Top row left to right: Mariso Lago, Kenneth Knuckles, Joseph Douek, Alfred Cerullo, Richard Eaddy, Middle row left to right: Allen Cappelli, Hope Knight, Anna Hayes Levin, Orlando Marín, Larisa Ortiz Bottom row left to right: Michelle de la Uz, Rad Rampershad, David Burney, Carl Weisbrod

We've grown bleary eyed seeing it on the federal level since Donald Trump took his trip from NYC's real estate world and started appointing his cabinet and top government policy officials: It seems like there isn't a single such appointment made where the inherent conflicts-of-interest and the effective capture by private interests of federal public agencies doesn't seem the carefully crafted intention of the appointment, rather than a gawd-awful mistake, incompetence or general obtuseness about what is in the public interest.  (It was right from the beginning.)

Where might Mr. Trump have learned that such a cookie-jar approach to populating government could be accepted as routine and par for the course?  Maybe from the way that New York City "government" puts the real estate industry in charge of "governing" all things real estate.  probably the most egregious example is New York City's City Planning Commission Commissioners.  There are tons of other examples in this city (like the revolving door at the Landmarks Preservation Commission for those who then lobby).

Villager op-ed

Lynn Ellsworth of Human-scale NYC recently addressed the question just how totally the City Planning Commission is captured by industry interests with an op-ed in The Villager, back up with her research that provides  gallery portraits of the Commissioners and the allegiances to the real estate industry that laden them.  See: OPINION: Foxes guard City Planning henhouse, by Lynn Ellsworth, May 22, 2019.

Her opinion piece represents points Ms. Ellsworth made at a May 15, 2019 press conference recently on the steps of City Hall speaking about the current developer practice of grabbing the sky for luxury condo units by building "void" buildings launched upwards to new heights on stilts to be taller than the rest of the city. 

May 15, 2019 press conference

Ms. Ellsworth's gallery is also reminiscent of a similar round-up of suspect commissioners that Citizens Defending Libraries put together in 2015 when the Planning Commission was hellbent to approve the shrink-and-sink deal that would sell Brooklyn's second largest library in order to turn the site over to the developer of a luxury tower.  Full disclosure: As a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries, I was involving in putting that round up together as well as requests that various commissioners recuse themselves, only a few of which did (there was an opinion of no conflict of interest).  See:  Report on Tuesday, September 22nd City Planning Commission Hearing On Proposed Sale and Shrinkage of Plus Testimony of Citizens Defending Libraries, and Open Letter To NYC Planning Commissioner Cheryl Cohen Effron Respecting Her Vote About Selling & Shrinking the Brooklyn Heights Library, Other Libraries The Revson Foundation, Center for an Urban Future, And More.

Alicia Boyd of MTOP (Movement to Protect the People) is another activist who, in concert with a coalition of others, has sought to ventilate these conflicts of interest that usually go unremarked upon.  That has included demonstrations and press conference outside of the Planning Commission.

Lynn Ellsworth with Citizens Defending Libraries outside City Hall, December 2015 protesting library sale.

Ms. Ellsworth's gallery and the research it represents is a beautiful piece of work and valuable to have at hand.  She indicates that it may be subject to some refinement with some future revisions, but it is too extraordinary a resource not to be look at now.

Does Noticing New York publish the work of others?: Seldom, but sometimes.  In this case, veteran Noticing New York readers will find themselves in very familiar territory.   Enjoy, and file away for future reference.  Oh, and as you read, you will see references to NYC library sales.

* * *    

The Fox Guards the Henhouse at the Department of City Planning
Part 1: Profiles in Complicity

Communities Cannot Get A Fair Hearing when the Regulatory Agency is Captured by the Industry it is Supposed to Regulate.

By Lynn Ellsworth, of Human-scale NYC, May 16, 2019
(Contact: lynnellsworth [at] outlook.com)

In 1976, sociologist Harvey Molotch wrote a famous essay describing an "Urban Growth Machine" consisting of a coalition of large property owners, developers, realtors, industry-dependent elites and politicians whose economic interests aligned to push for insatiable real estate development they dubbed "growth".  Many years later, Rutgers economist Jason Barr studied high-rise development in Manhattan and described a "Skyscraper Industrial Complex" of real estate developers, real estate advisors and financiers, construction unions, architects, construction and engineering firms whose economic self-interests aligned to demand never-ending and unregulated high-rise construction.  

These forces have crystalized in New York City in the most powerful special interest lobby New York has ever known, the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) whose Board of Governors is dominated by an elite group of spectacularly wealthy oligarchic families, some of which have become feudal dynasties with thousands of tenants paying rent to them. It is a situation not seen since the medieval period. REBNY's financial and lobbying power is a matter of common knowledge.

This power is only a problem and a matter of public interest when the real estate industry comes to control the institutions that are supposed do the regulating for the public good. The Department of City Planning is a case in point. There, the Fox has come to guard the henhouse and communities can no longer get a fair hearing.*  The Commissions hearings have become a kind of Kangaroo Court for communities, for even the Commissioners at City Planning who aren't directly involved in real estate development are all clearly members of the "Skyscraper Industrial Complex".

(* Part 2 will discuss how to repair the situation in the City Charter.  This article will be subject to possible revisions- Please send typo alerts or any new facts to the attention of the author.)

To be specific, of the 13 members of the Commission who control the Department of City Planning:

-    One is a real estate investor, a donor to the Mayor and runs a $75 million "opportunity fund" for Brooklyn (Douek)
-    One is a former lobbyist for the real estate industry (Cappelli)
-    Five are real estate developers of various types, ranging from an employee of Bluestone to CEOs of Development Corporations to the head of the Fifth Avenue Committee (de la Uz, Knuckles, Eaddy, Knight, and Marín)
-    The current Chair's professional history is that of running the notorious corporate subsidy-granting Empire State Development Corporation, a real estate development entity for the state.  It has seriously abused eminent domain to the detriment of black and low-income communities. One academic notes that the Corporation acts as "Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the poor to give to the rich" (Lago)
-    Only one has a degree in urban planning, but alas, runs a consulting firm advising city agencies and developers how to "optimize" their retail tenant mix so that it fits the owner's "goals" (Ortiz).
-    At least two have serious conflicts of interest with the current rezoning project on the table at Gowanus (Bluestone and Fifth Avenue Committee).  At least one had a clear conflict of interest with the East Harlem rezoning (Knuckles).
-    Two are architects with high-rise projects under their belts (Burney and Rampershad).
-    One has long been a cheerleader for the Hudson Yards project and whose spouse is a partner at the  ‘Big Law' firm of David and Polk that advises the developers such as Extell who are involved in the Hudson Yards project as well as many other major real estate players in NY (Levin).
-    One is CEO of the real estate controlled BID, the Grand Central Partnership, whose board of directors reads like the Who's Who of the Board of Governors of the Real Estate Board of New York and who has pushed for multiple upzonings in Midtown(Cerullo)

Is it any wonder these Commissioners, the majority of which represent the real estate development community, mistake upzoning, real estate profit-making and high-rise projects for actual urban planning?  We call on the City Charter Commission to repair the situation (see Part 2 for details).

Profiles of the Real Estate Industrial Complex at DCP:  with citations.

Mariso Lago, Chair of the DCP.  One of her claims to competence for serving as Chair is her experience as CEO of the Empire State Development Corporation. Part of the stated mission of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) is to support economies though "real estate development" across New York State.  The current Chair is Howard Zemsky, a real estate developer who owns the Larkin Development Group. ESDC mostly organizes public subsidies for big developer-run projects (such as the Amazon project.  It also issues public bonds to pay for them and awards contracts to developers.  Current NYC "signature" and "large-scale" projects include the redevelopment of Penn Station and of the Javits Convention Center.  ESDC specializes in creating interlocking boards of subsidiaries to carry out its work. It is famous for the abuse of eminent domain to impose its vision.  It used those powers for the disastrous Atlantic Yards Project that demolished a swathe of Brooklyn as well as the Columbia Manhattanville Project that destroyed an immense stretch of West Harlem for Columbia University's new glass-filled campus. One of ESDC's subsidiaries was also responsible for building luxury housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park - even when it become clear that housing was not needed to subsidize the park. One of the ESDC's subsidiaries still manages a portfolio of 20,200 housing units in New York City. ESDC bonds were used to build a network of 32 adult prisons to accommodate people arrested under the Rockefeller drug laws.*  "Good Jobs First" a national good government group, accuses the ESDC of "awarding lavish subsidies with little accountability."  An Institute for Justice report by Dr. Dick Carpenter found that ESDC's "eminent domain abuse disproportionately targets those who are less well off and less educated" and acts as "Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the poor to give to the rich."  The Brooklyn Bridge Park redevelopment was particularly ridden with conflicts of interests and scandal during Ms. Lago's tenure at the Empire State Development Corporation. The architect of one of the governor's biggest deals at the ESDC was found guilty of bid rigging. E.J. McMahon, Director of the watchdog group ‘Empire Center' has fretted over misplaced priorities at the ESDC with the comment: "What roads could you build, what bridges could you build with the money you are spending on factories [then handed over] for private corporations?" Gotham Gazette describes ECDC-supported entities as "scandal-plagued."  Ms. Lago has publicly supported a high-rise, glassy, Dubai-on-the-Hudson vision for New York City in a video interview with the real estate press , calling it a ‘win-win-win'.  She mentions that the only real strategy DCP has it to define areas to "take more density" and in the same interview she expresses to be one with REBNY's desire to do away with the State FAR cap on height and bulk.  She has no training in urban planning.

(*King, Ryan S.; Mauer, Marc; Huling, Tracy (February 2003). "Big Prisons, Small Towns: Prison Economics in Rural America" (PDF). The Sentencing Project. Archived from the original (pdf) on 2010-07-10.)

Kenneth Knuckles, Vice Chair of the Commission.  He has been on the Commission since 2002 and has no training in urban planning.  He was the longtime CEO of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation (known as UMEZ) and only retired from there at the age of 70 in April of 2018.  UMEX is a real estate development organization that does a few other small business support activities under the heading of "economic development."  Substantial funding for UMEZ comes from New York City, meaning UMEZ has an internal incentive not to bite the City hand that feeds it.  Under Mr. Knuckles, UMEZ provided $87 million in loans to real estate development projects and was the key player setting up the controversial East River Plaza that benefited big developers (specifically, Ratner, Blumenfeld, and Canyon Capital Advisors).  That plaza is a vertical mall for big box stores and features a bizarre $64 million parking lot that as of 2012 was nearly empty, with less than 5% used of the spaces actually in use.  A senior accountant who worked at UMEZ wrote about his experience there on Glassdoor, saying "the only successes I saw while I was there were in funding large corporations to develop areas in Harlem." Mr. Knuckles is quoted in Crain's thus: "I would like to say we created the environment that was conducive to stores like Whole Foods [now owned by Amazon] coming to Harlem."  The role of Whole Foods in the "whitification" of Harlem was called out in 2016 in Michael Henry Adam's moving opinion column in the Times, "The End of Black Harlem" in which Adams wrote: "Whole Foods might as well be Fortnum and Mason…To us our Harlem is being remade, upgraded, and transformed, just for them, for wealthier white people."

Joseph Douek, Commissioner.  He is Chair and CEO of an investment and hedge fund called Viceroy Equities which is"betting big on Brooklyn with a $75 million Opportunity Zone fund".  Recall that opportunity zone investors will pay zero capital gains taxes if their real estate investments are held for ten years.  Opportunity zones are pure subsidies to real estate investors.   He has no training in urban planning.  Opportunity zones in Brooklyn overlap with proposed upzonings.

Alfred Cerullo, Commissioner is the President and CEO of the Grand Central Partnership, a big real estate Business Improvement District (BID). That BID drove the recent upzoning for the Vanderbilt Corridor and Midtown East, as both upzonings directly benefited members of the Partership. Of course, the Board of Directors of the Grand Central Partnership also reads like a who's who of the Real Estate Board of New York, with REBNY's CEO John Banks literally serving as the official secretary of the BID.  Cerullo is a Republican and former actor with a law degree, but no training in urban planning.  SL Green, a big real estate firm, owned 1 Vanderbilt and spearheaded the shocking upzoning for that area.

Richard Eaddy, Commissioner.  Mr. Eaddy's work prior to government service was with ET Partners, a real estate development and consulting firm.  He had previously been Chief Financial Officer of the real estate company "L & M Equity Participants" the precursor of L& M Development partners, a firm which brags on its website that it has "over $7 billion in development, construction, and investment".  He was also development manager at the real estate company Olympia and York.  His master's degree is in real estate development.  He has no training in urban planning.  It is safe to consider Mr. Eaddy to be a member of the real estate development community.

Allen Cappelli, Commissioner  A lawyer without training in urban planning who appears to be a professional board member, although according to the New York Times he was once a lobbyist for the real estate industry.  He is a former member of the board of the MTA where he served for 8 years overlapping with John Banks, current president of the Real Estate Board of New York (Cappelli was appointed to the MTA in 2008, while Banks was already on it while Banks continued to be on the MTA with Cappelli until 2015).  As a resident of Staten Island, Cappelli "was the only [MTA] member of the board to vote against increasing tolls and fares."  Note that the New York Times has called the MTA"one of the most unwieldy bureaucracies in the state" with an infamous amount of "bloat."  After leaving the MTA, De Blasio put him on the Civil Service Commission for three days a week of work at $412 a day.

Hope Knight, Commissioner is President and CEO of a private entity known as the "Greater Jamaica Development Corporation" whose mission is to "plan, promote, coordinate and advance responsible development" and is specifically responsible for glassy towers in the Jamaica neighborhood known as "The Crossing" and the "Hilton Garden Inn" and is now actively promoting to builders property lots containing 99,000 and 84,000 square feet respectively.  The Chair of the Board of the corporation is Peter Kulka, CEO of KJL Management Corporation, a real estate property management company in Queens." The Corporation's job of cheerleading new development includes the breathless phrase on their website "Jamaica makes new development happen!  $3.7 billion worth!" Ms. Knight's prior work had been on the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zones" from 2003-2015, (an entity described under the paragraph for Commissioner Knuckles.)  Ms. Knight does not have a degree in urban planning but instead an MBA from University of Chicago and considerable prior experience in banking with Morgan Stanley.

Anna Hayes Levin, Commissioner.  Her degree is in law, not urban planning. She served for many of the Empire State Development Corporations subsidiaries  such as those for the redevelopment of Hudson Yards and the Javits Center.  For example, she was  "alternative director" of the Hudson Yards Development Corporation. She had been chair of the Land Use Committee of CB4 during the tumultuous and controversial approvals for the Hudson Yards project between 2001 and 2009. At the time, she was also on the Javits Community Advisory Committee and on the Penn Station Community Advisory Committee, all ESDC projects.  Ms. Levin is married to a senior counsel and long-time partner at the law firm of Davis Polk, a firm which claims (in their words) to be ‘'at the center of the real estate marketplace." Their clients include major real estate players in NYC including SL Green, Slate, Naftali, Related, RXR, and Extell.  Their website specifically states that the firm advised Related on the Hudson Yards deal.

Orlando Marín, Commissioner.  He is currently employed by the Bluestone Organization, which is "a private developer" and which describes itself on its website as "a real estate development company."  Bluestone's website says it is developing projects with the ‘Fifth Avenue Committee" (a real estate development corporation whose Chair is also on the Commission).  Mr. Marin also once worked at the Empire State Development Corporation. He has a BA in architecture and a diploma in ‘Real Estate' as well as a Master's in public administration.  He lives in the Longwood area of the Bronx, an area that Crain's describes as a place where investors "clamor to rezone."  Bluestone's website describes its investments in areas where upzonings have been or are now on the agenda, including Bushwick, Jamaica, Gowanus, Crown Heights and Rockaway.  Some of these are in partnership with developers such as the Fifth Avenue Committee, Hudson Properties, and Jonathan Rose.

Larisa Ortiz, Commissioner.  Ms. Ortiz does have a degree in urban planning, but her principal job is working as a consultant (Larisa Ortiz Associates) to real estate developers and government agencies. She specializes in how to optimize their retail rents. Many of her clients are either large shopping center developers and New York City agencies and BIDs.  She markets herself as (from her website) a "commercial district advisor."  Her firm's mission includes to "develop market-based strategies for the redevelopment of urban places."  One of her clients is the New York City Economic Development Corporation where she advised them on the miserable "Fulton-Nassau Crossroads" program for retail in Lower Manhattan and the similarly controversial retail destruction of the Essex Street Market.

Michelle de la Uz is a Commissioner and Executive Director of the "Fifth Avenue Committee" which is unequivocally a real estate development firm, notwithstanding its status as a "community development corporation."  It's website claims real estate assets of over $100 million and has buildings in the works that will cost more than $400 million.  The committee does specialize in "affordable" housing, a term whose definition is obviously contested throughout the city and Uz does have a record of voting against rezonings that she thinks do not have deep enough levels of affordability, but she does not question the high rise or skyscraper character of De Blasio's policies. She does not have a degree in urban planning.  The Fifth Avenue Committee was instrumental in the demolition of the Brooklyn Public Library in Sunset Park. They received a no-bid contract to take on that particular development project.  The village of Sunset Park hotly contested the arrangement, pointing out that the Fifth Avenue Committee had given heavily to De Blasio's non-profit "Campaign For One New York."  Her organization in 2017 got $2.945 million in revenue from "government grants" and spends over $5 million for salaries, nearly all of its total revenue. Part of its revenue comes from $385,000 in rents from the buildings it owns. The Fifth Avenue Committee founded the "Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice" to advocate for certain groups during the planning for the Gowanus upzoning, a group that has pushed in favor of the rezoning.*  De la Uz wrote an op-ed in the Daily News in 2018 advocating for a spot rezoning for the community-contested project at 80 Flatbush Street in Brooklyn that favored a single developer, saying ‘we need to build bigger' and says resistance to developers is just "a regressive reality that must change" echoing the unproven fantasy REBNY p.r. line that not building skyscrapers might "impact job growth." She then fantasizes in the op-ed that the 80 Flatbush project was going to happen "without public subsidies" which indicates a weak grasp of reality.  Last, her organization partnered with another developer, Hudson Properties, to advocate for building a child care center next to the spot on the Gowanus canal that emits coal tar fumes that are so toxic that even the Environmental Protection Agency is concerned.

(* See the audit and 990 forms for Fifth Avenue Committee that Propublica has kindly made available.)

Rad Rampershad, Commissioner.  Mr. Rampershad is an architect, not an urban planner. He is resident of the low-rise, heavily down-zoned neighborhood of Richmond Hill, Queens, where Gary Barnett the CEO of Extell also lives.  He is a Senior Project Manager at the Gerald Caliendo architecture firm in Briarwood, Queens. His firm designed the glassy high rise "Four Points by Sheraton" in Long Island City and the similarly massive glass tower known as the "Z Hotel" in Hunters Point north of Long Island City. Architects like this are courtiers and dependents to the real estate industry.

David Burney, Commissioner.  Mr. Burney does have a degree in urban planning and is director of the Urban Placemaking and Management program at Pratt Institute School of Architecture, all of which definitely makes him not a real estate developer and not a deep part part of the "Growth Machine."  He was Director of Design and Capital Improvement for NYCHA for 13 years under Bloomberg, a worrisome aspect of his professional life:  as we all know there has not been adequate capital improvement in NYCHA for many, many years during the Bloomberg era. Mr. Burney was also one of the architects who did the massively over-scaled 29-storied Zeckendorf Towers in the Grammercy neighborhood while he was at the firm of Davis, Brody, & Associates.

Carl Weisbrod, former Chair of the Commission.  He is a senior advisor at HRA, a consulting firm that advises real estate developers and government agencies on big redevelopment schemes. The Real Deal credits Weisbrod for turning Times Square into the tourist zoo that it has become while he was in a "series of government positions."   He was for example president of the Economic Development Corporation for some of that period during which time he used "eminent domain aggressively to help the city take-over much of the land in the 42nd Street area."  While at HRA he led the rezoning of Hudson Square on behalf of his client the real estate division of Trinity Church.  That rezoning is resulting in the subsequent demolition of many a historic property in that area. He is a lawyer, but has no degree in urban planning.  He was for many years head of the Alliance for Downtown, a big real estate BID (developer Bill Rudin was one of the founders) that dominates much of the politics of Lower Manhattan.  As head of City Planning, he pushed through De Blasio's upzonings, over the opposition of  90% of the community boards in the city.  In that position, he also green-lighted the massive Extell tower in the Two Bridges area of Manhattan, claiming that the developer's requests amounted to a "minor modification" of the permit he granted, thus Carl Weisbrod, former Chair of the Commission.  He is a senior advisor at HRA, a consulting firm that advises real estate developers and government agencies on big redevelopment schemes. The Real Deal credits Weisbrod for turning Times Square into the tourist zoo that it has become while he was in a "series of government positions."  He was for example president of the Economic Development Corporation for some of that period during which time he used "eminent domain aggressively to help the city take-over much of the land in the 42nd Street area."  While at HRA he led the rezoning of Hudson Square on behalf of his client the real estate division of Trinity Church.  That rezoning is resulting in the subsequent demolition of many a historic property in that area. He is a lawyer, but has no degree in urban planning.  He was for many years head of the Alliance for Downtown, a big real estate BID (developer Bill Rudin was one of the founders) that dominates much of the politics of Lower Manhattan.  As head of City Planning, he pushed through De Blasio's upzonings, over the opposition of  90% of the community boards in the city.  In that position, he also green-lighted the massive Extell tower in the Two Bridges area of Manhattan, claiming that the developer's requests amounted to a "minor modification" of the permit he granted, thus allowing the developer to avoid going through ULURP. The Manhattan Borough President has sued the city over Weisbrod's decision.  Weisbrod has since become Chair of the Trust for Governor's Island which is overseeing a major plan to allow developers to have their way with the island. Cityland describes Weisbrod at the time of his appointment as having a "continuity of a pro-growth outlook" (with "growth" referring to real estate development.)  When he was appointed to City Planning, Cityland also noted that "his commitments to curtail the limbo of the pre-certification process, loosen the shrink-wrapping nature of some building envelope controls….. will be welcome news for developers."  Cityland concluded with obvious satisfaction that he would get those things done for the developer community.

Part 2:  What is to Be Done?

The Fox Guarding the Henhouse situation can be fixed with tighter conflict of interest rules in the City Charter. 

To be continued…

A number of months ago, I resolved to write a letter to Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons, our minister at our First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Brooklyn, requesting that she deliver a sermon about peace.  It was not until just recently, when something urged me to get it done soon, before Christmas, before the start of the new year, that I completed my task.

Today is Christmas Eve.

Regular readers of Noticing New York are likely to know that I have a long-standing tradition of, every year, on Christmas Eve publishing a seasonal reflection for the holidays.  I began it in 2009 when I wrote a piece with comparisons between the story of the holiday film, "It's A Wonderful Life" with its admonitions about how, without our believing in ourselves and our power to make choices and decisions to improve the world and make it a more hospitable and welcoming place for everyone, we face winding up in the world of "Pottersville."   Each Christmas Eve I have written about the holiday parable tales and films, like "It's A Wonderful Life"or Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol"or the Grinch who, like Scrooge, similarly evolved in the "Grinch Who Stole Christmas."  These are all, at bottom, the same stories, they are all stories about the pull of greed and how, absent our better decisions and influence, it affects the world versus the world we can decide to have instead.  (Links to my previous Christmas Eve reflections can be found at the very end of this post.)

This year I asked myself what I would provide as my seasonal Noticing New York reflection, and then I realized that with my December 19th letter to Reverend Ana requesting a sermon about peace I had already written it.

I will leave it to you, as readers, to discern how this letter about the need to substitute peace for our perpetual national wars, like all the previous Noticing New York seasonal reflections, is also about how out-of-control greed distorts the world we live in.  . .  Is this also a New York City theme, like what Noticing New York generally concerns itself with?: Consider what New York City would be like without national wars. .  also consider that Brooklyn For Peace is addressing this running a “Move The Money” campaign with a resolution (No. 747-2019) introduced for passage in the New York City Council; that's a campaign that our Unitarian congregation's Weaving Social Justice Committee has signed on to as a co-sponsor.

As this seasonal post has a Unitarian element to it, I should mention that when Charles Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol"he was regularly attending services at Unitarian congregation--  It is one of many links to the ways in Christmas has become ingrained in our culture with a reflection of Unitarian influences.  I should also mention that, taking some liberties, a Unitarian, Rod Serling, wrote an adaption of  "A Christmas Carol,""A Carol for Another Christmas,"which was specifically structured around an anti-war message.  Serling's version of Scrooge is "Daniel Grudge" played by Sterling Hayden.  Serling wrote this teleplay as part of a United Nations project.  It is an interesting, but flawed piece, and although it includes visiting ghosts, its not as good as his usual "Twilight Zone" scripts:  Serling gets sidetracked by trying to sort out the politics of `isolationism' and misses some bigger targets that would have been much easier to hit.  Serling's script for "Seven Days in May,"which may also be viewed as anti-war and pro-peace is far more trenchant and gripping.  Hayden, along with Peter Sellers, who appears at the end of "A Carol for Another Christmas"in a fascinatingly bizarre bit a surreal carnivalia, are also both much better in the immortally on-target anti-war "Dr. Stangelove."

Because the letter I wrote to Reverend Ana concerns topics that have been central to the concerns pursued by National Notice, which I write to deal with national issues such as  perpetual war, the environment and the climate emergency, wealth and income inequality, censorship and information control, I am also publishing my letter to Reverend Ana on National Notice.

Because the censorship and information control subjects of this letter are so important, I am also publishing it at Citizens Defending libraries.

When I met with Reverend Ana on December 19th to deliver my letter and make my request for a sermon about peace she asked me what should be the thing that such a sermon would seek to bring about as a change in the listening congregation and whether it would be asking for an action step; how would such a sermon be more than just a lamentation or lecture about how the world is terrible in still one more lamentable way.

I  have been thinking about that, and I realized that my letter is a prayer for peace, and that sometimes prayers come first and the answers follow from having offered up prayers.  There are, in fact, also things we can definitely do, the Brooklyn For Peace Move the Money campaign is just one small example of what can be built upon.  But, lastly, there is just knowing and having others know what they need to know.  As you will see in my letter when it gets to the subject of the government suppression of such information, knowing and passing along information is very important.

