunday morning, January 3, 2021 at the British Consulate in NYC to demand that Britain refuse to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that Trump pardon him. A judge in Great Britain will be deciding whether to accede to the U.S. government’s persecution of Assange Monday.

All the speeches were very sharp, powerful and radical. Protesters also called for Freedom for Leonard Perrier and Mumia abu-Jamal, and all political prisoners. WBAI’s Mimi Rosenberg recorded the speeches by Randy Credico, Kim Ives, Patricia Dahl, Chuck Zlatkin, Marty Goodman, the Raging Grannies, and more ….

Very proud of those who braved the cold and the covid to stand for Julian Assange, freedom of the press, and against fascism and government repression.

PATRICIA DAHL, NYCFreeAssange.org

KIM IVES, Haiti Liberte

RANDY CREDICO

MARCY GORDON, singer-songwriter

MIMI ROSENBERG records speakers for WBAI radio.

MARTY GOODMAN, Socialist Action

MARILYN VOGT-DOWNEY, WBAI radio Local Station Board

CHUCK ZLATKIN

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WHY DID THE DEMOCRATS HAVE A BAD ELECTION DAY?

Posted on November 7, 2020 by MITCHEL COHEN

Guest Column by RALPH NADER

Apart from barely squeezing through the swing states to defeat corrupt, incompetent, lying, corporatist Donald Trump, the Democratic Party had a bad election.

Loaded with nearly twice as much money as the Republican Party, the Democratic Party showed that weak candidates with no robust agendas for people where they live, work, and raise their families, is a losing formula. And lose they did against the worst, cruelest, ignorant, lawbreaking, reality-denying GOP in its 166-year history.

The Democrats failed to win the Senate, despite nearly having twice the number of Senators up for re-election than the Republicans. In addition, the Democratic Party lost seats in the House of Representatives. The Democrats did not flip a single Republican state legislature, leaving the GOP to again gerrymander Congressional and state legislative districts for the next decade!

Will all this lead to serious introspection by the Democratic Party? Don’t bet on it. The GOP tried to learn from their losses in 2012, which led to their big rebound. Already, the Democratic Party is looking for scapegoats, like third party candidates.

Will the leaders of these inexcusable defeats — Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — explain how this happened? Will they take some responsibilitty and tell the American people why they let their profiteering media consultants spend so much money on tepid, low-impact TV ads at the expense of a massive ground game to give voters personal reasons to get themselves out to vote, beyond Trump? A third of all eligible voters stayed home. Could part of the problem be the 15% commission the consultants receive from TV ad revenues as compared to zero commissions from ground game expenditures?

Can the corporate Democratic leaders respond to inquiries by progressives and the sidelined primary voters of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Can they respond to why the living wage, the corporate crime wave, and the GOP-blocked stimulus/relief package, which was passed by the Democrats in May (including a $600 a week extension for tens of millions of desperate workers and critical aid to local agencies overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic), were not prominently front and center? Also, why did the Democrats refuse to campaign for full Medicare for All, supported by 70 percent of the American people? The Democrats, as pointed out by political media specialist Bill Hillsman, did not speak directly to white, blue-collar workers who deserted Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump in 2016.

Moreover, the Democratic Party has a long-standing problem with authenticity. Rhetoric for a large infrastructure jobs program paid for by repealing corporate tax cuts and loopholes is seen as a throwaway line by many voters. Democrats should have explained, at the local level, how determination and integrity could shape the upgrading of our schools, clinics, roads, mass transit systems, waterworks, and other public services, with good-paying jobs.

Meanwhile, the Trumpsters showed their ferocious energy for wannabe, ego-obsessed, dictatorial Donald with more rallies, signs, and door-to-door contacts. The Democrats misread the faulty polls again thinking that the projected huge turnouts were primarily their voters and not also the Trump voters who turned out in greater numbers as well.

Too many Democratic operatives treat Trump with derision and mockery, instead of stressing how his daily lawlessness and serial violations of the Constitution have dismantled the protections for the people and turned the government over to big business to do and grab whatever they want.

