Preemptive Strike on North Korea: Is Trump Wagging the Dog?

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

SHARMINI PERIES • LAWRENCE WILKERSON
THE REAL NEWS NETWORK

Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy Lawrence Wilkerson's last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02). Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a member of the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (1987 to 1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel, and began work as an advisor to General Powell. He has also taught national security affairs in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. He is currently working on a book about the first George W. Bush administration.

TRANSCRIPT

SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. Last Wednesday's test launch of an intercontinental ballistic rocket by North Korea appears to have had its desired effect, rattling Washington. White House National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, when asked about the test, said ...

H.R. MCMASTER: Has the potential of war with North Korea increased since this latest launch? I think it's increasing every day.

SHARMINI PERIES: On CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, Senator Bob Graham said preemptive war with North Korea is more likely.

REPORTER: Where are we with North Korea right now?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: We're getting close to military conflict because North Korea is marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that can not only get to America but can deliver the weapon. We're running out of time. McMaster said that yesterday. I'm going to urge the Pentagon not to send any more dependents to South Korea. South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour. It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea given the provocation of North Korea, so I want them to stop sending dependents. I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.

REPORTER: How close? You say we're getting close to a military confrontation. What are we talking about here?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: The intelligence community can tell you that better than I can but I have an extensive discussion with the administration about this topic. The policy of the Trump administration is to deny North Korea the capability to hit America with a nuclear-tipped missile, not to contain it. That now means preemptive war as a last result. That preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon means the marriage is more likely. I think we're really running out of time. The Chinese are trying, but ineffectively. If there's an underground nuclear test, then you need to get ready for a very serious response by the United States.

SHARMINI PERIES: On to talk about this with me is Colonel Larry Wilkerson. He's a retired US colonel and former chief of staff to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, now a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary. Thanks for joining me, Larry.

LARRY WILKERSON: Good to be here with you, Sharmini.

SHARMINI PERIES: Larry, let's take up what Senator Graham just said. First, that dependents and children of US military should not accompany them to the bases in South Korea, where there is some 28,000 US military personnel carrying out various extensive wargames in the region. Second, that a preemptive strike is near. How serious is this?

LARRY WILKERSON: I can only interpret what Lindsey Graham just said from two possible perspectives, very different perspectives: one, that he's trying to do what people say Donald Trump is trying to do in a very strategic way, and that is scare the devil out of Kim Jong-un and his North Korean military so that they'll come to the negotiating table, abjectly surrender in other words or he's just as dumb, as strategically inept as I think the entire administration is. I don't know which interpretation to put on it but increasingly I'm thinking, after having visited with the Senate and visited with representatives in the House for a number of other reasons and talked with them, that there are not a lot of people with a lot of smarts over there in the Congress.

SHARMINI PERIES: Larry, do you really believe that McMaster and other advisors to President Trump including the Pentagon, will allow Trump to carry out a preemptive strike on North Korea?

LARRY WILKERSON: They're all provocations. We may say that they're to keep our troops ready and exercises are just routine, and so forth but the timing of them makes them provocations. Anybody can crawl into Kim Jong-un's head and the collective head of North Korea for that matter, and see that they're provocations.

Let's just back up for a moment, though and let's examine what Lindsey said. You'll understand why I interpret it more on the one side than the other of those two alternatives I gave you. First, there are 210,000 plus Americans already on the Korean Peninsula. Some of them are sponsored by the military. Others just came there, which is permissible. They came there to live in Seoul and be near their loved one, who's in Pyongyang or Pyeongtaek or someplace else in the US armed forces. There's almost a quarter of a million Americans already there. There are 50,000 Japanese. There are a million Chinese.

Lindsay, how are you going to get all these people out of South Korea? How are you even going to get the Americans out of South Korea? By the way, Lindsay, if you do it over time, which your remarks suggested you might be smart enough at least to do, then it's going to take time. You're going to have to do it over civilian aircraft mostly, so you're going to get all these flights going and you're going to get all these people out of South Korea. That signal alone is going to be provocative to the maximum.

I've done this. I've done the war planning. I've done the war. If you evacuate all these people from South Korea, the South Koreans are going to know what you're contemplating. Whether you're contemplating it by starting it yourself, which sounds increasingly like the case, when you listen to Trump and Graham and others, or by provoking North Korea to do it so that they can destroy half of Seoul before you even get your act together, is irrelevant in terms of the destruction that's going to come to the peninsula. This is the kind of idiocy with which we're dealing now in Washington, Sharmini.

SHARMINI PERIES: Larry, when President Trump was in China a couple of weeks ago, he urged the Chinese to do what it must to contain North Korea. Does this new missile test meaning that China is failing in its efforts to contain Pyongyang?

LARRY WILKERSON: Not at all, in my view. I think China has pretty much tried just about everything it could without violating its own strategic objectives, which are ultimately to keep North Korea standing. It might be a basket case, but to keep it standing.

What you have now is the virtuoso chess master of the world who's waded into it, along with the most accomplished diplomat I've met in my time in the US government, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia. The two of them are outpacing us every step of the way. Every time any kind of crevice opens up at NATO, every time any opportunity exists for Putin to protect his own flanks and yet exploit it against us, he does so, and he does so masterfully.

