Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the United States is and always will be the world’s leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolution, but it has nothing to do with the real world.

The Rise of China

The United States as Number 2

by DEAN BAKER

Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the United States is and always will be the world’s leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolution, but it has nothing to do with the real world.

Those familiar with the data know that China is rapidly gaining on the United States as the world’s leading economic power. According to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China’s economy is currently about 80 percent of the size of the U.S. economy. It is projected to pass the United States by 2016.

However, there is a considerable degree of uncertainty about these numbers. It is difficult to accurately compare the output of countries with very different economies. By many measures China is already well ahead of the United States.

It passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest car market in 2009. In most categories of industrial production it is far ahead of the United States and it is a far bigger exporter of goods and services. The number of people graduating college each year with degrees in science and engineering far exceeds the number in the United States. And China has nearly twice as many cell phone and Internet users as the United States.

China still has close to half of its population living in the countryside. The living standard of the 650 million people living in rural areas is much lower than in urban areas and also much more difficult to measure. The main reason that living standards are difficult to gauge is that prices are much lower in rural areas.

A new study that carefully examined China’s prices and consumption patterns concluded that it is far wealthier than the widely used data indicate. According to this study, China’s economy may already be as much as 20 percent larger than the U.S. economy. Furthermore, even if its growth rate slows to the 7.0 percent annual rate that many now expect, China’s economy may be close to twice the size of the U.S. economy in the span of a decade.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions about the future of the U.S. and China in international relations. Regardless of whether or not China’s economy is bigger than the U.S. economy, it clearly does not exercise anywhere near as much influence internationally. China’s leaders have been content to let the U.S. continue to play the leading role in international bodies and in dealing with international conflicts, intervening only where it felt important interests were threatened.

This pattern should not be surprising since the United States was slow to assert itself internationally, even though by every measure it was the world’s pre-eminent power following World War I. The result was that for the next quarter century, the United Kingdom ended up imagining itself to be far more important to the world than it actually was. Perhaps the United States is doomed to play a similar role.

The growing power and influence of China will have both positive and negative aspects. On the negative side, democracy in the United States, even with the corrupting impact of money on politics and the abuses of freedom carried out in the name of the War on Terrorism, still presents a better political model than one party rule in China.

Fortunately, China has shown no interest in trying to impose its political system elsewhere. For this reason the ascendency of China may not pose a threat to the spread of democracy elsewhere. (Of course, in spite of its ideals, the United States has hardly been a consistent supporter of democracy in other countries.)

The growing power of China has already increased the options available to many countries in the developing world. Since China can provide far greater amounts of capital than the IMF , World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated institutions, it provides developing countries with an important alternative. They need not adopt policies to appease these institutions to weather economic storms.

One area in which China’s policy can have an enormous impact is intellectual property. The rules on patents and copyrights that the United States has sought to impose on the rest of the world are incredibly wasteful. This is most apparent in prescription drugs, where patent monopolies allow companies to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for drugs that would sell for $5-$10 in a free market.

Not only do patents make cheap drugs incredibly expensive, they also lead to bad medicine, as huge patent rents encourage drug companies to lie and cheat to sell more of their drugs. It’s rare that a month passes when we do not hear of a scandal where a drug company concealed information about the safety or effectiveness of its drugs.

Of course the problems with the U.S. system of intellectual property go well beyond drug patents. Patents in high tech are primarily about harassing competitors. The difficulty of enforcing copyrights in the Internet Age has led to absurdities like the Stop Online Piracy Act.

China does not itself enforce intellectual property with the same vigor as the United States. Rather than following the United States blindly and impose the same sort of archaic and inefficient system domestically, China could do the world an enormous service if it would promote alternative mechanisms for supporting research andcreative work.

It’s clear that the rise of China will lead to many changes around the world. Political leaders in the United States will no doubt catch up with the reality of the new U.S. position in the world – probably about the time that they accept global warming and evolution.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.

This article originally appeared on Al Jazeera.

“It is the Palestinian people's right to oppose the occupation in all means, and the resistance must be focused on the 1967 territories.”

“It is the Palestinian people's right to oppose the occupation in all means, and the resistance must be focused on the 1967 territories.”

