While Nancey said no at the front door of the White House, Ronnie said yes to Crack at the back door. Send Crack to the Negroes, buys guns with money, send guns to Contras in Nicaragua.
3 decades later, a mixed legacy for 'Just Say No'
By GENE JOHNSON
March 8, 2016 6:09 PM
.
SEATTLE (AP) — For a
generation of Americans, first lady Nancy Reagan was most closely
associated with a single phrase: "Just Say No."
Three decades after the anti-drug campaign's
heyday, its legacy is mixed. Experts say the slogan brought new
attention to drug abuse and helped focus research on how to prevent it.
But the motto was also part of a larger escalation of the drug war that
relied on fear-based rhetoric, public moralizing and skyrocketing
incarceration rates.
"Overall
the larger prevention community is thankful for large campaigns like
'Just Say No,' for the broad, population-level awareness they raise,"
said Derek Franklin, who heads the Washington Association for Substance
Abuse and Violence Prevention. "However, the sort of shaming attitude
and questionable moral divide it created was something we wouldn't do
today."
Further evidence of
changing attitudes can be found in the movement to legalize marijuana,
which is now permitted for medical use in 23 states and for recreational
use in Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C.
Reagan,
who died Sunday at 94, made "Just Say No" the hallmark of her tenure in
the White House. She said she first became aware of the drug problem
when she learned that the children of some of her friends were using
drugs. Her own daughter, Patti Davis, later wrote of experimenting with
pills and cocaine.
As Reagan once recalled, the idea emerged
during a visit with schoolchildren in 1982 in Oakland, California. "A
little girl raised her hand and said, 'Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if
somebody offers you drugs?' And I said, 'Well, you just say no.' And
there it was born."
FILE - In this Feb. 14, 1984 file photo, first lady Nancy Reagan sits with fourth- and fifth-graders …
At the time, Allan Cohen
was the executive director of the Pacific Institute for Research and
Evaluation, which had a federal contract to help states and local
communities develop drug-abuse prevention programs. Cohen's organization
had promoted and adopted the program the first lady visited in Oakland,
called Oakland Parents in Action, which taught children skills for
refusing drugs offered by their peers.
The
message instantly resonated. By 1988, there were more than 12,000 "Just
Say No" clubs around the country. Most were at least loosely based on
the ideas developed in Oakland, Cohen said.
One of them was at
Clyde Riggs Elementary in Portland, Tennessee. Helen Berry, the mother
of a student there, was volunteering to help assemble a bulletin board
one day in 1985 when a teacher showed her some "Just Say No" pamphlets.
"It was like a light bulb came on," Berry recalled. "I said, 'Wow, this is really important.'"
She
went on to lead the school's "Just Say No" club for 25 years, bringing
in emphysema patients to warn about the dangers of smoking and quizzing
pupils about how long marijuana can stay in the body.
FILE - In this Oct. 2, 1988 file photo, Washington Redskins injured starting quarterback Doug Williams
"I just thought it was an outstanding program for kids to see
what drugs can do," Berry said. "I've had kids come up to me today who
are in their 30s and say, 'Mrs. Berry, I want you to know I never
touched a cigarette.'"
Many researchers remain skeptical of the
campaign's effectiveness, associating it with the first lady's calls to
be intolerant of drug users or with the famous television commercial
that featured an actor dropping an egg into a frying pan and saying,
"This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"
It's apparent now that efforts to scare people into abstaining from drugs failed, they said.
"You
think of 'Just Say No,' you think of eggs in a frying pan," said Caleb
Banta-Green, a researcher at the University of Washington's Alcohol and
Drug Abuse Institute. "Just because you remember it doesn't mean it
worked. Addiction is a medical condition, but we still have a
fundamental misunderstanding of what addiction is, and 'Just Say No'
spread that misunderstanding."
Michelle Miller-Day, a professor at
Chapman University in California, said the refrain might have been a
simplistic message, but its popularity also focused the attention of
researchers on the social context of drug use and on developing programs
that would help youngsters refuse drugs or at least delay
experimentation.
FILE - In this March 25, 1988 file photo, then first lady Nancy Reagan kicks off the NHL's " …
She worked with a colleague from Penn State University, Michael
Hecht, to develop "Keepin' It REAL" — for Refuse, Explain, Avoid and
Leave, a research-validated curriculum that the popular anti-drug
program DARE adopted in 2009 as it was under fire about its
effectiveness.
