Obama’s Secret Police

Government Spies Infiltrate Antiwar Movement
By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, July 31, 2009

Well, we can relax, because the bad old days of the Bush administration, when government agencies routinely spied on the antiwar movement and other dissidents, are over — right?

Wrong – very wrong.

The indispensable Amy Goodman has the scoop: The Seattle Port Militarization Resistance (SPMR) group in Washington state thought their listserv coordinator, who went by the name "John Jacob," was one of them: a dedicated antiwar activist and self-described anarchist. They trusted him, they put him in a key position, they befriended him – and then they found out that he was a government informant.

His real name: John Towery (here’s his myspace page, and here is a photo). He claimed to be a civilian employee at Washington state’s Ft. Lewis: in reality, he was and is a functionary of the force protection unit, i.e. military personnel. His job: spying on the antiwar movement.

Towery was "outed" when one of SPMR’s members filed a public records request in the city of Olympia for any documents, including emails, in the city’s possession that referenced communications between the city police and the military regarding "anything on anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, Students for a Democratic Society or the Industrial Workers of the World," as local antiwar activist Brendan Maslauskas Dunn described it to Amy Goodman on her "Democracy Now" program. The results were startling: "I got back hundreds of documents from the city."

It was in going through this material that he and his fellow activists discovered the truth about "John Jacob": that he was a spy sent in to keep track of antiwar activity in the area, and a member of the Force Protection Service at Ft. Lewis. His fellow activists confronted him, and, as Dunn stated:

"He admitted to several things. He admitted that, yes, he did in fact spy on us. He did in fact infiltrate us. He admitted that he did pass on information to an intelligence network, which … was composed of dozens of law enforcement agencies, ranging from municipal to county to state to regional, and several federal agencies, including Immigration Customs Enforcement, Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, Homeland Security, the Army in Fort Lewis. … He admitted to other things, too. He admitted that the police had placed a camera, surveillance camera, across the street from a community center in Tacoma that anarchists ran called the Pitch Pipe Infoshop. He admitted that there were police that did put a camera up there to spy on anarchists, on activists going there."

Oh, but he had a story: it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, he hadn’t completely betrayed his friends and associates, who had known him since 2007, when he first insinuated himself into local activist circles: because, you see, the Olympia and Tacoma cops had been planning to raid the Pitch Pipe Infoshop, as well as a house in Olympia where many activists lived, and they wanted their informant to tell them about all the guns, and drugs, and bombs that they imagined – hoped – were stockpiled there. Because, as everyone knows, no self-respecting anarchist is ever without a bomb to throw. "And, of course," says Dunn, "John told them, no, we didn’t have any of that stuff. He told them the truth."

"Of course" is maybe giving Towery too much of the benefit of a doubt: after all, if his friends were arrested, and the anarchist "conspiracy" broken up, his intelligence-gathering activities would be rendered more difficult. Perhaps Dunn is allowing his residual feelings for someone he describes as a former "close friend" get in the way of a more realistic assessment. Towery did his job all too well.

Be that as it may, this incident throws the spotlight on a shadowy national network of domestic spies – in effect, Obama’s political police, who infiltrate dissident groups of whatever sort and send the information back to what are called "fusion centers," part of the new "integrated" approach to fighting our eternal "war on terrorism" — a war that isn’t only being fought on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

The enemy is not just the Taliban – it’s Americans, too. And we aren’t just talking about the various weirdos and would-be mini-Osama bin Ladens, like John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. The national hysteria over the alleged threat of "homegrown" terrorism is being stoked to a fever pitch by the latest FBI "catch," a rural North Carolina "terrorist cell" supposedly headed by the proprietor of the local drywall contractor — a former "soldier of fortune" who allegedly fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets by the name of Daniel Patrick Boyd ("also known as Mohammed"), and a good old boy if there ever was one.

The next logical stage in our carefully-stoked national hysteria is to cast the "anti-terrorist" net wider – to include antiwar organizations like SPMR, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which Towery took a particular interest in. The antiwar movement is not a collection of "terrorist cells," and yet that is precisely how the US government is dealing with them: infiltrating and spying on our organizations, planning "raids" on activist gathering places and homes, and no doubt engaging in further disruptive activities yet to be revealed. How is this possible in the land of the free?

It’s possible – and, indeed, inevitable – due to the post-9/11 national security industry that grew up in the wake of 9/11. A vast bureaucracy sprang up around the stream – nay, river – of tax dollars that flowed out of Washington in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history. No expense was spared, no contractor was left behind – and the money spigot has only been opened wider now that Obama and his Keynesian advisors have decreed we must spend our way out of the economic recession. All these people, busily compiling "intelligence" on anything deemed "suspicious," are a police state waiting to be born.

The "fusion centers" are the product of a supposedly "wholistic" theory of intelligence-gathering adopted by the burgeoning Homeland Security bureaucracy in the post-9/11 era, an approach that integrates the personnel and facilities of various government agencies and pools them in designated "fusion centers." Fusing the civilian and the military, the local cop on the beat and the national security bureaucracy, the new apparatus of surveillance and repression is the virtual embodiment of government "work." Unable to get anywhere near Al Qaeda, they have to produce something to justify their funding, and naturally began to broaden the definitional limits of the "terrorist" label to include an ever-widening array of "suspicious" activities. The antiwar movement soon came into their purview, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Towery apparently worked for one such "fusion center," located at Ft. Lewis, where he routinely transmitted information about local antiwar organizations to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including military intelligence, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the immigration authorities. With his intimate knowledge of the politics and personal activities of every key member of the local "radical" scene – quite aside from having the names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information of every person on the local antiwar listserv – he was a valuable asset to anyone who wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the works. What every local activist, and anyone who’s ever signed their name to an antiwar petition or attended a meeting, needs to ask themselves is: how many other "John Jacob"s are hanging around – and to what purpose?

It can’t happen here? It has happened here.

You won’t hear or read about this in the "mainstream" media: Amy Goodman’s "Democracy Now" broke the story, and it hasn’t gone much further than that. The reason: the media is in the tank for Obama, and they don’t want to further tarnish his "progressive" credentials. After all, it’s bad enough he’s following the Bushian path on government secrecy, detainee policy, and the unprecedented expansion of presidential power.

Now that the Democrats are in power, they’re for all these things – because, after all, the Good Guys hold the reins. I can hear the Obama cultists now: They would never spy on the antiwar movement – why, for goodness sakes, most of those antiwar types voted for Obama! And now he’s sent his spies to disrupt their organizations? I don’t believe it!

