Martin Luther King, Jr: a Victim of the United States’ 20th Century Anti-Communist Campaign

Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014
Wiping Away the Tears

Martin Luther King, Jr: a Victim of the United States’ 20th Century Anti-Communist Campaign

by HEATHER GRAY


On April 7, 1968, the body of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. laid in a coffin at Spelman College’s Sister’s Chapel in Atlanta. King had been assassinated three days earlier on April 4 in Memphis. That weekend, I was one of throngs of people on the Spelman campus paying homage to the great man. Walking toward to coffin at the front of the chapel all you could hear was the sound of footsteps and weeping.

You looked at him through a clear glass cover over the coffin that was constantly being wiped clean by pastors on either side. One of them was Reverend Lawrence Carter, now Dean of the Morehouse University King Chapel. He told me years later that the glass was placed on the coffin because as people walked by their tears fell on King’s exposed body. The pastors wiped away the tears.

King’s leadership role in America paralleled many initiatives and movements for justice throughout the world that faced challenges within the context of the struggle between the East and the West in the Cold War era. After World War II, in fact, anti-colonial movements spread exponentially throughout the world, including in the U.S. that incorporated demands for justice and independence. The reaction against these movements has not been benign.

Prior to his assassination in 1968, King had played what is a universally acknowledged instrumental leadership role in the Civil Rights movement in America. His and others leadership was a challenge to some of the most egregious discriminatory policies in American history, largely centered in the Jim Crow South. Some of the leading campaigns were the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955 resulting in a reversal of laws that had prevented integrated seating on public transportation; and the profound 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that swept away the unequal treatment of Black Americans that had been in place since the end of the reconstruction period in the 1800’s after the Civil War.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/martin-luther-king-jr-a-victim-of-the-united-states-20th-century-anti-communist-campaign/

Costa Rica leftist easily wins presidential run-off

Published: Monday April 7, 2014 MYT 12:41:57 PM
Updated: Monday April 7, 2014 MYT 12:41:57 PM
Costa Rica leftist easily wins presidential run-off
by alexandra alper

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - A centre-left academic who has never held elected office easily won Costa Rica's presidential election on Sunday, ousting the graft-stained ruling party from power after its candidate quit campaigning a month ago.

Former diplomat Luis Guillermo Solis, of the Citizen Action Party (PAC), won with around 78 percent of votes by tapping in to public anger at rising inequality and government corruption scandals.

His win dislodges a two-party dynasty that has governed the coffee-producing country for decades. It is also another victory for Latin America's centre-left parties, which have steadily gained ground across the region in recent years.

"More than 1 million Costa Ricans have said yes to change," Solis told thousands of cheering supporters waving red-and-yellow party flags on Sunday night. "We need to shift away from ... a violence expressed in poverty, in inequality and in the utterly perverse form of corruption."

More:
http://www.thestar.com.my/News/World/2014/04/07/Costa-Rica-leftist-easily-wins-presidential-runoff/

Congrats to arcos on your new President, if you see this.

USAID Subversion in Latin America Not Limited to Cuba

Published on Sunday, April 6, 2014 by CEPR's The Americas Blog

USAID Subversion in Latin America Not Limited to Cuba

by Dan Beeton

A new investigation by the Associated Press into a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project to create a Twitter-style social media network in Cuba has received a lot of attention this week, with the news trending on the actual Twitter for much of the day yesterday when the story broke, and eliciting comment from various members of Congress and other policy makers. The “ZunZuneo” project, which AP reports was “aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government,” was overseen by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). AP describes OTI as “a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape.” Its efforts to undermine the Cuban government are not unusual, however, considering the organization’s track record in other countries in the region.

As CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot described in an interview with radio station KPFA’s “Letters and Politics” yesterday, USAID and OTI in particular have engaged in various efforts to undermine the democratically-elected governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Haiti, among others, and such “open societies” could be more likely to be impacted by such activities than Cuba. Declassified U.S. government documents show that USAID’s OTI in Venezuela played a central role in funding and working with groups and individuals following the short-lived 2002 coup d’etat against Hugo Chávez. A key contractor for USAID/OTI in that effort has been Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI).