Trump’s daily lawlessness and serial violations of the Constitution have dismantled the protections for the people and turned the government over to big business to do and grab whatever they want.

Trump openly commits federal crimes (e.g. The Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act) using federal property, including the White House, for his campaign, spending money illegally, while brazenly defying over a hundred investigative subpoenas from the House of Representatives.

Yet, neither Biden and Obama nor the Democratic Party made these corrupt forms of obstruction of justice, front and center issues. They even ignored Trump’s past criminal assaults of women, whom he has repeatedly degraded.

These many missed, obvious opportunities have consequences. Don’t Trump voters and their families also suffer from frozen minimum wages, from the absence of adequate or any health insurance, from those sky-high drug prices that Trump failed to reduce? He put more toxins in the air and water and allowed more dangerous workplaces. Trump calls endangering people and the planet “deregulation” but what he was really doing is rewarding his corporate paymasters.

Trump calls endangering people and the planet “deregulation” but what he was really doing is rewarding his corporate paymasters.

Of course, the Democrats would never argue that the American people, not corporations, should CONTROL what they already OWN such as the public lands, the public airwaves, and the shareholding mutual and pension funds investing their money. The Democrats never even think to demand that U.S. taxpayers get a direct return for trillions of dollars of government research and development that have subsidized the growth of modern industries (from aerospace to computers to agribusiness, biotech, pharma, and more).

While Trump incites street violence and then cries loudly for “law and order,” the Democrats don’t throwback “law and order” for violent, polluting corporate crooks who cheat and harm children, consumers, workers, and communities, as well as rip off government programs like Medicare. Trump has gotten away with defunding the federal corporate crime police big time. Never will the Democrats go after Trump for the bloated, runaway, unaudited military budget and its Empire that are devouring necessities here at home.

The House Democrats refused to keep multiple impeachment pressure (apart from the Ukraine matter) on the Republicans. A national TV audience of the Senate dealing with a dozen of Trump’s impeachable offenses would give even the most ardent Trump supporters pause. (See December 18, 2019, Congressional Record, H-12197).

The Democrats let Trump and his lawless Attorney General William Barr get away with all his corrupt, criminal, and unconstitutional actions, which have turned the White House into an ongoing crime scene. And, despite this “rap sheet” Trump came close to winning the Electoral College for a second term!

Next time, the rulers of the Democratic Party should listen to civic groups and advocates and not be so smug and incommunicado. As an example, I’ll refer you to my Eleven Suggestions for turning out the vote, with popular mandates, available to everyone in whole and in part for weeks (See also my latest op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal, October 27, 2020).

Now let’s see how many rollbacks and repeals Biden will quickly institute to stop Trump’s devastations and usher in a truly progressive, majoritarian set of long-overdue policies.

————————————–
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, and author of many public policy books, including the just published, Wrecking America: How Trump‘s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.

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ELECTIONS 2020

Posted on November 6, 2020 by MITCHEL COHEN

New York City, November 4, 2020.

The issue now in the U.S. is to fight for every vote to be counted — that is, the fight for at least the IDEA of democracy, even if it never actually existed and even though both candidates represent the interests of Wall Street and the 1 percent.

In some ways it’s like voting for either syphillis or ebola.

Despite that, I am a proponent within the Green Party (25 years a member) of trying to get the party to publicly advocate support for Biden in swing states. Why?

Because one party’s candidate openly calls for bolstering white supremacist lynch mobs (Trump), while the other at least mouths the words upholding “equality” and the ideal of an anti-racist society. I think that ideal is important to uphold. Even though it’s only rhetoric. Marx wisely observed that at some point ideas can and do become a material force.

We are in the position of having to choose from the evil of two lessers because neither the Green Party nor the rest of the Left have built ANY direct action mass-organizations for the last 12 years, and now try to substitute electoral campaigns for their lack of mass-based organizational work.

That desperately needed work stands to be more survivable under a Biden presidency than under Trump — who is just as imperialist and warmongering as his opponent. Some here don’t recognize that, and they portray Trump as a lesser-imperialist, but that’s simply not the case.