What Marwan Barghouti Really Means to Palestinians

by RAMZY BAROUD

Last week Marwan Barghouti, the prominent Palestinian political prisoner and Fatah leader, called on Palestinians to launch a “large-scale popular resistance” which would “serve the cause of our people.”

The message was widely disseminated as it coincided with Land Day, an event that has unified Palestinians since March 1976. Its meaning has morphed through the years to represent the collective grievances shared by most Palestinians, including dispossession from their land as a result of Israeli occupation.

Barghouti is also a unifying figure among Palestinians. Even at the height of the Hamas-Fatah clashes in 2007, he insisted on unity and shunned factionalism. It is no secret that Barghouti is still a very popular figure in Fatah, to the displeasure of various Fatah leaders, not least Mahmoud Abbas, who heads both the Palestinian Authority and Fatah.. Throughout its indirect prisoners exchange talks with Israel, Hamas insisted on Barghouti’s release. Israel, which had officially charged and imprisoned Barghouti in 2004 for five alleged counts of murder – but more likely because of his leading role in the Second Palestinian Intifada – insisted otherwise.

Israel held onto Barghouti largely because of his broad appeal among Palestinians. In late 2009, he told Milan-based Corriere Della Sera that “the main issue topping his agenda currently is achieving unity between rival Palestinian factions” (as quoted in Haaretz, November 25, 2009). More, he claimed that following a unity deal he would be ready to submit candidacy for Palestinian presidency. Barghouti, is, of course, still in prison. Although a unity deal has been signed, it is yet to be actualized.  

Barghouti’s latest statement is clearly targeting the political class that has ruled Palestinians for many years, and is now merely managing and profiting from the occupation. “Stop marketing the illusion that there is a possibility of ending the occupation and achieving a state through negotiations after this vision has failed miserably,” he said. “It is the Palestinian people’s right to oppose the occupation in all means, and the resistance must be focused on the 1967 territories” (BBC, March 27).

Last December, Jospeh Dana wrote, “Barghouti is a figure of towering reverence among Palestinians and even some Israelis, regardless of political persuasion.” However he did not earn his legitimacy among Palestinians through his prophetic political views or negotiation skills. In fact, he was among the Fatah leaders who hopelessly, although genuinely pursued peace through the ‘peace process’ – which proved costly, if not lethal to the Palestinian national movement. Dana wrote, “Barghouti’s pragmatic approach to peace during the 1990s demonstrated his overarching desire to end Israeli occupation at all costs” (The National, Dec 23, 2011).

Although his latest message has articulated a conclusion that became obvious to most Palestinians – for example, that “it must be understood that there is no partner for peace in Israel when the settlements have doubled.” – Barghouti’s call delineates a level of political maturity that is unlikely to go down well, whether in Ramallah or Tel Aviv.

So it’s not his political savvy per se that made him popular among Palestinians, but the fact that he stands as the antithesis of traditional Fatah and PA leadership. Starting his political career at the age of 15, before being imprisoned and deported to Jordan in his early 20s, Barghouti was viewed among Fatah youth – the Shabibah – as the desired new face of the movement. When he realized that the ‘peace process’ was a sham, intended to win time for Israeli land confiscation and settlements and reward a few accommodating Palestinians, Barghouti broke away from the Fatah echelons. Predictably, it was also then, in 2001, that Israel tried to assassinate him.

Marwan Barghouti still has some support in Israel itself, specifically among the politically sensible who understand that Netanyahu’s rightwing government cannot reach a peaceful resolution, and that the so-called two-state solution is all but dead. In a Haaretz editorial entitled ‘Listen to Marwan Barghouti,’ the authors discussed how  “back when he was a peace-loving, popular leader who had not yet turned to violence, Barghouti made the rounds of Israeli politicians, opinion-makers and the central committees of the Zionist parties and urged them to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.” The authors recommended that ‘Jerusalem’ listen to Barghouti because he “is the most authentic leader Fatah has produced and he can lead his people to an agreement” (March 30).

