THE STUPID ISSUE: VOLUME 106, ISSUE 129
Massachusetts' Message of Stupid
by Robert Parry, Consortium News




Having grown up in Massachusetts, I never bought into the idea that the state was that much more liberal than most others. The dominant media there is not the center-left Boston Globe but the right and far-right talk radio shows that pervade the Bay State as they do the rest of the country.

Beyond the usual right-wing standard-bearers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, there are home-grown shock jocks like Howie Carr, who delights his audiences with slurs about Hispanic immigrants and jokes about African-American rappers.

The two idiots who baited Hillary Clinton before the 2008 New Hampshire primary with the chant “iron my shirts” were affiliated with Boston’s WBCN, which once was a leading progressive anti-war station (the original home of Danny Schecter “the news dissector”) before it was sold off and evolved into just another source of loud and obnoxious talk.

So, why should it be such a surprise that a guy like Scott Brown, who played to that jock-like mentality, would catch the fancy of many Bay Staters? Especially given the inchoate anger of people who are suffering from a wretched economy and who can take some perverse pleasure in punishing someone like Martha Coakley, who slipped up on where Curt Schilling stood on the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry.

Still, ever since Tuesday night – the latest Massachusetts “shot heard round the world” – politicians and pundits have been analyzing what the voters’ message was. According to the dominant analysis, the voters of Massachusetts were “sending a message” to Washington about bipartisanship.

That’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid heard. ”The American people want us to work together,” he said. And he was not alone in hearing a call for greater cooperation on the tough issues facing the United States.

However, if that was the intended message from Massachusetts voters, it was a message of stupid.

The last thing that the election of Scott Brown will do is to get the Republicans to be more cooperative with President Barack Obama and the Democrats. Indeed, now that the Republicans have tasted blood – realizing that their strategy of obstruction is paying off – there is absolutely no political reason why they should make any meaningful compromises.

In other words, the logical result of the Brown election will be more Washington gridlock, which GOP leaders think will give them a powerful campaign theme about Democratic ineptness and failure. That, in turn, will likely mean a major Republican sweep in November’s congressional elections and thus more gridlock as the Republicans seek to ensure that Obama is a one-termer.

And, if the Republicans do regain total control of the U.S. government in 2013 – maybe with Sarah Palin as President – the nation can expect a reprise of George W. Bush: more tax cuts tilted to the rich, more swaggering foreign policy, more unrestrained corporate power, more right-wing religious fervor, more neglect of global warming and environmental dangers, and more deficits.

A Future Look

Is that the future the Massachusetts voters wanted to presage with Scott Brown’s election to fill the Senate seat formerly held by John F. Kennedy and his brother Ted? Perhaps, it is.

Perhaps the people of Massachusetts want to be in the vanguard of a really stupid America, one that continues to ignore real challenges and continues to drift toward a unique combination of Big Power military and Third World debt.

In his post-election comments – when he wasn’t pimping out his daughters as “available” – Sen.-elect Brown was explaining that a key secondary selling point in clinching his victory was his opposition to Obama’s plan to try some terrorism suspects in civilian courts, rather than military tribunals, a favorite topic of right-wing talk radio.

Most voters, Brown noted, don’t think that accused terrorists deserve the constitutional protections of the American legal system. “In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them," he said in his victory speech.

And recent polls seem to back Brown up. Many voters apparently have no historical appreciation for the reasoning behind the habeas corpus principle of English law or the thinking of the American Founders, who understood the need to protect individuals from abuses of government tyranny.

Instead, the “Dirty Harry” tough-guy-ism of ignoring the law and just shooting the “bad guys” has deeply infected the American psyche.

For the past three decades, vigilante-ism also has been skillfully exploited by politicians from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Indeed, any politician who dares suggest that legal principles are important can expect to be hooted down as an ACLU-card-carrying wimp. Remember Michael Dukakis in 1988.

This message from the Brown victory should be particularly chilling to civil libertarians who have argued that Obama should go even further in rejecting Bush-style kangaroo courts. Lacking any media infrastructure that compares to the vast right-wing echo chamber, progressives and other advocates for the rule of law must recognize that they are losing this debate.

‘Have a Beer With’

Massachusetts voters also were sending another message on Tuesday, that politics should be a fun diversion, like some reality TV show where the cool guy wins out over the serious gal.

The United States has seen this trivial pursuit of politics before, especially in Election 2000 when the refrain was that George W. Bush was someone you’d “like to have a beer with” while Al Gore was a tedious know-it-all.

In the Massachusetts Senate race, Brown drove a truck and hung out with ex-Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, Massachusetts football star Doug Flutie, and one of the actors from the TV show “Cheers,” which was set in a fictional Boston bar.