Yet that, in effect, is what happened: not that the President personally ordered "Agent Orange" – as Towery was known on the listserv – to infiltrate and spy on the Washington antiwar movement. It wasn’t necessary: the "fusion centers" that dot the American landscape are merely doing what spy agencies are supposed to do, and they’re doing the same thing under President Obama that they did under George W. Bush. Obama hasn’t put a stop to it because he’s fighting an expanded version of the same war, and is loath to let a bunch of left-wing hippies stand in his way.

We have been through this before: go back and read Seymour Hersh’s exposés of government "cointelpro" operations conducted on antiwar activists and other dissidents during the 1970s. The Socialist Workers Party, at one point, had something close to a majority of police agents in its ranks, and the SWP case is a particularly egregious example of what was a widespread phenomenon during that tumultuous era.

It looks to me like we are going back in time, rather than progressing – an odd phenomenon when you consider that there’s an alleged "progressive" in the White House. To get a handle on what’s happening, consider the thoroughly reactionary Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of "eternal recurrence" – with the added fillip that each time some infamous chapter in our history repeats itself, the brazen hypocrisy of the miscreants grows worse.

At least with people like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, we had some kind of ideological consistency and honesty: those guys thought they had the right – and the duty — to carry out their crimes against the Constitution, and didn’t make any bones about it. It’s the "progressives," who claim fealty to civil libertarian values, and yet countenance the Obama administration’s continuation and expansion of the surveillance state, that are the real danger. Because they manage to fool an awful lot of people – the very same people who wrote to me in anger and puzzlement when I first began to take on the Obama-ites. Give him a chance, they whined. He’s only just gotten into office.

Okay, well, he’s had his chance, and he hasn’t taken it. President Obama is presiding over an even wider war than George W. Bush ever dreamed of, and because of that the antiwar movement is a natural target for his spy agencies, whose reach continues to grow. Why any of this is surprising to anyone is beyond me, but then again I’ve not been inducted into the Obama cult.

One wonders what it will take for what passes for the "left" these days to wake up. If I were them, I would heed the words of Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and onetime ally of the New Left, and apply it to their own movement:

"For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to … discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all, perhaps, who his enemies are."

*******************
Also see:

Concept of Operations (CONOPS)
for
Police Intelligence Operations (PIO)

Army manual for spying at home & abroad.

click here for pdf of the manuel

U.S. envoy: Sudan not terror sponsor, time to lift sanctions

By Grace Chung, McClatchy Newspapers, July 31, 2009

WASHINGTON — The U.S. special envoy to Sudan said Thursday that the United States should drop its designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism and "unwind" sanctions that it's maintained since President Bill Clinton applied the label in 1993.

Ambassador Scott Gration, a retired army general, said that maintaining the designation for Sudan would be a "political decision" that was "backed by no evidence" and was hindering U.S. development goals in southern Sudan.

Gration told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that sanctions linked to the designation had held up the delivery of basic supplies essential to providing humanitarian assistance and developing infrastructure.

"At some point, we're going to have to unwind some of these sanctions, so we can do the very things we need to do," Gration said. "The equipment we need to develop the south can't come through because the ports of Khartoum are sanctioned."

He agreed with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who said that "there is no evidence today that Sudan is involved as a state sponsor of terror" and continued sanctions would be akin to "cutting off our nose to spite our face."

Sudan was reported to have formally appealed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Gration said that Khartoum was cooperating in the U.S. battle against al Qaida, drawing criticism from Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. Feingold, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Khartoum's efforts to fight extremists "overstated."

The sanctions, imposed at a time when Sudan was an eager host of international terrorism groups including Osama bin Laden and the then-fledgling al Qaida, made the country an international pariah. Its reputation sank further after the Khartoum government's assaults against civilians in the Darfur region in 2003, which the Bush administration labeled genocide. Earlier this year, the U.N.-created International Criminal Court issued indictments against Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al Bashir on charges of mass atrocities in Darfur.

Although 2.7 million people remain displaced in Sudan, the level of violence has gone down significantly, and attacks are mostly criminal in nature and don't reflect a coordinated effort, Gration said.

"There are significant differences between what happened in the 2003 genocide and what is happening now," Gration said.

Gration's assessment differed from that of President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, who've openly called the crisis in Darfur an ongoing genocide.

Under questioning, Gration refused to retract comments last month in which he said that the conflict in Darfur was no longer genocide but at worst "the remnants of genocide."

He called the dispute a "definitial issue" and said that there was "an honest debate" going on in the administration.

"It doesn't really matter what you call it, in my view. What matters is that people are living in dire conditions that must come to an end," he said.

Gration's remarks raised hackles among senators and human rights groups, who worry that the administration might be easing its pressure on Sudan.

"If Ambassador Rice is correct and if there is an ongoing genocide, then clearly the Congress and the U.S. approach to dealing with the government should be different," said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.

"The policy that the administration seems to be adopting has an overemphasis on incentives," Colin Thomas-Jensen, policy adviser for the Enough Project, a human rights advocacy group, told McClatchy. "The fact is, sanctions in the past have been an effective tool to change the behavior of Sudan."

"If sanctions are not used, we'll need to find other measures" to put pressure on Khartoum, Jerry Fowler, the president of the Save Darfur Coalition, told McClatchy.

The Obama administration is in the process of formulating a policy that will help Sudan apply the terms of a 2005 peace agreement that ended the 22-year civil war in Sudan. Gration affirmed that the Obama strategy will include "both incentives and pressures," as well as adequate benchmarks for ensuring compliance.

*****************
The Real Reason:

Gration said U.S. economic sanctions had undermined American efforts to help implement the 2005 accord, barring the delivery of heavy equipment needed for road and rail projects in southern Sudan. He said the provision of such assistance would be vital in ensuring that southerners can establish a viable government if, as expected, they vote to secede from Sudan in a 2011 referendum.

- Colum Lynch, Washington Post, July 31, 2009

Law gives officers more reach

Probation missteps prompted the push for reforms
BY SARAH OVASKA AND JOSEPH NEFF, News & Observer, July 31, 2009

The new law also will allow police to conduct warrantless searches of probationers and their vehicles if police have reasonable suspicion the offender has a weapon or is engaged in criminal activity. The bill also makes it clear that any probation officer can search any probationer, his vehicle and his home.

