February 28, 2011

SPLC Intelligence Report / By Mark Potok

For the second year in a row, the radical right in America expanded explosively in 2010, driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities. For many on the radical right, anger is focusing on President Obama, who is seen as embodying everything that’s wrong with the country.

Hate groups topped 1,000 for the first time since the Southern Poverty Law Center began counting such groups in the 1980s. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups, despite having some of the political wind taken out of their sails by the adoption of hard-line anti-immigration laws around the country, continued to rise slowly. But by far the most dramatic growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement — conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy — which gained more than 300 new groups, a jump of over 60%.

Taken together, these three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22% rise. That followed a 2008-2009 increase of 40%.

What may be most remarkable is that this growth of right-wing extremism came even as politicians around the country, blown by gusts from the Tea Parties and other conservative formations, tacked hard to the right, co-opting many of the issues important to extremists. Last April, for instance, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070, the harshest anti-immigrant law in memory, setting off a tsunami of proposals for similar laws across the country. Continuing growth of the radical right could be curtailed as a result of this shift, especially since Republicans, many of them highly conservative, recaptured the U.S. House last fall.

But despite those historic Republican gains, the early signs suggest that even as the more mainstream political right strengthens, the radical right has remained highly energized. In an 11-day period this January, a neo-Nazi was arrested headed for the Arizona border with a dozen homemade grenades; a terrorist bomb attack on a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Wash., was averted after police dismantled a sophisticated anti-personnel weapon; and a man who officials said had a long history of antigovernment activities was arrested outside a packed mosque in Dearborn, Mich., and charged with possessing explosives with unlawful intent. That’s in addition, the same month, to the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, an attack that left six dead and may have had a political dimension.

It’s also clear that other kinds of radical activity are on the rise. Since the murder last May 20 of two West Memphis, Ark., police officers by two members of the so-called “sovereign citizens” movement, police from around the country have contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to report what one detective in Kentucky described as a “dramatic increase” in sovereign activity. Sovereign citizens, who, like militias, are part of the larger Patriot movement, believe that the federal government has no right to tax or regulate them and, as a result, often come into conflict with police and tax authorities. Another sign of their increased activity came early this year, when the Treasury Department, in a report assessing what the IRS faces in 2011, said its biggest challenge will be the “attacks and threats against IRS employees and facilities [that] have risen steadily in recent years.”

Extremist ideas have not been limited to the radical right; already this year, state legislators have offered up a raft of proposals influenced by such ideas. In Arizona, the author of the S.B. 1070 law — a man who just became Senate president on the basis of his harshly nativist rhetoric — proposed a law this January that would allow his state to refuse to obey any federal law or regulation it cared to. In Virginia, a state legislator wants to pass a law aimed at creating an alternative currency “in the event of the destruction of the Federal Reserve System’s currency” — a longstanding fear of right-wing extremists. And in Montana, a state senator is working to pass a statute called the “Sheriffs First Act” that would require federal law enforcement to ask local sheriffs’ permission to act in their counties or face jail. All three laws are almost certainly unconstitutional, legal experts say, and they all originate in ideas that first came from ideologues of the radical right.

There also are new attempts by nativist forces to roll back birthright citizenship, which makes all children born in the U.S. citizens. Such laws have been introduced this year in Congress, and a coalition of state legislators is promising to do the same in their states. And then there’s Oklahoma, where 70% of voters last November approved a measure to forbid judges to consider Islamic law in the state’s courtrooms — a completely groundless fear, but one pushed nonetheless by Islamophobes. Since then, lawmakers have promised to pass similar laws in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.

After the Giffords assassination attempt, a kind of national dialogue began about the political vitriol that increasingly passes for “mainstream” political debate. But it didn’t seem to get very far. Four days after the shooting, a campaign called the Civility Project — a two-year effort led by an evangelical conservative tied to top Republicans — said it was shutting down because of a lack of interest and furious opposition. “The worst E-mails I received about the Civility Project were from conservatives with just unbelievable language about communists and some words I wouldn’t use in this phone call,” director Mark DeMoss told The New York Times. “This political divide has become so sharp that everything is black and white, and too many conservatives can see no redeeming value in any” opponent.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll this January captured the atmosphere well. It found that 82% of Americans saw their country’s political discourse as “negative.” Even more remarkably, the poll determined that 49% thought that negative tone could or already had encouraged political violence.

Last year’s rise in hate groups was the latest in a trend stretching all the way back to the year 2000, when the SPLC counted 602 such groups. Since then, they have risen steadily, mainly on the basis of exploiting the issue of undocumented immigration from Mexico and Central America. Last year, the number of hate groups rose to 1,002 from 932, a 7.5% increase over the previous year and a 66% rise since 2000.

At the same time, what the SPLC defines as “nativist extremist” groups — organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected immigrants or their employers — rose slightly, despite the fact that most of their key issues had been taken up by mainstream politicians. There were 319 such groups in 2010, up 3% from 309 in 2009.

But like the year before, it was the antigovernment Patriot groups that grew most dramatically, at least partly on the basis of furious rhetoric from the right aimed at the nation’s first black president — a man who has come to represent to at least some Americans ongoing changes in the racial makeup of the country. The Patriot groups, which had risen and fallen once before during the militia movement of the 1990s, first came roaring back in 2009, when they rose 244% to 512 from 149 a year earlier. In 2010, they rose again sharply, adding 312 new groups to reach 824, a 61% increase. The highest prior count of Patriot groups came in 1996, when the SPLC found 858 (see also chart, above).

It’s hard to predict where this volatile situation will lead. Conservatives last November made great gains and some of them are championing a surprising number of the issues pushed by the radical right — a fact that could help deflate some of the even more extreme political forces. But those GOP electoral advances also left the Congress divided and increasingly lined up against the Democratic president, which is likely to paralyze the country on such key issues as immigration reform.

What seems certain is that President Obama will continue to serve as a lightning rod for many on the political right, a man who represents both the federal government and the fact that the racial make-up of the United States is changing, something that upsets a significant number of white Americans. And that suggests that the polarized politics of this country could get worse before they get better.

Mark Potok is the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Intelligence Report.

Reposted from AlterNet.

Countercurrents.org

Mention fascism and most peoples’ minds turn to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Japanese Fascism, Papadopoulos’ Greece and South Africa’s Apartheid regime. However, most people are blissfully unaware of a rising form of fascism, more virulent than all past fascist regimes combined. Its aim is to subjugate the entire planet and its resources to U.S. corporate interests.

It is true that German Fascism, was evil, but it is also true that its evilness has been exploited, even exaggerated by one powerful Zionist entity and its supporters to justify the persecution and dispossession of the Palestinian people. German Fascism has diversified and mutated into super fascism supported by regimes claim to be “liberal democracies”.

The word Fascism originated from the Latin ‘Fasces’, means a bundle of sticks tied together to represent the ruling élite. At the heart of fascist ideology are corporatism, militarism, nationalism, racism and total control of citizens. Fascism is, “ a political system or regime with a tendency toward or actual exercise of Fascism ” [Webster's Dictionary]. Unfortunately, many opportunists and apologists for Israel-U.S. crimes use the word fascism as a name-calling, carelessly thrown it around to demonise others in order to mislead the public.

In his 2003 essay Fascism Anyone ? , the British writer, Laurence W. Britt, identifies fourteen characteristics of fascism common to past fascist regimes. Are they common and shared by regimes today? The purpose of this essay is to seriously inform people of the growing danger of fascism today, using the fourteen characteristics as a matchup.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism . Fascism is deeply rooted in a profound form of nationalism based on an illusion of race superiority, “white supremacy”. The Patriotic Act, “Anti-terrorism” laws, flag-waving, promotion of militarism and mass recitation of “Pledge of Allegiance” to promote war are common characteristics of xenophobic nationalism in the U.S., Israel, Europe and Australia. The American historian Howard Zinn writes: “ Is not nationalism – hat devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking–cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on–have been useful to those in power and deadly for those out of power”. Negative nationalism, including “patriotism”, is the greatest danger to civilisation.