By comparison, state Attorney General Martha Coakley thought Schilling was a Yankees fan. Plus, she looked so uptight, so straight, so b-o-r-i-n-g.

In other words, despite the experience of Bush’s disastrous presidency, the American voters are still enthralled with how they “feel” about a candidate, not those tiresome questions about experience, judgment and policy prescriptions.

Brown, a former nude male model, began embarrassing the state soon after the votes were tallied, when he took the national stage to accept his victory. To groans even from his supporters, Brown declared that his two daughters were “available,” presumably for guys looking for dates.

Brown’s comment about his daughters shocked even the Right’s madcap oracle Glenn Beck, who is known for his own off-the-wall remarks. Still, Beck thought Brown – in inviting men to make moves on his own daughters – was demonstrating the creepy behavior of a sexual predator.

“I want a chastity belt on this man,” Beck said. “I want his every move watched in Washington. I don’t trust this guy. … This one could end with a dead intern. … I’m just saying: Congratulations, now let’s monitor him. Let’s put an ankle bracelet on him. Let’s just know where he is at all times.”

Massachusetts voters may have thought they were sending some kind of message to the nation with their choice of Scott Brown. And surely they have thrown a wrench into the legislative process, whether on health care or on regulating Wall Street or on curbing global warming.

But whatever Massachusetts thought it was saying, it comes across as a message of stupid.

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THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 107, ISSUE 128
Haiti and America's Historic Debt
by Robert Parry, Consortium News




Announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S. history was.

In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness, it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.

However, more than two centuries ago, Haiti represented one of the most important neighbors of the new American Republic and played a central role in enabling the United States to expand westward. If not for Haiti, the course of U.S. history could have been very different, with the United States possibly never expanding much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

In the 1700s, then-called St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti was a French colony that rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere. Relying on a ruthless exploitation of African slaves, French plantations there produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar.

Many of the great cities of France owe their grandeur to the wealth that was extracted from Haiti and its slaves. But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.

The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But black Haitians confronted a brutal system of slavery. An infamous French method of executing a troublesome slave was to insert a gunpowder charge into his rectum and then detonate the explosive.

So, as the American colonies fought for their freedom in the 1770s and as that inspiration against tyranny spread to France in the 1780s, the repercussions would eventually reach Haiti, where the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force. Slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally.

When the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels – known as the “Black Jacobins” – gained the sympathy of the American Federalist Party and particularly Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself. Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution for the new nation.

Conspiracies

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s new freedom.

Despite Hamilton’s sympathies, some Founders, including Thomas Jefferson who owned 180 slaves and owed his political strength to agrarian interests, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward.

“If something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.

In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States – and his interests at least temporarily aligned with those of Napoleon. The French dictator was determined to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson was eager to see the slave rebellion crushed.

Through secret diplomatic channels, Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation.”

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

In May 1801, Jefferson picked up the first inklings of Napoleon’s other agenda. Alarmed at the prospect of a major European power controlling New Orleans and thus the mouth of the strategic Mississippi River, Jefferson backpedaled on his commitment to Napoleon, retreating to a posture of neutrality.

Still – terrified at the prospect of a successful republic organized by freed African slaves – Jefferson took no action to block Napoleon’s thrust into the New World.

In 1802, a French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure.

L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

Napoleon, however, broke his word. Jealous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

Foiled Plans

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.

Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign.

The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon – denied his foothold in the New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. Ironically, the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided collaboration with Napoleon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.

But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

The loss of L’Ouverture’s leadership dealt a severe blow to Haiti’s prospects, according to Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

“Had Toussaint lived, it’s very likely that he would have remained in power long enough to put the nation on a firm footing, to establish an order of succession,” Finkelman told me in an interview. “The entire subsequent history of Haiti might have been different.”

Instead, the island nation continued a downward spiral.

In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French and a counterrevolution, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island.

Though the Haitian resistance had blunted Napoleon’s planned penetration of the North American mainland, Jefferson reacted to the shocking bloodshed in Haiti by imposing a stiff economic embargo on the island nation. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

Jefferson’s Blemish

For some scholars, Jefferson’s vengeful policy toward Haiti – like his personal ownership of slaves – represented an ugly blemish on his legacy as a historic advocate of freedom. Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery.

In the 1820s, the former President proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

Jefferson’s deportation scheme never was taken very seriously and American slavery would continue for another four decades until it was ended by the Civil War. The official hostility of the United States toward Haiti extended almost as long, ending in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln finally granted diplomatic recognition.

By then, however, Haiti’s destructive patterns of political violence and economic chaos had been long established – continuing up to the present time. Personal and political connections between Haiti’s light-skinned elite and power centers of Washington also have lasted through today.

