White Duke fraternity suspended amid protest over Racist Asian party
/The parent organization of Kappa Sigma fraternity has suspended its Duke University chapter over a party some claimed was racist after photos surfaced of partygoers in Asian-style clothing.
Last Friday's party was reported to have featured an Asian theme, but university vice president of student affairs Larry Moneta said the title was changed to international relations after some students complained.
An Asian student group filed a complaint and held a protest rally Wednesday.
Pictures posted online showed people attending the party dressed in Asian-style clothing and a greeting that mocked Asian dialect.
Kappa Sigma executive director Mitchell Wilson said the national organization will investigate the party and take final action based on the outcome of that probe.
Moneta said the university is considering unspecified action.
Maryland moves closer to abolishing death penalty
/Maryland could be just weeks away from abolishing the death penalty. Several state lawmakers are expressing optimism they can repeal capital punishment. Hearings in the state House and Senate are scheduled for February 14th.
“I think people are finding out that the death penalty does not work, whether it’s Maryland or any of these other places that have abandoned the practice,” said Kirk Noble Bloodsworth on Jansing & Co., an advocate for abolishing the death penalty.
Bloodsworth is the first person whose capital conviction was overturned as a result of DNA testing in the U.S. He was convicted of murdering a child in 1984 and spent nearly nine years in prison, two on death row, before DNA evidence exonerated him in 1993.
“Seventy-eight percent of all wrongful convictions are because of witness identification problems,” Bloodsworth said. “There’s 27% of wrongful convictions because of false confessions.”
In addition, Bloodsworth says the death penalty is applied disproportionately to African-Americans and said the punishment shows ”racial bias.”
Bloodworth said he is confident Maryland lawmakers will pass a bill to abolish capital punishment soon. Since 1976, Maryland has executed five convicts—the last one taking place in 2005. Currently, there are five men on death row in the state.
“One good thing about Maryland is we have appropriation within the bill that the savings from the death penalty would go to the victims crime fund,” said Bloodsworth. “It’s one of the only packages that’s ever been put together like this. It would really help people.”
St. Louis County Police Lieutenant Ordered officers to target and arrest blacks in a predominantly white area
/A St. Louis County police lieutenant is being investigated over concerns that he ordered officers to target and arrest blacks in a predominantly white area of the county.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/11s10jW ) reports that the lieutenant is on paid leave pending outcome of the internal investigation. His name has not been released.
"I have 20 years of positive experience without a blemish, and now I have one allegation against me," the lieutenant told the newspaper. "I have done nothing that they say I have done."
Police Chief Tim Fitch says the investigation began with an anonymous letter from a county officer dated Dec. 24. It alleged that the lieutenant ordered officers under his command to focus on arresting black people in the area of South County Center and a Wal-Mart store in south St. Louis County.
Fitch hopes to complete the inquiry by the Feb. 20 police board meeting. He was not aware of any previous internal affairs complaints or race-related allegations against the lieutenant.
Police sources told the newspaper that the lieutenant told about 20 officers to check license plates of black drivers and arrest those with outstanding warrants.
"I will be open-minded about this until I see all the facts, but I'm not so naive as to think that it didn't happen," Fitch said.
Michael Love, a black 27-year-old St. Louis resident shopping Wednesday at South County Center, said targeting would not surprise him. He said anyone who believes in racial targeting "should not be in any position of power."
Bigotry Porn on Fox News
/In the New York Times today, Thomas Edsall presents some evidence that racial resentment has increased in the Obama era, especially among Republicans. Jamelle Bouie comments:
Edsall sees this as a crucial through-line in the ongoing story of GOP extremism. Growing racial resentment has deepened the conservatism of right-wing Republicans, and contributed to their total rejection of President Obama and the Democratic Party in 2010 and 2012.
It’s worth noting the real disputes over the racial resentment scale. Over the years, a growing group of political scientists have questioned the actual influence of ideology on anti-black attitudes....In this narrative, opposition to race-conscious policies has less to do with outright animus, and more with a belief in equal opportunity and a desire to treat people fairly.
But the divide between racism and ideology isn’t so neat—as has been true throughout American history, beliefs about race are hard to separate from political ideology.
No, it's not neat at all, and Jamelle's post is worth a read. But I'd like to suggest a subtly different explanation for the apparent rise in racial resentment over the past few years. This comes from a long email a friend sent me about various options the conservative movement has
for boosting its electoral fortunes, and in particular, various options Fox News has for helping out on this score:
Certainly one suggestion would be to replace the morning crew (they're stale, unreformed, a standard SNL joke, and a limitless font of offensiveness) and cut out the -ist comments that emanate daily from their shows. And maybe stop being a one-stop shop for inane stories featurning everyday black people doing or saying dumb things. This is a huge attraction to Fox. (When conservative colleagues / family mention Fox to me, it's usually in the context of a wide-eyed explanation of a story on Fox showing how stupid minorities or minority individuals are.)
This stuff really animates the base and Fox knows it. It's bigotry porn. And it just helps to makes conservatives radioactive to the groups that Republicans need to broaden their appeal. So, if you want to rebrand and broaden the appeal of Fox (and the Republicans) while keeping it conservative, aggressively ditching the cheap and not so veiled bigotry might be a productive place to start. I'm open to hearing arguments that bigotry is not an intrinsic value of the conservative ideology (and God knows Goldberg, Lowry, Ponnuru, Douthat, Brooks, Frum and others breathlessly try to advance this argument despite actual and continuing evidence to the contrary), but that's a big sales job. But a necessary one.
Is this "ideology"? Is it pandering? Is it pure commercialism? It's not easy to say. In the end, it's sort of a mushy blend of all those things. But I'd submit that to the extent we've truly seen an increase in racial resentment, a good part of it is due not to either pure ideology or to pure racial animus per se, but to active editorial decisions made by Fox News. The summer of hate in 2010 was the most jaw-dropping example of this, but in more modest form it's been visible during Obama's entire first term. And of course, Drudge and Rush Limbaugh play the same game.
When does it end?
White Man Attacked by Cops while Filming Houston Police Officers Detain Black Man - Phone Taken by Cops. Retuned 1 Yr. Later without Video
/They are supposed to ensure public safety, but a local man says Houston police officers are dangerous themselves.
Back in 2011, Al Herzik says he saw an off-duty Houston cop berate and unlawfully detain and a man. He says he started filming the ordeal with his phone, and that made everything worse.
“I thought I was helping protect Mr. Reed, but as it turns out, I was just creating problems for myself,” Herzik says.
Herzik says Officer Kenny Li physically attacked him, to steal away his cell phone and then he says the officer ran into a nearby business yelling “call 911, officer down!”
Surveillance shows the circus that ensued. A team of cops searched Herzik’s property, and he says his phone ended up being confiscated for more than a year. It was just finally returned, without the video.
At this point, community activists say they want the U.S. Department of Justice to add this case to the list they are already investigating about HPD.
They also want Officer Li to be let go.
Internal affairs suspended him for five days. He appealed the suspension.
HPD has no comment.
White Students/"Teacher" @ Lauderdale County High School on Michelle Obama: “She looks like a gorilla.”
/Bob Grisham, a psychology teacher and head football coach at Lauderdale County High School, is under suspension for remarks he made to students about First Lady, Michelle Obama. The remarks, recorded by a student in class and made public by Times Daily on Feb. 5, 2013, were racist and anti-gay.
Michelle Obama
The first of the remarks made by Grisham were about First Lady, Michelle Obama. He called her “fat-butt” and said it looks like she weighed 180 pounds, adding that she is overweight. Grisham said Michelle Obama was the cause of the 600-calorie lunches at the school. A person in the background on the audio adds to the comment with “She looks like a gorilla.”
Gay bashing remarks
Bob Grisham didn’t stop with trashing the First Lady. He went on to bash gays by calling them “queers.” Grisham states in the audio that “I don’t like queers” and “I don’t believe in queers…what they do is wrong and an abomination against God.”
Coach gets suspended
The school board had an emergency meeting on Feb. 5, 2013 to discuss the remarks made by Grisham. As a result of his remarks, the board suspended him for 10 days. Part of his reprimand includes taking a sensitivity training. Grisham will not be allowed to teach his psychology class for the remainder of the 2012-2013 school year.
Some feel that this is too harsh a punishment—but is it? A good teacher sparks healthy conversation and the ability for students to offer up different and opposing opinions. Grisham’s remarks went beyond that. The school board seemed to think so when they removed him from teaching for the remainder of the school year.