More recent State Department cables made public by Wikileaks reveal that USAID/OTI subversion in Venezuela extended into the Obama administration era (until 2010, when funded for OTI in Venezuela appears to have ended), and DAI continued to play an important role. A State Department cable from November 2006 explains the U.S. embassy’s strategy in Venezuela and how USAID/OTI “activities support [the] strategy”:

(S) In August of 2004, Ambassador outlined the country team's 5 point strategy to guide embassy activities in Venezuela for the period 2004 ) 2006 (specifically, from the referendum to the 2006 presidential elections). The strategy's focus is: 1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez' Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.

AP PHOTOS: Jamboree events teach Cuban kids skills

AP PHOTOS: Jamboree events teach Cuban kids skills
By Associated Press 5:29 p.m. April 4, 2014


[font size=1]
In this March 29, 2014 photo, children or "pioneers," wearing red neckerchiefs over white shirts walk through the Ernesto
"Che" Guevara Palace, during festivities marking the anniversaries of the Organization of Cuban Pioneers and of the Union
of Communist Youth in Havana, Cuba. Cuban schoolchildren are referred to as "pioneers," and the organization was
founded in 1961 to encourage the values of education and social responsibility among children and adolescents.
(AP Photo/Franklin Reyes) The Associated Press[/font]

HAVANA (AP) — Cuban children wearing red or blue neckerchiefs dance, jump and play in a complex of blocky, Soviet-style buildings with a giant red "Che" scrawled above the entrance.

It's a kind of cross between slumber party and Scout Jamboree, with a distinctly Cuban flair.

Kids learn skills such as tying knots and how to navigate by the stars; there are also competitions including races to dress themselves blindfolded, as well as sports and cultural activities.

Similar events are held around the island each April 4 to mark the anniversaries of the Organization of Cuban Pioneers and of the Union of Communist Youth.

~snip~



More:
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/apr/04/ap-photos-jamboree-events-teach-cuban-kids-skills/

We've seen your anti-Chavez "journalist" before. Here's a comment on him:

Response To John Carlin's Anti-Chavez Propaganda
Wednesday, 6 February 2008, 1:36 pm
Opinion: Toni Solo

Guardian exclusive: Hugo Chavez is Venezuelan President

By Toni Solo

Majority world opinion was not stunned on February 3rd when the UK Guardian's web site reported a fact about Venezuela. Perhaps it should have been. After extensive investigative research with my own insecure image in the mirror, I can reveal that this undiplomatic low-level unintelligence source commented, "well, chop me off at the knees and call me tripod...." Fact : Hugo Chavez is the Venezuelan President.

John Carlin's anti-Chavez propaganda piece, datelined the Observer February 3rd, really does contain just that single item of substance, buried deep inside yet another fact-impoverished Guardian web site report on Venezuela. It is the only relevant substantive fact in the article. The rest of Carlin's piece consists almost entirely of allegations plucked from thin air and quotations from Colombian government patsies or from unidentified "high-level security, intelligence and diplomatic sources".

Carlin's main allegations are that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) depend heavily on Venezuelan support and that the Venezuelan civil and military authorities facilitate FARC narcotics dealing on a large scale as a matter of policy. He alleges, "Thirty per cent of the 600 tons of cocaine smuggled from Colombia each year goes through Venezuela." But he offers no fact-based argument to support that claim. It seems to be based on a US State Department report which Carlin does not acknowledge.

Then he portentously asserts "In the end Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro made a public pronouncement in Uruguay in which he said, without addressing the substance of the allegations, that they were part of a 'racist' and 'colonialist' campaign against Venezuela by the centre-left Spanish newspaper El País, where I originally wrote about Farc and the Venezuelan connection." Why should the Venezuelan authorities respond to allegations that have, in fact, no substance?

