The Thunderbolt 230405 -- Secret Wars
Dana Walker
The Thunderbolt
News — Commentary — Calendar of Activist Events — Dumb Jokes
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1) Glen Anderson’s Latest
2) Safe Unpaid Leave Act for Railroad Workers
3) Update on Legislative Session
4) Zahid’s Story
5) Film Screening: Which Way Home
6) Saving Legacy Forests in Western Washington
7) Oly FOR Calendar
8) Bonus Tip of the Day
A detailed description of all events is located after the News and Commentary section
To go directly to an event description just type the index entry above into a search box
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Secret Wars
230406
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Cassandra's Curse
Hey, People!
I once had a reader refer to me as a “Cassandra” – and not in a good way. Generally, a “Cassandra” is a derogatory term for someone who constantly predicts doom and gloom.
Actually, his metaphor may have been more accurate than he realized and not in the way he meant it…
Cassandra was a Trojan priestess who was cursed by the god Apollo with being able to see the future – but to have no one believe her when she tried to warn them about impending catastrophes.
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The thing about Cassandra is that her predictions always came true, though…
Do You Feel Lucky?
David Axelrod told an interesting anecdote about Barack Obama: In 2009, right in the middle of the battle over affordable health care, Obama asked an advisor what the advisor thought the chances of the Affordable Healthcare Act's passage were? The advisor in return asked Obama how lucky he felt?
To which Obama replied, “I am a black man named Barack Hussein Obama and I am the president of the United States…”
The Handmaid’s Children
For those of you who think that the Handmaid’s Tale could never happen in America, you do understand that several states are now passing hate laws that are targeting some of our most vulnerable children, right?
Quo Pro Quid
For those of you who think fascism could never come to America, you do understand that our entire government is supported through a system of bribes that are euphemistically referred to as “campaign contributions” right? They claim that these campaign contributions are not corruption because there is no quid pro quo. Instead, they put the quo before the quid, thus making it quo pro quid, and therefore that makes everything all right!
Alaska or New Zealand?
Evidently the big debate amongst the top elites these days is whether they should build their survival bunkers in Alaska or New Zealand?
They are also reportedly deeply concerned about how to prevent their security guards and their serfs from turning on them once they are all locked inside their pods Without any outside support.
Jeez. Cry them a river.
Corruption in Sheep’s Clothing
Another indication that things in this country are getting both truly screwy and truly scary is that lately I keep finding myself agreeing with Republicans whilst simultaneously wanting to throw things at Democrats.
Congress recently held hearings on censorship in social media, one of my pet issues. They questioned Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, both of whom are known for being ‘far left’ – and both of whom are known free-speech advocates -- yet it was the Republicans who heaped praise upon their work while the Democrats grilled and questioned and generally attacked the credibility of two leading and multiple-award winning journalists.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz used the oldest trick in the book by attempting to simply avoid the message by attacking the messenger and she — one of the most corrupt members of an utterly corrupt Congress — attacked the credibility of one of the most important and respected journalists of the 21st century thus far. The Democrats asked complex and nuanced questions and then insisted upon a “yes or no” answer when either a simple yes or a simple no was completely inappropriate to the question. They either tried to deny that there was censorship happening at all or that whatever censorship might be happening was being done “for our own good”.
The Democrats also kept going back to Russian interference in the 2016 election and the need to defend against such things. This is in spite of the fact that almost every aspect of the Great Russian Conspiracy was totally discredited, and all that was actually proven was that the Russians spent a few hundred thousand dollars on social media ads in a campaign that literally spent billions. That is literally about the same proportion as a drop in a bucket of water — or in a bucket of slime in this case.
https://news.yahoo.com/matt-taibbi-fires-back-democrat-202053339.html
Secret Wars
Did you know that from 1998 to 2003 a civil war raged in the Congo that killed over 6 million people?
