70 top-paid US health industry CEOs raked in $9.8B since Obamacare passed

Absolute obscene greed! Good example of crapitalism. No wonder the USA does not have a health care plan, as all profits are pilfered away from those at the top. Greedy bastards. If we send those useless crapitalists to planet Mars, would America have a health care plan, like the rest of the civilized world? Americans are dumb asses for letting this happen.

Source: 70 top-paid US health industry CEOs raked in $9.8B since Obamacare passed

http://www.blacklistednews.com

July 25, 2017

Source: Boing Boing

 

You know all those health industry lobbyists who say that the American healthcare industry will go broke if it has to take care of the health of Americans?

Every year since 2011 — when ACA became law — the CEOs of US health companies have averaged an 11% raise. Remember, that’s 11 percent, every year.

Topping the list is John Martin who helmed Gilead Sciences to the tune of $863M since Obamacare’s passage.

American health care is indeed dangerous and unstably expensive, and to fix that, America’s health CEOs should be focusing on lower prices, eliminating unnecessary expenses, and coordinating care. Instead, America’s health care industry is booming at the expense of American health, thanks to a focus on selling more drugs, performing more procedures and tests, raising prices and engaging in gimmicky stock-inflating tactics.

* Pharmaceutical and drug-related company CEOs made up 11 of the top 20 highest earners.

* Gilead’s Martin made the most since the ACA became law. Several other executives — including John Hammergren of McKesson ($587 million), Leonard Schleifer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals ($338 million) and Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group ($279 million) — each took home more than a quarter-billion dollars on their own.

* A handful of lesser-known health care CEOs were among the highest earners. For example, Michael Mussallem of the medical device company Edwards Lifesciences collected $246 million since the ACA went into effect. Last year, for every dollar Mussallem’s company brought in as revenue, two cents went toward his pay.

* The analysis still underestimates how much wealth health care CEOs have. It did not include vested stock after CEOs retired, nor did it include the value of stock CEOs still hold. For example, Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina owns more than 13% of Walgreens, which equaled about $12 billion as of June 2017.

The sky-high pay of health care CEOs [Bob Herman/Axios]

(via Naked Capitalism)

(Image: Jeffrey Beall, CC-BY)

Pentagon snared in govt sting as fake cops easily acquire $1.2mn worth of military gear

Perhaps the US government should investigate itself and find where did the missing 1.3 trillion dollars went?

“The US Department of Defense has been caught out selling large amounts of military supplies to a fake police department. The fake department was created by the US government itself to sniff out waste and fraud.”

Source: Pentagon snared in govt sting as fake cops easily acquire $1.2mn worth of military gear — RT America

RT America

26 Jul, 2017

© Charles Platiau / Reuters

 

The US Department of Defense has been caught out selling large amounts of military supplies to a fake police department. The fake department was created by the US government itself to sniff out waste and fraud.

The Government Accountability Office issued a revealingreport last week showing that the Pentagon sold more than 100 controlled items valued at $1.2 million to a fake police department set up by the government watchdog agency through the 1990s-era 1033 program, according to a report released by the GAO. The 1033 program allows local and state law enforcement to apply for excess equipment from the US military.

The gear that the GAO received from the DoD included night vision goggles, simulated M-16A2 rifles and pipe bomb equipment.

The government watchdog set up a fake website with a fake address that led to an empty parking lot and gave the information to the DoD in their application for the supplies. The GAO then received the fake items in less than a week after applying.

“They never did any verification, like visit our ‘location,’ and most of it was by email,” Zina Merritt, director of the GAO’s defense capabilities and management team, which conducted the operation, told the Marshall Project. “It was like getting stuff off of eBay.”

Following the fallout from this report, the Pentagon has now promised to tighten its procedures for verification, which include going to the police department in question to verify its location and obtain valid identification when law enforcement comes to pick up supplies.

The GAO sting operation’s groundwork was laid after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The response to people protesting the death of the young man was met with military tanks and weapons as the Ferguson police department tried to break up the protests.

Further, it was confirmed that much of the equipment used by the Ferguson department in the protests was the same that was dispensed by the 1033 program, after the Marshall Project and others uncovered the connection.

Following the Ferguson protests, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order that prohibited the US military from giving away their equipment and made them deem other specific pieces of equipment “controlled,”according to the Marshall Project.

The order also established training requirements and strict oversight for law enforcement looking to acquire the military materials. Most importantly, the order ensured oversight from a Pentagon and Justice Department working group.

