Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Aung San Suu Kyi stripped of Freedom of Oxford award
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLSGW7GQLlI&feature=em-subs_digest
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Slavoj, Judith Butler & Larry Rickels. Psychoanalysis. 2006 1/3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16kMXUXPOE&t=123s
Be Thankful for the Internet as You Know It, Because It May Not Exist Much Longer
THE INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS
ARE LYING AND AJIT PAI IS LYING!
Posted on November
24, 2017 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
The day before Thanksgiving, November 23, the FCC dropped its
proposal “Restoring Internet Freedom,” FAQ and Declaratory Ruling,
Report and Order, and Order (PDF); they hope to schedule a vote on it for December 14. (Honestly. Why don’t they just go whole hog
and schedule the vote for December 24?) Let me start out by drawing attention
to this remarkable passage in the FAQ:
What the Order Would Do:
• Find that the public
interest is not served by adding to the already-voluminous record in this
proceeding additional materials, including confidential materials submitted in
other proceedings.
What could those “confidential
materials submitted in other proceedings” possibly be? Let’s speculate. New
York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman writes in an open letter to (former Verizon
lawyer and) FCC chair Ajit Pai:
[F]or six months my office has
been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice
and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’
and other Americans’ identities
Long story short: Bots[1]
organized by some unknown entity filed enormous numbers of often identical
comments on the proposal with the FCC. This matters, because as Schneiderman
points out:
Federal law requires the FCC
and all federal agencies to take public comments on proposed rules into
account — so it is important that the public comment process actually enable
the voices of the millions of individuals and businesses who will be affected
to be heard.
Which is hard to do when the
organic comments are drowned out. As a legal matter, Schneiderman seems
concerned with the theft of the identities that putatively signed the comments,
and to that end:
We made our request for logs
and other records at least 9 times over 5 months: in June, July, August,
September, October (three times), and November.
To which the FCC has so far
been unresponsive. As
Yves pointed out:
The Trump Administration says
it plans to ignore public comments, which would seem to open up the ruling to a
procedural challenge by anyone who had standing.
And what I would speculate is
that the “confidential materials submitted in other proceedings” bear on
Schneiderman’s request, which the FCC intends to stiff, since not taking pubic
comments into account would certainly open the FCC to procedural challenge.
With that detour into the
weeds out of the way, in this post I will answer the following questions:
1) What is “Net Neutrality”?
2) What would a “Packaged
Internet” look like? (I needed a phrase that implies the opposite of “Net
Neutrality,” which “Packaged Internet” seems to do. “Rigged Internet,” my
second choice, didn’t incorporate the cable-like package business model; see
below.)
3) What are the real and
theoretical harms of a “Packaged Internet”?
And I’ll conclude with some
thoughts on action to secure net neutrality, past and present. (I will also add
an Appendix on how the Democrats helped create this mess, because of course
they did.)
What is “Net Neutrality”?
In the shortest posssible
form: You are surfing the net at your browser, and your ISP is delivering bits
that build the pages that you read (or watch (or listen to)). All bits are
treated equally, no matter what (“neutrality”). The ISP must treat the bits
that build this page at Naked Capitalism exactly as it treats the bits that
build the Google search page or the Washington Post front page or whatever. So
they can’t cripple us to boost WaPo.
In somewhat longer form, FCC
commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Net neutrality is the right to
go where you want and do what you want on the internet without your broadband
provider getting in the way. It means your broadband provider can’t block
websites, throttle services or charge you premiums if you want to reach certain
online content.
Without it, your broadband
provider could carve internet access into fast and slow lanes, favoring the
traffic of online platforms that have made special payments and consigning all
others to a bumpy road. Your provider would have the power to choose which
voices online to amplify and which to censor. The move could affect everything
online, including the connections we make and the communities we create.