My recommendation to the Green Party (which the party officials have not accepted, and thus the need to fight for democracy within the Green Party too) do NOT ignore the horrors the Democratic Party has wreaked on the world; but Trump’s outright white supremacist organizing, including the militarization of the nation’s police forces, its attacks on women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies, and its fomenting of neo-Nazi death squads, are not trivial concerns.

The fight for democracy, as Marx and Engels wrote, is the first battle in any revolutionary socialist movement. That is where we’re at now: The fight for democracy.

I am asked by some fellow Greens why I am “parsing words” given that Biden is the apparent choice of the main imperialist sectors of U.S. capitalism. I respond thusly:

I don’t think opposing the candidate who publicly endorses and promotes and funds white supremacist lynch mobs is simply a “parsing” of words.

I don’t think opposing the candidate who publicly opposes a woman’s right to choose is simply a “parsing” of words.

I don’t think opposing the candidate who refused to provide necessary medical equipment to the states to fight a pandemic is a parsing of words.

I don’t think opposing a candidate who think it’s great to espouse grabbing women by “the pussy” at his discretion is a mere parsing of words.

I don’t think opposing a candidate who supports police murder of Black people is a parsing of words.

I don’t think opposing a candidate who refuses to recognize the validity of human-induced climate chaos and who opens the Arctic to oil drilling at the behest of his capitalist masters is a parsing of words.

Biden and Trump are equal in their imperialist service to their masters. So long as that remains fairly equivalent, and so long as there is no viable alternative at this critical moment (wishing the situation would be different won’t cut it when so many lives are on the line), it is inumbant on those who supported the Green’s electoral strategy to reassess their positions.

I pretty much think the Green party — and its banrupt and utterly stupid, narcissistic, and self-indulgent strategy at this time — has lost its soul, if not its mind.

Whom to vote for is NEVER a principle. It is a tactical decision based on an analysis of the conjuncture of forces and the historical moment.

To quote Dan Quayle (remember him?) “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” (Addressing the United Negro College Fund, whose slogan is “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”)

Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party

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REMEMBERING DAY STAR CHOU

Posted on October 31, 2020 by MITCHEL COHEN

Day Star Chou

The shattered universe never ceases to slash us with shards of memory, and also makes us laugh over the pieces. Daystar’s dying is a horror, and I know we’ll all think back over our lives together and not only feel the immense pain, but also — more and more — the beauty that Daystar brought into our lives. I am of course so sad that she’s flown off. Let me share some moments …..

Daystar, Evergreen, and Little Horse – Founders of the Flushing Greens/Green Party of NY.

When I was in the middle of a heart attack in January of 2001 at a statewide meeting of the NY Greens / Green Party, Day Star Chou and her sister Tanzania, drawing on their Cherokee heritage, put a small team together to physically push the blood through my body while we waited for an ambulance, and saved my life. It was quite miraculous, and yet it’s not in any of the modern medical books or protocols.

Day Star and Evergreen in Montauk Point

Joel Kovel told Robert Gold to call an ambulance, and Jennifer Jager and Joel hopped into it with me. We arrived at St. Luke’s hospital. In a scene right out of Hollywood Jennifer, seeing that they had me on a long intake line and refusing to treat me or even move me up in the line — during a heart attack! — decided that the only thing she could do to get them to examine me right away was to race my gurney through the emergency room shouting, “he’s dying, he’s dying!” Joel Kovel said, “Sshh, don’t say that!”. I looked up and thought “I am?” Suddenly everyone clicked into gear. I was whisked through the emergency room, and my good friends and audacious fellow Greens saved my life for a second time that day.

That scene has nothing directly to do with Day Star, but the different pieces are indelibly connected and jumbled together in my mind; what began with Day Star saving me was bookended by Jennifer saving me again.

Day Star and Evergreen in Montauk Point after NY State Green Party meeting.

Day Star is always in my thoughts. She was the first to sign up with the No Spray Coalition against pesticides, representing the Flushing Greens on its Coordinating Committee.