However, the group has not convened since President Donald Trump took office, according to the Constitution Project, a bipartisan think tank participating in the meetings.

Trump previously said that he would revoke the limitations set forth by Obama’s executive order, but as of yet, he has not repealed it.

The Department of Defense has also promised to conduct an internal fraud assessment by April 2018.

 

 

 

Policing for Profit: Jeff Sessions and Co.’s Thinly Veiled Plot to Rob Us Blind

Source: Policing for Profit: Jeff Sessions & Co.’s Thinly Veiled Plot to Rob Us Blind

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by John W. Whitehead

July 26, 2017

“Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit.”

— H.L. Mencken

Let’s not mince words.

Jeff Sessions, the nation’s top law enforcement official, would not recognize the Constitution if he ran right smack into it.

Whether the head of the Trump Administration’s Justice Department enjoys being the architect of a police state or is just painfully, criminally clueless, Sessions has done a great job thus far of sidestepping the Constitution at every turn.

Most recently, under the guise of “fighting crime,” Sessions gave police the green light to rob, pilfer, steal, thieve, swipe, purloin, filch and liberate American taxpayers of even more of their hard-earned valuables (especially if it happens to be significant amounts of cash) using any means, fair or foul.

In this case, the foul method favored by Sessions & Co. is civil asset forfeiture, which allows police and prosecutors to “seize your car or other property, sell it and use the proceeds to fund agency budgets—all without so much as charging you with a crime.”

Under a federal equitable sharing program, police turn asset forfeiture cases over to federal agents who process seizures and then return 80% of the proceeds to the police. (In Michigan, police actually get to keep up to 100% of forfeited property.)

This incentive-driven excuse for stealing from the citizenry is more accurately referred to as “policing for profit” or “theft by cop.”

Despite the fact that 80 percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge against the property owner, challenging these “takings” in court can cost the owner more than the value of the confiscated property itself. As a result, most property owners either give up the fight or chalk the confiscation up to government corruption, leaving the police and other government officials to reap the benefits.

And boy, do they reap the benefits.

Police agencies have used their ill-gotten gains “to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear,” reports The Washington Post. “They have also spent money on luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.”

Incredibly, these asset forfeiture scams have become so profitable for the government that, according to The Washington Post, “in 2014, law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did.” As the Post notes, “the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.”

In 2015, the federal government seized nearly $2.6 billion worth of airplanes, houses, cash, jewelry, cars and other itemsunder the guise of civil asset forfeiture.

According to USA Today, “Anecdotal evidence suggests that allowing departments to keep forfeiture proceeds may tempt them to use the funds unwisely. For example, consider a 2015 scandal in Romulus, Michigan, where police officers used funds forfeited from illicit drug and prostitution stings to pay for …  illicit drugs and prostitutes.”

Memo to the rest of my fellow indentured servants who are living through this dark era of government corruption, incompetence and general ineptitude: this is not how justice in America is supposed to work.

We are now ruled by a government so consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population that they are completely unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

Our freedoms aren’t just being trampled, however. They’re being eviscerated.

At every turn, “We the People” are getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

Americans no longer have to be guilty to be stripped of their property, rights and liberties. All you have to be is in possession of something the government wants. And if you happen to have something the government wants badly enough, trust me, their agents will go to any lengths to get it.

If the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

Here’s how the whole ugly business works in a nutshell.

First, government agents (usually the police) use a broad array of tactics to profile, identify, target and arrange to encounter (in a traffic stop, on a train, in an airport, in public, or on private property) those  individuals who might be traveling with a significant amount of cash or possess property of value. Second, these government agents—empowered by the courts and the legislatures—seize private property (cash, jewelry, cars, homes and other valuables) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity.

Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, without any charges being levied against the property owner, or any real due process afforded the unlucky victim, the property is seized by the government, which often divvies it up with the local police who helped with the initial seizure.

In a Kafkaesque turn of the screw, the burden of proof falls on the unfortunate citizenry who must mount a long, complicated, expensive legal campaign to prove their innocence in order to persuade the government that it should return the funds they stole. Not surprisingly, very few funds ever get returned.

It’s a new, twisted form of guilt by association, only it’s not the citizenry being accused of wrongdoing, just their money.

Motorists have been particularly vulnerable to this modern-day form of highway robbery.