And in long form, as
I wrote earlier this year:
Although the Obama
administration initially set
the table for net neutrality’s abolition — its choice for FCC Commissioner,
Tom Wheeler, was a tube cable lobbyist — a
successful grassroots campaign — which, besides
online activists, also included corporate heavweights that benefit from net
neutrality, like Google — ultimately led in 2015 to net neutrality’s adoption,
as the FCC decided to regulate ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act as
common carriers. (This is like treating ISPs as public
utilities, and the issue is often framed that way, but the two are not identical in function or law). Tim Wu
explains “common carrier”:
The concept of a “common
carrier,” dating from 16th century English common law, captures many similar
concepts [to open access and anti-discrimination remedies for “threats to the
end-to-end nature of the Internet”]. A common carrier, in its original meaning,
is a private entity that performs a public function (the law was first
developed around port authorities).
Taxis,
for example, are common carriers.
So, if taxis were no longer
common carriers, but worked the way Ajit Pay — sorry, Pai — wants the Internet
to work (and incorporating Rosenworcel’s verbiage), taxis wouldn’t have to pick
you up if they didn’t want to (“choose which voices”), wouldn’t have to take
you where you asked to go if they didn’t want to (“blocking”), could take the
slow route to the airport unless you offered to pay extra (“throttling”), could
charge you a fee to turn off the sound for that [family blogg]ing TV on the
back of the driver’s seat (“charge you premiums”), or even charge you extra for
picking you up at Penn Station as opposed to the Port Authority (“favoring the
traffic of online platforms”). The taxi companies would love this. Nobody else
would. ISPs would love a Packaged Internet. Nobody else would.
What Would a “Packaged
Internet” Look Like?
In short form, the Packaged
Internet would look like cable[2]. Ro Khanna tweets:
The FCC is
getting ready to overturn #NetNeutrality.
If they succeed, ISPs will be able to split the net into packages. This means
that you will no longer be able to pay one price to access any site you want.
A more concrete portrayal:
https://twitter.com/Pikminister/status/933020244997693440/photo/1
Here's the man
directly responsible for killing #NetNeutrality , Ajit Pai @AjitPaiFCC
Soon the net will become a #CableTV like money-pit for consumers. Where providers like @verizon @ATandT and @comcast will charge consumers with high prices to visit their favorite websites.
Soon the net will become a #CableTV like money-pit for consumers. Where providers like @verizon @ATandT and @comcast will charge consumers with high prices to visit their favorite websites.
And good luck trying to change
the terms of your package:
ME: I’d like to
negotiate this term of your boilerplate service contract
ISP: Why certainly, let me get our counsel on the line. We are, after all, equally powerful bargaining partners
ISP: Why certainly, let me get our counsel on the line. We are, after all, equally powerful bargaining partners
What Are the Real and
Theoretical Harms of a “Packaged Internet”?
The ISPs say they’ll behave:
We do not and
will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content. We will
continue to make sure that our policies are clear and transparent for
consumers, and we will not change our commitment to these principles.
Too funny. The
Rice-Davies Rule applies to what they say: “They would, wouldn’t they?”
And the FCC agrees with the
ISPs. From the Order:
“Because of the paucity of
concrete evidence of harms to the openness of the Internet, the Title II Order
and its proponents have heavily relied on purely speculative threats. We do not
believe hypothetical harms, unsupported by empirical data, economic theory, or
even recent anecdotes, provide a basis for public-utility regulation of
ISPs.428 Indeed, economic theory demonstrates[3] that many of the practices
prohibited by the Title II Order can sometimes harm consumers and sometimes
benefit consumers; therefore, it is not accurate to presume that all
hypothetical effects are harmful.
The ISPs are lying, and the
Ajit Pai is lying. Stanford’s Barbara van Schewick has a long list of the legal maneuvers the ISPs have deployed to
circumvent net neutrality. And Techdirt has an excellent compilation of real harms where
ISPs blocked, throttled, and generally gamed the net to their advantage.
You know, speculative
instances like that time AT&T blocked customer access to Facetime in order
to drive them to more expensive mobile data plans. Or the time
AT&T throttled users then lied about it (something AT&T’s still fighting a lawsuit over). Or that time Comcast applied
arbitrary and completely unnecessary usage caps and overage fees to its
broadband service (again, thanks to a lack of competition), then exempted the company’s own content from those caps while
still penalizing competitors. Or how about that time Verizon blocked competing mobile wallets from even working on its
phones to give its own payment platform an advantage?
There’s plenty more very real, very non-speculative examples where that
came from, and the problem gets worse if you look at the bad behavior by
ISPs on the privacy front (also caused by a lack of competition). Like when
AT&T decided to charge users hundreds of extra dollars a month just to opt out of
snoopvertising, or the time Verizon was busted covertly modifying user packets to track users around the
internet without telling them — or letting them opt out.
If you think these very real
market harms are “speculative” you’ve been in a coma for the last decade. Yet
this argument that net neutrality is an entirely theoretical problem sits at
the heart of the FCC’s order.
“We do not and will not block,
throttle, or discriminate against lawful content” my sweet Aunt Fanny.
And here is a list of
theoretical harms that a cursory survey of the Twitter provides:
Bitcoin
throttling: “Loss of ‘Net Neutrality’ means US government will be able to
throttle traffic to #Bitcoin exchanges…” (presumably by asking the ISPs to do
so)
Search
engine packaging: If FCC dismantles [net neutrality], and you get internet
from Verizon, they may force you to use Yahoo as your search engine (because
they own it), but PAY to use GOOGLE.
Free speech suppression: From The Nation:
[The FCC proposal] would “rig
the internet,” according to Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Mark
Pocan of Wisconsin and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who say, “If [Pai] is
successful, Chairman Pai will hand the keys to our open internet to major
corporations to charge more for a tiered system where wealthy and powerful websites
can pay to have their content delivered faster to consumers. This leaves
smaller, independent websites with slower load times and consumers with
obstructed access to the internet—a particularly harmful decision for
communities of color, students, and online activists. This is an assault on the
freedom of speech and therefore our democracy.”
Crippled activism: From Tim Karr of Free Press on Democracy Now:
The Internet was created as
this network where, where there were no gatekeepers. Essentially, anyone who
goes online can connect with everyone else online. And that’s given rise to all
sorts of innovation, it’s allowed political organizers, and racial justice
advocates to use this tool to contact people, to organize, to get their message
out.
Conclusion
Net Neutrality is important to
Naked Capitalism. As
I wrote:
Naked Capitalism is a small
blog. It’s in our interest — and we like to think it’s in your interest too,
dear readers, and in the public interest as well — to be just as accessible to
the public on the Internet as a giant site like the Washington Post or the New
York Times (or Facebook). If you agree, please support Naked Capitalism and all
small blogs by vociferously supporting network neutrality in every venue
available to you. Help Naked Capitalism stay unthrottled!
(And if you think the battle
is hopeless, see this must-read by Matt Stoller on the fight that got
the FCC to treat the Internet as a common carrier in the first place.) The
Verge has an excellent article on all the venues where Net Neutrality is
being supported; the tactic that particularly appeals to me is protests at
stores also owned by Ajit Pai’s owner: Verizon. And, as ever, I recommend a
Letter to the Editor in your local newspaper.
NOTES
[1] Via Motherboard:
This one was sent to the FCC
1.2 million times:
The unprecedented regulatory
power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering
innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation.\n\nI
urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory
overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan
light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more
than 20 years.\n\nThe plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal
Obama’s Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote
a truly free and open internet for everyone.\n
Yes, the “\n” was really
there. (I say “unknown entity” because although the New York Post blames “Russians,” they give no source,
and attribution is hard.)
[2] Market fundamentalists
argue that competition will keep the ISPs honest. Which might be true if competition were a thing:
[The FCC] argues that
customers offered a two-speed internet will defect to other ISPs, and that
beefed-up antitrust enforcement will prevent the worst offences. These are not
strong arguments. Only half of American households have more than one ISP to
choose from. Most of the rest are served by lazy duopolies.
[3] “Economic theory
demonstrates.” Stop it, Ajit. You’re killing me!
APPENDIX: The Role of the
Democrats
Ajit Pai, the FCC Commissioner
leading the charge to rig the internet, was appointed by Obama. Wikipedia:
He has served in various
positions at the FCC since being appointed to the commission by President
Barack Obama in May 2012, at the recommendation of Mitch McConnell. He was
confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate on May 7, 2012,[1] and was
sworn in on May 14, 2012, for a five-year term.
Before his appointment to the
FCC, Pai held positions with the Department of Justice, the United States
Senate, the FCC’s Office of General Counsel, and Verizon Communications.
Another Flexian slithers
through the revolving door. Obama no doubt asked McConnell for his very
valuable opinion to maintain partisan balance among the FCC commissioners (one
of those “norms” liberal Democrats are always yammering about). But actually:
Only three commissioners may
be members of the same political party
In other words, Obama could
have nominated a pro-Net Neutrality independent, and chose not to. When Trump
was elected, he nominated Pai for FCC Chair, and that only happened because
four Democrats — remember when Trump used to be a fascist? Good times — went
along and helped him out. Politico:
DEMOCRATS FOR PAI? — FCC
Chairman Ajit Pai locked down his reconfirmation Monday evening in a largely
party-line 52-41 vote. But Pai did win votes from four of the six Democrats who
voted in favor of last week’s procedural vote on his confirmation: Gary Peters
(D-Mich.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Jon Tester
(D-Mont.)….
— So why did these four buck
Democratic colleagues? “I disagree with him on net neutrality, but the
president has a right to the chairman because he won the election,” McCaskill
told John. “I have worked with him closely on the Lifeline issues and found him
to be easy to work with on those issues — and he’s
qualified.” [credentialism!] Peters echoed her on Pai’s
qualifications and also cited his interest in working with Pai to address the
Lifeline program./p>
— The senators like his
broadband views. “I just need a lot of help in West Virginia, and he’s been
moving in that direction,” former Commerce Committee member Manchin said,
lauding Pai’s work in “trying to get the rural broadband fund moving.” Pai is
“working with us,” Manchin said. Peters also mentioned rural broadband,
singling out Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as an area in need: “I found him very
receptive to ways to expand broadband access.” But like McCaskill, Manchin is
“still very concerned about net neutrality,” as is Peters, they told POLITICO.
Pai’s move to roll back net neutrality regulations dominated the Democrats’
opposition on the floor in the last week. Peters said
he “will hold him accountable” and try to ensure “the internet is free and open.”
Uh huh. Let me know how that
works out, Gary.
Rogue FCC Ignoring Majority of Americans That Support Net Neutrality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHeK_o0ks4
The Other, Lesser Known Ways Ajit Pai is Destroying the Internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd_ajI9KTfo
Why Net Neutrality Matters (And What You Can Do To Help)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjOxNiHUsZw
Myanmar's Policy Towards Rohingya Minority Being Called 'Apartheid'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERxQqM_3dE
Thirsty for Justice: How Israel Deprives the Palestinians of Access to Water
Sunday, November 26, 2017 By Zak Witus,
Truthout | News Analysis
Last year, the Standing Rock
Sioux tribe of North Dakota fought loud and proud against the construction of
the Dakota Access pipeline, fearing that the pipeline's inevitable leaks could
contaminate the tribe's main source of drinking water, the Missouri River. As
many of us in the United States thankfully now recognize, this act of
resistance by the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies constitutes only the
latest chapter in the centuries-long struggle by the Indigenous peoples of this
continent against the genocidal forces of settler colonialism. In
fact, the fight by Indigenous folks for their water rights permeates the
globe at this very hour. It extends to South America, Australia and to
Israel/Palestine, where the settler colonial state of Israel, with the strong
backing of the US, continues to systematically block Palestinians' attempts to
access clean water.
The lack of potable water for
Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, and even within the state of Israel itself, is a full-blown health
crisis. A person needs at minimum 120 liters of water per day, according to the World Health Organization, but an average
Palestinian in the West Bank receives only 73 liters of water per day. As a
2009 World Bank report on water restrictions in the
Occupied Territories put it, many Palestinian communities in the West Bank,
particularly in the area under strictest Israeli control, "face water
access comparable to that of refugee camps in Congo or Sudan." In
the Jordan Valley, Israelis use roughly 81 times more water per capita than Palestinians in
the West Bank, filling their swimming pools to the brim. In Gaza, the
situation is even worse: the United Nations estimates that 96 percent of the
water is unfit for consumption. By year's end, Gaza's only source of
water, the Coastal Aquifer, will be depleted, and irreversibly so by 2020, when the UN
projects that Gaza will be literally uninhabitable.