We’d met 5 or 6 years earlier. She supported the old Green Party USA (as did the rest of the NY Greens’ assembly of locals) and the two of us co-edited the NY Greens’ newspaper, which the prior editor, Pete Dolack (then a member of the Brooklyn Greens and No Spray Coalition coordinating committee), christened as “G”. We sat through lengthy meetings of the NY State Greens coordinating committee, which met one Sunday per month, frequently in the Flushing Greens’ office, where Day Star and I alternated as secretary, Evergreen served as Treasurer, and included Robert Gold, Maria Kuriloff, Paul Gilman, Elizabeth Shanklin, Nina Scalora, Marc Jacobs and 7 or 8 others.

Day Star and Evergreen. Evergreen and Day Star. The two of them, inseparable, were raising their nephew Little Horse, and we all watched him grow up into a tall and strong man. Day Star confided her fears of allowing Little Horse, as he got older, to venture off on his own; they were especially worried of how the NYPD would respond to Little Horse, and tried to teach him to be alert and avoid unnecessary confrontation with them.

Cathryn Swan, Little Horse, Day Star, Olivier (comrade from France), Mitchel, Cendra (also from France).

They supported freedom for Leonard Peltier and Mumia abu-Jamal, and helped steer those as policies of the NY Greens. They also opposed — unusual for Greens — the use of marijuana, although they were clear to separate that view from their denunciation of the Rockefeller Drug laws and the use of the drug war to throw Black people into jail.

Day Star pushed Evergreen to run for local office on the Green Party line, and of course we endorsed his campaign,

Flushing Greens, Daystar and Evergreen’s home local of the Greens/Green Party of NY.

conducted in several languages among the large Chinese population. I tried to encourage Day Star to run as well, but she felt that Evergreen would better represent the largely Chinese-immigrant district.

Day Star was (was? is?) someone just so special, so powerful and righteous, and engaged. A Green through and through. And the photo Paul Gilman found (at the top of this remembrance) is sooooo amazing. Wow.

Committee to Free David Wong

Missing Day Star’s presence on this planet ….

Day Star is unseen here, sitting next to the file cabinets in the rear. Notable for me because my daughter Malika is sitting next to me at a NY Greens coordinating committee meeting in the Flushing Greens’ office.

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THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Posted on October 8, 2020 by MITCHEL COHEN

HEROIC FLY ATTACKS V.P. PENCE FOR HIS LIES AND FASCISM DURING VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Caught in
his web
of lies,
VP Pence
ensnared

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photo
for more

“HELP ME”
PENCE PLEADS

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to reTweet it.

“The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy … one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat.”

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
The Communist Manifesto

My aim is to reinvent the wheel. My goal is to impeach or remove the Trump regime and, yes, to preach to the choir.

Resistance to fascism can and will take many forms. I write in the autumn of 2020. It is still possible to prevent the fascist juggernaut from sweeping away every gain won by workers in the United States since the 1880s, but we‘ll have to move quickly and back up our votes with militant direct action.

Public education, clean running water and sanitation, public libraries, the nation‘s food supply, the last remaining forests, women‘s, Black, gay liberation and in fact everyone’s civil liberties as well, reproductive rights and personal privacy, are all under attack as never before. Corporate pollution threatens the most out-of-the-way corners of the planet. A novel pandemic is upon us, a wave to what to expect in the future (if there is to be a future)? There is no let-up, and climate chaos is already coming faster than we can deal with. Whole island nations are now submerged under water; the Arctic ice caps are melting; and mass applications of pesticides and genetically engineered crops are destroying our food supplies and sacred places, and taking over the world’s agricultural lands.