For instance, police stole $201,000 in cash from Lisa Leonard because the money—which Leonard planned to use to buy a house for her son—was being transported on a public highway also used by drug traffickers. Despite the fact that Leonard was innocent of wrongdoing, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the theft on a technicality.

Police stole $50,000 in cash from Amanee Busbee—which she planned to use to complete the purchase of a restaurant—and threatened to hand her child over to CPS if she resisted. She’s one of the few to win most of her money back in court.

Police stole $22,000 in cash from Jerome Chennault—which he planned to use as the down payment on a home—simply because a drug dog had alerted police to its presence in his car. After challenging the seizure in court, Chennault eventually succeeded in having most of his money returned, although the state refused to compensate him for his legal and travel expenses.

Police stole $8,500 in cash and jewelry from Roderick Daniels—which he planned to use to purchase a new car—and threatened him with jail and money-laundering charges if he didn’t sign a waiver forfeiting his property.

Police stole $6,000 in cash from Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson and threatened to turn their young children over to Child Protective Services if they resisted.

Tenaha, Texas, is a particular hotbed of highway forfeiture activity, so much so that police officers keep pre-signed, pre-notarized documents on hand so they can fill in what property they are seizing.

As the Huffington Post explains, these police forfeiture operations have become little more than criminal shakedowns:

Police in some jurisdictions have run forfeiture operations that would be difficult to distinguish from criminal shakedowns. Police can pull motorists over, find some amount of cash or other property of value, claim some vague connection to illegal drug activity and then present the motorists with a choice: If they hand over the property, they can be on their way. Otherwise, they face arrest, seizure of property, a drug charge, a probable night in jail, the hassle of multiple return trips to the state or city where they were pulled over, and the cost of hiring a lawyer to fight both the seizure and the criminal charge. It isn’t hard to see why even an innocent motorist would opt to simply hand over the cash and move on.

Unsurprisingly, these asset forfeiture scams have become so profitable for the government that they have expanded their reach beyond the nation’s highways.

According to USA Today, the U.S. Department of Justice received $2.01 billion in forfeited items in 2013, and since 2008 local and state law enforcement nationwide has raked in some $3 billion in forfeitures through the federal “equitable sharing” program.

So now it’s not just drivers who have to worry about getting the shakedown.

Any American unwise enough to travel with cash is fair game for the government pickpockets.

In fact, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been colluding with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and local police departments to seize a small fortune in cash from American travelers using the very tools—scanners, spies and surveillance devices—they claimed were necessary to catch terrorists.

Mind you, TSA agents already have a reputation for stealing from travelers, but clearly the government is not concerned about protecting the citizenry from its own wolfish tendencies.

No, the government bureaucrats aren’t looking to catch criminals. (If so, they should be arresting themselves.)

They’re just out to rob you of your cold, hard cash.

Think about it for a moment. You pay a hefty fee just to be able to walk free. It’s called income tax. As former presidential candidate Ron Paul recognizes, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.” And if you refuse to pay any of that so-called income tax, you’ll be severely fined and/or arrested and put in jail.

One more thing: you don’t really own your property. That is, your house or your land. Even when you pay off the mortgage, if you fail to pay your property taxes, government agents will evict you and take your home.

This is not freedom.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying taxes (a pittance compared to what we are forced to shell out in taxes today) to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let the corporate elite and number-crunching bureaucrats pilfer our bank accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as it pleases.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money? What if we didn’t just line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the corporate collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent? What if, instead of meekly tolerating the government’s ongoing efforts to rob us blind, we did something about it?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the government can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.

It’s up to “We the People” to demand reform.

These injustices will continue as long as we remain silent.

As American journalist H.L. Mencken observed:

The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful, and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year by year: It is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if … the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.

In other words, make them hear you.

And if they won’t listen, then I suggest it’s time for what Martin Luther King Jr. called for when government doesn’t listen: “militant nonviolent resistance.”

More articles by:John W. Whitehead

John W. Whitehead is the president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People.

Net Neutrality Regulations Are Pushed by Large Corporations (16 min)

Some big corporations don’t want a free market. They want a protected market with barriers. Lawmakers seem hungry to regulate the Internet. It’s dangerous!

Source: Net Neutrality Regulations Are Pushed by Large Corporations

http://www.activistpost.com

July 24, 2017

By Vin Armani

In this video, Vin Armani explains why you’ve been tricked into supporting net neutrality. Some big corporations don’t want a free market. They want a protected market with barriers. Lawmakers seem hungry to regulate the Internet. It’s a dangerous combination that infects most industries. Don’t let it happen to the Internet.

