The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?
July 07, 2009 By Michael Parenti
Source: www.michelcollon.info
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Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.
First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon's School of the Americas (known to many of us as "School of the Assassins"). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.
Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama's people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.
Third, immediately after the coup, Obama stated that he was against using violence to effect change and that it was up to the various parties in Honduras to resolve their differences. His remarks were a rather tepid and muted response to a gangster putsch.
Fourth, Obama never expected there would be an enormous uproar over the Honduras coup. He hastily joined the outcry against the perpetrators only when it became evident that opposition to the putschists was nearly universal throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the world.
Fifth, Obama still has had nothing to say about the many other acts of repression attendant with the coup perpetrated by Honduran military and police: kidnappings, beatings, disappearances, attacks on demonstrators, shutting down the internet and suppressing the few small critical media outlets that exist in Honduras.
Sixth, as James Petras reminded me, Obama has refused to meet with President Zelaya. He dislikes Zelaya mostly for his close and unexpected affiliation with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. And because of his egalitarian reformist efforts Zelaya is hated by the Honduran oligarchs, the same oligarchs who for many years have been close to and splendidly served by the US empire builders.
Seventh, under a law passed by the US Congress, any democratic government that is the victim of a military takeover is to be denied US military and economic aid. Obama still has not cut off the economic and military aid to Honduras as he is required to do under this law. This is perhaps the most telling datum regarding whose side he is on.
As president, Obama has considerable influence and immense resources that might well have thwarted the perpetrators and perhaps could still be applied against them with real effect. As of now his stance on Honduras is too little too late, as is the case with too many other things he does.
Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions (City Lights); and God and His Demons (Prometheus, forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
it's independence day, and yet, i don't feel free. the rent is due the first of each month, my summer gig starts on monday, and the humidity is kicking in after a month of rain. yeah, there is the mingus sextet of 1964, but what happens after the disc ends? i must say there is not a single american flag on my street, but the street only has three houses. it is 2:20 pm, and for now, all is quiet. the dickheads are gathered by the charles river, ready for the pseudo bombs to drop. and i, i still don't see a damn thing to cheer about. let kool and the gang celebrate. for me, this is a day to at best, ignore, and at worst, mourn.
we kicked the british out, but who is gonna kick us out? what does a tax on tea have on drones over pakistan? as carlin said, why don't you ask an indian about that great american spirit of freedom and generosity, if you can find one." we are all about celebrating 230 year old revolutions, as we do our best to put down the revolts of today. i would call it hypocrisy, but that would mean that the people were thinking enough to be hypocritical, and that they don't do. rather, they are after a good time, and they truly believe, the pale ones especially, that they live in the greatest country in the world. it is an honest stupidity, rather than a dishonest intelligence, that seems to be driving our society over the edge.
and those of us in the back seat can only cover our eyes, for we surely know that the landing will be anything but smooth.
happy 4th.
we kicked the british out, but who is gonna kick us out? what does a tax on tea have on drones over pakistan? as carlin said, why don't you ask an indian about that great american spirit of freedom and generosity, if you can find one." we are all about celebrating 230 year old revolutions, as we do our best to put down the revolts of today. i would call it hypocrisy, but that would mean that the people were thinking enough to be hypocritical, and that they don't do. rather, they are after a good time, and they truly believe, the pale ones especially, that they live in the greatest country in the world. it is an honest stupidity, rather than a dishonest intelligence, that seems to be driving our society over the edge.
and those of us in the back seat can only cover our eyes, for we surely know that the landing will be anything but smooth.
happy 4th.
Gray Panthers
July 2009 By Eric Laursen
printer friendly version Laursen's ZSpace page
By Roger Sanjek; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 298 pp.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The second Bush administration had just begun and the American war in the Middle East was grinding along in its deadly, directionless way when I was contacted by an organizer with a New York City group called Grandmothers Against the War. Eighteen of her comrades had been arrested at the Times Square Recruiting Center the previous fall when they tried to enlist to replace the young people serving in Bush's occupation of Iraq. They were about to go on trial for allegedly blocking pedestrian traffic.
Over the next year and a half, I helped write and circulate many press releases for the Grandmothers. I sometimes took part in antiwar actions with them and other groups they worked with. I also started to learn more about these elder activists. They had a shrewd way of going against people's stereotypes about older people, while using those preconceptions creatively to connect with the public. It was fun, it got attention, and it fostered a more decentralized, inclusive activist culture.
That approach had its roots—as did some of the Grandmothers—with the Gray Panthers, one of the more remarkable movements to emerge from the 1960s. Superficially, the Panthers were a pressure group for the rights and dignity of the aged. But like other emblematic 1960s movements, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party, they built their activism on a vision of a new society in which elderly people could achieve greater control of their lives by working through a model of community partly based on mutual aid. They challenged every social assumption about how and where the elderly should live, how they interact with younger people, and even how they should conduct their sex lives.
If that put them beyond the pale of much conventional politics, it also made them one of the most recognizable activist groups of the time. That's partly because the Gray Panthers wanted more than simply to secure more rights and resources for their "interest group." They sought to change the way the public viewed the elderly and, beyond that, the social role people were expected to play at every stage of life. They launched a nationwide Media Watch that spotted and called out stereotypical portrayals of the aged. Yet they also took full advantage in the early 1970s when the media became enchanted with the image of little old ladies and gentlemen forming picket lines and borrowing the name of a black revolutionary movement.
They returned the favor in 1973 when Bobby Seale was running for mayor of Oakland and the Black Panthers in that city were enduring intense pressure from police, FBI, and other agencies. As part of their Project SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment), the Oakland Gray Panthers arranged for Black Panther teams to escort seniors who lived in dangerous neighborhoods. An obvious and practical response to an everyday problem, it also emphasized the Gray Panthers' solidarity with the movements of other excluded and disadvantaged groups. It was part of an endlessly creative effort to muddle society's expectations and open up new possibilities for how groups like the elderly and inner-city African Americans could interact with each other.
The Gray Panthers have also persisted. Despite a period of decline and identity crisis, the organization survived and began to revitalize itself in the new century, meanwhile spreading its unique activist approach through groups like Grandmothers Against War. But the Panthers' social vision—which included intergenerational housing, community-run clinics emphasizing preventive care, and a linkage between social services and economic democracy—may be the most intriguing thing about them today. In the early years of the movement, that vision was built on the presumption that an affluent society should be able to perfect itself. But it also offers at least some partial answers to our current dilemma, namely, how to collectively define and fulfill our social needs at a time when government is retreating from the provision of social services and an increasingly rapacious economic elite fights to maintain its grip on power.
"Gray Panthers are out to make old a beautiful thing, not something to be hidden but something to be declared and affirmed," founder Maggie Kuhn said, explaining the Panthers' project. "The thing that we're up to is that life is a continuum and age is a period of fulfillment, of continued growth and creativity where the inputs, the experience of a lifetime can be related to the group of people who are coming into their creative productive years, and to our young people."
This conception of life has clear practical implications today, when more and more working families find themselves simultaneously raising children and caring for aging relatives. A fruitful place to start exploring such connections is the new book Gray Panthers, a long needed history of the movement, by Roger Sanjek, a sociologist who has also been an on-and-off participant for more than 30 years. His book is concise and slightly breathless as it crams a great deal of struggle, accomplishment, and personal drama into just under 300 pages.
