Nancy Miller Saunders : Jane Fonda and the 'Home of the Brave'

Jane Fonda at the Oleo Strut GI Coffee House, Killeen, Texas, circa May 1970. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / Space City!
Jane Fonda and the 'home of the brave'

By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011

"I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences." -- Jane Fonda

The same day Obama and the Democrats caved in to Republican Tea Party extremists on the deficit, I learned that the cable channel QVC canceled an appearance by Jane Fonda because of angry calls from extremists objecting to her anti-Vietnam War activities. It has been nearly 40 years since that war ended yet these Swiftboater-types still cling to hatred of her, much of which is based on lies and distortions.

Yes, the picture of her sitting and laughing on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun damned her in many people's eyes. But appearances can be misleading, which they are in this case as she explains in a recent piece, “The Truth About My Trip To Hanoi," posted on her blog.

Although one picture may be worth a thousand words, those words can be misleading as easily as they can be revealing. But rather than risk letting go of their hatred by listening to her explanations of what happened and why she went to North Vietnam, these Swiftboaters have clamped their minds shut around their hatred. One mistake in an otherwise exemplary campaign to stop an increasingly unpopular war and Fonda is condemned forever and always.

We claim in our national anthem that ours is “the home of the brave.” Is it, when our president and Congress knuckle under to extremists' threats to bankrupt the country? Is it, when cable channels let bullies frighten them out of letting a movie star peddle her latest book on an entirely different topic?

Where is the bravery in these cave-ins? Where is the bravery in our docile acceptance of such hateful extremism? We recently saw true bravery in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, where people fed up with corruption nonviolently withstood fierce attacks and toppled Hosnei Mubarak's regime. We are seeing it again in the streets of Syria where people are being gunned down for their nonviolent protests.

Jane Fonda is a brave woman who looked beyond her instinctive feelings that would not let her imagine the United States could ever fight an unjust war. But then she met and listened to active duty GIs and Vietnam veterans. She began to study that war and discovered what it was doing to the men being sent to fight it. She worked to find them help they needed.

When they asked, she spoke for them, using her celebrity to amplify their voices in an effort to get the American people to listen to what they had to say about what was being done in our name and to our sons, brothers, and neighbors. Only with knowledge -- not emotional assumptions, no matter how treasured -- can we correct our mistakes and maybe, just maybe, avoid making them again in the future. But, sadly, we have repeated them in Iraq.

Fonda also campaigned for an organization that was unprecedented in our history: Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Never before had U.S. combat veterans massed together to protest the continuation of the war in which they fought, but Vietnam veterans did just that, beginning in 1968.[1]

Two years later Fonda was working with VVAW and I found myself listening to the war's veterans after VVAW asked a group of us filmmakers to film their first two major demonstrations. They pointed out that they had the message and we had the means to broadcast it.

We put together four film crews to accompany VVAW and document the first demonstration, a RAW March over Labor Day weekend, 1970, from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.[2] (RAW stood for Rapid American Withdrawal from Vietnam.) Those of you old enough to remember that day may know that we risked being busted for crossing a state line to foment a riot, even though starting a riot was definitely not our intention.

Whenever possible VVAW used paradigms from the American Revolution to emphasize their patriotism and dedication to our founding principles. The route they chose was one some of George Washington's troops took to Valley Forge that memorable winter. In towns along the way, the veterans performed guerrilla theater in which they used volunteers acting as Vietnamese civilians to demonstrate their sanctioned brutality during the many search and destroy missions they had been sent on.

Image from the 1972 documentary film, Winter Soldier. Photo from Winterfilm Collective.
We filmmakers were with VVAW the entire weekend, even camping on the ground next to the veterans' encampment all three nights. We interviewed them, waded into the middle of their guerrilla theater to film it, and watched with growing admiration as they resisted provocation after provocation. They knew what violence is like and the damage it can do. They did not want to yield to it here at home.

At Valley Forge on Labor Day, VVAW staged a rally that began with more than 200 veterans making a moving entrance. Fonda was one of the speakers, again using her celebrity to amplify what the veterans had to tell their fellow citizens. She then left on a nationwide tour of campuses, introducing veterans to VVAW and recruiting volunteers for the next major action.

That second action was the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) in Detroit, Michigan, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, when more than 100 Vietnam veterans gave “straightforward testimony -- direct testimony -- about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy.”[3]

Contrary to extremists' accusations, VVAW carefully vetted the men it let testify. All had to have their discharge papers and IDs with them. Their testimony was checked against what other veterans knew, against documented evidence and whatever else the organizers could lay their hands on. We filmed the entire three days of testimony as well as related events and interviews with men who testified. Fonda financed us and attended the investigation, though she did not speak at it.[4]

The memories I brought away from the WSI are of haunted eyes of old men who had seen too much grief in already long lives -- as they looked at me from youthful faces. The contrast was proof of their stories. I remember seeing tough, war-hardened men break down and weep. I remember them hugging each other for mutual support. I remember listening to gut-wrenching testimony hour after hour for the full three days.

And I remember a love that spread from the veterans to include all of us who took the time to listen, to really listen, to what they had to say. This was a love far more powerful than any romantic love. It was the love of shared commitment.

Working on those two films with VVAW changed my life, much as I imagine listening to GIs and veterans changed Fonda's. Neither of us had to do what we did, but our hearts and souls had been touched. We knew, as few civilians did, why the war had to be ended. Its destruction had come home in the bodies and minds of those sent to fight it. Sadly there are people still trapped with the hatred necessary for war, necessary to make rational human beings kill other human beings.

I was so moved that I vowed to write the truths I learned about the war, about our national policy, and about the terrible toll it had taken on its veterans, and about the Nixon administration's efforts to silence and discredit VVAW. A number of veterans entrusted their stories to me to tell, much as others had trusted Fonda to speak for them.

In far subtler ways than the blatant lies and hatred used to vilify Fonda, I was hounded, intimidated, pressured, and threatened -- in attempts to make me shut up. The pressure was subtle, and friends to whom I turned for help told me to “stop being so paranoid” -- but some of the veterans stood by me. The first two people not directly involved with VVAW to believe me both had connections in the CIA, which suggests that I was not being paranoid. At times I was so terrified that I did stop... for a while.

The cumulative result of this harassment is that it took me nearly 40 years to finally keep my vow. Unable to find a publisher brave enough to work with me, I had to self-publish Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers.[5] All that interference would make another good book.

In a second book I would include the lessons I learned from the veterans about overcoming one's fears, about reaching down inside oneself to find the courage needed to continue, about the value of humor and laughter. And I would write about a man I met, Budd Saunders, a combat veteran who believed me -- although he was not a VVAW member or even a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Budd protected me, loved me, married me, and encouraged me to finish Combat by Trial. On our living room wall is a photograph of two of the veterans who most influenced me during those difficult years. One of them, Scott Camil, was hounded far worse than I was. He was framed several times, once for a capital offense (kidnapping), and he was shot in the back (the bullet barely missing his heart) by DEA agents when he refused to let them set him up on a drug deal.

Underneath their photograph I have pasted a quote from Scott: “If you let them demoralize you, then they're effective. If you don't, they aren't. That's up to you, not them.”

If enough of us keep such thoughts in mind, instead of clinging to our fears and wishful beliefs, we can rebuild our “home of the brave.” But it will take all of us finding the strength and courage that dwells within each of us to speak out against lies, distortions, and intimidation; to stand up to the corporate bosses who would squeeze us dry for their profit. And, above all, to stop letting hatred destroy us personally and as a nation.

