These are submissions to local, regional and/or national media – some published, some not – as well as some very personal observations.
Sections enclosed thus: [ ] have been added to the original.
Those who have read all, or even substantial parts, of my ebook The Wizard of Sacramento: Governor Jerry Brown, will recognize the spirit behind the words.
HARVARD STUDENTS GET A+
On 7 October, the same day Hamas launched a surprise cross-border attack on Israel, a group of student organizations at Harvard University released a statement on social media arguing that Israel’s “apartheid regime” created the conditions leading to and was “entirely responsible” for the war, which has now killed over 2,000 people in Israel and Gaza, including numerous civilians.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement read. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.”
The statement also called on Harvard to disinvest its considerable endowment from any companies tied to Israeli settlements in the West Bank deemed illegal by large portions of the international community.
The historical record of Jewry is complex, but its essence can be stated simply: For generations, Jews worldwide were often reviled and persecuted.
Metaphorically speaking, they have been on the receiving end of the whip.
But when circumstances gave Jews their own government, it is they who have increasingly used any authority or influence they possessed to whip others.
The Israeli government time and again has stolen the property of Palestinians and has used its armed forces to harass and humiliate them. (See Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010.)
Worldwide, those who criticized these practices were labeled by Jews as “anti-Semitic,”
Teachers and university professors who simply encouraged class discussion of such issues were verbally attacked by Jewish support organizations who called for the dismissal or official reprimand of those educators.
Jewish support organizations spied on and intimidated those whose opinion they did not like.
Some Jews, such as those joining “K Street” in Washington, D.C. openly opposed the practices described above, but US governing officials, well aware of the power of Jewish voters, have consistently bowed to or overlooked the behavior of the Israeli government.
And, in the current circumstance of Hamas’s attack on Israel, you won’t see any government official, or media personality attempt to describe the historical past that has created the present.
But brave and independent Harvard students have done just that.
They heartily deserve an A Plus!
[“A prestigious journal published by Harvard Law School has been accused of censorship after it refused to publish an academic article accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, allegedly because editors feared a backlash.
The Harvard Law Review, which is run by the school’s student body, declined the 2,000-word essay – titled The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine – by a Palestinian doctoral candidate, Rabea Eghbariah, after it had been edited, fact-checked and initially approved.
The article, commissioned after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, followed by an Israeli assault on Gaza, would have been the first by a Palestinian scholar ever published by the review. The Intercept originally broke the story.
It argued that events in Gaza – where more than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its military offensive – met the terms of genocide as defined by the United Nations convention. The article also called for a legally recognised crime of “Nakba” (catastrophe), the Arab word used to describe the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes at the time of Israel’s founding in 1948.
But plans to publish it as a blogpost were abandoned after a crisis meeting of more than 100 editors. The rejection was reportedly driven by fears that publication might harm editors’ career prospects by provoking a backlash that could include having their personal details disclosed in an attempt at public shaming, a process known as “doxxing.”
Working on the review is a well-trodden path for law school students, who later advance to high-flying careers in politics, elite law firms, and clerkships at the US supreme court. Barack Obama served as the review’s president during his time as a Harvard law student.
The decision was criticized in a statement issued by 25 editors, who said such a rejection was unprecedented and motivated by fear.
“At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote, according to the Intercept. “The body of editors – none of whom are Palestinian – voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way.”
The review’s editor, Apsara Iyer, told Eghbariah, in an email that the decision “was not based on your identity or viewpoint”.
However, a separate email written by an online editor, Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, and reported by the Nation suggested otherwise.
“The discussion did not involve any substantive or technical aspects of your piece,” Shahriari-Parsa told Eghbariah. “Rather, [it] revolved around concerns about editors who might oppose or be offended by the piece, as well as concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff and HLR leadership.”
In response, Eghabriah, a human rights attorney, complained to editors that the decision amounted to “discrimination” and “outright censorship”.
The article was eventually published by the Nation under the headline ‘The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza’.”
The Guardian, November 2023]
[FEINSTEIN:THE FLIP SIDE]
If fair and balanced reporting is to be respected, the encomiums for recently deceased Senator Dianne Feinstein must be accompanied by the less savory aspects of her political career.
Feinstein was an enthusiastic supporter of the US government’s widespread spying on its own citizens. She called Edward Snowden’s revelation of the extent of this surveillance an “act of treason.”