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/third-congo-civil-war-1998-2003/
I suspect you didn’t since the media completely ignores anything that happens in Africa. Can you imagine the media coverage if some kind of civil unrest in a European country were to kill even a few dozen people, much less 6 million?
In 2007 The United States formed the United States Africa Command, or AFRICOM. You may remember I warned Africans that they needed to cover their backsides because this meant the United States was about to start “bringing democracy” to a lot of African countries.
They not only have indeed been doing that, but the United States has been secretly supporting all kinds of nastiness in northeast Africa with virtually no media coverage. Did you know that last November -- nine months after the outset of the US proxy war with Russia and Ukraine -- the US lost a two-year proxy war in Ethiopia that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced more than 5 million people?
This was a civil war in Ethiopia commonly called the Tigray War and the US proxy in that war was the Tigray People's Liberation front, or TPLF.
In 2020, the TPLF -- who at that point had been the US proxy in the area for decades and who through holding one sham election after another had been dominating Ethiopia for the entire time -- finally lost an election in spite of their American support. However, with US help and encouragement the TPLF attacked the new government thus launching this civil war – and all of this was done with almost complete media silence about the actual facts of the matter.
Fortunately, we have reporters such as Anne Garrison, an independent journalist based out of Northern California. Her writing has appeared in the Black Agenda Report, the Grayzone, and the San Francisco Bayview. She is also a co-producer of Pacifica Radio’s COVID Race and Democracy. Ms. Garrison traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2022 to investigate conditions there firsthand.
According to Ms. Garrison: “There are hundreds of thousands of people dead and over 5 million people displaced in a war that went on for two years and the US was absolutely central to what happened by backing its proxy force, the TPLF, in an aggressive war that began in November 2020. The best way to understand the US involvement is to understand that the US exploited ethnicity here in order to dominate the Horn of Africa. It's a hugely geostrategic region as it sits right on the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Over 40% of the world's oil passes through those waterways, through the Red Sea and the straits of Hormuz, and the coast of Somalia has perhaps the largest untapped oil reserves in the world.”
There are three countries sitting next to one another on the ‘Horn of Africa’: Ethiopia Eritrea and Somalia. In 2018 those three countries formed a regional alliance. This alliance included cultural exchanges and regional cooperation in economic trade and these new alliances gave this region, which had been fraught with conflict, more hope for peace than it had had in in many years.
However, this was more independence than the US was willing to put up with. The US simply seems utterly incapable of tolerating anyone anywhere in the world trying to raise an independent head in any manner – especially if there is some sort of strategic interest – which in the case of Ethiopia and Somalia such interests involves both oil and the transport of oil. Somalia alone has five ports right in the middle of this strategic area. In addition, Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa and it also had the fastest growing economy before the American intervention. It is also arguable that a lot of this conflict has been about the emergence of an energy superpower in the region with Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the largest dam in Africa and the 7th largest in the world. One of the greatest challenges in Africa is electricity poverty and Ethiopia is contracting to sell energy downstream as well as the potential to provide electricity throughout Ethiopia.
There is also the fact that Egypt is very unhappy about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Israel likes to keep Egypt happy, and the US likes to keep Israel happy.
Also, in the late 19th century Ethiopia repelled the Italian invaders in the battle of Adwa and therefore it is the only country in all of Africa never formally colonized by European powers – that is until the US came along with its indirect form of imperialism by setting up the TPLF to do its bidding.
Another factor at play here is that Ethiopia never had direct access to any ocean ports until this new agreement with Somalia and Eritrea. Now it has direct access to several very fine ports.
Eritrea is also very important in this story as Eritrea is kind of like the Cuba of Africa. However, Ann Garrison went to Eritrea and she loved it. She said, “It was so peaceful, it was so beautiful. I never saw anyone begging on the streets, I never saw anyone sleeping on the streets, and I never clutched at my pocketbook. Everyone who actually goes to Eritrea says the same thing. It's a very poor country but it's very egalitarian and as a result it has a very relaxed feel. You don't see huge displays of either wealth or of poverty and it's pursuing a step-by-step steady as you go development path. Many people say it's the only truly independent country in Africa because it is one of only two countries that do not collaborate with AFRICOM [the other being Zimbabwe] and equally important Eritrea does not have IMF or World Bank debt – for the simple reason that Eritrea never took out any loans from the IMF or the World Bank.”
Neighbors Ethiopia and Somalia, on the other hand, both suffer heavily from IMF debt.
However, if you read anything in the Western press it will say Eritrea is the worst place in the world. Eritrea helped Ethiopia during the recent Ethiopian war because as the war started the TPLF fired upon Eritrea. The fact that Eritrea was brought into the war enraged the West because Eritrea has particularly competent security forces and because they simply hate Eritrea due to its lack of dependence upon the West. The idea of Ethiopia and Somalia being allied with the “Cuba and North Korea of Africa” was really threatening to the West and – just as is the case with Cuba and North Korea -- they have been trying unsuccessfully to isolate Eritrea for decades.
Then, to exacerbate things even more, Eritrea recently met with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov about Russia possibly using Eritrean ports on the Red Sea for various kinds of collaboration.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/27/russias-lavrov-meets-eritrean-president-in-surprise-visit
As soon as the TPLF started this war the “Tigray Genocide” meme began to appear on social media and all the leading lights of the “Genocide Industrial Complex” began popping up everywhere on the Media Machine. (For those of you yet unaware of this, the “Genocide Industrial Complex” exists largely to justify both US and Israeli aggression…)
CNN ultimately won an Emmy for reporting upon the impending ‘Tigray Genocide’.
When this narrative meme of ‘Tigray Genocide’ appeared the people of the Horn were immediately terrified that they were going to be the next Libya or the next Syria because the United States first destroyed Libya (Libya does not have a functioning government to this day) and after destroying Libya the US invaded and bombed Syria back nearly into the Stone Age (and in fact they are still doing so in spite of claims to the contrary) and all of those actions were also based upon the pretense that they were ‘preventing genocide’.
And yes, the ‘Holocaust Industrial Complex’ is a key part of the ‘Genocide Industrial Complex’ as this is invariably the justification used for the brutal oppression of the Palestinians in general and anyone who criticizes Zionism in particular.
And, of course, accusations of genocide were also used to justify the Yugoslavian intervention back in the 1990s, and charges of genocide are being leveled against the Russians today.
And, of course, any time the United States is involved in some nasty intervention, lies misdirection and gas-lit BS dominates the media. For instance: There were widespread reports in the Western media about a famine in Tigray, and it was reported that humanitarian aid to Tigray was being blocked by the Ethiopian government. However, when Anne Garrison saw convoy after convoy of aid heading into Tigray, she stopped numerous truck drivers and questioned them about being denied entrance into Tigray; every single one of those drivers reported that they had been entering and leaving Tigray with no problems of any kind.
Any time you start hearing talk from the Western powers about the ‘international community’ needing to ‘take responsibility’ for some atrocity that may or may not actually be real then this is one of the surest signs that military intervention is inevitable.
However, The US was thwarted in its efforts to ‘bring democracy’ to Ethiopia when China and Russia, backed by every country in Africa, blocked a resolution to intervene into Ethiopia in the UN.
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This is an ongoing story. Stay tuned.
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Meanwhile – it’s time to get to work…
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The Cascadia Action Alert
February, 2023
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1) Glen Anderson’s Latest
As always, Glen is churning out all kinds of invaluable information. Check it out:
I keep posting information about a wide variety of issues to my blog, www.parallaxperspectives.org
Currently, THE ITEMS LISTED BELOW are the 10 most recent:
- Poverty results from this: A Quarter of Biden’s Budget Will Go to Pentagon Contractors. They donate heavily to Congress’s armed services committees.
- Right-wing extremism is a serious threat to democracy in the U.S. and many other countries
- STOP the U.S.’s 60+ years of hatred and abuse of Cuba!
- Besides humanizing state-level prison sentences, FEDERAL SENTENCING LAW must be overhauled too.
- Republicans are persistently WRONG + INCOMPETENT about COVID
- 3-minute video: Tom Lehrer’s funny song about nuclear holocaust
- Gun manufacturers promote violence in U.S. and worldwide! STOP THEM!
- These savvy, practical insights can reach and convince the public about our issues
- De-regulated banks crash!!! Here are some insights into recent crashes of big banks.
- Insights into ECONOMICS and mainstream news media biases
The lower right corner of my blog’s home page lists many issue categories, so you may choose to see posts on each of those issues. Visit www.parallaxperspectives.org so you can click any of the ones you want to read. Click a category to see several pages of posts under that category. (Many posts pertain to several categories.)
The green banner at the top of the home page:
- Allows you see ALL blog posts in chronological order
- Invites you to subscribe to future blog posts
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2) Safe Unpaid Leave Act for Railroad Workers
This seems timely. I got this message from the Backbone Campaign:
Friend --
Please take action in solidarity with rail labor. Contact your Washington State Legislators today to tell them you support the Safe Unpaid Leave Act.
Contact Info for your Legislators HERE
Comment Directly on the Bill HERE
ESSB 5267 – the Safe UNPAID Leave Act for Washington State Railroad workers is under attack by rail carrier and business lobbyists! This legislation is IN DANGER of being killed unless we show our state representatives there is strong support for passing this bill!
Protecting rail workers from discipline and termination is on the “top 10 bills to kill” list of the Association of Washington Business!
Labor allies are asking that we help GENERATE PHONE CALLS - or at least e-mail messages - from as many people as possible!
To find your State Representative: https://app.leg.wa.gov/DistrictFinder/
Or call the Washington State Legislative Hotline: 800-562-6000
Comment on ESSB 5267 by clicking the link HERE.
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3) Update on Legislative Session
I got this message from the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance:
There are just three weeks left before this legislative session ends on April 23, and there is still work to do to push lawmakers to pass key affordable housing and homelessness priorities.
This week brings another critical deadline with the fiscal committee cutoff on Tuesday, April 4. Next week brings the April 12 deadline for bills to be approved in the opposite chamber. Any bill that is deemed “necessary to implement the budget” is exempt from these deadlines, including HB 1628.
Michele offered that the last week was a roller coaster with many budget hearings. She thanked the more than 24 people who testified on the House and Senate budgets since they were released.
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WASHINGTON
LOW INCOME HOUSING ALLIANCE
304 Alaskan Way S., Suite 302
Seattle, Washington 98104
(206) 442-9455
in...@wliha.org
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4) Zahid’s Story
Local immigrants – including local activist/immigrant Zahid Chaudhry -- tell their stories in these interviews. Check it out:
It took longer than I was expecting, but we finally have your interview with World Affairs Council posted. Here's the link: https://www.wactacoma.com/immigrant-stories-project (yours is second from the top). Thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this, I think you had a real strong story to tell. We will be trying to publicize these to the schools this Spring.
Hope everything is going well with you!
-John
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5) Film Screening: Which Way Home
I got this message from Rochelle:
Join us in partnership with Strengthening Sanctuary Alliance for a special after-hours screening of past Academy Award Nominee, still relevant today, "Which Way Home," A powerful documentary following a group of unaccompanied children as they make the journey across Mexico in hopes of crossing the border into the United States. The film screening will be introduced by Olympia immigration attorney, Steffani Powell.