Carlin as US propaganda shill : drugs and terror

Before looking a bit more closely at Carlin's self-evidently dishonest and insincere reporting, it needs placing in relation to the current campaign by the Bush regime and its allies in the European Union to discredit the government of Hugo Chavez. Recently US Drug Enforcment Agency official and US Southern Command military officers have accused the Chavez administration of failing to act forcefully to prevent narcotics trafficking and of being a destabilising influence in the region. Carlin's piece is likely to be recycled endlessly in mainstream media as "proof" of Venezuelan government links to narcotics and "terror".

More:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0802/S00060.htm

Victorious over phase one, Venezuelans prepare for next assault revealed in secret documents.

Victorious over phase one, Venezuelans prepare for next assault revealed in secret documents.
By Les Blough in Venezuela. Axis of Logic
Saturday, Apr 5, 2014

We bring the Axis of Logic community up to date with this report on the status of the February-March 2014 assault on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the health of the revolution here, vibrant and strong despite a very dangerous and difficult period in our history. Let us begin with an assessment of the opposition political parties and then move on to the defeat of this phase of the crawling coup’s latest terrorist attacks; finally, we will explain the next strategy, planned by the opposition and their supporters in the US government and Venezuela's preparation to defeat them again as they have in every attempt to overthrow the government over the last 15 years.

Opposition Fractures

Within MUD, the opposition's allied political parties (Mesa de la Unidad Democrática), various political parties are fighting with each other for control. Yesterday, President Maduro said the problems in the Chacao municipality of Caracas during the February-March terrorist assault were organized by Leopoldo Lopez' Voluntad Popular party (PV). Chacao's opposition Mayor Ramón Muchacho is a member of a rival political party, Primero Justicia (PJ). Two other opposition mayors in the country who supported the attacks over the last 2 months have been arrested, jailed and removed from their office by a Supreme Court decision. Yesterday, President Maduro said PV organized the attacks in Chacao to pressure the Supreme Court to arrest Muchacho (PJ) so that they can try taking back control of Chacao in what would then be new elections. This may be the reason why the government has not yet arrested Muchacho for his support of the attacks within his jurisdiction.

Government's defeat of Phase I of the 2014 coup

It appears the government has reduced the terrorist assault to very few sporadic attacks and has all but eliminated the guarimbas, gaining control of and cleaning up the streets in Chacao & Baruta in Caracas, Valencia, Merida and San Cristobal.

On Thursday, April 3, the Venezuelan military defeated Colombian paramilitaries in Tachira, captured 14 and killed one of them, William Molina. National radio reports some of those captured are giving up information on their recruiters and funding sources in interviews being carried out by the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN).

On Friday, April 4: Diosdado Cabello, President of Venezuela's National Assembly (AN), announced that the reform of the Anti-Terrorism Law was submitted to the National Assembly, following the firebombing of the headquarters of the Ministry of Popular Power for Housing and Habitat in Chacao where 89 pre-school children were rescued by the troops and firemen. This ministry carries out the work of Gran Misión Vivienda (Great Housing Mission Venezuela), created by President Chavez.

More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66521.shtml

Leftist seen easily winning Costa Rica presidency after rival pulls out

Leftist seen easily winning Costa Rica presidency after rival pulls out
Alexandra Alper
Reuters
3:09 a.m. EDT, April 6, 2014

SAN JOSE (Reuters) - A center-left academic who has never been elected to office is expected to easily win Costa Rica's presidential election run-off on Sunday, after his ruling party rival unexpectedly ditched his bid last month.

Luis Guillermo Solis, a former diplomat, rode a wave of anti-government sentiment over rising inequality and corruption scandals to finish ahead in a first round of voting in February, surprising pollsters who had placed him fourth.

Facing a depleted war chest, his ruling party rival Johnny Araya then quit campaigning after an opinion poll showed him trailing badly.

Solis has promised to fight Costa Rica's stubbornly high poverty rate while stamping out corruption, an issue that has dogged President Laura Chinchilla's administration.

More:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/sns-rt-us-costa-rica-election-20140406,0,7015839.story

NAFTA Linked to Massive Human Rights Violations in Mexico

Source: Scoop Media New Zealand

NAFTA Linked to Massive Human Rights Violations in Mexico
Sunday, 6 April 2014, 12:44 pm
Article: Kent Paterson

NAFTA Linked to Massive Human Rights Violations in Mexico
by Kent Paterson

In a series of preliminary opinions, an international tribunal of conscience has condemned massive violations of human rights in Mexico.

Now wrapping up a four-year process of evidence gathering, members of the Mexican chapter of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT) have found grave threats to the environment, food sovereignty, indigenous autonomy, and democratic rights of self-expression and organization of the Mexican people.

A common denominator is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), according to PPT representatives and collaborators.

“Groups and movements participating in the tribunal have documented ways in which NAFTA has been pernicious to Mexico’s social, economic and cultural life,” says Dr. Zulma Mendez, member of the Group for the Articulation of Justice in Ciudad Juarez and a participant in the gender violence and femicide section of the PPT.

According to Mendez,“The unequal relations of power that are present in NAFTA and which help to make it attractive to U.S. interests have been addressed: Transnational corporations that divest communities of a viable future through practices that turn communities into mass production spaces, workers into a pair of arms, and life as disposable…”

Read more: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1404/S00032/nafta-linked-to-massive-human-rights-violations-in-mexico.htm

Voter abstention main challenge for Costa Rica's only presidential candidate

Voter abstention main challenge for Costa Rica's only presidential candidate
Javier Cordoba, The Associated Press
Published Saturday, April 5, 2014 7:02PM EDT

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica -- Nobody stands between Luis Solis and the presidency of Costa Rica.

The centre-leftist's only rival in Sunday's runoff dropped out of the race last month, leaving Solis one chief remaining challenge: getting enough Costa Ricans to the polls to give him a respectable vote total.

Solis topped the first round of the presidential vote in February with only about 30 per cent of the vote and a margin of less than 1 percentage point over Johnny Araya of the governing National Liberation Party. But just over a month later, polls showed Solis had built a lead of two or three to one, and Araya stopped campaigning, saying it would be a waste of money.

~snip~
"If he gets less votes that what he got in the first round, he won't have political legitimacy even if legally he is president," said Francisco Barahona, a political science professor at the University of Costa Rica

The son of a shoemaker turned small businessman, Solis studied history at the University of Costa Rica and obtained a master's degree in Latin American studies at Tulane University in the United States. He also has taught at Florida International University and at the University of Michigan.

More:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/voter-abstention-main-challenge-for-costa-rica-s-only-presidential-candidate-1.1762831#ixzz2y3b8C9Fv

Mass Incarceration and Capitalism

Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014

The Violence of Economic Exploitation

Mass Incarceration and Capitalism

by ROB URIE


With no public acknowledgement of the irony the U.S., the ‘land of the free,’ has both the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest overall prison population. The dominant public perception appears to rest at the local level: the state has the right to prohibit socially destructive acts; people commit socially destructive acts and they are put in prison. Left largely unconsidered is the nature of the democratic capitalist state that claims this right to incarcerate. American history places it squarely in the service of economic interests. The country was founded on genocide and slavery. Western political theory frames these as ‘political’ acts. Genocide against the indigenous population was / is framed as military conflict. Slavery in theory ‘ended’ with the Civil War. But both of these also had profound economic impacts. Much as the enclosure ‘movement’ in Britain produced a ‘criminal’ class of peasants ‘freed’ from formerly collective lands, the American genocide against the indigenous population resulted in imposition of European ‘property’ relations where ‘property’ had never before been conceived. As far back as the philosopher Aristotle slavery was framed as the right of conquerors over the conquered whereas the labor expropriated from slaves in America supported a self-perpetuating plutocracy that today finds the descendents of slaves overwhelmingly populating U.S. prisons and the descendents of slave ‘owners’ as a class immune from prosecution for its own socially destructive acts and in position to profit from the system of mass incarceration.

Likewise, the history of race ‘relations’ in the U.S. doesn’t reduce to singular explanations. But it does tie broadly to Western imperial history, to British, European and American strategies of colonization, subjugation and economic expropriation begun in the seventeenth century that by degree continue today. The kidnapped Africans forced into slavery in the U.S. were used to feed a global system of capitalist trade and they served as human ‘currency’ as chattel property. The self-serving storyline that capitalism ‘replaced’ slavery with ‘free’ economic participation ignores the role expropriated slave labor played in capitalist trade and capital accumulation and it requires an anti-historical notion of ‘free’ economic participation that ignores the strategies of economic coercion that followed the nominal end of slavery. Designated three-fifths a person in the U.S. Constitution to accrue political power to slave ‘owners,’ slaves accrued political power to the institution of slavery as system of labor expropriation as well. A century or more of theoretical argumentation on both left and right notwithstanding, slavery was a capitalist institution that fed nascent global capitalist trade. And its residual in post Civil War strategies of racial repression, suppression and economic exploitation relate by degree to current capitalist imperialism in other former colonies. The racist, classist prison system in the U.S. is fact and reified metaphor for this ‘internal’ history and for the breadth and reach of the capitalist imperial relations behind the concentrated fortunes today so in evidence in the West.

Readers here likely know some or all of this history but most Westerners appear to have little to no knowledge of it. To most the question back is: how can a system of public safety, ‘crime’ suppression, be a strategy of social repression? Part of the disconnect lies within the very idea of crime as it is socially circumscribed through the anti-historical precepts of capitalist democracy. If ‘the West’ is capitalist and democratic then all social acts are ‘freely’ undertaken. Social history and material need are irrelevant because ‘we’ all have the same opportunity to react to existing circumstance in the present. Readers may see the outline of the ‘opportunity society’ of right-wing fantasy here. Within this frame the fact that per capita rates of incarceration in U.S. states are between five and ten times higher for the descendents of slaves than for the descendents of slave ‘owners’ must indicate innate qualitative differences, as must the relations of income and wealth distribution to this same residual of history. But if ‘crime’ were defined as the willful causing of social harm to others how could these overlaps of history: slavery, social repression, economic expropriation, and incarceration, not be crimes? As Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Kahlil Gibran Muhammad and other great historians of social tragedy before them have noted, the Western narrative of ‘crime’ ties closely in history to strategies of economic expropriation and social repression against nominally ‘freed’ slaves and their descendents following the end of the Civil War. And it ties as well to British social theories of ‘crime’ used to explain the sudden appearance of a large peasant class dispossessed by the enclosure of formerly collective lands.

But this history of race in America is particular as well. It can’t be reduced to Marxian notions of class alone because the social persistence / insistence of race is more than just economic. And to reduce the history of race ‘relations’ to economics within the circular precepts of capitalist democracy is to misrepresent systematic repression as missed ‘opportunities,’ as the otherwise included who only coincidentally share relation with ‘external’ imperial subjects in social outcomes but who nevertheless join the ‘us’ when it comes to paying taxes and fighting and dying in imperial wars. While specific social technologies like race-based drug laws enforced using race-based policing are the mechanism that ‘explains’ the current massively disproportionate incarceration rate for blacks, browns and indigenous peoples, drug laws were used for a century prior in strategies of targeted social repression. The near instantaneous conversion of the U.S. penal population from white to black following the Civil War restored the economic relations of coerced expropriation outside of explicit chattel title. ‘Convict leasing’ was the conversion mechanism that tied ‘the law’ as tool of social repression to the economic expropriation that fed post-war capitalist relations. Capital ‘formation’ in the West included the aggregation of the expropriated labor of slaves, the exploited ‘resources’ that accrued from genocide against the indigenous population and from the place of these in the global system of capitalist trade. Race doesn’t reduce to class but it does find broad analog in Western imperial relations.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/mass-incarceration-and-capitalism/