What he's recently done, of course, is suggest that Kim Jong-un or some representative from North Korea and an equal from the United States, mediated by Sergei Lavrov or some other capable Russian, meet and talk. If I were Donald Trump and I professed to have the credentials that he does, his reality TV show suggesting those credentials, I would start playing chess too instead of playing a lousy game of checkers, which is what he's been playing so far. I must say, Jim Mattis, and H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly and a host of others, Rex Tillerson included, have been playing this really dumb game of checkers, too, while Vladimir Putin plays chess.

I would take the initiative here. I would say, "Okay, Vladimir. Okay, Sergei. Name your place and name your time. We will sit down with you as the intermediary and whatever North Korean comes, we will send an equivalent and we will talk." I'd shock them to death, and I'd make them put up or shut up. Let's sit down in Pyongyang. I'd want to go to Pyongyang. I wouldn't want to go to Moscow and I wouldn't want to do it here. I'd want to go to Pyongyang, and I'd want to sit down and I'd want to start talking. That has so many advantage to starting the guns to going.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Since you've been in this role in the past, Larry, what are the initial steps that need to be taken in order to have this kind of conversation with North Korea?

LARRY WILKERSON: With this administration, you'd probably have to start from scratch. I don't think they've given any real substantive thinking to any of this. I think that they're hoping that this kind of bluster and bravado that they've been throwing out there, and now they've got this 230 plus airplane exercise going on on the peninsula, Vigilant Ace I think they're calling it, a provocative act, a maximum provocative act. To Kim, that looks like the beginning of the invasion. I might even start shooting some of my rounds at Seoul if I were he. This is an extremely stupid thing to be doing.

I would want to stop all of that. You stop your ballistic missile testing, you stop your nuclear weapon testing and I'll stop my exercising. Let's all go to Pyongyang, and we'll sit down.

Now you've got to find somebody on the US side, and this is going to be hard. This is really going to be hard because I see no one in the current United States government, at the State Department or elsewhere, who could sit down with a very talented, accomplished North Korean, a very talented, probably one of the most capable as I said diplomats in the world, Sergei Lavrov and negotiate in a way that was bound to get America what it needs. That's our first problem. We don't have anybody to do this and Donald Trump has made sure we don't have anybody to do this. That's the kind of thing I'd be pursuing right now. Let's go to Pyongyang. Let's sit down. Let's talk. If the Russians want to mediate, great, because if there's a failure, it's on you, Moscow, not us.

SHARMINI PERIES: On the CNN program GPS, Larry, with Fareed Zakaria, it was discussed that the technology for the ballistic missile that North Korea has just launched came from Russia. Do you think this is possible?

LARRY WILKERSON: I can tell you without breaching any official secrets that when I was working on the North Korean working group and elsewhere in my time studying northeast Asia, we were very worried about it and had some significant proof about Russian scientists who at the end of the Cold War had no future. They had been very well paid, very secure in their positions, very respected people, and they spread to the four winds, as it were. They went to places like Tehran. They went to places like Islamabad. They went to places like Pyongyang. You have had, ever since the end of the Cold War, Russian expertise.

Our question was always whether or not Moscow had planned this, whether there was some connection still with Moscow or whether it was all just independent. I think our conclusion at the time was that it was independent work on the part of these private citizens who wanted to find someplace to put their skills to work, and make some money and create a secure life for their families.

I don't know if that's still the case. If I'd been Vladimir Putin and I was looking for ways to combat the United States, I would probably have made some contact with some of these scientists, and gotten briefings, and found out where they are, and so forth. Not to suggest that he's doing that in a nefarious way. Maybe he's just doing it because he wants to be brought up to speed and maybe that's one of the reasons he's now making his offer to mediate negotiations. I rather doubt that, though. I think he's probably seeking another march on the United States. He's been achieving them. He's achieved them in Kosovo. He's getting ready to achieve them even more in Kosovo, in Crimea, and Georgia, and Ukraine of course, in Syria. This man's got a victory record that's quite impressive compared to our loss record.

SHARMINI PERIES: Finally, Larry, getting back to Senator Lindsay Graham's statement about a preemptive strike on North Korea, how likely is it that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other arms of the military Pentagon would respond with such a strike at this time?

LARRY WILKERSON: Sharmini, let me tell you how difficult this is. I've done the war planning here, and I've been updated on some of the war planning that's more modern than my time in the military. If we were to fire a spread of nuclear weapons at North Korea, even if we pinpointed the strike points with a CEP of 10 meters, say, or even 10 feet, that is to say, it would land within 10 feet of our strike point, if we fired all of that panoply of death and destruction, we would kill a lot of people, and we would destroy an enormous structure aboveground, and we probably would pollute Japan and China and certainly all of North Korea, but we would not get their nuclear weapons complex. It is too far underground and too well protected.

That's the nature of the challenge that we're confronting. In order to ensure that you've got that complex, you would have to fight either a nuclear-assisted or a totally conventional conflict on the ground, in the air, at sea, and you would have to defeat the North Korean armed forces and then march in and more or less occupy the country, search out all of those facilities and destroy them. Then you'd probably have to hang around for a while to make sure chaos didn't result, and to make sure that Russia and China didn't take real advantage of that chaos and consolidate North Korea before you could or before the South could.

This is not an easy challenge, as McMaster and Mattis and others are presenting it as. I'm not being fair to them because if you'll check their statements, you'll see that they've said from time to time, especially General Mattis, that this is an incredibly difficult problem. In the meantime, while all of this is happening, if even only half, only half, Sharmini, of North Korea's artillery works, Seoul is going to be aflame. It's going to be burning. Thousands if not tens of thousands of people are going to be dead, probably hundreds of thousands in the casualty figures. This is not something you want to do, period.