In Europe, nationalism – once had plunged Europeans into protracted and barbaric wars –, is on the rise and it is threatening the survival of the European Union itself. It is a deadly virus spreading like fire throughout Europe, while the U.S. looks on happily. As nationalism spread, the fate of minorities is at the mercy of racist and populist sentiments.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights . Human rights are nothing more than pretext to enforce Western domination on the rest of the world. The U.S., Israel and Britain see human rights as an obstacle to their expansionist ideology and no country in the world in contempt of international human rights law than the U.S., Israel and Britain. The U.S. and Israel, in particular, are serial violators of human rights law. When European and U.S. politicians visited the Gaza Concentration Camp in Israel-occupied Palestine, the only prisoner they expressed concern about is an Israeli POW who has been accorded all his human rights under the Geneva Conventions by his Palestinian captors. They totally ignored some 11000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them women and children, who are subjected to gross human rights violations, including torture by the Israeli Gestapo. “Through clever use of propaganda by marginalizing and demonizing those being targeted, the population was brought to accept human rights violations, including torture and sexual abuses. When the abuses were egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation”, writes Laurence. Human rights abuses, including torture, are part of America’s violent history. The U.S. aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan exposed America’s dark history of torture and flagrant abuses of human rights.

Prisoners of war and detainees (many without charges) were incarcerated, abused and tortured in global gulags and concentration camps around the world. From Guantánamo Bay Camp in Cuba to Afghanistan to Iraq and to countless “black sites” prisons, innocent men, women and children have been subjected to injustice, human rights abuses and torture. In Iraq, there are hundreds of known and secret concentration camps and prisons, where innocent Iraqi civilians are being detained under deplorable conditions without being charged with any crime. Tens of thousands have been detained for years and an equal number have disappeared, possibly unlawfully executed. There are no charges, no due process and no justice. The situation in U.S.-NATO-occupied Afghanistan is even worse than in Iraq. Both nations were illegally invaded and have endured oppression, human rights abuses, injustice, torture, rape, and looting. One wonders why the Noble Prize Committee has no concern for Muslim prisoners’ welfare.

It is well-documented that the justice system in the U.S. is a travesty of justice. Guantánamo Bay Camp is considered “outside U.S. legal jurisdiction” despite it is located on a U.S. Navy base in Cuba. This flawed argument designed to deny justice to illegally detained men in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. The Camp has become as notorious as, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram Base in Afghanistan. Prisoners, including male children are denied their human rights, abused and tortured, and some have been executed. Many have been destroyed mentally, although they have committed no crimes. For example, Omar Khadr, an Afghan-Canadian (child soldier) prisoner of war in Guantánamo Bay Camp since he was 15 years old is a case of naked hypocrisy. Khadr was tortured and coerced (forced to sign a confession) into plea-bargain and sentenced to 40 years in prison for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier on the battlefield while defending his country against an illegal foreign invasion, while U.S. and Western leader who committed heinous war crimes remain free and unindicted.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause . The most common characteristic of fascism is scapegoating of people from minorities. Even before 9/11, Muslims were identified as enemies, accused of ‘taking-over’ Europe. The event of 9/11 was an opportunity to justify attacking the scapegoats, Islam and Muslims. In Europe and many parts of the U.S., Canada and Australia, Muslims are often unfairly depicted as terrorists, anti-women and violent in order to justify racism and injustices. False flag terrorist acts orchestrated by Western governments to justify gross injustice and stirrup xenophobic fear against Muslims.

Most importantly, the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. and Europe is fuelling the war on Islam and Muslim nations. In all these countries the population are feed (by the media) a daily diet of racism to improve their support for an aggressive war being waged by the U.S. and its allies against the Islam and Muslims. In Australia, anti-Muslims hatred and bigotry have infected every Australian institution. Racial profiling of Muslims has become a cancerous disease speeding rabidly into Australian government agencies, universities and even schools.

In the U.S., the war on Muslims is worsening and provides ammunition to America’s war on Islamic nations abroad. Islamophobia has become a fully-fledged Zionist industry that promotes fear of Muslims as part of U.S. war. The enemies of Israel are the enemies of the ruling élite. “ Much of this bigotry and misinformation can be traced directly to what I am calling the infrastructure of hate, an industry which connects venomous anti-Islamic blogs, wealthy [Jewish] donors, powerful think tanks, and influential media commentators, journalists, and politicians”, writes Frankie Martin, the Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International Service in Washington DC ( Washington Post , 27 October 2010) .

Europe has become a bastion of Islamophobia. Clones of Adolf Hitler are sprouting like wild mushrooms all over Europe. Their fascist policies have become part of Europe’s mainstream politics. Many of these small clones have said that they are proud to be compared to Adolf Hitler. Their support is growing alarmingly in countries with an ugly history of collaboration with Nazi Germany. In the so-called “open” and “tolerant” societies of Austria, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, Denmark, France, Holland, Hungry, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland fascist forces are on the rise with a Zionist and militarist agenda.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism . The military industrial complex is the most powerful corporate industry in the U.S. The U.S. military budget is a phenomenal. It is estimated that the U.S. spend $623 billion – not includes $3 billion military aid to Israel – on military in 2008. U.S. military spending exceed the rest of the world’s spending combined. U.S. military feeds on the largest budget and resources, even when more than fifty million Americans are in desperate needs and the country is drowning in debt. Billions of U.S. tax payer dollars are spent on the military every day. As pointed out by Laurence; “The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling élite ”. The U.S. has access to the largest stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical of weapons in the world that Hitler didn’t have. The world’s most militarised society is also ruled by a wealthy Zionist and neo-fascist ruling élite that could blow up the world at any time .

In addition to this giant monster, the world largest military organisation, NATO, is under the control of US generals and remains an instrument of the U.S. militarism. “The alliance itself is an excrescence of the U.S. military-industrial complex. For sixty years, military procurements and Pentagon contracts have been an essential source of industrial research, profits, jobs, Congressional careers, even university funding. The interplay of these varied interests converges to determine an implicit U.S. strategy of world conquest”, writes Diana Johnstone, author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions .  This offensive military “alliance” continues to expand in dangerous direction.

Under the rubric of “Western shared values and common interests”, the U.S. has assembled the biggest imperialist military force in history. Threatened and coerced, regimes from around the world are joining in drove with “slavish devotion” to U.S. wars. As mentioned earlier, fascism protects corporate interests and the ruling élite . It is not difficult to argue why so many regimes are joining U.S. aggressive wars. If they cannot join U.S war because of domestic pressure, they open their nations’ door’ to U.S. military. The U.S. military has more than 1000 fortified military bases (large and small) in countries around the world. They are not only used as launch pads for aggression against other nations, but also protecting hideous and corrupt dictators in most countries where they are based. Most of these bases are installed against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the local populations.

In a recent interview on 29 November 2010, U.S. ADM. James Stavridis, NATO supreme allied commander and U.S. European Command chief, told Defense News : “NATO is ‘a wealthy alliance’ with a $31 trillion collective GDP. It is a ‘big and capable alliance’ with 7 million troops and 3,400 ships”. It is a truly super fascist alliance. Its new concept of “expeditionary operations” means attacking nations beyond NATO territories, known that there is no other nation or groups of nations that pose any serious threat to this super fascist force. The existence of this militarised and “wealthy alliance” depends on unprovoked aggression and manufactured pretexts for war.

Naked Aggression

Militarism and aggression go hand in hand, like a parasite and its host. Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Apartheid South Africa were notorious examples. Today, the U.S., Britain and Israel are leading the way. In fact, there are striking similarities between the past three regimes and the current three regimes. Naked aggression has been integrated into U.S.-Western corporate culture.

Since World War Two, the U.S. – supported by the like of Britain, Israel Canada and Australia – has massacred more civilians and destroyed more nations than all past fascist regimes combined. It is rightly argued that every U.S. government (including every U.S. president) since 1945, is guilty of war crimes and flagrant violation of international law . Any nation that refuses to submit to U.S.-Zionist ideology and U.S. dictate is threatened with violence. “You’re either with us or against us”, said George W. Bush. There is no neutrality, and nations’ sovereignty has become obsolete.

Even a great nation like China is threatened. If China “refuses” to submit to Western dictate, we must be prepared to use force (i.e., aggression), said Kevin Rudd, former prime minister (now foreign minister) of Australia, the U.S. “staunch” vassal in Asia-Pacific. You think Rudd, who claims to be an “expert” on China, thinks twice before making such an unwise statement. “Every 10 years or so the U.S. needs to pick up some [defenceless] little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business”, writes Michael Ledeen, a U.S. Zionist propagandist. Every country that has been invaded by the U.S. military was left a shattered graveyard and a humanitarian misery. The aim is to instil fear in the world’s population, dominate the world and force U.S. dictate onto another people.

It is vitally important to highlight few recent examples of U.S. aggression and flagrant violation of international law. The U.S. war on Korea (1950-1953) caused the unnecessary death of some 3 million Koreans and destroyed every city and village in North Korea or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Since 1953, the DPRK has been defending itself against U.S. aggression and ongoing false propaganda. The 1953 armistice designed to justify U.S. military presence in the region and threatened neighbouring nations.

A decade after the aggression against North Korea, the U.S. began another decade-long criminal aggression against the people of Vietnam that caused the death of more than 3 million innocent civilians and contaminated the country with biological and chemical agents, including napalm. Despite its military superiority, unlimited resources and indiscriminate violence, the U.S.-imperialism was defeated by a peasant society. In 1991, the U.S. began a criminal aggression against Iraq to “eradicate” its defeat in Vietnam and remove the so-called the “Vietnam syndrome”.

It is estimated that t he 1990 U.S.-Britain enforced genocidal sanctions caused the death of more than 2 million innocent Iraqi civilians, including the death of more than 600,000 infants under the age of five. On 15 December, 2010, the UN Security Council – chaired by no other than U.S. Vice-President, the Zionist Joe Biden – voted to “end” the sanctions on Iraq after the puppet government accepted U.S. conditions, including long-lasting colonial occupation. According to John Mueller and Karl Mueller, the brutal and inhumane sanctions against the Iraqi people have caused far more deaths over time than the combined use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the two world wars (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999). Asked whether this was worth the death of half a million children, Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN replied: “We think the price is worth it”. The genocidal sanctions followed by the 2003 criminal U.S.-British aggression. The unprovoked aggression is the most barbaric aggression in the history of barbarism; a supreme international war crime. It was premeditated aggression against a defenceless people under genocidal siege. Despite the suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people, the crimes were covered-up by the media. (For more on U.S. crimes in Iraq, see: Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions , Harvard, 2010).

In 2001, the U.S. began replicating the atrocities in Vietnam are being replicated in Afghanistan. Since 2001, U.S. and NATO force have occupied and terrorise the nation of Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-NATO indiscriminate and relentless U.S. aerial bombing and strafing, including the illegal and criminal drone attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan that caused the death of more than 2000 Pakistani civilians. For the people of Afghanistan, living conditions and security have deteriorated beyond belief under a new form of Western colonialism. Like all U.S. aggressions, the war on Afghanistan is a crime against humanity. It is vitally important to note that; ”all the war crimes the U. S. has committed against other peoples were not planned and carried out by sadistic thugs or xenophobic right-wingers but by ordinary folks who come from solid family backgrounds, are well mannered, display elevated cultural taste, and may even be informed by good intentions, writes Boggs. And the planners of these horrendous crimes are mostly so-called whiz kids liberal, cultured, urbane, visionary government officials and many celebrated academics from the Ivy League Schools”, writes Carl Boggs, a Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles .

According to a report entitled Project for the New American Century authored by a gang of U.S. Zionists and neo-fascists, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan, which was published 2008, the fall of Communism is an opportunity for the U.S. to rule the world militarily and establish a new worldwide empire through aggression and permanent war, using international organisations such as, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to provide cover and legitimacy for U.S. crimes, mostly committed in broad daylight.

In October 2001, then U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said that U.S. “war on terror” was “different” from other wars: “in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime”. In other words, the U.S. is in perpetual war of aggression against countries and people the U.S. ruling élite deemed to be counters to U.S. imperialism.

5. Rampant sexism . The ruling élite of fascist regimes tend to be male-dominated. Fascism mobilise masculine virile energy in time of war. One of the lies used to justify U.S. aggression against defenceless people is the “liberation” of women. In fascist regimes, women are seen as less aggressive, gay-sympathisers and tend to be anti-abortion, although not all women are anti-abortion. In most U.S.-led Western societies, the political and economic establishments are still very male-dominated. Women are considered less intelligent and lack the ‘ethics’ of strong male leaders. Treated as second-class citizens, women play a secondary role. Violence, including sexual violence, against women is as high as U.S. skyscrapers. The current trends of using women as “seductive” tools to win votes for a particular male-dominated party are a tragedy not an advancement in gender equality.

6. A controlled mass media. The media and the “entertainment” industry important tasks are the coercion and indoctrination of the population from early childhood. Zionist propagandists called this the “intelligent manipulation of the masses”. It is a formidable achievement with truly global results. Just take a look at the tens of thousands of Australians flocked to Sydney Harbour to see Oprah Winfrey.

Objectivity doesn’t exist in corporate media, and “free speech” is free if the ruling élite like it. Today’s propaganda is more superior and more efficient than at any time in history of propaganda. it is a global propaganda rife with distortion, slander, cover-ups and outright lies. The main players are the U.S. government and wealthy U.S. Zionists with a complete monopoly on mainstream media. From TV channels such as, CNN, CBS, Fox News, BBC and print media like Murdoch Press and the New York Times to Internet web sites like Google, Facebook and YouTube, all owned by pro-Israel Zionist Jews. According to Canadian journalist, Eric Walberg; ”Google co-founder and billionaire Sergei Brin is a big supporter financially of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that funds Jewish immigrants to settle in Israel” on Palestinian land. In addition, the U.S. corporate élite and wealthy U.S. Zionists have a total control on the “entertainment” industry, including Hollywood, which plays an important role in spreading pro-U.S. Zionist propaganda.

While the rhetoric of “free media” is prevalent in most Western countries, a culture of censorship is widespread even by the most “independent” and “alternative” media outlets. Journalists and reporters have to abide by and adhere to a one-sided framework that promotes U.S.-Western fascist policies. Because if they deviates from this ‘ doctrinal framework’ or from the line of serving power, they wouldn ‘ t get their work published. Propagandists and apologists (i.e., accomplices in war crimes) are rewarded and elevated to iconic status in the media in order to be perceived by the public as even-handed “intellectuals”. Anyone deviates from this fascist framework risks persecution and character assassination.

The ongoing criminal attacks by Western politicians and the corporate media on WikilLeaks for daring to release a large cache of U.S. “diplomatic” cables. U.S. politicians and commentator in the corporate media have called WikilLeaks a terrorist organisation and are calling for its co-founder, Julian Assange, to be thrown in Guantánamo Bay Camp or killed by Special Forces. A former assistant to Canadian prime minister the extremist Stephen Harper has proposed assassination as the best way to remove Assange. T he primary aim of this violent thinking is to warn and blackmail others. It is also possible that the U.S. and its allies are using WikilLeaks to justify silencing dissident media, particularly in the Internet.

While the WikilLeaks disclosure is a welcome relief, the mainstream and corporate media have selected few cables to promote U.S. war on Iran and North Korea and undermine the impact of the leaked information. As one of the New York Times mindless propagandists, David Brooks writes: “ The Times has thus erected a series of filters between the 250,000 raw documents that WikilLeaks obtained and complete public exposure. The paper has released only a tiny percentage of the cables. Information that might endanger informants has been redacted. Specific cables have been put into context with broader reporting” ( NYT 29 November 2010). Where are the lies used to justify the U.S. aggression against Iraq? Exposure of these lies will strengthen the case of war crimes against the perpetrators of the war and the deaths of more than a million innocent Iraqis . Does WikiLeaks have anything related to Israel’s serious war crimes and terrorist acts? In reality, a lot of the leaked cables are dubious in nature and benefits Israel’s fascist agenda more than and undermining U.S. imperialism and threatening U.S. national security.