The Gray Panthers conceived of themselves as a multigenerational movement and they worked on an astonishingly wide range of issues at once, including social justice and antiwar causes not directly related to aging. This is part of what continues to make them of interest to contemporary activists trying to forge connections between different but related struggles, and Sanjek was right to encompass as much of their story as possible in his book.
By far the highest-profile Gray Panther was Kuhn, a career activist, organizer, and program coordinator for the Young Women's Christian Association—and later the United Presbyterian Church—who began putting the idea together for a broad-based movement of socially conscious elderly when she herself faced mandatory retirement at 65. Sanjek does his best not to let Kuhn dominate his book, giving plenty of space to other important Gray Panthers, including Lillian Rabinowitz, who founded the Berkeley network, Frances Klafter, Elma Griesel, and New York organizers Lillian Sarno and Sylvia Wexler.
But the center of gravity keeps shifting back to Kuhn who emerges as a remarkable activist and visionary, as well as a media magnet who made the Panthers a pop cultural presence as well as an effective movement. Partly this was because she was an eloquent speaker and conversationalist and a deeply appealing presence. Her appearances with Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson were memorable and she was constantly in the news and in print media during the 1970s and 1980s. Another reason, however, was that she insisted, both within the Gray Panthers and in public, on centering elder activism around a broader social vision, not just the issue of the moment.
Kuhn lived in an intergenerational household in Philadelphia that served as a prefiguration of the kind of community she wanted the Panthers to help build. At a time when it was still considered unseemly, she insisted on talking about sex as an important part of life for the elderly, including her longtime relationship with a married man and later her involvement with a 21-year-old male Black Panther. Breaking taboos was her way of broadening the discussion of what life could be for the elderly and keeping the movement focused on possibility rather than on the next strategic compromise.
Elderly people were one of the last and, superficially, the least likely identity group to come to consciousness in the 1960s. But they had every reason. At the time, a far higher percentage of older Americans lived in poverty than the general population. Social Security was not yet fully indexed to inflation and Medicare was just getting started. Many of the elderly were warehoused in nursing homes, often in deplorable conditions. If they wanted to keep leading active lives, the cards were stacked against them. Big employers generally enforced mandatory retirement rules and nowhere were workplaces or public facilities required to accommodate their special needs.
The term "ageism" was coined in 1968, the year of uprisings, by gerontologist Robert Butler as a catch-all for the host of demeaning prejudices heaped on the old, ranging from the nasty (doddering, "senile," crotchety) to the patronizing (passive, old-fashioned, cute). Older people were starting to complain, get active, and form groups to fight for their rights. The American Association of Retired People (AARP) was launched in the late 1950s. The following decade other large advocacy organizations appeared, including the labor-backed National Council of Senior Citizens and the National Caucus on the Black Aged.
They quickly began to make progress. In 1965, Congress passed Medicare as well as the Older Americans Act, which funded a collection of new service and employment programs for the elderly. A year later came the first iteration of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which started the move to abolish compulsory retirement.
The Gray Panthers, who coalesced in 1972, were different, however. They didn't aim to be a mass organization directed by a Washington staff that mobilized its members from the top down. Instead, they organized through locals or "networks" loosely joined to a national office. At their peak in the early 1980s, the Panthers had only 5,000 to 6,000 members and 122 networks, whereas AARP's rolls topped 30 million. But the Panthers were hard-core, committed activists, many of them veterans of the old left and the radical wing of the labor movement, who joined because they wanted to give significant time and creativity to the cause.
As such, they helped push other elder activists in a more aggressive direction. Kuhn described the Gray Panthers as "gadflies to keep older, more established...organizations moving toward ever more radical goals." In this they weren't always successful. To give one instance, they fought against, but failed to prevent, a restructuring of Social Security in 1983 that raised payroll taxes, cut benefits, and boosted the retirement age.
Attempting to testify before the Greenspan commission, which set out the main elements of the restructuring, Kuhn was hauled away and arrested, making headlines. Other advocacy groups for the aged went along, however, because they felt it was the best deal they could get. Their willingness to compromise marked the end of more than 40 years of expansion and improvement for America's support system for the aged. Soon after, the movement against Social Security would start to spread its caricature of the elderly as "greedy geezers" devouring the resources of the young.
But the Gray Panthers were influential beyond their numbers in pushing for nursing home reform, an end to age discrimination in hiring, long-term care insurance, and better services that would help the elderly to lead more independent lives. They fought hard for a national health care system and forged strong alliances with influential figures such as Representatives Ron Dellums and Claude Pepper, Senator Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader. They participated just as actively in the campaigns for a nuclear freeze and an end to U.S. intervention in Central America and its support for apartheid South Africa.
From the beginning, the Gray Panthers regarded these other causes as integral to their mission. This had fundamentally radical implications, tying the Panthers philosophically to other groups that understood the need to establish a degree of autonomy and control of their environment if they wanted to improve and achieve respect for their lives. For instance, the innovative Over 60 Health Center, which the Gray Panthers opened in Berkeley in 1977, was the product of their desire not just for a clinic that specialized in their needs, but one that emphasized preventive care and was run by the community of users, not just professionals who provided the service.
Shared housing—"congregate living arrangements" in which people from a span of generations came together to form a household or family of choice—was one of the Gray Panthers' most ambitious concepts. Networks in Berkeley, Brooklyn, Denver, and Boston explored the idea. A group of Gray Panthers in Boston actually secured a grant to open a Shared Living Project residence, and the practice continues to spread modestly in some neighborhoods.
What the Over 60 Clinic, shared housing, and some other Panther projects had in common was an underlying, if not always conscious, critique of the New Deal-Great Society model for social progress. That model put the definition and fulfillment of social needs into the hands of technocrats: those schooled, trained, and indoctrinated to provide a professional "service." While it accomplished quite a bit in the decades before Reagan and the "Great Reversal," it provided very little voice for the people who participated in government social programs and received government assistance. Besides a name, one of the things the Gray Panthers shared with the Black Panther Party was a desire to bring social assets back under community control.
"Planning in an economic democracy must be under the control of elected representatives of the people while utilizing the expertise of scientists, technicians, economists, workers, [and] consumers," a Gray Panther manifesto from 1977 said. "Some planning [should be done] on the federal level, but much can be by regional and community bodies [with] as much local control as possible."
The Gray Panthers, like most social democratic-leaning movements in the 1970s, advocated a kind of decentralized mixed economy that firmly subordinated private enterprise to public need. But that kind of synthesis became less tenable after Reagan, when the continuing conservative dominance in Washington persuaded many grassroots progressive groups that they had to move to a more top-down model to defend their gains and survive.
The Gray Panthers experimented with such a structure, which meant investing more control in a Washington office that would mobilize the local networks when an issue or a bill came up that required "turnout" or contact with an elected official. They were also trying to cope with a decline in the movement itself. Panther membership fell in the 1980s, with the passing of some activists and, more importantly, the failure of many younger members to stick with the group, undermining the lifecycle model Kuhn and other early organizers had hoped would sustain it. However, the movement survived and in recent years has attempted to move back to the original network model.