In her office she snarled dismissively at young climate change activists: “You come in here and tell me it’s your way or the highway …”
Publicly she sucked up to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) after the Amy Coney Barrett hearings: “This has been one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in, and I want to thank you for your fairness and the opportunity of going back and forth.”
In view of that performance, Feinstein was pressured by her own party into stepping aside from chairing the Judiciary Committee should her party win control of the Senate, [a perquisite her long-standing role as ranking member of that committee would normally have been assured].
By 2018 her esteem among California Democrats had so eroded that the party structure declined publicly to endorse her for re-election.
Whether Feinstein’s refusal toward the end of her life to acknowledge the political consequences of her severely damaged physical and mental capacities might be debated.
So please: In fairness, let us remember Senator Dianne Feinstein – warts and all.
by William Smithers
Los Angeles Times
September 28, 2023
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
YOUR GRANDFATHER
HAS ARRANGED FOR YOUR DEATH
Chloe, Jack and Madeline Bresch, has Mom told you your grandfather Senator Joe Manchin has arranged for your deaths?
It is widely known by anyone who follows public reports of the world’s most knowledgeable climate scientists, that unless drastic measures are immediately put in place (and it may well be too late to hope for that), this planet’s civilization will be destroyed: most humans, animals and plants cannot hope to survive the furnace heat that will envelop the earth.
Joe Manchin, Democratic Senator of a state largely funded by coal and gas production, whose personal fortune is largely provided by his ownership and investments in them, has led opposition in Congress to enactment of legislation that would go some distance toward making this country a bit safer from the inevitable horrific degradation.
Chloe, Jack and Madeline, would you please send your grandfather a note, telling him why you would prefer him to help you live a full life rather than die in misery before you can reach advanced age?
William Smithers
Santa Barbara
TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY MUST BE DESTROYED
The Un-United States
By William Smithers
The Santa Barbara Independent
Fri Dec. 11, 2020
The results of the recent presidential election make clear that a majority of American voters reject Donald Trump but do not reject the Republican Party; witness the “down-ballot” success of Republican congressional and state candidates.
But the behavior of these Republicans, together with the behavior of Trump advocates in general, makes something else clear.
America’s racists, bigots and white-supremacists — who have always been with us — but who tend to keep their heads down in the presence of a truly democratic government, have under Trump exploded into cocksure, costumed, multi-parading view.
These Trump neo-Nazis don’t care that Trump constantly lies, that he is a crook, that he has repeatedly acted to degrade women, that he has conspired with the Russian government to influence and disrupt our elections, that he has damaged the lives of thousands of immigrant children, that he has threatened the health and safety of millions of Americans due to his hands-off policy regarding the world-spreading disease Covid-19; that he has acted out of spite to delay and discredit the voice of American voters, that he has used his office to line his own and his families’ pockets; that he threatens national security by crippling President-elect Biden’s efforts to complete a rational administration transition, that he has proved himself repeatedly a narcissistic sociopath, strutting but incompetent.
Like the Nazis of another era, Trumpers echo anything the Dear Leader says: “Lock her Up!’; “Rigged election!”; “Climate Change a hoax!” “COVID-19 is Chinese!”; etc.
Trump’s “Republicans” care about one thing: he has pledged to keep non-whites out of the US, to encourage KKK-types to flourish and to deprive non-white Americans and immigrant Mexicans, South Americans, Afghans, Lebanese, Africans and the like of their voting and humanitarian rights.
These Republicans have enthusiastically applauded Trump’s illegal, unethical and/or morally outrageous actions or have, in classic cowardice, kept silent as support.
They are the Americans, fearful and hating, who cannot stand to know or acknowledge that in a generation, non-whites will become a major plurality in this country. White political and social domination must, in their eyes, be preserved – and at any cost.
They will not change. They will not be reasoning with you. They do not seek to be part of a “united” U.S. They have found their forever champion, and now make their bigotry a battle flag, as fervent and committed as were their 1860s forebears.
Decent, fair-minded citizens have one effective choice:
Destroy this Republican Party for at least a generation.
Not by violent word or deed, but by rejecting for any elected office a known Republican or known right-wing enthusiast: school-board, local council, supervisor — any office that provides opportunity for a further career in support of the foulness of recent years. Choke the plant by severing its roots.
I would go further: If you have a choice, do not socialize with known right-wing advocates. Unless family, work or other circumstances make contact inevitable, leave them to isolated congregation in their own enclaves.
Threaten no one; hurt no one.
Just consign them to the rewards deserved by their racist degradation.
