Rep. Elijah Cummings (D‑Md.) dead at 68 The world is indeed a less hon­or­able and noble place today.
R.I.P.…

It was refresh­ing to hear the Prime Minister talk about the ensu­ing cor­rup­tion imbroglio involv­ing Ruel Reid, Fritz Pinnock and oth­ers recent­ly.
Addressing a JLP Area Council One meet­ing at the Girl Guides Association of Jamaica head­quar­ters in St Andrew, the PM said he was sad­dened by the débâ­cle that has engulfed his admin­is­tra­tion.
“There is no ques­tion that it (Reid’s arrest) sad­dens me, that it sad­dens the entire par­ty, and I know you who sit here as well, you are indeed very sad­dened, very con­cern about what hap­pened.”

“I want to make it clear that … the Jamaica Labour Party that now has lead­er­ship and respon­si­bil­i­ty for the future of this coun­try, the insti­tu­tion of the par­ty, is strong­ly against any­thing that could be char­ac­ter­ized as cor­rup­tion, malfea­sance, and abuse of pub­lic funds,” Holness stat­ed, adding that con­cerns being raised are being tak­en seri­ous­ly by the par­ty.

“We will do every­thing in our pow­er to ensure that wher­ev­er there is cor­rup­tion, wher­ev­er there is the mis­use of pow­er, mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion of pub­lic resources, that this admin­is­tra­tion will ensure that the mech­a­nisms are in place to fer­ret it out and bring them before the courts.” 
“This Government under­stands that, so when we sit togeth­er as a Cabinet, when we sit togeth­er as a par­ty, we have to look into our­selves, we have to reflect on what it is that we need to do, and the first thing is that the Government must nev­er inter­fere in the inde­pen­dent process­es to inves­ti­gate and pros­e­cute cor­rup­tion.”

More than any­thing else he said, the Prime Minister said the fol­low­ing; “You play a very impor­tant role in hold­ing Government to account. And what I know about the del­e­gates and work­ers of the Jamaica Labour Party is that dem love dem par­ty bad, but dem love dem coun­try more.” 

So he does get it. That was a charge to par­ty faith­ful as to where their loy­al­ties ought to be. Of course, many in atten­dance who were cheer­ing the Prime Minister com­plete­ly missed that charge, and one would guess it went over the heads of the major­i­ty of the hyper-par­ti­sans in the par­ty.
That is what this writer has been say­ing to laborites. Nations have polit­i­cal par­ties for nation­al devel­op­ment. Not the oth­er way around.
We make the grave mis­take in believ­ing that our loy­al­ties ought to be with the polit­i­cal par­ties of our choice. Our loy­al­ties should be to our nation.
No, I don’t care about the argu­ment that Comrades loy­al­ty is to their par­ty. We do not become our adver­saries, we set exam­ples for them to fol­low.
The People’s National Party has always had a cult-like per­sona. Members of the Jamaica Labor Party should not try to out-cult mem­bers of the PNP.

The over­ar­ch­ing point as far as I am con­cerned is that even though the Prime Minister said the Government must nev­er inter­fere in the inde­pen­dent process­es to inves­ti­gate and pros­e­cute cor­rup­tion.” It sends a chill down my spine, because that state­ment demon­strates that there is a lot more work to be done to build fire­walls around our crim­i­nal jus­tice process.
Even though I applaud the Prime Minister for open­ly mak­ing the state­ments he did, I wished he had gone far­ther by address­ing the state­ments made by Delroy Chuck his Justice Minister who can­not seem to keep his mouth shut.
There are many ways to inter­fere in the crim­i­nal jus­tice process. Chuck’s assault on law-enforce­ment was clear­ly a gra­tu­itous and cor­rupt attempt at influ­enc­ing a case which we are told is still under inves­ti­ga­tion.
That kind of inter­fer­ence is cor­rup­tion and it needs to be called out for what it is.
Since we can­not un-hear what we already heard, I am not inclined to be respon­sive to the idea that he with­drew the state­ment he made.
That a Minister of Government would inter­vene, (ver­bal­ly or oth­er­wise) in an active inves­ti­ga­tion, and a case that has not come to a res­o­lu­tion, which involves a for­mer col­league, is the very def­i­n­i­tion of corruption.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

St. Paul’s Betty McCollum is rad­i­cal­ly pro­gres­sive on U.S. pol­i­cy toward Israel. Why don’t you ever hear about it?

By Jessica Schulberg

Over the past few years, one mem­ber of Congress has stood up to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), denounced Israel’s poli­cies, which she likened to “apartheid,” and pushed laws that would place human­i­tar­i­an con­di­tions on U.S. mil­i­tary aid to Israel. Human rights advo­cates praise her, and she is pop­u­lar in her pro­gres­sive dis­trict. But she is nei­ther the face of the pro­gres­sive left nor the bogey­man of Fox News. Unless you’ve lived in Minnesota — or read MinnPost — there’s a good chance you’ve nev­er heard of her. 

Her name is Betty McCollum, and she has rep­re­sent­ed St. Paul for almost 20 years. 

President Donald Trump — who loves to attack Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.), one of the first Muslim con­gress­women, for her crit­i­cism of Israel — has nev­er once tweet­ed McCollum’s name. That the Democratic con­gress­woman who leads the van­guard of pro­gres­sive U.S. pol­i­cy toward Israel in Congress is not the sub­ject of con­stant bad-faith attacks from the right is a tes­ta­ment to her prag­ma­tism. But it also expos­es the incon­sis­ten­cy of the out­rage cam­paign direct­ed at Omar and the oth­er mem­bers of the so-called “Squad,” a group of pro­gres­sive first-term law­mak­ers who are all women of color.

“Rep. Omar has a his­to­ry of launch­ing vir­u­lent anti-Semitic screeds,” Trump claimed at a cam­paign ral­ly in Minneapolis on Thursday. “She is a dis­grace to our coun­try and she is one of the big rea­sons that I am going to win and the Republican Party is going to win Minnesota in 13 months,” he continued. 

Trump’s attacks on the Squad, which also includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.), “are inten­tion­al­ly done to rile up the racist instincts of a por­tion of his base,” said Dylan Williams, of the left-lean­ing pro-Israel group J Street. “This dou­ble stan­dard that’s being applied to these con­gress­women is very clear, and it’s not a stan­dard that has been applied to oth­er con­gres­sion­al crit­ics of Israeli pol­i­cy and the occu­pa­tion.” Omar, who is Black, Muslim and an immi­grant from Somalia, rep­re­sents “a per­fect storm of char­ac­ter­is­tics that they could try to attack and por­tray as the prob­lem to a white evan­gel­i­cal base,” said Yousef Munayyer, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. 

“Rep. McCollum,” Munayyer added, “didn’t fit the poster.”

McCollum, who grew up in South St. Paul, trained as a social stud­ies teacher. After she grad­u­at­ed, she had a hard time find­ing full-time work, so she took on long-term sub­sti­tute teach­ing jobs and worked part-time at Sears. In 1984, McCollum’s tod­dler daugh­ter frac­tured her skull falling off a play­ground slide that didn’t have enough sand at its base. The girl recov­ered quick­ly, but the city didn’t do any­thing about the play­ground until after McCollum pushed for it at a City Council meet­ing — a vic­to­ry that prompt­ed her to run for local office. She served on the City Council and in the Minnesota state­house before she was elect­ed to Congress in 2000. 

There is no one moment that prompt­ed McCollum to become one of the most out­spo­ken mem­bers of Congress on Israel and Palestine. She tends to talk about the con­flict as just one of the many human rights crises bedev­il­ing the world. As a law­mak­er, she has shown a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in pol­i­cy aimed at pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble kids: She has worked to pro­vide HIV-AIDS assis­tance to orphans, pre­vent child mar­riage and fix crum­bling schools for Native American chil­dren. 

In 2006, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of groups that pro­vide human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance to Palestinians warned McCollum of a loom­ing human­i­tar­i­an dis­as­ter. At the time, law­mak­ers were prepar­ing to vote on the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, a bill osten­si­bly intend­ed to iso­late Hamas, the group that has been des­ig­nat­ed by Israel and the U.S. as a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion and that had recent­ly won a major­i­ty in the Palestinian par­lia­ment. The bill, human­i­tar­i­an work­ers explained, would make it hard­er for aid orga­ni­za­tions to pro­vide life­sav­ing med­ical care to Palestinians. McCollum lis­tened and was one of two mem­bers who vot­ed against advanc­ing the bill out of committee.

The bill, which was backed by AIPAC, passed eas­i­ly in the House. But McCollum’s dis­sent­ing vote set her up for a feud with one of the most pow­er­ful lob­by­ing groups in the coun­try. On a Friday after the vote, McCollum’s chief of staff, Bill Harper, got a phone call from Amy Rotenberg, an AIPAC mem­ber who had met with McCollum on behalf of the orga­ni­za­tion. McCollum’s “sup­port for ter­ror­ists will not be tol­er­at­ed,” Rotenberg said, accord­ing to Harper. Rotenberg, who declined an inter­view, described Harper’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the con­ver­sa­tion as a “seri­ous distortion.”

“Bill Harper’s descrip­tion of the con­ver­sa­tion with me was false in 2006 and it is false now,” Rotenberg wrote.

McCollum was shocked. She wrote a let­ter to AIPAC’s exec­u­tive direc­tor slam­ming the group for attempt­ing to use “threat and intim­i­da­tion to sti­fle legit­i­mate pol­i­cy dif­fer­ences.” She banned AIPAC rep­re­sen­ta­tives from her offices pend­ing a for­mal apol­o­gy from the lob­by­ing group. It was a lone­ly time to go up against AIPAC. J Street, the left-lean­ing alter­na­tive to AIPAC, didn’t exist yet. Members told McCollum that she had “writ­ten her death sen­tence,” she said. 

“I went, ‘OK, if I lose an elec­tion over stand­ing up for med­ical sup­plies for kids, OK, I’m ready to go!’” McCollum said. “When I came back, the whis­per kind of was, ‘You can survive!’”

McCollum nev­er got a pub­lic apol­o­gy, but she did even­tu­al­ly let AIPAC rep­re­sen­ta­tives back into her office. “But they don’t bul­ly her or do what they do to oth­er mem­bers,” said Brad Parker, a senior advis­er at Defense for Children International Palestine.

McCollum wins reelec­tions in her pro­gres­sive dis­trict by huge mar­gins — she received 91% of the vote in the 2018 pri­ma­ry and beat her Republican oppo­nent by 36 per­cent­age points. She has no inter­est in run­ning for Senate, she said. 

In 2015, when a group of activists start­ed orga­niz­ing in oppo­si­tion to Israel’s mil­i­tary deten­tion of Palestinian chil­dren, McCollum’s office was one of the first places they vis­it­ed on Capitol Hill. Palestinian human rights is an out­lier issue on Capitol Hill — “You don’t even have access to a lot of offices; they don’t want to deal with Palestinian orga­ni­za­tions,” said Parker, whose group briefed McCollum’s team on the issue. “Those bar­ri­ers don’t exist with Betty.”

They showed McCollum’s team a 2013 UNICEF report that described Israeli sol­diers remov­ing Palestinian kids from their homes in the mid­dle of the night, blind­fold­ing them and tak­ing them to an inter­ro­ga­tion cen­ter. The kids were beat­en, deprived of sleep and forced to sign con­fes­sions in a lan­guage they did not under­stand, with­out a lawyer present, the report said. 