Watch the full broadcast here
Live free and succeed outside the rigged system at Counter Markets

Vin Armani is the host of The Vin Armani Show on Activist Post, agorist entrepreneur and co-founder of Counter Markets. Follow Vin on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube. Get the weekly podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Vin is available for interviews at email – Vin (at) VinArmani.com.

Anti-Russia sanctions: ‘EU should stop playing games of Washington’

“Nathan Gill: It is time for the EU to decide whether or not they want to defend Europeans and European business interests and stand up against what the Americans are trying to do.”

Source: Anti-Russia sanctions: ‘EU should stop playing games of Washington’ — RT Op-Edge

RT Op-Edge

24 Jul, 2017

© Zach Gibson / Reuters

 

It is time for the EU to decide whether they want to defend Europeans and European business interests and stand up against what the Americans are trying to do, says MEP Nathan Gill from the UK Independence Party.

An EU delegation is holding crunch talks on Monday with US lawmakers. It comes as a leaked memo suggests Brussels is preparing retaliation if Washington pushes ahead with new anti-Russian sanctions that could hurt European businesses.

RT: Do you expect the European Commission delegation to change US lawmakers’ mind ahead of the voting on new sanctions?

Nathan Gill: No, not really. What we are seeing here is some very jingoistic Russia-phobia legislation that is coming out primarily pushed by some very angry Democrats and CNN who are trying through the fog of smoke and mirrors distract people from the real reasons why they voted for Trump in the election for the presidency. What we’ve got to remember is it hasn’t affected American business or industry. The sanctions, the recrimination that Russia has put against American and EU countries – exports, imports, etc. – the Austrian Institute [of Economic Research] estimate that has already cost the EU over €100 billion and up to 2.5 million jobs…

…But it is not really costing the Americans. They are going to try and punish Russia because we are seeing this witch hunt against Trump and against Trump’s family for the so-called links during the election which is all smoke and mirrors. The reality is, the only people that are going to be hurt are the people from Europe. We are looking at the energy cost rise by at least €3 billion. This is big money we are talking about.

RT: If fresh sanctions are approved, what kind of measures can Brussels apply to retaliate and defend its business deals with Russia?

Nathan Gill: It is time for the EU to decide whether or not they want to defend Europeans and European business interests and stand up against what the Americans are trying to do. If they truly want to stand up and defend Europe over internationalism, then they will do that, and they will say “no, we are not playing the games of Washington any longer.”

‘US government wants to put Trump in a box’

Martin McCauley, author, and Russia analyst, told RT: “There is a majority in the House of Representatives for increased sanctions, it is expected to go through tomorrow. Then it will go to the Senate. And there is majority already in the Senate for increased sanctions. It looks like a done deal from an American point of view. All the European Commission officials could say is “this is going to damage us.” Because one of the things the Americans would target will be the construction of the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. They may put pressure on German companies to slow that down; they don’t really favor that going ahead… The House of Representatives and the Senate want to tie President Donald Trump down, put him in a box so he can’t really relax any sanctions on his own.” 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

How Gaza was made into an unlivable place

Source: How Gaza was made into an unlivable place | Human Rights | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

By Michael Lynk

July 25, 2017

Michael Lynk is the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel.

What is it like to live in a place with a few hours of electricity a day and eight hours of water every four days? Palestinians gather in front of the gate of Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza during a protest against the blockade calling for reopening of the crossing [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

 

Gaza and Tel Aviv lie only 75 kilometres apart from each other. They share the same sandy topography and the same intensely hot Levantine summers. But the similarities largely end there. Any recent satellite image taken at night over the eastern Mediterranean would show an incandescent blaze for Tel Aviv, and only wan pinpricks of light further down the shore in Gaza.

Gaza is in the third month of an externally enforced reduction of its already meagre electrical power supply. The enclave of two million people would ordinarily require about 450 megawatts (MW) of electricity daily for around-the-clock power. However, over much of the past decade, as part of the tight Israeli blockade of Gaza, its power supplies have fluctuated around 200MW, resulting in persistent blackouts. But over the past several months, according to the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha, Gaza’s supply each day has varied from 140MW to an all-time low of 70MW, lengthening the blackouts and the human suffering.