In his article entitled ‘The New Mandela’, Uri Avnery wrote that Barghouti “is one of the very few personalities around whom all Palestinians, Fatah as well as Hamas, can unite” (CounterPunch, March 30). However, it is essential that a conscious separation is made between how Barghouti is interpreted by the Palestinians themselves and Israelis (even those in the left). Among the latter, Barghouti is presented as a figure who might have been involved in the “murderous terror” of the second Intifada (Haaretz) but who can also “lead his people to an agreement” – as if Palestinians are reckless multitudes desperate for their own Mandela who is capable, through his natural leadership skills, of uniting them into signing another document.

For years, but especially after the Oslo peace process, successive Israeli governments and officials have insisted that there was “no one to talk to on the Palestinian side.” The tired assertion was meant to justify Israel’s unilateral policies, including settlement construction. However Barghouti is a treasured leader in the eyes of many Palestinians not because he is the man that Israel can talk to, and not because of any stereotypical undertones of him being a ‘strong man’ who can lead the unruly Arabs. Nor can his popularity be attributed to his political savvy or the prominence of his family.

Throughout the years, hundreds of Palestinians been targeted in extrajudicial assassinations; hundreds were deported and thousands continued to be imprisoned. Marwan Barghouti is a representation of all of them and more, and it’s because of this legacy that his messages matters, and greatly so. In his latest message, Barghouti said that the Palestinian Authority should immediately halt “all co-ordination with Israel – economic and security – and work toward Palestinian reconciliation,” rather than another peace agreement.

Most Palestinians already agree.

Ramzy Baroud is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. He is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle  and  “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London). 

There are SO many reasons to LOVE and emulate the Irish!

Property Tax Revolt in Ireland

Remember Captain Boycott!

by LAURA FLANDERS

In 1880, Irish tenants turned their backs on their landlord’s rent collector and gave birth to the verb “to boycott.”  This spring, the Irish are at it again, but this time it’s property owners who are refusing to pay and their government that’s collecting.

Saturday at midnight was the deadline for Irish property owners to register to pay a new one hundred Euro property tax. It’s a flat fee, introduced this year as part of a package of taxes and cuts negotiated by the government in its $90 bailout deal with the IMF and the European Union.

To beleaguered property-tax payers elsewhere, an annual fee worth roughly $133 may not sound like a fortune but the Irish have already seen €20 billion worth of austerity measures since the crash of 2008; they’re facing billions more cuts and tax hikes, and they’re keenly aware that registering for the charge paves the way for the introduction of an annual property tax.

“Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay” declared the banners at a rally Saturday.  Property taxes themselves aren’t themselves reactionary, one unemployed Dubliner fumed to me Friday, but this charge treats all homeowners alike. What really gets protestors riled up is that while unemployment benefits, health care and education are being slashed, speculators are being paid back – full value – on risky bets. Reversing a campaign pledge, the Fine Gael/Labor Coalition government announced a €717m repayment to unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders, last fall. Another €1.25 billion was repaid this January.

One Irish senator was ruled out of order when he attempted to read a list of Anglo-Irish Bank bondholders into the record in 2010. If those enjoying the windfall now resemble the investors who held the bonds in the state-owned bank then, they’re private banks and investment firms with political clout among them, Goldman Sachs Asset Management which reported a fourth-quarter profit of about $1 billion at the end of last year. Its next returns come out next week.

Just  805,500 of Ireland’s roughly 1.6 million households registered by the deadline. Is the government really going to pack the courts with homeowners, when not a single banker or speculator’s been brought to justice? That’s what Marie Mulholland, an unemployed labor and community organizer in Dublin was asking this weekend. “The mood here is miserable. Angry and fed up.” On the other hand, the household charge has strengthened the independent/socialist alliance in parliament, the United Left Alliance, which has five seats in the Dail, was recently joined by the left-nationalist Sinn Fein in supporting the boycott.

It’s worth thinking about as Americans edge up to Tax Day this April. In the 1880s, the Irish Land League campaign against Captain Boycott and his boss left the landlord with no laborers to bring in the harvest, no shop willing to sell him goods, no laundry to take in his linens. What’s it called when a society ostracizes its government?