Students at Lauderdale County High School got a first hand lesson for Black History Month this week. Thanks to their teacher and coach, Bob Grisham, they learned that racism is alive and well in Lauderdale County, Alabama.
Dick Morris Discusses Undercover Plan to Fractionalize Non-Whites & Make "the Hispanics" Republican - Avoid "the Blacks"
/White People & Numerical Inadequacy: Fear of a Black Planet. 90% of the world is non-white!
Cress Welsing: The Color-Confrontation theory further postulates that whites are vulnerable to their sense of numerical inadequacy. This inadequacy is apparent in their drive to divide the vast majority of non-whites into fractional, as well as frictional, minorities. This is viewed as a fundamental behavioral response of whites to their own minority status. The white "race" has structured and manipulated their own thought processes and conceptual patterns, as well as those of the entire non-white world majority, so that the real numerical minority (whites) illusionally feels and represents itself as the world's majority, while the true numerical majority (non-whites) illusionally feels and views itself as the minority. Interestingly, the white collective, whenever discussing the question of color, never discusses any of its own particular ethnic groups as minorities, but constantly focuses on the various ethnic, language and religious groups of non-white peoples as minorities. Then great efforts are made to initiate conflict between these arbitrary groups. This is one of the key methods by which a minority can remain in power. The "divide, frictionalize and conquer" pattern, observable throughout history wherever non-whites are confronted by whites, results primarily from whites' sense of color deficiency and secondarily from their sense of numerical inadequacy. This pattern, then, is a compensatory adjustment to permit psychological comfort through dominance and control. (See Diagram I.) Similarly, the present-day frantic focus on birth control for the entire non-white world is another example of white peoples' conscious or unconscious awareness of their numerical deficiency status. There is never great emphasis on controlling the births of whites; in fact, there are some white governmental groups that give dividends to citizens for increased procreation. [MORE]
Smithsonian American Indian Museum to Hold Day Long symposium to Discuss whether Racist Redskin Logo Depicting Non-White Person as a Mascot is Racist
/The Washington Redskins’ team name has been the subject of legal battles, political debate and now will be part of a scholarly discussion at the Smithsonian about the use of Native American mascots and nicknames in American sports.
The National Museum of the American Indian will host a daylong symposium Thursday entitled “Racist Stereotypes and Cultural Appropriation in American Sports.” Scholars, sports writers and Native Americans will gather for the public discussion.
The Redskins’ name, perhaps the most visible, has been the subject of ongoing debate. As recently as Tuesday night, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray specifically avoided saying the name of Washington’s NFL franchise in his State of the District speech and instead referred to “our Washington football team.”
Museum Director Kevin Gover, of the Pawnee Nation, said the name “redskins” is the most offensive term for a team, at least to his ear.
“It is the equivalent of the n-word,” Gover said. “That’s how it was used when I was a child. That’s the name people chose to call me if they wanted to hurt my feelings, and I think that’s still the case in many circumstances.”
Blacks & Latinos Made Up 87% of NYPD Stop & Frisks in 2011
/NYPD Report [HERE]
The NYPD released a report last night showing they stopped-and-frisked a record number of people in 2011, with blacks making up 53% of the stops, followed by Latinos at 34%, and whites around 9%. "The nearly 686,000 stops conducted in 2011 equated to less than one stop per police officer per week among the 19,600 officers on patrol during the period," Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Paul Browne said in an email. Brooklyn's 75th Precinct, which covers East New York, Cypress Hills, Starrett City and City Line, saw the most stops, with 31,100—97% of them involved blacks and Hispanics.
Blacks and Latinos together make up 52.8% of the population in the city, yet they represented roughly 87% of all stop and frisks in 2010. You wouldn't surmise that from this Daily News headline on the report: "No racial profiling in 'stop and frisk:' NYPD report."
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4th Amendment Not Real for Non-Whites. The 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, although only one sentence long, protects people against unjustified detentions by the government. It reads: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In order for the police to stop you the Supreme Court has ruled that police must have reasonable articulable suspicion that there is criminal activity afoot and the person detained is involved in the activity. In order to frisk you the Supreme Court has ruled that the police must have independent reasonable articulable suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous before they may touch you (a cursory patdown for weapons). Police may not act on on the basis of an inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or a hunch - there must be some specific articulable facts along with reasonable inferences from those facts to justify the intrusion.