The immediate cause of the power crisis lies with the dispute between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas over fuel taxation. This prompted the PA to request the Israel reduce the 120MW it sold daily down to around 70MW, and Israel has complied. 

A second source of electricity is Gaza’s sole power plant, which can only produce 50-55MW daily (on those occasions when it has been able to import fuel from Egypt). The power plant was badly damaged by Israeli bombings in 2006 and again in 2014, and Israel has restricted the entry of replacement parts into Gaza. If the plant was fully operational, it could produce around 140MW.

The third supply source for power to Gaza comes from Egypt, which provides around 28MW daily, although there are ongoing disruptions to its availability. And the fourth source is individual solar panels and generators, which are available only to the well-off.

The social consequences of this extraordinary power crisis are severe. Households without access to generators or solar panels – which is most of Gaza – have between 4-6 hours of electricity at the best of times, followed by 12-16 hours of blackouts. Hospitals rely on over-extended generators, and have to ration power. Workplaces are shuttering. More than 100 million litres of untreated sewage spills daily into the Mediterranean, fouling the beaches and the fishing grounds. Food must be bought daily and consumed quickly. Internet service – for almost all Gazans, their only link to the outside world – is spotty. And there is little available power for air conditioning and fans to combat the sweltering summer heat.

The background to the Gaza crisis

The United Nations Country Team in the occupied Palestinian territory recently released an incisive report on Gaza (PDF), focusing on the humanitarian impact of Israel’s 10-year blockade and the internal political divisions among the Palestinians. Its findings are bleak: Gaza’s impoverishment is entirely the product of human decisions, and not the fate of nature.

The year 2007 was ground zero for Gaza. In July of that year, Israel imposed its comprehensive blockade on the Strip, and declared it to be an “enemy entity”. Life before 2007 in Gaza was already very difficult, but now it has become harsh and unremitting. Gaza, which was once said to be the future “Singapore of the Middle East”, has become a metaphor for immiseration. 

INTERACTIVE: 24 Hours in Gaza

According to the UN report, between 2006 and 2016, Gaza’s real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita declined by 5.3 percent, while it grew in the occupied West Bank by 48.5 percent. Poverty has increased from 30 percent of the population in 2004 to around 40 percent today. Gaza suffers from one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, at 41 percent by the end of 2016. Over 60 percent of Gazans between 20-24 years old are without work, and the unemployment rate for women between 2006 and 2016 increased sharply from 35 percent to 64 percent. More than 60 percent of the population in 2017 was partly or wholly dependent on humanitarian assistance. According to other reports, gender-based violence, divorce rates, suicide and drug use are all on the rise.

The UN report reminds the world that Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza, as it controls its land, sea and air borders, even if it no longer has “boots on the ground”.

Gaza’s traditional economic sectors are withering. Agriculture, forestry, fishing and manufacturing have all declined in economic size, and the principal source of growth, tragically, has come from the reconstruction of the neighbourhoods destroyed during the three conflicts with Israel over the past nine years.

Israel controls what leaves and enters Gaza, with the average number of truckloads of goods exiting Gaza in the first five months of 2017 less than a third of what it was during the first half of 2007. “Gaza’s economic trajectory over the past decade”, the UN report stated, “is a strong indicator of the ongoing de-development in the Strip.”

The situation of drinking water in Gaza is at a desperate level. The unsustainable over-extraction of Gaza’s coastal aquifer has caused the intrusion of seawater, with 96 percent of the groundwater now unsuitable for human consumption.

Half of the population has access to water for only eight hours every four days, and another 30 percent receives water for eight hours every three days. Trucked water is 15-20 times more expensive than network water, and it is unreliable in terms of quality. As with other scarce goods, it is the poor and vulnerable who are affected the most. A new water agreement between Israel and the PA, announced recently, may bring some future relief, but Gaza’s best bet is water self-reliance through desalination plants and secure electricity sources.

The UN report reminds the world that Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza, as it controls its land, sea and air borders, even if it no longer has “boots on the ground”. As such, it retains legal obligations to the population to ensure its health, dignity and well-being. In particular, the report emphasises that “the numerous restrictions imposed by Israel on both movements of people and goods into and out of Gaza impede the enjoyment of a range of human rights such as the right to freedom of movement and … the right to health, education, work, adequate standards of living and family life”. The other parties that share responsibility for Gaza – Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt – also have a legal duty to observe human rights and humanitarian standards, which has not always been kept in recent years.