“It’s like, ‘Wait a sec­ond. We’re giv­ing mon­ey, the U.S. gov­ern­ment, to UNICEF, to do this report — and we’re giv­ing mon­ey to the Israeli gov­ern­ment to do the things that the report is about,’” Harper, McCollum’s chief of staff, said. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

The U.S. cur­rent­ly gives Israel $3.8 bil­lion a year in mil­i­tary aid. Since World War II, it has received more U.S. for­eign assis­tance than any oth­er coun­try, accord­ing to the Congressional Research Service. Most coun­tries that receive U.S. assis­tance are sub­ject to exten­sive restric­tions on how the aid is used. But for Israel, much of the mon­ey goes direct­ly into its Ministry of Defense, with lit­tle American over­sight, Harper said.

In 2017, McCollum intro­duced a bill to block U.S. aid to Israel from being used to “sup­port the mil­i­tary deten­tion, inter­ro­ga­tion, abuse, or ill-treat­ment of Palestinian chil­dren in vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al human­i­tar­i­an law.” She rein­tro­duced the bill in April, this time with lan­guage that would amend the so-called Leahy law, which pro­hibits the U.S. from pro­vid­ing mil­i­tary assis­tance to for­eign gov­ern­ments that com­mit “a gross vio­la­tion of human rights.” The cur­rent bill would also set aside mon­ey to fund non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions that pro­vide phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tion­al treat­ment for Palestinian chil­dren who have been detained by the Israeli military. 

Last March, the Minnesota del­e­ga­tion of American Muslims for Palestine trav­eled to Washington to meet with McCollum and talk about her bill. At the end of the meet­ing, McCollum tweet­ed out a pic­ture of her pos­ing with the group. The con­gress­woman didn’t think much of it — she tweets pic­tures of groups she meets with all the time. But Palestinian activists are used to being ignored by their elect­ed offi­cials, AMP chap­ter lead Mariam El-Khatib said. When El-Khatib saw the tweet, she thought, “Wow, she doesn’t mind being asso­ci­at­ed with AMP or Palestinians doing this kind of work.” 

The bill has 21 co-spon­sors, all Democrats. Two addi­tion­al Democrats with­drew their names as co-spon­sors. When Rep. Debbie Dingell (D‑Mich.) pulled her name, she tweet­ed that her “heart has always been with the chil­dren of Palestine” and that she was push­ing lead­er­ship “hard” for a vote on a “res­o­lu­tion sup­port­ing a two-state solu­tion.” 

McCollum pushed back: “Rep. Dingell removed her name from HR 2407, call­ing it ‘coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to a peace­ful, two-state solu­tion,’” McCollum tweet­ed. “Does ongo­ing U.S. fund­ing for Israeli mil­i­tary deten­tion and abuse of Palestinian chil­dren pro­mote peace or human rights violations?”

McCollum esti­mates that if all of the mem­bers who told her in pri­vate they liked the bill were will­ing to sup­port it pub­licly, she’d have anoth­er 20 co-spon­sors. But she also knows the bill has almost no chance of mak­ing it out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, head­ed by the staunch­ly pro-Israel Rep. Eliot Engel (D‑N.Y.) — much less becom­ing law. Engel and Dingell did not respond to requests for comment. 

“It’s the obvi­ous bill that still won’t get passed,” said Jaylani Hussein, head of the Minnesota chap­ter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. 

Last year, McCollum accept­ed an award from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. During her accep­tance speech, she described Israel’s nation-state law — which reserves the right to self-deter­mi­na­tion in Israel for Jewish peo­ple — as a sys­tem of apartheid. For a sit­ting mem­ber of Congress to use the word “apartheid” in ref­er­ence to Israel is rad­i­cal — almost incon­ceiv­able. But her com­ments attract­ed almost no nation­al attention. 

With the excep­tion of fringe actors, such as Zionist Organization of American President Mort Klein, most of the peo­ple from the pro-Israel com­mu­ni­ty who weighed in on her speech offered mea­sured crit­i­cism. Steve Hunegs, of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, expressed dis­ap­point­ment with her word choice and her deci­sion to attend the event, but he also empha­sized her past sup­port for a two-state solu­tion. He didn’t accuse her of anti-Semitism. 

McCollum thinks the con­ver­sa­tion about Israel is shift­ing among her col­leagues. The lead­er­ship of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has vowed to annex parts of the West Bank — has Democrats con­cerned that prospects for a two-state solu­tion are disappearing.

Without a two-state solu­tion, “do we have apartheid in Israel?” McCollum asked. “Do we have some­thing sim­i­lar to Jim Crow laws, which we had a strug­gle with in this coun­try and we’re still fac­ing the reper­cus­sions that are with race rela­tions? Do we not say anything?”

The con­ver­sa­tion is slow­ly shift­ing, but it’s not hard to imag­ine what would have hap­pened if Omar, the con­gress­woman who rep­re­sents the dis­trict across the riv­er from McCollum’s, had used the word “apartheid” in ref­er­ence to Israel. Like McCollum, Omar has spo­ken out against the influ­ence of AIPAC and crit­i­cized the right-wing gov­ern­ment in Israel. But, unlike the more senior law­mak­er, Omar’s crit­ics usu­al­ly assume the worst inter­pre­ta­tion of her words.

In the week imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing Omar’s “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby” tweet — an obser­va­tion that mem­bers of Congress are will­ing to infringe on Americans’ right to crit­i­cize Israel because of mon­ey direct­ed their way by pro-Israel lob­by­ists — Omar was round­ly accused of traf­fick­ing in anti-Semitic tropes about the influ­ence of wealthy Jews. Her name was men­tioned in 21 Fox News shows, 51 CNN shows and five MSNBC shows, The Intercept report­ed. Her name also appeared in near­ly 500 news­pa­per arti­cles, accord­ing to a Lexis Nexis search. 

Omar apol­o­gized after the “Benjamins” tweet and said she was grate­ful for col­leagues and allies who edu­cat­ed her on the “painful his­to­ry of anti-Semitic tropes.” Later that month, she spoke at a pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy town hall about her fear that her legit­i­mate crit­i­cisms of Israel will be mis­con­strued as anti-Semitism because she is Muslim. She asked why she is allowed to crit­i­cize the influ­ence of the National Rifle Association and Big Pharma but not the influ­ence of the pro-Israel lob­by. But peo­ple paid atten­tion to only one line in her remarks: “I want to talk about the polit­i­cal influ­ence in this coun­try that says it is OK for peo­ple to push for alle­giance to a for­eign country.”

Omar was talk­ing about an effec­tive polit­i­cal lob­by­ing oper­a­tion — one that includes plen­ty of evan­gel­i­cal Christians and is opposed by lots of American Jews. But Omar’s crit­ics, includ­ing some lib­er­als, insist­ed she was ques­tion­ing the loy­al­ty of American Jews. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait pro­claimed she no longer deserved “the pre­sump­tion of good faith,” and Engel accused her of “invok­ing a vile anti-Semitic slur.” Within days, the House passed a res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing all forms of anti-Semitism, list­ing “accu­sa­tions of dual loy­al­ty” along­side the neo-Nazi ral­ly in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the mas­sacre at a syn­a­gogue in Pittsburgh. 

McCollum’s staff say that the rea­son she doesn’t evoke the same reac­tions as Omar is because she is care­ful with her words and has spent years cul­ti­vat­ing close rela­tion­ships in Congress, includ­ing with lead­er­ship and mem­bers on the oth­er side of the polit­i­cal spec­trum. McCollum works “excru­ci­at­ing­ly” hard to make sure that what she says about Israel is “based on evi­dence” and is backed on reports, Harper said. She goes out of her way to make clear that she is not attack­ing Jews or Israelis, but the poli­cies of a gov­ern­ment, Harper continued. 

I asked more than a dozen pol­i­cy advo­cates and Capitol Hill staffers who work on Israeli-Palestinian issues about the dis­parate treat­ment between McCollum and Omar. All of them agreed that McCollum is care­ful and that she ben­e­fits from close rela­tion­ships with her col­leagues. But racism and Islamophobia are also part of the rea­son why Omar faces vit­ri­olic back­lash every time she weighs in on Israel while McCollum has gone rel­a­tive­ly unno­ticed, almost all of the advo­cates and Capitol Hill staffers said. 

“Undoubtedly, Rep. McCollum is one of the lead­ing human rights cham­pi­ons on Palestinian human rights on the Hill, con­sis­tent­ly for years, with­out fail,” said Beth Miller, the gov­ern­ment affairs man­ag­er at Jewish Voice for Peace. “The fact that she has nev­er been attacked in the way that Reps. Tlaib and Omar have been speaks to the racism and Islamophobia that is very present in this conversation.”

Even if Omar used the same lan­guage that McCollum has in crit­i­ciz­ing Israel, she would still be maligned as an anti-Semite, Munayyer argued. “You can try to be as care­ful as you want with your lan­guage, obvi­ous­ly it’s impor­tant that every­one should be care­ful with their lan­guage on this issue,” he said, “but when no mat­ter what you say, you’re being attacked because of who you are. It’s not about what you’re say­ing, it’s about you hav­ing a voice on this issue.”

From the out­side, McCollum and Omar seem like the per­fect duo to bring real change to the U.S. con­ver­sa­tion around Israel: a vet­er­an law­mak­er who has good­will among her col­leagues and a fiery new­com­er who isn’t afraid of rais­ing hell. 

“People like Reps. Omar and Tlaib — and, to a cer­tain degree, Bernie Sanders — are bring­ing much-need­ed atten­tion to the occu­pa­tion in ways that we’ve nev­er seen before in Congress. But you also need work­hors­es like Rep. McCollum to qui­et­ly build con­sen­sus around leg­is­la­tion,” a senior Democratic Hill staffer said. “As in any move­ment, the two roles are com­ple­men­tary. You can’t make real change with­out both an inside and an out­side strategy.”

Omar, who, through a spokesper­son, declined an inter­view, is a co-spon­sor of McCollum’s bill — but most of the time, the two mem­bers do their own thing. 

“Ilhan is on the oth­er side of the Mississippi River, and we talk some­times in the break room in between votes,” McCollum said, adding that the same was true with Omar’s pre­de­ces­sors. But, at times, McCollum has seemed vis­i­bly annoyed with Omar and the con­tro­ver­sies that sur­round her. 

In March, McCollum put out a rare state­ment on her Minnesota col­league: “Rep. Omar has the right to speak freely, and she also must take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the effect her words have on her col­leagues, her con­stituents, and the poli­cies Democrats seek to advance,” McCollum said. “Democrats have an impor­tant agen­da to advance and for any Member of Congress to be suc­cess­ful it takes the sup­port of at least 217 col­leagues to pass a bill. No one does this job alone.”

McCollum’s chief of staff put it more blunt­ly, “My own take on it is that she real­ly derailed a lot of our work,” Harper said. 

But as any­one who has tried to talk, write or argue about Israel and the Palestinians knows, there’s no way to do it that will please everyone. 

“Given how detached the D.C. debate on Israel-Palestine is from the actu­al real­i­ty of what goes on there, there may be no way we move this debate clos­er to real­i­ty in a way that avoids ten­sion entire­ly,” said Matt Duss, a for­eign pol­i­cy advis­er to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.). “We just have to do our best to be as hon­est and sen­si­tive and con­struc­tive as we can, but it’s a debate we need to have.”