LAURA FLANDERS is the host of The Laura Flanders Show coming to public television stations later this year. She was the host and founder of GRITtv.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura. 

The “99% Spring” Brings Co-optation 

into Full Bloom

Counter-Insurgency as Insurgency

by MIKE KING

As the Occupy movement begins to come into full bloom across the country this Spring – with plans for massive days of action and demonstrations on May 1^st, new campaigns for transit justice on both coasts, continued organizing against foreclosures and police violence, and a slight chance of a bank protest or two – there are several weeds sprouting in the prefigurative garden.  Not least of which is the “99% Spring” campaign, led and funded by every corner of the modern Democratic Party machine.  One might ask themselves “What is wrong with non-violent direct action?” or “How effective could the ‘Democratic Party machine’ actually be, anyway?”  There is nothing inherently wrong with civil disobedience and it surely remains to be seen if this campaign can train 10,000 people let alone the 100,000 they plan to.   The campaign director at MoveOn.org, Ilyse Hogue, an organization that seems to be the key player in the 99% Spring, has recently written in the Nation that “Occupy is Dead” and that the 99% Spring will succeed where Occupy has failed – while mimicking their slogans.  What they lack in actual knowledge of Occupy’s health, they certainly make up for in co-optive obviousness.  Fertilized by decades of expanding inequality, Occupy needs to bloom and transform in the coming months, without getting mired in conflict with the various failed institutions of the organizational Left.  However, those flowers of resistance will have to rise above the weeds of a dying order, including the 99% Spring dandelions.

The organizations comprising this effort are a litany of individual trade unions, both trade federations, environmental groups, and a range of non-profits, including groups who have done very respectable work, such as Jobs with Justice.  There likely isn’t unified intent on behalf of every actor in this campaign.  In Oakland, I have heard of some local participants in the training having serious reservations about the effort, but are participating in it nonetheless.  The (potential) intent of these organizations, or the people they will train who will choose to lie down and get arrested, over some other tactics, isn’t the issue.  What matters is the effect of this effort in the existing political context of counter-insurgency, the dismissive, patronizing and divisive terms in which this is being put, and the timing – right before the presidential election.  If successful, this will undoubtedly serve as a wedge over tactics, exacerbating the “good protester / bad protester” trope that is always used, and that we have heard in the last few months already – from liberal Mayors to Fox News and everywhere in between.  This attempts to bring organizations with sordid histories into Occupy, who will invariably try to wrestle legitimacy from a popular, radical movement, into political groups that are reformist at best, wholly complicit with the current order at worst.  Hogue has stated that the plans for this effort pre-dated the formation of the Occupy movement in the U.S.  The original goal, likely, to generate systemically non-threatening actions to draw attention to inequality and injustice – not to stop it, but to gather votes for Democrats, who, ostensibly, address those issues.  Now that the Occupy movement has already done that, inadvertently, they seek to employ the same campaign to contain and defang that movement while preserving their positions as mostly poverty pimps and lazy labor bureaucrats that think strikes have lost their usefulness.

The existing powers, who some of these same progressives have consistently stood against (from their political position), deeply need to weld a safety valve on Occupy.  Homeland Security, who has been “advising” police and city governments nationally and who coordinated the mid-November 18-city raid on the Occupy movement, released anarticle this week entitled “The Occupy Movement: Rising Anarchy” which states:

“So far, Occupy protests in the United States exhibit a mostly peaceful nature. However, certain elements within Occupy that have been seen both here and abroad have the potential to inflict major damage to governments, people and the private sector. If not carefully monitored and mitigated, these elements pose a significant threat to modern democracies.”

The existing order needs an institutionalized, liberal super-hero-on-a-leash to be used (whether the organizations involved all intend to or not) disrupt, discredit and destroy, from the inside, those elements who organized the November 2^nd General Strike in Oakland, the militant demonstrations against police violence in New York in recent weeks, or community-led, anti-capitalist efforts against foreclosures in Chicago, or those that set barricades aflame in Seattle on December 12, 2011, or the scores of lesser-reported militant action that have taken place in the last half-year, out of nowhere.  They also want to suck the tens of thousands of young people all over the country, hoping to be able to do the same thing in their cities, into a more palatable strategy.  Those in power would like to see nothing more than for 100,000 people to be trained to chain themselves to local bank branches for 6-9 months, hooting about their “greedy side,” get disillusioned at how fruitless that is, and go back to playing video games and downloading pirated music after Obama’s re-election.