In 2012, the UN issued a report entitled “Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place?” (PDF). If that report was gloomy, the new UN report is desolate. It concludes that Gaza, in the interceding five years, has endured a “downward spiral of de-development, while the people of Gaza are caught in a cycle of humanitarian need and perpetual aid dependency”.

With less than three years before 2020, the report warns that, unless the present path is radically altered, Gaza will become “more isolated and more desperate” with the chances of more devastating conflicts and an even more flattened economy on the horizon. Should this happen, the hope for political reconciliation among the Palestinians and an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine will become that much more elusive. Will those nighttime satellite images of Gaza soon be able to detect any lights at all?

Michael Lynk is the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967. He was appointed in 2016. He also teaches at the Faculty of Law, Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Uruguay Tells US Drug War to Take a Hike

Source: Uruguay Tells US Drug War to Take a Hike

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by John Grant

July 25, 2017

Newsflash! Uruguay has fashioned a marijuana legalization program that is smart and graceful, yet does not turn the little South American nation into a tourist Mecca like Amsterdam. Legalization only applies to citizens. It may be the best decriminalization model yet. In the annals of beleaguered US Attorney General Jeff Sessions — whose obsession with weed I wrote about earlier — this amounts to another warning shot from the real world making it clear re-invigorating federal anti-marijuana law enforcement is not workable — unless the plan is to assume an all-out police state mode. Everybody knows the bloodhounds are baying in the woods and getting closer on the scent of Sessions’ Russia problem. In a front-page interview with The New York Times, President Trump makes it clear he’s fed up with Sessions for recusing himself on the Russia investigation. Jeff Sessions may be approaching pariah status in Washington DC.

Uruguay’s actions are part of a general trend in Latin America that suggests leaders there don’t give the US Drug War much credence any more. One leader after another has expressed frustration with the US military and police obsession with the supply of drugs from the South, while leaders in the US fail to socially address the demand at home that has always driven the so-called “war.” Latin American leaders are effectively reading the US the riot act. Bastante! Enough. That goes for leaders in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Jamaica and even Canada.

One of the most interesting examples of this shift occurred during the notorious summit meeting in Cartagena in 2012. Conservative Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos publicly requested of President Barack Obama that the US do more about demand and let up on Latin America for being the supplier of that dysfunctional US demand. Get your own house in order and stop scapegoating us.

Americans, however, never got this story. As many will recall, what we did get was a raft of juicy scandal stories about the president’s secret service detail getting laid by high-class Colombian prostitutes. (Prostitution is legal in Colombia and thrives in Cartagena.) Was this absence an insidious conspiracy? Or was it, rather, just the exceptionalist American subconscious at work making it clear the United States never recognizes problems having to do with itself. As any morally righteous gringo understands, the real horror was American special agents protecting the president of the United States having sex with dark and furtive Latin women for cash. Elite American warriors compromised by Mestizo honey pots! Now that’s a story you can run with in Gringolandia. Editors decided Americans didn’t want to hear that the USA had been using its Drug War to demonize Latin America for supplying it what its population demanded — as if that isn’t a perfect definition of free private enterprise.

Santos wrote this in a Guardian op-ed: “We need to introduce a public health framework to the treatment of drug consumption focusing on prevention, attention, rehabilitation and re-socialisation of drug abusers.” He did praise Obama for encouraging his controversial peace initiatives with the FARC — a novel approach that does seem surprisingly good. “Many people warned me that it would be political suicide,” Santos told Obama in opening remarks at the summit. “Making war is so much easier than making peace. And you not only believed it was possible, you encouraged me to go ahead, and gave me your full and enthusiastic support.” Santos also honored Obama for opening relations with Cuba. Many on the right in Latin American and in the US feel Santos must have lost his mind.

With the ascendancy of a ruthless, inexperienced TV-star/real-estate-mogul as US president — a man who got into the White House by slandering Obama as an illegal immigrant from the Dark Continent and calling Latin American immigrants “rapists” — respect has turned to outright disdain. Eduardo Blasina, the director of something called the Montevideo Cannabis Museum, summed it up this way for The New York Times: “Today, what the United States says has never mattered less. We don’t see its president as a reasonable individual whose opinion is worth anything.”

Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, a small nation on the Atlantic coast south of Brazil and northeast of Argentina. Until recently, the amazingly humble Jose “Pepe” Mujica was president of Uruguay; he started the ball rolling on the legalization of marijuana. Mujica is a former guerrilla imprisoned and tortured during the days of the dirty wars in that region. As many will recall, that was when Henry Kissinger — accessory to the murder of duly-elected President Salvador Allende in Chile — liked to point out something called “the arc of history” didn’t pass through South America, which meant to Mr. Kissinger what went on down there didn’t really matter. It didn’t matter if friendly right-wing regimes murdered and disappeared citizens in the left-leaning opposition. It was a horrific time. Many of the disappeared were killed and their naked bodies flown out over the ocean, slit open so they’d sink when kicked out the door as unidentifiable shark chum. It’s always good to remember this period, lest it return like a Dracula sequel. One good way to remember is to use Netflicks for films like The Official Story, a memorable Argentine film about a conservative, childless high school history teacher whose husband (he’s in the secret police) brings home an adorable baby girl. This woman’s growing curiosity and her efforts to figure out where this child came from makes the film a powerful story.

There’s a very deep-seated mistrust in Latin America for right-wing gringo leaders from the North. Uruguay is small and likely more homogeneous and cosmopolitan than its much larger neighbors. This may explain why its ex-guerrilla leader is so respected, while in the giant to the north — Brazil — ex-guerrilla, former President Dilma Rousseff, who was also imprisoned and tortured, was ignominiously removed from the presidency by the Brazilian right in a highly-polarized political climate. Her predecessor — the popular Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva — was just given a 10-year jail sentence. In both cases, the charge was corruption. With a very violent and exploitative history, Brazil is one of the more corrupt nations on the planet; corruption seems to have been absorbed into its very being. Corruption in Brazil? To paraphrase the narrator’s line in Apocalypse Now: “Charging someone with corruption in Brazil is like giving out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500.”

Colombia has a very bloody history as well. But President Santos has broken with his predecessor and the absorption of FARC into the system seems to be working. His views on the Drug War are equally interesting. He opened his Guardian op-ed this way:

“How does one explain to a Colombian peasant in a rural community in the southwest of the country that he will be prosecuted under criminal charges for growing marijuana plants, while a young entrepreneur in Colorado finds his or her legal recreational marijuana business booming?”

A very good question that our own Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other drug warriors should be made to ponder. Too many of them are still obsessed with violence and prison as a problem solvers.

Uruguayan Congressman Sebastian Sabini, a 36-years-old leftist and an occasional pot smoker, is the father of the new marijuana legalization plan in Uruguay. He says it’s a matter of social justice. “The sectors that bear the brunt of drug policies are the poorest,” he told The New York Times. “The ones sent to jail are the poor people.”

That class-based dynamic is certainly at work here in the United States. (Of course, we’re not supposed to mention the idea of class here in North America.) All one has to do is look at the race and economic strata of the majority of people we have prosecute and imprisoned over the years for drug crimes. Then watch unpopular New Jersey Governor Chris Christie pander to The Opiate Crisis and suburban Jersey girls on heroin. Nobody cried such crocodile tears when it was inner city African American kids ruining their troubled lives on crack or heroin. Then, it was an impassioned call for more cops and more prisons. Get tough! No mercy! Arrest ‘em and lock ‘em up. And once they’re locked up in America — where politicians can never be seen saying I’m sorry or I was wrong — prison reform is a Sisyphian project.

I will never forget an encounter I had back in the ‘90s with then-Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. I was working as the house photographer for Widener University, which is just south of the Philly airport and just north of the Delaware line. Biden was then working hard in the Senate to fund more cops and prisons. He came to Widener to speak on the topic, and I was assigned to photograph him. After taking a few shots, I decided to stay to listen to the man and his pitch for the Drug War, something that personally interested me, beyond my job as a flak photographer.

I forget exactly what the beloved working-class senator from the corporate state of Delaware said. But it didn’t sit right with me. I had been spending my vacation time as a photographer in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua, in the middle of the Reagan Wars. I’d also been photographing addicts on the street through a needle exchange program in inner city Philadelphia and had been reading on Harm Reduction research. Later, I become aware, from a book by Ted Gest called Crime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order, that when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, Democrats were freaked out: they feared they were finished politically. According to Gest, it was Joe Biden who saved the day by saying, “‘Give me the crime issue and you’ll never have trouble with it in an election.’” Crime bills were the way for Democrats to stay in the political game.

