Monthly Archives: September 2015

Refugees Left Stranded As Europe Faces ‘Crisis of Political Will’

‘You aren’t going to solve these problems by closing borders.’—Adrian Edwards, UN refugee office

By Andrea Germanos, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-18-2015

Refugees wait at a registration point in Preševo, Serbia on 10 August 2015. (Photo: Stephen Ryan / IFRC via flickr)

As Hungary on Friday said that it was constructing another razor wire fence, this time along its border with Croatia, a humanitarian aid organization is stressing that what the European continent is facing is not a refugee crisis but a crisis of political will.

The new barriers for the refugees come as Turkish state media said Friday that the body of a four-year-old Syrian girl’s body washed up on a beach, just weeks after the body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed ashore, the image of which captured global headlines. Continue reading →

‘Foolish and Mean-Spirited’: US House Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood

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‘The ultimate goal of anti-abortion extremists in Congress is to promote their political agenda of banning safe, legal abortion in this country.’

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-18-2015

Photo via Let Your Voice Be Heard

An ideological and at times sorely misinformed debate—one catalyzed by the right-wing’s latest “underhanded smear campaign” targeting women’s health—gripped the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday, as the chamber approved two anti-choice bills, one of which strips Planned Parenthood of all its federal funding for one year.

The Republican-majority House passed both the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015 (roll call here), which cuts off federal funding to the critical healthcare provider for one year unless it stops providing abortions, and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (roll call here), which would impose criminal penalties on doctors who do not try to save a fetus that “survives an abortion.” Continue reading →

Justice Department Lets Giant Corporation Evade Prosecution for Deaths of Over 100 People

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‘This deal will not deter future corporate wrongdoers, it will not hold GM accountable, and it sets back the demand for justice by the family members of victims of GM’s horrible actions.’—Robert Weissman, Public Citizen

Written by Andrea Germanos, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published September 17, 2015.

“A GM engineer knew about the fatal defect even before the first car rolled off the line,” stated law professor Rena Steinzor. And then “GM lawyers conspired to delay the recall.” (Photo: Bill Selak/flickr/cc)

The $900 million settlement General Motors reached with the Justice Department over its defective ignition switches is being criticized as “unconscionable” for holding no executives criminally accountable for actions that lead to the deaths of over 100 people.

Reuters sums up the settlement:

GM admitted to failing to disclose to its U.S. regulator and the public a potentially lethal safety defect with the switches that kept airbags from deploying in some vehicles.

The largest U.S. automaker also admitted to misleading consumers about the safety of vehicles affected by the defect.

GM was criminally charged with scheming to conceal a deadly safety defect from its U.S. regulator, as well as wire fraud.

Under a three-year deferred prosecution agreement, GM must hire an independent monitor to oversee its safety practices, including its ability to fix defects and handle recalls.

The Associated Press adds:

The statement of facts to which the company agreed describes in scathing terms GM’s deceitful and dismissive approach to handling a problem that was evident even before the defective switch went into production in 2002.

Danielle Ivory reports at the New York Times that the settlement “is, in effect, corporation probation.”

“This settlement is shamefully weak,” stated Rena Steinzor, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, and author of Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction.

“A GM engineer knew about the fatal defect even before the first car rolled off the line. He secretly changed the part in 2005 but left hundreds of thousands of cars on the road with the bad switch. GM lawyers conspired to delay the recall. Much harsher penalties and individual prosecutions are warranted. The deferred prosecution is a toothless way of approaching a very serious problem,” Steinzor said.

Robert Weissman, president of the watchdog organization Public Citizen, lambasted the deal, stating Thursday, “Shame on the Department of Justice and shame on its prosecutors.”

“This deal will not deter future corporate wrongdoers, it will not hold GM accountable, and it sets back the demand for justice by the family members of victims of GM’s horrible actions,” Weissman continued.

“It is unconscionable that a giant corporation can conceal information about deadly safety defects for a decade, be responsible for the deaths of more than 100 people as a result and escape any criminal liability based only on a corporate fine and a promise not to do wrong again in the future,” he said. “It is equally unconscionable that none of the executives inside General Motors responsible for this disaster are going to be held criminally accountable, as now appears to be the case.”