RALEIGH -- Police and probation officers had their powers expanded Thursday with a new law that responds to problems discovered in the state's probation system after the killings of two Triangle university students.

The reforms signed into law by Gov. Beverly Perdue will allow probation officers to access portions of a probationer's juvenile record, previously considered off-limits because of confidentiality concerns. Police, not just probation officers, will also be able to search offenders when they suspect criminal wrongdoing without needing a judge to sign off on a warrant.

At a news conference in front of the Raleigh Police Department, Perdue called the reforms a "critical first step" toward fixing the system assigned to supervise 114,000 people on probation and parole.

But the probation department still has serious stress, primarily from a growing list of vacant positions. In December, the department had 118 vacancies among probation officers; today, the number has swelled to 145.

Correction spokesman Keith Acree said the department is delaying filling lower-level positions slated for an increase in pay and responsibility. The department needs additional funding in this year's budget, he said.

And the General Assembly has yet to approve more money for more officers. Perdue pressed legislators to find room for $24.2 million in a tight budget to pay for 175 new officers and raises for the 1,048 existing officers over the next two years.

The Senate has gone along with part of her plan, adding in its budget proposal 129 probation officers and supervisors and giving most probation officers a bump in salary. But a House version didn't include money for new positions. The fate of Perdue's proposal isn't clear; the House and Senate are tussling over their final budget bill, which could emerge as early as next week.

Two killings drew attention

The push for changes in the probation system came from two catalysts: the deaths of two Triangle university students early in 2008, and reporting in The News & Observer that culminated in a three-part series in December.

The N&O series detailed a probation system in crisis.

A high number of vacancies forced probation officers to carry dangerously heavy caseloads, resulting in botched oversight of many cases and 13,000 missing offenders. Since 2,000, 580 probationers had killed while under state supervision.

The reporting followed the high-profile deaths of UNC student body president Eve Carson and Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato. Two of the defendants in those cases were on probation and had received scant attention from the Wake and Durham probation offices.

The probation division's top managers -- including director Robert Guy -- have been replaced, and Perdue has called for re-examining how the department monitors offenders.

Laurence Lovette, a teen charged with first-degree murder in the Carson and Mahato cases, had a record of serious crimes in the juvenile system. Prosecutors in adult court did not take that record into account when arranging a plea for one of his first offenses in the adult system.

The new legislation would allow probation officers access to confidential juvenile records in situations where the crime committed would equate to a felony in the adult system.

Warrantless searches

The new law will also will allow police to conduct warrantless searches of probationers and their vehicles if police have reasonable suspicion the offender has a weapon or is engaged in criminal activity. The bill also makes it clear that any probation officer can search any probationer, his vehicle and his home.

The changes came in response to the experience of Mark Hornsby, a Harnett County probation officer disciplined for conducting a search in Harnett County of a convicted drug dealer on probation in Sampson County. Before that, Hornsby had been lauded for years for his success in seizing guns and drugs from probationers on his watch.

Hornsby said that his supervisors recently changed the negative evaluations to outstanding.

"They took away all my bad write-ups," Hornsby said. "I'm free to do my job again."

The department has made significant progress in locating missing probationers who have hidden from supervision.

In July 2008, probation officers couldn't locate 14,770 offenders. On Thursday, that number was down to 12,143.

Correction Secretary Alvin Keller credited much of that success to a ramped-up database that allows police officers to see if a person is wanted for avoiding supervision.

"It helps the probation officer spend less time on paperwork," Keller said. "It's a process that's ongoing."

Various law enforcement officers from the state Highway Patrol and Raleigh Police Department were at the bill signing to demonstrate an enhanced database that allows police officers to instantly check to see if a person is on probation and also to pull up an individual's driver license photographs.

Correction officials acknowledged that the fix could have been made years ago, but no one in the criminal justice system pushed to do it.

The fix merged Department of Correction files with existing systems that law enforcement officers use to see if individuals have active warrants.

The N.C. Department of Justice used several grants to pay for upgrades on their end, while the correction department paid $20,000

"It's ridiculous in my mind that we weren't already doing it," Perdue said.

Friday: Crucial Vote on Single Payer Healthcare - Calls needed

One week ago, we eagerly anticipated a crucial vote on single-payer Medicare for All (H.R.676) in the House Energy & Commerce Committee, sponsored by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). But then seven BlueDogs waged a highly-publicized war against a "robust public option" and the vote was delayed for a full week.

We just learned the vote will be today ( Friday ). Based on all of your calls, we have nine single-payer Democrats: Tammy Baldwin, Michael Doyle, Eliot Engel, Anna Eshoo, Gene Green, Edward Markey, Janice Schakowsky, Anthony Weiner, and Peter Welch.

Five more Democrats are leaning toward single-payer but still uncommitted. Please call each one and give them one crucial reason to support single-payer from our petition:
http://www.democrats.com/single-payer-petition?cid=ZGVtczQ3NTdkZW1z
(Be sure to sign our petition and forward it if you haven't already.)

Lean Yes
Diana DeGette CO01 202-225-4431
Jane Harman CA36 202-225-8220
Christopher Murphy CT05 202-225-4476
Frank Pallone NJ06 202-225-4671 @FrankPallone
Bobby Rush IL01 202-225-4372

Be concise and practice in advance so you can speak quickly (or leave a voicemail) because they are getting swamped. Report the results of your calls here:
http://www.democrats.com/single-payer-committee-whip

If you have more time, these 14 Democrats support a "public option" at best. But that "public option" (a new government program to compete with private insurance) was disastrously weakened this week by the BlueDogs. They banned the use of Medicare pricing to reduce costs and thereby expand availability. Try to persuade these 14 to vote for single-payer instead of a worthless BlueDog "public option."

Public Option Only (or Won't Say)
Rick Boucher VA09 202-225-3861
Bruce Braley IA01 202-225-2911
G.K. Butterfield NC01 202-225-3101
Lois Capps CA23 202-225-3601
Kathy Castor FL11 202-225-3376
John Dingell MI15 202-225-4071
Charles Gonzalez TX20 202-225-3236
Jay Inslee WA01 202-225-6311 @RepInsleeNews
Doris Matsui CA05 202-225-7163
Jerry McNerney CA11 202-225-1947
John Sarbanes MD03 202-225-4016
Bart Stupak MI01 202-225-4735
Betty Sutton OH13 202-225-3401
Henry Waxman (Chair) CA30 202-225-3976

Don't let anyone tell you single-payer can't pass: the Kucinich Amendment for a single-payer "state option" passed by a shocking 25-19 bi-partisan majority in the House Education and Labor Committee on July 17. The Weiner Amendment will pass on Friday if enough Democrats vote for it!

A victory on the Weiner Amendment would make a huge difference. Please call as soon as you get this - night or day.

Thanks for all you do!

Bob Fertik
Democrats.com

U.S. Army Manuel on Spying (Domestic & Abroad) leaked

Concept of Operations (CONOPS)
for
Police Intelligence Operations (PIO)

Army manual for spying at home & abroad.

click here for pdf of the manuel

Gaza's children fly for kite world record

By Anne Barker, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 31, 2009

Thousands of children in the Gaza Strip have succeeded in breaking the world record for the number of kites flown in one place and are now set to enter the Guinness Book of Records.

The United Nations organised the event to give something positive to children who are on summer holiday but banned from leaving Gaza because of the Israeli blockade.

Thousands of children gathered on Gaza's beaches with their kites ready, waiting for the official countdown and whistle.

The previous record was set last year when about 700 kites flew in Germany.

But the UN's John Ging says he is confident the kids in Gaza had thousands in the air.

"The kids here are world class. We've always said that," he said.

"Today they've broken a world record. Let's unleash the rest of their potential."

Authorities had combed the beach for days before the event to check there was no unexploded ordnance left over from the war in January.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).
Monthly Review

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

Stand in Solidarity with Prof. Gates! Say NO to Racism!

Stop Racial Profiling and Police Brutality!

Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Was Right!

The Cambridge Cops Must Apologize!

Youth Need Jobs & Schools - Not Jails!

Demand a Justice Department Investigation
of Racial Profiling Across the US

Sign the Online Petition here. Let President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media know you stand against racism with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and you want the Obama administration to launch a national investigation into racial profiling and police brutality NOW!
http://www.bailoutpeople.org/gatespetition.shtml

The arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by a Cambridge police officer after showing two forms of identification after he, along with a Black limo driver, had unjammed the lock to the front door of Gates' own house in a predominantly white, upscale neighborhood known as "Harvard Square" has brought the struggle against racism to the front pages of newspapers throughout the US and around the world.

The Cambridge Police Department and their racist allies have worked overtime to slander and vilify Prof. Gates. But his only crime was in fact to resist the racist arrogance of the Cambridge Police and not acquiesce to their racist and unjust treatment of him. The torrent of racist vitriol targeting Prof. Gates as well as the absolute racist arrogance displayed by the Cambridge Police Department in demanding that Pres. Obama and Gov. Patrick apologize for expressing support for Prof. Gates, cannot go unanswered! It is time for all poor and working people, and particularly whites, to come out against these racist attacks and stand foursquare in 100% solidarity with Professor Gates and against racial profiling and police brutality.

Cambridge, Harvard University and Boston are seen around the world as bastions of liberalism, hotbeds of progressive ideas and prestigious places from which cutting-edge research emanates. But the racial profiling and arrest of Prof. Gates have re-raised the question of how much has changed since the 1970s when, in the wake of court-ordered busing for desegregation, white racist mobs were stoning buses carrying Black school children and attacking Black people on the streets and in their homes.

Gates was Right! The Cambridge Police Department was Wrong!

Racial profiling is another expression of institutionalized racism. In the U.S., racial profiling and police brutality have become an unfortunate reality of life for people of color, especially youth. It doesn't matter whether it occurs in the inner city, a small town, or an upper-middle class suburb.

In a 2004 report entitled "Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security and Human Rights in the United States," Amnesty International documented that in a year-long investigation, an estimated 32 million people had been racially profiled--the vast majority of them from nationally oppressed groups. One can only imagine how much these numbers have increased over the last five years, not only for those born in the U.S. but also for immigrants. Since 9/11 there has been a corresponding increase in racial profiling targeting the Arab and Muslim communities.

The police have been, by far, the most feared perpetrators of racial profiling, and understandably so. Police harassment and brutality is an epidemic. According to a 2008 report by the Washington, D.C. based Campaign for Youth Justice entitled ”Critical Condition: African American Youth in the Justice System” African American youth make up 30 percent of youth arrested while they represent only 17 percent of the overall youth population. Additionally, African American youth are 62 percent of the total number of youth prosecuted in the adult criminal system and are nine times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence.

One only needs to remember how the Somerville 5 (5 Black youth from Somerville who were arrested on racist frame up charges by the Medford Police) or the Jena 6 were treated. Not to mention the racism that followed the devastation of the 9th Ward in New Orleans as a result of hurricane Katrina.

As the economic crisis deepens the ruling class will use all means at its disposal to foster artificial divisions between white workers and Black, Latina/o, and immigrant workers. It is our responsibility to build a movement based on anti-racist, class-wide solidarity--as workers of all nationalities are losing their jobs, homes, health care and pensions in rapid numbers; and as the economic crisis becomes even more extreme.

Text of online petition:

To: President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media

I deplore the racist treatment of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by the Cambridge police on July 16. Professor Gates was arrested simply for being in his own home and insisting on his right to have the name and badge number of the arresting officer, rather than standing silent in the face of blatant racist injustice inside his own home. I demand an immediate apology to Professor Gates from the Cambridge Police.

The Gates affair throws a bright national spotlight on the reality of racial profiling and police brutality in the United States, as Professor Gates himself said at the time of the incident. President Obama acknowledged this in his comments on it at his national press conference.

I call on all justice-loving people to stand in 100% solidarity with Professor Gates and against racial profiling and police brutality, and to stand up against the barrage of right-wing hate spewing forth from law enforcement and police unions and fanned by news media outlets and commentators, having the arrogance to demand that President Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick apologize for supporting Prof. Gates and speaking the truth.

I further demand that the Justice Department take up an immediate robust investigation of racial profiling and police brutality nationwide, and bring perpetrating police officers to justice and withdraw funds from police departments which practice racial profiling and police brutality. What happened to Professor Gates is not an individual incident. Racial profiling and police brutality must be dealt with in a serious and systematic way.

Sincerely,
(your signature appended here).

Bail Out The People Movement
Boston
617-522-6626
bopmboston@gmail.com
http://bopm-boston.blogspot.com

National Office
212-633-6646
bailoutpeople@safewebmail.com
http://www.BailOutPeople.org

The Day the President Turned Black (But has he turned back?)