Reverend Ana is about to go on sabbatical, so her response to my request with a sermon will probably be a while in coming.  There will be time for the matter to gestate.  But that doesn't mean that, in the meantime, my letter won't bring about other responses and cause other things to happen, perhaps it will cause something in your own life or some things that you choose to do.

Best and blessings to you all this season.


December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between“worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false“confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally`presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

* * *

Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal reflection where you can read:

•    Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

•    Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,

•    Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,

•    Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,

•    Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,

Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey

•    Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays

•    Saturday, December 24, 2016, Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection

•    Sunday, December 24, 2017, This Year’s Seasonal Reflection: Yes We Are Now Living In Ratnerville, Locally and Nationally, And Yet We Hope And Work Towards Something Different

 •    Monday, December 24, 2018, This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")

Overlaid charts from Noticing New York 2014 article, reshaped to show how Bloomberg's increasing annual wealth at the time makes the increasing annual average wealth of the rest of the "Forbes 400" look virtually flat by comparison- Anything suspect about this?  Read the 2014 article.

 While Michael Bloomberg was New York city mayor, Noticing New York had cause to cover him extensively, including how he used money to control and censor information about himself.

As Bloomberg’s wealth is now being used to buy the “Democratic” party from its corporatist leaders, thus only reiterating how those leaders are actually non-Democrat Duopolists, it is time to go back and look at the suspect origins of the money flows Michael Bloomberg controls.  Now, as when Bloomberg was mayor, that money is being used to buy a lack of scrutiny and a lot of false myth making about Bloomberg. .  So that’s another reason to go back and look at how money flowed into Bloomberg’s hands after he announced his intent to hold political office.

I will be writing a lot more about this soon in Noticing New York to bring things up to date, but for the meantime it is important to know where Noticing New York’s articles left off, with this last article in 2014 about Bloomberg’s wealth increases.

One Last Check As Mayor Leaves Office- Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2013, Plus Updates On His Annual “Charitable” Giving,  January 18, 2014.

When Bloomberg first announced his interest in running in this race for the Democratic nomination, I tweeted in October:

Emoluments Clause violations Round 2: Michael Bloomberg, who threatens to step in to replace departing Biden, did with his terminals what Trump does with his hotels, amassing inexplicable wealth as NYC mayor.

Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson is poised to take on new responsibilities holding her position as BPL head.  It will occur with a merger that will make the Brooklyn Historical Society in Brooklyn Heights a junior subcomponent of the Brooklyn Public Library, which will now assume the role of the “parent institute” of the Historical Society.  This combination was announced by the BPL’s press release, February 27, 2020.

As the plans are solidifying, Ms. Johnson sat down in an interview to describe how the merger plan had come about, and why these plans will be good the BPL’s overall plans and partnership expansions and why it will be good for the history that people will remember.  “Our eye first landed on the Brooklyn Historical Society as an institution that we should attend more to when we were making plans for the consolidating shrinkage plans involving the shrink-and-sink sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library across the street and a few yards down” said Ms. Johnson.  The Brooklyn Heights Library was being replaced by a luxury tower as a result of the real estate deal that Ms. Johnson steered through the BPL.  It was once Brooklyn’s second biggest library, the Business, Career and Education Library and a federal depository library to boot.

Ms. Johnson said that when the BPL was selling that library it needed a small temporary library to replace it for a time until a planned reduced size library could be built under the luxury tower that was planned. “We considered putting the small temporary library in the Brooklyn Historical Society,” said Ms. Johnson, “we actually talked to them about that.”  Johnson pointed out that the Brooklyn Historical Society is a library itself, which she said might have allowed them to argue the temporary arrangement involved a bigger aggregate book count.  Johnson pointed out that consolidating shrinkages like what the BPL was doing with the real estate deal sale of the Brooklyn Heights library, with its theoretically sending books and functions to the Grand Army Plaza BPL library, didn’t have to involve just an institutional consolidation of BPL or NYC libraries, like with the New York Public Library’s proposed Central Library Plan.

“These consolidating shrinkages can also be inter-institutional,” said Ms. Johnson.  “That’s what we would have had if we had used Brooklyn Historical Society space for the interim library, and it is the kind of thing we are doing where we are moving the Brower Park Library into the Prospect Heights Children’s Museum to reduce the museum’s previously expanded space,” said Ms. Johnson.

Ms. Johnson, smiled, very pleased with herself, as she then got to the subject of the Othmer money, funds left to Brooklyn institutions by a quiet unassuming Brooklyn couple nobody knew had become superwealthy after they invested with their friend Warren Buffett.  Said Ms. Johnson:

We were talking to the Historical Society about these possibilities back when we were making plans in 2013.  Given the timing, we were almost forced to notice then, due to certain commonalities, something else we needed to think about.  The Historical Society was one of the institutions that was among those Brooklyn institutions famously benefitting, receiving millions of dollars, from the surprise bequests of Donald and Mildred Othmer.  2013 was also the mayoral election year when another such institution benefitting from such Othmer bequests was being shutdown: Long Island College Hospital.  With gifts during their lives and then thereafter from the wills of the two Othmers, Long Island Collage Hospital received a phenomenal endowment from the Othmers, more than $135 million.

It would have been impossible to reach that money and make better use of it- so the hospital could be turned into real estate transactions- were it not for that fact that Long Island College Hospital was convinced to merge with a series of other health institutions, first with Continuum Health Partners and then with SUNY Downstate Medical Center.  It involved intricate dealings, but this allowed the endowment funds to be posted as security, something the New York State Attorney General’s office was convinced to pre-approve, (as if they didn’t see what was coming), and Voilà . . .   

“Real estate deals and no money sitting around going to waste in troublesome ways that might pull towards different priorities!” emphasized David Woloch a Brooklyn Public Library executive vice president and spokesperson who had joined Ms. Johnson to help her with her interview.  “Activists were actually helping to make sure that we didn’t let the connection go unnoticed,” said Mr. Woloch, “because the activists were pointing out the similarity of how libraries and hospitals were both public assets similarly up for sale.”

Ms. Johnson said that money that came into various Brooklyn institutions from the Othmers pre-9/11, in the later 1990s was almost totally unforeseen.  “It came out of nowhere,” said Ms. Johnson, “it was something of a `money bomb.’”   “And when a bomb hits your house throwing things into disarray,” said Ms. Johnson, “you want to do some cleaning up and vacuuming.”  The good thing though said Ms. Johnson is that, while the money came in unexpectedly, it has been a useful tool, a tracer, to spotlight institutions that might need “independence adjustments.”  “That’s certainly true with Historical Society,” which deals with “history,” which is “precious.”
    
Johnson mentioned that when David C. Chang, Polytechnic's president, learned that his engineering school was going to receive more than $175 million- nearly $200 million- from the Othmers he said: “We start from being one of the have-nots and go to being one of the very well-endowed schools.”  The blare of that unusual Brooklyn brightness has since been somewhat adjusted via Polytechnic's subsequent merger celebrated in 2014 with Manhattan-based NYU.

Ms. Johnson also described how things were faring at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, another institution given money from the $750 million estate of a Brooklyn Heights Othmer couple.  And she explained that people should watch for new connections between the BPL and the garden.

Ms. Johnson that, despite the infusion of the Othmer funds, the Botanic Garden’s basic trajectory, including shorter hours, higher user fees and its increasingly privatized closures for fashionable weddings (the BPL also advertises its spaces for fashionable weddings).  She noted that the Botantic Garden had been able to sell off its science research building that was on its outside perimeter.  At the same time, Ms. Johnson said that it is important that the Botantic Garden board has behaved in an amendable and basically welcoming way to the towers and proposed development that, with zoning change reversal, will be set up along its borders blocking sunlight.

Ms. Johnson noted that the BPL will be implementing a plan that gets“gets Oohs and Ahs” connecting the BPL’s Grand Army Plaza central library to the shadier and more pleasant Botantic Garden space.  The GAP library “will connect with Mount Prospect Park to create a Central Brooklyn green campus that includes the library, park and Botanical Gardens.”  Mount Prospect Park is a public park (with the second highest promontory in Brooklyn) which sits between the library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  BPL's plan involves altering space within the library “dramatically opening up the exterior of the library” to facilitate a new restaurant space within the library building that would unfold to include outdoor café space in the park. 

“All in all,” said Ms. Johnson, “I think the infusions of the Othmer money to the institutions in Brooklyn have met the kind of response they deserve.”  Ms. Johnson acknowledged that not absolutely everyone agreed.  It’s known that Dr. Donald Othmer himself drafted much of the meticulous detail for the bequests in his own will and that of his wife Mildred’s.  Warren Buffett, the friend who handled their investments and made them wealthy told the Wall Street Journal, speaking about what happened with the depletion of the Othmers’ Long Island College Hospital endowment, that if the Othmer’s were alive, “I would think...they would feel betrayed.”
                               
Johnson doesn’t see it that way:

We have something called the cy-près doctrine.  It’s a legal concept.  The concept basically recognizes how inappropriate, essentially impossible it is for dead people to rule from the grave.  The dead don’t know what is going to be what after they die.  Lots of things are going to be unexpected and unforeseen.  The cy-près doctrine dictates that instead of doing what dead people wanted, you should do what you know dead people would have wanted if they had known better.  For instance, do you think the library systems could ever be doing everything they are doing in terms of turning libraries into real estate deals, providing a venue for society weddings, exiling books, and cutting back to much shorter hours, if they had to do exactly what dead people who made the donations to set up the libraries wanted?

Johnson said this was an especially important concept when it came to how precious the possession of history is.  History, she maintains, is too far too precious not to be kept in the hands of those who are supposed to write it.  Ms. Johnson said that was why it was so important for the BPL and the Historical Society to combine into a single unit for historical record custody.  “The history of the last several decades is one that I am proud to be a part of,” said Ms. Johnson, “The overarching truth to that history is that it has been a history of the victories of privatization– I’ll remind you that it’s axiomatic that history is supposed to be written by the winners.”  Ms. Johnson said that as Churchill knew history is to be written by those that command the reins of power.  As Churchill is famously quoted: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

Ms. Johnson said that it was relatively easy for the board of the BPL and the board of the Historical Society to reach agreement about the merger.  “We’re mostly all the same kind of people,” said Ms. Johnson, maybe there is one person on the BHS board who cares about the previous old fusty ideas that people used to promote about what history is, but basically, Ms. Johnson said the BHS board, like the BPL board, is a complement of the kind of people who know what needs to be written and preserved in terms of history: corporate lawyers (good at things like white collar defense for those charged with accounting fraud), mega-bankers and some real estate people.  “Nevertheless,” said Ms. Johnson,“we can improve through the merger and have better control; our BPL board composition is more refined and fine-tuned in terms of what it needs to be in ensuring everything reflects the private partnership goals and this to be respected.”

Ms. Johnson offered an example of what it means to be keeping things on track or not in terms of history that needs to be written.  Recently, Brooklyn For Peace donated its archives to the Historical Society,  over 25 linear feet of organizational records, event ephemera and recordings, and subject files dating back to 1983.  “This is the kind of history people want to write?” scoffed Johnson, “Brooklyn For Peace has been around since 1983/1984— If history is supposed to be written by winners, how does that work?  We have more wars now than ever.  These people are real losers!  These space usurping records are prime candidates for culling.”
 
Similarly in the vein of what makes good historical fodder Ms. Johnson spoke of killing two Othmer birds with one stone: the BHS might also remove records that showed that there were once plans that the 500 beds of LICH were to have been used as a designated isolation hospital in the event of a pandemic.
   
Ms. Johnson said she could anticipate acquisition of the Historical Society would be a boon for all sorts of goals important to her.  She said the beautiful landmark building the BHS was in would be another great place for wedding and society events without her people eager to mingle at such events needing to Uber any further than Brooklyn Heights.  People would not have to go to Grand Army Plaza.  She noted that the New Times had already let the news out that the plan would start “with the eternal New York City preoccupation” of managing all the real estate dollars that could be involved.  Ms. Johnson noted how, in connection with the revealed merger, the BPL has pronounced itself to be “on a space grab,” but that the BPL had not yet decided to characterize this as actual space growth or part of its demonstration of its flexibility exercises allowing it to jettison space.  Mr. Woloch opined that the BPL could always go back and forth on these characterizations; that there was no need lock itself in respecting these things.  He noted that the BHS space might, for certain purposes and at certain times, be nominally cited as an ancillary part of the library space to be tucked nearby David Kramer’s luxury build replacing the Business, Career and Education library.

As Brownstoner notes, important to the “timeline for the merger,” will be necessary that the BPL and BHS are currently having discussions“with the City of New York regarding funding necessary for combining the institutions.”  This is obviously important with respect to Othmer endowment funds has BHS converts into joining the city’s family of libraries and its tradition of creatively underfunding them.

Ms. Johnson said that there would be no “sweeping changes,” respecting the BHS mission, but that she was particularly eager to take on and engage in a “rebranding” for the BHS with a new “less  fusty-sounding” name to proclaim the BPL’s ambition for everyone to understand that the institution would be democratically opened up.  “It used to be even more fusty-sounding,” said Ms. Johnson, “The Long Island Historical Society.” Ms. Johnson said, “when we took the Business and Career Library out of Brooklyn’s downtown, we updated the name; we now call it a `center,’ the `Business Career Center’; we dropped the fusty-sounding `L-word.”  Johnson said “center” sounded modern and distinguished it from the “Commons,” the “Leon Levy Information Commons” that it is above and from which it will be otherwise indistinguishable.

Johnson said the “rebranding” should also make use of some more of the naming rights that the private partnership building the BPL has been engaged with allows, like the BPL’s partnering with the Nets and the Barclays Center celebrated at its last gala in May 2019 where the Nets and Barclay’s center were honored.  “If we put the name `Barclays’ on the landmark Brooklyn Heights building that rules out calling it another ‘center’; you can’t have two ‘Barclays Centers,’ in Brooklyn” said Johnson, “but we might call it something like the ‘Barclays Historical Information Outlet,’ then it would be distinguished and not fusty-sounding at all.”

Ms. Johnson said that she wanted to point out the overall pattern of convergences that she said the merger of the BHS into the BPL was just a one incidental part of: Libraries are also being subjected to consolidating shrinkages while the library is also essentially merging with private sector interests though its private-public partnerships.  She described the converging as going in the direction of a “supremacy singularity.”  Ms. Johnson proudly pointed out to how this convergence even extended to her own personal life and how she was now living in her own personal partnership with Forest City Ratner’s Bruce Ratner, a personal partnership that paralleled the BPL Barclays/Nets partnership.

Ms. Johnson opined that Bruce Ratner was a great man who had contributed mightily to the history of Brooklyn.  She said that people had actually called the struggle that Bruce Ratner’s won to bring Atlantic Yards and the Barclays Center to Brooklyn the second “Battle For Brooklyn.”  Ms. Johnson said there was too much Brooklyn history that the Brooklyn Historical Society had not covered adequately.  She said that this would start to be remedied in a year’s time when the merged BHS would mount a major exhibition of the writings that Churchill created about what a great man he was.  “It is time that people realized Churchill’s intimate connections with Brooklyn,” said Ms. Johnson.  His mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American, a Brooklynite born in 1854 just blocks away from the landmark BHS building, 197 Amity Street, in 1854.  She said the exhibit would be in two parts, the second part drawing parallels between Churchill as a great wartime leader and Bruce Ratner fighting to bring the future to Brooklyn. 

Ms. Johnson said that the exhibit was slated to open in a year, on the first of April 2021, which was why it was being announced today, April 1st 2020.

PS: The shrunk-and-sunk library space that will be in the David Kramer’s luxury building at the sight of the former Business, Career and Education Library is next to and part of the same zoning lot, real estate development parcel as Forest City Ratner’s One Pierrepont Plaza. The underground BPL library parts can connect to the underground Ratner building parts.  The BHS has its own underground parts that are just a few feet away underground from the Ratner building.  The Ratner organization has been excellently adept at acquiring, through political machinations, private ownership of public streets adjacent to its properties.  The Ratner organization is now looking at doing that for the street between it and the BHS building.  If it succeeds (and it may join the buildings with an underground tunnel), it would put the air and development rights to the BHS building in play as part of the Ratner development and zoning parcel.

Today is Christmas Eve.

I have a long-standing tradition of, every year, on Christmas Eve, publishing a Noticing New York seasonal reflection for the holidays.  This year I hardly feel up to it.  There is Covid, of course. Whatever Covid actually means, we have had about nine months of it in New York City.

Over the year, I've written a bit about the Covid-19 coronavirus, mostly at National Notice, another associated blog where I write about national issues, politics and economic issues.  There I have written about the mysteriousness of what we don't know about Covid.  I have written about how wackily inadequate our healthcare system is to deal properly with the virus, because insurance companies seek and succeed in profiting in the most unexpected ways from a bad system.  I have written about how we are losing valuable personal contact and we are losing the value of our faces and facial expressions as a communication device in our Covid shutdown world.   I have written about all the weird and hard to square advice and information we've gotten about necessary Covid precautions, a really good example being what we've been told about Covid, and dogs, cats, hamsters, minks, ferrets, and sometimes children.  I've written about how, despite all its ridiculously impressive graphs of the virus, the New York Times has undependably contradicted its own reported facts about Covid.  

And from the very start, I noted how Covid was pushing us, ever more so, out of the physical realm and into the digital realm, which is very susceptible to the control of others.  It affects such basic rights as free speech and the right of assembly.  You won't find my National Notice articles easily, because now Google, in all its monopolistic wisdom, seems to be suppressing National Notice with its algorithms.

Meanwhile, over at Citizens Defending Libraries where we write about the selling off of libraries, the elimination of physical books and librarians from this public commons, along with the accompanying exploits of privatizing public assets while also privatizing and controlling information, I wrote about how Covid was being used as an excuse to financially starve and set up state and local governments for a round of austerity.  That round of austerity will, I predict, be used as an excuse for more privatizing sell-offs.  Did I mention in  that writing what is being done to the Post Office?-- Will Amazon take over its functions?  Yes, I did.  And describing how these privatized priorities unfold, I also, at Citizens Defending Libraries, reported about how, when construction was supposed to halt in New York because of Covid, the luxury tower replacing Brooklyn's second biggest library continued to build based on the cheeky pretext they should be allowed to because the luxury building could be considered urgent "affordable housing."   

That much said, backing up further, the really big part of the Covid picture that's not getting much coverage at all is how this virus is being used as an excuse and an occasion for a huge upward transfer of more wealth to the already most wealthy.  We can expect the wealth thus transferred to be spent on about the only thing it can go to: more privatization of public assets and more acquisition of all the things the rest of us now own and share. .  .

The best example of this face of Covid as we close the year 2020 is, once again, a familiar personality, Stephen A. Schwarzman.  Mr. Schwarzman is the New York Public Library trustee who has been a central specter in the selling off of New York City Libraries and, going along with that, the privatization of the library culture.   Mr. Schwarzman is a fellow who thinks that the poor should be taxed more and that the wealthiest like him should be taxed at a lower rate than everybody else.  He boasts of his friendship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (remember the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi?).  And somehow we name our 42nd Street Central Reference Library after him?   Somehow we think he should be an NYPL trustee?

Mr. Schwarzman was one of the central profiteers from the 2008 economic downturn when an almost unimaginable number of homes were foreclosed upon and became the property of companies like those of Mr. Schwarzman's.  That was 2008.  2020?: Mr. Schwarzman is very much his same old self, back in the news making money from the Covid crisis, again buying up foreclosed homes.  Schwarzman is saying his firm was “a huge winner” from the 2008 financial crisis and now he thinks “something similar is going to happen,” as he boasts to his investors about “huge increases in rents” and his firm pursues evictions during the pandemic.

Mr. Schwarzman would be good company amongst the pre-reform Ebeneezer Scrooge, the pre-reform Grinch and the sour old bad banker, Mr. Henry Potter, from  "It's A Wonderful Life," all of them subjects of our prior Seasonal Reflections.

All that said, and as much as 2020 has been a year of fervid Covid preoccupation and distraction, I think the best and bigger seasonal reflection to return to is a republication of my last year's letter requesting a sermon from our minister about peace.  We could use such communications in all our houses of worship, and innumerable other places as well.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the simple, but eloquent anti-war 1950 anti-war song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy.  I mention it and quote from it at the end of my open letter to our Unitarian Universalist minister requesting a sermon about peace.  Like my letter, it too is a prayer for peace.

To me its amazing that with powerful songs like this with us around since 1950 and songs like John Lennon and Yoko Ono's“Imagine” added to it (1971), every year at Christmas, when we revere peace, we still have war.  If anything, it gets worse.

The seasonal tradition is to revere peace and still have lots of war.

My letter of last December is absolutely as relevant this year as last.  That's because this seasonal tradition never get old.

 But, as I supply this letter for you to read again this year, I invite you to think about one more thing. . .  And that's how being on a constant war footing with supposed "enemies" and the need to keep secrets and lie to the public that goes along with it, leads to other things.  It leads to other things like the Stephen Schwarzman's of the world having full license to unleash so much Scroogey Grinchiness on the world fully expecting to impoverish the rest of us.

Here is my 2019 December letter praying for a sermon on peace, praying, if you will, for peace.

Best and blessings to you all this season.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between“worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false“confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally`presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

* * *

Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal reflection where you can read, including in 2019 when I wrote my open letter asking fro a sermon about peace where I wrote a little more about Unitarians, Rod Serling, and their relationship to peace and Christmas:

•    Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

•    Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,

•    Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,

•    Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,

•    Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,

Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey

•    Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays

•    Saturday, December 24, 2016, Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection

•    Sunday, December 24, 2017, This Year’s Seasonal Reflection: Yes We Are Now Living In Ratnerville, Locally and Nationally, And Yet We Hope And Work Towards Something Different

 •    Monday, December 24, 2018, This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")

 •    Tuesday, December 24, 2019 An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Double height streetery - Fifth Avenue in Park Slope- last spring it was single height.

(* Also spelled 'streateries')

Mayor Bill de Blasio, (“Build de Blasio” as he is affectionately known by some in the real estate development community) has an even worse plan with respect to his use of “Covid emergency” declarations for a privatizing takeover of public space to enhance private real estate ownership in New York.  It’s an even worse plan and attorney Arthur Schwartz of Advocates for Justice says that he’s going to fight and defeat it.  Mayor de Blasio's plan is that he wants to turn property owners’ street occupation rights into even more development rights than previously imagined.

Schwartz noted how he had already sued when the City Council unilaterally decreed the Open Restaurants Programpermanent and he confidently predicted that he would not let this new, expanded and even worse version of that “Covid emergency” based declaration get one wit further.   Respecting Schwartz’s earlier legal action see: The Village Sun (Real News For The Community)- Locals to sue city over ‘illegal’ Open Restaurants program, by Lincoln Anderson, March 9, 2021

Schwartz previously attacked the de Blasio and the City Council for using the “Covid emergency” as an excuse to make `Open Restaurants Program’ permanent by passing a law (Intro 2127-A), November 15th of last year, that gave the mayor’s Department of Transportation and whatever any other agency the mayor designated unfettered power to create a permanent program to give the streets away for ‘restaurants.’  In the lawsuit Schwartz brought pro bono (representing an ad hoc coalition of community groups under the umbrella name “New Yorkers for Safe Open Streets” a.k.a. S.O.S.) Schwarz pointed out that this extensive delegation of power to the mayor and his agencies  amounted to “unconstitutional” changes to the city’s zoning laws bypassing community input and  “totally ignoring” the City Charter’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), a process that specifically requires zoning change review by community boards, the borough presidents, the City Planning Commission and the City Council.

Schwartz said that the permanent long-term giveaway of streets to neighboring properties was a privatizing handout to landlords, and that:    

basically, property owners would be able to charge higher rents due to the permanent availability of the parking lane for use for additional seating.

In other words, with higher rents being charged, there would be no benefit to restaurants or restaurant owners.

Ultimately, the community activist attorney* said, the Open Restaurants program post-COVID would not benefit restaurants, only landlord property owners who would be able to charge higher rents due to the permanent availability of the parking lane for use for additional seating.  “You can’t be doing this without any parameters at all,” says Schwartz adding to his objections,“there isn’t even the slightest framework to hem in the mayor and his agencies from doing absolutely anything they want or can imagine.”

(* NOTE: Arthur Schwartz is the same community activist attorney who successfully represented WBAI free speech radio, "Radio for the 99.5%," the only truly listener supported public radio station in New York City, in fending off a potentially privatizing attack on the station that involved the surreptitious and illegal shutdown of the station in October 2019.)                       

The Village Sun article includes this overview analysis by Schwartz, “speaking to The Village Sun,” he said:

what is currently being seen with the Open Restaurants diktat is part of a wider problem of community disenfranchisement perpetrated by City Hall.

“To me,” he said, “it’s part of an approach taken by the city that is also reflected in the recent proposal by [Council Speaker] Corey Johnson to create a ‘zoning czar’ that would shorten the ULURP process, where decision making on land use is getting more and more centralized and less involving the affected communities. This is imposing the will of the mayor on communities without their having a say.”

Those of us who have been watching the effect of Covid on city real estate are worried that this will also compound consolidating ownership: Are we are going to be seeing greater consolidation of property ownership in a city where a limited number of real estate families already dominate excessively given the squeeze of high property high taxes from a stressed city in need of income while store fronts are vacant as Mom and Pops close because of the virus?  Mom and Pops, unlike the big box stores, don’t have a parallel web-sales presence to help carry them through.  Big real estate owners also seem to have an affinity for big-box chain stores where they can replicate deals over swaths of property. . . All this in a city where City Hall has been handing out huge acreage swath to single owners, like the Atlantic Yards (now “Pacific Park”) project, Hudson Yards, Willets Point, the Columbia takeover of West Harlem, etc. often with the aid of eminent domain abuse seizures of property from smaller owners. And now public streets and sidewalks will be consolidated in that ownership.

Mayor de Blasio has defended making the `Open Restaurants Program’  permanent saying that assuring that permanence will induce the construction of sturdier outdoor enclosures to accommodate restaurant patrons.  He notes that many of the streeteries initially built last spring were ramshackle affairs, thrown up often so improvisationally that they constitute unsettling eyesores to the community.  "Knowing that you can keep, rather than quickly scrap what you build, will generate investment in far lovelier enclosures as people think in terms of a future and build with that in mind," said de Blasio.  

Irving Place is one of the streets where sturdy streeteries are expected to be greatly expanded under the new de Blasio permanence program.

Mayor de Blasio’s new edition of the `Open Restaurants Program’ is supposed to be initially be launched mostly by new regulations issued by the mayor. Ideas for it started to get generated when Evan Moore a Department of Transportation Deputy Director was conferring and trading expertise and thoughts with Max Tolstoy of the Department of Buildings.  With the streeteries built last year becoming more permanent and with the continuing need for such legal “outdoor” spaces to accommodate patrons given the prospective bans on indoor restaurant space, a number of the streeteries were informing the city that they were going with the expedient of building second stories to their “outdoor” space.

Moore and Tolstoy quickly realized there were implications to be considered.   For instance: `Should staircases meet any prescribed code standards?’  This led to trying to think through possibilities through on a more integrated basis.  `Should second stories only be permitted for those who had built sturdier structures making use of the outdoors, for instance, those with locking doors, and operable glass windows?’ Then it was realized that with outdoor staircases possible, maybe even lifts and sidewalk elevators being used, especially if wheel chair access is to be nondiscriminatorily provided, why not consider putting some of the new outdoor space structures on the roofs of shorter buildings?

Irving Place is a good small street to see in microcosm many solid doors and sturdy operable windows on streeteries.

Thinking multidimensionally this way, and thinking of building upwards in general, Moore and Tolstoy realized they had a tool to work with that they hadn’t been thinking about, known to those who understand the zoning code and regulations as "FAR," for Floor to Area Ratio.  The FAR concept, already in the code and thus already available, prescribes that how much and how tall you can build in terms of total square footage will be determined as a multiple of the dimensions of the real estate you own absent any structures.  Thus, formally recognizing the right to permanently occupy what was parking lane space as the addition to the owned property that it actually is, means that all building owners with such space attached have additional FAR with which to build higher and more real estate.

Mr. De Blasio, immediately blessed this concept with the caveat that any new space built with the additional FAR coming available would have to be deemed “outdoor” space for a period of time, a period of time that would also have to have some conceptual relation to the period of time that people think that Covid, at least as a crisis, is expected to be around.  Furthermore, the space would also have to be deemed restaurant space throughout that period.  De Blasio further specified that, somewhat along the lines of some of the legal concepts of `adverse possession’ or `possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ the Moore Tolstoy Open Restaurants Program should henceforth start requiring that parking lane street acquisitions and everything built under the program should be built with a certain level of sturdiness and meet certain minimums of protected enclosure in order to be considered certifiably consummated.

On 19th Street and Park Avenue, one of the city's streeteries is now rebuilding in a sturdier fashion planning to take advantage of de Blasio program loans for structures of greater permanence.

“But you can’t just expect that people will be able to do all this building under the program with insufficient resources to do so,” said de Blasio.  That is why eligible owners applying to City Hall for approval will be able to take out loans from the city, “Sturdier Construction Underwriting Motivation” loans.  Modeling the program on the federal Covid program Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, these loans will likewise be forgiven if the structures built are sturdy enough to stand for one year.  The loans will be funded by tax-exempt bonds issued by Goldman Sachs.  The City’s former deputy mayor for housing under de Blasio, Alicia Glen will get a finder's fee for the bond transaction.  Although Glen is not now with Goldman, she came to work for de Blasio as Deputy Mayor for Housing from her previous position with Goldman where she led Goldman Sachs’s Urban Investment Group.  Glen said that it required a lot of thinking, `to whom the loans should go,' but that Goldman was advising that loans should, for logical reasons, go to the property owners, not the restaurant operators.  She said this was the advice the city was going to go with.

Most of the streeteries on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, the neighborhood from which de Blasio originally hails, are expected to go to two story editions

Because most of the loans are expected to be forgiven rather than repaid, the source of funds for bond repayment will have to come form another source.  Goldman has decided the bonds will be tax-increment bonds.  Instead of any repayment funds having to come from the real property owners acquiring new properties and building rights under the program, the bonds will be paid off by higher taxes (tax-increments) that the rest of each neighborhood’s properties will pay. This is justified, says Glen, by the additional value and overall uplift the new building and dining spots will add to the neighborhoods.  To encourage their acquisitions, the street property acquiring owners will be exempt from real estate taxes for five years.

Arthur Schwartz says he will fight the new Moore Tolstoy Open Restaurants Program for all the same exact reasons he brought his lawsuit against de Blasio’s initial Intro 2127-A version of the program prior to these new expansive interpretations, and he emphasizes that this version has all those same faults, flaws and unconstitutionalities, while at the same time "being ten times worse" . .  Schwartz says he is absolutely confident he will prevail. . .

. . . Nevertheless, mayor de Blasio is set to boldly announce, in a press conference today, the Moore Tolstoy Open Restaurants Program along with Goldman's imminent issuance of its tax-increment bonds for  the“Sturdier Construction Underwriting Motivation” ("SCUM") program loans.  That should make a lot of restaurant landlords happy, this first day of April, April 1st.

Another streeterie in Park Slope that just went to two stories in March.

And one more

Julian Assange at Christmas- The center image from the WeeklyLeaks site and magazine- Julian, in his prison cell, chained cannot reach the keyboard to give us truth.

Today is Christmas Eve.

I have a long-standing tradition of, every year, on Christmas Eve, publishing a Noticing New York seasonal reflection for the holidays.  They can be bittersweet, because, well. . . we have a ways of not living up to the holidays.

This year? 

I went to an event today.  What better way to spend Christmas Eve in a way that could be true to the  spirit of this holiday?

I had to sort of promise to my daughter that it would be sparsely attended, only maybe 18 people, I said.  But it was an important group of people.  And our number, while perhaps too small, turned out to be larger than that (photos at the end of this post).

My daughter has in mind to travel in the next few days.  It has to do with love and affection.  She wants to go see her boyfriend.  As you know, we have all of these lockdowns affecting us, so she is worried about travel restrictions.  She was understandably worried that possible Covid exposures could affect her plans.  As it is, we are getting word of airlines cancelling or contemplating cancelling their flights. 

The lock downs on travel are, in an of themselves, a sort of restriction on communication because there is nothing like traveling to visit somewhere to communicate what that place is really like or what is going on in other places in the world.  But my daughter's worry about my `assembling'with others at a demonstration, along with the sparse turnout we now might routinely get for such things, and the general hesitancy for so many of us to be with people people, is another shutting down of communication and of the communal actions that may flow that.

The demonstration I went to today was a vigil for Julian Assange outside the offices of NBC/MSNBC here in New York City.  Why?  Because MSNBC (Joe Scarborough and Clair McCaskil) has been lying about Julian Assange basically looking falsifying the record to stoke anger to facilitate his continued persecution.  And persecuting Julian Assange is about about shutting down our communications, shutting down free speech and shutting down the the kind of journalism that holds the powerful accountable.

Most conspicuously, it is about shutting down those that would shine the kind of journalistic light on and truth telling about the actions of the powerful that might end our endless wars.  But Julian Assange has also worked to shed light on so much else of importance, never publishing anything incorrect (something the New York Time sand Washington Post could never claim).  For instance, Assange published at least sixteen revelations highly relevant to deceptions by the powerful about climate change, important background for the recent Glasgow conference.

And Assange isn't the only one doing work to hold the powerful accountable about climate change that is being persecuted.  Environmental justice attorney Steve Donziger is also being persecuted and being held unjustly incarcerated right now.

This Christmas we are entering our third year of Covid lock downs and restrictions.  And since my doctor and a number of other people tell me, including friends that were sick, it is apparently our third Christmas and Christmas Eve with Covid.  We think Covid has been in New York City since September or October of 2019.  It is also the third Christmas Steve  Donziger is spending incarcerated because he won an environmental lawsuit against Chevron/Texaco and  somehow our federal judiciary system was privatized in a way that allowed Chevron's law firms to prosecute him for that effrontery, see: What Library Defenders Need To Know About The Imprisonment of Environmental Attorney Steve Donziger Because He Obtained a Judgment Against Chevron For Its Pollution of The Amazon, Monday, November 1, 2021.

Like the shutdown and imprisonment of Julian Assange, the incarceration of Donziger and the way it hasn't been covered by the silent corporate media is a shutdown of information about the control the powerful are exercising over the flow of information. 

Former U.S. Attorney General and antiwar and social justice advocate, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark- died April 9, 2021– Whenever he went to a new country the first thing he wanted was to be taken to see that country’s prisons to understand the country better.

Who we in the United States imprison, or sometimes encourage our other colony countries like Britain to imprison tells a story about us.

I am a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of  Brooklyn.  Every week we are asked who we are praying for.  I list Julian Assange with others every week that we imprison. I don't know if I am being heard, but my list every week (you could so something like this too) goes something like this:

•        We give our love and support to journalist and peace advocate Julian Assange, ordered by a British court a week ago to be put into the hands of those who secretly plotted to assassinate and silence him.  The US has promised the Brits not to treat Assange cruelly unless the US decides to. Love to Julian’s family, including his brother Gabriel, who we met here in New York where, with their father John, they pleaded for our support as American people to free Julian from his more than now 11 years of incarceration and torture, his now being held incommunicado (currently in Belmash, “Britains’ Guantanamo Bay”), and to remind us about standing for the idea of First Amendment freedom to speak truth to power and to speak against war and war crimes and speak the truth about governments conniving not to handle climate change.

    •    Our heart is with Steven Donziger- Environmental attorney serving a six-month prison sentence on top of more than two years previous home incarceration BECAUSE he helped indigenous people in Ecuador's Amazon legally win substantial damages for the Chevron/Texaco oil company’s pollution and poisoning of their land and people.  -(In a mockery of justice, Donziger’s prosecution was handed over to Chevron, privatizing the judicial system as the NY Times sits passive and silent on the sidelines, one of its lawyer working for Chevron)- Oil Companies like Chevron also take us to war.  Donziger returned to house arrest the week before last from Danbury federal prison since there were Covid challenges at the federal prison.

    •    Payers for whistleblower Daniel Hale, sent away and incarcerated for one of the longest sentences ever because he revealed information contradicting the New York Times false stories about how our predator drone killings are “antiseptic, precise and accurate”; instead Hale revealed that 90% of the people we kill with drones are NOT those targeted and that 50% of the people we target have NO known relation to any so-called “terrorist” organizations. . . .

         . . .  Hale is being held in a CMU, a Communication Management Unit (“de facto solitary confinement.”- and more restrictive than a Supermax) to keep him and his peace message incommunicado.

    •    Our utmost spiritual energy and support to Journalist and former UK ambassador Craig Murray released just recently after going to prison for an eight months prison sentence on pretextual grounds.  Murray says he will not consider himself free until Assange is released.  Murray was imprisoned as vengeance for his (suppressed) whistleblower reporting and close coverage of the Julian Assange trial in Britain and as a means to prevent Murray from testifying in Spain abut the CIA’s illegal spying on Assange (and plans to kidnap and /or assassinate Assange, possibly similarly neutralize other journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitros) while Assange lived at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

    •    We light our candles and ache for the prisoners in Guantanamo, incarcerated 20 years, held incommunicado (CIA memo saying some will NEVER be released or allowed to tell their story), violating the Geneva Convention, many of them tortured (even to death) as we tried to get them to falsely “confess” to things they never did.-

    •    Love and support to Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, whom the U.S. caused to kidnaped, imprisoned, held incommunicado reportedly tortured, without needed doctors and lawyers (even deploying a U.S. warship for this purpose), for Saab’s so-called “crime” of doing work for a Venezuelan state charity program to feed and provide basic goods to Venezuela’s poor who are being starved by our sanctions.  Saab was recently made the subject of extraordinary rendition (‘extradition”) to the United States for further what. .. . .? And for what crime?: Because his country doesn’t have a corporate capitalist system of government?

    •    We light our candles for the black and brown people who we incarcerate at a far higher rate and for far longer times than those of privilege and convict (often falsely) for crimes that we don’t prosecute white people for– Making us the world’s largest penal colony nation with an incarceration rate more than double any other country, more than six times that of Canada– With about 4.4% and, according to the ACLU, nearly 25% of the world’s prison population.

    •    Those we incarcerate (Kamala Harris’ “DO NOT COME” people) when they come to our country seeking the political asylum we are legally obligated to give them.  There are given no idea of when they might ever be released.—

The seasonal tradition is to revere peace at this time.  And we still have lots of war, what Julian Assange shed a light on and what Julian Assange is in prison for shedding a light on.

December 2019 Christmas Eve I wrote and posted a letter to our Unitarian Universalist congregation minister asking for a sermon about peace.  We have not since gotten one.  My letter mentioned Julian Assange and his contributions and importance in breaking the silence that needs to be broken.  I republished my letter last Christmas Eve. 

My letter of is absolutely still as relevant as it was the last two Christmas Eves.  That's because this seasonal tradition of waging war and never saying anything about it never get old.

Here is my 2019 December letter praying for a sermon on peace, praying, if you will, for peace.

Best and blessings to you all this season.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between“worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false“confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally`presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

* * *

Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal reflection:

•    Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

•    Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,

•    Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,

•    Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,

•    Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,

Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey

•    Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays

•    Saturday, December 24, 2016, Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection

•    Sunday, December 24, 2017, This Year’s Seasonal Reflection: Yes We Are Now Living In Ratnerville, Locally and Nationally, And Yet We Hope And Work Towards Something Different

 •    Monday, December 24, 2018, This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")

 •    Tuesday, December 24, 2019 An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

 •    Thursday, December 24, 2020 Noticing New York 2020 Seasonal Reflection 

Here are pictures of today's Christmas Eve vigil for Julian Assange.