[The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans who hope to establish an honorable version of that party, has been running advertisements critical of the Republicans for months. In July 2021, Reed Galen, one of the co-founders, had said they sought to destroy the Republican party in the present form.
“The Republican Party must be defeated electorally anywhere and everywhere, and it must be left a smoking ruin so that someone can come in and rebuild a new, different, second party in this country,” Mr Galen said.]
The political party whose members refused to hold Trump accountable for his despotic, criminal behavior must themselves be held accountable when faced with those who vote.
[PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE THIS ARTICLE TO AS WIDESPREAD AN AUDIENCE AS YOU CAN REACH!]
FINALLY, A COMEUPPANCE!
By William Smithers
Los Angeles Times
Sat Dec. 19, 2020
In one of Orson Welles’ great films, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” neighbors speculate as to when the impossibly arrogant and mean-spirited George Minafer will ever get his “comeuppance.” Only in middle age, when George is broke and friendless, does this happen.
The film’s narrator comments: “George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance…. But those who had longed for it were not there to see it.”
Now, Democratic Party politics have given us a different story.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who enthusiastically embraced spying on Americans and more recently snarled dismissively at young climate change activists, followed up these stellar performances by publicly sucking up to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) after the Amy Coney Barrett hearings.
“This has been one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in, and I want to thank you for your fairness and the opportunity of going back and forth.”
Especially in view of that last performance, Feinstein was pressured into stepping aside from chairing the Judiciary Committee if her party wins control of the Senate.
a perquisite her long-standing role as ranking member of that committee would normally have been assured.
So, at long last, this real-life George Minafer has gotten her comeuppance.
And, in a world that at least sometimes seems right, we get to see it.
WHO CONTROLS THE POLICE?
By William Smithers
The Santa Barbara Independent
Wed April 21, 2121
Santa Barbara’s city council, meeting on June 23, 2020, debated whether to “urge,” “direct,” mandate or beg the municipal police to act nice, i.e., not to murder or mistreat persons because of race or other improper reasons.
Council member Harmon correctly advised, “These are only words.”
The council’s anti-racist pronouncement is only the latest in governmental bodies’ cautious attempts to negotiate an up-swelling citizen rage at recent evidence of police brutality.
Lesson I: In every group of persons who carry weapons – guns, clubs, mace, tear gas, bombs, tasers, chemicals, armored vehicles, knives – there will be some who use these weapons on persons they dislike because of race, ethnicity, religion, etc. This includes every police department in existence.
Anyone who believes police are all dedicated civic heroes who act only to preserve the safety of others, or who are all unlawful brutes, is living in cloud cuckoo land. Police personnel always encompass both, often residing in the same physical body.
[The police officer portrayed by actor Matt Dillon in the 2004 film Crash embodies this universal truth: On one day he sexually molests a black woman under his control; on another day he risks his life to rescue a person from a burning car.]
Lesson II: The behavior of police in any community is governed by four factors:
-
A community’s governor or mayor. This official will – or will not – act to assure that the community’s police behave always in ethical ways. In almost every community, this official has historically acted to protect individual police from all but the mildest form of punishment regardless of the severity of any crime committed.
2. A community’s attorney-general. This official will – or will not – act to assure that the community’s police behave always in ethical ways. In almost every community, this official has historically acted to protect individual police from all but the mildest form of punishment regardless of the severity of any crime committed.
3. A community’s police chief. This official will – or will not – act to assure that the community’s police behave always in ethical ways. In almost every community, this official has historically acted to protect individual police from all but the mildest form of punishment regardless of the severity of any crime committed.[“Los Angeles officials approved a $700,000 payout to a veteran police lieutenant in September after city attorneys determined his supervisors — including Assistant Chief Horace Frank, one of the LAPD’s highest-ranking commanders — wrongly demoted him after he reported alleged misconduct in his unit, records show.” L.A. Times, Dec. 15, 2020]
4. A community’s police union. This organization will – or will not – act to assure that the community’s police behave always in ethical ways. In almost every community, this organization has historically acted to protect individual police from any effective punishment regardless of the severity of any crime committed. Union members’ strikes, sit-ins, sick-ins, refusal to issue proper citations, etc., testify to the permissive loyalty provided all members regardless of behavior.
[“The Police Protective League, which represents about 9,800 officers, mailed its members ballots last week asking them to donate $22 per paycheck for the next 48 weeks to help the union support its allies, attack those it views as enemies and inform the public of the dangers associated with eliminating hundreds of positions at the LAPD.