By Greg Palast for The Huffington Post, GregPalast.com, July 29, 2009

He's in hot water now. For a moment, on national television, the President of the United States turned black!

Last week, when his buddy "Skip" Gates got busted for being Black in Boston, Barack Obama forgot his official role: to soothe America's conscience with the happy fairy tale that his election marked the end of racism in the USA.

Instead, Obama, the excruciatingly middle-of-the-road President, was seized by Barack the militant State Senator from the South Side of Chicago, who reminded us that cops bust Black guys for no goddamn good reason all the goddamn time.

I'm reminded that it was not so long ago that we watched the vicious gang-beating by Los Angeles cops of a defenseless, handcuffed, Rodney King, an African-American. King's beating was unusual only in that it was caught on videotape.

Yeah, I know: we've come a hell of a long way. Obama won, Jessie cried, Beyoncé has her own line of perfume and Tiger Woods plays where 30 years ago he couldn't eat lunch.

Good on them.

But what about Robert Pratt, Mr. President?

Pratt, a United Auto Workers member, has five kids and a mortgage payment of $1,100 a month on a house in Detroit worth no more than $40,000. The payment's astronomical because he pays 11% on his mortgage balance, double the national average interest rate. Now, on those crazy terms, he's sure to lose his house.

How did that happen? Pratt, whose story we've been tracking, was "steered" into a sub-prime loan by Countrywide Financial. "Steering" is the polite term for forcing folk into crappy loan terms. And not just any folk: Black folk, like Pratt. Over 60% of African-American mortgage applicants were (and ARE) steered into "sub-prime" predatory loans.

According to exhaustive studies by the Federal Reserve Board and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), African Americans are 250% more likely to get a loan with an "exploding interest" clause than white borrowers - and notably, the higher the income and the better the credit rating of a Black borrower, the more likely the discrimination.

As an economist, I can tell you it's not a stretch to say that Obama's failure to deal with endemic racism in the finance system is killing off hope of the nation's economic recovery. The "exploding rate" attack centered on Black and Hispanic communities has, according to the CLR, caused 40.2 million homes to lose value due to their proximity to foreclosed properties.

Yet, not a peep from the Obama Administration about ending this Ku Klux lending practice which has laid waste Black neighborhoods and taken a hunk of White America's housing values with it.

Instead, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is the honored guest of the Board of Directors of JP Morgan, owner of one of the most outrageous of the financial predators, Washington Mutual. Morgan/WaMu, with its racially-poisoned mortgage trickery, makes the Cambridge Police Department look like the NAACP.

(Indeed, Emanuel's host JP Morgan was sued last week by the NAACP for "systematic, institutionalized racism in making home mortgage loans.")

The cold truth is, financial attacks on the Black community continue as freely under Obama as under Bush, despite Obama's power to halt it instantly by banning loan-sharking as a condition of continued bail-outs for these banks. Obama has directed the FDIC to guarantee JP Morgan loans, saving the bank $3.1 billion this year. Obama has directed the FDIC to guarantee Mr. Pratt, uh, "hope."

And what about Thomas Johnson, Mr. President?

Johnson's a minister in Florida who lost his vote in 2000, alongside at least 94,000 others falsely accused of being felons without the right to vote. Most of the innocents accused and abused were Black, the minister included. I know, because I saw those state records with the carefully recorded "BLA" next to the voters' names.

I had an editor on the story, won't say his name because he was so typical, who asked me why Johnson, an African-American, didn't pound the table and DEMAND his ballot. Johnson's no Harvard professor in Boston with the President's phone number on his speed dial.

My extremely white editor, a Yale graduate, sitting in San Francisco, could not imagine what would happen if a dark-skinned Rev. Johnson had started making a scene in Alachua County, in the Deep Deep South. The Reverend was smart not to pull a "Skippy Gates" and lip-off at authority: just a couple months ago, Alachua cops 'Tased' an angry, but unarmed, Black man, then shot him dead with seven bullets.

Johnson's vote loss, you might say, was "so 2000." This is post-racial 2009. Bullshit. In last year's election, Florida went right back into the racially biased block-and-purge of Black voters, barring thousands from the ballot through new ID laws that would have made Jim Crow segregationists of the Fifties proud. (See the investigative report, "Block the Vote," by myself and Bobby Kennedy, from the October 2008 Rolling Stone).

Yet, the Obama Administration appears quite squeamish about taking down the nouvelle ballot-box Bull Connors.

Venom

What I'm saying is that the venom of structural racism in America continues to sicken us all, in our economy, in our voting stations, in our schools (don't get me started), our health care system, our ... well, you name it.

Yes, I joined the Hope Parade and voted for Obama, expecting just this one change: a direct attack on the remaining areas of official sanction of racist policies and practices. I'm still waiting.

It was quite inspiring, last Thursday, to the see a Black man appear, if momentarily, behind the Presidential seal. Unfortunately, Obama's swift demand for equal justice under the law was provoked only when the whip came down on someone, like himself, whose professional and class status had, they presumed, made them exempt from the daily insults and assaults visited on their less privileged brothers.

So much was made of Gates' Harvard post that the issue seemed to be It's not right to cuff a dark-skinned man who's a HARVARD PROFESSOR." The race-neutral rules of class privilege had been violated.

What's missing in America - and in the Oval Office – is any hint of outrage at the endemic, systemic cruelties visited on Black Americans, like Pratt and Johnson, who lack a key to the Harvard Alumni Club.

******

Greg Palast, an expert in finance and regulation, is the author of Armed Madhouse: Strange Tales and Sordid Secrets of a White House Gone Wild. His investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now were recently released as a film on DVD: Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon, on the Trail of the Financial Marauders.

Sign up for his reports at www.GregPalast.com.

Boston Cop, NYC Aide Under Fire Over Gates Remarks

FOXNews.com, July 30, 2009

A Boston police officer has been suspended and could be fired for a mass e-mail in which he used a racial slur to describe black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Commissioner Edward Davis put 36-year-old Justin Barrett on administrative leave pending a termination hearing after learning of the slur.

Click here for photos.

A person with knowledge of the case who was not authorized to speak publicly about the details told the Boston Herald that Barrett, a member of the National Guard, sent the e-mail to fellow Guardsmen and to The Boston Globe.

Barrett called Gates a "jungle monkey" in the e-mail, according to a copy posted online at MyFOXBoston.com. Officials told the Herald that Barrett admitted writing the e-mail.

WARNING EXPLICIT CONTENT: Click here to read the e-mail.