Neither liberalism nor conservatism, which dance around us as in the guises of Democrats and Republicans, present real solutions, but that’s all we‘re offered. We trap ourselves in a fundamentally immoral liberal imperialism, on the one hand, and the neo-conservative’s transfer of trillions of dollars in wealth from pretty much all of us to the wealthy, on the other. Liberals and Conservatives (both mislabeled as Democrats and Republicans) are equally deadly and equally bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, although via separate paths. They are twin horses of Apocalypse, the one thundering alongside the other in pretend battles like jousting knights of olde. Ecological collapse due to global climate chaos threatens to end complex life on this planet unless we the people rise up coherently — the poor, the once-upon-a-time workers who are being primed to slit each others‘ throats in competition for the increasingly scarce and privatized water, hospital beds, individual dwellings, jobs and needed services. Who among us will be our Harriet Tubman, leading us to freedom?

The candidacy of Bernie Sanders for U.S. President in the Democratic Party had raised the concept of socialism in the mainstream corporate media for the first time in a century as a cure for the parasites of capitalism – the Capitalist Infesto. The corporate-controlled Democratic Party leadership smashed him down. Bernie was not allowed to go deep enough; he wasn‘t allowed to continue. Should he have stuck to his guns (so to speak) and seen it through? Perhaps. But is that the issue we want to fight out today? The immediate issue: Can new and overtly socialist ecological movements arise, obstruct, and reverse the current transformation of U.S. society into overt fascism, which is prelude to creating the new society we really want to live in?

I write not to explain the ins and outs of the terrible tragedies we‘re facing but for the new generations to seize hold of the lessons from the new left – the 60‘s generation — which have been stolen, co-opted, perverted and sold back to us as our false “paths to freedom”.

Black Lives matter! Reproductive Rights matter! Workers’ rights matter! The fights against industrial pollution and global climate chaos matter! Can we understand the meanings of our own movements and allow the lessons embedded in them to blossom, a gift from one generation to the next? That requires new ways of thinking and putting those thoughts into practice.

So, let us vote for the evil of two lessers, of course, to stay the blade of fascism and white supremacy … but in doing so let us also keep in mind that even the lesser evil is still evil, still imperialist. So let us use this moment to also begin to build the kind of revolutionary mass-movements necessary to transform this society!

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SHOULD THE GREEN PARTY RUN ITS OWN CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT IN 2020?

Posted on September 16, 2020 by MITCHEL COHEN

by MITCHEL COHEN

Green Party 2020 candidates Howie Hawkins (President) and Angela Walker (Vice President)

As one of those who is trying to get the Green Party to switch its tactics and electoral strategy, I would appreciate it if Ajamu Baraka and others would at least address the arguments I and others are making …

… which has nothing to do with any expectations of Biden and the neo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

My ONLY points in recommending that Greens (and everyone else) vote for Biden in swing states are:

Trump is bolstering right-wing white supremacists (are there any other kind?), firing them up, egging them on to be his stormtroopers and death squads, and has appointed a US Attorney General that defends them and attacks antifascists instead.

Regardless of everything else about the Democrats, I do not think that Biden would do the same — do you? — and it makes a world of difference as to whether we are trying to organize under those conditions in a Trump regime vs. a Biden one.

The rhetoric alone makes a huge difference, but it’s not only about rhetoric.

In terms of domestic policy it ALSO makes a difference if you are a woman (reproductive rights), are gay-trans-bi-queer, are senior (a further raid on social security), and of course if you are Black.

Those are not insignificant differences, and to minimize them or not refer to them is dissembling. It means we cannot even discuss strategy for the Green Party until the above is recognized and acknowledged.

Note again: I think Biden will be terrible on foreign policy, although strangely he might support Cuba, as opening to Cuba was part of the Obama/Biden legacy. But when it comes to everywhere else, look out! …. Same as with Trump, despite what Baraka argues in Trump’s defense that Trump is serious about ending the “endless wars”. He gives a single example of a “peace process” towards Afghanistan, which is still yet to occur after 3 years. As of 16 months ago, Trump’s drone attacks, which Baraka ignores, far exceeded even Obama’s in 4 years:

According to a 2018 report in The Daily Beast, Obama launched 186 drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan during his first two years in office. In Trump’s first two years, he launched 238.