Clearly these rules are only intended for white people. Non-whites are stopped and then frisked because they are Non-white. This does not happen to white folks. It happens to all non-white people regardless of income, education, political affiliation or skin color. [MORE]
Florida judge denies request to postpone racist suspect George Zimmerman trial
/A Florida judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by the defense to delay the trial of George Zimmerman, a white man who is facing second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, almost a year ago.
The ruling came on what would have been Martin’s 18th birthday, an anniversary that his supporters marked by singing “Happy Birthday” before the hearing began in Sanford, Fla. Commemorations of the fatal confrontation that has ignited passions about race and guns are scheduled throughout the week.
Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, has always maintained that he shot Martin in self-defense when their paths crossed on Feb. 26 of last year. Supporters of Martin insist he was a victim of racial profiling when Zimmerman saw the teenager returning from a shopping trip to a convenience store.
The trial is scheduled for June 10. The defense has repeatedly argued that it needs more time to prepare an adequate case. The defense also maintains that the prosecution has not moved as expeditiously as it could in turning over material.
Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman’s attorney, took note of the birthday demonstration outside the Seminole County Courthouse. “The family has a special burden to bear today,” O’Mara said. “No matter what, a tragedy occurred.”
But O’Mara insisted that a delay was warranted. “We are working hard,” he said, adding, “we are running into an enormous amount of resistance.”
“The only additional argument is I need more time,” O'Mara said.
Bernie de la Rionda, the prosecutor, argued that the defense did not deserve a postponement because pre-trial delays were partly due to the defense canceling depositions.
“Sometimes we set aside days of depositions, and they're canceled ... that's frustrating,” De la Rionda said.
“We are four months away from a trial date,” Circuit Judge Debra Nelson told defense lawyers during the hearing. “I don’t see any of your issues to be insurmountable.”
With the trail date still set for June, both sides need to also prepare for an earlier self-defense hearing, tentatively scheduled for April. The hearing is part of the procedure in the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows people who believe they are threatened to use deadly force to defend themselves. The Zimmerman defense has argued that he acted within his rights under the law when he shot Martin, even though the teenager was unarmed.
Even a year later, the case still has power to move people. A rally, sponsored by Sanford police and the NAACP, is scheduled in the city’s historically black neighborhood of Goldsboro. Mayor Jeff Triplett and other city officials are scheduled to speak, along with local pastors and Martin family supporters.
On Saturday, a peace walk is scheduled in Miami as a remembrance.
Virginia White Party (Republicans) backs away from ‘three-fifths’ plan for Black voters
/First the good news: A Senate committee in the Virginia legislature shot down SB 723 — a proposal that would have moved away from one-person, one-vote to a gerrymandered system designed to give suburban and rural voters greater weight in decided state-wide elections.
The bad news, of course, is that Virginia Republicans seriously introduced and considered a proposal to move away from one-person, one-vote in favor of a system that would have discounted votes cast by “urban” voters (wink, wink).
That such a thing was even being considered is, as Josh Marshall says, “A big, big deal“:
Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.
This all sounds pretty crazy. But it gets even crazier when you see the actual numbers. Here’s a very illustrative example. They’re already pushing a bill to do this in the Virginia legislature. Remember, Barack Obama won Virginia and got 13 electoral votes. But as Benjy Sarlin reported today in a series of posts, if the plan now being worked on would have been in place last November, Mitt Romney would have lost the state but still got 9 electoral votes to Obama’s 4. Think of that, two-thirds of the electoral votes for losing the state. If the Virginia plan had been in place across the country, as Republicans are now planning to do, Mitt Romney would have been elected president even though he lost by more than 5 million votes.
Remember, plans to do this are already underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states in the Midwest.
Ohio and Michigan Republicans have decided maybe it’s better not to be seen as the party actively seeking to disenfranchise black voters. The plan to do this here in Pennsylvania seems like it’s probably not going anywhere either.
For a sense of just how appalling and explicit this effort was in Virginia, you have to do the arithmetic, as Paul Bibeau did:
This plan counts the votes of Obama supporters, or Democrats, or “urban people” — Have I used the right code words here? Do we know who we’re talking about? — less than other Virginians.
But you need to do the actual math. … Last election, Barack Obama won 51.16% of the vote. Under the new bill he would have won four of the states 13 electoral votes.
And do you know how much it counts an Obama voter as? (It’s 4/13 divided by 51.16%. I’ll wait. Do it. Get a calculator. …)
It is almost exactly three-fifths.