The new controversy in Boston comes on the heels of the media frenzy over Gates' July 16 arrest in his Cambridge home on a charge of disorderly conduct by a white police officer. Police were responding to a report of a possible burglary.

The charge later was dropped, but the case sparked a national debate on racial profiling, with even President Obama weighing in.

Barrett and the police union did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the disciplinary case in Boston. He has no previous disciplinary history in his two years with the department, the Herald reported.

Meanwhile, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, a Democrat, accepted the resignation of Lee Landor, his deputy press secretary, after she called Gates a racist and referred to President Barack Obama as "O-dumb-a."

Landor's comments on the social networking site Facebook were inappropriate, Stringer said in a statement.

Landor defended her entries, but added: "It is understandable that a black man encountering police will be suspicious of racial profiling, based on the long history of racism in this country."

Key witness disputes Hejazi account of Neda death

Press TV, July 29, 2009

More than a month after Neda Aqa-Soltan was killed in the post-election frenzy in Iran, a key witness to the incident moves to set the record straight.

Neda, 26, was shot dead on June 20 in an alley away from the scene of clashes between security forces and demonstrators in Tehran.

She immediately became an international icon after graphic videos of her bleeding to death in a matter of seconds, grabbed the attention of world media outlets.

Hamid Panahi, Neda's friend and music teacher who was by her side in her final moments, dismissed the slew of eyewitness accounts of the sad incident -- particularly the one given by Arash Hejazi.

Arash Hejazi, an Iranian physician currently studying in England, told the BBC that he had witnessed a member of the Basij shooting Neda.

His comments were a contributing factor in the Western-led media campaign against the Ahmadinejad government.

Panahi said contrary to Hejazi's account of the incident, 'there were no security forces of Basij members nearby'.

“In his interviews with foreign media outlets, Mr. Hejazi said that the culprit behind Neda's death was arrested on the spot. I saw nothing of the sort. There were only about a dozen people present at the scene. No one was arrested,” he said.

To prove his point, Panahi said that new revelations have found that Neda was in fact shot not in the chest, but in the back.

Panahi is not the first to dismiss Hejazi's account of Neda's death. Earlier in June, the man who drove Neda to hospital had also said that there were no Basij members around at the time.

Iranian security forces have dismissed the reports out of hand, asserting that they did not open fire on protestors during the sporadic unrest.

While Media outlets in the West blame Neda's death on Iranian security forces, new revelations show that she was murdered by a small caliber pistol-- a weapon that is not used by Iranian security forces.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asked Judiciary chief Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahroudi to conduct a through investigation into the incident.

SBB/HGH

Obama’s Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups

By Amy Goodman, Truthdig, July 28, 2009

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the city of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn’s union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a “John J. Towery II,” who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist “John Jacob.”

Dunn told me: “John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He said he was an anarchist. He was really interested in SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me.”

“Jacob” told the activists he was a civilian employed at Fort Lewis Army Base and would share information about base activities that could help the PMR organize rallies and protests against public ports being used for troop and Stryker military vehicle deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, PMR activists have occasionally engaged in civil disobedience, blocking access to the port.

Larry Hildes, an attorney representing Washington activists, says the U.S. attorney prosecuting the cases against them, Brian Kipnis, specifically instructed the Army not to hand over any information about its intelligence-gathering activities, despite a court order to do so.

Which is why Dunn’s request to Olympia and the documents he obtained are so important.

The military is supposed to be barred from deploying on U.S. soil, or from spying on citizens. Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: “In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents [and some would watch] every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics.” Pyle later investigated the spying for two congressional committees: “As a result of those investigations, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished, and all of its files were burned. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to stop the warrantless surveillance of electronic communications.”

Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others are pushing for a new, comprehensive investigation of all U.S. intelligence activities, of the scale of the Church Committee hearings, which exposed widespread spying on and disruption of legal domestic groups, attempts at assassination of foreign heads of state, and more.

Demands mount for information on and accountability for Vice President Dick Cheney’s alleged secret assassination squad, President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, and the CIA’s alleged misleading of Congress. But the spying in Olympia occurred well into the Obama administration (and may continue today). President Barack Obama supports retroactive immunity for telecom companies involved in the wiretapping, and has maintained Bush-era reliance on the state secrets privilege. Lee and Holt should take the information uncovered by Brendan Dunn and the Olympia activists and get the investigations started now.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times,” recently released in paperback.

The Honduran Connection

The U.S. right, including Bush appointee Otto Reich, mobilizes to support the putsch.
By Bill Weinberg, In These Times, July 29, 2009

Actually, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term through a constitutional reform, given that the binding vote establishing a constitutional convention (following the referendum scheduled for June 28 to establish a popular mandate) was to take place in November, simultaneous with the presidential election.

At best, Zelaya would be able to run again in four years. In his calls for a constitutional convention, he had emphasized the need to strengthen the labor code and to ensure public control of the telecom and power industries — not to abolish term limits.

No nation has recognized the regime that took power in Honduras June 28, when the military summarily deported President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica in his pajamas. Nonetheless, the political right in both the United States and Honduras is trying to build political support for the coup regime.

Zelaya’s opponents, who argue that the coup was not a coup, cite Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution, which states that any president who proposes an amendment to allow re-election “shall cease forthwith” in his duties.

Missing from this explanation is acknowledgment that the constitution was crafted by a military-dominated state in 1982, and that this measure was aimed at keeping elected leaders subordinate to the generals.

Zelaya was removed on the day his non-binding popular referendum on whether to open a constitutional convention was to be voted on. He had pledged to go ahead with the vote despite a Supreme Court ruling barring it.

Hours after his removal, the National Congress read a forged “resignation letter” from Zelaya. It then passed a resolution giving legal imprimatur to the removal and making Roberto Micheletti, head of the congress, president.

Actually, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term through a constitutional reform, given that the binding vote establishing a constitutional convention (following the referendum scheduled for June 28 to establish a popular mandate) was to take place in November, simultaneous with the presidential election.

At best, Zelaya would be able to run again in four years. In his calls for a constitutional convention, he had emphasized the need to strengthen the labor code and to ensure public control of the telecom and power industries — not to abolish term limits.

Coup in the works

In May, the Honduran Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CODEH) filed a case in the Honduran courts alleging that a military coup was in the works and calling on judicial authorities to intervene. They didn’t.

