Lies and Crap about Joanne Chesimard from the FBI and Rightwingers

Here, from an extremely stupid rightwing net mag called The Blaze.

Joanne Chesimard (otherwise known as Assata Shakur) is a fugitive from US justice. She is the first woman ever added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. The fact that she has suddenly been placed there makes no sense and smacks of political bullshit, nonsense and crap, just like everything the United Snakes government does.

Chesimard was a member of a radical Black guerrilla group that split off from the Black Panthers. This group was called the Black Liberation Army. They apparently committed quite a few times in the short period during which they were active, mostly in the early 1970′s. Chesimard appears to have been involved in quite a few crimes, including robberies and possible homicides.

She is charged with the murder of police officer Werner Foerster in 1973. She was in a car with other BLA members when they were pulled over for a tail light violation. In an ensuing struggle, Foerster was shot dead. According to the article, Chesimard killed him, but she has always insisted that she is innocent and was shot herself in the incident. The gusano* author added in this bit of idiocy:

As trooper Werner Foerster grappled with the driver, Chesimard shot him twice–then her gun apparently jammed. As Foerster lay on the ground wounded and helpless, Chesimard grabbed the trooper’s own gun and blasted two shots into his head, much in the manner of her Cuban idols Che Guevara and Raul Castro murdering hundreds of their own (always defenseless at the time) “counter-revolutionary” enemies.

There were 600 executions after the revolutionary victory. Those executed were accused of war crimes during the war, mostly running death squads. Rightwing death squads had slaughtered 10,000′s of Cuban civilians during the war: teachers, students, union members, peasants, etc. Those criminals got what they deserved!

Also I am not aware that Raul Castro himself ever executed a soul. The death squad members were killed by firing squad.

Prior to this incident, Chesimard had been arrested or detained a number of times, and had been put on trial more than once for various crimes. Somehow she always seemed to get acquitted. She moved around all the time. Police often raided places where she had just stayed, finding only empty apartments. She seemed to be some sort of master urban guerrilla, often donning disguises and seeming to stay one step ahead of the law. Even when she was imprisoned, she seemed to escape. She was finally captured four years after the crime in 1977, tried and sentenced to Life + 33 years.

In 1979, she was broken out of prison by a super-professional team. The ridiculous article above written by the fanatical anti-Castro Cuban gusano* Humberto Fontova says that Cubans helped to break her out of prison. I have read quite a bit about this case, and I have never heard that before. True, the team that broke her out was very good, but I have always heard that they were just BLA members or other radicals such as Weather Underground cadres.

She was then taken to Mexico, where arrangements were made to ship her to Cuba. At that time, Cuba was regularly taking in what they called “US political prisoners.” This article makes it sound like Cubans were helping the BLA all along. That would certainly be news to me, and in all of the reading I have done on the BLA, this is the first time I have heard that the Cubans helped them. Then we read this bizarre quote:

Since then, according to New Jersey State Police Col. Rick Fuentes, Chesimard “flaunts her freedom…To this day from her safe haven in Cuba Chesimard has been given a pulpit (by Castro) to preach and profess, stirring supporters and groups to mobilize against the United States by any means necessary. She has been used by the Castro regime to greet foreign delegations visiting Cuba.”

I have read Assata Shakur’s writings for years now. She isn’t stirring up anyone to do anything, and there’s no one to stir up anyway. There are no US radical leftwing groups of any significance, and there are certainly no armed ones. So whatever she says has no consequences anyway. She’s no threat to the US; that’s ridiculous. Rick Fuentes is probably another Cuban gusano from New Jersey. New Jersey has nearly as many lunatic gusanos as Florida does.

“Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist,” declared FBI agent Aaron T. Ford, during a recent news conference. “She absolutely is a threat to America.”

Listen to this FBI dipshit! Perhaps Chesimard is a domestic terrorist, though I doubt it. They thought they were at war with the US government, and apparently cops were a fair target in that war. Many guerrilla groups target various types of cops in their wars against the state. Bottom line is she is probably not a terrorist for killing a cop. Cop killer? Ok. Terrorist? No way. She is a threat to America? What an idiot! How is that? She is sitting over there in Cuba just like she has been for over 30 years now. She’s never leaving Cuba. She can’t possibly harm the US in any way whatsoever.

What is bizarre is why all of a sudden the stupid government has dredged up this old case. Chesimard has been on the lam for 34 years now. Now all of a sudden she is thrown onto the FBI’s Most Wanted List? Makes no sense.

What seems to be going on here is a major US multipronged attack on the Cuban government. Why this is happening is not known. A spy who went to Sweden long ago, wanted by the US on charges of spying for Cuba, has seen her case suddenly dredged up. She has been sitting over in Sweden forever, and almost everyone had forgotten about her case.

Around the same time, Beyonce and Jay-Z were called in to the State Department and charged with the bizarre crime of taking a vacation in Cuba. Yes, it is actually illegal in this “free country” for Americans to go to Cuba for any reason, including taking a vacation. Why? Because the Cuban Lobby (the gusanos) has demanded this, and the Cuban Lobby gusanos have always run the US government on the Cuba Question.

Recently, Cuban officials made strong overtures to the Obama Administration saying that they wanted to have talks on all issues, including the US colonial base occupying sovereign land in Guantanamo Bay to the embargo to any other issues. Obama told Castro to go to Hell. These anti-Cuba measures are probably an offensive by the gusanos and their allies in the US government to head off any improvement in relations between the two nations.

*Cuban exiles, especially the fanatical anti-Castro variety (Is there any other kind?) are known in Cuba as gusanos. Gusanos is Spanish for worms.

Walter E. Williams: Idiot, Tool, Black Conservative

The latest Walter E. Williams article.

A truly insane article by a typical Black conservative nut. This kook points out the logical fact that is known to anyone: What do the Top 10 US cities with the highest crime rates have in common? Guess what? They are chock full of Black people! Duh.

One would draw certain logical conclusions from these obvious facts, but a Black conservative is too much of partisan monkey liar to ever do that. As bad as Black liberals can be (and they can be pretty bad), Black conservatives are by far the worst that the Black race has to offer.

According the Williams, the logical conclusion that we draw here is twofold:

1. These cities are full of Black folks.
2. They are all run by Democrats, for the most part liberal Democrats.

Conclusion: Liberal Democratic administrations cause unbelievable amounts of crime!

I kid you not. Black conservatives really are that stupid. As if Black people would act any better under a hard rightwing administration, not that they would ever elect one.

We have an actual experiment to see if this is true: the South. All Southern states are run by radical rightwing Republicans. Before that, they were run by radical rightwing Democrats. All of those states have been run by Black-hating racist White people for ever and ever. And how do Black people act down South? Perfectly horrible. They act as bad as Black people do anywhere. Why would Black folks suddenly act better if a rightwing Republican racist White massa was in charge, cracking the whip on those niggas? You think is going to stop making them act up? Come on.

The truth is that those cities are full of crime for the precise reason that they are full of Black people. Once you get a city full of Black people, you tend to get a city with lots and lots of crime. Those Black people created all that crime, and they will create about as much crime whether they are under a liberal Democratic administration as when they are under a Republican white racist massa administration.

Williams is truly crazy: a Libertarian Black. Black Libertarians are even more insane than Black conservatives. About 3% of Blacks are Black conservatives. We know this because ~3% of Black voted for Mitt Romney in the last election. However, if you looked at the US news media, you would think that 50% or more of Blacks are conservatives. Black conservatives may be as rare as four leaf clovers, but the “liberal” media loves them, and loves to over-represent them as demonstrative of the politics of US Blacks. If you are a US Black conservative, you are almost guaranteed of getting your own radio or TV show or your own newspaper column.

Does anyone on Earth think that Libertarianism will do anything for US Blacks?

Libertarianism is what exists in the 3rd world. In the 3rd World, the state is almost nonexistent, spends almost no money on the people on social programs, and what money it does have goes solely for police and military to enforce class rule over the lower classes and the workers. If the lower classes and workers get too out of hand, you just call out the cops and army and slaughter them.

Other than that, the government exists solely as an arm of the richest sectors of society and serves to protect their interests. The rich and business classes get to do everything and anything they want to. The state is starved for funds because the businesses and the wealthy pay no taxes, and the elites don’t believe in government spending anyway due to “the threat of a good example.” If the state spends money on pro-people programs, that is socialism, and we oppose socialism. Also the people might come to like this socialism and might want to have a more socialist country. This would interfere with the moneyed interests of the nation’s elites, so we can’t have that.

Libertarianism is what Blacks have in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and a few other places. Probably Haiti is the best example because it is the most Libertarian society ever attempted in a Black country. You can see how well that is working out!

Over in Africa, we can look at Kenya, Nigeria or Zaire as examples of nearly Libertarian Black countries in which elites steal 100% of the money in society leaving the masses with nothing but starvation and disease. As you can see, that is working out just fine!

Most other Black nations are socialist to some degree or another, so it hard to find a Black example of a radical rightwing country, but the above examples are pretty good.

Libertarianism won’t do anything good for Black people. All it will do is turn Black neighborhoods and cities like Detroit and Oakland into Haiti or Nigeria. If you think that is an improvement on the present state of affairs, you are wrong.

Uncle Satan to Prosecute Black Stars for Visiting Cuba

Here.

It’s stuff like this that make me think America sucks.

Ameritards are actually so stupid that they think Americans should be fined or go to jail just for visiting Cuba? What a bunch of idiots! Moronicans are the stupidest human beings on Earth.

 

The Camp of Saints

Repost from the old site.

A very nice, but somewhat dated (though the situation has probably only gotten worse), review of The Camp of Saints, one of the most hated books ever written. The link is on the execrable Free Republic, and the author of the review is a libertarian fool. Looks like Jean Raspail, the author of the book, was some kind of rightwing nut too.

They both blame “socialism” for causing such horrible living conditions, along with starvation and mass and early death and disease, that afflict the Third World. This is truly bizarre. Even autarkic Albania nearly doubled life expectancy from 1946 to 1980, though it was not very successful in other ways.

Almost all of the true Third World nightmare states are operating under some kind of capitalism, usually a particularly ferocious.

That socialism is good for life can been seen in the figures of Sri Lanka and India. Because India lacks Sri Lanka’s infant mortality figures, India suffers about 2.7 million dead babies every year. Those are some real numbers for you Black Book of Communism clowns to chew on. Sri Lanka’s great figures can be attributed exclusively to a mature socialist system there (Sri Lanka is a member of the Socialist International).

Everywhere we look we find the same thing, with some aberrations such as North Korea. One thing Communists in general did and do a great job of, other than a few disruptive periods, was putting enough food in everyone’s stomach. This is also something that capitalists everywhere and at all times have done poorly, ranging from deficient to just plain disastrous.

Almost every Communist country ate vastly better after Communism than before. Cuba currently has the lowest malnutrition rate in Latin America, and the UN says they have beaten it altogether. Even Costa Rica has 7% malnutrition – so much for Latin American social democracy. That Communism or socialism “causes mass starvation everywhere it has been tried” is surely one of the vicious and stupid of the anti-Communists’ lies.

Anyway, ignoring the libertarian delusional thinking, the review is a good one, and the Spaniard author notes that it is taking place as we speak, with boats patrolling the shores off the coast of Europe for flotillas pouring out of West Africa towards Europe. Boatloads of Kurds landed on the Riviera and then poured through the streets of Marseilles a while back. Those are scenes right out of the book.

The book has been dismissed as racist claptrap, but that is not entirely true. Raspail was non-racist enough to suggest that Western civilization was a cultural concept and not a racial one. I currently live in Greater Tijuana, now extending 500 miles north of Mexico into California. Only an Hispanic or the most deluded Leftist would see this transformation of a White working class town into just another Mexican city as positive.

I have nothing against US expats, but I never intended to become one. Instead the foreign country came to me, and nobody asked me to vote on it either – instead, it just got shoved down my throat and I was told to lick my lips and say thanks. The US-Mexico border in some important ways no longer really much exists.

Raspail conflates immigration with illegal immigration, the same way the Leftist illegal immigrant lovers do. Legal immigration to the US, other than refugees, is hardly a problem. We vet them very carefully, and few get into trouble. We need to limit it for environmental reasons, but other than that, the real massive damage is being done by illegal immigrants and increasingly their offspring.

Here in California, once a city goes over 60% Hispanic, it is pretty much wrecked in the eyes of any sensible non-Hispanic. We are even starting to see some guilt-riddled Hispanic Flight, with more well-to-do and self-preserving Hispanics fleeing Hispanic-destroyed towns for Whiter suburbs.

Over 60% Hispanic and a city starts getting dirty, trashy, run-down and falling apart. Crime explodes, especially petty theft, but really all types. Gangs are everywhere and so is graffiti. School failure and dropout rates go through the roof. It’s a chaotic and somewhat dangerous mess, but I guess maybe illegals like it that way, because they are just reproducing the Mexico they fled.

This unfortunately titled Usenet post sums it up quite well. What the policeman describes is reality that any honest Californian understands oh so well. He’s not hallucinating. This is basically par for the course in this state.

Particularly poignant was the destruction of the wages and lifestyle of good honest working class Americans, a devastation outrageously championed to the hilt by the entire US Left. It’s hard to imagine a position that is more hostile to working class Americans, but the Left has taken it up.

I don’t necessarily agree with the rightwing “illegals only come here for the welfare” crap in the post but the portrayal of a decent American neighborhood destroyed by Mexican illegals is gut-wrenching.

Mostly this is associated with the illegals and their nightmarish and oversized broods of children, who are growing up as an Underclass that rivals the Black one but is not nearly so pathological.

Hispanics, like Blacks, are splitting into two races. Blacks have already split and Hispanics will be next. There is an assimilated Black group that can be describes as relatively “non-Ghetto”. There is another group with a “Ghetto” mindset to this extent or that that extends tentacles to varying degrees down into the clusterfuck called the Black Underclass.

The Blacks that have left ghetto behind are increasingly disgusted with their ghetto brethren, and are for all intents and purposes just leaving them to twist in the breeze. I don’t blame them.

The same thing is starting to occur with Hispanics. In my town, there is a group of Hispanics that has grown up (usually) speaking Spanish and English and is comfortable in both languages. They tend to be lighter and to make more money, but that’s not always the case. They are just another group of Americans pretty much like the rest of us, and they are no cause for concern at all in most ways.

There is another group that, as noted above, resembles a much better behaved Black Underclass in too many ways. I figure these groups are going to split more and more in the future. Class generally trumps race any day of the week with anyone.

The illegals have just transplanted the poor and peasant societies of Mexico to America. Their kids have largely become the new Underclass described above. This group tend to be darker and to make less money, but once again, no hard rules.

When the book burners scream, rational people want to know why.

By the way, I agree with some of the commenters after the piece on the need to read the book critically, to say the least.

The reviewer also offers some interesting points on a uniquely Iberian point of view, especially in terms of defending Western civilization in Europe from various unwashed or barbarian hordes, and their disgust at the Northern Europeans for wimping out on defending the continent. They also lived under Islam for way too long, remember it well, and are not going back without a fight.

Contrast to the Continental Left that seems to think new majority-Muslim states in Europe will be glorious explosions of progressive expression.

Iberians and non-Iberians have some conflict, but a little conflict adds luscious spice to life, and those who refuse to act aggressively in defending their interests get bulldozed.

Truth and Lies About the US Embargo of Cuba

Daniel writes:

Dano wrote:

Cuba has lots of qualified and highly trained workers, but no foreign investment to build the kinds of facilities that might employ them.

Only the United States embargoes Cuba. The rest of the world, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe (German, China, Russia, France, Spain, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Iran -you get the picture) is free to trade and invest in Cuba, but why don’t they? Answer that question, please?

OK, I’ll answer. No foreign investor in his right mind will invest in Cuba because sooner or later the Castro brothers will steal that investment. The irony is the US embargo is the greatest gift to the Castro brothers. Who would they blame without it. Get rid of the embargo and there are no more excuses, but the US is to stupid to figure this out.

None of this is true. The embargo says that any corporation that invests in Cuba cannot invest in the US. Anyone investing in Cuba cannot use anything that has any US parts or tech or material in it, otherwise it violates the embargo. Banks that do business with Cuba are violating the embargo and cannot do business with the US. Even ships that dock in Cuba are forbidden to dock in the US for a long time afterwards. The US pursues actions against many foreign corporations and banks that violate the embargo and regularly wins huge injunctions against them.

The Castro brothers will not steal any foreign corporation or nation’s legitimate investment in the island. They have no confiscated foreign property since US corporate property was confiscated (and rightly so!) at the very start of the revolution.

This is just crazy gusano* rhetoric. None of this is true – it’s nothing but lies.

*Gusanos is the Cuban word for the Cuban exiles in Florida. Gusano means worm in Spanish.

“When Will the Siege End?” by Saul Landau

Very nice article on Cuba by Saul Landau. Any system where university graduates make more money driving a taxi or making pizza doesn’t seem to work very well. Is this what socialism looks like? If so, count me out for at least that variety of socialism. People want stuff, money and stuff. And what’s wrong with that, anyway? What’s wrong with people having money and stuff? I am certainly not opposed to it in principle, and socialists should not be opposed to a certain amount of materialism as a human desire and need.

PROGRESO WEEKLY
When Will the Siege End?
By Saul Landau
Published on Wednesday, 06 March 2013 14:08

HAVANA – I walk some of the same streets I did in 1960 and 1961, a time when most Cubans awaited an attack from the United States, a time when people in their twenties and early thirties ran the government, and several hundred thousand of the propertied and professional classes fled to south Florida in fear of these young bearded radicals.

By mid 1960, the flow of U.S. tourists had slowed to a tiny trickle. The big hotels housed foreign supporters of the revolution and soon after honeymoon couples from the island itself.

Planes regularly flew from south Florida bases to drop bombs on island targets and Cubans joined the militia, wearing their well-laundered blue uniforms. Committee for the Defense of the Revolution met on almost every city block to try to keep their own turf secure from counterrevolutionary threats.

President Eisenhower played a kind of tit for tat diplomacy with Fidel Castro, responding with punishment for every move Cuba made that lessened U.S. power and influence on the island. Cuba bought cheap Soviet oil; Ike ordered the US-owned refineries in Cuba not to refine Soviet oil. Fidel nationalized Esso, Texaco and Shell; Ike place an embargo on Cuba.

Before all that, in March 1960, Ike had already ordered the CIA to plan the overthrow of the Cuban government. The Agency began to recruit Cuban exiles in Florida for an expedition that later bore the name of The Bay of Pigs fiasco, a 1,500 man force that invaded Cuba’s south coast along three beaches in the Bay of Pigs. The fighting endured for 72 hours before the Cuban military claimed total victory over the CIA-backed exile invaders.

Now, the Socialist government of Cuba has converted the swampy area into a resort, with a hotel and restaurants for curious tourists and Cuban vacationers. A museum offers remnants and keys to understanding that historic encounter that left President Kennedy with much diplomatic egg on his young face.

Save for a few short periods, U.S. hostility has remained unrelenting toward its small defiant neighbor. But Cuba built a formidable health-care system, a prodigious educational machine that begins in infancy and continues through the PhD, for those qualified.

But Cubans feel starved for things, commodities they see actors wearing and using in movies shown on Cuban TV. Well-educated and trained Cubans don’t see good jobs in their future when they graduate, as the island’s economy doesn’t generate a sufficient number of positions for the qualified people its schools produce.

The lure of Miami, where hundreds of thousands of Cubans now live, remains strong. An engineer drives a cab or makes pizzas, a woman with a University of Havana PhD in literature now lives in San Francisco and works as a translator. “I have more personal freedom here. Nobody mixes in my personal life as they did in Cuba, but I don’t want to get old and die in the United States. There’s no warmth here.”

On the same streets, I walk and chat with people and find enthusiasm for Raul Castro’s reforms, allowing private business and freedom to travel. But Cubans want more things, more opportunities, not an easy task for a government running an island economy.

Cuba has lots of qualified and highly trained workers, but no foreign investment to build the kinds of facilities that might employ them. So, as I walk along the ocean drive, El Malecon, I note hundreds of people idle during the middle of a workday. Some have ear phones plugged in, listening to music.

Others have cell phones and snap shots of their girl or boy friends. Tourists, mostly Canadian and west European populate the streets and downtown cafes and bars. Some U.S. exchange students also appear, eager and energetic. So far, they’ve learned a lot about Cuba from “dating” and “hanging out” with their Cuban counterparts.

I get nostalgic for old times and youth. But when I see the old U.S. Embassy, not the US Interest Section, I recall the nasty old days of violent counter revolution coming from Florida, the heroic deeds of Cuban guerrillas who had fought for the revolution and the good times of the old days.

Maybe, before I make another trip to the island, Secretary of State John Kerry will open discussions with Raul Castro for the purpose of restoring diplomatic and even commercial relations. What a change that will bring… I can imagine the Havana streets full of U.S. tourists and students
—-
Saul Landau is filming with Jon Alpert a documentary on Cuba’s campaign against homophobia. His Fidel and Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up are available on DVD through cinemalibrestudio.com.

Conn Hallinan, “Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget”

Nice piece on Chavez.

Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed.”

Conn Hallinan
Dispatches From The Edge: March 11, 2013

Paying Last Respects

In early December 2001, I was searching through my files looking for a column topic. At the time I was writing on foreign policy for the San Francisco Examiner, one of the town’s two dailies. A back page clip I had filed and forgotten caught my attention: on Nov. 7 the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department had convened a two-day meeting on U.S. policy vis-a-vis Venezuela. My first thought was, “Uh, oh.”

I knew something about those kinds of meetings. There was one in 1953 just before the CIA and British intelligence engineered the coup in Iran that put the despicable Shah into power. Same thing for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.

Chavez had reaped the ire of the Bush administration when, during a speech condemning the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he asked if bombing Afghanistan in retaliation was a good idea? Chavez called it “fighting terrorism with terrorism,” not a very good choice of words, but, in retrospect, spot on. The invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Iraqi War have been utterly disastrous for the U.S. and visited widespread terror on the populations of both countries. Upwards of a million Iraqis died as a direct and indirect effect of the war, five million were turned into refugees, and the bloodshed is far from over. Much the same-albeit on a smaller scale-is happening to the Afghans.

Would that we had paid the man some attention.

But for the Bush administration, Chavez’s statement presented an opportunity to rid itself of a troublesome voice. In came the White House’s Latin America “A Team.”

The top gun in that odious outfit was Otto Reich, assistant secretary of state for western hemispheric affairs and former Reagan Administration point man for the 1981-87 Contra War against Nicaragua. The General Accounting Office had nailed Reich during the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal for “prohibited convert propaganda,” planting false stories and opinion pieces in newspapers. A Cuban exile, Reich had helped spring Orlando Bosch in 1987 from a Venezuelan prison where Bosch was in jail for bombing a civilian Cuban airliner and killing 73 people.

Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for western hemisphere affairs, also a Cuban exile and former chief of staff for the Contras, was the Pentagon side of the team.

While Reich met with civilian opponents of Chavez and conservative businessman Pedro Carmona, Pardo-Maurer huddled with military leaders, including Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon. Carmona and Rincon would play a key role in the April 11, 2002 coup against Chavez. The National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development were also supporting Chavez’s opponents with money and advice, and both organizations have long histories of subversion and covert operations.

I had no special information about the possibility of a coup but it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the armies of the night were on the move. So I wrote a column titled “Coup in the Wind” that laid out the meetings, identified the actors, and reminded readers that the U.S. has a long and sordid history of organizing and supporting coups in Latin America.

A little more than three and a half months later, the plotters struck, arrested Chavez, suspended the constitution, dissolved the legislature, dismissed the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the National Election Commission, and fired provincial governors. We had seen this all before, and I flinched at what I thought would inevitably follow: executions, death squads, “disappeared” opponents, smashed unions, and a cowed population.

But April 11, 2002 was not 1954 in Guatemala, 1964 in Brazil, 1973 in Chile, or 1976 in Argentina. Chavez had lifted millions of people out of poverty, opened schools, increased literacy, and tackled malnutrition. In vast numbers those people rose up, and, for the first time in Latin American history, a coup was overturned.

Three days after Chavez was returned to office, Martha Honey at Foreign Policy In Focus sent me an email saying she liked the coup column and would I consider writing a follow-up for the think tank? I knew all about Martha Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan. As reporters for the Costa Rican Tico Times, they had uncovered much of the Iran-Contra plot and were legends among those of us in the alternative press. I also knew about FPIF. It is hard to write sensible things about U.S. foreign policy without it. So I did a piece called Anatomy of a Coup, detailing U.S. support for the plotters. Since then I have written over 200 columns, so in a way it was Hugo Chavez that landed me at FPIF.

Chavez became the president of a country where 70 percent of the population was considered “poor,” in spite of $30 billion in yearly oil revenues. It was a country where two percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, and where the gap between rich and poor was among the widest on the continent.

Today, according to the Gini Coefficient, Venezuela has the lowest rate of inequality in Latin America. Poverty has been reduced to 21 percent, and extreme poverty from 40 percent to 7.3 percent. Illiteracy has been eliminated and, proportionally, Venezuela is number two in Latin America for the number of university students. Infant mortality has dropped from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as it is for Black Americans.

Chavez’s government increased the number of health clinics by 169.6 percent and hands out free food to five million Venezuelans. Take a moment to read The Achievements of Hugo Chavez by public health experts Carles Muntaner, Joan Benach, and sociologist Maria Paez Victor in CounterPunch.

Comparing the man’s accomplishments to his U.S. obits was like taking a trip through Alice’s looking glass. Virtually none of the information about poverty and illiteracy was included, and when it was grudgingly admitted that he did have programs for the poor, it was “balanced” ; with claims of soaring debts, widespread shortages, rampant crime, economic chaos, and “authoritarian ism.”

Venezuela’ s debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is lower than that of the U.S. and Europe. Inflation has fallen to a four-year low. There is crime, but neighboring Colombia is far more dangerous, particularly if you happen to be a trade unionist. And more people in Venezuela are eating better than they have ever eaten in the history of the country. Over the past decade growth has averaged 4. 3 percent, and joblessness dropped from 11.3 percent to 7.7 percent. Americans would kill for those figures.

As for being an “authoritarian ,” most the country’ s media is venomously anti-Chavez and publishes regularly, and his opponents hold weekly rallies and protests. Want to try that in U.S. ally Honduras (or Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, etc.)?