Cohen said there's no way to quantify the impact of
"Just Say No," but it's unfair to conflate the campaign — a prevention
effort aimed at middle or elementary school children — with criticism of
the larger drug war or mass incarceration. And while the message may
have seemed simple, the Oakland-developed curriculum was actually
comprehensive, he said.
The
issues "of criminal justice overreach or overstatement of the moral
horrors of drug use were not much related to what the first lady was
doing," Cohen said. "The greatest legacy was the promotion of preventive
approaches, which at that point had almost been totally ignored."
These
days, researchers have come up with better prevention programs, said
Christopher Ringwalt, a prevention researcher at the University of North
Carolina. But schools aren't necessarily using them. An emphasis on
testing has squeezed prevention education out of many classrooms, he
said.
"It's frustrating for people like me," Ringwalt said. "Attention has turned elsewhere."
Key Figures In CIA-Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin To Come Forward
Oct 10, 2014
LOS ANGELES -- With the public in the U.S. and Latin America becoming
increasingly skeptical of the war on drugs, key figures in a scandal
that once rocked the Central Intelligence Agency are coming forward to
tell their stories in a new documentary and in a series of interviews
with The Huffington Post.
More than 18 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance”
newspaper series investigating the connections between the CIA, a crack
cocaine explosion in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of
South Los Angeles, and the Nicaraguan Contra fighters -- scandalous
implications that outraged LA’s black community, severely damaged the
intelligence agency's reputation and launched a number of federal
investigations.
It did not end well for Webb, however. Major media, led by The New
York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, worked to discredit
his story. Under intense pressure, Webb's top editor abandoned him. Webb was drummed out of journalism. One LA Times reporter recently apologized
for his leading role in the assault on Webb, but it came too late. Webb
died in 2004 from an apparent suicide. Obituaries referred to his
investigation as "discredited."
Now, Webb’s bombshell expose is being explored anew in a documentary,
“Freeway: Crack in the System,” directed by Marc Levin, which tells the
story of “Freeway” Rick Ross, who created a crack empire in LA during
the 1980s and is a key figure in Webb’s “Dark Alliance” narrative. The
documentary is being released after the major motion picture “Kill The
Messenger,” which features Jeremy Renner in the role of Webb and hits
theaters on Friday.
Webb's investigation was published in the summer of 1996 in the San Jose
Mercury News. In it, he reported that a drug ring that sold millions of
dollars worth of cocaine in Los Angeles was funneling its profits to
the CIA’s army in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.
Webb’s original anonymous source for his series was Coral Baca, a
confidante of Nicaraguan dealer Rafael Cornejo. Baca, Ross and members
of his “Freeway boys” crew; cocaine importer and distributor Danilo
Blandon; and LA Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez all were interviewed for
Levin's film.
The dual release of the feature film and the documentary, along with
the willingness of long-hesitant sources to come forward, suggests that
Webb may have the last word after all.
* * * * *
Webb’s entry point into the sordid tale of corruption was through
Baca, a ghostlike figure in the Contra-cocaine narrative who has given
precious few interviews over the decades. Her name was revealed in
Webb's 1998 book on the scandal, but was removed at her request in the
paperback edition. Levin connected HuffPost with Baca and she agreed to
an interview at a cafe in San Francisco. She said that she and Webb
didn’t speak for years after he revealed her name, in betrayal of the
conditions under which they spoke. He eventually apologized, said Baca,
who is played by Paz Vega in “Kill The Messenger."
The major media that worked to undermine Webb's investigation
acknowledged that Blandon was a major drug-runner as well as a Contra
supporter, and that Ross was a leading distributor. But those reports
questioned how much drug money Blandon and his boss Norwin Meneses
turned over to the Contras, and whether the Contras were aware of the
source of the funds.
During her interview with HuffPost, Baca recounted meeting Contra
leader Adolfo Calero multiple times in the 1980s at Contra fundraisers
in the San Francisco Bay Area. He would personally pick up duffel bags
full of drug money, she said, which it was her job to count for Cornejo.
There was no question, she said, that Calero knew precisely how the
money had been earned. Meneses' nickname, after all, was El Rey De Las
Drogas -- The King of Drugs.
"If he was stupid and had a lobotomy," he might not have known it was
drug money, Baca said. "He knew exactly what it was. He didn't care. He
was there to fund the Contras, period." (Baca made a similar charge confidentially
to the Department of Justice for its 1997 review of Webb's allegations,
as well as further allegations the investigators rejected.)
Indeed, though the mainstream media at the time worked to poke holes
in Webb's findings, believing that the Contra operation was not involved
with drug-running takes an enormous suspension of disbelief. Even
before Webb’s series was published, numerous government investigations
and news reports had linked America's support for the Nicaraguan rebels
with drug trafficking.