SHARMINI PERIES: Larry, just one more question, and I might integrate this into the earlier part of the interview. One cannot ignore, Larry, what's going on in Washington right now to the Trump administration by way of the investigations underway regarding the Russian collaborations around the election and so forth. The Trump administration would like nothing more than a war as a distraction at this point. How likely is it that that would play into a decision about North Korea at this time?

LARRY WILKERSON: Hard to say with this administration, Sharmini. If I were going to wag the dog with the tail of war, as many people said Bill Clinton did during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when he started bombing Miloević and Serbia, 178 days I think we bombed them, I'd pick a lot easier target than North Korea. If I were going to divert the American people's attention away from my troubles with the FBI, with Russian oligarchs and so forth, I'd pick a lesser target. I certainly wouldn't go after the DPRK. That's not to say that this administration is not stupid enough to do what you just suggested, so yes, I do have some concern about that.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Larry. I thank you so much for joining us today. I'm looking forward to you next week with your report.

LARRY WILKERSON: See you, Sharmini. Thank you and Happy Holidays.

SHARMINI PERIES: Thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.

If I were going to wag the dog with the tail of war, as many people said Bill Clinton did during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when he started bombing Miloević and Serbia, 178 days I think we bombed them, I’d pick a lot easier target than North Korea. If I were going to divert the American people’s attention away from my troubles with the FBI, with Russian oligarchs and so forth, I’d pick a lesser target.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Time to Organize a Mass Movement in Defense of Social Security and Medicare for All

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by DAVE LINDORFF

Photo by americans4financialreform | CC BY 2.0

Now that it looks like the President Trump and the Republican Congress will succeed in ramming through the most regressive tax bill (not “reform” bill as the media keep slipping into calling it) in the history of the income tax, it’s time to gear up for the real battle — a battle that calls for not more lame Soros-funded, Democratic Party-led “resistance,” but rather a deadly serious mass movement to defend and expand Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what remains of federal welfare assistance.

The Republicans have made it clear that their claim that this tax bill, in slashing taxes on corporations and the rich, will “pay for itself” through supposed higher economic growth is bogus and that the real goal is to, as conservative strategist Grover Norquist once put it, “to shrink government down to the size that we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But make no mistake, the Republicans aren’t talking about shrinking the biggest drain on the federal budget — the military — which consumes 54% of each year’s discretionary budget. No, they’re talking about cutting social spending, or in other words the key elements still left from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This campaign will be based upon a lie which the corporate media tend to repeat uncritically: that Social Security is “bankrupt” and more importantly that it is the main cause of the nation’s $20-trillion deficit (soon to be a $21.5-trillion or higher deficit after the new tax law works its magic). In fact, Social Security benefits are, always have always been and will through 2019 continue to be fully funded by payments made into the program by past and current workers’ FICA payroll taxes. The program has over its 81-year history contributed exactly nothing to the federal deficit. Rather, that deficit is the result primarily of the nation’s massive military budget and endless series of wars and cold wars since the end of World War II, as well as to a gutless Congress that continually adds to to the red ink by refusing to fully fund government programs, preferring to borrow and push the costs onto future generations. (Truth to tell, Congress has since World War II cravenly used borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund to finance US wars without having to raise income taxes to pay for them.)

Now is the time to begin building a mass movement to not only defend but to expand those programs, which are actually among the most meager and inadequate of retirement and state-run health programs among all developed nations.

The strategy for going after what Republicans scornfully (and Democrats ignorantly and lazily) deride as “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicaid, are actually earned benefits that workers have, over their lifetimes, paid for with taxes taken from both their paychecks and from their employers, is to claim that the government just can’t afford these programs anymore.

It’s true that because of demographic changes and medical advances — a declining birthrate, a major increase in life expectancy, and the arrival of a massive wave of so-called “Baby Boomers” born in the two boom decades that followed the end of World War II — there is a bulge in the number of people reaching retirement age and eligibility for both Medicaid and Social Security retirement benefits. We know that is happening (the first Baby Boomers reached 62, the earliest age for claiming benefits, in 2007, and reached 66, the age of eligibility for what is known as “full retirement,” in 2011). That bulge in elderly citizens claiming benefits will continue enrolling for retirement and Medicare eligibility until the period 2026 through 2034, when the last Boomer babies, born in 1964, will be reaching, respectively, either age 62 or age 70, the latter being the age one can file and receive maximum monthly benefit checks. (Then, left unsaid, is the reality that the shortfall problem will begin to go away as older retirees in the bulge begin to die off.)

Coincidentally, 2034 is also the year that, if nothing is done by Congress to bolster the Social Security Trust Fund in advance, the Social Security System as currently established under the 1936 Act, will have to draw on just the FICA tax receipts from then current workers. That, we’re told, would mean cutting benefits by some 21%. That’s hardly going bankrupt, but it would be a hard blow for the elderly who depend upon only Social Security benefits to survive on, as they have no retirement savings and no pensions thanks to America’s poverty-level minimum wage and the termination of most traditional pensions. But the countries of Europe, as well as Japan and Taiwan, all face these same issues and have dealt with them, keeping their much more generous systems solvent. Here the story is different.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]en years ago, this temporary shortfall in the Trust Fund and this predictable extra draw on the system’s resources because of the retirement of Baby Boomers could have been dealt with by a few simple tweaks, such as eliminating or even just raising the cap on income subject to the FICA tax (it’s currently capped at the first $127,000 of earnings). But Congress has refused to deal with such a fix, and the longer allegedly people’s deliberative body waits, the more dramatic and costly that fix will have to be. Today, the shortfall could be eliminated by changing the law so that all income — even multi-million-dollar incomes — be made subject to the payroll tax, and by a few smaller tweaks, like adding a transaction tax of perhaps 0.25% to every short-term stock trade — something many countries in Europe (where retirement systems are much better funded) do. Or the amount employers pay into worker accounts could be raised from the current matching 6.2% to 7.2% or 8.2%.