The old Venezuelan elites-aided by the U.S.-will now attempt to turn the clock back to 1997, the year before Chavez took over. But that will not be easy. Quite literally millions of people have been brought into the democratic process and they will not cede power without a fight. Once people have better housing, schools, nutrition, jobs and health care, it is very difficult to take those things away. Chavez handed a better life to the vast majority of Venezuelans, and, as they demonstrated in April 2002, they are perfectly able to defend those gains.

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed,” is the way former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva put it.

He will be missed, indeed.

Answering the Libertarians and Their Lies

Repost from the old site.

I decided to make a post about libertarians, radical free market fundamentalist religionists, and Far Right economics in general.

On Libertarianism, I think it is very important to answer some of the nonsense that is being parroted nowadays by the free market fundamentalists – libertarians – right wing extremists – amongst us. As the center of the US Right has gotten more and more extreme since the 1970′s, their arguments and policies have gotten more and more insane, irrational and ideological.

With the Right nowadays we are dealing with a nation of robotic ideologues – they no longer care anything for fact, theory, or science. Rightwing doctrine, more and more, resembles a kind of religion for its ideological adherents, and in that way it is similar to the leftwing orthodoxy that continued to enrapture some the Left in recent decades, even as it developed serious problems before their very eyes.

Into the 21st Century, the Right is bolder and wilder than ever. Formerly, the more honest ones at least used to acknowledge that socialism was better at providing for basic needs, health care, education and social support than capitalism. No more. Now total libertarian free market capitalism has become some sort of miracle nostrum that will cure all ills.

Poor health figures, health system doesn’t meet the needs of the people? No problem, just totally privatize the health system and all the problems go away. Problems with distribution of water, electricity, sewage, roads, parks, day care? Not a problem. Just get the state out of the way, deregulate, and let the corporations run it all.

The debacle of electricity deregulation in California is simply the typical result of privatization and deregulation of electricity the world over, for decades now, since the 1930′s.

We have case study after case study, with predictable results each time the “new experiment” is tried. The California experiment saw service plummet and investors get screwed, precisely the failures that led to the creation of public utilities in the 1930′s.

Utility companies maliciously rigged markets, cut off supplies to the starving state, formed monopolies and engaged in gleeful price-gouging of helpless consumers.

Deregulation of the financial industry and stock market is likely to cause financial panics, stock crashes and both economic recessions and depressions. It has in the past, it will in the future.

Deregulation of telecommunications in the US put the public system into the hands of a fewer and fewer people and sent cable prices through the roof.

It has facilitated a wild crime spree by major telecom firms, as these firms engaged in an orgy of out-and-out robbery of consumers, blatantly deceptive and unintelligible calling plans, deliberate over-billing, bumping consumers into other calling plans without telling them, and other outrages.

Privatization of water in Bolivia was a catastrophe – prices shot up, service was terrible, and many lost access to water.

Airline deregulation saw massive concentration in airlines, many cities lose air coverage and service go into the gutter. The price structure of airline flights became seriously disturbed to where a flight to a city 350 miles away might cost far more than a trip all the way across the country to a major hub.

Deregulation of trucking saw prices climb, service suffer, safety regs get tossed out the window, the accident rate go up, roads get destroyed by overloaded trucks and thousands of small firms get wiped out while a few super-firms took their place.

The last effect caused the peonization of the US independent trucker, a cultural icon. Self-regulation of any industry has meant no regulation, and consumers, workers and society are harmed every single time it’s done. Every time, every place, no exceptions. Got it?

The much-maligned OSHA regulations save 10,000′s of lives every year and we can prove it. Pollution regs do the same and clean up the planet besides, and we have the darn statistics to prove it.

Reducing environmental regulations dealing with water, air and toxics means lots of injuries and deaths, time after time, in place after place, in society after society. We are talking about effects so predictable here that if we were scientists, we could almost describe them as natural laws.

The latest insanity is the line that the way to solve health care problems is to totally privatize the health care system, because, as we all know, “socialism fails”.

This slander, this canard, against socialist health care, that it fails to meet the basic needs of human beings, needs to be answered forcefully, for the Libertarian Big Lie continues, ranting louder and louder, despite figures all over the world that conclusively show “socialized medicine” outperforming more private systems time after time and place after place.

In Nicaragua, after the Sandinistas took power in 1979, the health figures showed great improvement (along with education and literacy figures). When the Sandinistas were thrown out of power in an election cheered by liberals across America, the first thing the liberals’ hero, the ultrareactionary Chamorro, did, was wipe out government health care and free education.

At $30 a year, many parents could not afford to send their kids to school, so the kids dropped out. The health figures started going down right away. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

Cuba’s health figures have long been tops in Latin America and in 2002, for the first time, Cuban infant mortality figures actually beat US figures, where income is 20 times higher. The Latin state that often comes closest to Cuba is Costa Rica in health, education and housing figures, and as such, Costa Rica is bandied about by enemies of the Cuban Revolution.

But Costa Rica’s figures are due to the fact that Costa Rica has the most highly-developed social democracy in all Latin America, which it seems to have retained, despite frantic, bullying efforts, starting with Reagan’s orders to Arias in the 80′s, by the US to force Costa Rica to dismantle its social programs. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

In India, the state of Kerala, run by Communists off and on for the last 30 years, has developed a good state health system compared to the rest of India. When comparing Kerala to the rest of India as a whole, Kerala’s health figures are much superior. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

The social democracies in Europe have the best health figures on Earth, due to their evil, failed, inferior “socialized medicine”. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

Japan’s high health figures are accounted for by the fact that Japan has long had a virtual social democracy, with a lifetime employment system and generous benefits, including health care, taken for granted by Japanese corporations. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

And on and on and on and on.