This bill counts an Obama voter as 3/5 of a person. I don’t know if that fraction rings a bell with you. It was kind of a big deal, way back when. Women in fancy dresses, guys in gray — a lot of gray was in style. Is the light coming on now?
Charlie Pierce did the math too:
There is no point in mincing words. What the Virginia legislature is entertaining now in regards to its election laws is flatly fcking racist. That it is in response to changing demographics that make Virginia a tough get for the Republicans in presidential elections now doesn’t matter. That it is what we have come to expect from Republican-majority state legislatures around the country now doesn’t matter. That it’s naked opportunism doesn’t matter. That it may not pass doesn’t matter. This is a legislature acting to devalue African American voters to the advantage of white voters. This is Jim Crow bullshit, and no politician who deals in it, and no political party that continues to support said politician, is worthy of support by decent people in the year 20-goddamn-13.
Jamelle Bouie also sees the Jim Crow parallel:
In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state.
… This constitutes a massive disenfranchisement of African American and other nonwhite voters, who tend to cluster near urban areas. When you couple this with the move on Monday to redraw the state’s electoral maps — eliminating one state senate district and packing black voters into another, diluting their strength — it’s as if Virginia Republicans are responding to Obama’s repeat victory in the state by building an electoral facsimile of Jim Crow.
And Ta-Nehisi Coates says this is all too familiar for anyone who knows American history:
Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests.
These were cloaked under a colorblind argument — “We don’t discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can’t read the Constitution.” By “read the Constitution,” they meant “recite the Bill of Rights by heart.” And they’d ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point [out] that this is not a “new” racism. This is how [the] scheme went before the civil-rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.
To see the only other major political party in the country effectively giving up on convincing voters, and instead embarking on a strategy of disenfranchisement is bad sign for American democracy. There is nothing gleeful in this.
Minnesota the Home of Many Racist Suspects - racial gap among worst
/By now, Minnesotans should be getting the message about the state's dismal racial gaps.
But just in case, Craig Helmstetter, Wilder Research senior research manager, laid it out today at the annual meeting of Minnesota Compass in St. Paul. Compass is Wilder's data compilation project aimed at measuring progress or lack of it on some of the state's challenges.
Home ownership. The state ranks third in the percentage of white householders who own their own homes and 45th in the percentage of people of color who do so. The gap is the greatest in the nation.
Minnesota's home ownership gap is the nation's greatest.
Proportion of adults who are working. Among white people, the state is fifth. Among people of color, 22nd. Again, that gap is one of the greatest in the country.
Poverty rate. For white people, 8 percent. That ninth in the nation. For people of color, 26 percent. That's 30th.
High school graduation rates. For white people, 84 percent. For people of color, around half, depending on which minority group you're measuring.
The graduation rate is actually a gap that has been declining. If the current rates of change continue, Helmstetter said, much of it will be gone by 2030.
But that's a long time to wait. And Helmstetter showed the power of time combined with demographic change.
Because the percentage of Minnesotans who are people of color is rising, if that group's standing does not improve, then obviously the state as a whole will decline in these measures.
For example, if the poverty rates remain unchanged for people of color and for white people, then the overall state rate will be dragged up from 11.9 percent to 13.1 percent in 20 years. On the other hand, if the poverty rate for people of color is reduced to the level for white people, then the state overall would have a rate of 8.7 percent.
In the year 2030, Helmstetter pointed out, that's the equivalent of the population of St. Paul being lifted out of poverty.
There's work to be done, but among his messages was that working on the gaps brings big dividends.
Houston judge accused of racist remarks
/Widely known in the local federal courthouse for his tendency to say what he thinks about some of the cases brought before him, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes has found himself under fire again for remarks that a Texas civil rights group claims are racist.
The Texas Civil Rights Project has gone so far to ask for Hughes' resignation over comments he made during a hearing last November in a lawsuit brought by a state employee who claimed he was discriminated against when he was laid off. The comments came to light when the plaintiff, J.T. Shah, filed a recusal motion against Hughes, asking that the case be reassigned to another judge.
During the November hearing, Hughes at one point veered off on a tangent about diversity, making fun of educational institutions that have hired personnel to broaden the racial diversity of employees.
"And what does a diversity director do," Hughes said, "go around and (paint) students different colors so they think they were mixed?"