Then, just days before the coup, the Supreme Court received an accusation against Zelaya —apparently by one Robert Carmona-Borjas of the D.C.-based Arcadia Foundation. The judiciary rushed the case through the legal process, and Zelaya wasn’t given an opportunity to respond to the charges. Regardless of whatever constitutional violations Zelaya may have committed, the military abrogated the democratic process entirely by having the president deported.

Enter Otto Reich?

One of the grassroots groups mobilizing for Zelaya’s return, the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH), issued a statement on July 3 asserting the “undeniable involvement” of former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich in the coup d’etat. Similar claims were made at the emergency session of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C., where Venezuelan representative Roy Chaderton said:

We have information that worries us. This is a person who has been important in the diplomacy of the U.S. who has reconnected with old colleagues and encouraged the coup: Otto Reich, ex-sub-secretary of state under Bush. We know him as an interventionist…

Chaderton also cited Reich’s purported involvement in the attempted coup d’etat against Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez in April 2002.

In 2001, President Bush used a recess appointment to make Reich, a far-right Cuban exile, assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, bypassing strong Congressional opposition. In 1987, Congress had investigated Reich for illegal activities in support of Nicaragua’s right-wing Contra guerrillas.

In April 2002, the New York Times reported that on the morning the Venezuelan putsch went into action, Reich spoke by telephone with Pedro Carmona, the conservative businessman who would be installed as de facto president for the two days before the coup collapsed. The account claimed Reich coached Carmona on how to handle the coup, urging him not to dissolve the National Assembly. (Carmona did anyway, which is credited as a key factor in the coup’s failure.)

In January 2003, the White House quietly moved Reich over to the presidential staff as special envoy to Latin America rather than face Congressional opposition to his re-appointment as assistant secretary of state. He resigned in 2004 and returned to private life, later working as a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate John McCain.

In its July 3 statement, OFRANEH charged that Reich was working with the Arcadia Foundation to destabilize Zelaya, though it offered only circumstantial evidence to back up its assertion. The Arcadia Foundation website identifies the nonprofit as an anti-corruption watchdog that promotes “good governance and democratic institutions.” Reich’s name does not appear on the website.

However, one of the two names on the site’s “Founders” page is Robert Carmona-Borjas, who is identified as “a Venezuelan lawyer and an expert in military affairs, national security, corruption and governance.” It notes that he fled Venezuela and sought political asylum in the United States following the 2002 coup attempt: “In Venezuela, concerned with the issues of governability, the defense of human rights, democracy and the fight against corruption, he became an activist, disregarding the risks that such a stance implied.”

On April 27, 2002, the Mexican daily La Jornada reported that Carmona-Borjas had drafted “anti-constitutional” decrees for the coup regime. And this June, Honduran newspapers noted that Carmona-Borjas had brought legal charges against Zelaya and other members of his administration for defying a court ruling that barred preparations for the constitutional referendum that was scheduled for the day Zelaya would be ousted. A YouTube video dated July 3 shows footage from Honduras’ Channel 8 TV of Carmona-Borjas being extolled to enthusiastic applause from the stage at an anti-Zelaya rally in Tegucigalpa’s Plaza la Democracia.

Reich’s name popped up in the media in relation to Honduras earlier this year, when he accused the Zelaya administration of corruption after the Latin Node digital telephone company (since acquired by eLandia) was fined $2 million by U.S. authorities for allegedly bribing officials in Honduras and Yemen.

“President Zelaya has allowed or encouraged this kind of practices [sic] and we will see that he is also behind this,” Reich told the Miami Herald in April. He said he was prepared to make a sworn statement on the affair before Honduran law enforcement—but said he would not travel to Honduras to do so, because his personal security would be at risk there.

And in a September 2008 interview with the Honduran daily El Heraldo, Reich warned of Tegucigalpa’s growing closeness with Venezuela, remarking cryptically, “If President Zelaya wants to be an ally of our enemies, let him think about what might be the consequences of his actions and words.”

The Hondutel Scandal

The Latin Node scandal may touch on one of the key issues behind the coup. Despite the media focus on Zelaya’s supposed agenda to get term limits overturned, one of the real goals of his proposed constitutional reform was to re-extend national control over Honduras’ telecom system. The officials who Latin Node allegedly bribed were executives of the national company Hondutel, who apparently took kickbacks to allow Latin Node to provide digital telephone service in Honduras.

In an April 7 article that he wrote for Miami’s Spanish-language Nuevo Herald, Reich reminded readers that Zelaya’s nephew, Marcelo Chimirri, was a high official at Hondutel and had been accused of various illicit practices. An outraged Zelaya went on national radio and TV to announce that he would sue Reich for defamation: “We will proceed with legal action for calumny against this man, Otto Reich, who has been waging a two-year campaign against Honduras.”

In January, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa denied Chimirri an entry visa into the United States, citing “serious cases of corruption.” This wasn’t Chimirri’s first attempt to get a visa. Zelaya had complained to Washington a month earlier about the visa issue, urging U.S. officials to “revise the procedure by which visas are cancelled or denied … as a means of [applying] pressure against … people who hold different beliefs or ideologies which pose no threat to the U.S.”

Bush-appointee Ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford also weighed in, telling the Honduran newspaper La Tribuna that the U.S. government was investigating North American telecom carriers for allegedly paying bribes to Honduran officials to engage in so-called “gray traffic”—the illicit bypassing of legal telecommunications channels. He recommended greater competition as a means to combat this supposed abuse.

The Honduran business elite has long sought to privatize Hondutel. In the late 1990s, none other than Roberto Micheletti—the current coup-installed president—was Hondutel’s CEO. Nikolas Kozloff, author of Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left, wrote in a commentary at BuzzFlash.com:

At the time, Micheletti favored privatizing the firm. Micheletti later went on to become president of Honduras’ National Congress. In that capacity, he was at odds with Zelaya, who opposed the so-called ‘telecom reform’ that could open the door to outright privatization.

Chimirri was arrested by the new regime on July 2, 2009. The Arcadia Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for a statement. In a July 9 Miami Herald op-ed titled, “I Did Not Orchestrate Coup in Honduras,” Reich denies being the “architect” of the coup — which he also denies was a coup, and defends as “legal and constitutional.”

The website of Reich’s consulting firm, Otto Reich Associates, lists among its former clients AT&T and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon)—both of which would be possible purchasers of a privatized Hondutel.

Congressional coup backers

The New York Times reported comments from a House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee hearing in Washington on July 10, where several members of Congress criticized the Organization of American States (OAS) for suspending Honduras less than a month after it lifted the suspension of Cuba.