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader similarly criticized the settlement, stating Thursday that “the exoneration of all GM personnel gives new meaning to the surrender of federal law enforcement that remains impervious to the preventable hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries resulting from documented corporate criminal negligence or outright criminality throughout our country every year.”

Writing in 2014, filmmaker Michael Moore denounced attempts to blame the faulty switches on GM’s “corporate culture.”

No, the cause of this tragedy is an economic system that places profit above everything else, including—and especially—human life. GM has a legal and fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to make the biggest profits that it can. And if their top people crunch the numbers and can show that they will save more money by NOT fixing or replacing the part, then that is what they are going to goddamn well do. F*** you, f*** me, and f*** everybody they sent to their deaths. That pretty much sums up their “culture”. They knew they wouldn’t get caught, and if they did, no one would ever serve any time.

Laura Christian, whose 16-year-old daughter died in 2005 when the airbag in her Chevy Cobalt failed to deploy, said, “If a person kills someone because he decided to drive drunk, he will go to jail. Yet the GM employees who caused 124 deaths are able to hide behind a corporation because our laws are insufficient.”

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The Second GOP Debate – Our Takeaway

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As you’ve probably guessed by now, we at Occupy World Writes are news junkies. In this country, if you only relied on the major media for information, you’d be forgiven by us if you thought that the most important thing happening in this country is the jockeying for position in an election that’s still fourteen months away.

We try to stay as apolitical as possible. We’ve been watching the whole story unfold in front of us, even though in our case, it’s more like watching a trainwreck. We know that what happens is going to be ugly, but we just can’t turn away. With that in mind, I’d like to present my personal reflections on last night’s GOP Presidential debate.

First of all, there was the location of the debate; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Ronald Reagan’s been the Pole Star of the conservative movement for years, so this shouldn’t surprise anybody. Of course, all the candidates professed their love for Saint Ronnie, and pledged to follow his ideals.

When Ronald Reagan’s son Ron, a liberal political commentator, was asked by Politico what his father would think of the candidates, he replied:

“Full of weirdos, charlatans and people who aren’t really running for president? I think he’d be kind of appalled. I hope that if he’s floating around somewhere, he’s amused, being separated from all this.”

His other son Michael, a conservative strategist, was asked what the candidates get wrong about his dad. His reply:

“Every one of them mentioned my father in one way or another, and it’s interesting to see how many of them, and how many of the people out there that they’re speaking to recreate my father in their image and likeness instead of his.”

Once again, there were two debates. The first (the “kids’ table”, as some of the snarkier pundits have named it) went for an hour and forty-five minutes. The second debate (the one with the higher polling candidates) went for three hours.

The debates themselves went as expected. All the candidates made bold claims about what they’d do if they were elected, but gave no specifics about how they’d accomplish them. Planned Parenthood was demonized by all. The ACA was blasted by all, but there wasn’t any plan to replace it proposed by any of the candidates. Most of the candidates went after Donald Trump at one time or another; the exceptions being Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. Climate change was accepted as fact by quite a few of the candidates (a surprise), who for the most part then went on to say that since we couldn’t fix it on our own, that we should do nothing (no surprise).

There was a lot of chest pounding going on over the Iran deal, and loud assertions by each candidate that he or she was Israel’s best friend. All claimed that they would defeat ISIS; once again without any details as to how they planned to accomplish it. There was a lot of sniping at Hillary Clinton. In short, exactly what you’d expect.

There was something else that I expected, though; something about the location of the debate that seems to have passed over the moderators’ and candidates’ heads. Simi Valley was also the location of the first trial of the four policemen involved in the beating of Rodney King. In that trial, despite the video evidence, the jury acquitted three of the officers and had a deadlocked jury on the fourth, resulting in a mistrial. The verdicts led to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and a national dialog on police violence against the black community.