“How did so much crime legislation pass during the partisan 1980s?” Gest asks. “A key element was important personal relationships in the Capital, especially between Biden and the new Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.” This is the famous racist Dixiecrat who, following the Nixon Strategy, had changed his party affiliation to Republican, keeping his Senate seniority. It was the beginning of a fruitful political friendship — “fruitful” that is, if you were a politician willing to pander and fuel the Drug War fears of the time. The result was money for more cops and more prisons. It was part and parcel with what Michelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim Crow,” where the stigma of being a felon replaced the old stigma of being a nigger. Bill Clinton went on to pursue a similar strategy to stay in the political game.

It was thus that I encountered Senator Biden in a Widener University auditorium shilling for the Drug War. I was in the second row and raised my hand. Biden called on me, stepping toward me as I stood up. We were maybe ten feet apart. My question focused on why he seemed to dismiss addressing the demand problem in the United Stares. I mentioned Harm Reduction. The important word I used was decriminalization. My point was why couldn’t we try something other than using the military and police and prisons to address our very real drug problem?

I might as well have said something about his children. He knew I was there as some kind of working PR person, and he lit into me with vicious glee. He turned to address the audience, avoiding both me and my question.

“This fellow thinks he’s smart. He cleverly uses the term ‘decriminalization’ — when he really means legalization. He wants to make drugs legal, folks.” He went on some more. All the time I wanted to  say: “Listen — SIR! — would you answer my question.”

It was personal. But it made the man’s huge investment in the Drug War very clear. He knew very well that decriminalization and all the very reasonable Harm Reduction research was the Achilles heel of the Drug War. If the well-respected Ted Gest is correct, the Drug War virtually made Joe Biden’s political career; working with Strom Thurmond to put away black people made him who he is today. Is this unfair to Joe Biden? No doubt, his bi-partisan cooperation with Thurmond to some degree mitigated the South Carolina senator’s Old South racism. It did nothing, however, to ease up the trend that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans; and some would add it did nothing to mitigate the current dysfunctional national bruise caused by the ideological struggle between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements.

We all know Joe Biden’s well-nourished public persona as the working man’s politician, the guy all of us want to sit down and have a beer with. The fact is, I would have loved to sit down and have a beer with Joe. I’d ask him to answer the question he parried away in that auditorium. What do we have to do now to undo what you and your bi-partisan allies created back in the ’80s? We all may have the opportunity to ask him these questions, since it feels like he’s running for 2020. But let’s hope the Democrats get their act together and do better than running good ol’ Joe.

Thanks to the moral bankruptcy of our North American leaders on the Drug War and a history of arrogant intervention in Latin America — from Henry Kissinger to Joe Biden — leaders in Latin America are going their own way, working in the interests of their own populations. With the ascendancy of Donald Trump, this moral bankruptcy has reached a new low. The White House has become a major reality show and our attorney general and the rest of the cabinet are fodder for jokes.

In some quarters, there’s hope in dope. The great American Willie Nelson has launched his own marijuana company with the classy brand name Willie’s Reserve. Like Louis Armstrong and other musicians, Nelson is a regular pot smoker. He told Rolling Stone magazine he wished Attorney General Jeff Sessions would just lighten up and smoke a bone. Nelson also said he once worked for Donald Trump at one of his casinos and that the man had paid him well and on time, despite his vast experience with bankruptcy. Then he somehow became president of the United States and was surprised how hard that job was. Nelson toyed with the idea of running for president once. Then he thought about it and changed his mind.

“It’s easy,” the laid back Texas country singer said, “when you can just go bankrupt anytime you want to and say, ‘I’ll check you later.’ But that’s hard to do when you’re president of the United States.”

We wonder why we have an opiate crisis among white suburbanites and why legal marijuana is such a big deal now in America. Why every night on TV we get ads ad-nauseam for this or that legal drug to do this or that with our psyche or body. Americans of all stripes are simply exhausted and frustrated with the political/social/cultural world they’ve allowed to assume such power over them. We’re all taught what individuals we are — yet we’re caught in a maelstrom way beyond our control. So we turn to escape and delusion, helped along by this or that chemical. It’s not that hard to figure out. One simply has to be capable of seeing it. But, then, humans are generally screwed up everywhere. That’s the Human Condition, what Jean Paul Sartre meant when he coined the phrase “Hell is other people.”

More articles by:John Grant

JOHN GRANT is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper.