It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Fifty four years ago today this writer was getting ready to hitchhike to classes at Brooklyn College. It was a sunny, blue sky, early Spring day, and the college was a few miles from our apartment building. This writer was into just two important things in May of 1970: Meeting girls (as we called them then) and preparing for our school’s first football schedule in over 15 years. Ah, to be twenty years old and looking “lean and mean” with my bellbottom jeans, longish, wavy hair, Joe-Namath green eyes, and white buck shoes. I was ready to Rock and Roll at the campus.
Hanging out on the campus that day, I first heard the news of President Nixon’s latest edict of sending US soldiers into the sovereign nation of Cambodia, along with our bombers, to rout the Vietcong. Up to that point, quite candidly, I cared too little (for my own good) about the shit that was going down in Nam. Why should I? My self-centered narcissism was on cruise control with my 2-S draft deferment. As long as I stayed in school and took at least 12 credit hours a term Uncle Sam could not touch me. The way I looked at it that would be at least three more years before I might be forced into uniform. Yet, when one of my old freshman baseball team pals gave me the lowdown on this latest dose of Nixonian craziness, I took notice… finally! My friend, Larry, in addition to his addiction to the trotters (harness racing) and his girlfriend, was the first “Lefty” I had ever met at school. All of my football team compatriots were not into any sort of politics at all. Why I don’t really know, but I was just like them at this time. Larry said that this latest news was just too much to take for any sane American.
We all got the news about the many college campuses throughout the nation where there were not only demonstrations, but student strikes as well. Everything accelerated when some of our college’s more radical students were demanding that all military recruiters must get off our campus… NOW! Having experienced a few guys from my neighborhood coming home in boxes now hit home with me… finally! I joined the ranks of the protestors and got myself deep into the strike that just like that fermented.
Before you know it I was up inside the school President’s office with a group of fellow strikers. The President had left his office, as had most of the other staff , including all of our professors and instructors. I organized a group of student strikers to join me in getting the campus grounds cleaned up of all the thousands of flyers throughout. I knew the local news would be there real soon, and wanted to show the world that protestors can be diligent in keeping things copacetic. A real trip was when I got a guy I knew from Buildings and Grounds, a handball buddy, to help us with the tools we needed to make things look normal.
The strike took a more ominous tone on May 4 when those four Kent State student protestors were shot dead by National Guardsman; I was just about the same age as them. The cops were soon called in, but our student strike had already petered out. You see, it’s tough to maintain such an energy when 100% of the student population are commuters. So, the war in Vietnam had finally reached many of us students. I for one grew up that May of 1970 to become what I am today, a lifelong Anti (Phony) War Activist.
Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the It’s the Empire… Stupid radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Philip.
Saturday, March 30, 2024
Explained: The outrage over the racist cartoon mocking Indian crew of ship behind Baltimore bridge crash
An American webcomic posted an illustration of the Baltimore bridge collapse incident showing the ship’s Indian crew wearing loincloths ahead of the collision. This came a day after US president Biden praised the team for their prompt Mayday call
The narrative has drawn criticism for both undermining the ship's crew and for its racist portrayal of Indians. Image Courtesy: @FoxfordComics/X
An out-of-control cargo ship rammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, resulting in six presumed fatalities on 26 March.
The Indian crew on the ship is receiving praise from US President Joe Biden, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and other prominent figures; yet, a “racist” cartoon that depicts the tragedy has sparked controversy.
Let’s take a look.
The racist cartoon
An American webcomic has posted an illustration of the tragic event the day after US president Biden praised the ship’s crew, the majority of whom were Indians, for their prompt Mayday call.
The animated film, which was aimed at the ship’s crew, depicts dishevelled men wearing only loincloths ahead of the collision.
An audio clip of people cursing at each other in English with a heavy Indian accent was also included in the cartoon.
The video was posted on X with the caption, “Last known recording from inside the Dali moments before impact,” by Foxford Comics.
With 4.2 million views and more than 2,000 comments, the image has become widely popular.
Criticism
The narrative has drawn criticism for both undermining the ship’s crew and for its racist portrayal of Indians.
Indian economist Sanjeev Sanyal shared the cartoon and stated that a local pilot was probably in control of the ship at the time of the tragedy.
“At the time that the ship hit the bridge, it would have had a local pilot. In any case, the crew had warned the authorities which is why the casualties were relatively few (for such a disaster). The mayor in fact thanked the Indian crew as “heroes” for raising an alarm that limited casualties,” he said.
Another X user said, “It’s shameful that people are mocking Indian crew for the tragic incident. Meanwhile the governor himself praised the crew.”
“This racist trash is one of the reasons that many Indians still don’t prefer the United States, apart from the cheap way in which your gun laws enable your citizens to dispose our brethren due to the same racist agenda without fear,” a third user chipped in.
Biden and others praise Indian crew
Synergy said all crew members and the two pilots on board were accounted for, and there were no reports of any injuries. “All 22 crew members of Cargo ship that hit Key Bridge in Baltimore are Indian,” Synergy said in a statement issued on its website.
After the tragedy, Maryland governor Wes Moore hailed the Indian crew on board the Dali , saying that it was their quick thinking that saved other lives.
US president Biden said that the crew notifying officials that they had lost control of the ship, prompted the shutdown of the bridge, a move that “undoubtedly” resulted in the saving of many lives.
Personnel on board the ship were able to alert the Maryland Department of Transportation that they had lost control of their vessel. As a result, local authorities were able to close the bridge to traffic before it was struck, which undoubtedly saved lives,” stated Biden during his comments at the White House regarding the collapse.
Baltimore bridge tragedy
The ship flying under Singapore’s flag departed from Baltimore port at 1 am local time on Tuesday for a journey lasting around one month to Colombo, Sri Lanka, as per Marine Traffic.
The operators of the Dali cargo ship issued a mayday call that the vessel had lost power moments before the crash. At around 1.28 am, the vessel struck one of the 2.6-kilometre bridge’s supports, causing the span to break and fall into the water within seconds. Puffs of black smoke were seen as the lights flickered on and off.
The six missing people were part of a construction crew filling potholes on the bridge, according to Paul Wiedefeld, the state’s transportation secretary. Guatemala’s consulate in Maryland said in a statement that two of the missing were citizens of the Central American nation. Honduras’ deputy foreign affairs minister Antonio Garcia told AP that a Honduran citizen, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, was missing. The Washington Consulate of Mexico also said on X that citizens of that nation were also among the missing.
Rescuers pulled two people out of the water, one of whom was treated at a hospital and discharged hours later. Multiple vehicles also went into the river, although authorities did not believe anyone was inside.
Tuesday’s collapse might create a logistical nightmare along the East Coast for months, if not years, shutting down ship traffic at the Port of Baltimore.
The port is a major East Coast hub for shipping. The four-lane bridge spans the Patapsco River at the entrance to the busy harbour, which leads to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
The governors of those states promised in a joint statement on Thursday that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will plan to take on more cargo to assist minimise the impacts on the supply chain up the coast from Baltimore.
Other racist cartoons
There have been numerous occasions in the past where visuals have drawn attention to the unequal treatment given to different nations.
In August 2023, a German magazine named Der Spiegel published a cartoon depicting India’s population overtaking China. It showed an overcrowded Indian train passing a modernised Chinese bullet train travelling on a parallel track with only two drivers inside. The passengers on top of the Indian train were seen holding the tricolour.
While people on social media heavily criticised the inaccurate portrayal, some politicians and other authorities have also used Twitter to condemn the cartoon as “racist” and “derogatory.”
In 2015, a cartoon was published in the Australian newspaper depicting starving Indians chopping up and eating solar panels sent to the developing nation in an attempt to curb carbon emissions has been condemned as “unequivocally racist.”
Drawn by the veteran cartoonist Bill Leak, the cartoon received massive criticism for being racist. Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, was quoted as saying by The Guardian, “This cartoon is unequivocally racist and draws on very base stereotypes of third world, underdeveloped people who don’t know what to do with technology,”
In 2014, the New York Times newspaper published a cartoon showing a man, wearing a shirt, dhoti, and a turban, standing with a cow and knocking on the door of a room marked “Elite Space Club” where two bespectacled men donning Western clothes were reading a newspaper on India’s Mars Mission.
The cartoon, made by Singapore-based artist Heng Kim Song, accompanied an article titled India’s Budget Mission to Mars. It received widespread condemnation, with many calling it ”racist,” and accusing it of mocking India.
For the uninitiated, in September the same year, India became the first nation to successfully put the Mangalyaan robotic probe into orbit around Mars on its first attempt. With this, ISRO joined the elite club of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Soviet Union for carrying out successful missions to the Red Planet.
Gee someone should tell all these cops and governments that unions are irrelevant.......
May Day Demonstrators Rally Across Asia Workers across Asia rallied Monday to press for better conditions, often encountering a heavy police presence and, in some places, outright resistance.
- A leading trade union leader was arrested Monday as thousands of police brought the capital to a virtual standstill during a government clampdown on unauthorized May Day demonstrations, an opposition leader said. Chea Mony, leader of the Free Trade Union, was arrested by police and detained for two hours on grounds that he was organizing unauthorized demonstrations, said Sam Rainsy, leader of the opposition.
Demonstrations were planned in major cities across Indonesia, with up to 50,000 people expected in the capital alone to protest government plans to revise a labor law -- cutting severance packages and introducing more flexible contracts that would chip away at worker security. "Don't change the law," thousands of laborers chanted at Jakarta's main downtown roundabout, as others arrived in buses and trucks, waiving green, yellow and red flags and banners expressing their demands. High alert for Philippine May Day Strikes to follow May Day: CosatuSABC News
And this is why MayDay is still relevant and important even today.
'Preserve May Day significance' Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana urges workers and employers to preserve the significance of the world May Day celebrations to be observed on Monday. In a statement ahead of the celebrations, the minister said it was important for everyone to think of those who were still denied basic worker rights. "On Monday South African workers, as part of the global community, will be joining their counterparts around the world in celebrating the achievements and fruits of the struggles that were waged by their forefathers more than 100 years ago." As we will be celebrating, it is important to note that this year's celebration coincides with the 60th anniversary of the historic mineworkers' strike of 1946. It is the struggles of this nature that led to the current improvements in our working conditions," he said. It was important for people not to treat the May Day holiday as an ordinary public holiday, the minister said. "The freedoms that we enjoy today resulted from attempts by the government and its social partners to ensure the realisation of those struggles and I would therefore like to remind our fellow countrymen and women that as we celebrate, we should pause to spare a thought for those who are yet to enjoy these basic conditions."
Bangalore: It's May Day on Monday. But as workers around the world are celebrating their special day, 350 government employees in Bangalore have little to rejoice. They have been working on contract for more than a decade, and now, the Supreme Court has said that they have no right to regularisation. A case in point is B C Karunakar, who has been working as a typist at the Commercial Taxes department for over 20 years. But despite working here for two decades, he isn’t a permanent employee just like his colleague, T Govindaiah who has put in 22 years of work in the organisation.They've worked for 20 years without increments, medical facilities, and privileged leave. And now they will now retire without pension.
And in Montreal workers kicked off May Day early with a protest against the Charest Neo0Liberal agenda. May Day comes early to Montreal
And check out these sites.
LabourStart for up to the minute May Day headlines.
When the Left Attacked the Capitol Fifty years ago, extremists bombed the seat of American democracy to end a war and start a revolution. It did neither, but it may have helped bring down a president.
In the winter of 1971, you could still find vestiges of an age of innocence in Washington. The previous decade had been one of the most unstable in the country’s history, rocked by political assassinations, racial violence and explosions at public buildings. But at the U.S. Capitol, it was still easy to stroll through without having to empty your pockets or show a driver’s license. No metal detectors or security cameras. You didn’t need to join a tour. Which is why two young people who melted into the crowd of sightseers were free to scour the building for a safe spot to set their bomb.
They were members of the Weather Underground. Since 1969, the radical left group had already bombed several police targets, banks and courthouses around the country, acts they hoped would instigate an uprising against the government. Now two of these self-described revolutionaries wandered the halls with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing. They slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber. They hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, the phone call came into the Capitol switchboard. The overnight operator remembered it as a man’s voice, low and hard: “This is real. Evacuate the building immediately.”
It exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Both Europeans lost their heads.
Workers begin the job of cleaning up debris in a hallway on the Senate side of the Capitol on March 1, 1971, following the explosion of a bomb nearby. Officials reported extensive damage but no injuries. | AP Photo
Shocked lawmakers condemned the attack. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), called it an “outrageous and sacrilegious” hit on a “public shrine.” House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Oklahoma) said the bombing was “doubly sad” because it would likely lead to tighter security at the Capitol and less freedom for visitors. The Washington Post’s editorial page lamented “the easy contagion of extremism in a time of dark frustrations and deep disillusionment.”
Fifty years later, we find the nation assessing the physical and psychic wreckage left by another Capitol attack, this one at the hands of the radical right. It would be wrong to give these events equal weight on the historical scale, to simply regard them as insurrections from opposite ends of the spectrum. Dangerous and criminal as it was, the bombing amounted to a kind of guerrilla theater, a symbolic destruction of federal property to protest the disastrous military intervention in Vietnam. The Jan. 6 mob that ransacked the Capitol, causing five deaths, embodied a far more perilous delusion: that a national election was fraudulent and should be overturned with threats and violence against lawmakers. “Stop the War” versus “Stop the Steal.”
Still, the attacks do share historical context. Each arose from a cauldron of political polarization and distrust of government. They were carried out by splinter groups that had abandoned faith in American democracy and would have been pleased to see the system collapse. Both led to heightened security in Washington. Thus it may be valuable to examine the events of 1971, and what lessons those days may hold for our new era of extremism.
One big difference is that the 1971 attack was meant to oppose, not support, the sitting president, Richard Nixon. Another is that the case remains cold. While the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in broad daylight, their faces captured by security cameras, their own social media feeds or witnesses with smartphones, the Weather Underground set the bomb in secret. Members were much harder to track down, since they lived together in small cells under false identities.
The radical group gave the action a code name: Big Top. At first, it looked like a failure.
It’s unusual that we know so much about this particular attack. Even now, ex-Weather members appear to honor an omertà about their activities. Perhaps it was youthful pride that led them to reconstruct the caper in the mid-1970s for the documentary “Underground,” directed by Emile de Antonio. They identified themselves by name, while keeping their faces obscured. Over the years, additional details have emerged from associates, friends and relatives of the bombers, who spilled anonymously to historians and authors including Susan Braudy (Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left), Ron Jacobs (The Way the Wind Blows), Bryan Burrough (Days of Rage) and Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Destructive Generation).
So we know Big Top became a project for two teams. One team posed as tourists and scouted the building. A trash can? A closet? A tunnel? Finally, they found the 5-foot wall. Full of dust, so it probably wasn’t checked regularly. On Saturday, February 27, 1971, the two members of the other team strapped the dynamite and timer to their bodies and assembled the device in the bathroom. As they lifted it into its hiding place, it didn’t sit securely. “There was a ledge where the people who did it thought there had been a shelf,” Weather member Jeff Jones explained in the documentary. “It fell several feet.” After a sickening few seconds, they let out their breath. The bomb appeared intact, still set to go at 1:30 a.m. They left the building.
Top: George M. White, newly named architect of the Capitol, talks of damage to the building during a Senate Public Works subcommittee hearing, investigating the recent bombing, in Washington on March 2, 1971. Bottom left: Sen. Lowell Weicker Jr., R-Conn., stands in crater blasted out of a Senate washroom in the Capitol, on March 1, 1971, as he talks with Chief James Powell of the Capitol Police. Bottom right: Sen. Robert Dole, R-Kan., discussed Senate security at a news conference on March 9, 1971, in St. Louis, after the explosion in the U.S. Capitol. | AP Photos
The group had mailed copies of a letter to the New York Post and The Associated Press, taking responsibility. Sent by special delivery, it carried the group’s logo, a rainbow with a lightning bolt. That night, they placed their warning call. The Capitol police searched, found nothing. Zero hour came and went, and no bomb exploded. The fall must have broken the timer.
“So the organizers had a series of quick calls around the country and came up with a plan,” Jones said, “which was to take a much smaller device and go back in, and put it on top of the one that had been put there the day before. Sort of like a little starter motor.”
The next day, Sunday, the bombers returned, placed the new device, and called the switchboard again. U.S. Capitol Police searched as many rooms as they could in half an hour. According to an FBI report, one man checked the bathroom that held the bomb, saw nothing, and moved on. Only seven minutes later, it blew. Damage was estimated to be at least $100,000, equivalent to $650,000 today. (This week, officials put the cost of the Jan. 6 riot at $30 million.)
Neither Jones nor anyone else in the documentary named the bombers. However, at least three published accounts have identified them as two women then in their late 20s—Kathy Boudin, one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, and Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school whose looks, brains and take-no-prisoners attitude had made her a romantic icon within the left. Neither Boudin nor Dohrn has publicly admitted or denied placing the Capitol bomb. Neither responded to questions for this article.
According to Destructive Generation, it was Dohrn who called Rennie Davis in 1971. A few years ago, I visited Davis at his Colorado home as I researched my book MAYDAY 1971, about the clash between Nixon and the antiwar movement. His memories of the old days were generally quite sharp, except when it came to the Capitol bomb. He confirmed he’d been alerted about the attack in advance, but said he wasn’t told where or when it would blow. He also said he didn’t remember who called him, and he didn’t recall, if he ever knew, who actually placed the device. Davis died earlier this month from cancer, at the age of 80.
Three days after the bombing, Dohrn, already on the FBI’s most-wanted list for other crimes, nearly had been captured in the Bay Area, when she and others picked up some money wired to a Western Union office. A federal agent recognized them, but they sped away and later switched cars to elude the authorities. One of the drivers was Rennie’s brother John. His were among the fingerprints the FBI later found in a San Francisco apartment where the band had been handling explosives.
But the bureau hadn’t identified Dohrn as one of the possible Capitol bombers. The FBI and Justice Department remained focused on Washington.
As recent events have borne out, the federal government often underreacts to perceived security threats from the right and overreacts to those coming from the left.
The 1971 bomb blew at a crucial moment for Richard Nixon. On that particular morning he was winging his way to Iowa to shore up political support in the heartland. The president was struggling politically, his approval rating dropping. Republicans had lost a slew of congressional seats and governorships in the 1970 midterms, despite Nixon’s hope that moderates would approve the way he was handling the Vietnam War—stepping up the fighting while slowly withdrawing U.S. troops. Next year’s reelection campaign was looking fierce; polls showed him trailing the presumed leader among the Democratic challengers, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.
Nixon had largely built his career on antipathy to liberals and the left, and he didn’t need any additional fuel for his visceral distaste of the antiwar movement. A successful Spring Offensive threatened to not only complicate his Vietnam policies, and thus his second term, but also could distract from his grand plan to reopen diplomatic ties with China and remake the Cold War world.
One of his aides, Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., who would later run the notorious White House “Plumbers” unit that plugged damaging leaks to the media and sought to undermine the president’s opponents, fired off a memo suggesting the Capitol bomb could be a rare opportunity. Handled right, it might counter the trend of “softer” support for the administration’s Vietnam policies from “middle of the road Americans.” The explosion, wrote Krogh, “is a chance for us to point out that we have not been tough for nothing. A bomb detonating in the breast of the Senate is as close as one can get to the heart of super-liberal thought in this government.”
Early in his presidency, Nixon had urged the FBI and Justice Departments to crack down harder on the antiwar movement, even contemplating giving written approval to illegal tactics such as burglarizing the homes and offices of activists. Before the Spring Offensive, Attorney General John Mitchell insisted the protests would turn out to be violent, no matter what organizers said. He secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on the Mayday Tribe and three other groups. Now, the bombing fed the president’s belief that there wasn’t much difference between underground militants and peaceful protesters. Reporting to Nixon on the FBI’s hunt for the bombers, his chief domestic policy adviser listed the suspects: “It’s the Bernadette (sic) Dohrn, Rennie Davis bunch.”
The FBI shifted agents from all parts of the Washington field office to the case. They tailed Mayday activists, including four young people who drove north the day after the bombing, finally stopping them on a Pennsylvania highway. The agents, brandishing shotguns, searched their car but found no reason to detain them.
After all the investigating, only one person was taken into custody in connection with the bombing. She was a tall 19-year-old blonde from California named Leslie Bacon, who had been helping book musicians for the rallies. The FBI found witnesses who said they saw Bacon in the Capitol the day before the blast. When she denied it, she was charged with lying to the grand jury. Weather wrote an open letter to Bacon’s mother, saying she was innocent: “Mrs. Bacon, we cannot turn ourselves in to save Leslie. She is a committed revolutionary and understands this.”
At least a dozen other activists were subpoenaed before grand juries in New York, Detroit and Washington. All refused to answer questions. Some taunted the feds, like Judy Gumbo Albert, the driver of the car stopped in Pennsylvania, who declared of the bombing: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.” Prosecutors had to decide whether to bring Bacon to trial anyway. But by the time the matter came up, the Supreme Court had issued a decision that effectively would have forced the government to disclose details of its surveillance. The Watergate burglars had just been caught, and the last thing the administration needed was another bugging scandal. Nixon himself ordered the Bacon case dropped. She and the other activists went free. Bacon has continued to say she had nothing to do with the bombing.
The FBI, on Oct. 14, 1970, added to its 10 Most Wanted list of fugitives Bernardine Rae Dohrn, a self-proclaimed Communist revolutionary who advocates widespread terrorist bombings. The FBI described Dohrn, 28, as a reputed underground leader of the "Violence-Oriented Weatherman Faction of Students for a Democratic Society." | Getty Images
The Weather Underground continued to stage nonlethal bombings in the 1970s, notably a blast inside a Pentagon bathroom and at the State Department. (They called ahead on those, too.) When the Vietnam War finally ended, the group lost its center of gravity. By 1980, Weather had effectively disbanded. Dohrn, along with her husband and fellow member, Bill Ayers, came out of hiding. They didn’t go to prison. The government had dropped most charges against them for the same reason they couldn’t prosecute Leslie Bacon, and also because agents on a desperate hunt for clues had been caught conducting illegal break-ins at homes of the fugitives’ friends and relatives. The FBI’s overreach had backfired, but the era of left-wing extremism imploded on its own.
Kathy Boudin was one of the few who remained underground. In 1981, she helped a group called the Black Liberation Army rob an armored Brink’s truck outside New York City. Two police officers and a guard were killed, the militants were captured. Boudin and her romantic partner, David Gilbert, went to prison. She left their 14-month-old son to be raised by her closest friends, Dohrn and Ayers, who became academics in Chicago.
A grand jury subpoenaed Dohrn in the Brink’s case. When she refused to give a handwriting sample, she was jailed for eight months. Her friend Boudin spent 22 years in prison, winning parole in 2003, and now serves as co-director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University.
Neither has disclosed anything specific about Weather’s activities, but Dohrn has spoken in general about those days, with some regret if not quite an apology. “Now, nobody in today’s world can defend bombings,” she said in a November 2008 interview with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now.” “How could you do that after 9/11, after, you know, Oklahoma City? It’s a new context, in a different context … the context of the time has to be understood.”
A letter, postmarked Elizabeth, N.J., received on March 2, 1971, by the Associated Press in Washington, signed by Weather Underground, which claims responsibility for the March 1 bombing of the U.S. Capitol building. | AP Photo
In the same interview her husband said: “I think that if we’ve learned one thing from those perilous years, it’s that dogma, certainty, self-righteousness, sectarianism of all kinds is dangerous and self-defeating.”
As a slogan of the 1960s went, what goes around comes around. That 14-month-old son who Dohrn and Ayers raised for Boudin? He became a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer and a public defender. In 2019, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco, a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris. And on Jan. 6, as the pro-Trump mob attacked, Chesa Boudin sent out a tweet: “Hoping everyone who works in the Capitol is safe from this despicable effort to take down our democracy.”
Fifty years on, it seems remarkable how fast the 1971 attack faded from collective memory, even as it exercised a profound effect on the end of an era of political activism that would be unrivaled until the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The bombing supercharged Nixon’s paranoia, leading the president and his aides to ramp up their crackdown on the New Left. They ordered the biggest, and most unconstitutional, mass arrests in U.S. history during the Mayday protests, rounding up more than 12,000 people. And then weeks later, the White House launched illegal measures to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. On Labor Day weekend, Krogh dispatched operatives to break into the office of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, searching for compromising material. Nixon’s men were field-testing the tactics they’d soon be caught using against their political opponents in the 1972 election. Thus, you can draw a line, if a dotted one, from the bombing to the demise of Richard Nixon in 1974. Donald Trump, meanwhile, still awaits the consequences of the Jan. 6 attack.
USCG Works With Good Samaritan to Rescue Four Fishermen off Kodiak
On Sunday, the U.S. Coast Guard worked alongside a good samaritan vessel to rescue four fishermen from the fishing vessel Alaska Rose, which had capsized just off Chiniak Island, Alaska.
At about 1630 hours, Coast Guard Sector Anchorage received a mayday call from the crew of the Alaska Rose, who reported that their vessel were taking on water. The sector's watchstanders broadcast a request for assistance from nearby vessels and dispatched a Jayhawk rescue helicopter from Air Station Kodiak.
At about 1656, less than half an hour after the mayday call, the aircrew arrived on scene. Conditions were relatively rough, with waves of eight feet and winds of about 30 knots. The aircrew found that the Alaska Rose had capsized and the crew had gone into the water. One person remained on the hull of the capsized vessel, and they hoisted the survivor aboard and flew back to Air Station Kodiak.
Three other crewmembers were in the water, and a good samaritan vessel - the Kylia - retrieved all three safely and transferred them back to Kodiak. Water temperatures near Kodiak Island currently average about 40 degrees, posing a risk to survival in the event of long-duration immersion.
“I wholeheartedly thank the good Samaritans involved,” said Lt. Madeline Romito, Sector Anchorage command duty officer. “The quick response between them and the helicopter crew played a major role in the positive outcome of this case.”
The Alaska Rose is believed to have gone down after the rescue, according to local KMXT.
Friday, March 15, 2024
EU Ombudsman Calls for Reforms in EU Coast Guard in Wake of 2023 Tragedy
The European Union’s Ombudsman issued a report critical of the handling of the 2023 migrant boat tragedy in the Mediterranean where more than 600 people are thought to have drowned. It is also questioning more of the fundamental issues related to the operations of the EU’s Border and Coast Guard agency Frontex.
The report finds that the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency is unable to fully fulfill its fundamental obligations and is too reliant on member states. It calls on EU legislatures both to investigate the handling of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and to address the fundamental rights gap for Frontex.
Frontex describes its mission as supporting and coordinating the efforts of member states for border security and cross-border crime. While the agency has extensive resources when it comes to maritime situations, the report highlights Frontex operates in support of member state agencies which must request assistance and can also redirect Frontex. Previous reports have accused individual states of sending Frontex away or refusing its resources while efforts were made to “push back” migrants.
“Frontex includes ‘coast guard’ in its name, but its current mandate and mission clearly fall short of that,” concludes Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly in the recently released report. “If Frontex has a duty to help save lives at sea, but the tools for it are lacking, then this is clearly a matter for EU legislators.”
O’Reilly’s investigation was one of several launched after a migrant boat named Adriana sunk last year. Greece’s Ombudsman and the Greek Naval Court are still investigating the incident but the Hellenic Coast Guard declined an internal review despite accusations that its boat contributed to the sinking and covered up its actions by seizing survivors’ cellphones.
The boat had been identified as a risk by Italian authorities, Frontex, and international aid groups after it left Libya on June 10 overcrowded with approximately 750 people including children. The vessel was in Greece’s region and four days later founderedwith only around 100 people saved. Approximately 80 bodies were recovered.
While looking at the actions of Frontex as they related to the Adriana, the Ombudsman also investigated the agency’s response in other maritime emergencies, its mandate, and its structure. The report concludes that Frontex has no internal guidelines on issuing emergency signals and that there is a failure to ensure fundamental rights monitors are sufficiently involved.
In the case of the Adriana, a Frontex surveillance plane spent 10 minutes over the vessel on June 13 during a standard maritime surveillance patrol. It shared video footage and information about the boat’s conditions and sea state with the Italian and Greek authorities. Frontex highlighted the overcrowding and that no lifejackets were visible, but concluded the boat was not in immediate danger and did not issue a Mayday. Frontex says it believed Greece was handling the situation.
The report acknowledges it is contested if a Mayday should have been issued and if it would have prevented the tragedy. An internal report at Frontex however concluded while the agency complied with its obligations, in the future similar cases should be more thoroughly assessed.
Frontex made four additional offers of assistance on June 13 and 14 to the Greek authorities but received no reply. A second pre-planned surveillance on June 13 was diverted and Frontex did not return to the Adriana until after the vessel was lost. Under the current regulations, Frontex needed Greek permission to go to the location of the Adriana.
“It is not unlikely that there will be a repeat of the Adriana tragedy unless there are significant changes to the legal and operational framework for responding to maritime emergencies,” concludes the Ombudsman. The report observes boats in distress carrying refugees and asylum seekers can not as it now stands rely on proactive SAR operations at the EU level.
The Ombudsman has no legal authority to require changes but writes the incident should cause wider reflections on the changes needed to demonstrate the EU’s commitment to saving lives at sea. A request was made for Frontex to resolve internal issues, while the report calls on the EU to establish an independent commission to assess the reasons for the large number of deaths in the Mediterranean. The report also wants to consider whether Frontex should suspend or terminate activities when a member state has persistent violations of fundamental rights.
The Ombudsman calls on EU legislators to reflect on and address the clear fundamental rights gap in the way the system operates today.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Investigators To Examine Whether Dirty Fuel Caused Baltimore Bridge Crash
A safety probe into a Baltimore bridge collapse will determine whether contaminated fuel played a part in the accident whereby a giant ship lost power and crashed into the bridge forcing it to collapse.
Early investigations suggest that the Singapore-flagged Dali cargo ship was setting off from the Port of Baltimore to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when it apparently lost power and crashed into a support pillar of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
The lights on the Dali, a 948-foot-long container ship capable of carrying 95,000 tonnes of cargo, began to flicker about an hour into the trip, prompting a harbor pilot and assistant to report power issues and a loss of propulsion.
The bridge collapsed on impact and tumbled into the Patapsco River, with the crew managing to send a last-minute mayday call to the police just in time to stop traffic. Emergency responders rescued two people from the water while another six remain missing.
An oil executive has told Fox News there’s some validity to reports that contaminated fuel potentially caused the ship’s engine failure and triggered the accident.
"It's just stealing money, the companies selling them. If nobody's watching closely enough, they'll give them contaminated fuel," United Refining Company CEO John Catsimatidis said in response to a contributor asking how the dirty fuel could get onto the ship.
"Contaminated fuel is being sold to the [New York] schools and sold to the MTA whenthe MTA or the schools are not watching closely enough. You know, you give them 80 percent real fuel and 20 percent garbage. And theFBI should be looking into that," he added.
Supply chain management company Flexport has warned of a vicious feedback loop and supply chain disruptions following the collapse of the Baltimore Bridge.
“It’s not just the port of Baltimore that’s going to be impacted,” Ryan Petersen, the company’s CEO has said. According to Petersen, the port’s closure in Baltimore, Maryland, was just one factor that will contribute to shipping delays.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Baltimore's freak bridge collapse reverberates from cars to coal
Nacha Cattan, Heather Perlberg and Brendan Murray, Bloomberg News
The Dali container vessel after it struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge that collapsed into the Patapsco River in Baltimore, on March 26. , Bloomberg
The 1.6 mile-long bridge collapsed in a matter of seconds. The catastrophic consequences are set to stretch out for weeks.
As much as 2.5 million tons of coal, hundreds of cars made by Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co., and lumber and gypsum are threatened with disruption after the container ship Dali slammed into and brought down Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in the early hours of Tuesday.
Six people were presumed dead after a search in the Patapsco River, officials said Tuesday evening. The toll could have been worse except for a mayday call from the Singaporean-flagged vessel as it lost power.
U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said investigators were able to board the Dali Tuesday night to inspect the ship’s bridge, electronics and documentation.
“We do have the data record, which is essentially the ‘black box,’” Homendy said in an interview with CNN. “We’ve sent that back to our lab to evaluate and begin to develop a timeline of events that led up to the strike on the bridge.”
She added that investigators should have information from the vessel’s black box later on Wednesday.
The aftermath of the bridge’s collapse throws another spotlight on the fragile nature of global supply chains that have already been strained by drought in Panama and missile attacks on Red Sea shipping by Yemen-based Houthi militants. Docks in New Jersey and Virginia face the threat of being overwhelmed by traffic that’s being forced away from Baltimore, one of the busiest ports on the U.S. East Coast.
“It’s a large port with a lot of flow through it, so it’s going to have an impact,” John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer, told Bloomberg TV. “We’ll work on the workarounds. We’ll have to divert parts to other ports along the East Coast or elsewhere in the country.”
Baltimore only handled about three per cent of all East Coast and Gulf Coast imports in the year through Jan. 31, said S&P Global Market Intelligence. But it’s crucial to cars and light trucks, with European carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Volkswagen AG and BMW operating facilities in and around the port. It’s also the second-largest terminal for U.S. exports of coal, with a shutdown potentially hitting shipments to India.
About a dozen large vessels are stuck inside Baltimore’s harbour as well as a similar number of tug boats, according to IHS Markit and Wood Mackenzie’s Genscape. The list includes cargo ships, automobile carriers and a tanker named the Palanca Rio.
That’s just the impact on the port.
About 35,000 people used the bridge every day. The annual value of goods going over is about US$28 billion, according to the American Trucking Associations.
“We rely on our infrastructure systems for our daily needs, for a huge amount of the goods that we get in the United States from overseas and to have it cut off so suddenly, it’s a huge crisis,” said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, named for the man who wrote the text of the Star-Spangled Banner, took five years to build and was completed in 1977. The cost at the time was around $141 million, according to one estimate. A rebuild today is likely to cost “several billion dollars,” said Freemark.
President Joe Biden said he wants the federal government to pay and vowed “to move heaven and earth to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge.”
But Baltimore is in for a lengthy reconstruction. It could be weeks before any port operations resume as officials need to remove bridge debris and the 984-foot Dali from the river.
That’s expected to accelerate a shift of cargo to the U.S. West Coast to avoid bottlenecks from Boston to Miami. A sudden 10 to 20 per cent increase in volumes through a port is enough to cause massive backlogs and congestion, according to Ryan Petersen, the founder and chief executive officer of Flexport Inc., a digital freight platform based in San Francisco.
Trade hub
Traversing Maryland, meanwhile, threatens to create headaches for motorists and truckers. A trip from Edgemere heading south to Glen Burnie was about 15 miles (24 kilometers) over the bridge. It’s 20 miles via the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. The trip will be even tougher for truckers hauling hazardous materials, which are barred from the tunnel. They’d have to travel 45 miles on the Baltimore Beltway.
The biggest hit though could be to Baltimore itself, a city of close to 600,000 people whose stagnation and high-poverty neighborhoods were made famous by television show The Wire.
The bridge helped connect major parts of Baltimore and was key to its renaissance as a logistics and e-commerce hub after the shuttering of its steel industry. With its deep-water port, shortline railway and well-located interstate highway, the city attracted investors who have been pouring money into redevelopment.
One of the largest projects, Tradepoint Atlantic, has leased millions of square feet in warehouse space to some of the world’s biggest businesses, including Amazon.com Inc. and FedEx Corp.
Facing months of uncertainty, Baltimore and Maryland both declared a state of emergency.
Throughout the morning on Tuesday, crowds gathered in east Baltimore County, camping out in grassy spots or climbing highway guardrails to get a better look of the bridge and snap photos. Across the street from a Dollar General on Dundalk Avenue, residents discussed the roar of the structure collapsing, comparing it to a jet engine during takeoff.
Not far from the collapsed bridge, police changed shifts at the dock of the Hard Yacht Cafe in Dundalk. Officers getting off their boat had been circling the waters as part of the rescue effort for more than 10 hours, they said, adding that divers were searching for remaining victims in the water when they left the scene.
“This is one of the cathedrals of American infrastructure,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “The path to normalcy will not be easy, it will not be quick, it will not be inexpensive, but we will rebuild together.”
After Bridge Tragedy, One Baltimore Cargo Terminal is Still Open
The tragic collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge has put a new spotlight on Tradepoint Atlantic, the logistics complex located on the former Bethlehem Steel site. Unlike Baltimore's inner harbor, Tradepoint is seaward of the bridge's wreckage, and it is one of the few parts of the city's waterfront still open to deep-sea traffic.
In a statement, the terminal's operator said that it was working closely with officials as the emergency response proceeds.
"Tradepoint Atlantic has been in constant contact with emergency response officials and leaders from Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and the State of Maryland and will continue to coordinate during this extremely challenging situation," the company said. "As part of the Port of Baltimore, we are committed to helping our state and local partners and the entire port community recover and rebuild from this tragedy."
Tradepoint is a receiving terminal for ro/ro vessels in the Baltimore area, and this is a core part of the Port of Baltimore's trade. The port vies with Brunswick, Georgia for the title of biggest ro/ro port in America - but the vast car terminals and parking lots on the far side of the bridge are currently inaccessible. Carmakers Volkswagen and BMW, which both have receiving facilities at Tradepoint Atlantic, have both said that their Baltimore operations are unaffected by the bridge collapse.
The site's importance is only set to grow in years to come. Tradepoint is working with MSC and TIL to build a container terminal at Sparrows Point, which would increase Baltimore's capacity to handle containerized cargo by 70 percent. Subject to federal approval for dredging, it could be open as soon as 2027.
In the meantime, multiple seaports up and down the East Coast have said that they stand ready to absorb the extra cargo volume from Baltimore. The additional cargo per port is not expected to rival the peak surge levels seen during the late-pandemic import boom. The Port of Virginia, which is just 125 nautical miles to the south of Baltimore, has been investing heavily in expansion and is expected to pick up a substantial share of the slack.
“I don’t think we’ll have a large impact in terms of logistics and shipping moving forward. There might be snafus over the next couple days while issues are being worked through, but I think they’ll be able to overcome that pretty quickly,” said Brent Howard, president of the Baltimore County Chamber of Commerce, speaking to The Hill.
Bill Doyle Comments on Cargo Ship M/V Dali Allision in Port of Baltimore
Special News Feature: Bill Doyle provides insight into the M/V Dali's allision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge. While federal, state and local authorities are on the scene, there is growing speculation about the vessel’s condition and fuel supply.
The 984-foot container ship was transiting the harbor at nine knots when it struck the bridge, and the circumstances of the accident are still under investigation. The ship is owned by Grace Ocean and is registered in Singapore and managed by Synergy Marine.
Six people who were on the bridge are missing and presumed dead. Two others were rescued from the water. Authorities say the eight construction workers were repairing potholes on the bridge. There were 22 Indian nationals and two local pilots aboard the cargo ship.
Multiple Vessels Trapped in Baltimore, Including Sealift Ships
As federal and local authorities focus on the emergency response to the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, Port of Baltimore's inner harbor remains cut off from the rest of the world. No vessels can get in to deliver Baltimore's core cargoes - containers, cars, gypsum and sugar - and no vessels can get out.
The latter fact will be of particular interest for shipowners who have vessels inside the harbor. These include one car carrier, the Swedish-flagged Carmen; four bulkers, the Klara Oldendorff, Balsa 94, Saimaagracht and JY River; and four laid-up ships belonging to the Maritime Administration's Ready Reserve (RRF), the Cape Washington, Gary I. Gordon, SS Antares and SS Denebola.
The Biden administration has restoration of the navigation channel at the top of its list of priorities, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday.
"We can't wait for the bridge work to be complete to see that channel reopened. There are vessels that are stuck inside right now and there's an enormous amount of traffic that goes through there. That's really important to the entire economy," he told NPR in an interview.
The closure's effect on four RRF vessels could have potential implications for emergency sealift preparedness. The RRF's vessels are kept in reduced operating status at multiple sites around the nation, and the shutdown of any one port would not affect the service's ability to mobilize transport options for most overseas contingencies.
However, two of the vessels in Baltimore are high-value assets - the steamships SS Antares and SS Denebola. These are two out of eight Fast Sealift Ships - a class of SeaLand boxships that were converted for military ro/ro service in the 1980s. They are among the fastest cargo ships in operation today, and their peak speed tops out at 33 knots.
The eight FSS vessels have delivered goods for every major U.S. conflict since the First Gulf War; however, these powerful steamships are 50 years old, and each ship's ability to get under way is not known. The RRF has acknowledged issues with its aging tonnage, and commercially-obsolete steam plants are particularly challenging for MARAD to man and maintain.
Old Lessons May Haunt Baltimore Bridge Tragedy
For observers who have been in shipping long enough, Wednesday's disastrous bridge collapse in Baltimore brought to mind lessons learned in 1980, when the freighter Summit Venture struck and destroyed half of Tampa's Sunshine Skyway bridge. 35 people died in that disaster, prompting a decade-long rethink of highway bridge design. The Skyway Bridge was rebuilt with a fortress of protective concrete dolphins - but it is unclear whether Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge was updated to meet a similar standard before it was hit by the boxship Dali on Wednesday morning.
Baltimore's Key Bridge opened in 1977, three years before the Skyway Bridge disaster (and two years after a similar casualty in Tasmania). Based on visual evidence, the Key Bridge had one small dolphin on each side of the central span's piers, intended either for scour protection or for defending against allisions. When the container ship Dali approached early Wednesday morning, the vessel appeared to pass by the dolphin and strike the pier directly with her starboard bow.
“Maybe [the dolphin] would stop a ferry or something like that,” consulting engineer Donald Dusenberry told the New York Times. “Not a massive, oceangoing cargo ship.”
Tampa-area attorney Steven Yerrid was involved in the response to the Skyway Bridge disaster in 1980, and he told local media that when he saw the fendering system on the Key Bridge, it looked all too familiar. "I felt not only shock, but extreme sadness, because I knew other people had to unnecessarily lose their lives to learn a lesson that was taught 44 years ago," Yarrid told Tampa's Fox 13.
The Skyway Bridge's lessons were written down and codified by AASHTO, America's highway standards body, in 1991. The rules laid out protection requirements for newly-built bridges and guidance for retrofitting old structures. Risks still remained: in 2002, a barge tow hit a pier on the I-40 bridge in Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, destroying the span and killing 14 people. Only the upstream side of the I-40 bridge had structures to protect it from barge traffic - but the casualty vessel approached from the other direction.
For many engineers, the fact that a landmark structure like the Key Bridge could still be felled by marine traffic is a call to action. "As a matter of principle, when there is a bridge pier in a shipping channel we should expect the bridge to be strong enough to withstand impact or to be protected from impact," structural engineer Shankar Nair told the Baltimore Banner.
"Yes, it could be raised whether it should have been better protected," Cot says. "There has been a historical interest in making fender systems a lot more robust, such that if you have these types of allisions - which are bound to happen - that they do not damage the bridge structure itself. I do think that those representing the vessel interest would probably raise that."