But why the decline? The Gray Panthers were in part victims of their own success. Many of the large and small initiatives they pursued in the early decades—annual indexation of Social Security benefits, an end to mandatory unemployment, kneeling buses—became reality. Others, such as nursing home reform, national health care, and the mainstreaming of the disabled have been tougher slogs, but now claim much broader support. Meanwhile, the Gray Panther model of activism has been diffused: in the U.S. with groups like Grandmothers Against the War and in other countries through organizations that directly copied it (Graue Panther in Germany, Les Panthères Grises in France, and more).
All of which points to the effectiveness of the simple but shrewd frame the Gray Panthers presented: a group of elderly women and men adopting a militant style of organizing that people had previously assumed was reserved for the young. But the movement's survival also suggests that they have benefited—may, ultimately, depend on—Kuhn's insistent focus on a radical vision: in housing, health care provision, sexual relationships. This aspect of the movement is where, if the Gray Panthers persist, they could play an important role, not only in pushing against social and economic barriers, but in creating new ways to live beyond them.
"Until rigor mortis sets in," Kuhn said, "do one outrageous thing every week," and she meant it.
July 2009 By Eric Laursen
printer friendly version Laursen's ZSpace page
By Roger Sanjek; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 298 pp.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The second Bush administration had just begun and the American war in the Middle East was grinding along in its deadly, directionless way when I was contacted by an organizer with a New York City group called Grandmothers Against the War. Eighteen of her comrades had been arrested at the Times Square Recruiting Center the previous fall when they tried to enlist to replace the young people serving in Bush's occupation of Iraq. They were about to go on trial for allegedly blocking pedestrian traffic.
Over the next year and a half, I helped write and circulate many press releases for the Grandmothers. I sometimes took part in antiwar actions with them and other groups they worked with. I also started to learn more about these elder activists. They had a shrewd way of going against people's stereotypes about older people, while using those preconceptions creatively to connect with the public. It was fun, it got attention, and it fostered a more decentralized, inclusive activist culture.
That approach had its roots—as did some of the Grandmothers—with the Gray Panthers, one of the more remarkable movements to emerge from the 1960s. Superficially, the Panthers were a pressure group for the rights and dignity of the aged. But like other emblematic 1960s movements, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party, they built their activism on a vision of a new society in which elderly people could achieve greater control of their lives by working through a model of community partly based on mutual aid. They challenged every social assumption about how and where the elderly should live, how they interact with younger people, and even how they should conduct their sex lives.
If that put them beyond the pale of much conventional politics, it also made them one of the most recognizable activist groups of the time. That's partly because the Gray Panthers wanted more than simply to secure more rights and resources for their "interest group." They sought to change the way the public viewed the elderly and, beyond that, the social role people were expected to play at every stage of life. They launched a nationwide Media Watch that spotted and called out stereotypical portrayals of the aged. Yet they also took full advantage in the early 1970s when the media became enchanted with the image of little old ladies and gentlemen forming picket lines and borrowing the name of a black revolutionary movement.
They returned the favor in 1973 when Bobby Seale was running for mayor of Oakland and the Black Panthers in that city were enduring intense pressure from police, FBI, and other agencies. As part of their Project SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment), the Oakland Gray Panthers arranged for Black Panther teams to escort seniors who lived in dangerous neighborhoods. An obvious and practical response to an everyday problem, it also emphasized the Gray Panthers' solidarity with the movements of other excluded and disadvantaged groups. It was part of an endlessly creative effort to muddle society's expectations and open up new possibilities for how groups like the elderly and inner-city African Americans could interact with each other.
The Gray Panthers have also persisted. Despite a period of decline and identity crisis, the organization survived and began to revitalize itself in the new century, meanwhile spreading its unique activist approach through groups like Grandmothers Against War. But the Panthers' social vision—which included intergenerational housing, community-run clinics emphasizing preventive care, and a linkage between social services and economic democracy—may be the most intriguing thing about them today. In the early years of the movement, that vision was built on the presumption that an affluent society should be able to perfect itself. But it also offers at least some partial answers to our current dilemma, namely, how to collectively define and fulfill our social needs at a time when government is retreating from the provision of social services and an increasingly rapacious economic elite fights to maintain its grip on power.
"Gray Panthers are out to make old a beautiful thing, not something to be hidden but something to be declared and affirmed," founder Maggie Kuhn said, explaining the Panthers' project. "The thing that we're up to is that life is a continuum and age is a period of fulfillment, of continued growth and creativity where the inputs, the experience of a lifetime can be related to the group of people who are coming into their creative productive years, and to our young people."
This conception of life has clear practical implications today, when more and more working families find themselves simultaneously raising children and caring for aging relatives. A fruitful place to start exploring such connections is the new book Gray Panthers, a long needed history of the movement, by Roger Sanjek, a sociologist who has also been an on-and-off participant for more than 30 years. His book is concise and slightly breathless as it crams a great deal of struggle, accomplishment, and personal drama into just under 300 pages.
The Gray Panthers conceived of themselves as a multigenerational movement and they worked on an astonishingly wide range of issues at once, including social justice and antiwar causes not directly related to aging. This is part of what continues to make them of interest to contemporary activists trying to forge connections between different but related struggles, and Sanjek was right to encompass as much of their story as possible in his book.
By far the highest-profile Gray Panther was Kuhn, a career activist, organizer, and program coordinator for the Young Women's Christian Association—and later the United Presbyterian Church—who began putting the idea together for a broad-based movement of socially conscious elderly when she herself faced mandatory retirement at 65. Sanjek does his best not to let Kuhn dominate his book, giving plenty of space to other important Gray Panthers, including Lillian Rabinowitz, who founded the Berkeley network, Frances Klafter, Elma Griesel, and New York organizers Lillian Sarno and Sylvia Wexler.
But the center of gravity keeps shifting back to Kuhn who emerges as a remarkable activist and visionary, as well as a media magnet who made the Panthers a pop cultural presence as well as an effective movement. Partly this was because she was an eloquent speaker and conversationalist and a deeply appealing presence. Her appearances with Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson were memorable and she was constantly in the news and in print media during the 1970s and 1980s. Another reason, however, was that she insisted, both within the Gray Panthers and in public, on centering elder activism around a broader social vision, not just the issue of the moment.
Kuhn lived in an intergenerational household in Philadelphia that served as a prefiguration of the kind of community she wanted the Panthers to help build. At a time when it was still considered unseemly, she insisted on talking about sex as an important part of life for the elderly, including her longtime relationship with a married man and later her involvement with a 21-year-old male Black Panther. Breaking taboos was her way of broadening the discussion of what life could be for the elderly and keeping the movement focused on possibility rather than on the next strategic compromise.
Elderly people were one of the last and, superficially, the least likely identity group to come to consciousness in the 1960s. But they had every reason. At the time, a far higher percentage of older Americans lived in poverty than the general population. Social Security was not yet fully indexed to inflation and Medicare was just getting started. Many of the elderly were warehoused in nursing homes, often in deplorable conditions. If they wanted to keep leading active lives, the cards were stacked against them. Big employers generally enforced mandatory retirement rules and nowhere were workplaces or public facilities required to accommodate their special needs.
The term "ageism" was coined in 1968, the year of uprisings, by gerontologist Robert Butler as a catch-all for the host of demeaning prejudices heaped on the old, ranging from the nasty (doddering, "senile," crotchety) to the patronizing (passive, old-fashioned, cute). Older people were starting to complain, get active, and form groups to fight for their rights. The American Association of Retired People (AARP) was launched in the late 1950s. The following decade other large advocacy organizations appeared, including the labor-backed National Council of Senior Citizens and the National Caucus on the Black Aged.
They quickly began to make progress. In 1965, Congress passed Medicare as well as the Older Americans Act, which funded a collection of new service and employment programs for the elderly. A year later came the first iteration of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which started the move to abolish compulsory retirement.
The Gray Panthers, who coalesced in 1972, were different, however. They didn't aim to be a mass organization directed by a Washington staff that mobilized its members from the top down. Instead, they organized through locals or "networks" loosely joined to a national office. At their peak in the early 1980s, the Panthers had only 5,000 to 6,000 members and 122 networks, whereas AARP's rolls topped 30 million. But the Panthers were hard-core, committed activists, many of them veterans of the old left and the radical wing of the labor movement, who joined because they wanted to give significant time and creativity to the cause.
As such, they helped push other elder activists in a more aggressive direction. Kuhn described the Gray Panthers as "gadflies to keep older, more established...organizations moving toward ever more radical goals." In this they weren't always successful. To give one instance, they fought against, but failed to prevent, a restructuring of Social Security in 1983 that raised payroll taxes, cut benefits, and boosted the retirement age.
Attempting to testify before the Greenspan commission, which set out the main elements of the restructuring, Kuhn was hauled away and arrested, making headlines. Other advocacy groups for the aged went along, however, because they felt it was the best deal they could get. Their willingness to compromise marked the end of more than 40 years of expansion and improvement for America's support system for the aged. Soon after, the movement against Social Security would start to spread its caricature of the elderly as "greedy geezers" devouring the resources of the young.
But the Gray Panthers were influential beyond their numbers in pushing for nursing home reform, an end to age discrimination in hiring, long-term care insurance, and better services that would help the elderly to lead more independent lives. They fought hard for a national health care system and forged strong alliances with influential figures such as Representatives Ron Dellums and Claude Pepper, Senator Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader. They participated just as actively in the campaigns for a nuclear freeze and an end to U.S. intervention in Central America and its support for apartheid South Africa.
From the beginning, the Gray Panthers regarded these other causes as integral to their mission. This had fundamentally radical implications, tying the Panthers philosophically to other groups that understood the need to establish a degree of autonomy and control of their environment if they wanted to improve and achieve respect for their lives. For instance, the innovative Over 60 Health Center, which the Gray Panthers opened in Berkeley in 1977, was the product of their desire not just for a clinic that specialized in their needs, but one that emphasized preventive care and was run by the community of users, not just professionals who provided the service.
Shared housing—"congregate living arrangements" in which people from a span of generations came together to form a household or family of choice—was one of the Gray Panthers' most ambitious concepts. Networks in Berkeley, Brooklyn, Denver, and Boston explored the idea. A group of Gray Panthers in Boston actually secured a grant to open a Shared Living Project residence, and the practice continues to spread modestly in some neighborhoods.
What the Over 60 Clinic, shared housing, and some other Panther projects had in common was an underlying, if not always conscious, critique of the New Deal-Great Society model for social progress. That model put the definition and fulfillment of social needs into the hands of technocrats: those schooled, trained, and indoctrinated to provide a professional "service." While it accomplished quite a bit in the decades before Reagan and the "Great Reversal," it provided very little voice for the people who participated in government social programs and received government assistance. Besides a name, one of the things the Gray Panthers shared with the Black Panther Party was a desire to bring social assets back under community control.
"Planning in an economic democracy must be under the control of elected representatives of the people while utilizing the expertise of scientists, technicians, economists, workers, [and] consumers," a Gray Panther manifesto from 1977 said. "Some planning [should be done] on the federal level, but much can be by regional and community bodies [with] as much local control as possible."
The Gray Panthers, like most social democratic-leaning movements in the 1970s, advocated a kind of decentralized mixed economy that firmly subordinated private enterprise to public need. But that kind of synthesis became less tenable after Reagan, when the continuing conservative dominance in Washington persuaded many grassroots progressive groups that they had to move to a more top-down model to defend their gains and survive.
The Gray Panthers experimented with such a structure, which meant investing more control in a Washington office that would mobilize the local networks when an issue or a bill came up that required "turnout" or contact with an elected official. They were also trying to cope with a decline in the movement itself. Panther membership fell in the 1980s, with the passing of some activists and, more importantly, the failure of many younger members to stick with the group, undermining the lifecycle model Kuhn and other early organizers had hoped would sustain it. However, the movement survived and in recent years has attempted to move back to the original network model.
But why the decline? The Gray Panthers were in part victims of their own success. Many of the large and small initiatives they pursued in the early decades—annual indexation of Social Security benefits, an end to mandatory unemployment, kneeling buses—became reality. Others, such as nursing home reform, national health care, and the mainstreaming of the disabled have been tougher slogs, but now claim much broader support. Meanwhile, the Gray Panther model of activism has been diffused: in the U.S. with groups like Grandmothers Against the War and in other countries through organizations that directly copied it (Graue Panther in Germany, Les Panthères Grises in France, and more).
All of which points to the effectiveness of the simple but shrewd frame the Gray Panthers presented: a group of elderly women and men adopting a militant style of organizing that people had previously assumed was reserved for the young. But the movement's survival also suggests that they have benefited—may, ultimately, depend on—Kuhn's insistent focus on a radical vision: in housing, health care provision, sexual relationships. This aspect of the movement is where, if the Gray Panthers persist, they could play an important role, not only in pushing against social and economic barriers, but in creating new ways to live beyond them.
"Until rigor mortis sets in," Kuhn said, "do one outrageous thing every week," and she meant it.
hooray for hollywood
Honduras Solidarity
July 04, 2009 By Danny Glover
Source: BC
Danny Glover's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Please join me in solidarity with the people of Honduras to determine their own future.
I urge all to support the citizens of Honduras in their demand that President Manuel Zelaya be restored immediately to his constitutionally elected post and authority as President of Honduras. It is imperative that citizens across the United States write and call upon President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to quickly execute every available influence to ensure that President Zelaya is safely returned to his post.
Your voices are urgently needed to encourage our government to exercise its influence to ensure that the Ambassadors of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua who have been violently kidnapped are not harmed and are immediately safely returned.
The flowering of Participatory Democracy in Latin America has been ruthlessly assaulted by anti-democratic sectors of the Honduran elite in collusion with sectors of the armed forces. Their shameless violation of constitutional laws can not be allowed to take hold. The coup d'état against President Zelaya is a threat to the growing desire and organization of citizens across our hemisphere to more actively seek forms and agendas of governance to achieve their basic social, economic, cultural, and political well being.
Sincerely
Danny Glover
July 04, 2009 By Danny Glover
Source: BC
Danny Glover's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Please join me in solidarity with the people of Honduras to determine their own future.
I urge all to support the citizens of Honduras in their demand that President Manuel Zelaya be restored immediately to his constitutionally elected post and authority as President of Honduras. It is imperative that citizens across the United States write and call upon President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to quickly execute every available influence to ensure that President Zelaya is safely returned to his post.
Your voices are urgently needed to encourage our government to exercise its influence to ensure that the Ambassadors of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua who have been violently kidnapped are not harmed and are immediately safely returned.
The flowering of Participatory Democracy in Latin America has been ruthlessly assaulted by anti-democratic sectors of the Honduran elite in collusion with sectors of the armed forces. Their shameless violation of constitutional laws can not be allowed to take hold. The coup d'état against President Zelaya is a threat to the growing desire and organization of citizens across our hemisphere to more actively seek forms and agendas of governance to achieve their basic social, economic, cultural, and political well being.
Sincerely
Danny Glover
Published on Saturday, July 4, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
No Press Freedom in Post-Coup Honduras
by Medea Benjamin
When José David Ellner Romero heard the soldiers breaking down the door of the Globo radio station on the evening of the June 28 coup, he had a flashback. His mind conjured up the terrible images from the 1980s, when he was arrested by the military, thrown into an underground prison and tortured. "I couldn't stand the thought of going through that hell again, so I got out on the ledge of the windowsill and jumped," Elner told our delegation. His fractured shoulder, ribs and bruises were minor given that he jumped from the third floor.
The owner of the station, Alejandro Villatoro, was thrown to the ground by soldiers who put their guns to his head and demanded to know where the transmitter was. Villatoro also happens to be a deputy in the National Assembly from the governing Liberal Party, but that didn't afford him special treatment. While Villatoro was not a fan of deposed President Mel Zelaya, he believes in free speech and always guaranteed his employees that freedom. After the military invaded and censored his station, he now supports Zelaya's return. "If this new government says it's for democracy, then why is it censoring the press? This is the 21st century," he told us. "We shouldn't have coups and censorship and thugs running the country."
Radio Globo is now back on the air, but one of its most critical programs, Hable como habla, is still banned and the host of the show, Eduardo Maldonado, is in hiding. And every now and then, like when they broadcast an interview with the deposed president, their signal is suddenly blocked.
Reporter Luis Galdamez, who hosts a show on Radio Globo, is back on the air but the military told him not to criticize the new government. He refuses to buckle, but he's scared. "I get death threats every day. I don't even read my text messages anymore, they're so grotesque" he said. On our insistence, he pulled out his iphone and randomly picked from the 64 new messages he had. "We're watching you," the message read. "We know where you live and how many children you have. If you keep talking shit, we're going to hang you and cut out your tongue for talking shit. Remember what happened in the 80s."
Galdamez, a single father, is under tremendous pressure. At night, he sees cars without license plates outside his house, rifles pointing out the window. He wants to leave the country, but doesn't know where he and his children could go.
Another radio station under attack is Radio Progreso in the city of Progreso. Four hours after the coup around 25 soldiers stormed into the studios of the community-based station and closed it down. Hundreds of local people quickly gathered to defend the station and demand that the military leave. Thanks to the tremendous outpouring of support, Radio Progreso opened the next day, Monday, but by Tuesday the soldiers were back again. The station is now transmitting clandestinely.
While the coup leaders say they are bringing back democracy by deposing an autocratic president, their first actions after kidnapping the president and flying him to Costa Rica was to keep the public in the dark. At the time of the coup on June 28, they cut the electricity and when it came back on four hours later, news programs had been replaced by music shows, soap operas, sports and cooking lessons.
By day two, most TV and radio stations were back on the air, but the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL) notified cable TV operators of a ban on broadcasting certain international TV stations such as Telesur, Cubavisión Internacional and CNN Español. The pro-Zelaya Channels 36 and 50 were also banned, their studios surrounded by soldiers. Another TV station not allowed to broadcast was Canal 66 Maya TV. "They've taken off the air everyone who does not support the coup," said Santos Gonzalez, a Channel 50 reporter.
The owner of Channel 36, Esdras Amado Lopez, received threats that he would be arrested and went into hiding. A week after the coup, the station was still shut and surrounded by soldiers. The government-operated Channel 8, located inside the heavily guarded presidential palace, was taken off the air but was back in business on Wednesday-transmitting the new government's propaganda. All of the TV stations are now decidedly pro-coup, devoting significant coverage to demonstrations in favor of the new government while ignoring or minimizing mass rallies supporting Zelaya.
The only reason there is not more press censorship in Honduras today is because most of the media-TV, print and radio-is owned by businesspeople who support the coup. Edgardo Dumas, publisher of the large circulation daily La Tribuna and the country's former Defense Minister, claims that rumors about censorship are "totally and absolutely false." In a July 2 interview with W Radio in Bogotá, Colombia, Dumas claimed, "I don't see any limit on freedom of the press. The four newspapers are putting out impartial and true news. No TV or radio station has been interfered with." When asked why CNN was cut, he said it was "misinforming" the public and was "on the payroll of the dictator of Venezuela Hugo Chavez."
The more educated Hondurans are now seeking information from the internet and text messages, but most Hondurans are getting a daily dose of pro-coup propaganda and journalists who oppose the government are doing so at great risk to themselves and their families.
The Honduran people should have the right to know what their new leaders, in the name of democracy, are doing to destroy the very basic foundations of a democratic system-a free press.
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org).
No Press Freedom in Post-Coup Honduras
by Medea Benjamin
When José David Ellner Romero heard the soldiers breaking down the door of the Globo radio station on the evening of the June 28 coup, he had a flashback. His mind conjured up the terrible images from the 1980s, when he was arrested by the military, thrown into an underground prison and tortured. "I couldn't stand the thought of going through that hell again, so I got out on the ledge of the windowsill and jumped," Elner told our delegation. His fractured shoulder, ribs and bruises were minor given that he jumped from the third floor.
The owner of the station, Alejandro Villatoro, was thrown to the ground by soldiers who put their guns to his head and demanded to know where the transmitter was. Villatoro also happens to be a deputy in the National Assembly from the governing Liberal Party, but that didn't afford him special treatment. While Villatoro was not a fan of deposed President Mel Zelaya, he believes in free speech and always guaranteed his employees that freedom. After the military invaded and censored his station, he now supports Zelaya's return. "If this new government says it's for democracy, then why is it censoring the press? This is the 21st century," he told us. "We shouldn't have coups and censorship and thugs running the country."
Radio Globo is now back on the air, but one of its most critical programs, Hable como habla, is still banned and the host of the show, Eduardo Maldonado, is in hiding. And every now and then, like when they broadcast an interview with the deposed president, their signal is suddenly blocked.
Reporter Luis Galdamez, who hosts a show on Radio Globo, is back on the air but the military told him not to criticize the new government. He refuses to buckle, but he's scared. "I get death threats every day. I don't even read my text messages anymore, they're so grotesque" he said. On our insistence, he pulled out his iphone and randomly picked from the 64 new messages he had. "We're watching you," the message read. "We know where you live and how many children you have. If you keep talking shit, we're going to hang you and cut out your tongue for talking shit. Remember what happened in the 80s."