It’s twenty-three years later, and police violence against the black community has again become a flashpoint for national discussion. Was the #BlackLivesMatter movement discussed at the debate? Of course not. The irony is staggering – and it was the biggest takeaway of the night for me.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Finding the US to be complicit in Ethnic Cleansing

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When you turn your back on a friend who was willing to die for you, there is little left of your ethics or morality

10-yr-old Selman Ağır is one of at least 5 children who have been killed by sniper fire. Selman, who was shot in the head, was transported to the hospital where he died from his injury. Photo via Revolution News.

History, if not learned from, has a very awful way of repeating itself. In the case of the Kurdish people, we have been very poor students indeed.

In 1915, the borders of Kurdistan were erased from the European maps. The country no longer existed, and the territory it occupied was divided between the then-neighboring countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran Georgia and Armenia. The people of Kurdistan were now expected to just “be” citizens of their new territory, and any mention of a previous Kurdistan was forbidden.

It was, and in many areas of the previous glorious Kurdistan still is, a crime to be Kurdish. This remained a nightmare for survival for the Kurds in every country they lived in, resulting in millions dying because of their heritage, millions of others fleeing for their lives. The original refugee crisis had begun, although no one would ever recognize it as such.

In the 1970’s, Kurdish politicians were elected to office in southern and western Turkey. The government’s response was to stage sieges, cut off utilities and transportation services to Kurdish communities, arrest mayors and imprison them with the most degrading, inhumane forms of torture being a daily ritual for them. The earliest “Gitmo” experiments had begun, and there were no limits to the atrocities.

On March 16, 1988, a chemical weapon attack on the Kurdish population of Halabja, Iraq, killed an estimated 5,000 persons immediately and injured another 7,000 – 10,000. In the aftermath of the attack, thousands more died of complications, disease and birth defects. The attack was and remains today the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in human history. Saddam Hussein taught the future president Bashher al-Assad of Syria how to kill in a very efficient manner, and the preparations for Kurdish villages in addition to other opposition was an easy move the Syrian government to make when the civil war began.

When Daesch (IS, aka Islamic State, began their reign of terror in the Middle East, it was the Peshmerga forces of the Kurds that offered the only substantial ground operation capable of defeating them. So effective was their ground campaign that the US worked directly with the Kurds in targeting airstrikes against IS. When the battle for Kobane began, Turkey predicted an early defeat of the Kurds and lined up tanks and troops on the border to watch the slaughter and prevent reinforcements of Kurds coming from Turkey. They were greatly disappointed.

Today, Turkey’s President Erdogan has discarded what many considered to have been a “peace process” following an election where the outcome was not as he desired. Rather than share any portion of his government and give up the dream of ultimate power with no constitutional restraints, he is now staging what many are predicting will escalate into a civil war through the militia’s extrajudicial killings of Kurds, sieges on Kurdish communities, sniper attacks, restriction on journalists attempting to cover these events, and all other means at his disposal to reduce the voting Kurdish population before the snap elections in November.

Because the US has wanted to use an airbase in Turkey, the government has brokered a deal with the devil. In exchange for using the airbase, the US is to turn a blind eye as Turkey attacks Kurds both within and without Turkey. Claiming they are defending their territory from the attacks of the PKK, they have convinced the international community that they are forced to do this in the interest of national security. The US has become an ingrate to the Kurdish heroes they had so recently sang praises of.

The world paused and cried when Kurdish 3-year old Aylan al-Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on the shore of the Aegean sea. How many more Kurdish children have needlessly died and gone unnoticed by the rest of the world? How many more Kurdish parents will have to make the decisions about fleeing for their lives or dying with their children in their arms? Those that think refugees that flee are just looking for “cable tv” in another country show their cowardly ignorance of a situation they are unwilling to begin to understand. Kurds are people that deserve every right to life, just as everyone else.

Occupy World Writes believes the United Sates has erred greatly and has grossly underestimated the evilness of Erdogan. We believe that until there is movement toward protecting the Kurds as they were willing to protect all the Middle East against IS, our government is as accountable for these deaths as is Erdogan’s. This is a moment when we must pause long enough to recognize the truth and refuse to let history continue to repeat itself. There are no excuses for the continued attempts to rid the world of any ethnic group.

