The Wellstone Files

Senator Paul Wellstone, the progressive Democratic Senator from Minnesota, tragically died in a plane crash eight years ago this month, just before Election Day, as he was running for a third term. Minnesota Public Radio has obtained hundreds of pages from the FBI's file on Wellstone, beginning when he participated in protests against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. The files go right up to the plane crash and its aftermath, as the FBI investigated tips indicating the crash was a result of sabotage.

Read the full story here: The Wellstone Files | Minnesota Public Radio News

Coal Baron Fuels Toomey's Senate Race

Pat Toomey, the Republican running for the open Senate seat from Pennsylvania currently held by retiring Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter (?-PA), says on his website that "Washington is threatening new and heavy costs and burdens on businesses", and that government instead should be "cutting taxes and decreasing regulation." This has apparently attracted the interest, and money, of a multimillionaire coal executive who normally confines his political activity to West Virginia.

Don Blankenship is the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, a job which paid him $17.8 million in 2009. Massey was in the news this past April when an explosion at their Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed 29 mine workers. Although the investigation is still ongoing, it appears that high levels of methane gas inside the mine may have led to the explosion. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had repeatedly fined Massey for violating safety regulations, including those requiring proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane. Presumably these are among those pesky regulations that Toomey wants to decrease if he's elected to the Senate.

According to the Federal Election Commission website, Blankenship gave a personal contribution of $2,000 to Toomey's campaign in September 2009. He is also a director of the National Mining Association, whose two political action committees COALPAC and MINEPAC have also contributed to Toomey.

Blankenship has a history of involvement in his native West Virginian politics. In 2004 he spent $3 million to help defeat state Supreme Court justice Warren McGraw. He was photographed vacationing on the French Riviera with another state judge, Elliot "Spike" Maynard, who later voted to set aside a $76 million judgement against Massey Energy. Having lost his re-election to the court, Maynard is running this year for Congress against Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall. Blankenship, of course, is listed among Maynard's contributors.

Blankenship's newfound interest in Pennsylvania campaigns may have something to do with Massey Energy's expansion into the state. In May 2010, Massey got permission to buy the Mathies coal mine near Pittsburgh, which is now the first Massey-owned mine in Pennsylvania. Given Massey's record of safety and health violations, many people living near the Mathies mine are concerned about this takeover.

Blankenship claims he cares about the safety of coal miners, as well as creating more mining jobs. If that's so, then you would expect the coal miners to follow his political priorities. However, the United Mine Workers of America labor union, through its PAC, has contributed not to Toomey but to Joe Sestak, the Democratic House representative from the Philadelphia suburbs who defeated Specter in the primary. It seems that the mine workers know that Sestak is more likely to be on their side than Blankenship's friend Toomey.

Hopefully, when Pennsylvania voters go to the polls on November 2, they will remember the song "Which Side Are You On?", written by the wife of a UMW coal miner in Kentucky, and vote against the candidate funded by a coal CEO who profits while his employees are killed on the job.

Coexist

In memory of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, as well as all people who have lost their lives since then in wars, bombings, and other acts of senseless violence.

Keep The Trains A-Rollin'

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

- "City of New Orleans", by Steve Goodman

Power outages along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor this morning caused delays and cancellations, not only for Amtrak trains but also for trains operated by regional agencies NJT (New Jersey Transit), SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), and MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) which use Amtrak's tracks and power lines.

The reaction of most people in the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington metropolitan areas to this news was probably, "what, again?". Entering "Amtrak power outage" or "Amtrak signal problems" into your search engine will give you an idea of how often this seems to happen.

Unfortunately, each time an incident like this occurs, it reinforces the idea that train travel is unreliable, and makes people more likely to use their cars. "Better pull your car out of the garage if you need to get to work on time", chirped one local TV newscaster this morning.