Galdamez, a single father, is under tremendous pressure. At night, he sees cars without license plates outside his house, rifles pointing out the window. He wants to leave the country, but doesn't know where he and his children could go.
Another radio station under attack is Radio Progreso in the city of Progreso. Four hours after the coup around 25 soldiers stormed into the studios of the community-based station and closed it down. Hundreds of local people quickly gathered to defend the station and demand that the military leave. Thanks to the tremendous outpouring of support, Radio Progreso opened the next day, Monday, but by Tuesday the soldiers were back again. The station is now transmitting clandestinely.
While the coup leaders say they are bringing back democracy by deposing an autocratic president, their first actions after kidnapping the president and flying him to Costa Rica was to keep the public in the dark. At the time of the coup on June 28, they cut the electricity and when it came back on four hours later, news programs had been replaced by music shows, soap operas, sports and cooking lessons.
By day two, most TV and radio stations were back on the air, but the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL) notified cable TV operators of a ban on broadcasting certain international TV stations such as Telesur, Cubavisión Internacional and CNN Español. The pro-Zelaya Channels 36 and 50 were also banned, their studios surrounded by soldiers. Another TV station not allowed to broadcast was Canal 66 Maya TV. "They've taken off the air everyone who does not support the coup," said Santos Gonzalez, a Channel 50 reporter.
The owner of Channel 36, Esdras Amado Lopez, received threats that he would be arrested and went into hiding. A week after the coup, the station was still shut and surrounded by soldiers. The government-operated Channel 8, located inside the heavily guarded presidential palace, was taken off the air but was back in business on Wednesday-transmitting the new government's propaganda. All of the TV stations are now decidedly pro-coup, devoting significant coverage to demonstrations in favor of the new government while ignoring or minimizing mass rallies supporting Zelaya.
The only reason there is not more press censorship in Honduras today is because most of the media-TV, print and radio-is owned by businesspeople who support the coup. Edgardo Dumas, publisher of the large circulation daily La Tribuna and the country's former Defense Minister, claims that rumors about censorship are "totally and absolutely false." In a July 2 interview with W Radio in Bogotá, Colombia, Dumas claimed, "I don't see any limit on freedom of the press. The four newspapers are putting out impartial and true news. No TV or radio station has been interfered with." When asked why CNN was cut, he said it was "misinforming" the public and was "on the payroll of the dictator of Venezuela Hugo Chavez."
The more educated Hondurans are now seeking information from the internet and text messages, but most Hondurans are getting a daily dose of pro-coup propaganda and journalists who oppose the government are doing so at great risk to themselves and their families.
The Honduran people should have the right to know what their new leaders, in the name of democracy, are doing to destroy the very basic foundations of a democratic system-a free press.
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org).
The Anti-Empire Report
July 3rd, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
Much ado about nothing?
What is there about the Iranian election of June 12 that has led to it being one of the leading stories in media around the world every day since? Elections whose results are seriously challenged have taken place in most countries at one time or another in recent decades. Countless Americans believe that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by the Republicans, and not just inside the voting machines and in the counting process, but prior to the actual voting as well with numerous Republican Party dirty tricks designed to keep poor and black voters off voting lists or away from polling stations. The fact that large numbers of Americans did not take to the streets day after day in protest, as in Iran, is not something we can be proud of. Perhaps if the CIA, the Agency for International Development (AID), several US government-run radio stations, and various other organizations supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (which was created to serve as a front for the CIA, literally) had been active in the United States, as they have been for years in Iran, major street protests would have taken place in the United States.
The classic "outside agitators" can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh's residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.1 Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.2 The New York Times reported: "An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so)." 3
In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and "educating" Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnaping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnaping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran's currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.4
"I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran's affairs," said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. "Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd."5
"Never believe anything until it's officially denied," British writer Claud Cockburn famously said.
In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that's come along in quite a while.
So why the big international fuss over the Iranian election and street protests? There's only one answer. The obvious one. The announced winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Washington ODE, an Officially Designated Enemy, for not sufficiently respecting the Empire and its Israeli partner-in-crime; indeed, Ahmadinejad is one of the most outspoken critics of US foreign policy in the world.
So ingrained is this ODE response built into Washington's world view that it appears to matter not at all that Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's main opponent in the election and very much supported by the protesters, while prime minister 1981-89, bore large responsibility for the attacks on the US embassy and military barracks in Beirut in 1983, which took the lives of more than 200 Americans, and the 1988 truck bombing of a US Navy installation in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons. Remarkably, a search of US newspaper and broadcast sources shows no mention of this during the current protests.6 However, the Washington Post saw fit to run a story on June 27 that declared: "the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms."
Can it be that no one in the Obama administration knows of Mousavi's background? And do none of them know about the violent government repression on June 5 in Peru of the peaceful protests organized in response to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement? A massacre that took the lives of between 20 and 25 indigenous people in the Amazon and wounded another 100.7 The Obama administration was silent on the Peruvian massacre because the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, is not an ODE.
And neither is Mousavi, despite his anti-American terrorist deeds, because he's opposed to Ahmadinejad, who competes with Hugo Chavez to be Washington's Number One ODE. Time magazine calls Mousavi a "moderate", and goes on to add: "It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged," offering as much evidence as the Iranian protestors; i.e., none at all.8 It cannot of course be proven that the Iranian election was totally honest, but the arguments given to support the charge of fraud are not very impressive, such as the much-repeated fact that the results were announced very soon after the polls closed. For decades in various countries election results have been condemned for being withheld for many hours or days. Some kind of dishonesty must be going on behind the scenes during the long delay it was argued. So now we're asked to believe that some kind of dishonesty must be going on because the results were released so quickly. It should be noted that the ballots listed only one electoral contest, with but four candidates.
Phil Wilayto, American peace activist and author of a book on Iran, has observed:
Ahmadinejad, himself born into rural poverty, clearly has the support of the poorer classes, especially in the countryside, where nearly half the population lives. Why? In part because he pays attention to them, makes sure they receive some benefits from the government and treats them and their religious views and traditions with respect. Mousavi, on the other hand, the son of an urban merchant, clearly appeals more to the urban middle classes, especially the college-educated youth. This being so, why would anyone be surprised that Ahmadinejad carried the vote by a clear majority? Are there now more yuppies in Iran than poor people?9
All of which is of course not to say that Iran is not a relatively repressive society on social and religious issues, and it's this underlying reality which likely feeds much of the protest; indeed, many of the protesters may not even have strong views about the election per se, particularly since both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are members of the establishment, neither is any threat to the Islamic theocracy, and the election can be seen as the kind of power struggle you find in virtually every country. But that is not the issue I'm concerned with here. The issue is Washington's long-standing goal of regime change. If the exact same electoral outcome had taken place in a country that is an ally of the United States, how much of all the accusatory news coverage and speeches would have taken place? In fact, the exact same thing did happen in a country that is an ally of the United States, three years ago when Felipe Calderon appeared to have stolen the presidential election in Mexico and there were daily large protests for more than two months; but the American and international condemnation was virtually non-existent compared to what we see today in regard to Iran.