References:

[1] Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have joined together in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).
[2] Different Sons , Bowling Green Films, New York, NY.
[3] Excerpt from the transcript of the opening statement to the Winter Soldier Investigation, January 31, 1971.
[4] Winter Soldier, Winterfilm, New York, NY; reissued by Millarium Zero, Harrington Park, NJ.
[5] Nancy Miller Saunders, Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers, iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2008.

[Nancy Miller Saunders was a member of Winterfilm Collective which documented activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She is the author of Combat by Trial and is a freelance writer living in the Arkansas Ozarks with her husband Budd Saunders.]

Also see:

• BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard: The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

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VERSE / Felix Shafer : hey, marilyn

hey, marilyn


From august
through Black august
the drum beat us
all black and blue
and back again
where we live
inside shadows
with you

*

Here on the sad
fuming planet
comes a laughing ghost
beloved fugitive
our first anniversary
spun from these burning strands
our sensitive memory
of the afterlife without you
oh marilyn
a toast to your year
a salute to our tears
for the shadow of the panthers
cetewayo, shasha
smitty, dc and g (eronimo)*
now passing by

*

Here in my heart
a branch of middle summer
intermingles the past
with life's juggly light
flowing like fire
over the river wide
your red kite
tangled, unescaped
high among
the maple trees

We are your family
the red blood cells
in & out of prison cells
the red resistance cells
grouped by transience
side by side
overcoming
great misfortune
in the lonely outside

*

Last night I dreamed
of walking down storied halls
a familiar house
after the typhoon
people known by their resemblances
returned, some drained of smiles
some doing yoga
some replacing mislayed objects
overcome in bedrooms
A daring girl led me closer to the last window
beyond where I can see
There where the backyard
ought to be
was the outdoor visiting patio
of FCI Dublin

*

We come to recollect your absence
with ourselves
to feel your palm
resting on each hand
To receive your
loving encouragment
and your example:
That to live we must risk ourselves
for the uncertain future
with dignity

*

Marilyn because
you were charming
and unb0wed
because you had
miles of style and acres of smiles
because you were a generous
citizen of earth
sister and god mother
I am throwing open the door
to release the bars
to forget the cancer and the tears
so that I can see
your shining face

*

When it's quiet
when i lay deep down to sleep
i whisper kindness and
when I rise up
i sing of how
you wanted us to be happy and strong
when we were with you

Now a year after you have gone
I will We will


felix shafer 8.3.11

* Michael Cetewayo Tabor, Henry ShaSha Brown, Marc Smitty Smith, Don Cox and geronimo ji Jaga pratt are freedom fighters associated with the Black Panther Party & some with the Black Liberation Army who passed in the year since Marilyn died


Marilyn Buck -- political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer -- was paroled last August after spending 30 years in federal prisons. But, after only 20 days of freedom, on August 3, 2010, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com. Read Felix Shafer's three-part Rag Blog series, "Mourning for Marilyn Buck."





Why We Sing


By Mario Benedetti

If every hour comes with its death

if time is a den of thieves

the wind is no longer a good

and life is nothing more than a moving target
you might ask, why do we sing?
if our bravos are left without support

our homeland dies from sorrow

and the heart of man is smashed to pieces

even before the shame explodes
you might ask, why do we sing?

if we’re as far away as the horizon

and if over there were left the trees and the sky

if every night is always some sort of absence

and if every waking is a missed encounter
you might ask, why do we sing?
We sing because the river is calling

and when the river calls, the river calls

we sing because cruelty has no name

and destiny does have a name

we sing because the child and because all

and because someday and because the people

we sing because the survivors

and our dead want us to sing
we sing because to shout is not enough

and the crying and the cursing is not enough

we sing because we believe in people

and because we will defeat failure
we sing because the sun recognizes us

and because the fields smell of spring

and because in this stalk in that fruit

every question has its answer
we sing because it rains over the furrows

and we are the militants of life

and because we neither want nor can

allow the song to be turned to ashes.


Mario Benedetti (Sept. 14, 1920 - May 17, 2009) a Uruguayan poet, journalist, and novelist, was considered one of Latin America's most significant authors. Active in radical movements, he went into exile in 1973 when the military, backed by the U.S. CIA, took power. For 10 years, Benedetti lived in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and post-Franco Spain. Mario Benedetti returned to Uruguay in 1983, yet lived for long periods in Madrid, Spain. Exile marked his life profoundly and one of his most important works is El Desexilio y Otras Conjeturas (Dis-exile And Other Conjectures, 1984). Marilyn Buck, who wrote about the internal exile of imprisonment, considered Mario Benedetti one of her favorite writers.

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Carl Davidson : Winter of Our Discontent?

Summer of our discontent: Buildings set on fire in Tottenham, a poor neighborhood in north London. Photo from Politicol News.
Son of 'Shock Doctrine':
The approaching winter of our discontent

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011

Watching the rebellions of the young and poor continue in London and now spread to other industrial centers in the UK raises an interesting question: Will the Arab spring and the European summer lead to a fall and winter of discontent here in the USA?

All the makings for it are there. We have impoverished communities of the unemployed where there are huge numbers of young people who have never had a regular job of any sort. Now that any form of taxing the rich for funding a jobs program like that proposed by Rep. John Conyers' HR 870 has been declared "off the table," it doesn't appear likely to change, either.

Add to that the GOP-led "Shock Doctrine" (with an assist from the White House) of creating a neoliberal deficit hoax to take from the working class and give to Wall Street, and you spread deeper misery across all of Main Street.

Now the AFL-CIO, thank goodness, is calling for a new round of mass actions against austerity and in defense of the tattered safety net. Add to that the October2011.org project, where the peace and justice movement is planning to camp out in downtown DC's Freedom Plaza until all the troops are brought home from the wars.

It's a perfect storm shaping up. Hopefully, many of our young unemployed and underemployed will be drawn to them. But any police outrage could set off a chain reaction -- we've seen this many times in our history.

We have a few decent politicians facing up to the problem, like the 80 votes of the Congressional Progressive Caucus behind the People's Budget. But our top political class has declared their efforts "off the table," too.

In brief, they're telling us our views don't count and we have nowhere to go.

That's what the bigwigs in London thought, too. Now they're all in a tizzy about riots and violence. In contrast, in one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Of course, many small shops and working-class homes, unfortunately, are being harmed in the UK events. Street heat is best when the target is narrowed on the upper class, and you keep the moral high ground. That way you can draw even more millions into relatively peaceful assembly with powerful and lasting implications. But when long-ignored social dynamite explodes, things don't always work out that way, with the well-controlled niceties of a tea party, no pun intended.

It is right to rebel against outrages and unjust conditions imposed from above. The "Shock Doctrine" is a two-way street, and once it erupts, more than you might think will know which side of the barricades to gather on.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age. He serves as webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net and Beaver County Blue. This article was first published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Sometimes We Have to Sing

The banks are made of marble:
Sometimes we have to sing

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / August 10, 2011

Fred was dating a young woman who gave him the two Weavers Carnegie Hall albums for Chanukah in the winter, 1958. He brought the albums over to my house so I could listen. He never got them back.

I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard those albums. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

From time to time I reminisce about all this as I still listen to the music that makes me mad, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to and even give myself, on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization, and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home.

The deficit battle, which is a farce except for the pain the outcome will cause working people, reminded me of the Weavers blasting out “The Banks Are Made of Marble.” They sang of travels around the country seeing all the suffering that the capitalist system was causing; “the weary farmer,” the idle seaman, the miner scrubbing coal dust from off his back, “heard the children cryin” as they froze in their shacks, and the suffering of workers everywhere.

Why does the song suggest there is so much suffering all across America? The answer is so simple:

...the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

The song, written by Les Rice in 1948 said the antidote to this situation was workers getting together and together making a stand. He predicted that the result would be a good one:

Then we’d own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we’d share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for

I also was thinking about an old Robin Hood song written by Woody Guthrie in the 1930s about an Oklahoma legend, Pretty Boy Floyd. According to Woody’s rendition, Pretty Boy Floyd got into a fight with a deputy sheriff and killed him. Floyd was forced to flee and allegedly took up a life of crime. At least authorities and journalists blamed Floyd for every robbery or killing that occurred in the state of Oklahoma. “Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.”

But in true Robin Hood fashion Pretty Boy Floyd stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Floyd, the outlaw, paid the mortgage for a starving farmer. Another time when Floyd begged for and received a meal in a rural household, he placed a thousand dollar bill under his napkin when he finished dinner. One Christmas Day Floyd left a carload of groceries for starving families on relief in Oklahoma City.

And in these days of massive unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, criminal wealth, and staggering poverty, through the voice of Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie tells the wrenching story of capitalism that today is not too much different from during his time.

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]



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Bob Feldman : The Hidden History of Texas

Map of the State of Coahuila and Texas, 1836. Image from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 1: The pre-1821 years

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 10, 2011

[This is the first installment of Bob Feldman's new Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Since 1965 at least three high-profile Texas politicians -- former U.S. Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, former U.S. Rep. George H. W. Bush and former Texas Gov. George W. Bush -- have used their decision-making power in the White House as U.S. presidents to involve the United States in major morally disastrous and economically wasteful military interventions overseas.

The general populace knows a lot about Texas politics and history, yet most people in the United States who didn’t grow up in Texas and who never have lived in Texas probably know very little about the hidden history of Texas.

Prior to 1821, for example, people of Jewish religious background who wanted to openly practice Judaism were, at least in theory, not allowed to become residents of Texas because the Spanish authorities in Texas required people who lived in Texas to worship openly only as Catholics.

And, even today, only about 131,000 of the over 25.1 million people who live in Texas appear to be of Jewish background, although the land area of Texas is a lot larger than the land area of Manhattan Island -- where about 243,000 of the 1.6 million residents are of Jewish background.

But long before white Europeans of Christian religious background arrived and explored Texas in the 1500s, Native American people had been living in the South Plains in what is now Texas for over 10,000 years.

The first permanent settlement of white Europeans in Texas didn’t happen until 1682, when Spanish-speaking people established a settlement a few miles east of what is now El Paso. And over 80 years later, in the 1760s, there were still only 1,000 Spanish-speaking settlers in San Antonio and only 500 Spanish-speaking settlers in East Texas.

Even in the late 1770s, fewer than 4,000 Spanish-speaking settlers of European descent actually lived in what is now Texas.

Of the over 3,000 people who lived in these settlements in 1777, around 50 percent were born in Spain, 25 percent were either mestizo or mulatto, and 25 percent were Native American. But, at the same time, about 20,000 Native Americans still lived in Texas in areas outside the Spanish-speaking settlements at the end of the 1770s. In addition, 20 known slaves of African-American descent also lived in Texas in the 1770s.

As late as 1792, Texas still had only about 3,169 Spanish-speaking residents, including 34 blacks and 414 mulattos of African-American descent. So, not surprisingly, the majority of people who lived throughout all areas of Texas in 1799 were still Native American.

When Texas was part of the New Spain colony in North America under Spanish rule during the late 18th century, the legal status of women who owned property in Texas was actually better than it had been when the 13 U.S. colonies on North America’s East Coast were ruled by the UK prior to 1776.

According to the Spanish laws that governed Texas in the 1770s, for example, unmarried women in Texas who owned property retained title to their own property after marriage; and they also shared equally in the ownership of any property they and their husbands acquired after marrying. In addition, the husband of a woman in Texas in the 1770s could not, under Spanish law, sell the married couple’s community property without the consent of his wife.

In August 1813, an attempt was made by some of the fewer than 4,000 Spanish-speaking residents of Texas to establish a Texas republic that would no longer be either ruled by a royalist viceroy who represented the monarchical Spanish government or be part of New Spain.

But after a leader of the Spanish-speaking rebels named Gutierrez declared Texas independent from Spain on Aug. 6, 1813, the new Texas Republic’s Army of North Mexico (which numbered 1,400 men), led by Jose Alverez de Toledo, was defeated at the Battle of Medina (in what is now the area around San Antonio) on Aug. 18, 1813, by a Spanish royalist force of 2,000, led by Joaquin de Arrendo.

Some 1,000 of the combatants involved in the Battle of Medina were killed during the battle; and the royalist troops of Arrendo then “executed 327 soldiers from the republican army who surrendered or were captured after the battle,” according to University of North Texas Professor of History Randoph Campbell’s 2003 book Gone To Texas: A History of the Lone Star State.

In addition, “in San Antonio 40 men suspected of supporting Gutierrez and/or Toledo paid with their lives,” “eight women and children from their families died of suffocation while packed into prison compounds,” and a detachment of Arrendo’s Spanish royalist army “advanced towards Nacogdoches, executing 71 more accused rebels along the way,” according to the same book.

Six years later, in the summer of 1819, Texas was invaded by an army of about 300 Anglo-American men, led by an Anglo-American merchant named James Long -- who also tried to set up an independent Texas republic that would no longer be ruled by Spain or be part of New Spain.

But by the fall of 1819, royalist Spanish troops had driven Long’s army of Anglo-American invaders back across the East Texas border and back into U.S. territory; and after Long led a second unsuccessful invasion of Texas by armed Anglo men two years later, he was imprisoned and then killed by local Spanish-speaking Texas authorities, after the armed Anglo invaders were again defeated by Spanish-speaking troops in the late summer of 1821.

Shortly before Long’s second invasion of Texas was beaten back, an alliance between the white Creole elite landowners in New Spain (who had been born in New Spain and, thus -- under Spanish rule -- did not enjoy the same political and economic rights as Spanish-born residents of New Spain), New Spain’s clerical leaders and Spanish royalist army general Agustin de Iturbide was successful in pressuring the royalist viceroy to sign the Aug. 24, 1821 Treaty of Cordoba.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Cordoba, New Spain ceased to exist as a political entity and the independent Empire of Mexico was established (although the Spanish government in Madrid later declared the Treaty of Cordoba null and void in February 1822, unsuccessfully attempted to reconquer its former Mexican colony in 1829, and did not formally recognize the independence of Mexico until 1839).

So after Aug. 24, 1821, Texas would become part of the newly independent Empire of Mexico. And after the white Creole military commander of Vera Cruz, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, led a white Creole landowning elite-supported Mexican Army revolt in December 1822 which set up a federal republican form of government in Mexico in 1823, Texas now became a part of the Republic of Mexico’s state of Coahuila y Texas in 1824.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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David P. Hamilton : France is on Vacation

Image from Gem's World Postcards.
Letters from France VII:
En vacances payé...
Paid vacations and how we live

The value placed on time off from work holds leisure, family, and the pursuit of happiness more important than the pursuit of profits.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog /August 9, 2011

[This is the seventh in a series of dispatches from France by The Rag Blog's David P. Hamilton.]

PARIS -- It’s August and France is on vacation. If you are an American tourist visiting Paris for the first time this month, you will find it strange that most restaurants that are not part of international chains are closed for the month. That famous boulangerie that makes award-winning baquettes you read about in the guide book will be closed too. If you’re renting a short term apartment, don’t dream of calling a plumber.

Strange too will be how few Parisians are in evidence. The metro isn’t crowded. It seems they have abandoned the place to the tourists. Those Parisians that remain may be more surly than usual. They’re resentful for having to work in August providing services to vacationing Americans while all their friends are at the beach.

By one measure, there are two types of French: juilletistes and aoutiens (those who take their extended summer vacation in July and those who take it in August). Regardless, the mass exodus from the workplace to vacation destinations is annual, sudden, and on a vast scale.

Before the development of the network of modern super highways, major roads leading south out of Paris were made one-way for 24 hours on August 1st. Now the vacation time is somewhat staggered, but literally hundreds of thousands of Parisians leave every year at virtually the same time, most headed south. The population center of the whole country shifts several kilometers southward within a matter of hours. If you awoke from a hundred-year sleep, you would think the Prussians were advancing on Paris once again.

To some degree this concentration of vacation is compulsory. Employers are required by law to grant an extended paid leave between May and October. School vacation is in July and August. Many businesses just close down for the month.

This lull in activity is reflected in measures of the French economy. There is an annual third quarter contraction. Manufacturing can be off as much as 25% for the month. But France is the world’s number one tourist destination and the French love to travel within their own country more than any other, so facilities specifically related to tourism will be bustling. It’s high season and that especially refers to prices, which throughout the country become those that Parisians are already accustomed to paying.

To Americans it seems quite phenomenal that a major country can run its affairs in this way. Much of France literally shuts down for the month. Even political campaigns pack it up and go to the beach. Sègoléne Royale, attempting to revive her faltering campaign for the Parti Socialiste nomination for president in October, announced she would reduce her vacation to nine days, clearly a sacrifice of significant proportions meant to signal her extreme seriousness.

The value placed on time off from work holds leisure, family, and the pursuit of happiness more important than the pursuit of profits.

The World Tourism Organization studied “the average number of paid vacation days per year employees receive” in nine developed countries. France ranked second with 37 days a year, behind Italy’s 42. The U.S. was a very distant last, trailing eighth place Japan by 12 days. According to this study, the typical U.S. worker gets only 13 paid vacation days a year, IF they meet certain criteria, such as having a decade of seniority.

Nationmaster.com says workers in France get “seven weeks, the most significant vacation time of any country in the world," plus public holidays, while paid vacations for U.S. workers are “not required, but typically [are] 10 working days with eight national holidays.”

CNN Money says “typical practice among large U.S. companies” is that workers with 10 years seniority get an average of 15 days paid vacation and 10 paid public holidays a year. All French workers get at least 30 and 10 by legal right regardless of their tenure on the job.

CNN also points out that “unlike in most other countries (including all the EU), there is no U.S. federal law mandating that companies pay employees for time off or that they grant them a minimum amount of vacation days unpaid.” Indeed, according the Center for Economic Policy and Research, the U.S. is “the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.”

Most U.S. workers actually get much less than the “typical” cited above. When CNN considered “companies of all sizes and workers of all tenures," the number of paid vacation days and public holidays for U.S. workers dropped to nine and six. A quarter of U.S. workers get no paid vacation time at all.

Another way to look at this is that, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2008 the average U.S. worker worked 1,792 hours a year compared to 1,560 hours a year for the worker in France. That’s 29 more eight-hour days a year for the U.S. worker, more than a month of additional work.

Some results attributed in part to this extended time off are that productivity is higher in France than in the U.S., French workers are paid better for the time they work, and the pay scale is more equitable. The minimum wage in France is about $13 an hour, compared to $7.25 in the U.S. and unions are much stronger there, especially in the public sector. The official poverty rate in France is the seventh lowest among 152 nations listed and less than half the poverty rate in the U.S., according to the 2009 CIA World Factbook.

Paid vacations are not the only time off from work the French enjoy. A new mother gets 16 to 26 weeks of maternity leave at full pay, depending on how many children she has. She can get up to a year off with her employment guaranteed. Fathers get two weeks off paid paternity leave and can share up to two years of unpaid time off with the mother, their employments guaranteed.

Families also get approximately 2,000 euros ($2,900) when they have a child followed by payments of around 100 euros ($145) a month per child until the child is 20 years old. If you are adopting a child, you get more. The family of a child with disabilities gets much more. Add to this the fact that with a note from a doctor sick leaves are unlimited and the French work week is only 35 hours long.

American workers have for decades been taught to internalize values that make the interests of their employer paramount. Depending on which study you read, in 2007 between one third and half of employed U.S. adults don’t use all the vacation time they have coming to them. 39% of U.S. men and 30% of women feel guilty about taking time off from work. 25% of U.S. workers and 33% of managers have bosses who expect them to be on-call while on vacation.

And the situation is getting worse. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American man today works 100 more hours a year than he did in the 1970s, the average woman 200 hours more. With high unemployment, job insecurity, weak unions, and poor benefits for the unemployed, the worker’s forced subservience to the needs and values of the employer is amplified.

The typical American sleeps one to two hours a night less than his or her parents did. Those extra work hours come at the expense of rest and time spent with family and friends, and in creative or leisure activities. They come with a price measured in anxiety, stress, dissatisfaction, depression, and poor health.

According to Cornell economist Robert Frank, in the U.S. the incentives are set up to systematically underemphasize leisure and overemphasize consumption. He who dies with the most toys wins. We must consume on a level that keeps us abreast or ahead of our peers and on a level that keeps the profits of the capitalists growing.

Frank argues that this value reflects a classic failure of collective action. An individual would be worse off if he or she were to unilaterally opt out of the “positional competition." But we would all be better off if we decided collectively to ratchet down the economic one-upmanship of consumerism and instead devote a bit more time and resources to the leisure time we claim to desire.

However, collective action by workers is anathema in the U.S. capitalist hegemony. Our rulers prefer a society of rugged individualists, standing tall in the sunset puffing Marlboros beside their new 4X4 super heavy duty pickup truck.

Not surprisingly, France’s policy on paid vacations was initiated by the Popular Front government composed of Socialists and Communists soon after they took power in the election of June 1936. The right to an extended paid vacation was part of the Matignon Agreements that also included winning the 40-hour work week, the right to join a union, bargain collectively, and strike, the removal of all obstacles to union organization, and a 7-12% pay increase for all workers.

These concessions were won in one afternoon meeting that included representatives of unions, employers, and the government. The Popular Front had just won the election to control the National Assembly, Leon Blum had become the first Socialist (and Jewish) prime minister, and a million French workers were honoring a general strike that had swept France after the Popular Front electoral victory. Hundreds of factories had been occupied by their workers to prevent lockouts.

Under those circumstances, the capitalists readily capitulated on all points. Given France’s long history of multiple popular insurrections, they had little choice. Every expansion of these benefits and defense of them since 1936 has come about as a result of initiatives from the organized and militant left.

Extended vacations are now considered a tradition and a necessity by the French, a part of their collective consciousness for the entire year. Beginning in the spring, conversation turns to vacation plans. The experience itself builds family bonds and gives life variety and perspective.

In the fall, you share memories of last summer. The cold, gray winter is warmed by dreams of where you might go when summer vacation comes again. A co-worker not taking a vacation is pitied. The most vivid childhood memories are those of long family vacations. Paid time off and travel are now firmly ingrained elements of modern French culture.

Through generations of collective struggle they have won that benefit in order to pursue their muse or their decadence, but regardless, to better define their own existence. Although otherwise generally positive, my own memories of family vacations in France include watching a relative spend hours running up over $3,000 in phone bills from a Paris hotel room while trying to keep up with business responsibilities back in the USA.