Recent Republican administrations have been particularly hostile to the popular will of the impoverished Haitian masses. When leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was twice elected by overwhelming margins, he was ousted both times – first during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and again under President George W. Bush.

Washington’s conventional wisdom on Haiti holds that the country is a hopeless basket case that would best be governed by business-oriented technocrats who would take their marching orders from the United States.

However, the Haitian people have a different perspective. Unlike most Americans who have no idea about their historic debt to Haiti, many Haitians know this history quite well. The bitter memories of Jefferson and Napoleon still feed the distrust that Haitians of all classes feel toward the outside world.

“In Haiti, we became the first black independent country,” Aristide once told me in an interview. “We understand, as we still understand, it wasn’t easy for them – American, French and others – to accept our independence.”

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A FILM REVIEW
FOUR-FIFTHS OF THE WORLD
by Malik Isasis



People of color comprise four-fifths of the world’s population making use of the term minority, spurious. The term minority was created for people of color as a political tool in the big toolbox of white supremacy to reinforce the colonization in the New and Western world. The people of color or humanoids rather, known as the Na’vi, on the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar, comprised of one hundred percent of the humanoid population--just as the Indigenous populations had throughout North and South America before the arrival of European ships.

James Cameron’s Avatar is interesting on many levels because we are trained as consumers of science fiction that alien invasion involves space crafts floating down from space and hovering ominously above cities with technology light years ahead of our own. Often these visitors are hostile with plans of taking earth’s resources, which sometimes include putting humans on the dinner menu. In Avatar, we are the invading aliens from outer space, floating down with mechanized horror with the intention of settlements and the taking of Pandora’s rich resources. Our technology is light years ahead of the people on planet Pandora, which is eagerly, put to use in dominating the Indigenous population. In using their vast technological advantage over the Na’vi, Cameron illustrates the corporate and government collusion in creating the seeds of genocide, and the neo methods of colonization.

Corporate henchman, Parker Selfridge, played by Giovanni Ribisi often uses derogatory adjectives as Blue Monkeys, or Savages to describe the Na’vi. Of course dehumanizing a race of people makes killing them go down a little easier. With flashes of humanity, corporate henchman, Parker, attempts to educate, or “reeducate” as it were, offer medicines and schools, to the Na’vi in exchange for relocating them—more like forced-relocation off their ancestral land, but Parker’s flash of humanity is spoiled in the first place, for he assumes that the Na’vi are less evolved than humans, nothing more than blue primates, this assumption is of course, wrong. Parker is unable to overcome his greed, even when he witnesses the horror show unleashed by an overzealous Colonel Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, whose one-track mind is bent on either destroying, or completely domesticating the Na’vi into submission.

One can’t help but think of current occupations of places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine while watching the film.

Many reviews I’ve read on the film unimaginatively compare the film to Dances with Wolves, a film where Kevin Costner’s character, an American Civil-War era military lieutenant integrates himself into the Sioux nation, an Indigenous tribe in South Dakota, while it is true that the films share common themes, the comparison seems only to criticize Cameron’s writing skills. It’s a cheap shot really; the criticism of the story itself tries to marginalize the film’s message itself. Every story has been told. We can reinvent new ways of telling the same stories, but we will always retell the same story. Cameron shouldn’t be faulted for reimagining colonization of an Indigenous population, which is done in this film to great effect.

Back during the Red Scare between 1917-1920 and again between 1947-1957, at the height of United States hysteria about communism, the government initiated a CO-INTEL program where FBI agents or informants went deep cover as communists’ organizers or members to subvert groups that were thought to be communists, or supporting communists’ activities. By the mid fifties, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been so effective at infiltrating so-called communist groups that there were more FBI agents posing as communists than actual communists. Hoover went on to use it in other movements like the Civil Rights Movement.

The corporate/military entity that has invaded Pandora has itself created a CO-INTEL program called Avatar, whereby humans are genetically match to drive Na’vi bodies. The goal of the Avatar is to integrate into the Na’vi society to gain intelligence and to sabotage.

The Na’vi are people of color, literally, they are a rich electric blue with huge gold eyes, like those of cats. They stand ten feet tall, yet their plight is an allegorical one. The film Avatar is about humanity's relationship with nature (or lack there of), corporate greed, and colonization. All indigenous cultures have been colonized, relocated, killed off by greed of a State and its corporate interests. It is why we currently occupy two countries.

Cameron shows a great deal of respect for the Na'vi people, and it is no accident that Cameron’s ode to African and other indigenous cultures’ from around the world are on display, from rituals, dress, to hairstyles, because it is their story he is telling. Aliens from another planet is just the packaging to make the medicine go down.

I’ve seen the film three times, thus far, and I believe it to be one of the best films of 2009.

Grade: A+

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