At least that is one lesson we are banking on the world having not yet forgotten.

#KurdishLivesMatter

400+ Groups to Obama: You Have the Power to ‘Keep it In the Ground’

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‘You can’t be a climate leader while continuing to open up large amounts of federal land to extraction and encouraging continued fossil fuel development.’

Written by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published September 14, 2015.

Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, where the Obama administration has said Shell can drill for oil, is among the millions of acres of public land and ocean already leased to the fossil fuel industry. (Photo: Backbone Campaign/flickr/cc)

Hundreds of prominent organizations and leaders from Alaska to Florida are formally calling on President Barack Obama to stop new federal fossil fuel leasing on public lands and oceans in the United States, arguing that doing so would accomplish more in the global fight against climate change than any other single action taken by the president’s administration.

In a letter to be delivered Tuesday to the White House, the 400-plus signatories note that “[u]p to 450 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution could be immediately removed from the global pool of potential climate pollution” if Obama were to deem unleased oil, gas, and coal “unburnable.” What’s more, the letter continues, as “the world’s largest historic cumulative polluter and a global economic leader,” the U.S. has an obligation to take such a bold action.

The American public owns nearly 650 million acres of federal public land and more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf—as well as the fossil fuels beneath them.

More than 67 million acres of public land and ocean are already leased to the fossil fuel industry, according to the letter, representing an area 55 times larger than Grand Canyon National Park and containing up to 43 billion tons of potential carbon pollution.

While 15 million land acres and 21 million acres of ocean have been leased during the Obama administration alone, the groups behind the letter state that under existing federal laws, including the Mineral Leasing Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, the president has “clear authority to stop new leases…[w]ith the stroke of a pen.”

“You can’t be a climate leader while continuing to open up large amounts of federal land to extraction and encouraging continued fossil fuel development,” said Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter in a statement released Monday. “If President Obama is to keep his commitment to curbing climate change, he must do everything he can to keep fossil fuels in the ground and stop drilling and fracking on public lands.”

Added Rainforest Action Network executive director Lindsey Allen: “The federal government is enabling some of the wealthiest companies in the world, with names like Exxon and Peabody, to mine and drill America’s public lands for private profit. This egregious drilling, fracking and mining is devastating the health of communities and endangering the stability of our climate. We are simply asking President Obama to stop selling off our national forests, oceans and sacred heritage sites for pennies on the dollar and slow the effects of climate change by stopping fossil fuel leasing on public lands.”

An analysis released last month by Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity—both signatories to this week’s letter—showed that allowing unleased publicly owned fossil fuels to be developed would “cripple the U.S.’ ability to meet its obligations to avert the worst effects of the global climate crisis,” as the green groups put it at the time.

On the other hand, “stopping new leasing would help secure the legacy of our public lands,” Tuesday’s missive reads. “It would safeguard our air and water from dirty energy pollution; ensure the health of communities that have lived in energy sacrifice zones for generations; and keep our last, best wildlife habitat from being lost to fossil fuel industrialization.”

In a statement, Cherri Foytlin of the Bridge the Gulf community media project described what has already been lost to fossil fuel leasing, particularly to companies like BP, which was responsible for the devastating 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I would ask that you put yourself in our place,” she said. “Over five years have passed since BP’s broken promises spewed as easily from their tongues as the oil did from their broken pipe. To this day our peoples and ecosystems suffer from BP’s brutal, callous, and lasting assault. Five years, and our dolphins still die, our turtles still die, our oysters still die, our marshes still die, our people still die.”

“BP is a corporate serial killer,” she continued. “BP is a terrorist organization. Yet they not only remain free to continue their patterns of destruction, they are subsidized by our government to do it. How many more graves will there be, before justice is truly served in the Gulf Coast? That is the only question we have now.”