After The Associated Press reported on these connections in 1985, for example, more than a decade before Webb, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) launched a congressional investigation. In 1989, Kerry released a detailed report
claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the
Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons, but that the U.S.
government knew about it.
According to the report, many of the pilots ferrying weapons and
supplies south for the CIA were known to have backgrounds in drug
trafficking. Kerry's investigation cited SETCO Aviation, the company the
U.S. had contracted to handle many of the flights, as an example of CIA
complicity in the drug trade. According to a 1983 Customs Service
report, SETCO was “headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a class I DEA
violator.”
Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in
the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.)
that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after
dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in
detail about the flights in media interviews.
“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and …
raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies
were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to
raise funds for covert military operations against the government of
Nicaragua,” a copy of a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)
Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When
the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued
to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with
him, with the blessing of the U.S. government.
The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no
surprise to the Reagan White House. On April 15, 1985, around the time
Baca says she saw Calero accepting bags of cash, Oliver North, the White
House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra
operation, was notified in a memo
that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen,
North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had
“potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided
by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved
in drug-running out of Panama.”
North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security
Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is
being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug
runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a
conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother.
An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another references
a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude
cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes
as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing
process.)
Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the
Contras' drug-running in the 1980s and repeatedly warned superiors,
according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter.
Castillo “believes that North and the Contras’ resupply operation at
Ilopango were running drugs for the Contras,” Mike Foster, an FBI agent
who worked for the Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, reported in 1991 after meeting with Castillo, who later wrote the book Powderburns about his efforts to expose the drug-running.
“The charges could hardly be worse,” the article
opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe
CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak
of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of
the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was
the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy
the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing.
Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound.
Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”
The emergence of Webb’s story “posed a genuine public relations
crisis for the Agency,” writes the CIA Directorate of Intelligence
staffer, whose name is redacted.
In December 1997, CIA sources helped advance that narrative, telling
reporters that an internal inspector general report sparked by Webb's
investigation had exonerated the agency.
Yet the report itself, quietly released several weeks later, was actually deeply damaging to the CIA.
“In 1984, CIA received allegations that five individuals associated
with the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE)/Sandino Revolutionary
Front (FRS) were engaged in a drug trafficking conspiracy with a known
narcotics trafficker, Jorge Morales,” the report found. “CIA broke off
contact with ARDE in October 1984, but continued to have contact through
1986-87 with four of the individuals involved with Morales.”
It also found that in October 1982, an immigration officer reported
that, according to an informant in the Nicaraguan exile community in the
Bay Area, “there are indications of links between [a specific
U.S.-based religious organization] and two Nicaraguan
counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the
United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to
Nicaragua. A meeting on this matter is scheduled to be held in Costa
Rica ‘within one month.’ Two names the informant has associated with
this matter are Bergman Arguello, a UDN member and exile living in San
Francisco, and Chicano Cardenal, resident of Nicaragua."
The inspector general is clear that in some cases “CIA knowledge of
allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals
had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA.”
In other cases, “CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations
or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.”
“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, said in congressional testimony
in March 1998. “There are instances where CIA did not, in an
expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with
individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the
allegations.”
* * * * *
One of the keys to Webb's story was testimony from Danilo Blandon,
who the Department of Justice once described as one of the most significant Nicaraguan drug importers in the 1980s.
“You were running the LA operation, is that correct?” Blandon, who
was serving as a government witness in the 1990s, was asked by Alan
Fenster, attorney representing Rick Ross, in 1996.
“Yes. But remember, we were running, just -- whatever we were running in
LA, it goes, the profit, it was going to the Contra revolution,” Blandon said.
Levin, the documentary filmmaker, tracked down Blandon in Managua.
“Gary Webb tried to find me, Congresswoman Maxine Waters tried to
find me, Oliver Stone tried to find me. You found me,” Blandon told
Levin, according to notes from the interview the director provided to
HuffPost.
Waters, a congresswoman from Los Angeles, had followed Webb’s investigation with one of her own.
In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his
support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays
his significance. "The big lie is that we started it all -- the crack
epidemic -- we were just a small part. There were the Torres [brothers],
the Colombians, and others," he says. "We were a little marble, pebble,
rock and [people are] acting like we're big boulder." The Managua lumberyard where Levin tracked down Blandon.
Webb’s series connected the Contras' drug-running directly to the growth
of crack in the U.S., and it was this connection that faced the most
pushback from critics. While Blandon may have been operating on behalf
of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on
his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that
the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.
“Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and
distribution organization operating in southern California,” the warrant
reads, according to Webb's orginal report.
“The monies gained through the sales of cocaine are transported to
Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking
officer in a chain of banks in Florida. … From this bank the monies are
filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”
Blandon's number-one client was “Freeway” Rick Ross, whose name has
since been usurped by the rapper William Leonard Roberts, better known
by his stage name “Rick Ross” (an indignity that plays a major role in
the film). The original Ross, who was arrested in 1995 and freed from
prison in 2009, told Webb in "Dark Alliance"
that the prices and quantity Blandon was offering transformed him from a
small-time dealer into what prosecutors would later describe as the
most significant crack cocaine merchant in Los Angeles, if not the
country.
His empire -- once dubbed the “Walmart” of crack cocaine -- expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest before he was eventually taken down during a DEA sting his old supplier and friend Blandon helped set up.
Levin's film not only explores the corrupt foundations of the drug
war itself, but also calls into question the draconian jail sentences
the U.S. justice system meted out to a mostly minority population, while
the country's own foreign policy abetted the drug trade.
“I knew that these laws were a mistake when we were writing them,"
says Eric Sterling, who was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary
Committee in the 1980s and a key contributor to the passage of
mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, in the documentary.
In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to research from The Sentencing Project,
a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders
serving prison sentences ballooned to more than 500,000 -- most of whom
are not high-level operators and are without prior criminal records.
"There is no question that there are tens of thousands of black
people in prison serving sentences that are decades excessive,” Sterling
says. “Their families have been destroyed because of laws I played a
central role in writing.”
The height of the drug war in the 1980s also saw the beginning of the
militarization of local law enforcement, the tentacles of which are
seen to this day, most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, former LA County Sheriff's
Deputy Robert Juarez, who served with the department from 1976 to 1991
and was later convicted along with several other deputies in 1992 during
a federal investigation of sheriff officers stealing seized drug money,
described a drug war culture that frequently put law enforcement
officers into morally questionable situations that were difficult to
navigate. The hunter and the hunted: A Los Angeles detective finally meets the kingpin he'd pursued.
“We all started getting weapons,” said Juarez, who served five years
in prison for skimming drug-bust money. “We were hitting houses coming
up with Uzis, AK-47s, and we’re walking in with a six-shooter and a
shotgun. So guys started saying, 'I’m going to get me a semi-automatic
and the crooks are paying for it.' So that’s how it started.”
But Juarez, who served in the LA County Sheriff’s narcotics division
for nearly a decade, explained that what started as a way for some
officers to pay for extra weapons and informants to aid in
investigations quickly devolved into greed. Since asset forfeiture laws
at the time allowed the county to keep all cash seized during a drug
bust, Juarez says tactics changed.
“It got to where we were more tax collectors than we were dope cops,”
Juarez recalled. “Everything seized was coming right back to the
county. We turned into the same kind of crooks we’d been following
around ... moving evidence around to make sure the asshole goes to jail;
backing up other deputies regardless of what it was. Everyone, to use a
drug dealer's term, everyone was taking a taste.”
* * * * *
Between 1982 and 1984, Congress restricted funding for the Contras,
and by 1985 cut it off entirely. The Reagan administration, undeterred,
conspired to sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, using some of
the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras. The scandal became known as
Iran-Contra.
Drug trafficking was a much less convoluted method of skirting the
congressional ban on funding the Contras, and the CIA's inspector
general found that in the early years after Congress cut off Contra
funding, the CIA had alerted Congress about the allegations of drug
trafficking. But while the ban was in effect, the CIA went largely
silent on the issue.
“CIA did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it
received indicating that Contra-related organizations or individuals
were involved in drug trafficking,” the inspector general's report
found. “During the period in which the FY 1987 statutory prohibition was
in effect, for example, no information has been found to indicate that
CIA informed Congress of eight of the ten Contra-related individuals
concerning whom CIA had received drug trafficking allegations or
information.”
This complicity of the CIA in drug trafficking is at the heart of
Webb’s explosive expose -- a point Webb makes himself in archival
interview footage that appears in Levin’s documentary.
“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and
said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods,
let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where,
'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is
sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know
anything about it.'"
Gary Webb and Sacramento Bee writer Fahizah Alim. She interviewed Gary before his "suicide" in Sacramento.
Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a
founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three
presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national
TV shows, and is the author of 10 books. His latest book is "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority."
Over the long weekend before the Mississippi and Michigan primaries, the sky above Sea Island was black with corporate jets.
Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Napster’s
Sean Parker, Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk and other members of the super-rich
were jetting in to the exclusive Georgia resort, ostensibly to
participate in the annual World Forum of the American Enterprise
Institute.
Among the advertised topics of discussion: “Millennials: How Much Do They Matter and What Do They Want?”
That was the cover story.
As revealed by the Huffington Post, Sea Island last weekend was host
to a secret conclave at the Cloisters where oligarchs colluded with
Beltway elites to reverse the democratic decisions of millions of voters
and abort the candidacy of Donald Trump.
Among the journalists at Sea Island were Rich Lowry of National
Review, which just devoted an entire issue to the topic “Against Trump,”
and Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Trumphobic New York Times.
Bush guru Karl Rove of Fox News was on hand, as were Speaker Paul
Ryan, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham,
dispatched by Trump in New Hampshire and a berserker on the subject of
the Donald.
So, too, was William Kristol, editor of the rabidly anti-Trump Weekly
Standard, who reported back to comrades: “The key task now, to …
paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him.”
Kristol earlier tweeted that the Sea Island conclave is “off the
record, so please do consider my tweets from there off the record.”
Redeeming itself for relegating Trump to its entertainment pages, the
Huffington Post did the nation a service in lifting the rug on
“something rotten in the state.”
What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about
bringing the blessings of “democracy” to the world’s benighted, AEI,
Neocon Central, believes less in democracy than in perpetual control of
the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites.
If an outsider like Trump imperils that control, democracy be damned.
The elites will come together to bring him down, because, behind party
ties, they are soul brothers in the pursuit of power.
Something else was revealed by the Huffington Post – a deeply embedded corruption that permeates this capital city.
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a
501(c)(3) under IRS rules, an organization exempt from U.S. taxation.
Million-dollar corporate contributions to AEI are tax-deductible.
This special privilege, this freedom from taxation, is accorded to
organizations established for purposes such as “religious, educational,
charitable, scientific, literary … or the prevention of cruelty to
children or animals.”
What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up to at the Cloisters
was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known
as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917.
From what has been reported, it would not be extreme to say this was a
conspiracy of oligarchs, War Party neocons and face-card Republicans to
reverse the results of the primaries and impose upon the party, against
its expressed will, a nominee responsive to the elites’ agenda.
And this taxpayer-subsidized “Dump Trump” camarilla raises even larger issues.
Now America is not Russia or Egypt or China.
But all those countries are now moving purposefully to expose U.S.
ties to nongovernmental organizations set up and operating in their
capital cities.
Many of those NGOs have had funds funneled to them from U.S. agencies
such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has backed
“color-coded revolutions” credited with dumping over regimes in Serbia,
Ukraine and Georgia.
In the early 1950s, in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA of the Dulles brothers did this work.
Whatever ones thinks of Vladimir Putin, can anyone blame him for not
wanting U.S. agencies backing NGOs in Moscow, whose unstated goal is to
see him and his regime overthrown?
And whatever one thinks of NED and its subsidiaries, it is time
Americans took a hard look at the tax-exempt foundations, think tanks
and public policy institutes operating in our capital city.
How many are like AEI, scheming to predetermine the outcome of
presidential elections while enjoying tax exemptions and posturing as
benign assemblages of disinterested scholars and seekers of truth?
How many of these tax-exempt think tanks are fronts and propaganda
organs of transnational corporations that are sustained with
tax-deductible dollars, until their “resident scholars” can move into
government offices and do the work for which they have been paid
handsomely in advance?
How many of these think tanks take foreign money to advance the interests of foreign regimes in America’s capital?
We talk about the “deep state” in Turkey and Egypt, the unseen
regimes that exist beneath the public regime and rule the nation no
matter the president or prime minister.
What about the “deep state” that rules us, of which we caught a glimpse at Sea Island?
A diligent legislature of a democratic republic would have long since dragged America’s deep state out into the sunlight.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/the-sea-island-conspiracy/#7IFLktwvBkzxrvRt.99
Author Sonja Williams talks about her biography of journalist and activist Richard Durham
When producer Sonja Williams began
researching for the radio series, Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was,
she found very little African-American radio drama from the 1940s. What
little she found reinforced negative stereotypes.
A colleague eventually suggested she look into Destination Freedom,
a series of weekly broadcasts created by journalist and activist
Richard Durham that featured African-American leaders and heroes of the
day.
Williams became enthralled with Durham’s life and work and eventually wrote a biography of Durham, "Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio and Freedom" (University of Illinois Press/2015).
Host Frank Stasio talks with Williams about Durham’s life and career.
On the Rise of Donald Trump... And the Need for and Possibility of Real Revolution
March 7, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Donald Trump is three things.
One: Trump is the perfect representative of the ugliest, most
rotten, most parasitical, and most corrupt parts of the already
extremely ugly, vicious, and oppressive American empire and the social
values that embody that empire. Not only his political stances, but the
whole way he moves through life—the bullying, the sleaze, the worship
of and glorying in money, the pride in ignorance, the crude chauvinism
of “USA Number One,” the leering nastiness toward women: this is exactly where the so-called American Dream leads. He embodies the exploitation and plunder that is
capitalism, and the me-first mentality it spawns. He is an extreme
expression of that, but an expression nonetheless. This is what people
are conditioned to want and to follow in this society. And this is what
strikes a deep chord in the hard-core followers of this braying,
pig-headed jackass.
Two: Trump has pulled together a section of the fascist
movement in America in a much more visible and aggressive way. He is
organizing those whose feel left out and “disrespected,” who have been
taught that their white skin and American identity make them special
but who don’t “feel special” anymore, and who blame it on those they
have been taught to despise as being “beneath them” in society. This
sense of frustrated “white male entitlement” runs deep in the marrow of
white America; it is openly played on by the Republicans and “politely
respected” (while being played on its own way) by the Democrats—and now
Trump has taken it to a whole other level. He is aiming these angry
people at immigrants, at Black people—against, in short, the most
oppressed; he is aiming them against “foreigners” and “the different,”
and in particular against all Muslims: and he is aiming them against anyone
who would refuse to go along with the crimes of this system or who
even dares differ with Trump. He stirs “his people” up with a vision of
America rampaging, murdering, and openly torturing all around the
world—open, crude, unapologetic gangsterism, as opposed to the
“refined” gangsterism of Obama. His rallies are not complete without
some of his minions mobbing and beating up anyone who would dare to
raise a voice against this, to the raucous cheers of the mob that Trump
has summoned. And should anyone criticize Trump online, he has millions
of followers who, piranha-like, create a “virtual mob” to go after
them.
In doing this, Trump has swept in many people who may not be
dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries, but whose dissatisfaction and
yearnings, coupled with their naiveté and even more than that the
historic advantage and status afforded them as “white people” in
America, make them susceptible to Trump’s appeal—which makes him all
the more dangerous.
All this and what it says about the larger society, even if
there were nothing else (and there is plenty else), concentrates the
need for a real revolution.
But there is more. Third, Trump has seriously exacerbated the
ongoing legitimacy crisis in the way that the American empire is ruled.
“Legitimacy” refers to the way in which people very broadly, in normal
times, perceive the rules by which the system runs—and the armed force
that is used to back up those rules—as being “legitimate.” They may
object and protest when these rules seem to be bent, or violated, by
those in power, but in normal times they mainly accept the rules
themselves. However, when these rules begin to be questioned and
violated by those who hold power, when those in power fall out in
disagreement over what the rules should be, when the rules do not seem
to work, when the working of the rules becomes so odious that people
are driven to resist, or when acts of resistance call the rules into
question... people may begin, on a mass scale, to question the very
rules themselves. Where did these rules come from in the first place,
and who and what do they serve? When people in their millions are
wondering about this, these questions become very dangerous indeed for
the ruling class.
For some time now, there has been fierce contention between
two groupings in the ruling class, more or less centered in the
Democratic and Republican Parties, precisely over forging new
“legitimating norms,” or rules. This contention has gone on for two
decades now and takes many different forms—right now, the very sharp
and unprecedented fight over whether Obama will be allowed to exercise
his constitutional duty to nominate another Supreme Court justice is one
example. But at bottom is a fight over what will be the “legitimating
norms”—the cohering consensus of the “rules” of society—in a time of
great change and upheaval.
The system as a whole faces multiple crises on different
fronts—the globalization and “turbo-charging” of the world economy,
which has led to the hollowing out of the domestic industrial base and
the downgrading of the living standards of tens of millions of people,
accompanied by an extraordinarily pronounced income inequality... the
fracturing international situation, with a direct challenge to the U.S.
(and Western Europe) mounted by the fundamentalist Islamic jihadist
forces but also coming from other rivals... the tumultuous changes in
the role of women, economically and culturally, especially in relation
to the family... and changes in the “racial” makeup of America—the
increasing necessity to rely on immigrant labor coupled with the actual
removal of millions of African-Americans out of the labor
force, and the institution of a genocidal system of mass
incarceration... and the intensifying ecological crisis. There is
widespread alienation and a feeling, among many different sections of
people, that the system is not working and the rules are not being
applied fairly.