Okay, so we know that Social Security and Medicare, two of the most popular programs of the United States government, are in the gunsights of Republican strategists. Ergo, now is the time to begin building a mass movement to not only defend but to expand those programs, which are actually among the most meager and inadequate of retirement and state-run health programs among all developed nations.

The first step is to begin a campaign to explain to the American people that Social Security and Medicare will not go bust as long as they fight to protect them. Despite the best efforts of conservative and neo-liberal ideologues to pretend that they are doomed by demographics and actuarial tables as if they were private annuities, Social Security and Medicare are in fact purely political constructs and benefits are set and funded by the decisions of elected politicians.

The second step is to explain clearly to all Americans that Social Security and Medicare do not simply benefit the old and the sick. They are there for every worker who becomes disabled or too ill to work anymore. Social Security benefits are also paid to support children when a wage-earning parent dies, or to a widow who may have earned no or only a minimal Social Security benefit while raising a family. Even more importantly, Social Security and Medicare also mean that children and grandchildren do not have to bankrupt themselves or short-change their own children’s future by having to impoverish themselves to support their aging parents and/or grandparents. If you think about it, what working-age person complains the benefit payments to their retired parents or grandparents being too high? And yet that is one of the more obscene tactics opponents of these programs have turned to: trying to stir up an inter-generational war over “entitlements.”

Marches on Washington and state capitals in this movement should not include just older people — they should be packed with young people demanding that grandma and grandpa and mom and dad get the benefits they’ve earned, and that these programs be there for them too, when it’s their turn to need them.

I would say that this movement I’m calling for should also be in defense of Medicaid — the federal/state program that funds medical care for the poor (and also for a huge proportion of the middle class when they need to move into long-term nursing home care), and of welfare for families of the unemployed and those who, despite working at prevailing minimum wages, cannot survive without financial assistance. But the truth is that these programs, as well as Medicare itself, should be replaced with some type of national health program for all, such as they have in the UK and Canada (and virtually all of Europe and much of Asia), and by a federal minimum wage that actually is set high enough to support a family on it (current minimum wages are so low that workers qualify for welfare programs like WIC and Food Stamps, meaning these programs are actually just taxpayer-funded payroll subsidies for greedy employers unwilling to pay their workers a living wage).

It’s easy to make the case that the US has the most costly health system in the world by a factor of two, and still leaves nearly 30 million citizens uninsured and unable to pay to see a doctor, while other developed countries, at a fraction of the cost, have systems that cover all their citizens’ health care costs. It’s easy too to make the case that raising incomes at the bottom is the best way to raise all workers’ incomes since employers have to offer more to attract workers when less skilled workers start to receive more than those skilled workers are currently receiving. It’s a no-brainer.

The challenge, as I see it, is to also make the connection between the coming attacks on these New Deal remnant programs and the vast sums of tax money being annually squandered on the US military’s war machine, a giant funds-sucking monster that currently receives $1.3 trillion, counting the interest on the debt for prior wars and military spending. That is as much as the next eight nations in the world, including China and Russia, spend on their militaries, and it is demonstrably a huge waste.

Are we safer because we spend multiple times what our rivals [actually the rivals of the US plutocracy, not the US people—Eds] spend on our military? Is the US free from the threat of terror because of the endless wars that the US is fighting or providing aid for others to fight (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.)? Clearly not. Would the US be at risk if the military budget were cut by 75%, if its nuclear force was trimmed to a few dozen weapons (pending reaching a global ban on nuclear weapons), if it ceased to have $15-billion aircraft carriers, whose only purpose is engaging in unprovoked wars on third-world countries that pose no threat to the US, and if its bloated officer staff was whittled down to a few generals per military branch? Hardly. We have been terrorized by our government leaders and our compliant corporate media for long enough. It’s time to whittle the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so presciently warned us against down to a size where it would no longer be able to dictate its own budgets, as its military bases and arms manufacturers, situated strategically in every congressional district in the union, currently allow it to do.

Any movement to protect and expand Social Security and to move the US away from its shabby, complicated and cut-prone patchwork health care system of Medicare, Medicaid, employer-based private insurance, charity care and, at least for now, the Affordable Care Act, to some kind of nationalized health system, needs to be independent of the two main political parties. The Republican Party is attempting to eradicate public retirement and public health care programs of all kinds, or at least to convert Social Security into some kind of worker-funded ggovernment-mandated401(k) managed by private firms, and to erase the ACA.

But the Democrats have been treacherous on this. [Surprise!!] The ACA — Obamacare — is with us because President Obama, despite having a mandate and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2009, chose to reject any consideration of a Canadian-style single-payer government medical insurance program, and instead developed an insurance-friendly Rube Goldberg-like government subsidized the program, the ACA, which was immediately slated for death by Republicans and which was doomed by its own internal contradictions which were bound to eventually make it too costly to continue with. Meanwhile, Obama also, early in his first term, created a commission, headed by former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson (famously known for calling Social Security “a cow with 310 million teats”) and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Clinton. They called for raising the retirement age and making Social Security more of a means-tested program — an idea Hillary Clinton also promoted, disastrously, during her losing 2016 presidential campaign.