Later, Hughes appeared to discount the possibility that the plaintiff in the case could have been discriminated against because of his South Asian ethnic background. Shah's Indian origin did not impress Hughes as special.
"All right," Hughes said. "So he's Caucasian."
"No, he's Indian," replied the attorney for the state.
"They're Caucasian," Hughes said. "That's where we came from. That's why Adolph Hitler used the swastika."
Hughes appeared to confuse Caucasian - a racial classification that was popularized in the 19th century and which used certain Eastern European characteristics as representative of a larger group - with Aryan, which refers to the original speakers of early Indo-European languages and which later was hijacked by 19th-century racial theorists to describe a purportedly "master" root race that represented the human ideal.
US Expands Military Reach in Latin America
/The US continues to militarize all of Latin America, spending enormous amounts of cash in order to prop up obedient regimes, train armies and militias, build new military bases, deploy more troops, and keep the military industrial complex fat and happy.
“In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War,” reports the Associated Press, “the US has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade.”
“US Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counternarcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers,” while Washington is simultaneously ”training not only law enforcement agents in Latin American nations, but their militaries as well, building a network of expensive hardware, radar, airplanes, ships, runways and refueling stations,” and justifying it all under the drug war.
The US is building new military bases in Guatemala, Panama, Belize, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and elsewhere.
Hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars go to militarizing the region for the benefit of Washington and its corporate collaborators, but it ends up in some very nasty places. John Lindsay-Poland at FOR details some of the human rights abusers Washington is currently supporting:
The US Southern Command (SouthCom), responsible for US military activities in Central and South America and the Caribbean, is assisting the Panamanian border police, known as SENAFRONT, by upgrading a building in the SENAFRONT compound. The force was implicated in killings of indigenous protesters (PDF) in Bocas del Toro in 2011, and fired indiscriminately with live ammunition (PDF) on Afro-Caribbean protesters last October.
And even though there is legislation that bans “most State Department-channeled military aid to the army” in Guatemala, the ban curiously “does not apply to Defense Department assistance,” and US military aid to Guatemala has increased more than seven times since 2009.
The contracts included new assistance to the Guatemalan special forces, known as Kaibiles, former members of which have been implicated in giving training to the Zetas drug cartel, as well as the worst atrocities during the genocide period of the 1980s. Two contracts, funded by SouthCom and signed in September, were for a “shoot house” and “improvements” at the Kaibiles training base in Poptun, Petén.
“In addition,” Lindsay-Poland writes, “the US military spent another $8.1 million on fuel in Guatemala last year, probably for ‘Beyond the Horizon’ military exercises held there and in Honduras from April to July, and perhaps to support the deployment of 200 Marines to Guatemala in August.”
The US has recently expanded its mission in Honduras, referred to as Operation Anvil. It is run with six State Department attack helicopters and a special team of commando-style Drug Enforcement Administration agents who have now been implicated along with Honduran security forces in the killing of innocent Hondurans on several occasions.
In June, a group of academics from around Latin America plus the US wrote a letter to the State Department protesting against the US military presence in Honduras and demanding that aid to the country’s abusive law enforcement apparatus be halted. They exposed the drug war as the farce it is, charging “we are the ones providing all the corpses in your war” and arguing that “combatting drug trafficking is not a legitimate justification for the US to fund and train security forces that usurp democratic governments and violently repress our people.”
And when Washington isn’t giving its support and training to human rights abusers, its military spending in the region exclusively helps the corporate entities in the military industrial complex. Lindsay-Poland:
Many countries that host US military activities hope to receive economic benefits and jobs as a result. But more than five of every six Pentagon dollars contracted for services and goods in the region went to US-based companies. Only nine percent of the $574.4 million in Pentagon contracts signed in 2012 (including fuel contracts) were with firms in the country where the work was to be carried out. In the Caribbean, there were virtually no local companies that benefitted from the $245 million in Defense Department contracts.
The US has a lengthy record of savage military interventionism and support for mass murderers in Central and South America. The Obama administration has dramatically increased this long historical trend. One is tempted to point out how ineffective it has been under the stated drug war justifications, given that such approaches have only bolstered the black market drug trade. But the truth is, this approach is incredibly effective in keeping obedient regimes in place, maintaining geo-political/economic/military dominance in the region, and deepening the pockets of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and countless other corporate welfare queens.