 

Your home is a workplace! Post this there visibly to attest that you are requiring your nanny and any plumber, or private tutors entering the premises to prove they have been vaccinated.

Jezzum!!!

Talk about scary!!

I am even asking myself of this is true.  If it’s true, why isn’t it a major story in the New York Times? . . . But it does seem to be true!  The Gothamist is reporting it solemnly in a way that doesn’t look like a spoof that would have gotten through holiday-distracted editors.  WNYC is sending the story along in emails, maybe on the air as well.

Here is the headline in the Gothamist:

NYC Residents Must Check Vax Status Of Babysitters, Housekeepers Under New Mandate,  by Jake Offenhartz, December 28, 2021.

Gothamist article on de Blasio's Nanny Mandate

This requirement comes from our departing mayor Bill de Blasio days before his administration ends. In a probably obligatory way the NYC Health Commissioner is mentioned as being involved.  The City Council wasn't involved.

Really awful things often get shoved through on the cusp where one administration is exiting and another coming in. That’s true often at the local government level or at top national levels.  It dilutes accountability and blame.  One day, you may not even be able to remember who did it, and where will Mr. De Blasio soon have moved onto by then?

I’ve tried to keep Noticing New York out of the Covidian debate issues, but this is such an authoritarian shift in city governance it can hardly go unnoticed.  You have to ask: What this kind of high-handed intrusion into people’s lives might herald for the future in many areas aside from Covid?

Here is some of the text of the Gothamist article telling the story- escalating fines and penalties starting at $1,000?:

    The mandate, which took effect on Monday, means that city residents who may not think of themselves as traditional employers are now legally required to check the vaccination status of those paid to work in their homes, according to Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesperson for the city Law Department.

    * * * *

    Paying a handyman on TaskRabbit to mount a new flatscreen TV on your wall? Under the city’s latest executive order, the person doing the hiring is technically required to verify the handyman’s proof of vaccination. The same goes for nannies, plumbers, movers, private tutors and just about any other professional not directly employed by an outside entity.
    Those that don’t abide by the rules could face a fine of $1,000 – with escalating penalties on subsequent violations, according to the city’s guidelines.

    * * * *

    . .  Over the weekend, AKAM, a property manager with roughly 50,000 units across the city, informed residents that they would have to obtain vaccine compliance forms from any worker entering their building.

    “Each resident should be able to provide that proof of vaccination to the Management team if requested,” an email sent by AKAM read. “The property reserves the right to revert any fines or other penalties for non-compliance back to the resident if they are determined to be the cause for non-compliance.

All of this with zero reference to the context of the comparable or superior immunity that it is believed unvaccinated people may have from having had Covid already.  At this point, numbers indicate that probably half of New Yorkers or more have already had Covid.  It also seems to have zero acknowledgment of the ineffectiveness and short-term protection of the vaccines, especially when it comes to the newer variants.  The vaccines don’t provide protection immediately (even you can then carry around a card) and a few short months after a “booster” (three?) the protection may have ebbed to as low as 30%. . .

The New York Times has even published on its front page the thinking that: “too many shots may eventually lead to a sort of immune system fatigue, compromising the body’s ability to respond to the virus.”

. . . Meanwhile, a major New York City medical center is sending me repeated emails telling me that children over five should all get the still experimental vaccines.  Is that truly good, reliable advice for a major medical center to be sending out?  What if your doctor has different opinions about all of this?

Do I now have to be fined $1,000+ or fire my parent’s trusted long-term caretaker because her doctor has advised against her getting a “booster,” including because she had bad side effects from previous shots?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from our departing Mayor de Blasio.

It’s history in the making!  Not since New York City’s Landmarks laws and programs and Landmarks Commission were ushered in back in the early 1960s has anything new and exciting been done in this area.  Looking back, it’s always be more of the same old, same old, or, put another way, more of the same old, save old.

But that is not to say that the public doesn’t love its landmarks and historic districts; it absolutely does!  And that love of the quaint, the old and the curious that acquaints us with our past and where we came from is about to be harnessed by two giant developers of real estate, Related and Vornado, who have gotten the go ahead from the city’s Landmarks Commission (LPC- Landmarks Preservation Commission) to show what they can do working with another company that is expert about what the public loves and should love about its history and its past.  That company they will be working with is Disney.

The intention of the new demonstration program will be more and better development in the city while the public will, at the same time, be more deeply, efficiently and broadly connected with its sense of history and with the continuity that informs our city populace of where it came from as reflected by the ever evolving range of architecture that has resplendently bedecked NYC over past decades and centuries.

The public loves its landmarks and its historic districts; it’s one of the city’s most terrifically popular programs.  And the way that New York is imbued with a rich history that can still be observed and absorbed by viewing many parts of the city is one thing that attracts tourists. The attraction of tourists drives an important city industry.  However, the real estate professionals appointed by the mayor who serve on New York City’s Landmarks Commission have noted that landmarks and historic districts pose problems for the public.  They, therefore, invited some of New York’s premiere developers to consult and see what could be suggested using some of the industry’s infamously creative cleverness.

One problem with historic districts is who gets to enjoy them. Partly because they are so desired and sought after as places to live, they have a notorious proclivity to become enclaves for the wealthy.  Because they freeze and preclude further development and density, they also preclude expansions to invite additional populations in to enjoy residing there.  Another problem the professionals on the Landmarks Commission were eager to solve is that this locked-in low density is often, due to history, in central areas of the city from out of which other areas of the city grew.  Those central areas are often, in the professionals opinions, exactly the wrong areas to have low density.  Moreover, historic districts such as Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village often sit atop transportation hubs and the confluence of subway and bus lines around which it is important to gather greater density and development.

The Related Companies/Vornado demonstration program will address these issues by working with Disney plus, introduce into historic districts and landmarks benefits not possible when creaky old structures cannot be retrofitted with new technology.  The program will involve relocating a number of landmarks and historic districts to more optimal areas.  Actually, a better word for what these relocations will involve is `re-creations’ of what gets moved to new areas.  The programmatic term that Vornado and Related have decided to use to describe the transfers to new locations is “reestablishments.”  The reestablishments will allow leeway for there to be significant improvements integrated into them at the new locations.

“None of what we are talking about is without precedent,” said Landmarks Commission Chair Sarah Carroll, “for instance, in Staten Island, we have the Historic Richmond tourist and visitors museum site.  This involves historic structures brought to that location from all over the island to form the full collection of its 40 structures.”  And she noted that, in practice, with the passage of time, most buildings in historic districts transition from being what was once actually at a site to being de facto recreations of what was previously there: Facades have to be redone (brownstone, while soft and easy to quarry and carve, is an exceptionally short-lived material that is never actually replaced with the same dark sedimentary, often riverbed, sandstone), cornices need to be replaced and such ornamental replacements are most typically done more safely with fiberglass design duplications.  In Brooklyn Heights, 123 Joralemon Street, one of the historic district’s most conspicuous historic buildings, a carriage house, is not historic at all; looking circa 1880, it’s a 1993 replacement (designed as if servicing an adjacent mansion) for a 1952 ranch house that looked like it belonged in Queens.  So, in this case, what’s really historic?  

123 Joralemon Street- The historic 1952 house is on the left

 123 Joralemon is an example and lesson in how tastes change and how the flexibility of new construction can accommodate this.  The exterior of the building fits in exactly the way people currently think it should to comport nicely with the rest of the historic district.  When built it was built in 1993, the interior of the structure felt like it fit in with the district that way too, but since then the entire interior has been extensively renovated by a new owner to be the most modern thing imaginable, lots of glitz and glass that’s straight out of the Jetsons. . . But stick a gaslight outside and who would suspect!

Side by side- Will the real Joralemon Street imposter please stand up?

The demonstration program may start small while thinking big, hoping to get its legs under it and to give the developers a chance to prove to the real estate professionals at Landmarks that they are entertaining the right notions in green lighting this program: The candidate historic real estate location that is up for selection for the first relocation is just one single block length’s worth of buildings, 19th Street’s “Block Beautiful” in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, between Third Avenue and Irving Place.  Where will it be moved to?– That’s where they are thinking big!: Sunnyside Yards in Queens.  In Sunnyside Yards there will be room for many future additional relocations.

The "Block  Beautiful"

The “Block Beautiful” relocation gives Disney the opportunity to show off a transformational talent for which it thinks it is especially suited in a way that will superbly advantage the new program.  The “Block Beautiful” is cited as one particular example of changing fashions: “destoopification.”    No, that is not a typo for “de-stupefaction,” that is, instead, a name for a phenomena where buildings in New York City with the traditional style of front building stoop, inherited from the old Dutch designs, became déclassé and townhouse owners all over the city modernized by removing the stoops and creating new entrances on the lowest floor.  That also allowed extra flexibility creating more rooms if separate apartments were created in the building.  But with stunning architectural whiplash, things have changed again in areas like Brooklyn Heights were once-removed stoops are being put back again as hedge-funders gussy up purchased buildings that are again owned and occupied by one wealthy family.

In the dusk of architectural history, stoops can sometime be a `sometimes you see it, sometimes you don't' proposition.

What Disney with its technology will be able to do is teach the history of architectural fashion change by having the same established historic section display different era facades on different days of the week. To an extent this can be accomplished by projections overlaying different lighting changes, but it will also require storing things like stoops that will have to be rolled out and locked into place certain days.  In this regard the reestablished areas will have the advantage of large areas that will be in taller back structures that, with clever design, will not be readily observable.  Says Ms. Ona Lott, a Disney executive and representative about its design capabilities, “at our Florida Epcot center, the new modern, futuristic and big, may be cheek by jowl with our ancient Moroccan Casbah, but you don’t notice the former when you are enveloped in and looking at the latter.”

Putting stoops back in place when they are no longer grandfathered normally can raise all sorts of property line issues, but this won’t be an issue in the reestablished areas as the Vornado, Related, Disney joint venture will privately own the entirety of all the land, including all streets, sidewalks, park and green areas.

Another advantage the reestablished areas will have is there will be well thought out technology using the same sort of tunnels and unnoticed passageways that Disney uses at its theme parks for its Disney characters to appear where and only where they are supposed to.  This will make sanitation and garbage removal a far more aesthetic proposition.  Think of the way things are now says Ms. Lott, the Disney exec: “You have a row of buildings all from the 1800s and outside people are throwing away their 50' flat screen TVs as they graduate to bigger 4K, 8K (or soon 16K) models.  That plus a tangle of discarded routers and USB wires and flavored vodka seltzers is just not very historic.”  Now, in reestablished areas, such trash will head out to the landfills via hidden tunnels that nobody thinks about.  In place of the missing trash, Disney will periodically manifest historically appropriate trash depicted on its own ultra-realistic large flat screens.  And there will be no garbage smell to go with it unless you press the accompanying scent button.

Back at 19th Street, between Third and Irving, it will now be possible to put up a series of new towers like those that have been going up on Third Avenue for some time now.  Proving that a good job can be done reestablishing the “Block Beautiful” at its new Sunnyside Yards location will make it possible to move on to the next goal of reestablishing Gramercy Park at Sunnyside.  “The reestablished Gramercy Park will be quite an attraction, so much so that we are thinking we might actually make it just a fraction larger,” say Ms. Lott, “We will surround it, as before, with a hotel and most certainly the Players Club and the National Arts Club (formerly the mansion with enormous library of Samuel Tilden).” Meanwhile, Vornado and Related will have a whole city block to build on where Gramercy Park formerly stood.

Gramercy Park as seen from above at its current location- one whole city block!

Things will lead one to another.  A reverter clause affecting Gramercy Park’s chain of title and deed means that when that park property is built on, Union Square will again be privately owned. “It’s complicated real estate stuff,” Related VP David Chablis explained.  So Union Square will also be reestablished as one of the linked greenways of the Sunnyside Yards history learning center.  Visitors to the reestablished Union Square will again get to visit the old S. Klein’s department store on its border, because, with the restablishments, it will be possible to rewind the historical clock to any time that’s desired. . .

. . .  But, wait, Union Square, wedged between the Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park historic districts is not a historic district, right?  That’s another advantage to the program; how with more flexible modification, historic destructs can be more easily created and expanded, even retroactively.

Nobody living in what are currently historic districts will be required to sell what they now own, but they will be entitled to first dibs discount acquisitions on properties in the reestablishments.  If they do sell, they may make hefty profits.  Moreover, if they exercise their first dibs options, they and the heirs taking reestablishments property from them will all have continual access to the reestablishment areas without ever having to pay a perimeter fee.  For its maintenance and upkeep and the teaching and education that will be provided in the reestablishments Disney will be paid a fee financed with perimeter fees paid using people’s phones much the way that new York metropolitan area drivers have been using E-ZPass® to pay for bridge and highway tolls.  The areas will be designated with barely noticeable circumference wires rather like certain Jewish neighborhoods have set out the eruv perimeters for Jews observant of the Sabbath in this way.

Vornado, Related and Disney will be working with New York’s three public library systems to research historical accuracy.  This can be useful, because, in Brooklyn, for instance, the Brooklyn Library has taken over the Brooklyn Historical Society, and, now having subsumed it, has renamed it the Center for Brooklyn History* (there is thought of adjusting the name further to “The Center of Brooklyn History”).  Vornado and Related said the fact that the boards of the city’s library systems have been filled with people from the real estate industry and people who work for content control companies like Disney will help ensure the needed corporation in adhering to the desired historical narratives to be communicated.