It is said that Americans live to work and the French work to live. That truism reflects the stage of the class struggle in our collective mentalities.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Tony Platt : Prison Strike at Pelican Bay

Image from Los Angeles Times.
The shame of California:
Prison strike at Pelican Bay

This strike has drawn worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

BIG LAGOON, California -- I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of Northwest California, while 60 miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks.

I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top 20 “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Pelican Bay was California’s first supermax prison, built in 1989 on 275 acres of clear-cut forest near Crescent City. With an annual budget of $180 million, it has a payroll of more than 1,600 guards and service workers.

The prison was built for 2,280 prisoners, but its current census is close to 3,500, almost half of whom are housed in a prison within the prison, the SHU, an X-shaped cluster of brutalist concrete buildings, surrounded by guard towers, electronic fencing, and barren ground.

Here, more than a thousand men, whose families live hundreds of miles away, are imprisoned 23 hours a day in 8 x 10 foot, windowless, constantly lit cells, subject to sensory deprivation and social isolation, sometimes for years.

The hunger strike at Pelican Bay, which lasted from July 1st to July 22nd, was led by long-term prisoners in the SHU. It is estimated that on any given day in the United States, at least 25,000 prisoners are held in isolation, and perhaps as many as another 80,000 are kept in segregation units, typically in isolation. Writing in The New Yorker (“Hellhole,” 30 March 2009), Atul Gawande calls this practice “legalized torture,” resulting in long-term physical and mental damage to many of its victims.

Pelican Bay, like many of California’s prisons, was built on formerly agricultural land in a region seeking to resuscitate its depressed economy. The hardscrabble Crescent City, briefly a boomtown during the Gold Rush and once a beneficiary of the lumber and commercial fishing industries, has one of the state’s highest unemployment rates and among the most stingy public services.

When the state borrowed from public funds to build the high security prison at a cost of $277.5 million to taxpayers, it was supposed to boost the local economy. But the benefits primarily went to local landowners, and construction and utility companies; to national chains like K-Mart, Ace Hardware, and Safeway; and to the politically powerful guards’ union. Meanwhile, the county’s unemployment rate is almost 14 percent and one out of three people live in hand-to-mouth poverty.

Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Photo by Adam Tanner / Reuters.
The city’s misery is compounded by its record rainfall and susceptibility to tsunamis. Unless work or family requires you to stay in Crescent City, this is a place to drive through on the way to somewhere else. No wonder that prisoners comprise about 46 percent of the city’s 7,600 population. Small towns that hoped for a bonanza by inviting prison construction, says Ruth Gilmore in Golden Gulag, are victims of a boondoggle.

California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits, and investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only 12 prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global leader in prison construction. Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons, and minimum-security camps stretch across 900 miles of the fifth largest economy in the world.

In 1982, the prison system cost taxpayers 2 percent of the General Fund; by 2006, it cost almost 8 percent. In 2008, more than one out of six state workers in California was employed by the Department of Corrections, almost three times as many as were employed in Health and Human Services.

In the last decade, “corrections” (with 61,000 employees) has increased its share of state workers, passing the state university system (46,000), second only to the University of California (86,000). Meanwhile, prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher education.

Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, like Crescent City, making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed or the working poor, victimized by drastic changes in California’s economy over the last 20 years. The prison system is the shame of California, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide, and the gutting of social programs.

Prisons function as an unemployment program comparable to early capitalist workhouses, except they’ve become warehouses for unused labor rather than sites of production. When prisoners return to their communities, observes Gilmore, the cycle is repeated: they are locked out of “education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday life. In such inhospitable places, everybody isolates.”

On July 1st, a small group of prisoners in Pelican Bay’s SHU, calling themselves the Short Corridor Collective, initiated a hunger strike, calling for the abolition of long-term solitary confinement, improvement in programs for SHU prisoners, and an end to various abusive administrative procedures.

Unlike a similar action by prisoners in 2002, this strike drew the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the state. Moreover, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity was so successful in getting out information about the strike that European human rights organizations urged the Governor to respond to prisoners’ demands and The New York Times carried an Op Ed condemning the “bestial treatment” of prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison (Colin Dayan, “Barbarous Confinement,” 17 July 2011).

During the strike, according to the Short Corridor Collective, at least 17 strikers, including three leaders, were transferred to another prison for medical treatment. The Collective ended the action on July 22nd after gaining the right to wear cold weather caps, to have calendars in their cells, and to have access to educational programs in the SHU.

Though these concessions by prison authorities are modest, we should not underestimate the larger significance of the strike. It draws worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens; it forces the government of California to sit down, face-to-face, and negotiate with people who have been demonized as semi-human beasts; and it raises the possibility of once again incorporating prisoners into a larger struggle for social justice.

The civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s regarded prisoners as an important constituency, forging intimate ties between community and prison. It fought for massive decarceration, abolition of capital punishment, and ending the racial double standard of arrest and incarceration.

It will take a similar movement today to expose the tragedy of American injustice and make prisoners human again. Thanks to the Short Corridor Collective and thousands of activist prisoners, we now have an opportunity to renew the struggle.

For more information about the strike at Pelican Bay and its consequences, go to Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

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Jordan Flaherty : Historic NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina Cops Run Amuck

Rev. Raymond Brown pumps his fist outside New Orleans Federal Court Friday in celebration of conviction of cops involved in the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge shootings. Photo by Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune
From heroes to villains:
NOPD verdict reveals post-Katrina
history of police violence, cover-up

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In an historic verdict with national implications, five New Orleans police officers were convicted on Friday of civil rights violations for killing unarmed African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and could face life in prison when sentenced later this year. The case, involving a grisly encounter on the Danziger Bridge, was the most high profile of a number of prosecutions that seek to hold police accountable for violence in the storm’s wake.

The officers’ conviction on all 25 counts (on two counts, the jury found the men guilty but with partial disagreements on the nature of the crime, which could slightly affect sentencing) comes nearly six years after the city was devastated by floodwaters and government inaction. The verdict helps rewrite the history of what happened in the chaotic days after the levees broke. And the story of how these convictions happened is important for anyone around the U.S. seeking to combat law enforcement violence.

The results of this trial also have national implications for those seeking federal support in challenges to police abuses in other cities. New Orleans is one of four major cities in which the Department of Justice has stepped in to look at police departments. Any success here has far-reaching implications for federal investigations in Denver, Seattle, Newark, and other cities.

The Danziger Bridge case begins with Hurricane Katrina. As images of desperate survivors played on television, people around the world felt sympathy for people waiting for rescue after the storm. But then images of families trapped on rooftops were replaced by stories of armed gangs and criminals roaming the streets.

News reports famously described white people as “finding” food while depicting black people as “looting.” Then-Chief of Police Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey that “little babies (are) getting raped” in the Superdome. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced she had sent in troops with orders to shoot to kill, and the second in charge of the police department reportedly told officers to fire at will on looters.

Evidence suggests that the NOPD acted on these instructions. On Sept. 2, just days after the storm, a black man named Henry Glover was shot by a police sniper as he walked through a parking lot. When a good Samaritan tried to help Glover get medical help, he was beaten by officers, who burned Glover’s body and left it behind a levee.

The next day, a 45-year-old named Danny Brumfield, Sr., was killed by officers in front of scores of witnesses outside the New Orleans convention center when he ran after a police car to demand that they stop and provide aid.

The following morning, two families were crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, which connects Gentilly and New Orleans East, two mostly middle-to-upper-class African American neighborhoods. Without warning, a Budget rental truck carrying police officers arrived and cops jumped out. The officers did not identify themselves, and began firing before their vehicle had even stopped.