The other side of French airstrikes on Mali: ‘They ruined everything I had'
/French President Francois Hollande is triumphant about his operation in Mali, but stories are emerging which show a different side of the war. Journalist Gonzalo Wancho tells RT that for every two rebels killed in airstrikes, a dozen civilians died.
“We’re learning what happened in battle day by day. In the town of Konna, we heard stories from the fog of war. [Rebels] fled to the north when French troops showed up. It’s reported that the cost of that victory was high. While French planes killed only two rebels, the number of civilian casualties were an estimated 14,” journalist Gonzalo Wancha told RT.
It comes just days after French President Francois Hollande declared “victory” in northern Malian cities. But the victory also had its price:
“I wasn’t home when the bombing began. I started praying when I learned my house was under attack. They ruined everything I had – my family and my livelihood. [My children were 11, 10, and 6]. They all died,” Idrís Meiga, a farmer from Konna, told RT.
Meiga’s story is not unique. In fact, it is becoming all too common to hear of similar tragedies in northern Mali.
“Some kids came running up to us and said their mom had died. I brought them to our house. Their mother died after an hour of clinging to life. The children have nobody else but us,” resident Abdul Kampó said.
Another story involved a mother who died from shell splinters, leaving three children behind – including a newborn baby.
Two young brothers drowned in a nearby river as they attempted to flee from the fighting.
These residents refuse to be persuaded by military claims of “victory.”
“People [in the town] say [French] war crimes must be prosecuted under the Geneva Convention,” Wancha said.
And while Hollande maintains that French military intervention in Mali will be short lived, the consequences of this war will affect the lives of these innocent civilians for a lifetime.
Meanwhile, airstrikes continue in Mali’s far north. Earlier Monday, 30 jets targeted training and communication centers of Islamist militants in the town of Tessalit.
The move was an effort to cut off nearby supply routes. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France’s Inter radio that rebels “cannot stay there a long time unless they have new supplies.”
It is believed that French civilians are being held hostage by militants in the area.
Both France and the Malian government have come under criticism for their alleged activity against terrorists and Islamist supporters in the African country.
Days ago, three suspected Jihadists who were arrested in the liberation of Timbuktu said they were tortured by Malian soldiers who used a method similar to waterboarding.
“To force me to talk they poured 40 liters of water in my mouth and over my nostrils, which made it so that I could not breathe anymore. For a moment I thought I was actually going to die,” said one of the men who said he was from the central Malian town of Niono.
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, Malian government forces executed at least 13 suspected Islamist supporters and “forcibly disappeared” five others from the towns of Sévaré and Konna last month.
If a Corporation (BP) Pleads Guilty to Manslaughter, Who Goes to Prison?
/Pleading guilty to killing someone usually means going to prison…unless the perpetrator is a corporation.
This week, BP agreed to 11 counts of manslaughter for the workers killed during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, when the Deepwater Horizon oilrig blew up.
But no one from the oil giant will serve time for the convictions. Instead, BP will pay a $4 billion fine, which is equivalent to what the company made in revenue every four days last year.
Also, BP will have five years to pay the fine. This news left some family members of those killed on the rig feeling bitter.
“I think BP is the real winner today,” Chris Jones, whose brother, Gordon Jones, was killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion, told the Houston Chronicle. “They got what they wanted—to resolve the criminal charges,” he added, “and they get a nice five-year payment plan to pay it off.”
In addition to the 11 felony manslaughter counts, BP’s plea deal included one misdemeanor count under the Clean Water Act; one misdemeanor count under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; and one felony count of obstructing Congress by deliberately understating the amount of oil that flowed after the blowout.
NYPD defend undercover spying of Muslims
/The New York Police Department is defending its use of undercover officers to prevent terrorism attacks, saying it follows the Constitution regardless of what civil rights lawyers say about its surveillance of the Muslim community.
Police spokesman Paul Browne commented in a statement Monday. It came after civil rights lawyers claimed in court papers that the police department had resumed now-banned tactics it used against anti-war demonstrators in the 1960s and 1970s.
Civil rights lawyers say the NYPD has subjected the Muslim community to “widespread and intense” surveillance, including where they eat, shop and worship.
They seek a court order against further surveillance of Muslims without evidence of crimes. Browne said terrorists have tried to attack the city at least 16 times since Sept. 11, 2001.