7. Obsession with national security . The so-called “war on terrorism” is meaningless. First, it is a manufactured catchall phrase to label and demonise the enemy and protect the ruling élite; and second, it is a pretext to justify aggressive wars and control the population through draconian laws and repressive measures. The Washington Post (20 December 2010) reports that since 9/11 the U.S. “ is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators”. The U.S. claim that it needs the information to protect the population from acts of terrorism is ironic. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism and a source of instability everywhere. In the new age of “security”, police and security guards littered the streets of Western cities and towns ready for every move. Peaceful protesters are attacked with rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray. If arrested, protestors risk criminal charges and imprisonment.

In the U.S., presidential directives allow police and security agents (CIA and FBI) to abduct, kidnap, detain indefinitely and torture people suspected of planning “terrorism”. In February 2010, President Obama signed a one-year extension of three provisions of the Patriotic Act to allow the government “to obtain roving wiretaps over multiple communication devices, seize suspects’ records without their knowledge ” ( Christian Science Monitor , 01 March, 2010). Americans have been told to spy on their neighbours, a despicable act which was used by the Nazis.

In the current case of WikilLeaks, a number of U.S. Congressmen and journalists have called for the prosecution of Julian Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act for breaching U.S. security. This is not something out of the blue, but has been used in the past to prosecute American citizens. It is reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s prosecution of people – labelled “traitors” – who criticised the Nazi Party or made joke about the F u ehrer.

In the U.S. and in Europe, communities and entire cities have been subjected to 24-hours camera surveillance – a form of repression. Large metropolitan cities like London, New York and Chicago have become forests of surveillance cameras and by far the most camera-surveilled cities in the world. One quarter of the world’s surveillance cameras are in Britain. Citizens are watched around the clock and their movements are recorded and tracked (through a series of ID cards and credit cards) as they go about their daily business. In addition, many cities in the U.S. have begun using iris scanning technology, an invasive form of identification. Fear is forcing people to make more concessions.

According to civil rights groups and privacy advocates, the growing culture of surveillance posed great threat to civil liberties and personal freedom of citizens. The aim is to have a total control of society by whatever means, and force people to submit to draconian laws. Furthermore, the obsession with national security is also a corporate business that benefits the manufacturers of surveillance cameras, iris scanners and their Congressional lobbyists. Security is simply a pretext for no personal security.

8. Religion and ruling élite tied together . George W. Bush justified his criminal wars as a “message from God”. Hence, opposing Bush’s war crimes was considered an attack on God, Bush’s God. The U.S. is not exceptional, most regimes (even the most unreligious) use religion to rally support for a godless ruling élite .

The U.S is one of the most religious countries in the world, almost fanatical. Successive U.S. regimes attached themselves to the state predominant religion, Christianity. Furthermore, a large segment of the American population, including more than fifty million (and growing) Evangelical Christian-fascists are religious fanatics that form the political base of the Republicans Party.

No other nation uses religion to justify war crimes than the state of Israel in Palestine. The Zionist entity is forcing the rest of the world to recognise it as a “Jewish state”, so it can commit more crimes.

9. Power of corporations protected . Fascism is characterised by a “corporatist approach to economics”, as in the U.S. and major Western states today. Indeed, protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. It is not secret, what is good for IBM and Boeing is good for the country. According to a new report by the New York Times , even the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is increasingly defending and siding with corporate interests. The ruling élite “have chosen to serve the narrowest possible private minority interests of transnational financial and industrial corporations”, writes Susan George of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Hence, fascism is corporatism. The ruling élite write the rules in ways to benefit the few (owners of corporations) at the expense of the majority. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised.

The ruling élite see the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production, but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic élite were often pampered by the political élite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of the “have-not” citizens. The ruling-corporate élites are so powerful, even if a change in the White House doesn’t lead to a change in policy. The Obama Administration proposal of a two-year pay freeze for all civilian federal workers while leaving Wall Street and corporate CEOs continue to make record profits and bonuses through tax cuts and bail-out is a case in point. In his recent fiscal deal with the Republicans, President Obama cut the net earnings of the lowest-paid workers and passed them to the wealthiest 1 per cent Americans. In other words , Obama agreed to extend George W. Bush tax cut to the wealthiest Americans.

10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated . Under fascist regimes, unions and organised labour considered enemy of the state. In the U.S, the working-class or public workers have been decimated by successive U.S. regimes on behalf of big wealthy corporations.

In most Western countries striking union workers were attacked and organized labour was crashed by the ruling élite and its corporate allies. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Australian prime minister, the bigoted John Howard were vicious enemies of unions and the working-class. In Germany, France, Spain and Greece, anti-labour laws are on the rise.

One of the major reasons Western powerful corporations have relocated their export industries off-shore to China and elsewhere is to exploit the labour there and ineffective regulations in host countries. The high profits operations have destroyed organised labour at home, in the U.S., Europe, Japan and South Korea. Economic ‘globalisation’, a variant of U.S. imperialism, has perpetuated workers exploitation.

Local workers (“Third World” workers) are forced to work under criminal and inhumane conditions, and paid poverty-level- wages. If they protested, they will be dealt with severely. The recent case in Chittagong, Bangladesh when police fired on striking garment workers killing 4 workers and injured more than 150 workers is a case in point.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts . “Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes”, writes Laurence. In fascist regimes, ignorance is encouraged while intellectualism and awareness were discouraged. Intellectuals and the arts are promoted and encouraged as far as they provide needed propaganda.

In the U.S., the McCarthyism era was followed by different forms of repression. People who question or doubt the official story of 9/11 are demonised and depicted as anti-American “conspirators”. The event was used as an opportunity for the U.S. government to crackdown on dissent, including students’ protest and academic freedom.

Through tight control of intellectual and academic freedom, universities have turned into right-wing think tanks and racist laboratories of citizens’ indoctrination. Universities have become powerful and privileged corporations that seemed far removed from the daily life of ordinary people. Academics are paid propagandists spreading false propaganda to manipulate the masses.

Terry Eagleton, who was forced to retire from his post as John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University writes: “By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices? They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”. As Laurence writes; “Politically independent academics harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed”.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment . The U.S. is leading the world in incarceration rate and the prison industry is one of the largest “growth” industries. The U.S. has more prisoners than anywhere on the planet. Nearly 10% of the population or one in 100 adults in the U.S. is in jail or prison. On average, one in every 20 American men is behind bars or “being monitored”. In 2008, about 5.1 million people were on probation or parole. Most of those incarcerated are African-Americans and Latinos caught in an unjust and corrupt justice system. According to the Washington Post (29 February 2008); “ One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group”.

Police power is sacrosanct and promoted to the point of encouraging abuse of people from minorities. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuses. Petty crimes is exaggerated and used and as an excuse for more police power. With the help of the media and Hollywood, crimes have also become an obsession of the majority. The ruling élite like to talk tough every time they talk about crimes, but not their own.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption . The U.S. and Israel are ranked very high amongst the most corrupt nations in the world. The economic and the ruling élite used their positions to enrich themselves and their cronies. “Corruption worked both ways; the ruling élite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic élite , who in turn would gain the benefit of government favouritism”, writes Laurence.

In general, cronyism and corruption are widespread in most Western countries, but it is cleverly covered-up and normalised in the media and in ruling élite circles. For example, in Australia, cronyism and corruption are parts of the Australian culture and deeply embedded in every government, public and private institution. Privileged employment and positions are all in the hands of white Australians and it is a well fenced territory. There is no exception throughout Australia, one state is more corrupt and more prejudice than the other.

The same rampant culture of cronyism and corruption is also exported world-wide, particularly, to countries occupied by Western forces. After the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. authorities began an expensive campaign to promote cronyism and corruption among the ruling élite, the puppet governments. The aim is to demonise the nations and cover-up the crimes of the occupying forces. It is no coincidence that Afghanistan and Iraq are amongst the most corrupt nations in the world today.