Officers had heard a radio call about shootings in the area, and according to prosecutors, they were seeking revenge. James Brisette, a 17-year-old called studious and nerdy by his friends, was shot nearly a dozen times and died at the scene. Many of the bullets hit him as he lay on the ground bleeding.

Four other people were wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, a 38-year-old mother who had her arm shot off of her body, and her 17-year old daughter Lesha, who was shot while crawling on top of her mother’s body, trying to shield her from bullets. Lesha’s cousin Jose was shot point-blank in the stomach and nearly died. He needed a colostomy bag for years afterwards.

Lance Madison, left, whose brother, Ronald, was shot and killed on the Danziger bridge by New Orleans Police Sept. 5, 2005, gets a hug from prosecutor Cindy Chung outside the Federal Court building Friday. Lead prosecutor Barbara "Bobbi" Bernstein is on the right. Photo by Matthew Hinton / The Times-Picayune.
Further up the bridge, officers chased down Ronald Madison, a mentally-challenged man, who was traveling with his brother Lance. Ronald was shot in the back by one officer and then stomped and kicked to death by another. Lance was arrested and charged with firing at officers, and spent weeks behind bars.

At the time, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that officers “sent up a cheer” when word came over police radios that suspects had been shot and killed.

A cursory investigation by the NOPD justified the shooting, and it appeared that the matter was closed. In fact, for years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.

Eddie Jordan, the city’s first black district attorney, pursued charges against the officers in late 2006. When the cops went to turn themselves in, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of officers who cheered for them and called them heroes. Before the case could make it to trial, it was dismissed by a judge with close ties to the defense lawyers, and soon after that Jordan was forced to resign.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s charges, the story of police violence after Katrina remained untold. Jordan believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up.

"They were looking for heroes,” he says.

They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police; they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.

Other elected officials, like the city coroner, went along with the police version of events. For example, the coroner’s office never flagged Henry Glover’s body, found burned in a car, as a potential homicide.

But the Madisons, the Bartholomews, and the Glovers, along with family members of other police violence victims, refused to be silent. They continued to speak out at press conferences, rallies, and directly to reporters. They worked with organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities, which was founded by criminal justice activists in the days after Katrina, and Community United for Change, which was formed in response to police abuses.

Monique Harden, a community activist and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, helped to bring testimony about these issues to the United Nations. Another post-Katrina organization, People's Hurricane Relief Fund, presented the charges to an international tribunal.

Activists worked to not only raise awareness of specific issues of police violence, but to say that these problems are structural and that any solution must get at the root causes.

“This is about an entire system that was completely broken and in crisis,” says former Safe Streets co-director Rosana Cruz.

Everyone’s job in the criminal justice system depends on there being a lot of crime in the city. The district attorney’s office doesn’t work on getting the city safer, they work on getting convictions at any cost. As long as that’s the case, we’re not going to have safety.

Former District Attorney Jordan feels that investigators should pursue charges up to the very top of the department, including Warren Riley, who was promoted to police chief shortly after Hurricane Katrina and served in that role until 2010.

“Riley, by his own admission, never even read the report on Danziger,” Jordan points out. “It’s so outrageous, it’s unspeakable. It’s one of the worst things that anyone can do. It’s hard to understand why he’s not on trial as well.”

“Fish starts rotting at the head,” adds Jordan. “This was all done in the backdrop of police opposition at the very top. It’s not surprising that there was a cover-up. You just have to wonder how far that cover-up went.”

In 2008, journalist A.C. Thompson did what New Orleans media had failed to do, and seriously investigated the accusations of police violence. His reporting, published on ProPublica and in The Nation, spelled out the shocking details of Glover’s killing and pointed toward police coordination with white vigilantes in widespread violence. It brought national attention to the stories that had been ignored. Activists took advantage of the exposure and lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus and the Justice Department for an investigation.

Demonstrators protest Danziger Bridge killings in 2010 New Orleans march. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
In early 2009, a newly empowered civil rights division of the Justice Department decided to look into the cases. Federal agents interviewed witnesses who had never been talked to, reconstructed crime scenes, and even confiscated NOPD computers. They found evidence that the Danziger officers had radically rewritten their version of what happened on the bridge that day.

When FBI agents confronted officers involved in the Danziger case, five officers pleaded guilty and agreed to testify about the conspiracy to cover up what happened. They revealed that officers had planted evidence, invented witnesses, arrested innocent people, and held secret meetings where they worked to line up their stories.

Before last week’s verdict, the Justice Department had already won four previous police violence convictions, including of the officers who shot Glover and burned his body, as well as of two officers who killed Raymond Robair, a pre-Katrina case in which officers beat a man to death and claimed (with the support of the city coroner) he had sustained his injuries from falling down. About half a dozen other investigations are ongoing.

The Justice Department is also looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.

The Danziger trial has been the most high-profile aspect of the federal intervention in New Orleans, and this verdict will have far-reaching implications for how the effectiveness of federal intervention is perceived. The convictions and guilty pleas in the case reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy that reaches up to sergeants and lieutenants. Marlon Defillo, the second-in-charge of the NOPD, was recently forced to retire because of his role in helping cover up the Glover killing.

Most important, the verdict has helped shift the narrative of what happened in those days after Katrina.

The defense team for the Danziger officers was steadfast in describing their clients as heroes. Attorney Paul Fleming described the cops as “proactive,” saying, “They go out and get things done. They go out and get the bad guys.”

Police attorneys in the Glover and Danziger trials also sought to use the so-called “Katrina defense,” arguing that the exceptional circumstances following the storm justified extra-legal actions on the part of officers. With these convictions, the juries have definitively refuted this excuse.

In her closing arguments, Bobbi Bernstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, fought back against the claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

Officers went out with a mission to deliver “their own kind of post-apocalyptic justice,” she added. “The law is what it is because this is not a police state.”

In comments immediately after the verdict, family members of those killed on the bridge expressed gratitude for those who had helped them reach this point, but stressed that their pain continued.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict, Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, said that the officers, “took the twinkle out of my eye, the song out of my voice, and blew out my candle,” when they killed her son.

Jacqueline Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, told assembled press, “Ronald Madison brought great love to our family. Shooting him down was like shooting an innocent child.” Commenting on officers who had testified for the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges, she added, “We regret that they did not have the courage and strength to come forward sooner.”

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, but was convicted of leading the conspiracy, could receive a maximum of 120 years. Sentencing is scheduled for December, but will likely be delayed.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times ,Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was first published at ColorLines. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

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FILM / Ed Felien : Harry Potter Through the Eyes of an Afghan Child

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, Part Two.
Harry Potter through the
eyes of an Afghan child

Understanding the lesson of Harry Potter is essential to understanding the cultural values that underpin our need for the vindication of war.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / August 8, 2011

SPOILER ALERT: Read this only if you already know how Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, Part Two and the war in Afghanistan end.

A large part of the charm of Harry Potter is nostalgia for the simple naiveté of childhood. We are willing to believe in supernatural powers because up to the age of four or five we believed we were the center of the universe. We believed we had magical powers. If we didn’t like something we would cry, and Mommy and Daddy would change it.

The pull of this nostalgia in the Harry Potter series is intensified by encapsulating the fantasy in the context of a 1930’s English boarding school. Hogwarts could easily pass for the “playing fields of Eton,” a familiar and archetypical educational experience.

Would any of this make sense to an Afghan child?

Perhaps the reference to the English boarding school might seem confusing, but the magical powers of childhood would seem familiar. But, more than that, the life or death struggle between Harry Potter and Voldemort would seem like current events.