(* The Center for Brooklyn History is currently closed, physically closed, to the public, but is providing virtual access to some history, plus is providing a “grab-and-go” history supply service in its lobby.)

Mixed in with the reestablishments of New York’s well known historic districts, the Disney company will be integrating duplicates of some of its Disney theme park history re-creations like its Disney Main Street (some building may be done by Alexandria, Virginia and Potomac, Maryland Builder/Developer EAY).  The city is expected to benefit terrifically in that the new historical areas that can be visited and the much more efficient way that they can be taken in are expected to be a huge draw from tourists in the future.

Work by Alexandria, Virginia and Potomac, Maryland Builder/Developer EAY

 

Because the reestablishment areas will be evolved with the special Disney touch, thinking and creativity, the areas can be copyrighted.  Said Dr. Kols, Disney’s Director of Historical Affairs, “The old adage that `history is written by the winners’ has the corollary that `those who get to write our history, get to own it, . . ahem, . .  copyright it.’”  “Of course, any such copyright ownership is subject to ‘fair use’ commentary” said Dr. Kols. . . ,“as determined by the courts reading our lawyers’ briefs.”

Mayor Eric Adams is exceptionally happy with the proposed demonstration program.  In fact, without Adams the program would not be happening. The program’s legalities would be exceptionally tricky, even likely tripping up on various Constitutional prohibition entanglements, except for the New York State provisions (Executive Law Chapter 18, Article 2-B) that allow Adams, as mayor, to suspend laws and do what he wants pursuant to his declaration of the Covid emergency.  Adams says that if the New York City Public Advocate wants to use his standing to challenge any of his actions, the Advocate will have the opportunity to do so with the statute of limitation for a mandamus challenge commencing with the actions that Adams is taking as of this April 1st.

Those who want top-down control of the world would encourage us to be either isolated or in conflict with each other.  But on this cold, frigid Christmas Eve, those of us willing to be together have each other to keep ourselves warm and hopeful.

This is Noticing New York's annual seasonal reflection.

On this Christmas Eve the wandering polar vortex has brought us frigid temperatures here in New York City.  It was ten degrees this morning when I first woke up and checked the temperature.  We attribute these frequent extreme weather events, both extremely icy frigidity and, alternately, sometimes unseasonably balmy warm winter days, to the slowing of the jet stream (caused by climate warming) that corrals the polar vortexes; no longer effectively corralled by less swift winds, the vortexes lose their shape, becoming octopussy and wander out of place.

But in this cold we have each other to keep us warm. . . that is, if we haven't been driven apart or into conflict or driven just to hole up in self-imposed solitary confinement out of Covidian fear.  It's almost 2023 when we will be entering year four of whatever Covid craziness we chose to continue.  And there are those for whom it seems it will never be over, who have gone from not wearing masks (placing some kind of hope in them- just what who knows) back to wearing masks again.  Mayor Adams' city administration recently told people that that's something they should do.

But for those of us who are together, who have not been driven apart, or, as I said, into conflict with each other, we have each other to keep ourselves warm and joyful.

We all now live in a world where people who are seeking to make things increasing top-down controlled try to isolate us.  They generate conflict among us and seek to make us suspicious of each other and generally fearful.  Conflict is generated, not only here, but also around the world.  America is a perpetually warring nation.  At the bidding of the powerful we have a thousand military bases around the world.  We don't do anything about it.

In 2019 as Christmas approached, the season where we purport to venerate peace, I wrote an open letter to the minister of our Unitarian Congregation, the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn, requesting a sermon about peace.  I pointed out that for as long as we had been attending, since the mid-90s, we'd never had one.  It's now the end of 2022,  and despite that request we still have never had one.

My letter request, still relevant, is reprinted again further on in this post.

That was 2019.  In the Covid lockdown craziness era the Unitarian congregation has gone on to exclude from its premises of `welcoming' worship anyone who has not had the Covid spike manufacturing injections and anyone who does not wear a mask.  The church is using its influence demanding these things of the congregation's children as well.  . . . I wonder about the lost art of whistling.  You can't whistle "Jingle Bells" of "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" with a mask on.  I wonder if people will remember how to whistle when they stop wearing masks?  Have you noticed the how you've heard less whistling in the past three years?

. . . .  Of course, you can't share your smiles either.  All your facial expressions are covered up and hidden.  No wonder we feel suspicious of each other and feel more alone and apart.

Did I say that those of us socializing and not driven apart have each other for warmth, including emotional warmth?  Julian Assange is still being held incommunicado and being tortured in a high security British prison, Belmarsh, Britain's Guantanamo.

Last year's seasonal reflection we wrote about Julian's imprisonment on trumped up charges he hasn't been convicted of and should never even be rightfully tried for.  Julian has never been mentioned during a Unitarian service of our congregation.  It's Julian who has said, different times in slightly different ways: "If wars can be started by lies, then peace con be started by truth."

Julian Assange at Christmas- The center image from the WeeklyLeaks site and magazine- Julian, in his prison cell, chained cannot reach the keyboard to give us truth.

 Let's stand together and share truth as we are warm and convivial together.

I still subscribe to the New York Times.  I get it to know where the propaganda is headed.  The Times is always in the lead.  Once upon a time it was called the "good grey Times."  That does not mean that it was accurate then as it cheered on various wars and conflicts such as what was called the "Vietnam War," extending into Laos and Cambodia with between 4 to 5 million Asian casualties.  It only meant that it adopted a pose of sobriety.   These days the Times is embarrassing to an extreme in the way its headlines so transparently proclaim how hard they are striving to sell particular propaganda points. . .   

"Zelensky Plans A Daring Visit To Washington"?   What's with the adjectives?  Really, why "Daring"?  Why not just "Zelensky To Visit Washington."  What's `daring' about leaving a war zone?  Or is it just the real oddness of a foreign leader addressing our Congress?  As we approach WWII levels of spending?

Animated graphic by Will Geary retweeted by Max Blumenthal showing this year's spending by the U.S. on NATO's Ukraine War.

Or could the Times have made the intended objective of this headline below any less blatant?

 

These headlines were from the same front page this week, both above the fold.

Here, once again, is my 2019 December letter praying for a sermon on peace, praying, if you will, for peace.

Best and blessings to you all this season.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between“worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false“confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally`presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

* * *

Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal reflection:

•    Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

•    Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,

•    Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,

•    Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,

•    Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,

Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey

•    Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays

•    Saturday, December 24, 2016, Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection

•    Sunday, December 24, 2017, This Year’s Seasonal Reflection: Yes We Are Now Living In Ratnerville, Locally and Nationally, And Yet We Hope And Work Towards Something Different

 •    Monday, December 24, 2018, This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")

 •    Tuesday, December 24, 2019 An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

 •    Thursday, December 24, 2020 Noticing New York 2020 Seasonal Reflection 

  •    Friday, December 24, 2021  Noticing New York 2021 Seasonal Reflection

Whatever "floats your boat"-  Will the public be happy with big real estate industry families and the New York City Partnership taking over the Macy's Parade?

 

The Macy’s parade must go on!  It’s a tradition.  Just like “The Show Must Go On” tradition.  In fact, it’s the same tradition.  In the early 1990's when Macy’s Department store first filed for bankruptcy, one of the first things the bankruptcy court judge clarified was that the Macy’s parade would still be held.  In fact, later as Macy’s, through its acquisition by Federated was coming out of bankruptcy that bankruptcy judge, Burton R. Lifland, wanted a guarantee“etched in some form of stone” that Macy's traditional Thanksgiving Day parade would continue.  And its Fourth of July fireworks too!  The parade is viewed as an essential “gift to the people of New York,” a matter of vital “public interest.”

The Macy’s parade, approaching its centennial has been held every year since 1924, except for two years during World War II when there was a helium shortage.

In the 1990's the decisions were being made reactively to quell the suspense by issuing assuring  announcements that the parade would continue despite any financial difficulties on Macy’s part.  Now action is being taken prospectively and proactively so that the city will never be in suspense about the holding of the parade again.  A group of real estate families is banding together and forming a working alliance with the Partnership Fund for New York City to take over the parade so as to assure that the parade will continue no matter what happens to Macy’s.

The real estate families banding together to take this responsibility with the partnership are the Ross family (Related Companies), the Roth family and the Zenkendorfs.  Speaking for the Real Estate parade families in an interview, Steve Roth of Vornado said the following:

You have to be looking ahead on these issues and we have been looking at Macy’s with a caretaking eye about the future for sometime now.  And the future does not always stay the same; it can shift a lot.

In 2007 our family members, Stephen M. Ross of Related Companies and Steven Roth of Vornado Realty Trust were negotiating with Macy’s to improve the prospects for the future by, abandoning its landmark building so that we could build for it a new home in a state-of-the-art mall on 33rd street, just across from its 34th street location.  That was to allow Macy’s to put behind it the drawbacks of age and inefficiencies associated with the musty old hodgepodge structure it’s been in for far too long.  It’s much the same reasoning as applies to why we advocate the sale with real estate project rebuilding of our libraries.

That sale and mall creation deal is not what happened in 2007.  It may have been a good thing.  The days of big brick and mortar retail stores may be numbered.  The ultimate future for Macy’s increasingly looks like maybe none at all.  Now, as is also inevitably pointed out (also with libraries-while we are on the subject), we have Amazon.  Also, it’s to be remembered that Macy’s is exactly in the vicinity of our Vornado Penn Station redevelopment rezoning plan to replace the existing neighborhood with new towers.  Those will be Class A office towers extending the gorgeous glass skyscrapers of the Hudson Yards complex to the east around Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.  As you know, this will be done in the name of honoring history with a faithful recreation of the fabled old Penn Station that was destroyed with a beautiful rebuilding to summon it back from history’s graveyard.

The real estate families thought about acting on a broader more collective base through REBNY, the Real Estate Board of New York, but acting through such an association would have limited opportunities for swiftly capitalizing on opportunities arising in the future and confuse claims of branding and ownership.   Mr Roth said that they would nonetheless be looking out for everyone’s real estate interests: For instance, Broadway, with its theater ownership chains and the hotels filled by performance hungry tourists, are a big part of the city real estate scene.  The parade annually features enticing Broadway Show performances as a big part of what it offers and will continue to do so.

The broadening of who is represented with the new management and responsibility for the parade, and ensuring that the public interest will be represented, will come from the signing on of the Partnership Fund for New York City and its participation in the events.  Next year and for the immediately foreseeable future the parade will be retitled as the “Macy’s and More Parade.”

Why is Macy’s turning the parade over to this set of new interests?  While the parade obligation can be viewed as an expensive liability, it is also can, and does, make money.  But who knows how much it actually makes or loses when factored into Macy’s overall profit and loss statements?  Speculation is that the transfer of the parade is a side deal with respect to some other real estate transaction Macy’s has been involved in.  As observed in a Citizens Defending Library post noting that Jeff Gennette- Jeffrey Gennette, named president of Macy's, Inc., in March 2014, was on the board of the Brooklyn Public Library- Macy’s is:

a player when it comes to real estate.   It sold it's Downtown Brooklyn Fulton store (the former Abraham and Strauss) plus parking facility to Tishman Speyer summer 2015 while signing a major Long Island City lease.  In June 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported (similarly Fortune and Reuters) how Macy’s “owns some of the world’s most valuable property and is being urged by investors to unlock that value.”  That language sounds strikingly similar to that being used about libraries, and the Wall Street Journal article noted how such a move could be harmful to Macy’s core retail mission.

Roth said that letting the public be assured, starting now, about the real estate industry’s continued shepherdship of the parade will probable help acclimate the public and quell dissent if there is any subsequent shutdown of Macy’s 34th Street and takeover of its property for real estate development in the future.

Under the new plans, the real estate industry families are looking to the new Co-Chair of the Partnership Fund for New York City, Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla, to serve as the new Grand Marshall of the parade and its official public relations face.  Roth said this should boost the advertising profile of the parade since“Pfizer and its sister pharma companies already buy 70% of the advertising putting news on the national airwaves.”

Pfizer head Bourla will be Grand Marshal of future parades

NYS Attorney General Tish James is looking at whether there could be antitrust violations involved in the new arrangements.  It may be that she is not impressed by what’s being proposed, and it is not clear that she was serious in how she responded being told about Dr. Bourla’s role in the parade.  She said:

Bourla is a veterinarian. There are a lot of animals in the Thanksgiving day parade, not just The Care Bears, but a whole slew.  I’m sure that Dr. Bourla will be making sure that they are all anatomically correct.  After all, somebody heading Pfizer shouldn’t be involved in selling fantasies.

Roth said that the future parade would promote the glories of New York real estate development more directly.  One plan underway is for there to be a balloon float of the beloved Empire State Building tower.  It will point (it will have to pass through the street somewhat lying on its side) to a “star in the sky,” which will be another float proceeding ahead of it, a bigger grander version of the Macy’s star. . . .

. . . But this new float will be one of the parade’s most attention getting new technological innovations.  Using holographic technology and an interior projection capability the float will be able to transform itself, back and forth, before the spectators’ eyes: One moment it will be the 102-story 1931 Art Deco skyscraper pointing to a star, and the next moment it will be a Pfizer Covid Shot needle chasing after the shape of a spiked Covid virus ball. 