No, the only way to fight this looming battle for Social Security and health care for all has to be independent of parties, like the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s before it. And it needs to start getting organized now before the Republicans get their shit together on this.

On the bright side, this is a battle that can, if done right, unite in one mass progressive movement the broadest possible spectrum of the American public, bridging distinctions of race, age and gender, where people live (urban, suburban or rural), class (poor, working, middle or even upper-middle income people) and ideology (socialist, Democrat, independent and even many Republicans since everyone needs Social Security and health care).

So who’s on this? We need to get to work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

DAVE LINDORFF—The only way to fight this looming battle for Social Security and health care for all has to be independent of parties, like the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s before it. And it needs to start getting organized now before the Republicans get their shit together on this.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

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Closing the consciousness gap

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By The Editor, posted on November 29, 2017

The billionaires are getting richer and richer. But their time at the top of the pyramid may be cut short sooner than mos realise.

At the Workers World Party conference, 2017.

Social consciousness often lags behind reality. Things change, but our understanding of them is hampered by old conceptions, born out of previous conditions.

And then, when the gap becomes utterly preposterous, there can be great leaps forward as consciousness overtakes reality in what seems like a dizzying whoosh.

Marxists have long understood that societies progress not evenly or in a straight line, but by what some call “combined and uneven development.” Lenin wrote about the extremely rapid capitalist development of Germany and Japan in the era of imperialism, when they caught up to and even surpassed some of the more established European colonial powers in a few decades.

What is true of material development is also true of consciousness. It progresses not slowly and evenly, but by leaps forward — and sometimes backwards — as conditions change.

The consciousness of tens of millions has been changed by these struggles, to the point where capitalist liberalism has to make itself appear to be on the side of justice. Alongside this are the many polls in recent years showing that capitalism has become a dirty word.

Are we seeing the beginnings of a broad and deep change in consciousness inside the U.S.? There are many reasons to think so.

First, of course, is the emergence into prominence of popular movements that have long been suppressed. The ongoing struggles of Black and Brown people against racism and national oppression, of women against the patriarchy, of LGBTQ people against queer bashing, all continue, for these conditions are reinforced by both the state and the way capitalism functions. Yet the consciousness of tens of millions has been changed by these struggles, to the point where capitalist liberalism has to make itself appear to be on the side of justice.

Alongside this are the many polls in recent years showing that capitalism has become a dirty word. Why else would a demagogic but calculating billionaire politician like Trump talk so much about workers? He is trying to refurbish the image of capitalism by linking it to “good jobs,” blaming other countries for “stealing our jobs.”

At a time in history when automation, robots, self-driving trucks and a zillion other labor-saving innovations are dazzling the owners of capital with the promise of shedding workers so they can rake in even bigger profits, Trump’s tweets are bound to wear thin.

Right now, young workers are on the cutting edge of consciousness. We saw some of them on Nov. 18-19 in Newark, N.J., at the Workers World Party national conference. Proudly multigendered and multinational, they did a splendid job of defending and explaining the need for revolutionary change in this country. And they weren’t afraid of making it known to the whole world — via social media. What a change from the days when progressives feared being hounded and isolated!

This struggle is only beginning. But already the outlines of an immeasurably better future are clear. We humans have progressed in our knowledge to the point where we have the means to end backbreaking labor so everyone can have what they need without being worked to death. An increasingly smaller class of increasingly richer individuals stand in our way.

Wrap your head around that, and revolutionary consciousness is sure to follow.

https://www.workers.org/2017/11/29/closing-the-consciousness-gap/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

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Recent Slaughter in Colorado Highlights the Prairie Dog’s Plight

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

We share this planet; we do not own it.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR THE ANIMALS TODAY?

The penalty for merely annoying humans is death.
Our disrespect for animals' lives is of revolting, sociopathic dimensions. And more often than not the fate of our wildlife is consigned to the whims of agribusiness, corrupt politicians and sadistic morons—their executioners.

by KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

a few isolated islands remain. Despite this, the Redwoods still need to be defended.

The Bison’s range once stretched from Idaho to Virginia, and Minnesota to Texas, and the animals numbered 25-30 million. By 1890, Whites had hunted them down to a few hundred. The famous Yellowstone herd, which is based out of the national park, is descended from just 23 individuals and currently numbers less than 5000. Despite this, the Bison still need to be defended.

Prairie dogs are a keystone species originally found throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states of the US. Though once quite common, over the past century their population has plunged by over 98% due to the activites of the US Occupation, with cascading effects to other fauna and flora. Despite this, they too still need to be defended.

Prairie dogs differ from the Redwood and the Bison in one important aspect: unlike the previous two, they enjoy very little legal protection. Only two of the five species of prairie dog are officially listed as under threat, but these laws are rarely enforced. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has so far turned down all petitions to list the other three species. At the local level, few pro-prairie dog laws exist and in fact some counties actually require the eradication of prairie dogs on private land.

So killing prairie dogs is still a common occurrence. Earlier this month, in Longmont, Colorado, a prairie dog colony was exterminated for no urgent reason and against the wishes of local residents. It was this story that brought the plight of the prairie dogs to my attention and inspired me to investigate further.