One of the things which kept the Jamaica Labor Party out of elec­tive office after Edward Seaga lost to Michael Manley in 1988 for an unprece­dent­ed ¹⁸¹⁄₂ years, many Jamaicans will tell you, is arro­gance.
Arrogance on the part of the elites inside the par­ty who get their tail feath­ers up their own ass­es as soon as they taste polit­i­cal pow­er.
A sense of enti­tle­ment that ulti­mate­ly alien­ates the aver­age strug­gling Jamaican from a par­ty they see as anti­thet­i­cal to their own inter­est.
The PNP a far less effec­tive par­ty at good gov­er­nance, nev­er­the­less has been far more effec­tive at find­ing com­mon cause with the man on the street.
The irony of ironies is that the par­ty of (Bustamante, the tra­di­tion­al work­ing guy), could effec­tive­ly be pro­pa­gan­dized and viewed as the par­ty of uptown elites.

For bet­ter or for worse, the peo­ple vot­ed out the JLP and gave Bruce Golding a very slim major­i­ty in September of 2007. Before he could fin­ish the first term, Bruce Golding was forced to step aside as he was embroiled in the imbroglio of the Mannat Phelps and Phillips affair in which he alleged it was the par­ty, not he which paid the afore­named American law firm to lob­by the American Government not to demand the extra­di­tion of transna­tion­al, now con­vict­ed and incar­cer­at­ed crim­i­nal Christopher (Duddus)Coke.
Golding made way for Andrew Holness, a young man whom many saw as a new direc­tion for the par­ty, but the dam­age was done. Holness sought his own man­date, but he was round­ly reject­ed at the polls, set­ting up anoth­er PNP admin­is­tra­tion, this time under the lead­er­ship of the hap­less Portia Simpson Miller.
Jamaica was not nec­es­sar­i­ly a PNP coun­try, as the com­rades would like to believe or have you believe, but the major­i­ty of the Jamaican peo­ple were not hap­py with the deci­sions the JLP was mak­ing. Neither were they enam­ored with the elit­ist atti­tude of the par­ty’s top-tiered functionaries.

But Holness was giv­en a new man­date, after he demon­strat­ed to the Jamaican peo­ple that he could hum­ble him­self and show that he cared about their needs.
On inau­gu­ra­tion day Thursday, March 3^rd. 2016 Andrew Holness was sworn in at Kings House for a sec­ond time as Prime Minister. In his inau­gur­al address on the sub­ject of cor­rup­tion Holness said the fol­low­ing;

With this man­date: There is no major­i­ty for arro­gance. There is no space for self­ish­ness. There is no place for pet­ti­ness. There is no room for com­pla­cen­cy and, There is no mar­gin for error. I am under no illu­sion as to the mean­ing of this man­date. We have not won a prize. Instead, peo­ple are giv­ing us a test.

But it seems that despite the many suc­cess­es of the new Administration, there are some with­in the par­ty whose fin­gers con­tin­ue to have crazy glue attached.
And to the hyper-par­ti­sans, I don’t give a damn about your sud­den feal­ty to the idea of [inno­cent until proven guilty]. Save it.
The lat­est arrests of Ruel Reid and oth­ers may not end in con­vic­tions, after all, Jamaica’s upper Saint Andrew elites do not go to prison, worse yet if they have polit­i­cal con­nec­tions.
And so the bar­rage of unfor­tu­nate crit­i­cisms have start­ed to pour out of the JLP and its min­ions. Delroy Chuck, whose daugh­ter is rep­re­sent­ing Reid we are reli­ably informed, blast­ed the secu­ri­ty forces for doing what?
Doing their jobs!
The shame­less Chuck is one of the old crus­taceans of Jamaican pol­i­tics. One who still leech­es off the Jamaican tax­pay­ers. In a shock­ing dis­play of what may amount to tam­per­ing, Delroy Chuck used his posi­tion as Minister of Justice to demean and berate the secu­ri­ty forces for arrest­ing his cronies, even though he admit­ted he did not know what evi­dence the secu­ri­ty forces had.
Even if we were to set that aside, what right does a min­is­ter of gov­ern­ment have berat­ing the secu­ri­ty forces for doing their job?
Worse yet, his daughter,(an attor­ney) is rep­re­sent­ing one of the arrest­ed per­sons. While Delroy Chuck is rep­re­sent­ing the very same gov­ern­ment under whose lead­er­ship the secu­ri­ty forces fall.
I was stunned at the broad­side and we made it known in a not too intel­lec­tu­al arti­cle, after which Chuck backed away from his state­ments, but did not apol­o­gize.
But Chuck did not back away because he saw any­thing wrong with his under­min­ing the inves­ti­ga­tions with his com­ments, he backed away because there was pushback.

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They are not quit­ting, they fun­da­men­tal­ly believe that politi­cians and their cronies are above the nation’s laws. Young Jamaica; the youth arm of the JLP said the raids appeared staged…No one should pay atten­tion to polit­i­cal par­ty sur­ro­gates, and farm teams in my esti­ma­tion, so I won’t be set­ting prece­dent here.
However, Hugh Wildman; Attorney rep­re­sent­ing Fritz Pinnock blast­ed the actions of the secu­ri­ty forces; Siad Wildman “The Gestapo-like oper­a­tion yes­ter­day was sole­ly for embar­rass­ing per­sons and boost­ing the wan­ing polit­i­cal for­tunes of some.
No dude, your clients embar­rassed them­selves when they allowed them­selves to be caught up in these alle­ga­tions. Now if ever I was arrest­ed for some­thing I would want my lawyer to go to the mat for me, so I’m going to be lenient with Wildman, despite his unfor­tu­nate use of words.
“The Gestapo-like oper­a­tion yes­ter­day was sole­ly for embar­rass­ing per­sons and boost­ing the wan­ing polit­i­cal for­tunes of some.”
Wildman seemed to bounce from defense lawyer to polit­i­cal oper­a­tive, need­less to say, he needs to acquaint him­self with exact­ly what Hitler’s Gestapo was. He may be more judi­cious with the use of that term after he does so.
The con­tin­ued JLP talk­ing point that the accused men and one woman could have been asked to come in to be charged miss­es the fact that there is deter­rence in the perp-walk. Police have no oblig­a­tion to call any­one to come in, arrest­ing crim­i­nal sus­pects is the law.
What the JLP and its mouth­pieces are ask­ing for is spe­cial treat­ment for Reid, Pinnock, and the Parish Councillor.

The idea that any mem­ber of the Jamaican Legislative House, much less a min­is­ter of gov­ern­ment, or the legal pro­fes­sion would demean the mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces by using terms like Gestapo to attack them for doing their duties, demon­strates a woe­ful mis­un­der­stand­ing of what the Gestapo was and a crass attempt to over­dra­ma­tize at the expense of the hard-work­ing mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces.
These igno­rant state­ments should be direct­ed at the thieves and fraud­sters who were placed in hand­cuffs because of their alleged sticky fin­gers.
(I hope they were placed in hand­cuffs)
The fact that any mem­ber of the JLP would lam­bast the secu­ri­ty forces for doing their sworn duties instead of chastis­ing their cohorts for engag­ing in crim­i­nal­i­ty, demon­strates to the nation the lev­el of cor­rup­tion and immoral­i­ty which per­vades this admin­is­tra­tion.
Jamaicans always believed that this par­ty hat­ed the police, these dumb morons are mak­ing it crys­tal clear.
I have no fear of being labeled a com­rade. The com­rades label me Laborite when I step on their corn, Oh well.….

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Dirty Delroy Chuck has once again opened his mouth and fur­ther embar­rassed the par­ty and gov­ern­ment of which he is a part, by stick­ing his nose where it does not belong.
Again, Chuck who is part of the yel­low-skinned uptown bour­geoise has con­vinced him­self that there ought to be two sets of rules, one for his kind and anoth­er for every­one else.
In his own words, and clear­ly in an inci­dent that no min­is­ter of Government ought to be crit­i­ciz­ing law-enforce­ment, Chuck decid­ed to inject him­self into the Ruel Reid arrest, on the sole basis that he believes peo­ple like him­self, Ried and Fritz Pinnock, should get spe­cial privileges.

Chuck; The DPP seems to have had no addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al or evi­dence, and what seems so unfor­tu­nate is that the arrests took place (in a man­ner that) looks like Nicodemus in the night.”

Why would a Minister of Government pub­licly crit­i­cize the DPP in a sit­u­a­tion where he admit­ted that he does not have the facts?

Chuck; speak­ing to the arrests of his cohorts; “I don’t get the impres­sion that these per­sons are actu­al­ly run­ning away. They have made them­selves avail­able on all occa­sions, so in fact, if an arrest should have been made, they could eas­i­ly have been asked to come in so that they could be charged.”

Chuck; On bail; If charges were to be laid against the per­son now arrest­ed as a result of the probe: “I sus­pect they could eas­i­ly have been grant­ed their own bail, or they could be asked to sur­ren­der their trav­el doc­u­ments, as the case may be.”

Chuck is demand­ing spe­cial treat­ments for his cohorts whom he clear­ly believes should not be sub­ject to the embar­rass­ment of arrest as reg­u­lar folks.

Chuck; On the offi­cers involved in the raid; “ the cops are sala­cious, in that you put so many peo­ple at these per­sons’ gates”.
“based on the lit­tle I’ve heard, it’s a fur­ther search for more mate­r­i­al, so it seems like the author­i­ties are still not sure what they are look­ing for?”

What Delroy Chuck is say­ing, is that regard­less of the fact that Ruel Reid, and Fritz Pinnock may have com­mit­ted crimes against the Jamaican peo­ple, they should be spared the humil­i­a­tion of a pub­lic arrest.
That is exact­ly what that fuck­ing retard is say­ing. The fact is that pub­lic sham­ing is exact­ly the right thing to do, it is a part of the deter­rent effect which ought to work at pre­vent­ing poten­tial offenders.

Chuck; Come to a con­clu­sion. If you don’t have the mate­r­i­al, report that there’s not enough mate­r­i­al to charge. But if you go and you charge, be care­ful that you (don’t) charge on very lim­it­ed evi­dence, with the end result that the cas­es might not go very far, and that would under­mine the sort of con­fi­dence that you would have in the insti­tu­tion if you pro­ceed to charge on very lim­it­ed evi­dence and the cas­es turn out to be weak or dis­missed by the court.”

Even though he has no idea what the evi­dence is, Delroy chuck the Minister of Justice, is work­ing assid­u­ous­ly to work the ref­er­ees, (judges) in a case in which he does not know the evi­dence.
This is an unscrupu­lous and under­hand­ed method of under­min­ing the case against his friends.

Chuck; admit­ted that he does not know of the evi­dence that is involved in the probe, but stressed that at the end of the day, “we must be very pro­fes­sion­al in what we do”. He expressed the hope that the man­ner in which the law enforce­ment agen­cies car­ry out their oper­a­tions can be accept­ed as being professional.

So even though he has zero facts on the case, and even though there has been zero alle­ga­tion of impro­pri­ety or unpro­fes­sion­al behav­ior on the part of law-enforce­ment, this filthy Minister was pre­pared to begin the work of under­min­ing the case which has not even gone to court.
The Prime Minister has an oppor­tu­ni­ty, in the inter­est of the par­ty and coun­try, to ask Delroy Chuck to step aside.
It is enti­tled, uptown mulat­toes like Delroy Chuck who are left­overs from our colo­nial past that we must eschew.
If Delroy Chuck expects his friends to avoid arrest and embar­rass­ment he should encour­age them to obey the laws.
Not once has he as a par­a­site on the pub­lic pay­roll, spo­ken to the crimes alleged against his cronies. That is all we need to know about this asshole.