Along with a laundry list of climate, labor, and public health groups, the letter is signed by luminaries including 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, social justice advocate and professor Noam Chomsky, and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

However, the Washington Post‘s Chris Mooney pointed out: “Notably, some other leading green groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, are not signatories, suggesting that not all environmental organizations are ready to push the president this far, especially in light of his recent intense focus on climate change, epitomized by the newly finalized Clean Power Plan.”

But in comparing the 5 billion tons of carbon pollution that Obama’s Clean Power Plan would cut by 2030 to the 450 billion tons of carbon pollution that sit beneath lands owned by U.S. taxpayers, “it’s pretty clear that fossil fuel extraction on public lands is a far bigger fish he can fry,” said May Boeve, executive director of 350.org. “That’s the kind of bold, aggressive action it’s going to take to solve this problem, and that’s what it means to truly be a leader on climate change.”

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No, You Cannot Know This Man’s Account of His Torture by the CIA

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U.S. officials say lawyers’ notes describing treatment of man for whom torture techniques were developed are classified, despite new rule

Written by Andrea Germanos, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published September 11, 2015.

The detainee’s lawyer says the CIA is trying “guarantee that Abu Zubaydah never discloses what was done to him.” (Photo: Stephen Melkisethian/flickr/cc)

Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah detailed the torture that the CIA inflicted on him to his lawyers, but that information won’t be making it to the public eye.

Reuters reported Thursday:

U.S. government officials have blocked the release of 116 pages of defense lawyers’ notes detailing the torture that Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah says he experienced in CIA custody, defense lawyers said on Thursday.

Zubaydah, abducted in Pakistan and transferred to U.S. authorities in 2002, has been held at Guantanamo without charge or trial since 2006. A lawyer for Zubaydah in his proceedings against Poland and Lithuania before the European court of human rights has written that he

might now be described as exhibit A in the week’s Senate report. He has the regrettable distinction of being the first victim of the CIA detention programme for whom, as the report makes clear, many of the torture (or “enhanced interrogation”) techniques were developed, and the only prisoner known to have been subject to all of them. With no less than 1,001 references to Abu Zubaydah specifically, the Senate report confirms the Strasbourg court’s findings regarding the horrific conditions of detention and interrogation techniques to which he and others were subject.

Reuters continues:

“We submitted 116 pages in 10 separate submissions,” Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lead defense lawyer, told Reuters. “The government declared all of it classified.”

Margulies and lawyers for other detainees said that the decision showed that the Obama administration plans to continue declaring detainees’ accounts of their own torture classified. A Central Intelligence Agency spokesperson declined to comment.

This is despite a rule change following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture. As the Huffington Post reported:

In January, the government modified its classification rules for the military commissions, the court system in which several Guantanamo detainees are being tried for war crimes. Under the new rules, the torture methods used in CIA prisons are no longer subject to classification, although any information that could reveal the locations where torture took place or the people who helped facilitate it remains secret.

Margulies told Reuters that he did follow those new rules, and that the CIA is trying “guarantee that Abu Zubaydah never discloses what was done to him.”

Investigative journalist and Guantanamo expert Andy Worthington has more details on Zubaydah, writing in May

Zubaydah has always been one of the most significant prisoners in the “war on terror”, not because of what he did, but because of what was done to him. The torture program was developed for him, leading to him being waterboarded 83 times, and it evidently severely damaged him physically and mentally, from the hints dropped by his lawyers over the years. In addition, the Bush administration publicly claimed that he was a significant member of al-Qaeda, when that was untrue — and, it seems, both the torture and the lies told about him means that he will probably never be charged, although there is no prospect of him being released either.

As the executive summary of the torture report revealed, his interrogators wanted assurances that, if he survived his torture, he would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life,” and senior officials responded by stating that he “will never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.”

The fact that we know anything at all about Abu Zubaydah is in many ways remarkable. Although documents have been leaked (like his diaries, and, years before, the account of his imprisonment and torture by the CIA that he gave to the International Committee of the Red Cross), and other accounts have, eventually, been made publicly available (like the executive summary of the CIA torture report), every word that he has uttered to his lawyer since he arrived at Guantánamo nearly nine years ago remains classified — as does every word uttered to their lawyers by any of the “high-value detainees.”