Counter-Insurgency by any other name

This is not primarily about tactics, it is about politics.  MoveOn.org and reactionary unions are not spearheading this for no reason.  Are we to believe that the same unions that discourage their members from taking non-violent direct action during labor disputes, have found both the time and the energy to do a solid favor for the radical Left, by resuscitating a movement they have mistakenly diagnosed as dead?  This is primarily about co-option and division, about sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down it’s radical politics, and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 “good protesters” to overshadow the “bad protesters” (who actual take personal risks and/or have radical politics), to ease the State’s ongoing campaign to pick us off one by one.  In the words of MoveOn.org’s own campaign director, it is unabashedly and overtly a campaign of clear co-optation.  This is not a riding of the coattails of a hip social movement; this will be a form of counter-insurgency.  This will be used to disrupt, divide, discredit and destroy the Occupy movement.  The parameters of acceptable protest will be imposed, not by some local non-profit starving for funding or wanting to remain relevant, but by city officials, the police, the major media, Homeland Security, Chambers of Commerce, police front groups like “Stand for Oakland,” and on down the line.

The Occupy movement has broken with the Left’s long-standing, self-defeating tendencies of meaningless, police-choreographed marches, 1-day pageant strikes, movement discourse that thinks the logic of the lowest common denominator that wins elections will win social justice (99% frames not withstanding), and non-violent civil disobedience designed to curry favorable media attention that gets de-contextualized and buried in the sea on nonsense entertainment that is the media.  This scares the hell out of capital and the State.  99% Spring is not part of some nefarious conspiracy theory with Homeland Security or “the illuminati.”  99% Spring is not Wall Street.  But they sure as hell are doing their work, whether some of them want to realize that or not.

“Just Say, No” (to government-sponsored co-optation)

A New York lawyer and some folks from OWS have made an attempt to turn the direct democracy of Occupy into a representation democracy of elected “Occupy politicians” who would have a new-Constitutional Convention this July 4^th weekend in Philadelphia, comprised of elected officials from the Occupy Movement (“rising anarchy,” be damned).  In short time Occupy Wall Street, from which these charlatans emerged, publicly denounced this attempted event at a General Assembly, along with Occupy Philadelphia.  We have (imperfect) emerging direct, democratic institutions in our cities that reflect the will of the movement.  We should use them.  We should address the Operation 99% Spring Co-optation initiative the same way that New York and Philadelphia dealt with the “new founding fathers.”  It is time to weed out our garden, so that real, social justice efforts can bloom.

My knowledge of the Occupy movement is derived primarily from my experience in Oakland.  We have seen counter-insurgent efforts of this type before: when Mayor Quan’s Block-by-Block campaign organization tried to set up a “peace camp” right before the raid of the second Occupy Oakland encampment; when the one singular thing reporters wanted to know from press contacts before the December 12^th Port Shutdown was“How can we get the protesters to obey police orders?” or their myopic fixation on the property destruction that they consider “violence;” to Quan’s unheeded call for the “leaders of the Occupy movement” to condemn said “violence” (by which she means people carrying shields who were hit with projectiles and beaten, while groups of children were tear-gassed): or how permits, taken out behind Occupy Oakland’s back, were used to arrest people for possession of blankets in Oscar Grant Plaza – some of whom are facing prison time; to Quan’s use of non-profits as a palatable alternative to a violent, discredited, and costly movement in a press-release and subsequent “volunteer fair.”  All of this counter-insurgent misrepresentation, baiting, discreditation, and divisiveness is wearying and something we need to get better at combating.  It has also only been partially effective.  An Oakland Tribune poll found that 94% of Oaklanders support Occupy Oakland, even after all of the efforts I outlined above.  We shouldn’t find a false complacency in this.  It should be noted that even though most of these were attempts at co-optation, most came from clearly demarcated enemies.

