New Clear Vision

Beyond Our Winter of Discontent

by Randall Amster

Spring may be upon us, but the prevailing political winds foretell a long, cold season ahead. We’re two months into the Tr$mp presidency, and the template has been set: incompetence, intolerance, scandal, strong-arming, divisiveness, duplicity. If America was longing for a “reality show” at the top of the news queue, this moment certainly fits the bill — but this is actual reality, and as time passes the damage being done will only increase in its potential to have long-term corrosive effects. And this may well include the likelihood that this Administration’s conflict-centric ethos will manifest in a full-on war soon enough.

If that happens, all bets are off as to what ensues. For those with slightly longer memories, you may recall George W. Bush getting off to a shaky start, with a series of missteps and a penchant for being more interested in golfing than governance. Granted, this is a different era and context, and the players are different — to such an extent that Tr$mp almost makes Bush seem reasonable by comparison (yet not). In many ways, we’re living with the direct consequences of the Bush years, and Tr$mp is the clear beneficiary of a playbook that calls for an imperial presidency and blatant disregard for the Constitution. (more…)

And Reimagining What Can Be…

by Randall Amster

Good morning America, and welcome to those proverbial “interesting times.” We have a so-called President seemingly coming unhinged in public, a dystopian aura infusing politics at every level, a resurgence of hatred made safe by irresponsible rhetoric, and a cultural fascination with misdirection and blatant untruths. At the same time, there’s a burgeoning opposition movement contesting every brick in the apocalyptic wall, mobilizing in the streets and through its tweets alike, constituting a potential political counterforce—perhaps not only in this moment, but for the foreseeable future.

With football and baseball both on hiatus now, the national pastime seems to have swung to watching the unraveling of this Administration and the fantastic foibles of its terrific protagonist. This has all been a boon to the major media outlets, as well as to the Saturday night satirists and their ilk. It’s also a familiar posture for the general public to be in, regardless of political ideology, accustomed as many people have become to consuming “reality” programming, celebrity scandals, and infotainment gossip. (more…)

The Moment Is Here…

by Robert C. Koehler

Old wounds break open. Deep, encrusted wrongs are suddenly visible. The streets flow with anger and solidarity. The past and the future meet.

The news is All Tr$mp, All the Time, but what’s really happening is only minimally about Donald Tr$mp, even though his outrageous actions and bizarre alliances are the trigger.

“As the nightmare reality of Donald Tr$mp sinks in, we need to put our resistance in a larger perspective,” Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman wrote recently, describing Tr$mp as “our imperial vulture come home to roost.”

The context in which most Tr$mpnews is delivered is minuscule: more or less beginning and ending with the man himself — his campaign, his businesses, his appointees, his ego, his endless scandals (“what did he know and when did he know it?”) — which maintains the news at the level of entertainment, and surrounds it with the fantasy context of a United States that used to be an open, fair and peace-loving democracy, respectful of all humanity. In other words, Tr$mp is the problem, and if he goes away, we can get back to what we used to be. (more…)

On Our Duty to Celebrate Oscar

by Matt Meyer

Puerto Rican Patriot Oscar Lopez Rivera is NOW FREE! Transferred this week to San Juan, Puerto Rico, he will not be able to travel, hold meetings, give speeches or statements until his official date of clemency on May 17, 2017. He will serve his last days till then in a US federal facility in Puerto Rico. But he will be able to see his beloved daughter, granddaughter, siblings and family, to eat the foods of his youth, to see “the water’s edge” of which he profoundly wrote during his 35 years behind bars for the thought-crime of seditious conspiracy. He is on his homeland, and though he cannot yet feel the full force of the embrace of the entire peoples of Puerto Rico, he is nonetheless surrounded by that love and solidarity.