Biology and Ecology

Prairie dogs are classified into five different species in the genus Cynomys, of which four are found in the United States: Gunnison’s prairie dog (C. gunnisoni). the white-tailed prairie dog (C. leucurus), the black-tailed prairie dog (C. ludovicianus) and the Utah prairie dog (C. parvidens). The fifth species, the Mexican prairie dog, C. mexicanus, is only found south of the border. Of these, only two have conservation status: the Utah is “threatened” under the US Endangered Species Act and the Mexican is designated “endangered” by CITES.

Prairie dogs are mostly herbivorous, living off of leaves and seeds, though they sometimes also eat insects.

Prairie dogs are a “keystone species,” meaning that they have a disproportionately large effect in their ecosystem relative to their abundance. In fact, over 200 vertebrate species and a number of invertebrate species are directly or indirectly dependent on prairie dogs for their own survival. For example, over 90% of the diet of black-footed ferrets(Mustela nigripes) is prairie dog, and their numbers fell to a low of 18 individuals in 1986due to the decline in their food source.

Additional predators who consume prairie dogs are foxes, coyotes, badgers, eagles, and red-tailed hawks. Still other animals nest or shelter in prairie dog burrows, permanently or temporarily, including burrowing owls, mountain plovers, rattlesnakes, salamanders, turtles and rabbits.

Prairie dogs also have a significant effect on the plants in their range. Their selective foraging promotes a high diversity of plant species, which is appreciated by other browsing herbivores such as Bison and Pronghorn Antelope.

The burrowing activity of the prairie dog positively affects soil structure and health through aeration and by helping rainwater to percolate into it and be retained. This boosts the growth of flowering plants, which in turn benefits insects, birds and other creatures.

Social Life and Language

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]rairie dogs are social animals who live in colonies that people call “towns.” Each town is made up of several to many groups. Each group is comprised of one to several adult females and zero to several adult males plus their offspring. Each group has its own territory which is staunchly defended by males and females alike.

Females are fertile for only about five hours on one day a year in the spring. They bear litters of 4-5 babies and, like cats, there is multiple paternity within each litter. That is, the female can be impregnated by multiple fathers. Though the young reach maturity in three months, about half of them typically die before reaching breeding age themselves.

Within groups, individuals express a variety of social behaviors including chittering, kissing, and in the case of black-tailed prairie dogs, monkey-like communal grooming.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is prairie dog language. Arizona Biologist Con Slobodchikoff has spent many years studying the alarm calls made by Gunnison’s prairie dog and his findings are fascinating.

First, Slobodchikoff noticed that prairie dogs seemed to be making different alarm calls depending on what predator was approaching. So he recorded audio of a variety of calls along with video of the escape responses that followed them. Then he played back the recordings in the field and was able to confirm through observation that calls consistently correlated with responses.

Next, using computer-generated sonograms, he measured the frequency and time values of the pattern of chirps within each call. This was painstaking work, as each individual chirp is only about 1/10th of a second in length. But the labor paid off.

What he found was that alarm calls describe individual predators based not only on species – such as coyote, human, hawk or domestic dog – but had additional signifiers for attributes such as size, shape and color. For example, differently sized and colored dogs got different calls. So did a human wearing a blue shirt versus the same human wearing a yellow shirt. The structures of the calls, then, are analogous to the nouns and adjectives of human language.

Even abstract shapes were greeted by different sounds, as Slobodchikoff found when he presented the prairie dogs with illustrations of a circles, triangles, or a colored oval. In these cases, the prairie dogs were describing to each other things that they had never seen before.

In a further parallel to human language, Slobodchikoff discovered that the same sounds were vocalized with different “dialects” or “accents” by Gunnison’s prairie dogs throughout their range around the Four Corners area. After examining sonograms of the calls of other species of prairie dog, Slobodchikoff tentatively concluded that they contrast enough from each other to constitute separate languages that would be comprehensible only to their native speakers. He compared this to the differences among human languages such as English, Spanish, French, etc.

Slobodchikoff described prairie dog language as, “at the present time, the most sophisticated animal language that has been decoded.”

The War on Prarie Dogs

The vast majority of the Europeans who participated in the invasion of North America did not have the same interest or respect for prairie dogs as Slobodchikoff. Violence has been the far more usual hallmark of interaction.

The main threats to prairie dogs have been agriculture, development and introduced disease. It’s also been common to shoot them for sport as a form of target practice. (They are usually classified in rural communities as "varmints"—thereby free to shoot for kicks with "varmint rifles." Countless generations of hunters have acquired their lethal skill by using "varmints" as living targets. —Editor)

Farmers have long killed prairie dogs because they forage on a wide variety of vegetation in their environs, which includes crops if they are planted in prairie dog territory.

Ranchers have targeted them under the false beliefs that A) domesticated animals break their legs in the holes (which has never been documented) and that B) in competing for vegetation with prairie dogs, domesticated animals suffer. This second point is highly debatable. No real evidence exists proving it. Furthermore, Bison, who have a diet similar to cows, suffered no apparent adversity from sharing habitat with the prairie dog for millennia. In fact, Bison have shown a preference for grazing on the edges of prairie dog towns.

As for development, it’s an unfortunate fact for the prairie dogs that they’ve simply been in the way of urban sprawl. They make their towns on flat, open spaces that are also ideal for houses, malls and parking lots. Prairie dog towns have also fallen victim to resource extraction activities such as fracking and oil-drilling. I didn’t find any references to such in my research, but solar and wind farms would also disrupt or destroy their habitat, of course.