With the growing recognition that we, as a country, need to break our oil addiction, we need to find ways to encourage more, not less, train travel. Our overconsumption of oil, fueled in part by daily reliance on the personal automobile for commuting to work, has given us the Deepwater Horizon disaster (killing 11 workers and ruining the Gulf coast ecosystems), global warming, and military operations aimed at ensuring the steady flow of petroleum from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Encouraging more people to ride the train to work is an essential part of changing our energy use, but this can only work if the trains actually run on time. For this reason, funding for mass transit must be part of the equation whenever bills dealing with energy or climate change are debated; the issues are inextricably linked.

Government funding was used to build the interstate highways (beginning under the Republican Eisenhower administration in the 1950s), and continues to subsidize travel by car and plane. Government funding is now needed for capital improvements to our existing rail lines, as well as to build new lines, to give people more reasons to leave their cars in the garage each day and take the train to work.

Hiroshima - The Original Ground Zero

Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, on August 9, our military dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. These were the first, and so far the only, uses of nuclear weapons in attacks against people.

The official story promulgated in the U.S. is that these two A-bomb attacks were necessary to force a recalcitrant Japanese government to finally surrender and bring an end to World War II; without them, a high-casualty land invasion would have been necessary. My father, an Army Corporal serving in the Pacific at the time, was one of the soldiers being prepared for this invasion force, and was relieved that this use of atomic weapons had cancelled that invasion and probably saved his life.

Others, however, were horrified by these new weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and called on governments to limit their use and stockpiling. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project scientists in developing these A-bombs, spoke out publicly against starting a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which led to the loss of his security clearance and thus his ability to continue any government employment. U.S. physicist Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell coauthored a manifesto in 1955 which stated, in part: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them." In 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock (author of "Baby and Child Care"), Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins and others formed The Committee For A SANE Nuclear Policy.

Governments eventually began to listen. On August 5, 1963 - the day before the 18-year anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack - the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which limited testing of nuclear weapons to underground tests, out of rising public concerns over radioactive fallout from testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, or in the Pacific Ocean. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, was intended to prevent non-nuclear countries from developing or acquiring these weapons, although the refusal of India, Pakistan, and Israel to sign the treaty and their development of their own nuclear arsenals has weakened the treaty, as has the glacial pace of the promised disarmament by the established nuclear "club". The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), completed in 1996, was signed by President Clinton but failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

The time may be right, though, for a new round of efforts to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. For the first time, the U.S. government sent an official representative (John Roos, our Ambassador to Japan) to the annual August 6 memorial service at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park near Ground Zero of the 1945 detonation. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also there, along with representatives of nuclear powers Britain and France. Peace groups, including the Quakers' Friends Committee on National Legislation, are recommending we contact our Senators to push for ratification of the CTBT as well as the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed in April by U.S. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev.

The fact that this would put peace advocates on the same side of this issue as Henry Kissinger, who has been preaching nuclear abolition since 2007, should not deter us. Military hawks and their armchair cheerleaders initially welcomed atomic/nuclear bombs as the epitome of efficiency; they meant that a city could now be destroyed by a single bomber dropping a single bomb, rather than the multiple bombers dropping hundreds of incendiary bombs it took to destroy Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. However, they soon grew frustrated as political leaders refused to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam; what's the use of having such a great weapon, they grumbled, if we're not allowed to use it? Kissinger is probably just continuing his practice of realpolitik, deciding that if the U.S. and its allies can never actually use the darned things, we might as well just ban them forever.

This may be the first time in my life that I've ever agreed with Henry Kissinger on anything.

Arizona's "He Don't Look Right To Me" Law

There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me,

Get him up against the wall!

- "In The Flesh", Pink Floyd

Arizona's Senate Bill (SB) 1070, the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", was scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, July 29. Although a federal judge issued a last-minute temporary injunction blocking key portions of the bill, including those requiring police to check the U.S. citizenship status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally, other portions of the bill will still become law tomorrow, and further judicial action could lift the injunction. Moreover, the judge apparently didn't question the constitutionality, let alone the morality, of asking some people, but not others, for ID based on their appearance; the judicial proceedings appear to be more of a pissing contest between state and federal governments than a real debate about human rights.