Iranian leaders undertook a recount of a random ten per cent of ballots and recertified Ahmadinejad as the winner. How honest the recount was I have no idea, but it's more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004.
By what standard shall we judge Barack Obama?
Many of my readers have been upset with me for my criticisms of President Obama's policies. Following my last two reports, more than a dozen have asked to be removed from my mailing list. But if you share my view that the numerous atrocities US foreign policy is responsible for constitute the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and happiness, then I think you have to want leaders who are unambiguously opposed to America's military adventures, because those interventions are unambiguously harmful. There's nothing good to be said about dropping powerful bombs on crowds of innocent people, invading their land, overthrowing their government, occupying the country, breaking down the doors of the citizens, killing the father, raping the mother, traumatizing the children, torturing those opposed to all this ... Barack Obama has no problem with this, if we judge him by his policies and not his rhetoric.
And neither does Al Franken, who's about to become a Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The former Saturday Night Live comedian would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began, but he's gone to Iraq four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers' spirits. Why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? A happier soldier does his job better. And what’s the soldier’s job? All the charming things listed above. Doesn't Franken know what these guys do? He criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.”10 What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation?
Franken has been lifting soldiers' spirits for a long time. This past March he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you'll want to see. He called his USO experience "one of the best things I've ever done."11 Franken has also spoken at West Point, encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Obama.
Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network:
Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken's daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush's version of the war, because that would undermine Air America's laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry's version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden's proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. ... Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks we have no choice but to ... stay until we crush the insurgents. It's a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it's shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.12
I know, I know, I'm taking away all your heroes. But such people shouldn't be your heroes. You can learn to see through the liberal, Democratic Party apologists for the empire. Only a week ago, documents released by the Nixon Library in California revealed that five days before US and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970 — which elicited widespread, angry protests in the US, resulting in the fatal shootings by the National Guard of students at Kent State University in Ohio — President Richard Nixon got approval for the invasion from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis told the president: "I will be with you. ... I commend you for what you are doing."13
Long live the Cold War
President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup June 28 because he was about to conduct a non-binding survey of the population, asking the question: "Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?" One of the issues that Zelaya hoped a new constitution would deal with is the limiting of the presidency to one four-year term. He also expressed the need for other constitutional changes to make it possible for him to carry out policies to improve the life of the poor; in countries like Honduras, the law is not generally crafted for that end.
At this writing it's not clear how matters will turn out in Honduras, but the following should be noted: the United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military's plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It's difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with "a frown". The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? The response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed. It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional "golpe" bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate.
Following the coup, National Public Radio (NPR) showed once again why progressives refer to it as National Pentagon Radio. The station's leading news anchor, Robert Siegel, interviewed Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the conservative think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies:
Siegel: "There hasn't been a coup in Latin America for quite a while."
Forman: "I think the last one was in 1983"
Siegel did not correct her.14
This is ignorance of considerable degree. There was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, a coup in Haiti in 2004 that permanently overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a coup in Panama in 1989 that permanently overthrew Manuel Noriega. Is it because the US was closely involved in all three coups that they have been thrown down the Orwellian Memory Hole?
July 3rd, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
Much ado about nothing?
What is there about the Iranian election of June 12 that has led to it being one of the leading stories in media around the world every day since? Elections whose results are seriously challenged have taken place in most countries at one time or another in recent decades. Countless Americans believe that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by the Republicans, and not just inside the voting machines and in the counting process, but prior to the actual voting as well with numerous Republican Party dirty tricks designed to keep poor and black voters off voting lists or away from polling stations. The fact that large numbers of Americans did not take to the streets day after day in protest, as in Iran, is not something we can be proud of. Perhaps if the CIA, the Agency for International Development (AID), several US government-run radio stations, and various other organizations supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (which was created to serve as a front for the CIA, literally) had been active in the United States, as they have been for years in Iran, major street protests would have taken place in the United States.
The classic "outside agitators" can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh's residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.1 Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.2 The New York Times reported: "An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so)." 3
In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and "educating" Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnaping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnaping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran's currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.4
"I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran's affairs," said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. "Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd."5
"Never believe anything until it's officially denied," British writer Claud Cockburn famously said.
In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that's come along in quite a while.
So why the big international fuss over the Iranian election and street protests? There's only one answer. The obvious one. The announced winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Washington ODE, an Officially Designated Enemy, for not sufficiently respecting the Empire and its Israeli partner-in-crime; indeed, Ahmadinejad is one of the most outspoken critics of US foreign policy in the world.
So ingrained is this ODE response built into Washington's world view that it appears to matter not at all that Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's main opponent in the election and very much supported by the protesters, while prime minister 1981-89, bore large responsibility for the attacks on the US embassy and military barracks in Beirut in 1983, which took the lives of more than 200 Americans, and the 1988 truck bombing of a US Navy installation in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons. Remarkably, a search of US newspaper and broadcast sources shows no mention of this during the current protests.6 However, the Washington Post saw fit to run a story on June 27 that declared: "the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms."
Can it be that no one in the Obama administration knows of Mousavi's background? And do none of them know about the violent government repression on June 5 in Peru of the peaceful protests organized in response to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement? A massacre that took the lives of between 20 and 25 indigenous people in the Amazon and wounded another 100.7 The Obama administration was silent on the Peruvian massacre because the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, is not an ODE.
And neither is Mousavi, despite his anti-American terrorist deeds, because he's opposed to Ahmadinejad, who competes with Hugo Chavez to be Washington's Number One ODE. Time magazine calls Mousavi a "moderate", and goes on to add: "It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged," offering as much evidence as the Iranian protestors; i.e., none at all.8 It cannot of course be proven that the Iranian election was totally honest, but the arguments given to support the charge of fraud are not very impressive, such as the much-repeated fact that the results were announced very soon after the polls closed. For decades in various countries election results have been condemned for being withheld for many hours or days. Some kind of dishonesty must be going on behind the scenes during the long delay it was argued. So now we're asked to believe that some kind of dishonesty must be going on because the results were released so quickly. It should be noted that the ballots listed only one electoral contest, with but four candidates.
Phil Wilayto, American peace activist and author of a book on Iran, has observed:
Ahmadinejad, himself born into rural poverty, clearly has the support of the poorer classes, especially in the countryside, where nearly half the population lives. Why? In part because he pays attention to them, makes sure they receive some benefits from the government and treats them and their religious views and traditions with respect. Mousavi, on the other hand, the son of an urban merchant, clearly appeals more to the urban middle classes, especially the college-educated youth. This being so, why would anyone be surprised that Ahmadinejad carried the vote by a clear majority? Are there now more yuppies in Iran than poor people?9
All of which is of course not to say that Iran is not a relatively repressive society on social and religious issues, and it's this underlying reality which likely feeds much of the protest; indeed, many of the protesters may not even have strong views about the election per se, particularly since both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are members of the establishment, neither is any threat to the Islamic theocracy, and the election can be seen as the kind of power struggle you find in virtually every country. But that is not the issue I'm concerned with here. The issue is Washington's long-standing goal of regime change. If the exact same electoral outcome had taken place in a country that is an ally of the United States, how much of all the accusatory news coverage and speeches would have taken place? In fact, the exact same thing did happen in a country that is an ally of the United States, three years ago when Felipe Calderon appeared to have stolen the presidential election in Mexico and there were daily large protests for more than two months; but the American and international condemnation was virtually non-existent compared to what we see today in regard to Iran.