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) urged the United States to cut its support for the OAS, which gets 60 percent of its financing from Washington. He said the OAS response to the Honduras crisis proves that it is a “dangerous organization” that sides with Hugo Chávez in undermining democracy in the region.

“What has happened in Honduras was not a military coup,” Mack said. “If anyone is guilty here it is Mr. Zelaya himself for having turned his back on his people and his own Constitution.” Elsewhere, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) called Zelaya “a Chávez-style dictator” and described President Barack Obama’s call to reinstate Zelaya as “a slap in the face to the people of the Honduras.”

Reich was also among those who testified on July 10, as a transcript of Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearings held that day reveals. “What happens in Honduras may one day be seen as either the high-water mark of Hugo Chavez’s attempt to undermine democracy in this hemisphere or as a green light to the continued spread of Chavista authoritarianism under the guise of democracy,” he said, adding that Zelaya’s removal constituted “legal and defensible measures” by the Honduran judicial and legislative branches against the executive.

Hans Bader, counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-corporate, right-wing think tank, told Voice of America on July 3 that the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress believe Zelaya had put the country in peril. “I don’t think they needed to wait until he actually made himself into a dictator,” he said. “I think they were entitled to take action against a budding dictator.”

Throughout the hemisphere, the political right is assembling a barrage of legalistic sophistries in defense of the Honduran coup. If they prevail and the coup is allowed to become a fait accompli, it will be a grave step backward for democracy in the Americas and worldwide—made all the more insidious because, this time around, in contrast to the Cold War coups d’etat, it is being done under a veneer (however transparent) of propriety.

Bill Weinberg is editor of the online World War 4 Report and author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000). He is working on a book on indigenous movements in the Andes.

Honduras disarray spurs lobbying

By Kevin Bogardus, TheHill.com, July 28, 2009

Trade associations and companies both inside and outside of Honduras have stepped up their lobbying efforts in Washington as the nation’s political crisis remains unresolved in the wake of President Manuel Zelaya’s ouster.

A review of lobbying disclosure records by The Hill show that U.S. companies have worked to protect their operations in Honduras while more business groups from the Central American nation have turned to Washington lobbyists in order to keep Zelaya out of power.

The continuing focus by pro- and anti-Zelaya forces on Congress and the Obama administration is evidence of the United States’ sway with Honduras as the nation’s largest trading partner.

“We don’t want to see this political situation expand into an economic crisis. We want to see this resolved through peaceful dialogue,” said Stephanie Lester, vice president for international trade at the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA).

RILA and six other trade associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote to President Obama in a July 9 letter, urging to him maintain “economic stability” in Honduras.

“Predictability and stability are absolutely critical to U.S. companies, especially in these difficult economic times. Key to that predictability is that the United States maintain a secure bilateral and regional economic relationship with Honduras,” said the letter to Obama.

As the de facto government and Zelaya struggle to reach a resolution to the crisis, the U.S. government has suspended some aid with Honduras after the president’s exile June 28.

More than $20 million in aid to Honduras, including military assistance and certain development programs that go to the country’s government, have been suspended, according to a State Department spokeswoman.

In addition, there is an operational hold on $11 million worth of contracts under the Millennium Challenge compact with Honduras — a $215 million, five-year agreement signed in 2005 — that have not been authorized yet.

There have also been threats of harsher action by the U.S. government in the near future though if the crisis is prolonged.

The Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC), which oversees the compact, sent a July 17 letter to the de facto government expressing concern over recent unrest in Honduras and encouraging the authorities to take immediate steps to re-establish democratic order.

Further, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a July 15 Miami Herald op-ed that if progress is not made, more cuts in foreign aid should be made, along with targeted sanctions against individuals involved in the plot to overthrow Zelaya.

In jeopardy is more than $50 million in U.S. foreign aid slated for Honduras in 2009 and $130 million remaining in the compact between the MCC and Honduras. Others have gone further, such as the Organization of American States, which has suspended Honduras’s membership in the group.

A congressional aide who is working on U.S. policy toward Latin America said the administration has not gone further because it wants to provide room for the negotiations being mediated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to take their natural course.

“If there is a political benefit in going slow, it is that you give a face-saving timeline for the de facto government to exit and let Zelaya come back in. If you hammer them again and again, you don’t allow them that grace,” said the aide. The de facto government “should be under no illusion that time is not on their side and that a waiting game will not succeed.”

Aid to Honduras is “very important because it affects poor people in so many ways. Many poor people, for example, while I was there — USAID inaugurated many projects just for potable water,” said Larry Palmer, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras. But Palmer also said U.S. trade is just as important as aid to the country.

Honduras is one of the largest recipients of direct foreign investment in Central America, taking in about $517 million in U.S. investment by the end of 2006. U.S. exports to Honduras totaled $5 billion in 2008, and it is the third largest market for U.S. textile mill products.

That explains why business leaders in both Honduras and the United States have taken an interest in U.S. policy toward the de facto government, hiring lobbyists here in Washington to make their views known. Palmer explained American businesses’ interest in the crisis because “any type of sanction that would slow up trade with Honduras could have a detrimental effect on their businesses.”

Honduras, however, is a signatory to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which makes it tough to impose sanctions on the country. U.S. officials could look to see if Honduras violated any provisions of the agreement but the de facto government would likely argue any trade sanctions violate CAFTA.

Other than the letter by the seven trade associations, U.S. companies have also lobbied on the political crisis in Honduras, according to lobbying disclosure reports filed this quarter.

For example, Kimberly-Clark Corp., a health and hygiene company, had a contract lobbyist work Capitol Hill to oppose border restrictions and roadway blockades in Honduras, according to records. The company has a healthcare products facility in the country.

In addition, in-house lobbyists for Seaboard Corp., an agribusiness and transportation firm, lobbied on “agricultural, economic and political issues” regarding a list of countries, including Honduras, last quarter. Seaboard has at least four subsidiaries based in Honduras, according to records filed with the Securities Exchange Commission.

More Honduran business leaders have also hired help in Washington. For example, Asociacion Hondurena de Maquiladores registered two firms to lobby on its behalf — the Cormac Group and Vison Americas.

At Vison Americas, two former State Department officials from the Bush administration, Roger Noriega and Jose Cardenas, are lobbying for the association to “support the efforts of the Honduran private sector to consolidate the democratic transition in their country,” according to lobbying records.