The Center—Can It Hold?
Here the observations and analysis in the article “The Center—Can It Hold? The Pyramid as Two Ladders,” from the pamphlet The Coming Civil War and Repolarization for Revolution in the Present Era,
by Bob Avakian (BA), are very relevant. BA writes that “when a
legitimacy crisis occurs, when the ‘glue’ that holds society together
begins to come undone, and there is an attempt to forge a new ruling
consensus, then it is acutely posed whether that attempt to forge a new
ruling consensus (a new ‘social glue,’ so to speak) is going to hold
and work.”
Faced with this, the Democrats have in the main gone for a
more “multicultural” approach. They pay lip service to and attempt to
recast and channel the struggles of the different oppressed
nationalities that have been historically severely discriminated
against to allow room for some small sections to advance, while locking
the majority into even more desperate conditions (for example, the
“welfare reform” cuts and mass imprisonment carried out under the first
Clinton regime). They generally prefer to wrap their military
aggression in “soft power” and alliances overseas while continuing to
carry out vicious war crimes by drone and wage really savage wars
through proxies like Saudi Arabia. They make some reforms in the
“social safety net” in a “business friendly” way, even while presiding
over draconian cuts overall.
Those mainly grouped around the Republicans have opted for the
openly aggressive use of military power AND the building up of a
fascist base within the U.S. around the imposition of fundamentalist
Christian beliefs and values, a cult of the military, and a much more
unrestrained capitalism, which has included the further gutting of the
unions. In this dynamic, the Republicans have for decades been far
more aggressive, and the Democrats have over and over sought to
conciliate with them—while the Republicans have denied the very
legitimacy of the last two Democratic presidents.
Right now, each of these groups has encountered problems in
the current electoral campaign. This finds expression within the
Democrats in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, running on a platform of a
“people’s revolution,” and as a “democratic socialist” who professes
his aim to bring people into the electoral process in the form of the
Democratic Party. Never mind that his candidacy is NOT a people’s
revolution, nor is he a socialist, and that getting people to put on the
straitjacket of the Democratic Party (even a supposedly slightly
roomier straitjacket) will make it impossible to actually confront and
solve the problems facing humanity.
But these problems are much sharper in the Republican Party.
The main forces in this party find themselves going up against the
person leading in the nomination fight in a way that has not happened
in living memory. To be clear: Trump has, from the beginning, been
backed by larger forces; he is not quite the “independent actor” he
poses as. The wall-to-wall coverage he has gotten since last
summer—which until recently was quite respectful—is not simply
explained by “ratings.” But right now the main forces in the Republican
Party have indeed grouped up against Trump in a rather unprecedented
way.
For years, the Republicans have used the very same themes with
the very same people that Trump is now ringing with such success. In
fact, Trump’s main rival, Ted Cruz, is himself an extreme fascist, many
of whose positions are even more reactionary than Trump’s. Cruz also
is fighting with Trump for the Christian fascists—Trump has a
significant hunk of these, but has also expanded this base to other
sections and has been welding all this together under his command, which
is part of the particular threat he poses overall, and part of the
threat to Republicans—but also part of why people like the Republican
governor and former candidate Chris Christie are drawn to Trump.
But the fact that all these Republicans, and the party as a
whole, have based themselves on these themes is why, once they
perceived him as a possible threat, they had no real way to counter him
(at least at first). When they attack him for being a racist apologist
for the Klan... when they attack him for being a hater of women (a
misogynist)... well, it rings hollow, because this is what their
whole party has relied upon, this has been at the very core of their
appeal. The more this goes on, and the more the underlying dynamics are
dragged into the light, the more people may wonder why this racist,
chauvinist, fascist party has been viewed as legitimate at all. They
may wonder why the Democrats have not only sought to cooperate with the
Republicans, but have bent over backward to conciliate with them. Who
and what does this serve? Which class and what class interests?
Conversely, if Trump is put down by the Republican
establishment, how would his base respond to that? Already, the militia
movement and similar groups are all over the Trump thing—they don’t
even conceive of the current government as legitimate. What then if
those in charge violate their own rules to deny Trump the nomination?
They may, to be sure, be able to do this in a way that discredits Trump
among the people he has up to now called forward, and do so without
real damage to themselves. But they may not, either.