If approved, a portion of the “Protecting Our Profession” assessment would be used in part for the 2022 election, when candidates will be running for Los Angeles mayor, city attorney and as many as eight City Council seats. The funds could also go toward supporting candidates in Sacramento and fighting state and federal legislation …” Los Angeles Times, Dec.15, 2020]
Given the history of those who govern – and thereby determine – the behavior of police, what are the odds that we in Santa Barbara will be provided with bigot-free law enforcement?
William Smithers
Santa Barbara
Neither Prompt Nor Adequate
The Santa Barbara Independent
Twenty years ago, as editor of The Green Scene, newsletter of the local Green Party, I wrote a five-page editorial “Fiddling While Earth Burns,” documenting what international climate experts were telling us of the danger to us all should we continue our massive use of fossil fuels, which were heating the planet to a degree that was irreversible if not addressed promptly and adequately.
Nothing has changed in any way adequate to the threat.
That editorial quoted former vice-president Al Gore: “The minimum that is scientifically necessary [to combat global warming] far exceeds the maximum that is politically feasible.”
The succeeding 20 years have only bolstered his claim.
So any participants in April 22’s Earth Day can have nothing truthful to say to their visitors except, “Goodbye to you and yours.”
KAMALA HARRIS
Kamala Harris became CA Attorney-General “not to join the system,” she tells us in a recent interview, “but to change it.”
How is it then, that Ms. Harris as California’s chief law enforcement officer, chose not to prosecute Michael Peevey, the notorious head of the state’s Public Utilities Commission who broke the law by conspiring in a Warsaw, Poland hotel room with company reps to give $25 million to the California Center for Sustainable Communities as quid pro quo to have those utilities foot only $1.4 billion for closing the failed San Onofre nuclear power plant while their customers would pay a whopping $3.3 billion?
Peevey’s job was to protect California consumers, but though multiple investigations showed PG&E had put profits before safety in installing and testing gas lines, resulting in the San Bruno gas line explosion that killed eight people, injured 66 and destroyed 38 homes, Peevey served as PG&E’s biggest ally, fending off accountability and reportedly helping PG&E go judge-shopping for someone who would be sympathetic to the utility in deciding a $1.3 billion penalty phase.
Peevey was under criminal investigation for three years facing readily provable criminal conduct charges, but AG Harris allowed the statute of limitations to run out, relieving Peevey of any accountability before the law.
Co-incidentally, of course, Ms. Harris’s boss, Governor Jerry Brown, had publicly praised Peevey as “a man who gets things done.”
I hope the L.A. Times editorial board will remind readers of this history, certainly relevant in an election year.
William Smithers
Santa Barbara
[“It would be a travesty if current Attorney General Xavier Becerra let the statute of limitations run out and did not both complete the investigation and announce the result. … (Kamala Harris succeeded Becerra – and inherited investigation of this case. This entire comment is relevant to her stewardship.)
“Peevey’s inappropriate relationship with PG&E, the utility he was in charge of regulating, should have gotten him fired in the wake of the 2010 San Bruno explosion. But Gov. Jerry Brown inexplicably kept him on the job. …
“The utilities last week reached a $775 million settlement with consumers after customers filed a lawsuit saying they had been stuck with paying more than their fair share….
“Californians paid a dear price for Peevey’s consistentl putting profits above consumers’ interests. …
“There is evidence of improper behavior already in the public record. The attorney general needs to complete the investigation and be transparent with the results.” (Mecury News.com)]
♦ OTHER THOUGHTS ♦
A REBEL SMITHERS?
Born in Virginia and having many relatives there, I have assumed that some of my ancestors were Southerners who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I could not verify this through ancestry search, though I did via this means discover a related 1860s Southern family, two of whose sons – the older married – were listed in the census. A few years later, the married brother no longer appeared there. A contemporary list of military personnel hospitalized in Richmond includes someone with his name. Subsequent marriage records list the younger brother and the older brother’s wife as married! Surely the missing brother had died. His widow gave herself to the survivor.
I was somewhat startled, when looking closely at the 1865 Virginia map (“Jetersville & Sailors’ Creek”) in U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Volume 2, page 471, to see in the lower right corner the name “R.B. Smithers.”
(Family names sprinkled throughout that map are probably property owners. My ancestral search did not uncover an “R.B.”)
HUMAN RIGHTS
The long arch of human history gives substantial encouragement to those who hope to see governments guarantee individuals fair and equitable treatment, and guarantee equal participation in creating/maintaining the bodies that govern them.