Proof of concept prototype rendering

Next year’s parade will also have several new floats to promote Amazon.

The future of the Macy’s parade having been determined, the future of Macy’s fireworks is still being worked on.  It won’t be handled the same way as the parade.  Started in 1976, as the nation's bicentennial was being celebrated, the fireworks run up an expensive bill.

Dr. Albert Bourla and Pfizer are apparently ready to provide the answer.  It not just based on the fact that Pfizer is awash in cash.  In his own interview Bourla said:

The annual fireworks, the explosions, the smell of gunpowder propellant in the air, its accompaniment by big band marching music,  obviously works supremely well as its intended promotion of our military, how our soldiers fought to achieve this nation’s independence and how, now, how our military works hard to assure that other countries around the world are run by the Democratic or otherwise better regimes we think they should be run by.

The military has tons ofmoney.  It’s utterly appropriate that the military is offering to work with Pfizer to fund this annual event.  By this time, everybody should know that Pfzier has a lot of experience working with the U.S. military and being a conduit for joint operations.  Pfizer’s Covid vaccine shots (like Moderna’s) were financed as countermeasures by the Pentagon and by USAID (a not officially acknowledged extension of the CIA).  It helped our business tremendously that the gain of function research to create a Covid virus was also funded by the Pentagon and by USAID and makes complete sense that all of this was done at the same time going back to 2013. . .

People know and understand that the contract we signed with the United Sates to deliver the Covid shot countermeasures was signed with the Department of Defense as a military procurement contract under the “Other transaction authority” associated with DOD contracts ( OTAs) that exempt the arrangements from that standard laws that could hamper military operations.  The military, for instance, made itself available to handle the logistics of distribution of our shots. And we are good at working with our government agencies when things need to be classified as national security issues.  That's why it was no problem for us to be involved on the inside when, in March 2020 was the decision made to classify Covid information as a national security secret.

If nothing else, let’s give us credit for this: We’ve worked closely with Tony Fauci and he’s the head honcho in charge of bioweapons research funded by the Pentagon, I mean since 2002 when the Pentagon started by funneling $2.2 billion through NIH after the PATRIOT Act, Fauci, with the 68% raise he got from the Pentagon for that purpose, has been the highest paid official in government, the highest ever.

Professor of Law Ana Santos Rutschman, whose name was offered to bolster Bourla’s credibility about Pfizer’s close relations with the military,  confirmed that the DOD’s contracting mechanism, known as “other transaction authority,” or OTA, allows the department to purchase items or services thus enabling the government to move faster.  Moreover, she assured that “DOD is always very involved in vaccine R&D,” so such use of the OTA’s is hardly unprecedented.  She said that deployed American troops must be understood to be inevitably and always at risk in their service to the country when necessary, which is the reason for the military to be involved in such R&D.

Expecting these financing arrangements may go through, a new corporation, the Improved Truth Corporation is being set up to enter OTAs with the military and serve as the conduit for funds.  Wulf Matador, new president of the Improved Truth Corporation, says it is, appropriately, getting the seed money to get quickly underway from the Koch Brother Foundation for Improving Truth and the George Soros Truth Improvement Foundation. 

Mayor Eric Adams will be holding a rare Saturday press conference today, April 1, 2023, with Boula, Roth and the other involved participants to more fully brief the press and answer questions about the status of the plan for the parade and the fireworks' future.

 This is Noticing New York's annual seasonal reflection. 

In church, just days ago, we sang a Christmas Carol hymn: "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear."

It has in it this line:  "Oh hush the noise of battle strife, and hear the angels sing!"

Do you believe in angels?  Literally, or figuratively?

"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" started out as a poem.

Here is a poem.  I think of it as an angel's song.

If I Must Die

By Refaat Alareer, beloved Palestinian writer, poet, teacher, and translator.
 
Refaat was murdered on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike.  

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.
If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a tale.

Refaat Alareer taught Shakespeare.

In Palestine the voices of so many are being target for silencing.  Journalists are being targeted.  Doctors and medical worker are being targeted.  The message of such targeting is delivered with awful clarity when their families are targeted and killed as well.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is in Palestine.

This year the celebration of Christmas is being cancelled in Bethlehem and in Palestine.

In Bethlehem in a landmark Lutheran church the there is a creche, a nativity scene with the baby Jesus in a keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble. The Palestinian Lutheran minister there, Reverend Isaac Munther, addressed his congregation in front of it.

He said:

If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble. I invite you to see the image of Jesus in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble, in every child struggling for life in destroyed hospitals, in every child in incubators. Christmas celebrations are canceled this year, but Christmas itself is not and will not be canceled, for our hope cannot be canceled.

The lyrics of "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" were written by a Unitarian minister, pastor Edmund Sears.  He wrote it, it's reported, in a time of "personal melancholy" with the the news of revolution in Europe and the United States' war with Mexico fresh in his mind.

According to Ken Sawyer writing in UU World in 2002: the "song is remarkable for its focus not on Bethlehem, but on his own time, and on the ever-contemporary issue of war and peace."

"Oh hush the noise of battle strife, and hear the angels sing!"

 

In 2019, as part of my seasonal reflection, I wrote beseeching the minister of our Unitarian Universalist congregation for a sermon about peace.  Such a sermon has never been delivered. 

Since then, the "peace" sign you see in the picture that I provided below has been removed from the church worship space.  It's been placed with the church's historical artifacts.

Here, once again, is my 2019 December letter to our minister praying for a sermon on peace, praying, if you will, for peace.  Best and blessings to you all this season.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between“worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false“confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally`presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

* * *

Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal reflection:

  •    Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

  •    Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,

  •    Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,

  •    Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,

  •    Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,

Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey

  •    Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays

  •    Saturday, December 24, 2016, Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection

  •    Sunday, December 24, 2017, This Year’s Seasonal Reflection: Yes We Are Now Living In Ratnerville, Locally and Nationally, And Yet We Hope And Work Towards Something Different

  •    Monday, December 24, 2018, This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")

  •    Tuesday, December 24, 2019 An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

  •    Thursday, December 24, 2020 Noticing New York 2020 Seasonal Reflection 

  •    Friday, December 24, 2021  Noticing New York 2021 Seasonal Reflection

  •    Saturday, December 24, 2022  Noticing New York 2022 Seasonal Reflection

Malcolm is super, Mr. Dylan is super, and we've always known that radio is super, and that's not just a fantasy!

Great news coming up in a minute. .  Stay “tuned” as they say in radio!

WBAI Radio, 99.5 fm is New York City’s only truly listener supported radio station.  (WNYC when its financial statements were last checked is 70% corporate capture.)

WBAI and the entire Pacifica network, of which it is a part, have been on the financial ropes for a while now.  That is partly due to an overall decline in radio listening.  Not surprisingly, that flows partly out of the “creative destruction” of the internet; the internet, which is seemingly free to its users, as it data-scrapes everyone and steers you with algorithms is insanely easy to access.  In many ways it is much easier to access now than terrestrial radio.  Of course, here at Noticing New York and National Notice, we’ve admonished that “The internet giveth and that the internet taketh away.”  Things on the internet can change in an instant and anything there can be snuffed out in an instant, as easily as blowing out a candle.

So the internet may draw you in, but then leave you high and dry.  For instance, the new TikTok legislation isn’t what many people think.  Many people think it’s about one more Big Tech company data scraping, but this time objectionable because of having ties with China.  And that’s why the legislation is rearing its head?  Some say!  Or is it because “Free Palestine” is one of the highest trends on TikTok and the head of the Anti-Defamation League (in a leaked audio) is saying that they have a “TikTok problem” with Gen Z?  Actually, let’s just get real, it’s probably the bigger picture long range plan . . . . the so-called (misnamed) “TikTok bill” allows the government, the executive branch to exercise its `discretion’ to eliminate any website or even internet hosting service.

WE REPEAT: “The internet taketh away”!

That’s why terrestrial radio stations like WBAI and the other four stations with terrestrial signals that the Pacifica network owns are an important back stop or insurance policy against greater internet censorship and manipulation.  Terrestrial radio cannot be shut down and censored in the same way as the internet or as easily.  

That’s why there is great news about how WBAI and Pacifica will likely now be saved by an infusion of cash by monetizing the Pacifica historic archives.  It will give WBAI and Pacifica another go at being the happening place for important alternative narratives.  Legacy media, the corporate, commercial media is hemorrhaging audience, driving away especially the younger audiences as they earn everyone’s distrust and as they bore everyone with establishment narratives that seem increasingly far fetched and removed from reality.

Unfortunately, Pacifica and its stations haven’t been the obvious beneficiaries of the audience shift to alternative media sources (found taking place almost exclusively on the internet).  One reason may be that Pacifica has been too stuck in the past, too tied to its heritages; it hasn’t moved fast enough to keep pace with and help make sense of the rapidly changing world.  

But now that PAST with all its troublesome ties may be what saves Pacifica.  And the answer seems to come from untying those ties. . .

Pacifica’s past and with it, WBAI’s past going back to 1960 when the station became a part of the Pacifica Network and even years back in the 50's before activist philanthropist Louis Schweitzer entrusted the station to the Pacifica network, involves a huge amount of significant activist, political, alternative media narrative, and antiwar history.  It incorporates and has embedded in it the icons of the movements that, over those years, challenged the establishment and ripped away at the propaganda that was being used to perpetrate wars and perpetuate the military establishment and the control of this country by elites dedicated to class division.

And this rich history is preserved to be delved into in the Pacifica Archives, essentially the library of the network’s preserved history, replete with performances and recorded events that can be revisited, as if by time travel.

Since New York City, WBAI’s home, was so central to the nation as a cultural, news, financial, and political capital and hub, much of the most important material in the Pacifica archive, perhaps the greatest preponderance, things like visits by Bob Dylan or coverage of Malcolm X, come from and are WBAI’s history.      

The informative history in the archives is valuable in so many ways.  It can also be monetized to infuse Pacifica with needed cash, and that is the plan.

That is the plan.

Disney has put what is understood to be a very significant sum on the table to acquire from Pacifica the rights to be able to add that history and those events so as to have them join in the collection family of Disney franchises and properties.

Pacifica has been exploring ways to infuse much needed cash.  That has involved considerations of how to capitalize on its assets in various ways.  Nevertheless, insiders familiar with the talks that brought the deal about said that it was actually Disney corporation executives who first conceptualized what was possible.  Reportedly, it came after Disney’s terrific success with the first “Black Panther” 2018 film coming of Disney’s ownership of the Marvel comic book franchise.

When the film succeeded beyond expectations, Disney execs had apparently already been grappling with the question of how to recognize, incorporate and monetize identity politics in the Disney universe, which may have been part of what put them on the path to thinking about Pacifica and its archives, as that kind of politics is something that has come up as affecting Pacifica, a concern dealt within its environment.  But the clincher was that it’s hard to think about a “Black Panther” without thinking of the Black Panther Party, coverage of which definitely has been a part of the Pacifica history.        

The archives will be added the long list of what Disney owns and controls, giving it enormous cultural reach: The original well-known Disney characters and resorts by reason of which its often referred to as the “house of mouse,” Marvel Entertainment and all its characters, Lucasfilm which is the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, The Muppets, Pixar, which is the Toy Story franchise and more, the Winnie the Pooh Franchise, the Chronicles of Narnia Franchise, National Geographic and its history, ABC Entertainment (include news), ESPN, 21st Century Fox, and more recently the rights to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.”
                                    
That’s only a partial list.  Unfortunately, providing an exhaustive list would be exhausting and hardly possible.

Disney has indicated it wants to get more involved in presenting more historical, less fantastical stories.  Disney has always presented a vision of America’s past, say with its theme park’s “Main Street America,” or “Tom Sawyer’s Island,” but the idea is to be more involved in the actual tales that are to be told about America or the world, something it did with its 1995 Pocahontas film.  “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” (1996) presented a version of France’s past and politics, but was much too complicated to tell a good historical tale. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ethically appealing “Hamilton” (on Disney 2020) is a better example of where the company wants to head.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” affords the possibility of an expanded franchise, since the United States has many founding fathers or seminal icons of equal stature, “George Washington,” “Benjamin Franklin,” “Teddy Roosevelt,” etc.  Lin-Manuel Miranda who comes from a politically involved, local newspaper owning family in NYC’s Washington Heights is likely melodically on board for future installments.

Lin-Manuel Miranda provided the songs that musicalized Disney’s animated “Moana” film
(2016- more in the franchise coming, both animated and a conversion to live action) structured around Polynesian-styled characters involved in a Disney version of Polynesian history.

Disney executives have let it be known that owning Pacifica’s archives will help it contextualize histories more easily, for instance, about certain founding fathers where there have been past Pacifica programs about native first American history critical of such figures as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Disney says it knows where to go to partner for strengthened narratives about the United States when it works on productions that it hopes will be the fruit of the Pacifica archive.  One example is where the Pentagon helped with myriad script revisions of the 2008 Iron Man film (part of the Marvel franchise) to make it friendly to, and United Stated military supporting, rather than critical of the war industrial complex as was the basis of the original script.

The Mattel toy company is waiting to fashion its Barbie bodies into whomever will be the next Disney princesses. Maybe a young Mrs. Malcolm X?

The archive acquisition is being announced as taking effect, lock stock and barrel, today, April 1st.