Like many humanitarian crises
across the globe, the Palestinian water crisis didn't evolve naturally. As a
matter of official policy and using great precision, Israel and the US
have blocked every attempt by the Palestinians to develop and maintain
sustainable access to water. In the West Bank, the Israeli human rights
organization B'Tselem, documents how Israeli authorities routinely confiscate
and demolish Palestinian water infrastructure. Most recently, B'Tselem has
reported on the Israeli Army and Civil Administration destroying rainwater cisterns, slashing
pipes and seizing
construction equipment, like welding machines. An extensive
report by Amnesty International in 2009 shows that these cruel
practices of the Israeli military and Civil Administration in the West Bank go
back decades.
The Separation Wall,
constructed and expanded by Israel in violation of orders by the International
Criminal Court, stands as the biggest physical barrier to Palestinian
realization of their water rights. Winding through Palestinian territory, the
wall cuts off Palestinians in the West Bank from their wells and cisterns, as
well as some of the choicest farmland in the area. Along the wall, the Israeli
military arbitrarily declares wide swaths of land in the West Bank to be
"closed military areas," further seizing the already meager patches
of territory left to the Indigenous population.
In Gaza, now in its 10th year
under the brutal Israeli blockade, residents cannot import any materials that
they need to repair or improve their water network, which Israel has decimated
during repeated assaults. The official UN fact-finding mission on the 2008-2009
Gaza conflict (codename Operation Cast Lead) found that Israel deliberately bombed water
treatment and sewage facilities in Gaza for no other purpose than to inflict
collective punishment on the residents of Gaza -- a major war crime.
Subsequent reports by the UN and human rights groups found that Israel committed these same kinds of
unjustifiable intentional attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in
the 2014 conflict (codename Operation Protective Edge), severely damaging what
little was left of Gaza's water and sanitation network.
Furthermore, these crimes were
not the aberrant acts of a few rogue soldiers, but were the outcome of official
Israeli policy. And we know so beyond a reasonable doubt based on two principal
pieces of evidence. First, Israeli officials' explicitly stated before, during and after the conflicts that they would (and did) inflict collective
punishment on the residents of Gaza. Israel's so-called Dahiya doctrine
enshrines this strategy of total war (that is, war against civilians and
civilian infrastructure, not just military targets) into official policy.
Second, we can note, as the UN fact-finding missions did, how Israeli authorities refused to
modify their strategy of indiscriminately shelling densely-packed residential
areas over the course of the conflict, even after the high civilian death tolls
and allegations of war crimes were mounting.
Besides massively and
systematically destroying the Palestinian water system through direct violence,
Israel also prevents Palestinians from maintaining or developing their network
by bureaucratic means. After conquering the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel
issued a series of military
orders that gave the Israeli Army complete control over all
water-related issues in the Occupied Territories and required Palestinians to
obtain permits from the Israeli army in order to pursue any and all water
projects. All unpermitted water installations would be (and were) confiscated
or demolished. While in theory, Palestinians could still manage their water
needs after a long and complicated bureaucratic process, in practice,
Palestinians were hardly ever granted permits. According to B'Tselem, from
1967 to 1996, Israel granted Palestinians just 13 permits, and all these
permits only covered domestic projects; in other words, they wouldn't even
cover the work needed to repair existing wells and pipes, let alone expand the
water network in order to serve the growing population.