Voldemort (literally, from the French, "theft of death") has achieved a kind of immortality by transferring his soul into material objects called horcruxes. If anything happens to his body, then the material objects into which he has poured his soul can reanimate his corpse.

This must be the way the Afghans see the U.S. occupation of their country. If they defeat U.S. troops at one place, the foreign invader springs up even larger somewhere else. Voldemort has set up a stooge to run Hogwarts in the same way the U.S. has set up a CIA stooge, Karzai, to run Afghanistan.

In the final battle Voldemort sends unmanned magic flying discs to bomb and murder the students and faculty in much the same way the U.S. now sends drones against the Afghan, Pakistan, Yemeni, and Somali populations.

The movie begins with Harry, Ron, and Hermione on a quest to destroy the horcruxes. By using disguises and an invisibility cloak they sneak into Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault at the Wizarding Bank and recover Helga Hufflepuff’s cup. Harry destroys it with the Sword of Godric Gryffindor and then learns another horcrux is hidden in Hogwarts. Ron and Hermione find the Diadem of Ravenclaw and destroy it with the sword.

An Afghan child would immediately recognize and identify with the seemingly impossible pursuit of trying to destroy the material objects that embody the soul of their oppressor. When material objects multiply simply by touching them, how would it be possible to destroy them all?

Yet, they persist. Whether with a Sword of Godric Gryffindor in Harry Potter or an I.E.D. in Afghanistan, they blow up the material objects that have been used as an instrument of their oppression. Their only hope is to exhaust their power and drain their treasury.

By the final battle, there is but one horcrux left to Voldemort, his trained killer python, Nagini. But there is one other horcrux protecting Voldemort of which he is unaware. When he murdered Harry Potter’s parents, he tried unsuccessfully to murder Harry as well, but he only scarred his forehead. In his effort to murder Harry he poured part of his soul into him, and, so, Harry Potter is himself a horcrux for Voldemort. Which means, as long as Harry is alive, Voldemort cannot die. Voldemort does not know this and continues trying to kill him.

After an epic battle that has left many dead and wounded and Hogwarts in ruins reminiscent of the Church of St. Luke in Liverpool after the Blitz in World War II, Voldemort calls for a truce and issues an ultimatum. He will spare the remains of Hogwarts if he can have Harry Potter.

Harry has no choice. The suffering of his friends and the destruction of his school are too much for him, and he alone knows that Voldemort will never die as long as he lives. So he sacrifices himself.

Voldemort issues the killing curse: “Avada Kedavra,” which means instant death for Harry. Harry goes to a limbo-like place that looks like the waiting room in a train station. His deceased headmaster, Dumbledore, is there and explains that Voldemort couldn’t kill him. When he drained the blood out of him he became invulnerable to Voldemort’s curse, and when Voldemort attacked him he drained him of the horcrux that protected Voldemort.

Meanwhile, back at Hogwarts, Voldemort is insisting that all the remaining students and faculty swear allegiance to him. Neville Longbottom tries to rally the students to resist. Voldemort places the Sorting Witch’s hat on Neville’s head and causes it to burst into flames. Neville pulls the Sword of Godric Gryffindor out of the burning hat and slays Nagini, the last remaining horcrux protecting Voldemort.

At this point Harry comes back to life and battles once again with Voldemort. This time they are both mortal, and this time Harry wins and peace is restored.

What would an Afghan child think of this?

Wouldn’t he identify with Harry in his quest to try to destroy the material objects that are destroying his country and killing his friends? Wouldn’t he understand Harry’s sacrifice of himself as the only way to stop the destruction? And wouldn’t the afterlife, the final battle between virtue and evil and the ultimate triumph of goodness seem real to an innocent and religious child?

Understanding the lesson of Harry Potter is essential to understanding the cultural values that underpin our need for the vindication of war and for understanding how every culture uses those values to justify murder and suicide bombers.

Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

-- Dominic Behan

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly. Read more articles by Ed Felien on The Rag Blog]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Beating the Bullies of the Wealthy Class

Schoolyard Bully. Photo by Igor Dutina /New York Times.
Defeating the political and economic
bullies that are destroying America

When Barack Obama was elected president, many of us thought that here, finally was a real live Superman, who would save us from the bullying behavior of the wealthy class.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / August 8, 2011

Let me tell you a fictionalized story about true events in my life.

When I was growing up, there was a disagreeable kid in my neighborhood. I’ll call him Al. As some of us walked to school each day, he would sneak up behind us and grab our lunch, look in it, take what he wanted, and give the sack or lunch box back, leaving us with whatever he didn’t want.

At school recess, Al would often get a kid alone and demand some money for a soft drink or a snack. During lunch, Al would walk by and grab whatever he wanted off another kid’s plate.

He was careful to make sure that teachers monitoring the lunch room were looking the other way. If a kid told a teacher what Al had done, there would be the usual denials from Al, and the teacher might give both kids a warning, and Al would skate by. But any kid who told on Al had better find a new way to walk home from school that day because Al would be looking for the tattletale to rough him up or put him on the ground and bend his arm until he squealed in pain.

Playing with Al was asking for trouble, or at least was no fun. A game of baseball didn’t follow the usual rules. We had to follow Al’s rules, which changed to assure that he would win. If his own rules wouldn’t help him, Al would just lie about whether a ball was foul or a pitch was a strike or how many strikes he had taken when he batted.

Al intimidated, frightened, and dominated the others kids in our neighborhood. Parents were of no help. The few efforts made to talk with Al’s parents did no good, and only made Al madder at the kid who had squealed to his parents. The next day or the next week was a time of torment for the offending kid who had dared to tell his parents about Al’s behavior.

And Al had his group of followers, who were only too glad to do whatever Al asked, and participate in his intimidating the rest of us. What we needed was someone to stand up to Al and his pals, but the usual sources of help -- teachers and parents -- weren’t of much use, even when they tried. Oh, how we wished for Superman to sweep down and take care of Al and his pals. But, of course, Superman was fiction.

Al and his pals were bullies, ruffians, tyrants, and terrorists. The behavior of Al and his pals was not far different from the behavior of the corporate and financial classes and their willing minions and friends on Capitol Hill. When Barack Obama was elected president, many of us thought that here, finally was a real live Superman, who would save us from the bullying behavior of the wealthy class.

For those of us who fought in the civil rights, and women’s, and anti-war, and gay rights, and disability rights movements of the past half century, there was the double pleasure of not only getting someone to right the wrongs we had been suffering, but of having an African-American be that person. What fools we were.

Barack Obama was not a political incarnation of Martin Luther King. He saw and sees the world much differently than King did. King opposed war as a solution to problems. Obama embraced an expansion of the Afghanistan war. King would have abhorred torture and never participated in it. Obama promised to close that torture center called Guantanamo, but he has not done so, and he has opened up new ones in Afghanistan and allowed others to continue with both direct and indirect American involvement, mainly in the Middle East.

King stood with the oppressed, whether they were garbage workers in Memphis, poor whites in Appalachia, Native Americans, or farm workers throughout our country. He never curried favor with the wealthy elites. He had a habit of pointing out the injustices they fomented. Obama has done little of this. King knew that change comes only with conflict. Obama believes that there can be a post-partisan America, which is as foolish a notion as my belief that his administration would usher in an era devoted to the needs of average Americans.

If Obama were to play Superman against the wealthy elite bullies of Wall Street, he would not hire as his advisers some of those same people. He would spend money to reform the oppressive mortgages that are sapping the lifeblood from middle-American families rather than rescue the financial institutions that made those unjustified mortgage loans knowing that they would be bailed out when they failed, as they did spectacularly.