14. Fraudulent elections . Former U.S. president George W. Bush was an illegitimate president for two terms having arrived at the White House through well-known rigged elections. In general, U.S. elections are nothing more than a marketing campaign to manipulate and deceive the public because the U.S. is ruled by a powerful unelected ruling class. It is a plutocracy masquerading as democracy. The so-called, two-party system is a fraud. It is a one-party with two branches system that serves corporate interest. It doesn’t matter who occupy the White House.

The U.S. love affair with fraudulent elections in countries ruled by murderous dictators and corrupt despots is not secret. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Kosovo to Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan to Egypt and to Honduras and Haiti, the U.S. record of financing and staging fraudulent elections is staggering. Moreover, U.S. role in “colour revolutions” – in Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – produced the kind of despots that the U.S. ruling élite love to support. In reality, the U.S. is a leading exporter of fraudulent elections and an arch enemy of democracy. Throughout the world, the U.S. interference designed to promote instability and exploit local conflicts to expand U.S. imperialism.

In most European countries that pretend to be “liberal democracies”, elections lack transparency and accountability which undermines democracy and gives rise to cynicism and mistrust. They are becoming increasingly authoritarian. It is true, people have to vote, but their votes are meaningless. It is always, the same old wine in new bottle. All over Europe, elections are used to manipulate and con the population. “The European Union is not a democratic entity”, writes Susan George. It is an authoritarian state. “Anti-democratic values are taking hold. We have become stakeholders instead of citizens, consumers instead of sovereign people, we are offered consultation rather than real participation”, she added.

Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995 , the Italian writer and academic Umberto Eco, also identified fourteen “features that are typical” of what Eco called “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism”. Umberto noted that not all of the fourteen features have to be present at the same time for a regime to be called fascist, and “many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it” . Umberto writes: “Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes [Croatia]. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound [the American expatriate fascist]. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola”. Like the above matchup of fourteen characteristics, Umberto argued that all fourteen features that he identified applied to the U.S. regime to some degree.

Finally, the U.S. and many U.S. allies – Britain and Israel, to name two – have already entered a moment with all the characteristics of fascist regimes. With a complete monopoly on military power, violence and the media, the U.S. is a super fascist state , proliferating and propping-up smaller fascist states . It has become clear that, world order is no longer governed by international law and civilised norms, nor by treaties based on peaceful and multilateral agreements, but is based on the U.S. use of military threat and violence in pursuit of a fascist ideology to dominate the on behalf of U.S. ruling-corporate élite .

It is not difficult to predict the future under U.S. fascist domination. Fascism is not the way to defend freedom, promote democracy and provide security, adherence to the rules of law and civilised norms is. It is the duty of conscious people to dissent together against a U.S.-led super fascism on behalf of humanity.

Ghali Hassan is an independent political analyst living in Australia.

13 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Across America, daily incidents occur, one of many the cold-blooded January 1, 2009 murder of Oscar Grant – unarmed, offering no resistance, thrust face-down on the ground, shot in the back, and killed, videotaped on at least four cameras for irrefutable proof. USA Today said five bystanders taped it.

His killer: Oakland, CA transit officer, Johannes Mehserle, tried for the killing, the jury told to consider four possible verdicts – innocent, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter, jurors deciding the latter.

The Legal Dictionary defines it as “The act of unlawfully killing another human being unintentionally,” the absence of intent distinguishing it from voluntary manslaughter. Many states don’t define it or do it vaguely. Wallin & Klarich Violent Crime Attorneys say in California it carries a two – four year sentence. However, since a gun was used, Judge Robert Perry can add three to 10 additional years.

Because minority victims seldom get justice, especially against police, Mehserle may serve minimal time, then be paroled quietly when the current furor subsides.

After the verdict, it erupted on Oakland streets, hundreds turning out to protest, Bay Area indymedia.org saying:

“The actions of the Police in Oakland tonight (including dozens of arrests) show their disrespect for justice in General. Their heavy handed violence towards protestors just reinforces their total disconnect with the people of Oakland.” It’s as true everywhere across America, police acting like Gestapo, usually unaccountably.

Grant’s family will appeal the verdict and is suing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) for $25 million, his mother Wanda Johnson saying “My son was murdered (and) the law has not held the officer accountable.” It rarely does for Black, Latino, or other minorities, no matter the injustice, civil rights lawyer John Burris, representing Grant’s family in the civil suit, saying:

“The system is rarely fair when a police officer shoots an African-American male.” Police brutality against them and other minorites is systemic, including beatings, torture, and cold-blooded murder, usually with impunity, justice nearly always denied.

While far from certain, the Obama administration may charge Mehserle with civil rights or hate crime violations, DOJ spokesman Alejandro Miyar saying:

“The Justice Department has been closely monitoring the state’s investigation and prosecution. The Civil Rights Division, the US Attorney’s Office, and the FBI have an open investigation into the fatal shooting and, at the conclusion of the state prosecution, will conduct an independent review of the facts and circumstances to determine whether the evidence warrants federal prosecution.”

Systemic Police Brutality

An earlier Jones Report.com text and video account headlined, “Epidemic of Police Brutality Sweeps America,” showing footage of police repeatedly tasering a student with 50,000 volts of electricity for questioning the 2004 election results at a campus meeting.

Other videotaped incidents showed:

– a man victimized by police violence;

– a former sheriff’s deputy acquitted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting an unarmed man;

– police repeatedly beating an old man on the head, “for the crime of intoxication;”

– officers violently using assault rifles, tear gas, dogs, and at least one helicopter in an alleged narcotics sweep;

– a woman tasered to death by police; and

– a man in shock, bleeding and burned over much of his body, ordered to lie on the pavement, then tasered and shot to death while he sat dazed, the Report highlighting systemic police violence “repeated almost every day in (America), the police (getting) away with murder,” beatings, and other lawless acts – poor Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims for their faith and ethnicity their usual victims.

Amnesty International (AI) on American Police Brutality

On its web site, AI says “Police brutality and use of excessive force has been one of the central themes of (AI’s) campaign on human rights violations in the USA,” launched in October 1998. In its “United States of America: Rights for All Index,” it documented systematic patterns of abuse across America, including “police beatings, unjustified shootings and the use of dangerous restraint techniques to subdue suspects.”

Yet little is done to monitor or constrain it, evidence showing that “racial and ethnic minorities were disproportionately” harmed by harassment, verbal and physical abuse, false arrests, and in the case of West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, shot at 41 times by four New York policemen, struck 19 times and killed while he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building, unarmed and nonviolent, victimized by police brutality.

Nationwide, driving while black has been criminalized, racial profiling used for traffic stops and searches for suspected drugs or other reasons, the practice especially common in California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Texas.

AI cited numerous incidents, including beatings and “questionable” shootings, usually found to be unjustified, yet cops most often absolved. Although most US police departments stipulate that officers should only use deadly force when their lives, or others, are endangered, dozens of cases show they do it indiscriminately, at most being “mildly disciplined” even if guilty of serious misconduct.

“Police shooting(s) resulting in death or injury are routinely reviewed (internally or) by local prosecutors….to see whether criminal laws (were) violated. However, few officers are criminally charged and little public information is given out if a case does not go to trial.” As a result, systemic abuse stays hidden, police brutality allowed to persist with impunity.

Despite Congress passing the 1994 Police Accountability Act, incorporated into the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act to require the Attorney General to compile national data on excessive police force, Congress has consistently failed to fund it. Further, the legislation doesn’t require local police agencies to keep records or submit data to the Justice Department. Nor does it criminalize police violence and excessive force as human rights violations.

ACLU Report on Racial and Ethnic Profiling

In August 2009, the report titled, “The Persistence of Racial Profiling in the United States” quoted Rep. John Conyers (D. MI) saying “Since (9/11), our nation has engaged in a policy of institutionalized racial and ethnic profiling,” although, as an African-American, he knows the problem goes back generations, most recently in the “war on terrorism” against Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims for their faith, ethnicity, activism, prominence, and at times charity, a topic this writer addresses often – arrests, some violently, bogus charges, prosecutions, and imprisonments often compounding the injustice.

Post-9/11 under Bush and Obama, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have engaged in virulent racial/ethnic profiling, what the ACLU calls “a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the United States, impacting the lives of millions of people in African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, and Arab communities.”