Iranian leaders undertook a recount of a random ten per cent of ballots and recertified Ahmadinejad as the winner. How honest the recount was I have no idea, but it's more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004.
By what standard shall we judge Barack Obama?
Many of my readers have been upset with me for my criticisms of President Obama's policies. Following my last two reports, more than a dozen have asked to be removed from my mailing list. But if you share my view that the numerous atrocities US foreign policy is responsible for constitute the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and happiness, then I think you have to want leaders who are unambiguously opposed to America's military adventures, because those interventions are unambiguously harmful. There's nothing good to be said about dropping powerful bombs on crowds of innocent people, invading their land, overthrowing their government, occupying the country, breaking down the doors of the citizens, killing the father, raping the mother, traumatizing the children, torturing those opposed to all this ... Barack Obama has no problem with this, if we judge him by his policies and not his rhetoric.
And neither does Al Franken, who's about to become a Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The former Saturday Night Live comedian would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began, but he's gone to Iraq four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers' spirits. Why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? A happier soldier does his job better. And what’s the soldier’s job? All the charming things listed above. Doesn't Franken know what these guys do? He criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.”10 What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation?
Franken has been lifting soldiers' spirits for a long time. This past March he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you'll want to see. He called his USO experience "one of the best things I've ever done."11 Franken has also spoken at West Point, encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Obama.
Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network:
Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken's daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush's version of the war, because that would undermine Air America's laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry's version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden's proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. ... Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks we have no choice but to ... stay until we crush the insurgents. It's a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it's shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.12
I know, I know, I'm taking away all your heroes. But such people shouldn't be your heroes. You can learn to see through the liberal, Democratic Party apologists for the empire. Only a week ago, documents released by the Nixon Library in California revealed that five days before US and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970 — which elicited widespread, angry protests in the US, resulting in the fatal shootings by the National Guard of students at Kent State University in Ohio — President Richard Nixon got approval for the invasion from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis told the president: "I will be with you. ... I commend you for what you are doing."13
Long live the Cold War
President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup June 28 because he was about to conduct a non-binding survey of the population, asking the question: "Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?" One of the issues that Zelaya hoped a new constitution would deal with is the limiting of the presidency to one four-year term. He also expressed the need for other constitutional changes to make it possible for him to carry out policies to improve the life of the poor; in countries like Honduras, the law is not generally crafted for that end.
At this writing it's not clear how matters will turn out in Honduras, but the following should be noted: the United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military's plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It's difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with "a frown". The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? The response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed. It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional "golpe" bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate.
Following the coup, National Public Radio (NPR) showed once again why progressives refer to it as National Pentagon Radio. The station's leading news anchor, Robert Siegel, interviewed Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the conservative think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies:
Siegel: "There hasn't been a coup in Latin America for quite a while."
Forman: "I think the last one was in 1983"
Siegel did not correct her.14
This is ignorance of considerable degree. There was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, a coup in Haiti in 2004 that permanently overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a coup in Panama in 1989 that permanently overthrew Manuel Noriega. Is it because the US was closely involved in all three coups that they have been thrown down the Orwellian Memory Hole?
Friday, July 3, 2009
congressional bullshit caucus?
No Comment on Kidnapping of McKinney
Black Caucus Muzzled
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
Got to hand it to J. Jioni Palmer.
He’s learned the ropes of Washington well.
Palmer is the spokesperson for the Congressional Black Caucus.
Rang up Palmer on Wednesday.
Wanted to know whether the Congressional Black Caucus and
Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California), it’s chair, had any comment
on the hijacking of the Free Gaza boat – the Spirit of Humanity.
On board – a former Congressional Black Caucus member – Cynthia McKinney.
On June 30th 2009 Israeli Occupation Forces forcibly boarded the boat.
They kidnapped McKinney, Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and
19 other human rights workers and journalists who were on their way to
deliver much needed humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to
besieged Gaza.
So, I just wanted to know from Jioni Palmer – uh, given that McKinney
is a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus, you have a
comment on the hijacking, right?
No comment, Jioni said.
Okay, Jioni, how do I spell your name.
What, you are going to quote me saying no comment?
No, Jioni, I’m going to quote you as saying – We’re so freaked out
about pissing off AIPAC, that of course, we’re not going to issue a
statement condemning the hijackers. Who gives a rat’s ass whether
Cynthia McKinney is being held in a jail in the Israeli port city of
Ashdod?
Because that’s what you should say, Jioni, if you were telling the truth.
But you're BS-ing your way – the Washington way.
You send me an e-mail asking exactly what I’m after.
I tell you.
So you say – uh, well, let me get back to you.
You don’t get back to me.
I ring you up again.
I’m trying to get something for you – you say.
My apologies if I don’t meet your deadline -- you say.
Well, don’t apologize to me, Jioni.
Apologize to the Palestinian prisoners of Gaza.
It’s not about you or me or McKinney and her colleagues in jail in Israel.
It’s about basic human decency.
Check it out at freegaza.org.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of Corporate Crime Reporter and founder of singlepayeraction.org
Black Caucus Muzzled
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
Got to hand it to J. Jioni Palmer.
He’s learned the ropes of Washington well.
Palmer is the spokesperson for the Congressional Black Caucus.
Rang up Palmer on Wednesday.
Wanted to know whether the Congressional Black Caucus and
Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California), it’s chair, had any comment
on the hijacking of the Free Gaza boat – the Spirit of Humanity.
On board – a former Congressional Black Caucus member – Cynthia McKinney.
On June 30th 2009 Israeli Occupation Forces forcibly boarded the boat.
They kidnapped McKinney, Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and
19 other human rights workers and journalists who were on their way to
deliver much needed humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to
besieged Gaza.
So, I just wanted to know from Jioni Palmer – uh, given that McKinney
is a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus, you have a
comment on the hijacking, right?
No comment, Jioni said.
Okay, Jioni, how do I spell your name.
What, you are going to quote me saying no comment?
No, Jioni, I’m going to quote you as saying – We’re so freaked out
about pissing off AIPAC, that of course, we’re not going to issue a
statement condemning the hijackers. Who gives a rat’s ass whether
Cynthia McKinney is being held in a jail in the Israeli port city of
Ashdod?
Because that’s what you should say, Jioni, if you were telling the truth.
But you're BS-ing your way – the Washington way.
You send me an e-mail asking exactly what I’m after.
I tell you.
So you say – uh, well, let me get back to you.
You don’t get back to me.
I ring you up again.
I’m trying to get something for you – you say.
My apologies if I don’t meet your deadline -- you say.
Well, don’t apologize to me, Jioni.
Apologize to the Palestinian prisoners of Gaza.
It’s not about you or me or McKinney and her colleagues in jail in Israel.
It’s about basic human decency.
Check it out at freegaza.org.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of Corporate Crime Reporter and founder of singlepayeraction.org
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