Over many centuries, history records increasingly-guaranteed societal/governmental participation to persons of different race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, economic status and/or religion.
Like a stock-market chart, however, this progressive history is frequently interrupted by contrary motion: eras of domination, exploitation, mistreatment, enslavement and repression by one group or nation over another.
We don’t know how this history will play out in coming decades; we do know there are not many decades left for the civilization in which we live to exist.
CLIMATE POLITICS
As of the year 2023, only a massive, world-wide, coordinated effort to end fossil-fuel development and distribution will serve to protect some humans, plants and animals from extinction.
There is no evidence that this will or can happen.
In 2002, as editor of the local Green Party newsletter, I wrote a four-page editorial titled “Fiddling While Earth Burns.” (See our website menu.)
In it, former Vice-President Al Gore was quoted: “The minimum that is scientifically necessary [to combat global warming] far exceeds the maximum that is politically feasible.”
Nothing in the subsequent 21 years has altered in any way the accuracy of that claim.
Every significant scientific measure of the onset of climate change has exceeded in intensity and extent estimated forecasts made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(“There is no Planet B”)
Civilization as we know it, therefore, is going to be destroyed. The poorest and least politically powerful will, of course, go first – it is happening now – but all will eventually succumb, leaving a planet occupied, perhaps, by scattered animal, plant, bacterial and viral remnants.
I recently read The Russian Job, by Douglas Smith, a book that describes the massive effort of the American Relief Act, organized and directed by Herbert Hoover in the early 1920s, to feed millions of Russians devastated by famine.
Their starvation was so pervasive and acute that many Russians cooked and ate corpses, or actually murdered others, including their own children, to provide themselves with food.
As I read this, it suddenly occurred to me: this is exactly what is going to happen in this world. (See “Percy Bysshe Shelley Foretells the Future in 1818” on first page menu.)
RACIAL POLITICS
Evolution has left humans embedded with powerfully conflicting attributes: tribal loyalty and intelligence.
All humans, including such Neanderthals as those in pre-history, those in Nazi Germany, those in the US states of Mississippi, Alabama and Iowa, as well as those in every other global society, instinctively fear, distrust and/or loathe persons who look, sound, smell, dress, act differently and/or pray to different gods, animals, rocks or trees. This instinct has served to protect them from invasion, physical harm or just a feeling of anxiety. The consequent Neanderthal instinct is to crush the “other” so that no fear remains, no possibility exists of knowing who is in charge.
Bolstering this instinct is an urgent need to feel that one has value. Being able to think of others as inferior – perhaps even non-human – is a potent stimulant for inflated self-esteem.
(When I visited my elderly father in Virginia, a female guest at a local get-together referred dismissively to “that down-county trash.”)
Assisting the Neanderthal instinct, too, is a longing for power: land, riches, societal control. Anyone who has power: guns, clubs, swords, bombs, chemicals, political, legal, societal, is most likely to use the power to control and suppress “the other,” especially those physically weaker and those who cannot pose a realistic threat of punishment for violent or other mistreatment.
But evolution has also left in us a developing brain, an intelligence capable of examining instinctual urges, evaluating them for their actual usefulness to our lives and/or for their compatibility with our values.
It has also given us an “empathic” brain region, enabling us to “feel with” another.
Our intelligence enables us to ask: “Does that person of a different color, different accent, different dress, different religion, really pose a threat to me?” “Aren’t we really more alike than we are different? Doesn’t he or she, like me, probably have a family, want to live peaceably in the world, make a decent living and not be subject to hatred, violence or enslavement?”
Each one of us has the ability to inspect, evaluate and control our instincts.
To put it another way: You can’t help what you feel; you can help what you do!
Complicating matters are those in whom no empathy seems to exist, even when desperate hunger or repression are not present: murderers, thieves, grafters, despots.
Further complexity arises in the ever-threatening possibility of “mob psychology,” the attitude that sweeps over groups of people when its individuals see that others will approve actions or words – often violent or repressive – that the individual would never act on when alone.
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, nations and epochs, it is the rule” (Friedrich Nietzsche).
There is also the extreme reluctance of anyone – even one who may have more than a hint of conscience – to believe anything they’ve said or done makes them a “bad person.”
It may be little more than pie-in-the-sky to think that “What the World Needs Now … is Love, Sweet Love.” But at least a refusal to harm or disenfranchise others, or to applaud or assist those who do, would go a long way.