The Trump administration has carried out 176 strikes in Yemen in just two years, compared with 154 there during all eight years of Obama’s tenure, according to a count by The Associated Press and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Experts also say drone strikes under President Trump have surged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

And, as was the case during Obama’s presidency, these strikes have resulted in untold numbers of civilian casualties. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan killed more than 150 civilians in the first nine months of 2018.

Amnesty International reports drones have killed at least 14 civilians in Somalia since 2017.

As of January of this year, U.S. drone strikes fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria have killed at least 1,257 civilians, according to the Pentagon, and a monitoring group, Airwars, estimates the number to be as great as 7,500.

That you might not be aware of what should be a startling and deeply troubling escalation in unaccountable remote-control warfare by the U.S. is both by design and default.

For one, the Obama administration paved the way for popularizing and normalizing drone wars, which also included the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens, first by hiding it, then by begrudgingly acknowledging it, and then by pretending to meaningfully constrain it.

Obama eventually put in place arcane requirements to issue public reports on civilian death tolls (but just in certain military theaters), to limit targets to high-level militants (again, in certain battlefields), and require interagency approval (also only for certain targets).

Trump has peeled back all of those requirements because, well, he can. We now know more than we did about U.S. drone wars when Obama first took office, but less than when he left.

– S. E. Cupp Chicago Sun-Times May 8, 2019

So if we are going to discuss Green Party strategy, at least understand what I and others are saying, acknowledge you hear it, and repeat it back accurately.

Stopping fascists from having their hands on executive power is the most important point in this election.

And, yes, of course we’ll have to do a lot more afterwards regardless of who wins. Frankly, the Green Party should be doing it now, but as a Party it is invisible.

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writer, activist, poet, former chair WBAI-FM Local Station Board, Brooklyn Greens, Red Balloon Collective, rabble rouser.

Let me appropriate the words I grew up with: NEVER AGAIN.

Mitchel Cohen, Jewish (and disgusted) Brooklyn, New York

Monsanto (now part of Bayer AB) had to pay $78 million in 2018 and $10 billion more in 2020 to settle 100,000 cancer lawsuits. But that won’t stop a company whose 2021 revenues will top $49.991 billion…which is why Roundup is still being profitably sprayed in 160 countries around the world.

A battle royale is ripping through every country against the Monsanto Company’s carcinogenic chemical glyphosate, the primary active ingredient in its most profitable pesticide, “Roundup.” (Monsanto is now owned by the drug and agrochemical multinational corporation, Bayer.)

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”

An Aspirin the Size of the Sun

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About the Author

“The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes.”

– President George H.W. Bush

NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991

Almost everything said in the U.S. about Israel’s assault on the Palestinians is a lie — because we are implicated

Guest post by Chris Hedges

Published May 15, 2021 in ScheerPost.

Chris Hedges

Duct tape, equipment failures and sloppy lab work

How viruses can escape

Wuhan lab scientist worried about leak

Urgent Open Letter from Doctors and Scientists to the European Medicines Agency regarding COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Concerns

All it takes is dragging myself to one local Democratic Party meeting, even one hosted by a progressive and Green-friendly State Assembly member like Bill Colton (47 A.D. – Bensonhurst), to make me again realize two things:

1) How important regular local meetings are for congealing a “force” to accomplish *anything* ; and,

2) Why, despite all of our problems, I am a Green and not a Democrat.

Schumer tried to regain the floor by saying, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” but the elder man said, “I was a kid in 1929 at the Great Depression, and the Republicans did then what the are doing now. I say ‘kill them all’.”

Poet and countercultural pioneer put on trial for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl went on to become a beloved icon of San Francisco

Guest post by DAVE ZIRIN

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

HEROIC FLY ATTACKS V.P. PENCE FOR HIS LIES AND FASCISM DURING VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

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NEW BOOK BY MITCHEL COHEN: THE FIGHT AGAINST MONSANTO’S ROUNDUP: THE POLITICS OF PESTICIDES

ORDER HERE

Related Blogs

Mitchel Cohen, Jewish (and disgusted)
Brooklyn, New York

1) How important regular local meetings are for congealing a “force” to accomplish anything ; and,

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

click
photo
for more