The fact is, capitalism is bad for your health, period, exclamation point. It’s a rule of nature, like gravity or the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

What would a libertarian health care system look like? Simple. Like the health care system we had in most of the past few centuries on much of the planet, where only the well-off could afford to go to the doctor or buy medicine and the poor were left to beg for succor or sicken and die, which they did, by the hundreds of millions.

Want some examples, close to home? I know a number of folks who are disabled and therefore simply cannot work at any real job in the real world (they could maybe get by on a severely pampered part-time job with friends or family, but that’s not real life). Their disability check every month is the only thing that enables them to survive at all.

Without that check, they would need to depend on the kindness of friends or family, or, lacking that, they would go homeless, live on the streets, lack for food, shelter, medical care, etc.

I have known many poor workers who lacked for health insurance and had such a low income that they felt they could not afford to go to the doctor. So, they ignored health problems until they got worse and worse, and now they have chronic health problems.

One of them was thrown off Medicaid when he and his wife (both workers) earned just over the limits. Consequently, he stopped going to the doctor for months and felt he could not afford to buy his prescriptions. He lacked his meds, including a blood pressure drug and a blood thinner needed for a blood clot, for 5 months.

Another railed against “socialized medicine” but felt she could not afford insurance so she never went to the doctor or dentist. Now she has severe chronic knee problems and serious teeth problems.

She may need to have all her teeth pulled since she never went to the dentist because she felt she could not afford it. The knee problem may also have been exacerbated by lack of medical care. The reality is that this is what will happen to many people if we do away “state health care”.

This is what happens all over the world. I have friends in the Third World who tell me stories about their countries. It’s clear that people are dying in these places all the time because they cannot afford doctors or medicines. Their stories are true; I hear them with my very own ears.

What would a radical free market system do for education? Prices would go through the ceiling and quality would go down in many cases. Every teacher I know who taught at both private and public schools told me the quality of the program was much worse at private schools, where the owners scrimped on everything and shafted the teachers while flying around on their private jets.

I suppose the radical free-marketeers would like to get rid of public roads too. Let me tell you a story about roads. Up here in the mountains, we have private and public roads. Every single private road is utterly terrible and many are outright dangerous.

They are full of potholes, if they are paved at all. Why? Because in order to fix the road, each homeowner on the road would have to pitch in to fix it. No one wants to pay, so the road never gets fixed. Never, ever.

If you want to know what the libertarian vision looks like, just go to the Third World, where the state doesn’t pay for anything and the public sphere is decrepit, abused, nonfunctional, dangerous, inadequate, nonexistent or for the rich only.

Look at America pre-1900, where schools, doctors, hospitals, roads, electricity, sewage, and old-age supports did not exist or were luxuries for the moneyed only. The elderly, sick, poor and jobless simply sickened or died, in huge numbers. Tens of millions of Americans never went to school.

That’s the libertarian dream, or nightmare. We know what it looks like because it’s been tried in the past for centuries, the world over, in culture after culture. We can see its devastation in the 3rd World as we speak.

There need be no illusions at all about what radical free market fundamentalism will really bring, and we need to shout down the free-market ideologues and religionists with every lie they shower us with. Loud. Often. In their face. And never stop until we turn their dishonest roar into a whisper in the background.

The Invisible Hand of Starvation

Repost from the old site.

There are not many people in the US more dishonest than libertarians and Cuban exiles. Combine the two in one article, like this one here, and you get a perfect storm of prevarication and sophistry mostly in terms of selective fact-picking, lies of omission and failure to present a balanced picture.

Read an article like that, and you think that Batista’s Cuba was paradise and that Castro has destroyed a beautiful country. In fact, if you ask an average American about Cuba, this is probably what they will tell you.

The rightwing capitalist media in the US lies about few things more than Communism and socialism. There is almost nothing more threatening to them than a system that has seriously restrained the privileges of capital, so they pull out all the stops in terms of shameless lying in the Brainwash War to make sure this idea does not get too popular with Americas.

Not only do they want to kill the idea here, they want to kill it the world over. Every Communist country has had a devastating US-led blockade slammed on it, and at the same time, most either had some Contra-war waged against them or were forced to spend vast sums on their militaries due to continuous US threats of war against them.

Hence, we do not really know how well Communism works in praxis, since it has always been constrained by these devastating strangulations and threats.

As I said, the link by Humberto Fontana plus Thomas Woods appears devastating to Castro.

But let us not go down the list and pick apart and respond to each and every factoid.

Let us look at just one variable – nutrition.

The Cuban regime has recently reduced malnutrition in Cuba to 2%, about the level it is at in most 1st World industrialized states. This is the lowest level in Latin America. That is a reduction from the 40% malnutrition rate under the capitalist Cuba the exiles love so much (see below).

The US capitalist media continuously refers to Cubans, one of the most well-fed populations in Latin America (the second best-fed in the region in 1983)¹ as “starving”. The people who were starving lived in Batista’s Cuba, when 40% of the population was malnourished.²

Various studies of Cubans and nutrition were undertaken in the 1950′s. In 1956, 91% of the rural agricultural worker population was malnourished. The average ag worker was 16 pounds underweight and stunted in height. 35-40% (depending on the source) of the total Cuban population was malnourished. This manifested in weak and small bones, low resistance to disease and general weakness and fatigue.

Even in a middle class school population, 9% were undernourished. Malnutrition was rampant amongst Cuban children, along with various vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Lack of calcium had actually warped the skeletons of 11% of Cuban kids.³. In a public hospital in Havana in the 1950′s, 92% of the children had deficient diets.⁴

The state under Batista renounced its responsibility to feed the people, hence the poor, the rural areas, non-Whites, and the less educated all had deficient diets compared to the wealthier classes, the urban dwellers, the Whites and the more educated.⁵

In reports in the US rightwing press about Cuba, one constantly hears how the Cuban diet is “bland” and how the people complain because, tragicomically, they do not get to eat beef often enough. To the naive American reader, that sounds pretty bad.

Yet let us look at the situation for the families of Cuban agricultural workers under Batista, 40% of the population.

The following foods were only rarely consumed (compare to the heartrending tragedy of the modern Cubans who are denied their precious “beef”):

89% rarely drank milk
93% rarely ate corn
96%   "        meat*
96%+           bread
98%            eggs
100%           vegetables

*Any kind of meat, not just beef.

Notes

1. United States, Central Intelligence Agency. The Cuban Economy: A Statistical Review, ER 81-10052/PA, March 1981, p. 45.

2. Handelman, H., Cuban Food Policy and Popular Nutritional Levels, Cuban Studies, July 1981, p. 129.

3. Valdés, Nelson P., Health and Revolution in Cuba, Science and Society, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall, 1971, pp. 313-314.

4. Domínguez, Jorge, Cuba Order and Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 224.

5. Aballi, Arturo J., Distrofias infantiles en nuestro medio, Revista Cubana de Pediatría, Vol. 30, No. 9, September 1958.

Questions of Meritocracy under Capitalism and Socialism

Galton, an HBD type, writes:

First, there is nothing wrong with inequality, join in the same country a population heterogeneously cognitive and you will never be able to achieve equality and social justice, really.

You do not really know what you’re saying, Chile seems a great country, much better than mine, Brazil. Venezuela and Brazil believe in education, but it does not work miracles. If you have a population stupid not believe that with education they will become intelligent or politicized. Education can polish a rough diamond, but never an ordinary stone.

Socialism, Trotskyite style, is the death of meritocracy and all its qualities.

This is a socialist blog. We don’t believe in extremes of inequality such as you see in Chile, Brazil and the US. It’s just wrong! And inequality is actually a catastrophe. It’s bad for society in countless ways. It’s even bad for the individual on the medical health level.

The truth is that there are no Trotskyite projects happening in any nation anywhere on Earth. There aren’t even many Soviet-style Marxist programs. That project had so many problems that the truth is that no one wants to copy that model anymore. And that’s what my Leftist, Marxist-sympathetic friends tell me.

Even Cuba,which has copied the Soviet model, has a model that no one wants to copy anymore. Cuba itself is probably going to copy the Vietnamese doi moi market socialism model. The Cuban project as it stands has not been able to overcome the problems of the Soviet model “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.” Overcrowded housing with a huge backlog. Shortages in state stores. Lousy state products. Low productivity on state farms. Mass theft from state institutions.

North Korea has removed all statues of Marx and Lenin. Market socialism is alive and well in Vietnam and Laos.

So the specter of Marxism is basically an idiotic boogeyman raised by the Right.

The modern socialist projects look a lot like what is happening with the Leftist governments in Latin America who are instituting a variety of Leftist and socialist type projects. These are occurring in Cuba,Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. There is talk of one in Peru, but it may not materialize. Leftist projects were overthrown by US-backed coups in Paraguay and Honduras.

I never liked the socialist model whereby a doctor doesn’t make much more than a ditch-digger. Why go to school for all those years to be a doctor then. Under a proper socialist society, I think there should be a graded pay scale, say 1-8

Let us say that Scale 1 is the minimum wage in the US of 14,250 year.

Grade 1 (lowest level workers): $14,250/year.

Grade 3 (Bachelors Degree) $42,750/year.

Grade 4 (highly skilled blue collar workers such as mechanics, tool and die, welders, plumbers, electricians) $ $57,000/year.

Grade 6 (Master’s Degree or Secondary Degree like Teaching Credential) – $85,500/year.

Grade 10 (highest level workers at the doctorate level – physicians, professors, vets, pharmacists, professors, physical therapists, dentists) – $142,000/year.

There is your meritocracy right there. Education = IQ. I don’t see why society should pay you a whole lot more than that Grade 10 though. Why should we?

Now, if we allow a market to exist, maybe you could go try your hand in the market and see what you can make. Despite the nonsense of free market idiots, successful businessmen are not necessarily the best and brightest at all, and many only have average IQ’s.

There’s nothing meritocratic about capitalism in the market sense as far as entrepreneurs go. Sure, a few inventors get rich, and now there is a “brains capitalism” whereby smart, nerdy types set up companies, often in IT and the like, using the cognitive talents to make money as entrepreneurs.

But businessmen in general all down through history have simply had good people smarts, a lot of ruthlessness, extroversion and mostly a lot of luck. Capitalism is hardly a meritocracy!

Anyway, states like China, the USSR and Cuba did have relatively equalized wages without great differentials for persons of radically different intelligences, so it’s certainly possible to set up a society on that basis.

join in the same country a population heterogeneously cognitive and you will never be able to achieve equality and social justice, really.

So the comment above is just not correct.