The decision to block Zubaydah’s torture details comes the same week as the book Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program, written by former intelligence officials, hits shelves.

“The book,” writes Human Rights First’s Lucy Seyfarth, “fails to acknowledge any of the mistakes the CIA itself admits it made after 9/11, attempts to justify behavior that can never be justified, and insists on looking backward instead of preventing abuse in the future.”

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‘Won’t Back Down’: Seattle Teacher Strike Continues for Third Day

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Organized educators take stand for their profession, their students, and ‘people everywhere who are working for vital public schools and social justice.’

Written by Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published Friday, September 11, 2015.

A crowd of red-clad teachers, parents and students marched through downtown Seattle on Tuesday. Organizers estimated at least 4,000 teachers were there. (Photo: Kyle Stokes KPLU)

The teachers remain on strike. The picket lines are united. And support among parents is strong.

That is the latest message from Seattle Education Association on Friday, as classes were cancelled for the third day amid the continuation of a strike demanding an unfreezing of wages, the end of unreasonable standardized testing for students, a more fair evaluation system for teachers, and new policies to increase equity among students.

“There’s nothing new to report,” said Michael Tamayo, one of the negotiators for the SEA, on Thursday afternoon after face-to-face meetings with school district representatives failed to materialize. “They know what our proposals are and we’re just waiting for some feedback and movement from them.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, the position of the Seattle educators is notable because it goes beyond simple demands for higher wages and improved working conditions. The teachers have outlined “incredible list of educational reforms” seeking to address systemic problems—reforms that, according to Garfield High School history teacher Jesse Hagopian, would “truly improve the lives of children” throughout the city.

Offering its support, the progressive education group Rethinking Schools sent an open letter to Seattle teachers praising their tough stand.

“Seattle educators have said ‘Enough!’,” the letter reads. “You have bargained in good faith and now are striking for your members, for your students, for the broader community—and, really, for people everywhere who are working for vital public schools and social justice.”

With a community day of service planned by the teachers union for Friday, its members say they are eager to get back to the classroom but that the union’s fight remains focused on improving the lives of its members and all 53,000 students within the district.

“I’m ready to go on day one,” McClure Middle School teacher Mary Whisenhunt told the local Fox News 13 news channel. “I’m ready to go. I could teach tomorrow if we got a contract.”

However, she continued, “This is highly skilled work that we do that requires a lot of education. Many of us can’t afford to live in the city. I’m seriously considering moving out of the city. As a younger teacher coming with student loans from my master’s degree, it’s a struggle.”

Laura Lehni, a teacher in the district and member of the union’s bargaining team, told the Seattle Times she feels like there hasn’t been mutual trust throughout the talks, and that the union is still fighting to make teacher evaluations more consistent, to make changes to standardized testing, and to provide more training for school staff to address social equity.

“I think the district needs to buck up and pay the teachers what they deserve to be paid and give them the resources they need to educate our children,” said Lilith Lysistrata, a Seattle parent, with NBC’s K5 News. “I have four kids in the Seattle school district and both my spouse and I work. This is tough on us, but I don’t want the teachers to fold.”

According to Reuters:

Seattle teachers and support staff walked off the job and onto picket lines on Wednesday morning following a breakdown in 11th-hour talks with the school district the night before.

Outside Roosevelt High School on Thursday, scores of teachers, staff, parents and student sympathizers, flanked by musicians and motorists honking car horns, chanted and waved homemade placards backing the strike.

“This has to do with putting more support into the schools when so much money has been going to consultants and managers,” said English teacher David Grosskopf, 44.

The walkout comes at a time of increased scrutiny of education spending in the state. The Washington state Supreme Court last month fined the state $100,000 for every day it failed to present a court-ordered plan for fully funding public schools.