Evidence shows that racial minorities are systematically victimized, without cause, in public, when driving, at work, at home, in places of worship, and traveling, often violently.

A “major impediment to (prohibiting it) remains the continued unwillingness or inability of the US government to pass federal legislation (banning the practice) with binding effect on federal, state or local law enforcement.”

Nor do authorities comply with the provisions of the 1994 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) that obligates all levels of government.

In addition, the Justice Department’s 2003 Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies designed to ban federal officers from engaging in racial profiling is, in fact, flawed and does little to end it, because it doesn’t cover “profiling based on religion, religious appearance, or national origin.”

Nor does it apply to state and local law enforcement where police brutality is systemic. In addition, it specifies no enforcement mechanisms or punishments for violators, and contains a “blanket exception for national security and border integrity cases,” besides being advisory and not legally binding.

As a result, it actually promotes profiling and abuse, including false arrests, beatings and killings. It’s not surprising how minorities have been systematically mistreated by federal, state and local authorities, or that congressional legislation introduced to stop it never passed.

On December 13, 2007, the House and Senate introduced their versions of the End Racial Profiling Act (HR 4611 and S. 2481). Both bills were referred to committee and never enacted – making it extremely hard to nearly impossible for victims to successfully challenge abuses against them.

As a candidate, Obama promised a “Blueprint for Change” to ban racial profiling and related mistreatment, criminalizing them, but so far, no measures have been introduced or passed, showing another promise made, another broken, a systematic pattern under his leadership, across the board against the constituencies that elected him. Hopefully they’ll remember next election and choose another way, a third way, both parties equally corrupted in deference to big money and systemic police brutality that serves it.

National Police Misconduct Statistics

The Injustice Everywhere.com (IE) web site compiles them, publishing them in regular reports, some for individual cities, including daily accounts. One on July 10 covers King County, WA deputy Paul Schene, captured on videotape assaulting a 15-year old girl in jail. He was tried twice, hung juries resulting each time.

On July 9, the County Prosecutor’s Office dropped the charges, and won’t pursue a third trial. As a result, the sheriff’s department may rehire Schene, though he still faces possible disciplinary action. It’s currently in arbitration, IE saying decisions nearly always favor officers, in which case he’ll likely be reinstated to abuse other detainees, off camera to avoid being charged.

In early 2010, IE published an April – mid-December 2009 (8.5 months) Police Misconduct Report, from figures compiled in its National Police Misconduct Statistics Reporting Project (NPMSRP), begun earlier in March 2009, analyzing data:

“by utilizing news media reports of police misconduct to generate statistical information (to) approximate how prevalent (it) may be in the United States.”

Police departments don’t usually provide them, nor do courts, except for successful prosecutions, omitting confidential settlements and cases resulting in disciplinary action only, not trials. Media reports, though imperfect, are more complete because laws limit or filter information released. As a result, IE’s data “should be considered as a low-end estimate of the current rate of police misconduct,” as well as in individual cities covered.

Statistics compiled follow the same DOJ/FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) methodology, recording only the most serious allegation (not conviction) when multiple ones are associated with a particular incident. The findings were as follows:

– 3,445 police misconduct reports;

– 4,012 officers charged;

– 261 law enforcement officials (police chiefs or sheriffs) cited;

– 4,778 alleged victims;

– 258 fatalities reported;

– an average of 15.05 daily incidents or one every 96 minutes;

– nearly $200 million in related civil litigation expense, excluding legal fees and court costs;

– 980.64 per 100,000 officers charged;

– one of every 266 officers accused of a violent crime;

– one of every 1,875 charged with homocide;

– one of every 947 accused of sexual assault;

– 33% of police officers charged were convicted, not necessarily justly for the offense committed;

– 64% of officers convicted were imprisoned, not necessarily as long as justified;

– those sentenced served an average 14 months, far less than citizens for the same crime;

– misconduct by category included 18.1% for non-firearm related excessive force; 11.9% for sexual misconduct; and 8.9% for fraud or theft;

– analyzing reports by last reported status showed 45.9% affected officers adversely, including 14% internally disciplined and 31.9% criminally charged; of the latter, 32.5% were convicted “for a 10.4% total criminal conviction rate for alleged misconduct incidents; and

– 27% resulted in civil lawsuits, 34.3% favoring victims.

In addition, data were compiled for states, cities and counties, excluding unavailable federal statistics as well as local omissions, especially in some states. Various offenses included:

– accountability: evidence of coverups, lax discipline, and other failures to adhere to official policies or processes;

– animal cruelty, harming them by unnecessary shooting, inappropriate KP unit training, or other mistreatment;

– assault: “unwarranted violence” off-duty, excluding murder;

– auto incidents involving recklessness, negligence, and other violations of official policies;

– brutality, involving excessive physical force on-duty, excluding firearms or tasers;

– civil rights, including unconstitutional civil liberties violations such as lawless peaceful protest disruptions;

– sexual misconduct, including rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, wrongfully eliciting sex, harassment, coercion, prostitution, sex on duty, incest, and molestation;

– theft or fraud, including robbery, shoplifting, extortion or bribery;

– shooting: gun-related incidents both on and off-duty, including self-harm;

– taser: excessive force, including usage not according to guidelines, resulting in excessive injury or death; also, improper taser use may be recorded as “brutality;”

– color of law, including incidents involving misuse of authority such as bribery, soliciting favors, extortion by threat of arrest, or using badges to avoid arrest;

– perjury, including false testimony, dishonesty during investigations, and falsifying charging papers or warrants; and

– raids, including misconduct during warranted or warrantless operations or searches, wrong address raids, mistaken ones, use of no-knock ones when warrants require notification, or mistreatment during executions.

Misconduct status stages go from allegations to investigations, lawsuits, charges, trials, judgments, disciplinary measures, terminations, convictions, and sentences.

IE compiles data regularly, prepares daily and quarterly reports, and henceforth an annual one each January the following year. It explains that its statistics:

“should only be used (as) a very basic and general view of the extent of police misconduct. It is by no means an accurate gauge that truly represents the exact extent (of its extensiveness) since it relies on the information voluntarily gathered and/or released to the media, not (first-hand) by independent monitors who investigate complaints…..because no such agency exists for any law enforcement agency….”

Detailed quarterly and annual reports are produced, not monthly ones considered a less accurate “depiction of the overall extent of police misconduct….” Daily reports cover a sampling of individual incidents. Overall, IE provides a valuable reading of systemic police misconduct, though capturing only a snapshot of the full problem – widespread, abusive, violent, often with impunity, and when officers are held accountable, imposed discipline is usually mild, prison sentences rare and short-term, victims cheated by a criminally unjust system, favoring power over people, no matter the offense.

Final Comments

In December 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination published a report titled, “In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse of People of Color in the United States,” saying:

“Since this Committee’s 2001 review of the US, during which it expressed concern regarding incidents of police brutality and deaths in custody at the hands of US law enforcement officers, there have been dramatic increases in law enforcement powers in the name of waging the “war on terror (resulting in) the use of excessive force against people of color….(It’s not only continued post-9/11), but has worsened in both practice and severity” – a NAACP representative saying it’s “the worst I’ve seen in 50 years.”

On April 4, 2007, Ryan Gallagher, writing for Medill Reports, produced by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, headlined, “Study: Police abuse goes unpunished,” saying:

From 2002 – 2004, over “10,000 complaints of police abuse were filed with Chicago police….but only 19 resulted in meaningful disciplinary action, a new study asserts.” According to Gerald Frazier, president of Citizens Alert, it reflects “not only the appearance of influence and cover-up,” but clear evidence that city residents are being abused, not protected, despite the department’s official motto being “We Serve and Protect.”

Most disturbing is that the Chicago pattern reflects what’s happening across America, people of color like Oscar Grant systematically abused, in his case murdered in cold blood, what no criminal or civil actions can undo.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

“It’s well established that schools with large minority populations tend to have lower quality teachers,” Dr. Jackson said. “But it is unclear whether these schools are merely located in areas with a paucity of quality teachers, whether quality teachers avoid these schools because of the neighborhood or economic factors surrounding a school, or whether there is a direct relationship between student characteristics and teacher quality.”