Event by Olympia Timberland Library
Duration: 2 hr 30 min
Public · Anyone on or off Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/events/561750622599315/
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6) Saving Legacy Forests in Western Washington
I got this message from Janet:
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A few weeks later, in July of 2021, before we had a chance to file our opening brief, I discovered during a site visit that DNR had already started logging. It was a shameless attempt to end-run the legal process by racing to cut the trees down before the case could proceed. DNR knew that the Wahkiakum County Superior Court was certain to dismiss the case once the trees had been cut down. DNR then threatened to charge us thousands of dollars in legal fees if we did not drop the case. I was left with a choice to either withdraw the lawsuit, or pay the legal fees, watch the trees come down, and pursue a case that was destined to fail.
I opted instead to file a series of follow-up lawsuits against DNR in Grays Harbor, Pacific, and Lewis counties. The first of these lawsuits challenged the "About Time" timber sale, located about 30 miles southwest of Olympia, near the town of Oakville. Realizing that we were not giving up, DNR agreed to allow the case to proceed if we dropped the remaining appeals. The county-elected judge ruled in favor of DNR, as we expected, and we appealed the Superior Court decision to the Division II Appellate Court in Tacoma.
Over the past year, I've worked with some of the top attorneys in the Pacific Northwest to refine the legal argument against DNR. The "About Time" case was scheduled to be heard in the Division II Appellate Court in Tacoma earlier this month, but as the hearing data was approaching, the Murphy Plywood Company cut down all of the trees and filed a motion with the court to dismiss the case. DNR has broken its promise to allow this case to proceed, and is supporting the plywood company's motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the lawsuit is moot because the trees are all gone. We believe that DNR is supporting the motion because it fears the case would set a precedent, and force them to cancel timber sales that are currently planned in other legacy forests across Western Washington.
The Appellate Court is expected to make a decision on the motion to dismiss the case within the next month.
More information on the case is available on our website.
Stephen Kropp Director |
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7) Oly FOR Calendar
And finally – in lieu of a Thunderbolt events calendar -- I will instead give you the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliations events calendar:
OLYMPIA, SEATTLE, TACOMA FOR
PROGRAM MEETING:
THURSTON - SANTO TOMÁS SISTER COUNTY SOLIDARITY
Sun April 16, 6:30 - 8 pm, by Zoom
Three Chapters of Fellowship of Reconciliation, Olympia, Seattle, and Tacoma, jointly present a program meeting with Jean Eberhardt from the Thurston Santo Tomás Sister City Association (TSTSCA), talking about their scholarship program and other activities. Since 1988, this Association has fostered people-to-people connections between 2 counties in Nicaragua and the United States. For more info about this Association, see https://oly-wa.us/tstsca/About.php .
Jean Eberhardt recently retired after twenty years as an Academic Advisor at Evergreen College. She was a founding member of the TSTSCA, and will talk about her personal history in the Seattle to Nicaragua Construction Brigade in 1985. TSTSCA emerged from this, as part of the movement to put real faces on our Central American neighbors. Jean will talk about where they are now with their activities and their future plans.
Registration: please email Kerri Griffis kerrig...@yahoo.com or Jean Gant Delastrada GANT...@msn.com to request Zoom connection
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Friday, May 19th, at 7 pm Tom Rawson will play a
benefit concert for FOR's Mike Yarrow Peace Fellows (MYPF) in
person at the Olympia Friends Meetinghouse in Olympia. More
details and tickets will be available in mid-April. Contact Jean Gant
Delastrada at gant...@msn.com.
Applications are open now, until June 1st, for young people ages 14 to 24 wanting to be peace fellows in the 2023-2024 academic year. A complete description of the program and application materials are available on the WWFOR website, www.wwfor.org.
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The 2023 WWFOR Spring Assembly, will be held on Zoom again this year. Mark your calendar for the morning of Saturday, May 6th. Information, and updates as they occur, are available on the WWFOR website, www.wwfor.org. Registration will open by mid-April.
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8) Bonus Tip of the Day:
Don’t accept the status quo.
Peace.
Dana
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https://dana98501.wordpress.com/2023/04/06/tb-230406-secret-wars/
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