And the Guardian, focusing on the community response and a broad show of support for the teachers, adds:

The strike has drawn more attention to economic disparities within the district as parents from more affluent areas who have aimed to reach all of the district’s 97 schools witness some of the challenges facing the lower-income schools. Darcey Pickard, a mother of two children at Louisa Boren STEM K-8, organized a group to support the underserved schools in west Seattle after learning one school didn’t have a PTA – something she didn’t even know was possible.

Working past midnight, Pickard galvanized 160 new volunteers, securing food, coffee, water and snacks for the following day. Pickard also opened her home for bathroom use.

Many local restaurants donated meals to picketers. Will Lemke and Vanessa Resler, co-owners of the artisan popsicle company Six Strawberries, handed out free treats at three schools after a parent asked for their help. A Seattle public school graduate himself, Lemke remembers marching at the last strike with his parents in 1986 and says teachers do not ever strike on a whim.

“I hope that with the support of fellow Seattleites, local businesses and other allies, Seattle’s teachers will be back in the classroom as soon as possible with all of their demands met. If so, the real winners of this battle will be students – that’s who our public school teachers are truly fighting for.”

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Cizre cries for help: “Turkey’s Kobane” under siege

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As the conflict in Turkey spirals out of control, dozens of people have reportedly been killed in Cizre and the army shows no signs of lifting the siege.

Written by Joris Leverink. Published by ROAR on Friday, September 11, 2015.

Photo by Sertaç Kayar, showing HDP-deputy Osman Baydemir scuffling with riot police on the road to Cizre.

Tanks shelling the city center. No-one allowed in or out. Electricity and water have been cut, as well as phone lines and internet access. The people have dug trenches to stop armored vehicles from entering their neighborhoods and have hung sheets in the streets to prevent being seen and shot by snipers.

While the above reads as a report from Kobane, from when the Syrian town was still under attack from the so-called Islamic State (IS), it is in fact a description of the current situation in Cizre, a predominantly Kurdish town in southern Turkey.

Cizre under attack

Since the Turkish government imposed a curfew in Cizre last week, its citizens have been forced to remain indoors, risking being shot by snipers as soon as they step out. The city is under total lock down, which means that for at least a week people have had no access to fresh food or water, medical services, or anything else for that matter. Even the wounded are not allowed to be transported to the hospitals, as a result of which a number of civilians have died from non-lethal injuries due to blood loss and infections, among them a baby of less than two months old.

Due to limited phone and internet access in Cizre news from the besieged town reaches the outside world only piecemeal, meaning that reports of what is going on inside the town are difficult to confirm – a very worrying sign in and of itself.

In order to break the siege – and the silence – the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtaş has been leading a march in an attempt to reach the town on foot. At several instances this march was blocked by the police upon orders of the Minister of Interior Selami Altinok of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) who has argued that the HDP lawmakers are not allowed to enter the town “for their own security.”

While trying to circumvent the police blockades on the roads leading into town by following small trails through the fields and mountains, the HDP co-leader suggested that Cizre was being punished for voting “84 percent for the HDP” during the last elections in June. Demirtaş called Cizre “Turkey’s Kobane”, comparing the plight of the town and the resistance of its citizens to the Syrian Kurdish town when it was under attack from IS.

“In Cizre, 120,000 people have been held hostage by the state for a week,” he added. “They put ice on the corpses to stop them putrefying, because burials are banned.”

One of the most heart-breaking stories spoke of the young girl Cemile Çağırga, who was reportedly shot by the police in front of her house – under what circumstances remains unknown. After succumbing to her injuries her family was unable to transfer her body to the morgue due to the curfew and the threat of being targeted by snipers and artillery. For several days Cemile’s body was kept in a fridge in the family’s home before the young girl could be buried.

Violence spiraling out of control

The siege of Cizre occurs at a time when the recent upsurge in violence in the country’s southeastern Kurdish region appears to be spiraling out of control. An ambush by the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK on a military convoy left at least 16 soldiers dead – or so the state media reported – followed two days later by another deadly attack on a police van, killing another 11 officers.