A large number of prairie dogs have died of the plague, which entered the US in 1900. Carried by fleas, it rapidly spread through many wildlife populations. Unfortunately for prairie dogs, they are particularly susceptible and 90-100% in a town die within two weeks of its introduction.

Human extermination of prairie dogs over the last century has been accomplished through land-clearing, firearms, poison, and explosive gas. These methods are variously quick or agonizing, which is to say more or less “humane”.

One of the most brutal methods is to gas them with aluminium phosphide, an inorganic compound that is lethal to most animals including humans. It is sold under various brand names such as Fumitoxin® Weevilcide® and Phostoxin®. Aluminium phosphide is what was used to attack the colony at Longmont, Colorado, on the morning of Friday, November 10^th, 2017.

Tragedy at Longmont

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]eremy Gregory, a prairie dog activist who is executive director of Tindakan, a non-profit seeking solutions for ecological and social justice issues, was present for the mass killing. I contacted him via email and he described the scene and the situation thus:

“Four men working for Rocky Mountain Wildlife Services (not to be confused with the the Dept of Ag’s Wildlife Services but still as vile and heinous) set out to methodically place paper doused in fumitoxen in the homes of over 300 prairie dogs, just so a development company could be spared from humanely relocating them to another place. This colony resided on the edge of open space and habitat to an array of other beautiful and majestic species, some threatened like the burrowing owl and a family of bald eagles. There are also other bird species like falcons and hawks and of course, along with raccoons, fox, coyote… and the list goes on.

“Fumitoxin is a poison that, once ingested, causes that living being to bleed out, destroying the internal organs. It is an inhumane, slow and painful death. This poison has in fact been the contributor to the deaths of people, including two girls recently.

As bad as this is, it’s worse once you know the backstory. This wasn’t a case of prairie dogs being killed for an imminent construction project or agricultural endeavor, as poor as these excuses would be, given our over-built, over-farmed environment. No, apparently the motivation was, at least in part, real life hatred for prairie dogs and the humans who defend them.

Susan Sommers with Prairie Protection Colorado (PPC) filled me in on the details:

The City of Longmont actually has a law on the books that requires developers to “make a good faith effort” to relocate prairie dogs. Doing so is a part of the permitting process for approving new construction. The developer in this instance was Sun Construction, owned by Steve Strong and Andy Welch, who, as we shall see, are the villains in this tale.

Relocating prairie dogs is not easy. Challenge #1 is finding an appropriate chunk of real estate where the prairie dogs will be welcome. Challenge #2 is winning the approval of the County Commissioners of the receiving county. Challenge #3 is the official blessing of Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW), which requires that the developer submit a Wild To Wild Relocation application. Then there are the logistics of the relocation process itself, such as prepping the new spot and trapping the prairie dogs at the old one, etc.

PPC took care of challenge #1: They found enthusiastic hosts at the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, which is actively seeking prairie dogs as part of restoring a healthy prairie ecosystem that could support the reintroduction of black-footed ferrets. Refuge staff “felt confident” that the commissioners of Jefferson County would sign off on the relocation since the refuge is on federal land, which would cover challenge #2.

Unfortunately, this left challenge #3 – submitting the paperwork – in the hands of Sun Construction. First they asked the city for a waiver from the relocation requirement. When the city refused, Sun pulled their application to develop the property, even though this meant giving up on a seven-figure project. This left them legally free to exterminate the prairie dogs.

Which they did, on November 10^th, as told above.

Facebook Adds Insult to Injury

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter the extermination, Prairie Protection Colorado published three different posts about the event on their Facebook page. These posts included Sun Construction’s publicly advertised contact information, including their phone number (303-444-4780), email address (info@sunconstruction.com), and their web address (sunconstruction.com). Also named were Steve Strong and Andy Welch, whose role as owners is also a matter of public record.

Soon afterwards, Facebook deleted one of the posts and sent a warning to PPC that they would unpublish their entire page if they didn’t voluntarily delete any other posts similar to it. So PPC removed the other two posts and reposted new stories without the contact information, along with the following notice:

November 11 at 5:24pm

Facebook has required us to remove several posts due to concerns that they don’t conform to FB’s community standards. We have done so and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our followers.

Two days later, they added:

Sun Construction’s owners are watching this page, and they obviously reported our content to Facebook which resulted in our having to remove posts naming them as the individuals that called for this inhumane and horrific mass annihilation.

Here we see one of the serious issues with using Facebook for political activism. Although social media is de facto the public realm the way it is treated by its users, it is not so de jure, that is, according to the law. In the real world, Strong and Welch might not like having their names trumpeted in the town square, but unless a threat is being made against them or they are being slandered (neither of which was the case with PPC’s posts on Facebook), they have no legal recourse for complaint. They’ve simply got to grin and bear it. Of course, they can also make their case for their actions in the same square. These are basic principles of free speech in an open society (which, yes, is under assault).

Facebook, on the other hand, is a privately owned virtual space that can and does police the speech of its users who have no legal recourse except to its Terms of Service. Whereas US Constitutional free speech has been subject to nearly constant refinement and redefinition through the courts over the decades – and so it is fairly clear at this point what it encompasses, for better or worse – Facebook’s terms are a matter of a corporate caprice, if legally vetted. The terms are interpreted subjectively, by both people and by algorithms.

Yes, algorithms are subjective. Though the term sounds mathematical and connotes precision and even objectivity, any social media algorithm is purely a product of the prejudices, being written and tweaked by people.