Dr. Jackson’s findings suggest that it’s not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it’s the students-and it’s directly related to their race.

“This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction,” Jackson said. “This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools.”

The study focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district in North Carolina. In 2002, the district ended its race-based busing program, which distributed the district’s minority population across its schools. When the policy ended, some schools had a large and sudden inflow of black students. Since the racial makeup of the schools changed suddenly but the neighborhood and economic factors surrounding them stayed the same, Jackson could test the impact the student body itself had on teacher quality.

Using data supplied by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, Jackson found that schools that had an increase in black enrollment suffered a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores. Teacher effectiveness, as measured by teachers’ previous ability to improve student test scores, decreased in the black inflow schools as well. The change in quality for each school generally occurred in the same year that the busing program ended, indicating that teachers moved in anticipation of more black students.

“This study implies teachers may prefer a student body that is more white and less black,” Jackson says.

Black teachers were slightly more likely than white teachers to stay in the schools that experienced a black inflow, the study found. However, those black teachers who did leave black schools tended to be the highest qualified black teachers. So the decline in quality was somewhat more pronounced among black teachers than white teachers.

Just what it is about black students that pushes high-quality teachers away is hard to pin down, Dr. Jackson says. It could be that teachers are reacting to notions about black students’ achievement or income levels.

###

C. Kirabo Jackson, “Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation,” Journal of Labor Economics 27:2.

Since 1983, the Journal of Labor Economics has presented international research that examines issues affecting the economy as well as social and private behavior. The Journal publishes both theoretical and applied research results relating to the U.S. and international data. And its contributors investigate various aspects of labor economics, including supply and demand of labor services, personnel economics, distribution of income, unions and collective bargaining, applied and policy issues in labor economics, and labor markets and demographics.

This article was reposted from the University of Chicago Press Journals.

VICTORVILLE, Calif. — Ever since it became clear that Barack Obama would be our next president, there’s been an unprecedented run on guns ‘n ammo in America. Partly this is fueled by fears, some justified some not, that Obama will outlaw a broad range of assault weapons; partly it’s fueled by socioeconomic factors, racism and right-wing hate.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in Victorville, a desert exurb of Los Angeles that boomed faster with the subprime craze than just about any city in the country and fell harder when it all collapsed. Today, guns and ammo are in short supply here in Victorville. But there is an abundance of despair and paranoia.

There are a lot of guns around these parts, too. The barren desert surroundings are perfect setting for gun enthusiasts of all stripes, and it feels like most everyone here owns a weapon or two. And why not? You can drive 15 minutes beyond city limits, turn off onto a backroad and start unloading to heart’s content. That is, if you are able to get your hands on some ammunition.

In Victorville, every single gun store is out of all types of ammo, all the time.

“I went through 11,000 of 9mm rounds in two days. That’s an awful lot for a little shop like this. I would never ever stock that much,” an owner of a  gun shop tucked away in a corner of a strip mall told me. “All the people that make ammunition are making more than they have in any other year, but they are still running out.”

Excessive target practice did not even come close to explaining the insatiable demand for ammo. Even the local Wal-Mart, the pioneer in demand-driven distribution, can’t keep up, selling out of as soon as soon a new shipment comes in.

Rumor on the street has it that Wal-Mart has sold more ammo year-to-date than any other year in its history. And while Wal-Mart’s media relations department would not confirm or deny that information, citing proprietary concerns, all one has to do is visit their two stores in the area.

Aside from a couple of boxes of buckshot, shelves in the guns-and-ammo department stand perpetually empty — a weird sight in a store otherwise overflowing with goods. According to a salesperson at their Victorville location, ammo that arrives overnight will be picked clean long before lunch hour rolls around. The only sure way to buy is to call as soon as the store opens at 9 a.m. and put what you want on hold. That is, if a shipment comes in that day at all.

Charles Drew, owner of a gun store in Victorville, told the press that even people that don’t own guns are hoarding ammunition “just in case.” It is a trend recorded nationwide. 

The Outdoor Wire, a news service for the outdoor industry, has named Obama its “Gun Salesman of the Year.” Mandatory FBI background checks for firearms sales have jumped by 50 percent in recent months, while ammunition manufacturers have seen record sales. Olin Corp., maker of Winchester ammunition, upped its first-quarter sales this year from $110 million to $133 million, giving it a much-appreciated 20 percent boost in profits.

Ammunition has been so scarce lately that some police departments have been forced to scale back on target practice, fearing that they won’t have any bullets left for real police work.

And the thing to remember is that bullets aren’t cheap. A box of 25 9mm rounds sells for about $25. More specialized ammo easily sells for $2 a bullet or more. But in these difficult times, cost does not appear to be an issue, even in the flat-broke city of Victorville.

Victorville is set on a flat stretch of the Mojave Desert among Joshua trees and tumbleweeds 100 miles east of Los Angeles. Fertilized by land speculation and the riskiest of loans, blocks and blocks of beefy McMansions started sprouting here in the last decade, baiting low-income families with the glorious dream of homeownership.

Priced just right, Victorville was a testament to the accessibility of the American Dream for all, regardless of wealth. And in 2007, it became America’s second-fastest growing exurb, doubling its population to just over 100,000 in six short years.

There was no local industry to support such growth, and despite the two-hour average commute, each way, people flocked here from all over Southern California, eventually making Victorville more ethnically diverse than Los Angeles.

But the egalitarian dream didn’t last. Prices have now dropped to pre-2000 levels. Whole neighborhoods of beefy homes, some of them half-built, now stand abandoned, eerily blending in with the barren desert landscape.

The unemployment rate in Victorville doubled in the past year, spiking way above the national average to between 12.5 and 18.5 percent (the national and state averages are 8.5 and 11.2 percent, respectively).

Violent crime is on the rise, too. Victorville saw a 7 percent jump in 2008, while some surrounding areas clocked as much as 13 percent more homicides, rapes, robberies, assaults and motor vehicle theft.

There are two sides to Victorville, the old and the new. Before its stint as a dirt-cheap suburban paradise, Victorville was a tiny God-fearing community populated by white conservatives living an isolated frontier lifestyle with heavy military overtones.

One of the local World War II-era bases had shut down more than a decade ago, but a Marine Corps base remains operational and is still one of the biggest employers in the area. Until the housing boom flooded the area with urban homeowners, 1 out of every 6 adults here was a veteran.

The influx of new — and mainly nonwhite — homeowners has been a cause of racial tensions here for more than a decade.

“The chemistry out here is perfect for more and more racism,” said Tom Metzger, the infamous leader of the white supremacist hate group White Aryan Resistance who lives in Southern California, about the Inland Empire back in 2005. “You’ve got all these nonwhites moving here from Orange County and Los Angeles trying to flee the crime perpetrated on them by their own kind in their ghettos, and when they come out here, they’re basically shoving forced integration down the throats of the whites who have traditional claim to this area, and that is provoking a negative racist reaction among whites, as it damn well should. It’s great!”

What has been simmering conflict may soon be bubbling over the edge. There is almost a sense of inevitability of a spike in hate crimes.

“In the past month, there was only one reported hate crime. But you have to wonder how many go unreported. I think a lot, ” a local crime beat reporter told me. “Just go to our comments section and read what people are saying. There is definitely a perfect storm building.”

In October 2008, two teenagers belonging to a local hate group shot a black man in a liquor store parking lot. Schools have been dealing with an uptick in race-based conflicts and shooting threats. Earlier this month, one of the cars of a Jewish family was trashed inside and out, its engine destroyed and swastikas painted on its doors and hood.

As I’m writing this, news is coming out that police arrested a group of six local skinheads from Hammerskin Nation for attempted murder, witness intimidation, conspiracy to commit murder and assault with a deadly weapon.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Hammerskin Nation has been stepping up recruitment lately, as has every other known extremist group across the nation.

On April 15, about 200 people, mostly white, showed up at Victorville’s Tea Party. Some were not hesitant to vow that they’ll take violent action if “Osama’s” socialist policies continued unabated.