In response to these attacks nationalist groups around the country took to the streets en masse. In many cases these marches started as protests to show their indignation and anger, but they quickly turned into lynch-mobs targeting Kurdish neighborhoods, shops and individuals. A nationalist mob marching through a downtown Istanbul neighborhood was heard chanting “We don’t want a [military] operation, we want a massacre!”

Offices of the HDP were a popular target of the masses brandishing Turkish flags, hands held high up in the air making the “sign of the wolf” – a gesture emblematic of an ultra-nationalist organization called the Grey Wolves, which has been accused of countless racist and xenophobic attacks on Armenians, Kurds, Syrians and even Pope John Paul II. After two nights of attacks around 130 of the party’s offices were left destroyed or burned, windows broken and party signs torn down or covered with Turkish flags.

The HDP is perceived by many nationalist Turks as the political wing of the PKK, and as such as a terrorist organization in and of itself. The party’s historical success in the June elections, when it collected an unprecedented 13 percent of the vote and was able to send 80 delegates to the national parliament – the very first time a pro-Kurdish party entered Turkish parliament in the country’s history – angered many nationalists and AKP supporters alike.

Nationalists – represented in parliament by the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – fretted about seeing what they perceived as “Kurdish terrorists” inside the parliament; and AKP supporters saw their dream of Erdogan being installed as the 21^st century Sultan shattered when the party lost its absolute majority.

Both parties have reasons aplenty to be wary of HDP’s success. Another Kurdish victory in the upcoming November elections would seriously curb their aspirations to see their respective dreams of a Turkish utopia come to pass: an ethnically-pure country free of Armenians, Kurds, Greeks and Arabs in the case of the MHP; and a revived sultanate under the “auspicious” leadership of Erdogan in the case of the AKP.

The upsurge of violence in the east should be analyzed in light of the national elections of November. Plunging the country into war immediately after the coalition talks have broken down serves two purposes. First, it attempts to show that without the AKP at the wheel, the country is ‘doomed to disintegrate into chaos and violence’. Second, the escalation of violence is encouraged because of the belief that in times of crises people turn towards a strong leader who promises to restore peace and tranquillity — if only the people would grant him exceptional powers to do so.

A cry for solidarity

And while the party leaders cook up their plans to restore their power, its once again the ordinary people that suffer most; the mother who was shot by a sniper while holding her new-born baby in her arms; the young boy who got bored of sitting indoors days on end and decided to sneak outside for a quick peak, and got shot; the seven children who had to cover their mother’s dead body with bottles of frozen water to stop the body from decomposing because she couldn’t be buried after she was shot to death.

The siege of Cizre continues in a blatant violation of all morals and values that are supposed to determine the actions of a “democratic country.” It is outrageous that Turkey, especially as a NATO-member state, is allowed to target its own citizens, torturing them collectively in the name of ‘securitization’ and ‘fighting terrorism’.

In the case of Kobane the collective outcry of the international solidarity movement made the city’s plight impossible to be ignored. Let’s draw our lessons from this experience and raise our voices in solidarity with the people of Cizre, Silopi, Sirnak, Yüksekova, Sur and all those other towns, neighborhoods and villages that are being punished for demanding freedom, tortured for refusing to give in, arrested for simply being Kurdish and shot on the streets for daring to venture out of their homes.

Cizre is not alone, and it’s about time we’d let the world know.

Joris Leverink is an Istanbul-based freelance journalist, editor for ROAR Magazine and columnist for TeleSUR English.

Finland Proposes Taxing the Rich to Take in More Refugees

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As Obama administration considers taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees, Finland plans on accepting 30,000

By Nadia Prupis, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-10-2015

Finland has a new solution to help mitigate the migrant crisis: tax the rich. (Photo: sbamueller/flickr/cc)

Finland on Thursday proposed raising taxes on high earners to help pay for an influx of refugees that is expected to arrive later this year from war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa.

Finance Minister Alexander Stubb said the highest bracket of earners would pay one percent more on capital gains taxes, while those who make more than $81,000 USD (72,300 euros) a year would pay what Stubb referred to as a “solidarity tax.” Continue reading →