Some of us saw Obama as a modern-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt who would take dramatic steps to put Americans back to work on public works projects much as FDR did through the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. But Obama is no FDR any more than he is an MLK.

It is impossible to imagine that President Obama would tell the American people the truth about the financial sector as FDR did in 1933 when he wrote, “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

Today, economic inequality in this nation is as bad as it’s ever been. The top 20% own 85% of the wealth, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the other 260 million Americans. In fact, the top 1% own 43% of the wealth. And the gap between the top one-tenth of 1% and the rest of us has not been as great since the Great Depression.

Given the naked economic inequality now apparent in our country, it should not be too much to expect that a President Obama would be as forthright about our circumstances as was FDR in 1936:

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor -- other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness... Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was...

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Roosevelt explained the politics of what he sought for the country in this way:

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative...Wise and prudent men -- intelligent conservatives -- have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time... I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.

President Obama has failed to explain to the American people that the wealthy class has become the bully terrorizing the rest of us. His failure is due in part to his close relationship with those bullies. He has already raised nearly $100 million for his re-election campaign and is expected to amass more than $1 billion for his re-election effort.

Such money does not come from the bottom 80% of Americans. It comes from the very wealthy, the same ones who have gamed the American economic system for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else.

But there is another thing I have learned about bullies since I was a school kid. Bullies don’t like to be exposed and confronted. If there is any hope for us in the future, it will come only from massive exposure of the way the economic elites have gained control of this country, and how they have done it, followed by a confrontation they cannot avoid.

They have bought our politicians, who are willing to do their bidding. Perhaps three-fourths of the Congress, as well as the president, can be expected to help the wealthy elites maintain their stranglehold on our economic freedoms. Only if we stop being passive and apathetic about politics, focused primarily on consumerism and entertainment, can we become organized sufficiently to defeat the interests of the wealthy elites.

The American people need to understand why the real unemployment level is nearly as bad as it was in the Great Depression, and why our government manipulates the statistics to make us think otherwise. The people need to understand that the true “nanny state” is not the one that gives a pittance in unemployment benefits and Medicaid to those who need the help, but the one that bails out the banks and other financial institutions that have become “too big to fail,” while it leaves everyone else scratching for the scraps that may have fallen from the moneybags filled from the public trough by the wealthy.

Even if we don’t have a president or more than a handful of politicians who will tell us the truth about how this country has come to be controlled by about one-tenth of 1% of the most wealthy, the American people are still capable of understanding what Adam Smith realized 235 years ago -- that concentration of economic power leads to the concentration of political power.

The only way around this circumstance is for the people to fight the elites, understand the dynamics of the economic-political system, and vote into office politicians who will reverse this economic concentration of power. It’s time to identify the bullies, take names, expose their game plan, and beat organized money with organized people.

There are many groups aiming to organize people to take back the country from the wealthy elites. They include groups of organized workers, business leaders, veterans, students, those from the faith community, civil rights workers, women's rights advocates, immigrant rights defenders, LGBT supporters, environmentalists, academics, artists, celebrities, and other community activists.

Do an internet search for an affinity group that appeals to you and start working. If we challenge the bullies together, they can be defeated.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Ted McLaughlin : Unemployment News is Nothing to Celebrate

No celebration here. Image from the Atlanta Post.
The new unemployment numbers
are nothing to get excited about

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / August 8, 2011

The U.S. Labor Department released its unemployment figures for the month of July, and if you just gave a cursory glance at the headlines you might think the unemployment situation is improving. There are headlines saying things like "Unemployment Rate Down," "Jobs Rebound In July," "Hiring Picks Up," and "Improving Jobs Outlook." Headlines like that could make a person feel like good times are back.

But don't be fooled. Good times are not back and the unemployment situation is not getting better. Now you may want to correct me by saying that 117,000 jobs were created in July and the unemployment rate fell from 9.2% to 9.1% -- isn't that an improvement? Actually no. Let me explain.

While the 117,000 jobs created in July were more than the anemic number created in June, they were not even enough to cover the number of new workers entering the work force. It would take at least another 30,000 to 40,000 to do that. So the truth is that once again we have more people out of work than we did the month before -- actual unemployment got worse.

But if we have more people unemployed, how did the unemployment rate fall from 9.2% to 9.1%. To understand that you have to know how the government figures the unemployment numbers. Any person that the government cannot verify has looked for work in the last four weeks is not counted as unemployed. They may still be unemployed and looking for work on their own (or have given up), but they are no longer counted by the government as unemployed.

In fact, the government figures show that the workforce (the employed plus the official unemployed) shrank last month. In June it was 153.4 million people, but in July it was only 153.2 million people. Of course the workforce didn't actually shrink -- the government is just not counting an additional 200,000 people (probably because they can't be verified as looking for work in the last four weeks). This statistical shrinkage is the reason the official unemployment rate fell from 9.2% to 9.1%.

In June, the government figured the unemployment rate by dividing the number of unemployed (14.1 million) by the total workforce (153.4 million), and that came out to 9.2%. In July, after ignoring the 200,000 people they no longer want to count, they divided 13.9 million unemployed by a workforce of 153.2 million, and got a rate of 9.1%. That makes it look like the rate is going down, but it's all just a numbers and statistics game -- those people now being ignored are still out there and still out of work.

The government calls those they don't wish to count as people "marginally attached" to the workforce. They estimate the number of those people to be about 2.8 million people. That figure is probably very low because these people do not receive unemployment benefits and no longer visit the unemployment office -- making them very hard to count.

But let's assume the government is correct and the number is about 2.8 million. To get a truer picture of the real employment number we need to add them back to the unemployed number and the total workforce number. Then dividing the number of unemployed (now 16.7 million) by the total workforce (now 156 million), we find a more honest unemployment rate of 10.7%.

And if you add in the number of the underemployed (those involuntarily working part-time because they can't find full-time work -- about 8.4 million people), the rate climbs much higher. Adding the 16.7 million unemployed to the 8.4 million underemployed, we get a figure of 25.1 million (which is the number of full-time jobs needed for full employment). It would take nearly 18 years (at 117,000 jobs a month) to achieve that (and then only if no new workers entered the workforce in those 18 years).

Dividing the 25.1 million by the 156 million workforce (since the 8.4 million underemployed are counted as employed and included in the workforce number), we come up with an unemployment/under employment rate of 16.1%. That is a horribly high number, but it is the number we really should be worrying about because it more accurately reflects the number of Americans who cannot find full-time jobs.

Now you may be telling yourself at this point that we are still doing better than during the Great Depression when the unemployment rate peaked at 22.1% in 1932. But that's like comparing apples to oranges. The unemployment rate was figured differently back then. If the Great Depression unemployment rate was figured like the government computes unemployment now, it would be somewhere between 10% and 16%.

Since our current rates are between 10.7% (the unemployed) and 16.1% (adding in the underemployed), it looks to me like we are already experiencing Great Depression unemployment rates! And we haven't even discussed the 1.8 million jobs our economy is expected to lose due to the new debt ceiling deal. That could jack the rates up to between 11.9% and 17.2%.

So you can see that we're still in deep trouble as far as unemployment goes, and it looks like it will be a long time before things get better -- especially since neither political party seems to care about doing much to encourage job creation. And don't even try to tell me the Republican plan of tax cuts for the rich and government cuts is going to create any jobs. That's the prescription that got us in this mess in the first place.

Celebrate the new 117,000 jobs if you want to, but it's going to take a LOT more than that to even begin to pull us out of this hole.

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.]

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