SB 1070 is usually referred to as an "immigration law", but that's misleading. It's really an identification law, intended to permit authorities to categorize people based on their nationality or ethnic background. While allegedly passed out of frustration and alarm over "illegal immigration", in practice the law would most certainly have been used more against some immigrants than others. For example, chances are that the au pair from Ireland or the college student from Sweden who overstayed their visas would not have been forced to produce their identification papers. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of neighboring California, whose still-thick accent from his native Austria ought to make passing police officers wonder about his citizenship status, would also probably be spared from producing ID on the spot. The Arizona law was clearly targeted against the brown-skinned Hispanics who are imagined to be pouring over Arizona's southern border from Mexico, Central America, and South America. What's more disturbing than the specific mechanics of the law is the motivation behind it.

Is it merely coincidence that this law was drafted and passed during the term of this country's first non-white President? The news is frequently full of all-white protest groups who clearly hate the fact that Barack Obama is President, question whether he was actually born in the United States ("papers please, Mr. President"), and insist that they want "their" country back, presumably taking it back from those people in Washington who don't look the same as they do.

It's also interesting to note that this law was passed in Arizona, which as a territory during the Civil War requested, and was granted, membership in the Confederate States of America and swore their allegiance to CSA President Jefferson Davis. Back in the good ole days of the Confederacy, you didn't need to rely on papers to determine a person's status, other than to find out which white person legally owned a particular black slave.

Going even further back in history, the Arizona territory was originally formed out of land taken by the U.S. military from Mexico by force, in the Mexican-American War (which, interestingly, Abraham Lincoln opposed as a member of Congress). Arizona is also home to many native Americans, who might have been better off if they had taken the SB 1070 approach to illegal immigration when the first ships arrived from Europe.

When I was in the 12th grade, my high school German class took a trip to Munich, in what was then called West Germany. We took a train to Salzburg, Austria, and as we approached the border between the two countries, the porters walked up and down the train cars saying "Papiere bitte" (papers please). We all froze at the sound of that phrase, which immediately conjured up images from countless movies about World War II in which Jews and other refugees from the Nazi German authorities got caught without proper identification. On that same trip, we also visited the museum on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, where many of those people without the right papers ended up. Is this where we want to end up as a country?

My two daughters were both born in Peru, and adopted by me and my wife when they were infants. They are now naturalized U.S. citizens, but those official certificates from the federal government which prove that status are not among the items carried in their pocketbooks on a daily basis. If our family decided to take a vacation in Arizona, and SB 1070 were allowed to be fully implemented as originally planned, would my daughters be stopped and questioned, and perhaps taken away from us, because their brown skin makes them look like they don't belong?

A judge may have temporarily blocked this specific law, but not the underlying racism behind it. SB 1070 wasn't really the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act". It should have more properly been named the "Support Our White Neighborhoods Act."

Peace and Love, from Ringo to the World

Today is the 70th birthday of Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr. One could say he's had a pretty successful life: fame and fortune as drummer with The Beatles, successful solo recording and acting careers, even marrying a "Bond girl" (Barbara Bach). So whenever he's asked what he wants for his birthday, his answer is simple: "Peace and Love".

As explained on his website, each year on his birthday (July 7, or "the seventh day of the seventh month", as he explains in Muddy Waters fashion), Ringo asks people to flash peace signs at 12:00 noon, local time wherever they are, and say "Peace and love". If enough people do this each year, he figures, maybe we'll actually get it.

Ringo seems to be echoing the sentiments of a former bandmate from Liverpool, who asked us to "Give Peace A Chance" and reminded us that "All You Need Is Love". It certainly seems to be what the world needs now.

So here goes:

PEACE AND LOVE

Happy birthday, Ringo.