To the protestors, the economic crisis had exposed what their government had become: a big, meddling bureaucracy that had little regard for personal liberty. Socialism was a’coming to the USA, and it was hell-bent on exploiting honest, hardworking people like themselves — whether its being forced to bail out delinquent homeowners or having your jobs given to illegal immigrants.

While President Obama was talking about raising taxes, redistributing wealth and carelessly spending hundreds of billions of dollars on his banker buddies, their boys were coming back home from Afghanistan and Iraq thankless and jobless. Much of their anger was aimed at new residents: Hispanics, Asians and blacks.

Nowhere is this animosity more visible than on the local Internet forums. Here are just two of dozens of similar comments posted by readers on an article about Victorville’s spike in crime rates by the Daily Press, a local daily:

married wrote:

Sheriff’s can’t pinpoint why there’s an increase in crime? Geez even an idiot can tell you what the problem is – low-income housing, Juan and Shanana moving up here to get little Julio and Tyron away from the gangs, but not realizing they are the gang, and welfare money running out in the middle of the month. I can’t wait to hear the remarks I’m gonna get on this comment. 5/2/2009 7:59:03 PM

sandynator wrote:

No surprise here, what do you expect with all the social engineering we had via Barney Frank and the dems, too many gangbangers got loans and moved on up to the high desert. Now we the citizen pay the price while the fat cats like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and BO laugh themselves silly. 5/2/2009 9:59:36 PM

The day day after the nationwide Tea Party protests, channeling the spirit of Timothy McVeigh, the Department of Homeland Security released a perfectly timed report warning law enforcement agencies that America’s shifting political landscape, the economic downturn and influx of returning vets all combined for a perfect storm likely to cause a swell in right-wing extremist organization activity.

The report cited evidence that extremist groups are stockpiling weapons and ammo in preparation for … something.

Republicans went on a partisan offensive slammed the report as an affront against our troops, but even a cursory look at Victorville shows how close to the bone the report really gets.

Yasha Levine is a gun-ownin’ editor of eXiledOnline. He is currently stationed in Victorville, California, working on a book from the trenches of the American Dream. You can contact him at levine@exiledonline.com.

Reprinted from: http://www.alternet.org/story/139872/

Study finds indifference to racist comments

TORONTO – One reason racism persists is that many people imagine they would respond strongly to a racist act but actually respond with indifference, a new study led by York University shows.

Published in the Jan. 9 issue of Science, “Mispredicting Affective and Behavioral Responses to Racism” examines why acts of blatant racism against blacks still occur with alarming regularity, even though being labeled as a racist in modern society has become a powerful stigma.

“People do not think of themselves as prejudiced, and they predict that they would be very upset by a racist act and would take action,” said lead author Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor in York’s Faculty of Health. “However, we found that their responses are much more muted than they expect when they are actually faced with an overtly racist comment.”

Kawakami led the study at York with graduate student Francine Karmali. University of British Columbia professor Elizabeth Dunn, an expert on people’s ability to predict their future emotional responses, and Yale University professor John Dovidio, an expert on prejudice, are co-authors.

In the study, students who think they are waiting for an experiment to begin are exposed to racism. Specifically, a white confederate makes a racist comment about a black confederate when he briefly leaves the room. When he returns, the actual participant is asked to choose a partner to work with on a subsequent exercise.

“What we found was that students were more likely to choose the white confederate as a partner (63 per cent), despite the fact that the white person had made a racist comment about the black person,” said Kawakami. “And the racist comments ranged from moderate to one of the most powerful anti-black slurs in the English language.”

The findings may seem surprising at a time when America is about to inaugurate its first black president, but the election of one black man does not mean that racism is dead or that people will no longer tolerate acts of racism, Kawakami said.

Notably, there has been little research done on how people respond to prejudice toward others. However, University of British Columbia professor Elizabeth Dunn, one of the authors of the Science article, studies people’s ability to predict their own affective and behavioural reactions.

“People often make inaccurate forecasts about how they would respond emotionally to negative events. They vastly overestimate how upset they would feel in bad situations such as hearing a racial slur,” said Dunn. “One of the ways that people may stem the tide of negative emotions related to witnessing a racial slur is to re-construe the comment as a joke or as a harmless remark.”

Further studies currently being conducted by these researchers are investigating how characteristics related to the racists and the target of prejudice increases or decreases emotional, behavioral, and physiological reactions to racial slurs. Examining people’s perceptions of both the white and black confederate may provide important clues as to when people do and do not stand up against racism.

Reprinted from York University.

March 18, 2008

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn’t he say that America “got what it deserved” on 9/11? And didn’t he say that black people should be singing “God Damn America” because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn’t.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and “never batted an eye.” That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and “save American lives.”

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman’s own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we’re the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would “never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

And Wright didn’t say blacks should be singing “God Damn America.” He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn’t happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don’t believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks–and I do, for instance–it is worth pointing out that Wright isn’t the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early ’90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed “undesirable” including gays and racial minorities.

So that’s the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America’s favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those “prosperity ministers” who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock–though make no mistake, they already knew it–is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that “everything changed.” To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded–about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we’re shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation–we’re literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the “shining city on a hill,” for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do–and this is true even for millions of black veterans–for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like “God Bless America,” for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I’ve seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country–when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as “Negro Barbecues,” involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade–an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were–and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the “good old days” to which we wish we could return, still are–from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before “Leave it to Beaver” debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager’s textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon “this great country” as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one’s nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they–the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land–who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it–when our nation does–we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone–which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma–but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children’s story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they’ll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God–to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like–is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don’t believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief–after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire–many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one’s personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you’d be heading.

So you can curse God in this way–and to imply such hate on God’s part is surely to curse him–and in effect, curse those who aren’t Christians, and no one says anything. That isn’t considered bigoted. That isn’t considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

Reprinted from http://www.timwise.org/

The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination harshly criticized the US record on race after considering oral and written testimony submitted by the US government. In its conclusions issued today, the committee urged the US to rectify the “stark racial disparities” in criminal justice systems throughout the country. 

“The UN is telling the US that it needs to deal with an ugly aspect of its criminal justice system,” said Alison Parker, deputy director of the US Program at Human Rights Watch. “The committee outright rejected the government’s claim that more black kids get life without parole sentences because they commit more crimes.” 

The UN committee condemned what it found to be racial disparities in the death penalty and in the sentencing of youth to life without parole for crimes committed when they were under 18, a practice the committee wants stopped. Further, the committee called on authorities to take steps, including a moratorium on the death penalty, to root out racial bias. 

The committee also dismissed claims by the US government that it did not have the power to examine the detention of non-citizens at Guantanamo. It urged the US to guarantee “enemy combatants” judicial review of the lawfulness and conditions of their detention. 

“Once again, the Bush administration has been told by a major human rights body that it is not above the law when it comes to the war on terrorism,” Parker said. “The US should reverse its decision to deny judicial review to non-citizen enemy combatant detainees.” 

The committee criticized US practices in numerous other areas, including: 

- The Bush administration’s view that its human rights treaty obligations do not apply to laws or practices that are race-neutral on their face but discriminatory in effect; 

- Racial segregation in housing and in public schools; 

- Systemic inadequacies in indigent criminal defense, which have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities; 

- The disenfranchisement of millions of US citizens because they have been convicted of a felony, even though they have fully served their sentences or have been released on parole. 

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is the UN body of experts responsible for monitoring countries’ compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, a human rights treaty ratified by the United States in 1994. The committee’s comments and responses to state party reports are authoritative interpretations of states’ obligations under the treaty. 

As is its regular practice, the committee considered US compliance with the treaty following the government’s submission of a report, due in November 2003 but finally submitted by the US in April 2007. A US delegation participated in the committee’s meeting to examine the report on February 21 and 22, 2008 in Geneva, and responded to questions.

For more information on the United States and the CERD, please see the following documents: 

February 2008 Human Rights Watch submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination http://hrw.org/reports/2008/us0208/

February 2008 follow-up letter from Human Rights Watch to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/02/27/usdom18163.htm

April 2007 US Report to CERD
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/83517.pdf

March 2008 CERD concluding observations on the US http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/co/CERD-C-USA-CO-6.pdf

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