99% Spring is attempting to graft itself to Occupy and hollow it out from the inside out, imposing rigid norms of non-violence and deference to police authority, while watering down our politics and introducing well-funded and trained institutions that are either fully invested in, or dependent upon, the exist power structure – and have the resources, connections and will of self-preservation to navigate the Occupy ship into a doldrums from which it will never emerge.  Despite the undemocratic and self-defeating norm of consensus, we, as an Occupy movement, still have a sense of what we came here to do.  We didn’t come here to sign petitions or to get Obama reelected.  We didn’t come here to “have a voice in the system”; we came here to flip it on its head.  We will not be co-opted.  We should not have our tactics determined by the Democratic Party.  We should not let ourselves be undermined from within.  We have the capacity to call the 99% Spring out for what it is – a deluded attempt by the Obama campaign to kill two birds with one stone, to take the hundreds of thousands in the street demanding real democracy (laying bare the utter failure of the Obama administration and the American State) and turn it into a vehicle to re-elect him.  So that he can bomb Iran with impunity, or continue to deport more undocumented immigrants than any other president, or cover-up more massacres in Afghanistan, or think that half-baked rhetoric about inequality coupled with more tax breaks for businesses represents “Change we can believe in.”

The Occupy movement may not have the power to change the talking points of duplicitous, liberal Mayors.  It may not have the capacity to change the preoccupations of the mainstream media.  It certainly doesn’t have much say in the manner in which the police try to suppress it.  But we do have control over what goes on in our own house.  These people only become part of the Occupy movement if we let them continue to say that they are out of one side of their mouth, while the other side says we are directionless, un-strategic and “dead.”  Every single Occupation that doesn’t want to turn into nothing more than an ample pool of chumps registering people to vote for the same Obama administration that has declared an all-out war against us, should bring forward a resolution at their General Assembly to condemn this clear attempt to destroy our movement.  This isn’t about violence versus non-violence; this is about autonomy versus co-optation.  History will not forgive us if we let the 99% Spring Trojan horse into out movement so that the injustices we rose up against can be perpetuated with our own sanction, in our own name.

Mike King is a PhD candidate at UC–Santa Cruz and an East Bay activist, currently writing a dissertation about counter-insurgency against Occupy Oakland.  He can be reached at mking(at)ucsc.edu. 

Assassination By Drones: Why Such Killings Violate International Law

APRIL 05, 2012

Why Such Killings Violate International Law

Assassination By Drones

by DAVID MODEL

The first step in examining the legality of assassinating known or suspected terrorists through the use of unmanned armed vehicles (UAVs) is to decide whether such killings could be classified as part of an armed conflict.  If they are considered as part of an armed conflict, according to international law, the rules of armed conflict would apply; otherwise the laws of self-defence would be relevant.

According to the Geneva Conventions and customary humanitarian law, armed conflict only applies when two or more States are involved.  When the United States defines its campaign against terrorists as a global conflict, this designation is not based on the correct definition of war as characterized by international law but on America’s own interpretation of its effort to eradicate terrorism.  Only two or more States can legally, in the strictest terms, engage in war, not a State against individuals scattered around the globe.

The international laws relating to self-defence apply to the case where a State is seeking to protect itself from a group or groups of terrorists.  The laws of self-defence are articulated in the seventh chapter of the United Nations Charter.  In Chapter 7, Article 51, it states that: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs..Measures taken by members in the exercise of the right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not…affect the authority or responsibility of the Security Council…to take such action…to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

In analyzing this clause in the UN Charter, the overriding issue is whether this right of self-defence only exists if an armed attack has occurred or whether self-defence is legitimate under conditions of “anticipatory self-defence” or “pre-emptive self-defence”.

A precedent exists in customary law in the Caroline case which established that an “imminent threat” exists when it is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”  Developed by Daniel Webster, these criteria legitimize the use of force in the absence of an act of aggression.

There is an extensive body of work seeking to define when the use of force is legitimate given an imminent threat including the argument that: “The rule does not actually require an attack to be imminent to act, but rather permits defensive measures to be taken before one passes a point in time when it is too late to prevent catastrophe.