Since this arti­cle was first pub­lished we have been reli­ably informed that Delroy Chuck has with­drawn his com­ments.
But that is not enough, he should hand his reg­is­tra­tion to the prime min­is­ter. He is a dis­grace.
Furthermore, we are now learn­ing that Chuck’s daugh­ter who is a lawyer, is one of the attor­neys who will be rep­re­sent­ing Ruel Reid.
This makes Chuck’s state­ments even more insid­i­ous and trans­par­ent.
Delroy Chuck should resign now !!!!

This arti­cle has been updated.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Speaking to the arrests of for­mer Education Minister, Ruel Reid, Caribbean Maritime University (CMU) President, Fritz Pinnock, and a JLP Parish Councillor in St. Ann, in what appeared to be coör­di­nat­ed law-enforce­ment raids, the leader of the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion made the fol­low­ing state­ments.
In a release from Peter Phillips, the PNP said it regards the arrest of for­mer Education Minister Ruel Reid and CMU President Fritz Pinnock as a begin­ning, but an impor­tant step in Jamaica’s efforts to clean up cor­rup­tion and cre­ate an envi­ron­ment of good gov­er­nance and pro­bity in pub­lic affairs.
The release said that it was too ear­ly to make a detailed state­ment but it is close­ly mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion and await­ing fur­ther announce­ments from the Financial Investigations Divisions and the Major Organised Crime Agency.
“The par­ty will make a ful­some state­ment on the devel­op­ment when war­rant­ed,” said the PNP as it argued that oth­er inves­tiga­tive reports on Petrojam and NESoL “were long over­due”.
“The PNP feels it is impor­tant that the sit­u­a­tion, which per­sist­ed in some of these agen­cies and orga­ni­za­tions for well over a year, be brought to an end and the Jamaican peo­ple be pro­vid­ed with the rel­e­vant information.”

The state­ment from the Opposition leader and the oppo­si­tion PNP sounds rather rea­son­able to an onlook­er who has no his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge of Jamaican pol­i­tics.
To informed bystanders and oth­er stake­hold­ers how­ev­er, this state­ment by the oppo­si­tion leader and the PNP in gen­er­al, stinks of rank hypocrisy.
Peter Phillips, KD Knight, Omar Davies, AJ Nicholson, and oth­ers have active­ly been in pol­i­tics as long as I have been alive, maybe longer.
In the time ensu­ing, both in Government and in oppo­si­tion, Peter Phillips and the PNP have had ample time to cham­pi­on the cause of hon­esty, decen­cy, deco­rum, and the removal of cor­rup­tion from the Jamaican polit­i­cal system.

Never once has Phillips or his par­ty seen fit to address the scan­dals, gross theft, and the egre­gious cor­rupt prac­tices that the PNP has engaged in, which has become one of the things for which the PNP is known.
In fact, on one occa­sion when jour­nal­ists con­front­ed the last PNP Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, about one of the scan­dals, (the Trafigura scan­dal to be exact), she scam­pered away while telling jour­nal­ists dis­mis­sive­ly, to go ask the PNP. (Yes the same PNP of which she was the head).
It is with that dis­dain and con­tempt that the PNP holds the gen­er­al pub­lic, a pub­lic it pan­ders and lies to, when it’s des­per­ate for polit­i­cal pow­er.
Neither the PNP nor its prin­ci­pal offi­cers feel that they owe the Jamaican peo­ple an expla­na­tion for the bil­lions of dol­lars they siphon off, with which they pad their own pock­ets.
From as far back as the Iran sug­ar deal and even much far­ther back, “Shell Waiver Scandal” , Trafigura, and Outameani. Scandals in which PNP mem­bers col­lect­ed monies to the tune of tens of mil­lions of US$ and fail to turn the monies over to the par­ty, the Cuban light bulb scan­dal and the end­less list of graft, theft, and cor­rup­tion for which the par­ty has become infa­mous,. Forgive me a moment if this self-right­eous state­ment from the PNP makes me want to puke.

My research was min­i­mal, but some friends found this.

Unfortunately for the rul­ing JLP, all have been mem­bers of that par­ty.
Neville Cleveland Lewis and J A G Smith, both went to prison.
The PNP should take no com­fort from this, nei­ther should it har­vest any glee from it. The PNP may seek to mar­ket this as some kind of indi­ca­tion of its hon­esty, rather it should be seen that the JLP has been far less tol­er­ant of cor­rup­tion with­in its ranks, even though cor­rup­tion may be found in both polit­i­cal parties.

The fact of the mat­ter is that there have been expo­nen­tial­ly more scan­dals attrib­uted to the PNP than has been attrib­uted to the JLP.
The PNP has been far more aggres­sive with its pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns because of its entrenched sur­ro­gates with­in the local media enti­ties.
Insofar as the ele­vat­ed lev­els of cor­rup­tion with­in PNP admin­is­tra­tions have been over the JLP are con­cerned, that may be attrib­uted to the sim­ple fact that the PNP has held pow­er for longer peri­ods of time.

The mes­sage com­ing out of Peter Phillips s mouth, is exact­ly what our coun­try needs, rig­or­ous over­sight, but beyond that, strength­en­ing and restruc­tur­ing the guard rail around pub­lic resources is crit­i­cal.
Kleptomaniacs with­in both polit­i­cal par­ties should look at pub­lic ser­vice as an hon­or and a patri­ot­ic duty, not an oppor­tu­ni­ty to get rich overnight.
When we get to a place where there are suf­fi­cient guard rails in place on the one hand, and aggres­sive crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions on the oth­er, the thieves will seek employ­ment else­where.
Then maybe we may have in Gordon house peo­ple of char­ac­ter who will leg­is­late rather than bang on desks and shout moron­ic com­ments at each oth­er.
In the mean­time, nei­ther the PNP nor Peter Phillips has the moral char­ac­ter or cred­i­bil­i­ty to speak to cor­rup­tion in Jamaica.

This arti­cle has been updat­ed since it was first published.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

The mean­ing of the word “stu­pid” accord­ing to one def­i­n­i­tion, is ” hav­ing or show­ing a great [lack] of intel­li­gence or com­mon sense”.
But there is anoth­er def­i­n­i­tion for “stu­pid” which may be more eas­i­ly relat­able, at least to us Jamaicans, that is “doing the very same thing over and over and expect­ing a dif­fer­ent result.“
And so may the efforts at con­fronting the endem­ic crime sit­u­a­tion in Jamaica be char­ac­ter­ized.
Over the years, I have tak­en the lib­er­ty to char­ac­ter­ize the meth­ods employed as “whack-a-mole.” Since then, that char­ac­ter­i­za­tion has been val­i­dat­ed over and over by the imple­men­ta­tion of new Zones Of Special Operations and the dec­la­ra­tion of State Of Emergencies.
Despite the clear evi­dence that even with­in the ZOSOs and SOE, there are shoot­ings, mur­ders, and oth­er seri­ous crimes, not to men­tion the migra­tion of crim­i­nals to oth­er areas where they set up shop, the pow­ers that be still con­tin­ue to employ the same strate­gies.
Realistically, the strate­gies being used can­not rep­re­sent a con­tin­uüm in the minds of the gov­ern­ing author­i­ty for sure.
As have oth­ers, the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion has argued that the con­tin­ued use of ZOSOs and SOEs is not a long-term strat­e­gy. Or, as they say, it is not a fea­si­ble crime elim­i­na­tion strategy.

None of the crit­ics, includ­ing the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion, has artic­u­lat­ed a ratio­nal rea­son why the strate­gies being employed are unsus­tain­able.
We have!
Insofar as the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion is con­cerned, I have dis­missed them from this con­ver­sa­tion on crime. The oppo­si­tion is a part of the prob­lem; there­fore, I am not [stu­pid] enough to believe they will be a part of any work­able solution.

This is not a par­ty-polit­i­cal posi­tion for me; it is a ratio­nal deci­sion based on the fact that the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion has had more than enough time to shape and direct the nation’s poli­cies, includ­ing set­ting the stage on how the nation’s secu­ri­ty would be han­dled.
Eighteen and a half (181÷2) years, to be exact, and look at the con­di­tion of our coun­try.
In the time since they have been in oppo­si­tion, noth­ing has changed in terms of their aware­ness; their only pre­oc­cu­pa­tion seems to be a sin­gu­lar focus on regain­ing state pow­er.
On the oth­er hand, the gov­ern­ment should take no com­fort in the fore­gone; it has been over three years since this admin­is­tra­tion took office.
In that time, not only has crime con­tin­ued to increase unabat­ed, but clear­ly, the admin­is­tra­tion has demon­strat­ed it has no idea how to han­dle it long term.
If the strat­e­gy is to put large groups of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel in places where crime num­bers attract the atten­tion of the gov­ern­ment… The gov­ern­ment must be aware that they will either (a) run out of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel bod­ies, (b) will work to death the already over­worked mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces, and © that the strat­e­gy will have a neg­li­gi­ble effect on the problem.

Without assign­ing motive to the gov­ern­men­t’s strat­e­gy, it does appear that (as I have said in pre­vi­ous arti­cles), the idea is to sim­ply con­tain the crime sta­tis­tics enough to hold and retain pow­er rather than a seri­ous attempt at reme­di­at­ing this exis­ten­tial issue.
The most recent iter­a­tion of this regres­sive strat­e­gy is a new cur­few, just insti­tut­ed (North): Along Deanery Drive from the inter­sec­tion with Fourth Avenue to Mountain View Avenue; (East): Along Mountain View Avenue from the inter­sec­tion with Deanery Drive to Langston Road; (South): Along Langston Road from the inter­sec­tion with Mountain View Avenue to Fourth Avenue; (West): Along Fourth Avenue from the inter­sec­tion with Langston Road to Deanery Drive.
Without con­tem­plat­ing the nuanced and com­plex rea­sons why these announced strate­gies will do noth­ing to alle­vi­ate the prob­lem, it is at least clear to even the sim­plest among us that all the vio­lence prac­ti­tion­ers have to do is step out­side these lines of demar­ca­tion.
That is exact­ly why the ZOSOs and SOEs have become a laugh­ing stock.

Strategies aimed at effec­tive­ly deal­ing with seri­ous crimes can­not be sup­pres­sant strate­gies. Anything sup­pressed will even­tu­al­ly break free giv­en time. And so it is the def­i­n­i­tion of stu­pid­i­ty that this admin­is­tra­tion has stub­born­ly con­tin­ued on this cha­rade while the num­ber of mur­dered Jamaicans con­tin­ues to soar.
If the gov­ern­ment is seri­ous about deal­ing deci­sive­ly with this mon­ster, the gov­ern­ment must seek help from oth­er coun­tries (not England).
I under­stand the Administration has no respect for the police. I get that the police have hard­ly acquit­ted them­selves in a man­ner deserv­ing of admi­ra­tion.
Even so, that does not pre­clude the gov­ern­ment from ask­ing for help. Clearly, the admin­is­tra­tion can­not be will­ing to bet our coun­try’s future sov­er­eign­ty and sol­ven­cy on the altar of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy as the oppo­si­tion par­ty has.
The non­sen­si­cal rebrand­ing of the JCF as “a force for good” flies in the face of every good offi­cer who ever served in that agency.
It is an affront by this admin­is­tra­tion to cur­ry favor with vot­ers by sub­tly insin­u­at­ing that the JCF of yes­ter­year “was a force for evil.“
Many mem­bers, past and present, may have missed that slight I have not.
And so I am call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to set aside its pet­ty grudge against prop­er polic­ing.
Allow the police to pur­sue the gang­sters wher­ev­er and when­ev­er. The gov­ern­ment must extri­cate itself from its gar­ri­son con­nec­tions and put the inter­est of the nation above its own long-term polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions.
So too, must the oppo­si­tion par­ty.
No life is dis­pos­able or expend­able. The lives of ordi­nary Jamaicans should not become logs in the fur­nace of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy.
Stop play­ing around and fix this prob­lem now.

The let­ter, signed by 90 for­mer offi­cials, stressed the impor­tance of pro­tect­ing the whistleblower’s iden­ti­ty, The Wall Street Journal reported.

By Sanjana Karanth

Ninety for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials penned an open let­ter Sunday to the pub­lic defend­ing the whistle­blow­er in the Trump-Ukraine scan­dal, stress­ing the impor­tance of pro­tect­ing the per­son and their iden­ti­ty.
The let­ter is signed by ex-nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials who served under both Democratic and Republican pres­i­dents, includ­ing President Donald Trump him­self, The Wall Street Journal first report­ed. The whistle­blow­er remains anony­mous, though it’s been revealed that the per­son works in the U.S. government’s intel­li­gence community.

Dustin Volz✔@dnvolz

New: 90 for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials who served under Dem and GOP pres­i­dents, includ­ing Trump, pub­lish open let­ter say­ing whistle­blow­er fol­lowed the law and deserves pro­tec­tion + anonymi­ty.

“A respon­si­ble whistle­blow­er makes all Americans safer.”

The let­ter comes as Trump and his allies denounce the whistleblower’s com­plaint regard­ing the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. The com­plaint, which cites sev­er­al unnamed senior White House offi­cials, accus­es the pres­i­dent of pres­sur­ing Zelensky to inves­ti­gate 2020 elec­tion rival Joe Biden, whose son Hunter pre­vi­ous­ly had busi­ness deal­ings in Ukraine. The com­plaint led the House to launch a for­mal impeach­ment inquiry into Trump.

A sum­ma­ry of the call released by the White House large­ly cor­rob­o­rates the whistleblower’s alle­ga­tions. Trump, who has repeat­ed­ly described the call as “per­fect,” lat­er said on cam­era that both Ukraine and China should inves­ti­gate Biden for unsub­stan­ti­at­ed claims of corruption. 

Trump has pushed a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry sug­gest­ing the rules for whistle­blow­ers used to require first­hand infor­ma­tion and changed before the Ukraine whistle­blow­er came for­ward. But experts, includ­ing the intel­li­gence community’s inspec­tor gen­er­al who reviewed the com­plaint, said whistle­blow­ers have always been allowed to report on sec­ond­hand information.

The pres­i­dent has also false­ly accused the whistle­blow­er of “trea­son” because of the com­plaint, mak­ing veiled threats that the whistle­blow­er should be “dealt with” in vio­lent ways. Trump has repeat­ed­ly said he “deserved” to meet the whistle­blow­er and find out the person’s iden­ti­ty.
The for­mer offi­cials who penned the let­ter said they “applaud the whistleblower.”

“As such, he or she has by law the right ― and indeed the respon­si­bil­i­ty ― to make known, through appro­pri­ate chan­nels, indi­ca­tions of seri­ous wrong­do­ing,” they wrote. “That is pre­cise­ly what this whistle­blow­er did; and we applaud the whistle­blow­er not only for liv­ing up to that respon­si­bil­i­ty but also for using pre­cise­ly the chan­nels made avail­able by fed­er­al law for rais­ing such concerns.”

They said a whistle­blow­er should be “pro­tect­ed from cer­tain egre­gious forms of retal­i­a­tion.” “Whatever one’s view of the mat­ters dis­cussed in the whistleblower’s com­plaint, all Americans should be unit­ed in demand­ing that all branch­es of our gov­ern­ment and all out­lets of our media pro­tect this whistle­blow­er and his or her iden­ti­ty,” they wrote.

Federal law says Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson can­not dis­close the whistleblower’s iden­ti­ty with­out the person’s con­sent, unless it is “unavoid­able dur­ing the course of the inves­ti­ga­tion.” The law also says the whistle­blow­er should not face any “action con­sti­tut­ing a reprisal, or threat of reprisal” unless the whistle­blow­er fal­si­fied the report.

Members of Congress, includ­ing Sen. Chuck Grassley (R‑Iowa), have been try­ing to keep the whistleblower’s iden­ti­ty anony­mous as law­mak­ers in the House Intelligence Committee work with the whistleblower’s attor­neys to set up a meet­ing. The whistleblower’s lead attor­ney, Andrew Bakaj, wrote in a Sept. 29 let­ter that the whistleblower’s lawyers have “seri­ous con­cerns” about their client’s safety.

Earlier Sunday, Bakaj and fel­low attor­ney Mark Zaid con­firmed that they are rep­re­sent­ing a sec­ond whistle­blow­er from the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty who they say has first­hand knowl­edge of Trump’s mis­con­duct cit­ed in the orig­i­nal whistleblower’s com­plaint. Several for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials who were named in the let­ter post­ed on Twitter about their deci­sion to sign it. 

Joshua A. Geltzer@jgeltzer

“All Americans should be unit­ed in demand­ing that all
branch­es of our gov­ern­ment & all out­lets of our media pro­tect this whistle­blow­er & his or her iden­ti­ty.“

90 for­mer senior nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials sign new open let­ter to the American peo­ple: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/Whistleblower%20Letter.pdf?mod=article_inline …

Carl Woog@CarlWoog

Whistleblowers have every right to secure­ly dis­cuss their con­cerns with prop­er author­i­ties and be pro­tect­ed when they do so.Quote Tweet

Joshua A. Geltzer@jgeltzer · 14h“All Americans should be unit­ed in demand­ing that all branch­es of our gov­ern­ment & all out­lets of our media pro­tect this whistle­blow­er & his or her iden­ti­ty.” 90 for­mer senior nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials sign new open let­ter to the American peo­ple: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/Whistleblower%20Letter.pdf?mod=article_inline

Story orig­i­nat­ed here; https://​www​.huff​post​.com/​e​n​t​r​y​/​n​i​n​e​t​y​-​f​o​r​m​e​r​-​n​a​t​i​o​n​a​l​-​s​e​c​u​r​i​t​y​-​o​f​f​i​c​i​a​l​s​-​l​e​t​t​e​r​-​d​e​f​e​n​d​i​n​g​-​w​h​i​s​t​l​e​b​l​o​w​e​r​_​n​_​5​d​9​a​9​7​f​7​e​4​b​0​3​b​4​7​5​f​9​b​a​202

One of the many tragedies of the Trump pres­i­den­cy has been the fear with­in the main­stream media to appear fair and bal­anced in the face of Trump’s inces­sant bar­rage of attacks.
Don’t be fooled Donald Trump assumed the pres­i­den­cy know­ing he was ille­git­i­mate, he knew he had to dis­cred­it the peo­ple who would do the inves­tiga­tive work and those who would report on those inves­ti­ga­tions and that is exact­ly what he did.
Shell-shocked at being con­stant­ly berat­ed for being left-lean­ing the media went out of its way to give cre­dence and oxy­gen to Donald Trump’s cam­paign of lies .…. all in an effort to ward off the charge of being biased.
Where the media gets it wrong, is the mis­guid­ed belief that report­ing the truth should be counter-bal­anced with an equal dose of Donald Trump’s inces­sant lies ad dis­tor­tions.
Fortunately, not all in the media are blind sheep. In a rare dis­play of courage MSNBC’s after­noon anchor and for­mer Bush 43^rd aide, Nicole Wallace, fact-checked Donald Trump in real-time by cut­ting away from a live broad­cast by Trump, and informed view­ers that Trump was lying.
That is the kind of courage and char­ac­ter that is lack­ing among jour­nal­ists in the main­stream media.
If Donald Trump and his sup­port­ers are unhap­py with the report­ing of his lies and dis­tor­tions, He and his min­ions have the option of sim­ply telling the truth and desist­ing from the insid­i­ous cor­rupt prac­tices in which they are engaged. 

The unprece­dent­ed broad­sides against spe­cif­ic tar­gets with­in the FBI and the CIA, by Trump and his acolytes in the Republican Party, have been spec­tac­u­lar to watch.
Never in my life, have I seen a chief exec­u­tive and a polit­i­cal par­ty act with this degree of con­tempt for the norms and laws as they den­i­grate the struc­tures which have worked to make America the pow­er­ful nation it is.
Even more appalling, is the hypocrisy of the Republicans in both hous­es of the con­gress and their sup­port­ers who tra­di­tion­al­ly wrapped them­selves in the American Flag and tout­ed their fake Patriotism bona fides.
Specific tar­gets, like James Comey, Peter Strozk, John Brennan, Lisa Page and a host of oth­er top-tiered career pro­fes­sion­als have been attacked using the pow­er of the pres­i­den­cy and removed in a sus­tained cam­paign to hol­low out the intel­li­gence agen­cies, leav­ing the low­er rung career peo­ple ter­ri­fied to speak out, and of course plac­ing peo­ple at the top in main jus­tice and else­where, who have total feal­ty to him per­son­al­ly, not to the nation.
In the end, I believe that the Republic will with­stand this onslaught, not because of the par­ti­sans, but by the career patri­ots who love this coun­try and are will­ing to lay it all on the line for the good of their coun­try.
Some call them whistle­blow­ers, I sim­ply call them patriots.

The Republican con­gress­man resigned Monday. He pre­vi­ous­ly dis­missed the charges as “mer­it­less” and the result of a “witch hunt.”

Rep. Chris Collins (R‑N.Y.) is expect­ed to plead guilty Tuesday to felony charges relat­ed to insid­er trad­ing, two years after dis­miss­ing the alle­ga­tions as a “witch hunt.”
Collins resigned Tuesday amid reports of his guilty plea, the Associated Press report­ed.

Collins, his son Cameron, and Stephen Zarsky, the father of Cameron’s fiancée, had all ini­tial­ly plead­ed not guilty after the FBI arrest­ed them in August 2018. 

Federal court records show Collins is sched­uled to appear for a “change of plea hear­ing” at 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. Cameron and Zarsky are sched­uled to appear for sim­i­lar hear­ings Thursday.

All three face charges of secu­ri­ties fraud, wire fraud and mak­ing false state­ments. All three are expect­ed to change their pleas, though it’s unclear which exact charges they will plead guilty to. 

Collins served on the board of a small Australian biotech com­pa­ny called Innate Immunotherapeutics. He alleged­ly told his son and Zarsky about the unpub­li­cized tri­al fail­ure of a drug the com­pa­ny had devel­oped, which would lat­er cause stock prices to plum­met 92 percent.

Cameron and Zarsky both unloaded their shares before the stock tanked, there­by avoid­ing $768,000 in loss­es, accord­ing to an indict­ment. 

At the time of his arrest, Collins told reporters the charges were “mer­it­less” and that he would “mount a vig­or­ous defense in court to clear my name.”

The charges incensed President Donald Trump, who attacked then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for allow­ing the indict­ments to move for­ward, brazen­ly sug­gest­ing the Justice Department should pri­or­i­tize par­ty affil­i­a­tion over criminality.

Collins owned 37.9 mil­lion shares, worth just over $20 mil­lion, in the com­pa­ny before things went south.

The three-term con­gress­man was nar­row­ly reelect­ed in 2018 by less than one per­cent­age point. Lawmakers con­vict­ed of felonies aren’t barred from hold­ing their seats, but they aren’t allowed to vote.

Editors note: This is your Republican par­ty in which a can­di­date under Federal indict­ment can still be elect­ed in a dis­trict heav­i­ly pop­u­lat­ed with Republicans.
These are the kinds of immoral peo­ple who call them­selves Republicans. They fraud­u­lent­ly wrap them­selves in the American Flag and pre­tend to be patri­ots.
They are quick to con­demn any and every­one for not mea­sur­ing up to their hyp­o­crit­i­cal stan­dards. They preach reli­gion but are the most hate­ful of peo­ple.
Amoral, immoral, and fraud­u­lent liars.

Commencing an Impeachment inquiry in the house does not guar­an­tee a con­vic­tion in the Senate. Certainly not with a law-break­ing enabling Senate con­trolled by Republicans.
Nonetheless, com­menc­ing an impeach­ment inquiry is the cor­rect thing to do when a sit­ting pres­i­dent decides that the laws do not apply to him.
In some coun­tries, a law­less leader may be recalled, and in oth­ers, they engage in coups to remove lead­ers they believe are act­ing out­side their author­i­ty.
In the United States, the Constitution allows for impeach­ment as the means to remove a pres­i­dent who [com­mits high crimes and mis­de­monors] (sic).
Regardless of the out­come of the actions on which the US house has embarked, remov­ing a law­less, immoral can­cer­ous pres­i­den­cy is the cor­rect thing to do.
When the ques­tion is asked for pos­ter­i­ty, “what did our lead­ers do while all this was going on”?
It will for­ev­er be told, that the United States House of Representatives under Democratic lead­er­ship start­ed an impeach­ment inquiry, which was intend­ed to hold the head of the exec­u­tive branch of the gov­ern­ment accountable.

It will, for­ev­er be a stain on the US Senate under Republican lead­er­ship, that a bunch of men and women who took an oath to defend the Constitution of these United States, allowed a law­less exec­u­tive to con­tin­ue unchecked, as a result of polit­i­cal and oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions.
The Speaker of the House has a duty to pro­tect the Republic from a law­less exec­u­tive. Prudence and fideli­ty to con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties can­not be a slave, or sub­servient to poll results, or pub­lic perceptions. 

Defending the Constitution can­not be a func­tion of polls and pub­lic opin­ion.
If, as a nation, the United States is at a place in which the chief exec­u­tive can flout the laws and the peo­ple are okay with it, then the prob­lem is big­ger, much big­ger, than Donald Trump.
Regardless of the out­come of this inquiry, Donald Trump will have the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion, as did Andrew Johnson, William J. Clinton and Richard Nixon who resigned before he could be kicked out, of being impeached, or had impeach­ment inquiries com­menced against them.
It is a hall of shame in which Donald Trump belongs, he is a stain on the decen­cy of humanity. 

True to form Republican lead­er­ship in the Senate has stead­fast­ly vowed to defend a law­less Donald Trump. No oth­er sin­gle human being has done more harm to the Republic than Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell.
No sin­gle per­son­’s treach­ery will be more long-lasting.

Michael Harriot

“What do you play?”
If you are a black male on a large, pre­dom­i­nant­ly white col­lege cam­pus, you’ve like­ly answered this ques­tion when some­one — usu­al­ly a white per­son — inno­cent­ly assumed you play a sport that land­ed you at their pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ty. As a 16-year-old fresh­man at SEC foot­ball pow­er­house Auburn University, I stood 5’5” and weighed 120 pounds if I was soak­ing wet wear­ing a pair of Timberlands and you also mea­sured my high-top fade. Still, I can’t count the num­ber of times I’ve been asked that ques­tion, and I always wish I could come up with a sharp, wit­ty answer. 

One of the least-men­tioned symp­toms of the psy­chosis we call white suprema­cy is the delu­sion of mer­it. Many white peo­ple sub­lim­i­nal­ly believe that there is a sep­a­rate entrance through which black peo­ple can sneak their way onto the grand white stage sim­ply because they are black. If they ever find a black per­son stand­ing shoul­der-to-shoul­der with them, they assume the black per­son got there through affir­ma­tive action, ath­let­ic abil­i­ty or by div­ing through some “minori­ties-only” loop­hole that allows the “under­priv­i­leged” peo­ple with melanin to exist in white spaces. It’s why many white peo­ple still believe that black peo­ple get to go to col­lege for free. It’s also why white peo­ple think affir­ma­tive actions “low­er the stan­dard” so black peo­ple can be admit­ted to a col­lege or get jobs.

It’s also why Barack Obama will always be the “Black President.”
Barack Obama was bet­ter-edu­cat­ed, less scan­dalous and more suc­cess­ful than any pres­i­dent this gen­er­a­tion has seen. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama didn’t lie to get us into war. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama nev­er faced impeach­ment. He didn’t help hide a guns-for-cocaine plot like George H.W. Bush. And at the end of Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, 138 peo­ple in his admin­is­tra­tion hadn’t been con­vict­ed, indict­ed, or become tar­gets of offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tions for mis­con­duct and/​or crim­i­nal vio­la­tions, like Ronald Reagan. And because the cur­rent com­man­der in chief is a white suprema­cist, tax-evad­ing, broke-ass bitch with delu­sions of grandeur and a ball of laun­dro­mat dry­er lint for a brain, Donald Trump still can’t com­pre­hend how Obama earned a Nobel Peace Prize.
And it tears him apart.
On Monday, dur­ing a Press con­fer­ence dur­ing the U.N. General Assembly, Trump once again whined about Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace and how he hasn’t received one yet.
The Washington Post reports:

“I think I’m gonna get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things — if they gave it out fair­ly, which they don’t,” Trump said at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, respond­ing to a Pakistani jour­nal­ist who told him he would deserve the award if he could work out the decades-old dis­pute between India and Pakistan over the ter­ri­to­ry of Kashmir.
Trump offered no real evi­dence that the five-per­son Nobel com­mit­tee, which is appoint­ed by the Norwegian par­lia­ment, is actu­al­ly rigged — except that it award­ed Obama, then the pres­i­dent, the prize in 2009.

“They gave one to Obama imme­di­ate­ly after his ascent to the pres­i­den­cy, and he had no idea why he got it,” Trump said. “You know what, that was the only thing I agreed with him on.”

Goddamn, this man is thirsty.

In 2018, 18 Republicans nom­i­nat­ed Donald Trump for the pres­ti­gious hon­or because of his efforts to “end the Korean War, denu­clearize the Korean penin­su­la, and bring peace to the region.”

Also, none of that shit happened.

The Korean War isn’t offi­cial­ly over. The Korean penin­su­la still has nukes and there is no peace in the region.

Unless the Nobel Committee intro­duces a new cat­e­go­ry and Trump wins the Nobel Prize for Lying Motherfuckers, he prob­a­bly will always envy Obama’s accom­plish­ment. But Trump’s claims that the Nobel Prize is rigged is typ­i­cal of the psy­chosis that won’t allow him to admit that Obama won more elec­toral votes (both times), had a larg­er inau­gu­ra­tion audi­ence and prob­a­bly has a bigger…ummm…hand size.

Seriously, I was gonna say hand size.

Yes, hands.

Trump’s delu­sion is not atyp­i­cal. He is, after all, just a dumb white man strick­en with the men­tal ill­ness of white­ness. To be fair, being white is not a men­tal dis­or­der. However, white­ness makes one sus­cep­ti­ble to the idea that one has climbed their way to one’s posi­tions, pres­tige and perch atop the social stra­ta while the rest of us were lol­ly­gag­ging on the negro-only esca­la­tor. Because, if they admit­ted that the sys­tem was rigged in their favor, they would also have to acknowl­edge that their unwill­ing­ness to dis­man­tle the sys­tem of white suprema­cy makes them, in some small way, white suprema­cists, too.
All of them.

Just the oth­er day, dur­ing a late-night Walmart search for Hostess choco­late cup­cakes (I don’t eat that shit but, oh, the things we do for love), an elder­ly white man wear­ing a Crimson Tide t‑shirt stopped me and asked where he could find some kind of sea­son­ing. I don’t know why, but even after I told him I didn’t work there, he ram­bled into a long expla­na­tion of how he sea­soned his pork chops. I wish I could remem­ber the par­tic­u­lar herb, but all I could say was: “That’s the only sea­son­ing you use?”

In less than a minute, he revealed that his wife had taught him this sea­son­ing method and he nev­er real­ly cared for it. But after she passed away, he began eat­ing his chops that way. His voice began to crack and, I have no idea why, but this small lit­tle glimpse into his sor­row also made me tear up. For a minute and a half, under the flu­o­res­cent super­store light­ing, he was just an old man telling his sto­ry and I was just a human look­ing for shit­ty, preser­v­a­tive-filled cup­cakes.
Just before I walked away, he joked: “Why are you wear­ing that shirt?”
I looked down and real­ized I was wear­ing a dark blue t‑shirt that said “AuburnAF” writ­ten in bright orange let­ters. From a dis­tance, it was easy to mis­take the tee for a Walmart uni­form, which was prob­a­bly why he stopped me in the first place. I knew he was needling me because, like most of the peo­ple in the area, he was a fan of AU’s archri­val, the University of Alabama. “Oh,” I answered. “That’s where I went to school.” “Really?” he asked. “So, what did you play?
I still don’t have a good answer.

Trump’s actions are a ‘betrayal of his oath of office,’ Pelosi says

More than three-quar­ters of House Democrats have come out in sup­port of an inquiry as Trump’s Ukraine scan­dal grows. 

By Heidi Przybyla and Adam Edelman

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who for months resist­ed efforts to launch impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings against President Donald Trump, announced a for­mal inquiry on Tuesday, say­ing that the president’s bur­geon­ing Ukraine scan­dal marked a “breach of his Constitutional responsibilities.”

“This week the pres­i­dent has admit­ted to ask­ing the pres­i­dent of Ukraine to take actions which would ben­e­fit him polit­i­cal­ly,” Pelosi said.

“The actions of the Trump pres­i­den­cy revealed the dis­hon­or­able fact of the pres­i­den­t’s betray­al of his oath of office, betray­al of our nation­al secu­ri­ty, and betray­al of the integri­ty of our elec­tions,” she con­tin­ued. “Therefore, today I am announc­ing the House of Representatives is mov­ing for­ward with an offi­cial impeach­ment inquiry.”

Download the NBC News app for break­ing news and politics

Pelosi said she was for­mal­ly direct­ing her par­ty’s six com­mit­tees to “pro­ceed with their inves­ti­ga­tions under that umbrella.”

“The pres­i­dent must be held account­able,” she said. “No one is above the law.”

Pelosi’s change of heart comes as dozens of House Democrats — now more than two-thirds of the cau­cus — have come out in sup­port of an impeach­ment inquiry in the wake of reports that Trump may have with­held aid to Ukraine to pres­sure offi­cials there to inves­ti­gate the son of polit­i­cal rival Joe Biden.

The impeach­ment dri­ve fol­lows days of rev­e­la­tions sur­round­ing Trump’s appar­ent push to have the Ukrainian gov­ern­ment inves­ti­gate the for­mer vice pres­i­den­t’s son Hunter Biden, who had busi­ness deal­ings in the coun­try. On Monday, The Washington Post and oth­er media out­lets report­ed that Trump instruct­ed his act­ing chief of staff to place a hold on about $400 mil­lion in mil­i­tary aid for Ukraine in the days before a late July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump respond­ed on Twitter with­in moments of Pelosi’s announce­ment, call­ing it “Witch Hunt garbage.”

“They nev­er even saw the tran­script of the call. A total Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

Such an impor­tant day at the United Nations, so much work and so much suc­cess, and the Democrats pur­pose­ly had to ruin and demean it with more break­ing news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

Pelosi, Nadler, Schiff and, of course, Maxine Waters! Can you believe this?41.7K5:11 PM — Sep 24, 2019

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

They nev­er even saw the tran­script of the call. A total Witch Hunt!

Read more here; https://​www​.nbc​news​.com/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​/​t​r​u​m​p​-​i​m​p​e​a​c​h​m​e​n​t​-​i​n​q​u​i​r​y​/​p​e​l​o​s​i​-​a​n​n​o​u​n​c​e​-​f​o​r​m​a​l​-​i​m​p​e​a​c​h​m​e​n​t​-​i​n​q​u​i​r​y​-​t​r​u​m​p​-​n​1​0​5​8​251

Much has been said on the ques­tion of the Cockpit Country and the need for the Government to stop any min­ing in the pre­cious water­shed.
The Prime Minister, to his cred­it, has shown some sen­si­tiv­i­ty to the issue and in has promised that under his admin­is­tra­tion there will be no min­ing in the cock­pit coun­try.
Additionally, he has met with some activist artiste who has tak­en an inter­est in the cause of pre­serv­ing the area in its pris­tine con­di­tion.
We should all com­mend our artists who use their celebri­ty to bring atten­tion to these press­ing issues of our time.
We should cel­e­brate and encour­age, rather than try to find rea­sons to demo­nize and vil­i­fy them. 

With a clear eye on the evi­dence of the con­se­quences of cli­mate change, and doing what’s right, the Jamaican Government must forth­with can­cel all con­tracts, and make a full declara­to­ry state­ment, that not one sin­gle inch of the Cockpit Country will be touched for min­ing or any­thing else. It mat­ters not at this point, who did what.
The present Administration must now show the abil­i­ty to lead, and not engage in the back and forth about who award­ed con­tracts when.
The Jamaican peo­ple, and the next gen­er­a­tion, deserves a clear and unequiv­o­cal state­ment of lead­er­ship and com­mit­ment from our gov­ern­ment.
That state­ment should end this issue once and for all, that there will be no min­ing in this vital watershed.

This is not a polit­i­cal issue, it is an exis­ten­tial issue. Roughly 40% of the Islands water sup­ply comes from the Cockpit region. Over the years Jamaica has like oth­er coun­tries is record­ing high­er and high­er tem­per­a­tures as the effects of cli­mate change becomes unde­ni­able.
As the Amazon burns, wild­fires in California and Oregon evis­cer­ates entire towns each year, as mam­moth storms wipe out entire Islands, as lands once hab­it­able, become lakes due to ris­ing oceans, the writ­ing is on the wall, and it does not require any­one spe­cial to deci­pher what it is say­ing.
Climate change is real.
If there are finan­cial costs to can­cel­ing Noranda’s con­tracts, the Government should bite the bul­let and can­cel those con­tracts, but there should be no fur­ther action tak­en which would jeop­ar­dizes the future of Jamaica’s children. 

Climate change is hav­ing oth­er effects on our plan­et out­side the obvi­ous lack of water, wild-fires, mas­sive storms, and unpre­dictable tem­per­a­tures.
It is caus­ing mass migra­tion of peo­ple from their homes in search of food and water as the effects many thought would be for oth­er gen­er­a­tions has made it clear, it is for us to fix. For the peo­ple flee­ing their homes in Latin-America, life has become unbear­able with­out water.
This has been hap­pen­ing across the African con­ti­nent for decades, as rich mul­ti-nation­al cor­po­ra­tions con­tin­ue on in its cen­turies-long rape and pil­lage of the con­ti­nent.
Millions in Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, and oth­er African nations have lost their lives and their liveli­hoods but there has hard­ly been any atten­tion paid to this tragedy, because after all, its just Africans dying.

As America strug­gles to deal with the mass of human­i­ty press­ing against its south­ern bor­der, it is impor­tant to under­stand how some of the del­i­ca­cies Americans have come to cher­ish and enjoy, have con­tributed to that mass of human­i­ty at the south­ern bor­der.
In Chile, large scale avo­ca­do farm­ing has divert­ed much-need­ed water from small farms and home­steads leav­ing peas­ant farm­ers and reg­u­lar Chileans with­out the pre­cious com­mod­i­ty, forc­ing them to flee or face death from star­va­tion and thirst.

According to NBC) In one Honduran vil­lage named El Rosario, vil­lagers watched help­less­ly as drought with­ered their corn and bean crops for a fifth straight year. With noth­ing to sell and no food sup­plies to feed their fam­i­lies, they’ve entered the grow­ing sea­son with­out any reserves. 
For those who might want to leave — and can afford to — the choic­es are few. San Pedro Sula, a city a few hours to the north­west, is over­run by drug gangs and vio­lence. Migrant car­a­vans leave from there to the Mexico‑U.S. bor­der but offer no guar­an­tee — and hir­ing a smug­gler costs thou­sands of dol­lars. https://​www​.nbc​news​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​l​a​t​i​n​o​/​c​e​n​t​r​a​l​-​a​m​e​r​i​c​a​-​d​r​y​i​n​g​-​f​a​r​m​e​r​s​-​f​a​c​e​-​c​h​o​i​c​e​-​p​r​a​y​-​r​a​i​n​-​o​r​-​l​e​a​v​e​-​n​1​0​2​7​346

Now is not the time for plat­i­tudes and cheap slo­gans, I applaud the peo­ple who have stood up and demand­ed that the gov­ern­ment lis­ten to their con­cerns. After all, the gov­ern­ment must be a gov­ern­ment of [we the peo­ple]. For once, let us stop label­ing each oth­er with polit­i­cal labels and worse, and instead, see this cri­sis for what it is.
Climate change is not an abstract pro­jec­tion for future gen­er­a­tions to tack­le. It is here today, if we do not tack­le it, there will be no one left to do it.

Please share this arti­cle as much as you can, we need full aware­ness on this issue.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

By Elie Mystal

We can­not guar­an­tee the safe­ty of whis­tle-blow­ers. Oh, we pass all kinds of laws with fan­cy names like the “Whistleblower Protection Act.” Our pres­i­dents sign exec­u­tive orders called “Protecting Whistleblowers with Access to Classified Information.” But when the rub­ber meets the road, when a whis­tle-blow­er wants to dish about the peo­ple in charge of enforc­ing the laws, all of our acts and procla­ma­tions are eas­i­ly ignored pieces of paper. 

Chelsea Manning lives in the Alexandria Detention Center. Edward Snowden lives in Moscow. People get to be called “whis­tle-blow­ers” only when the insti­tu­tions they’re blow­ing the whis­tle on allow it. Otherwise, they’re called “crim­i­nals” or “spies” and are sub­ject­ed to the full weight of the American jus­tice system.

That jus­tice sys­tem is cur­rent­ly run by Attorney General William Barr, and he is the most obvi­ous rea­son our cur­rent “whis­tle-blow­er” has yet to come for­ward to Congress about what­ev­er he or she would like to tell the American peo­ple about Donald Trump’s inter­ac­tions with, and promis­es to, for­eign lead­ers. What we know is that this whis­tle-blow­er, an intel­li­gence offi­cial who worked at the White House, filed a com­plaint with Michael Atkinson, the inspec­tor gen­er­al for the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty — and that Atkinson deemed the infor­ma­tion cred­i­ble enough to for­ward it to the direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence (DNI), and then to Congress. What we also know is that the Department of Justice told the DNI to ignore our whis­tle-blow­er laws and keep the infor­ma­tion hid­den from Congress.

Now, there are peo­ple in Congress, the media, and on the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign trail who hope that the whis­tle-blow­er takes the hero­ic step of risk­ing their pro­fes­sion­al career and per­son­al free­dom to come for­ward, to Congress. Senator Kamala Harris urged the whis­tle-blow­er to “go direct­ly to Congress,” say­ing that the “American peo­ple will stand with you.”

Man, if I were the whis­tle-blow­er, I’d tell all of these politi­cians and pun­dits to kiss my whole entire back­side. We “American peo­ple” are a deca­dent bour­geoisie who won’t storm con­cen­tra­tion camps to save chil­dren. Why should the whis­tle-blow­er believe that the “peo­ple” will do any­thing to “stand with” them, unless the whis­tle-blow­er has the secret recipe for chick­en sand­wich­es? Our lead­ers in Congress are feck­less cow­ards. They have failed, repeat­ed­ly, to hold President Donald Trump or A.G. Barr account­able for any of their past trans­gres­sions against the rule of law. Why should the whis­tle-blow­er believe that Congress — through the new­ly opened House Intelligence Committee inves­ti­ga­tion or oth­er means — is going to start hold­ing Trump and Barr account­able now?
Read more here; https://​www​.then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​w​h​i​s​t​l​e​b​l​o​w​e​r​-​t​r​u​m​p​-​u​k​r​a​i​ne/

There are a lot of press­ing issues fac­ing the Jamaican peo­ple, as there are issues fac­ing coun­tries across the globe, large and small, rich and poor.
The chal­lenge for us, is to find lead­er­ship which is up to the task, hon­est, capa­ble and most of all, laser-like focused on real solu­tions for the future.
[Luckily for us], our small Island ‑Nation can be self-suf­fi­cient as it relates to feed­ing our­selves.
That, of course, depends on whether we are will­ing to eschew the inane belief that American goods are supe­ri­or to ours.
We can also be near ener­gy suf­fi­cient with the abun­dance of sun and wind we have at our dis­pos­al.
Despite the peren­ni­al prob­lems we have with not hav­ing enough clean drink­ing water in our pipes, I am of the opin­ion that there are more than enough sources of clean drink­ing water, in this the land of [wood and water].
The lack of water in the pipes is, how­ev­er, a bi-prod­uct of myopic and incom­pe­tent polit­i­cal lead­er­ship.
That can be solved if seri­ous effort and invest­ment are made in devel­op­ing the infra­struc­ture which would exploit the abun­dant water sources which exist across the length and breadth of the Island.
But before we get to har­ness­ing those water sources, the prac­tice of funer­al­iz­ing dead bod­ies in fam­i­ly plots must be out­lawed imme­di­ate­ly.
Apart from being bad for ground­wa­ter, it depre­ci­ates prop­er­ty value.

[Unlickily for us] the young lead­er­ship which has sprung up seemed to be more inter­est­ed in hype and social-media than actu­al­ly tack­ling the sub­stan­tive issues the coun­try face.
It appears that no mat­ter how many let­ters they have behind their names some of these young lead­ers are dumb­er than rocks.
Which brings me to the old cliché‘, “some men are born great, some have great­ness thrust upon them”.

PNP Senator Andre Haughton says he intends to move a motion that will allow for the use of Jamaican exple­tives in dance­halls. “This motion is impor­tant because this is our cul­ture. Too many aspects of our cul­ture have been unnec­es­sar­i­ly vil­i­fied. These lit­tle things, these words con­tribute to the unique­ness of the Jamaican cul­ture and is what sets us apart from coun­tries across the world.”
“When I say the dance­hall space, I mean any­where, wher­ev­er you can go get a per­mit and keep a par­ty. We want to make it like how you have X‑rated movies, that way peo­ple already know what dem a sign up for,” he said, not­ing that there are few peo­ple in Jamaica, who are affect­ed by the use of these “bad words”.
Haughton said over­seas these words are con­sid­ered com­i­cal, not­ing “there are a lot of peo­ple who these words don’t affect in a neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive way”.

As I said before there are press­ing issues fac­ing the Jamaican peo­ple, yet the young sen­a­tor is focused laser-like on coars­en­ing the cul­ture.
He argued that [over­seas] peo­ple find those bad words com­i­cal. Ha-ha, so there it is for­eign­ers find our lin­go com­i­cal, but they do not want it reg­u­lar­ized in their coun­try.
I sug­gest since this young sen­a­tor believes that they are so enam­ored with our exple­tives, he packs up and leave Jamaica, then unload a bunch of those [b**** c***t] on the inter­view­er at the first job he inter­views for.
You see, some of us are dead set on being clowns, shuck­ing and jiv­ing as long as Massa finds it enter­tain­ing.
Getting (rayyyyys) from idi­ot­ic dance hall Disc jock­eys, who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly tell men to dump build­ing blocks onto female gen­i­talia is not some­thing any­one should be seek­ing.
Neither should the desire for social media likes, influ­ence pub­lic pol­i­cy.
For years dance hall DJ’s have told Jamaicans not to tell police whats going on in their com­mu­ni­ties.
They open­ly encour­age and nur­ture the mur­der cul­ture in the music, and on the micro­phones, blar­ing out their dis­dain for soci­etal norms, while they open­ly encour­age killings and car­nage, right there in the dance halls. Look where it has got­ten us.
As if that is not bad enough, the young PNP Senator wants to put the mur­der and may­hem on steroids.

The most shock­ing thing about this, is not that he is sim­ply seek­ing a hype, but that he got the idea that artists should be free to unleash unchecked exple­tive-laced tirades, after police warned Japanese sound sys­tem, Mighty Crown, not to use pro­fan­i­ty dur­ing the Fully Loaded show in August of this year.
Overly anx­ious to please the Japanese, he is pre­pared to fur­ther erode our cul­ture, under the non­sen­si­cal notion that for­eign­ers are ben­e­fit­ting from it and finds our exple­tives com­i­cal. On a scale of 1 – 10, this guy is a zero on the idiot scale.
To begin with, the sug­ges­tion that it would be like x‑rated movies because peo­ple know what they are get­ting into is cocka­mamie.
Sound sys­tems are extreme­ly loud dis­rup­tive things. There is a silent sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who have to get up and go to work, but they are forced to endure nights with lit­tle or no sleep because of the inces­sant blar­ing of sound sys­tems, cou­pled with the moron­ic disc jock­eys scream­ing into the micro­phones.
Add a healthy dose of exple­tives to that men­tal tor­ture and you got a per­fect brew to dri­ve law-abid­ing work­ing peo­ple total­ly insane.
This is what Andre Haughton wants to unleash on work­ing people.

Murders shoot­ings and oth­er vio­lent crimes con­tin­ue unchecked mak­ing Jamaica one of the most vio­lent places on earth to live and raise a fam­i­ly.
One would expect that there would be an all hands on deck approach to this exis­ten­tial cri­sis, but not so.
In 2014, 1,192; mur­ders were report­ed to the police. In 2015 the num­ber was 1,450. In 2016 it was 1,350. In 2017 it was 1,616. And in 2018, 1,287 Jamaicans report­ed­ly lost their lives vio­lent­ly. Thus far for 2019, rough­ly 900 mur­ders have been report­ed to police, at this rate the homi­cide num­bers are on pace to equal last year’s num­bers if not exceed them.
This despite the spate os ZOSO’s and states of emer­gen­cies declared and oper­a­tional across hotspots.
These num­bers are gen­er­al­ly high­er as some of the vic­tims who have been shot, chopped, stabbed or oth­er­wise injured by assailants, even­tu­al­ly, die.
Those deaths are not includ­ed in these summaries.

If Jamaica is to meet the chal­lenges of the 21^st cen­tu­ry it will require enlight­ened and ded­i­cat­ed lead­er­ship, not hype and cos­met­ic changes designed to score points.
Andre Haughton should con­sid­er how he can help our coun­try in a pos­i­tive way, he can­not be that stu­pid, he is a Ph.D. On this issue, how­ev­er, he clear­ly needs to take a chill pill and step back from the hype.

After what looks like an almost cer­tain fail­ure to secure a major­i­ty in Israel’s elec­tion on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did­n’t need any­one to tell him about the mur­mur­ings with­in Likud that his own par­ty should start think­ing about a change in lead­er­ship. He sus­pects they are there, and have been for a while. 

As he arrived at the par­ty’s cam­paign head­quar­ters at Expo Tel Aviv in the ear­ly hours of Wednesday morn­ing, greet­ing senior Likudniks with forced, tight-lipped smiles, the heavy make­up he wore could not mask the tired­ness on his face from days of relent­less cam­paign­ing and long hours of non­stop online Likud TV broad­casts, in which he harangued right-wingers to go out and vote.

Netanyahu’s speech at a Likud ral­ly, deliv­ered more than five hours after vot­ing end­ed and exit poll results spelled doom, was a care­ful­ly mea­sured attempt to reassert his lead­er­ship, while acknowl­edg­ing, with­out say­ing it in so many words, that things have changed. Perhaps irrev­o­ca­bly.
Continue read­ing here; https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-in-defeat-netanyahu-looks-to-iran-and-trump-for-salvation‑1.7858253

An eight-ounce plas­tic bot­tle of drink­ing water retails for some­where between US$1 & $1.50 if you pur­chase at retail.
With bulk rate you get a bet­ter deal mon­e­tar­i­ly, as for the qual­i­ty of the drink­ing water, I can­not speak to that.
But water qual­i­ty is hard­ly what I want to talk about today, so there is that.
So at the rate of say US$1 per bot­tle, a gal­lon con­tain­er should cost approx­i­mate­ly US$8. Of course, again, because a gal­lon is con­sid­ered bulk-buy­ing the cost is expo­nen­tial­ly less.

A gal­lon of gaso­line retails for some­where between US$2-$3, on the east coast of the United States, I imag­ine it may be a lit­tle more pricey on the west coast nev­er­the­less the cost of drink­ing water is now greater than the cost of gaso­line.
Who would have thunk it?[sic]
For years now I have been telling friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers that the next major con­flict to engulf the world will prob­a­bly be over clean drink­ing water.

As sci­en­tist con­tin­ue to warn about the dan­ger cli­mate change pos­es to our plan­et, it is not dif­fi­cult to see how ris­ing ocean lev­els could con­t­a­m­i­nate fresh­wa­ter sources.
Droughts and wild­fires caused by defor­esta­tion and chang­ing tem­per­a­tures will force nations to com­pete more aggres­sive­ly for the pre­cious com­mod­i­ty.
The gen­er­al con­sen­sus is that 71% of the earth­’s sur­face is water, addi­tion­al­ly, water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in ice­caps and glac­i­ers, in the ground as soil mois­ture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog, accord­ing to one expert.
Nevertheless, not all of that water is drink­able water, and as we are all well aware, we each use a lot of water in our every day lives.
Estimates vary, but each per­son uses about 80 – 100 gal­lons of water per day. Are you sur­prised that the largest use of house­hold water is to flush the toi­let, and after that, to take show­ers and baths? With about 7.7 bil­lion peo­ple on the plan­et, the need for clean drink­ing water is a grow­ing one even as water becomes less abundant.

According to [Sciencedaily], about 70% of water flow reach­ing Egypt is derived from the Blue Nile and Atbara River, both sourced in Ethiopia. Over the past 200 years, rapid­ly increas­ing human activ­i­ty has seri­ous­ly altered flow con­di­tions of the Nile. Emplacement in Egypt of bar­rages in the 1800s, con­struc­tion the Aswan Low Dam in 1902, and the Aswan High Dam in 1965 has since altered water flow and dis­tri­b­u­tion of nour­ish­ing organ­ic-rich soil in the delta.

Egypt’s pop­u­la­tion has recent­ly swelled rapid­ly to about 90 mil­lion, with most liv­ing in the soil-rich Lower Nile Valley and Delta. These two areas com­prise only about 3.5% of Egypt’s total area, the remain­der being a most­ly sandy desert. Due to much-inten­si­fied human impact, the delta no longer func­tions as a nat­u­ral­ly expand­ing flu­vial-coastal cen­ter. Less than 10% of Nile water now reach­es the sea, and most of the nutri­ent-rich sed­i­ment is trapped in the delta by a dense canal and irri­ga­tion sys­tem.

According to the [Financialtimes], For cen­turies, the banks of the Nile have been home to farms pro­duc­ing rice as well as cot­ton and wheat. But now water short­ages, soil degra­da­tion, and pol­lu­tion have cre­at­ed a cri­sis that has under­mined agri­cul­ture in the delta, which is strug­gling to sup­port mil­lions of impov­er­ished farm­ers.

According to [Researchgate], Water scarci­ty has direct impli­ca­tions for food secu­ri­ty in arid regions. Egypt faces an esca­lat­ing sit­u­a­tion of water scarci­ty, as its renew­able fresh­wa­ter resources are fixed and the pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing rapid­ly. The per capi­ta sup­ply of fresh­wa­ter is already dan­ger­ous­ly low and pre­dict­ed to plum­met even fur­ther by the year 2025. 

Under British colo­nial rule, a 1929 treaty reserved 80 per­cent of the Nile’s entire flow for Egypt and Sudan, then ruled as a sin­gle coun­try. That treaty was reaf­firmed in 1959. Usually upstream coun­tries dom­i­nate con­trol of a riv­er, like the Tigris and Euphrates, which are much reduced by the time they flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. The case of the Nile is reversed because the British colo­nials who con­trolled the region want­ed to guar­an­tee water for Egyptian agri­cul­ture. The sev­en upstream coun­tries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda — say the treaty is an unfair ves­tige of colo­nial­ism, while Egypt says those coun­tries are awash in water resources, unlike arid Egypt, which depends on just one.[Thenewyorktimes]

In a July 2017 arti­cle, titled How Egypt Is Slowly Losing Its Hold Over the Nile River [world­pol­i­tic­sreiew] said; Currently, more than 430 mil­lion peo­ple live across the 11 coun­tries that make up the Nile Basin: Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Eritrea. The pop­u­la­tion of the Nile Basin is like­ly to jump to near­ly 1 bil­lion by 2050.
The upstream coun­tries “can’t wait for­ev­er for Egypt to get onboard,” says Aaron Wolf, a pro­fes­sor of geo­sciences at Oregon State University.

As the Amazon burns, wild­fires become a sta­ple across California, mas­sive storms wipe out entire pop­u­la­tion, killing thou­sands and the polar ice caps con­tin­ue to melt at a record pace, it has become clear that the cli­mate cri­sis is not some abstract issue of the future it is here.
Clean drink­ing water will become more and more valu­able even as it becomes more scarce.
Each and every one of the 7.7 bil­lion of us have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to be more coignizant of this cri­sis and do our part in con­serv­ing this pre­cious commodity.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.