In the 1990s, as a part of the
Oslo Accords, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization made a provisional agreement to "share" access to
the Mountain Aquifer, a vast underground source of water beneath the West Bank
and the easternmost parts of the State of Israel. This agreement, like most
agreements made across steep power gradients, reflected the inequality between
the negotiating parties, with Israel taking 80 percent of the water potential from
the Mountain Aquifer and the Palestinian Authority taking the remaining 20
percent. Keep in mind that the Mountain Aquifer is the only source of water for
the Palestinians living in the West Bank, because since 1967, Israel has prevented Palestinians from accessing the shores of the Jordan
River. Israel, on the other hand, has many other sources of drinking water,
including from the Sea of Galilee, the Coastal Aquifer, its water recycling
system (the most advanced in the world by far) and its desalination facilities
(also among the most advanced in the world). Nonetheless, Israel, being the
unquestionably dominant player here, took the lion's share of the water
resources between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Even worse, it was revealed eight years ago that Israel had in fact been
over-extracting from the Mountain Aquifer at almost double the agreed-upon
rate, drying up Palestinian wells while causing potentially irreversible harm to
the aquifer.
Meanwhile, the old oppressive
permitting regime continued, albeit through a new institution called the Joint
Water Committee (JWC) that was meant to review permits for water-related
projects. But, as the World Bank pointed out in its 2009 report, the name of this committee is a misnomer since
the JWC "does not function as a 'joint' water resource governance
institution" due to "fundamental asymmetries" between the
Israelis and Palestinians. Amnesty International described the situation more
plainly in its report, writing that, "The Joint Water Committee
merely institutionalized the intrinsically discriminatory system of Israeli
control over Palestinian resources that had already been in existence since
Israel's occupation of [the West Bank and Gaza] three decades earlier."
The World Bank and Amnesty International pointed out that between 2001 and
2009, about one-half of all Palestinian projects presented to the JWC were
approved, compared to the near 100 percent approval rate for Israeli projects.
Of the Palestinian projects approved by the JWC, those that touch on Area C of
the West Bank (which most do, for geographical reasons) must obtain a second
approval from the Israeli Civilian Administration, and this second approval
process is done without public participation or representation by Palestinians.
So, as much as one-third of water in the Palestinian water system is lost in
leakages due to old and inefficient networks that can't be replaced or
modernized because it's so difficult to obtain a permit.
In addition to the official
state-sanctioned strangulation of Palestinians' water supply, settlers in the
West Bank do their part through sabotaging Palestinian water infrastructure and
resources. Amnesty International has reported on
how settlers have destroyed Palestinian water pipes, poisoned rainwater
cisterns and dumped untreated sewage into Palestinian springs. Recent reports
show this pattern of settler
violence against Palestinians and their allies continuing up to the
present.
Significantly, human rights
organizations have noted that, though these despicable attacks by settlers
aren't officially state-sanctioned, the Israeli authorities rarely investigate
them, so the perpetrators generally enjoy impunity, feeling free to continue
terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors. It takes no
stretch of the imagination to consider how Israel would treat
Palestinians even suspected of such crimes, because we know that Palestinians
even suspected of terrorism sink into the bowels of the Israeli prisons, never
to be heard from again, while Israel demolishes the family homes of suspected
violent resisters, letting Palestinians and the world know that Israel won't
tolerate any resistance to its tyranny.
Lastly, we must remember that
Israel can only deprive the Palestinians of water because the US allows it. In
the past, when Israel committed massacres against Palestinians, or acted in
other ways that US presidents didn't like, presidential administrations have
occasionally threatened to cut off the flow of military aid, and in these
cases, Israel eventually fell into line. But the flow of US military aid to
Israel, roughly $3.1 billion per year (soon to increase to $3.8 billion annually), has continued unabated as Israel
has condemned the Palestinians to die of thirst, in violation of not just
international law, but US domestic law, which prohibits the sending of
non-humanitarian aid to known violators of human rights, which Israel plainly
is.
Water is one of the key
components of life as we know it. If we allow our country to continue to green
light Israel's dehydration of the Palestinians, we will be aiding and abetting
all further deaths and illnesses that befall the Palestinians living in the
Occupied Territories as a result. Worse, if present trends continue, we will be
responsible for yet another genocide against an Indigenous people.
Unlike past generations, many
of us now recognize and regret how our nation nearly exterminated the Native
people of North America. But what good is this retrospective shame if we don't
act to prevent our country from exterminating another Native people, the
Palestinians? The reality is, if we do nothing, the US, through our ally
Israel, will surely repeat these darkest chapters of US history. We can't let
that happen.