Based on the existing literature, it is difficult to argue that the threat extended by a single or group of terrorists poses a threat to the security of the United States.  It could be argued that terrorist poses a threat to individuals or to property belonging to the United States in which case criminal law applies and the response requires police action not an armed attack by a State.

A further point reinforcing the argument of a police action is that these targets of drone attacks are suspects until due process condemns them for criminal acts.  Killing the suspect precludes the application of due process.

It is clearly evident that for a State to launch an attack by an UAV is a violation of international law and those responsible for such acts become suspects of war crimes.  Arbitrary killing of individuals around the world notwithstanding the justification cannot be in accordance with the rule of law under which certain norms of behaviour have been established for the treatment of individuals suspected of illegal acts.

David Model is a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Seneca College in Toronto.

Was It a First Amendment Violation for a New York School to Suspend a Fifth Grader Who Shared a Violent But Perhaps Joking Wish?

The Right to Bully?

by JULIE HILDEN

On March 22, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit handed down its decision in Cuff v. Valley Central School District.  The case raised the question whether an elementary school student’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was suspended for six days based on arguably threatening—but possibly simply joking—words that he had written during a classroom assignment and shown to other students.  The panel split 2-1, with the majority siding with the school.

The Drawing at Issue, and B.C.’s Prior Drawing and Story

The student was known in court only as B.C. (The use of initials to identify juvenile parties in federal court is standard.)  At the time the drawing was made, B.C. was a ten-year-old fifth grader.

The drawing itself was an innocuous one, provided by a teacher to be colored in, and depicting an astronaut.  But the text that B.C. added to the astronaut figure was seen by some at the school as far from innocuous: The teacher had encouraged students to write a “wish” and B.C. had written “Blow up the school with the teachers in it.”

B.C. testified that the teacher told the students that day that they could write about anything, even “missiles” if they so chose.  And a reference to missiles, if there indeed was one, might arguably have suggested to B.C. that even warlike wishes were acceptable.

Unfortunately, however, this was not B.C.’s first disturbing incident involving a drawing.  Previously, B.C. had created another drawing, depicting a student firing a gun.  On that drawing, B.C. wrote, “One day I shot 4 people each of them got fo[ur] bullits [sic] on them.”  B.C. claimed that, when he wrote this, he was depicting a game of paintball, but one has to wonder.

And on a third occasion, B.C. wrote a story for class about “a big wind [that] destroyed every school in America . . . [And] every body ran for there [sic] life and than [sic] all adults died and all the kids were alive.  Than [sic] all the kids died.”

Previously, B.C. had also been involved in numerous altercations—some of them physical—and other misbehavior at his school.  Some of these incidents had also led to trips to the principal’s office for B.C.

The wish that B.C. made in connection with the astronaut drawing drew the attention of the fellow students to whom he showed it.  Several laughed, but one—who B.C. testified had initially laughed—later left her desk to go and tell the teacher.  Moreover, at that point, the student seemed to the teacher to be quite frightened.

The teacher then asked B.C. if he meant what he had written, and she testified that he looked at her, the court noted, with a “blank and serious face.”

Later, in the principal’s office, B.C. said he hadn’t meant what he’d written.  However, the Superintendent, after being briefed on the incident and on the earlier misbehavior by B.C., imposed a six-day suspension.

The Panel Majority’s Holding

The two-judge panel majority applied the seminal school-speech test drawn from the Supreme Court’s opinion in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist.  Specifically, the panel inquired into whether B.C.’s case had demonstrated “facts which might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities.”

The panel majority also quoted a precedent from the Second Circuit itself, which described the Tinker inquiry as ascertaining “whether school officials might reasonably portend disruption from the student expression at issue.”  Moreover, the panel majority cited a string of precedents that seem to establish something close to a post-Columbine zero-tolerance policy for threats of school violence that are assessed under Tinker.

When a court engages in Tinker’s inquiry, the panel majority made clear, the student’s intentions don’t count. What matters, instead, are the reasonable predictions that school officials make regarding the disruption that the student’s expression may cause.  (The panel majority also accorded significant deference to the school officials’ judgment in its analysis.)