This piece, which I initially wrote some weeks ago, seems more poignant than ever today. It suggests that human rights activists, and lovers of peace and justice everywhere have a responsibility to analyze and understand this case in the most positive and strategic of lights. Seditious conspiracy may have been Oscar’s convicted crime, and he did indeed serve years in solitary confinement and prison for thinking and planning with others how best to liberate his people, but the process and progress of movements for liberation have not been wholly shackled in this period. Oscar’s victory today, and ours, is indicative of a growing momentum as people’s movements taken more coordinated, conscious, and concrete shape. If we do not take time to celebrate advances even in the midst of bleak times, we will not be able to strategically envision or enact other winnable campaigns on the road to ultimate victory. Oscar’s thinking and planning has continued up to this very day, and so must ours. (more…)

With Allegiance to a Better World in the Making

by Robert C. Koehler

I pledge allegiance to . . . what?

The Electoral College, to no one’s serious surprise, voted Donald Tr$mp in as the nation’s 45th president, and the pot of outrage in the American spectator democracy begins to boil.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no — no to all his right-wing and idiotic cabinet and Team Tr$mp appointments, no to his conflicts of interest and serial tweets, no to his sexism, his reckless arrogance, his ego, his finger on the nuclear button.

The word of the day is resistance. For instance, Nancy Altman and Ira Lupu, writing at Huffington Post, point out that Tr$mp, though legally the new American president, lacks political legitimacy, thanks to widespread voter suppression, his huge loss in the popular vote and the anachronistic absurdity of the Electoral College; and even more disturbingly, is a thin-skinned, dishonest, immature jerk, utterly lacking the moral authority a national leader must project. These are flaws that cannot be ignored.

“Other elected officials, the media, and the citizenry at large have no obligation to afford him the slightest political respect,” they write. “Rather, the next four years should be a time of resistance and outright obstructionism. Opponents of Tr$mp should be at least as aggressive in challenging the political legitimacy and moral authority of his presidency as Republicans were in disrespecting President Obama, whose political legitimacy and moral authority were beyond reproach.” (more…)

Finding Humane Ways to Cope…

by Kathy Kelly

“That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, not to speak, not to see those people, the invisible ones, those who live on the other side of the border.” — Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage

It was a little over two weeks ago that Marlo entered Atwood Hall, here in Lexington federal prison. Nearly all the women here are nonviolent offenders. When I first saw Marlo, her eyes seemed glued to the tiled floors as she shuffled along hallways. I guessed her age to be 25 or so. A few days later, she came to a choir rehearsal. She was still shy, but she looked up and offered a quiet smile when she joined the soprano section. The next time our choir gathered, Marlo raised her hand before we ended our rehearsal. “I got something to say,” she said, as she stood. “When I first came here, I can tell all of you now, I was terrified. Just plain terrified. I have 70 months, and I felt so scared.” The intake process for this, her introduction to the prison system, had badly frightened her, but before sundown that same day, a second intake process had occurred, with several inmates finding her, reassuring her, and getting her beyond that first panic. (more…)

Sea Level Rise, Eniwetok, and Bert Bigelow

by Jerry Elmer

One of the most talked-about consequences of climate change is sea-level rise. The melting glaciers of Greenland could cause a rise of 7 meters, and in March 2014 scientists learned that Greenland’s glaciers are melting much faster than previously believed. The melting West Antarctic ice shelf could cause an additional sea-level rise of 5 meters – and in May 2014 it was learned that that ice mass is also melting far more quickly than previously known.

Two-thirds of the world’s cities with populations above 5 million people would be inundated by a sea level rise of only 3.5 meters – and that is not even accounting for storm surges from increasingly powerful hurricanes (think Katrina and Sandy). Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Indonesia and the Philippines (the last two are archipelagos) will be particularly vulnerable by the rising sea level, and atoll nations such as Maldives and the Marshall Islands may literally cease to exist.

It is in this context that the long-forgotten name of Bert Bigelow may re-emerge in the twenty-first century. But before I tell you about Bigelow, I need to tell you something about Eniwetok. (more…)