All of this is to say that two human beings, Steve Strong and Andy Welch, who orchestrated the painful deaths of close to 300 animals – of a species that has been driven to the edge of extinction – successfully requested that they not be named as the responsible parties in a de facto public forum by appealing to that forum’s “community standards.”

One might wonder which terms the Facebook moderators felt that PPC violated. Did they “bully, intimidate, or harass”? Was it “hate speech”? Or “ misleading, malicious, or discriminatory”? We will probably never know, nor does PPC have a “right” to be informed.

In the real world, PPC certainly did none of those things, and Strong and Welch wouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But Facebook is not the real world and in the realm of social media, there are no rights. Their “community standards” might sound reasonable, but in reality they are no more than mealy-mouthed nonsense, precluding honest discourse and enforcing authoritarian conformity. Note how much of the terminology is borrowed from the language of identity politics, but is here turned on its head and used to protect the actions of the oppressor from the critique of the oppressed. Disgusting.

In the case of PPC and Sun Construction, an unequal power dynamic exists; you have mainstream corporate owners on one hand and marginal, underfunded activists on the other. It is essentially impossible for PPC to “bully” Sun. The same dynamic exists between Facebook itself and its individual users, but to a much greater degree. Sun’s Strong and Welch are, in the end, just individuals and if enough of their community – including friends and family – told them to shape up their act, they just might do it. Facebook, though, is operatively unassailable.

Personally, I think it’s high time to ask whether social media is doing more harm than good. But that’s a topic for another time…

What motivates murder?

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o why did Steve Strong and Andy Welch and Sun Construction kill all the prairie dogs? The way PPC set up the relocation deal financially, it would not have cost more than extermination. But money was clearly not their primary concern since they were willing to let go of a big project rather than take the simple step to save the animals. This is aberrant behavior for Capitalists. When you can’t count on corporations to follow the profit motive, how else do you explain their behavior?

Sommers speculated:

Settler Colonialism” never ended; today’s resource extractors are directly descended from yesterday’s rapacious, Indian-killing pioneers, in spirit if not in blood. The twisted belief that humans have “dominion over creation” is deeply ingrained in the current society, even if that belief is itself relatively recent in the long history of the human species.

What we see in the slaughter of these innocents in Colorado is the same thing that drives the annual massacre of Yellowstone Bison and the continued logging of Redwood trees. Yes, there is greed, but there is more than that, too. There is also naked hatred.

Tindakan’s Gregory had this to say:

“The science is overwhelming that in order to not just survive but flourish, we must find ways to coexist with nature. As Jacques Cousteau proclaimed; without man, nature flourishes yet without nature, man perishes. We have reduced the prairie dog species to less than 2% of it’s original habitat, this in turn adversely affects thousands of other species, which we need for our own survival.”

He is describing our society’s behavior as what it is: suicidal. One could surmise that this is the inevitable outcome of being ecocidal.

These are ugly times. Of course the US has never been pretty – there were no “good old days” for a nation founded on genocide and slavery – but its malice is metastasizing as it stumbles down the inevitable path of its decline. The mean are getting meaner; the angry, angrier; the crazy, crazier. We are living in an era of failing and falling, where institutions and individuals alike are degrading, devolving. What hope, then, is there for the prairie dog and all the other endangered creatures? I won’t guess, but I do know that not fighting for them is choosing spiritual death for ourselves.

Organizations defending the prairie dog:

* Prairie Protection Colorado

* Prairie Dog Coalition (Humane Society of the US)

* North Colorado Prairie Dog Advocates

* Prairie Dog Pals

* Wild Earth Guardians

* Southern Plains Land Trust

* Tindakan

Also Recommended:

* Con Slobodchikoff’s videos about Prairie Dogs: Ecology | Social Life | Language | Conservation

* “Prairie Dog Gone” chapter from Welfare Ranching

APPENDIX

As reported by Esquire Magazine on Apr 23rd—
Of Course Donald Trump Jr. Spent Earth Day Shooting Prairie Dogs.
God bless America.
See the details below. Click on the orange button if you think this is a bad joke. [bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#4a4949″ icon=”arrow” expand_text=”Show More” collapse_text=”Show Less” ]

By Peter Wade, Esquire Magazine

Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the President of the United States of America, spent Earth Day on Saturday shooting bullets at prairie dogs, which is listed as a “species of concern” for endangerment.

Greg Gianforte—the ethical moron sent to Washington by Montanans. And this is the nation that never stops talking about Christian compassion.

Trump Jr. spent the weekend in Montana with Republican candidate for the U.S. House Greg Gianforte, who said of the trip: “As good Montanans, we want to show good hospitality to people. What can be more fun than to spend an afternoon shooting the little rodents.”

It is not illegal to hunt prairie dogs, but it’s also not exactly ethical, the Humane Society told ABC Fox Montana. Besides, just look at how adorable these little critters are.

Now is also an especially inopportune time to hunt prairie dogs, as they are currently in the middle of their breeding season.

“For prairie dogs, March through June is peak breeding season, which means pregnant, adult females will also be at risk. People do not hunt these animals for food or any legitimate wildlife management purposes,” said Lindsey Sterling Krank, director of the Humane Society’s Prairie Dog Coalition in a press release.

In sum, hunting prairie dogs hurts the environment and makes the world a sadder place. Sounds like the perfect hobby for a Trump.

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About the Author

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of Kollibri’s writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press.

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