B.C.’s prior drawings and writings that depicted violence were on school officials’ minds when they contemplated his suspension, and officials also had spoken to the school psychologist, who was aware of B.C.’s prior drawings and past disciplinary issues.

Based on the evidence, the two-judge majority ruled against B.C.

One other possible, but unspoken factor in the appellate majority’s decision might be the fact that it was U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff who initially ruled against B.C. and in favor of the school.  Judge Rakoff is reputed to be both very smart and very liberal. Thus, the members of the appellate majority might have had, in the back of their minds, the fact that even the liberal Judge Rakoff had ruled against B.C.

The Dissent

Judge Rosemary Pooler’s dissent took a very different approach than did the majority’s opinion:  Judge Pooler made it clear that she saw B.C.’s comment as trivial, whereas the majority took the comment very seriously indeed.  (It seems likely that the real nature of the comment lay somewhere in the middle, between these two extremes.)

Judge Pooler began her dissent by characterizing B.C.’s comment as a mere “stab at humor,” an “ill-advised joke.”  In her view, B.C.’s comment “barely had the potential to cause a stir at school, let alone a substantial disruption.” In addition, she predicted that had this case gone to a jury, the jury would have agreed that the comment was innocuous.

In support of her point, Judge Pooler notes that none of B.C.’s classmates seemed to have taken the comment seriously; even the girl who later became concerned initially laughed.  But clearly, that girl herself thought better of her first, knee-jerk response since she did, in the end, feel that her teacher ought to know about B.C.’s comment.

Judge Pooler makes a good point when she notes that the protection of free speech cannot depend on a listener’s veto; if a listener or reader misinterprets a comment, that is not the speaker’s or writer’s fault.

But here, B.C.’s prior writing and drawing provided context that could reasonably be used by a reader within the school administration to illuminate the meaning of B.C.’s most recent writing.  And that context suggests, to me, that Judge Pooler may have dismissed B.C.’s most recent writing too quickly.

Is the Tinker Standard Alone Sufficient to Protect Students in the Modern-Day School Context?

Finally, Judge Pooler contended that what the school was really worried about, in B.C.’s case, wasn’t that B.C.’s most recent writing would cause disruption at the school. It was, instead, that B.C.’s writing might foreshadow a possible school shooting, or other act of violence, to be perpetrated by him in the future.

Judge Pooler’s point, put another way, is that the Tinker standard isn’t truly fulfilled here. Tinker is about disruption that is immediately or almost immediately foreseeable, and that is sparked by student speech. It is not about long-term risks of violence, as real as they may be.

Moreover, it would be odd to categorize violence as just a subset of disruption in order to shoehorn future-violence cases into Tinker’s framework, when actual violence is typically so much more grave.

In addition, as Judge Pooler points out, Tinker requires that the speech at issue must itself forseeably lead to disruption. (For instance, a bully’s taunt to a future victim could qualify.)  It is not enough, then, that the speech at issue reveals the potential of a given student for committing violence at some unspecified time in the future.  To fall outside First Amendment protection, speech has to do more than just reveal a reality or shine light on a personality.

Perhaps, then, we need a new standard for modern schools that face not only the fear that their school day will be disrupted by students’ clashes, but also the fear that their students could actually be killed or seriously harmed by their fellow students.

With a child like B.C., who seems obsessed with the idea of violence against others, perhaps our legal test should focus on whether a public school is offering such a kid enough in the way of psychological counseling to ensure that his fascination with violence will not take a deadly turn.  (Kids who are bullies, too, should be required to attend extended counseling, which should also be offered to bullying victims if they so choose.)

Of course, counseling won’t be a panacea, but it could change some kids’ lives. In contrast, it’s not clear if a suspension—the punishment imposed on B.C.—will do any good at all.  Some parents may just side with their kids (as B.C.’s parents did in this lawsuit) and conclude the suspension was unjust.  And other parents may learn of the suspension and impose harsh punishments that only reiterate the lesson their child is already learning:  Might makes right.

"[you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real. " Kurt Vonnegut

Friday, 30 March 2012

I am very real

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel,Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.

On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.

(Source: Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage; Image: Kurt Vonnegut, via Everything was Vonnegut.)

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again:y]