As BA also said in this same series (“The Danger of the
Christian Fascists and the Challenges This Poses”), “you can’t keep
making promises to these forces, as the Republican Party does—you can’t
keep making promises and then leave them unfulfilled.” Trump has
exposed and taken advantage of the fact that the section of the ruling
class grouped around the Republicans has not, over decades,
really “delivered” to this base. The vaunted American military has been
defeated or bogged down all over the world by foes who are much weaker
militarily. Black people have not only NOT been “put in their place,”
they have in the past few years led a huge questioning of American
racism and the streets have been filled, at different times, with all
kinds of people uniting and putting it on the line against racist
police murder.
And even though Obama in fact is nothing but an instrument—in
fact, the commander-in-chief—of this very same empire, for the people
in this hard core Republican base the very idea of a Black man in authority—let alone president—is totally intolerable and illegitimate.
And there’s more: gay people, rather than being ostracized and cast
out, have been much more accepted, with the Supreme Court even granting
the right of marriage equality. And while, yes, they have continued to
hammer at women, and have taken away the right to abortion from
millions, this doesn’t satisfy these followers of patriarchy; further,
if the Supreme Court rules against the savage, woman-hating new
abortion restrictions in Texas and other states that are now coming up
for review, these people will be highly inflamed. Finally, there have
been the ongoing serious cuts in the living standards of tens of
millions that we referred to above, which form a backdrop and
underpinning of all this.
The Rise of a Would-Be American Hitler
Trump now
comes and claims to redeem these frustrated promises. He aims to cohere a
section of the longtime Christian fascists, with newer people who
share many of the same feelings of resentment and rage, ultimately
based on white American entitlement.
The implications loom very large, even as things are still in a
great deal of flux. If Trump wins the nomination, then this movement
would likely be further unleashed, with extremely ugly consequences in
every part of society. If Trump becomes president, this would reach a
whole other dimension, with Trump himself then moving to implement the
program he has run on.
And what if those in the ruling class who perceive Trump as a
threat, and are now—after letting him build himself up for months,
after promoting him during those same months—attacking him... what if
they succeed in derailing his quest for the Republican nomination?
Well, they would have a problem: What do they do with this movement
that has now cohered around him? It is not clear in that case what
either Trump, or the people he has drawn around him, would do.
Further, this situation could increasingly pose problems for
the Democrats as well. For instance, what if a section of the people
stoked up by Trump is either disappointed by him being denied the
nomination or, alternatively, is emboldened by his winning it, and
escalates their violence against the people whom the Democrats consider
“their base”? The Democrats continually conciliate with the
fascists—what if they do so again, and refuse to lead people to
confront this... when there are people in a mood to do so?
These are the type of things that those who make the decisions
in the American empire might have to confront: What would cause more
instability and harm for their interests, as they perceive them?
What to Do and How to Proceed in the Face of this Fascist Threat
Whatever immediately happens, the times are becoming heavier.
There will be repression. The current polarization—in which tens of
millions of people are looking for a way out, but see their
alternatives as being between fascists like either Trump or Cruz, and
the Democrats (including the supposedly “radical alternative” of
Sanders)—is NOT good, and left to itself would lead to disaster. There
must be RE-polarization for revolution—and this must be wrenched out of the current situation. There will NOT be any easy road to something better.
There is, and there must be more, resistance to this—not in
the form of voting for a Democrat—but building on the kind of thing you
see already in people going into these Trump rallies and calling him
out. But the most important thing we have to understand is
this: The turmoil at the top of society right now... the emergence of
political figures who aim to change how the people are ruled,
in possibly dramatic and extremely disruptive ways... the fighting
amongst the rulers over what to do about this... opens new
possibilities, and new necessity, to expose the system that has spawned
this and to build a magnetic pole around an organized force that
represents a real alternative: real revolutionary hope on a solid
scientific foundation. All this taken together is part of a process
that could create an opening in which a force that is going for
revolution, and willing and able to lead people to do that, can make
tremendous gains and possibly even open up the chance to go for it all. That is, to lead millions to go for revolution, all-out, with a real chance to win.
This is not the only possible outcome, nor is it necessarily
something that would grow one-two-three out of the present situation.
But revolution will NOT be made in a ready-made, easy-bake situation;
it will necessarily involve turmoil, upheaval, and advancing in the
face of sharp repression. The point is to analyze, grasp, and work on
those possibilities now.
The complexities of that... all the challenges that would
pose... all that is beyond what we are going to get into in this
article or this issue. But we DO have an article guiding you into the works of Bob Avakian,
who has developed a whole way of scientifically understanding this
kind of social upheaval and how extremely dangerous situations can be
seized on, with the right kind of leadership, to make huge gains. How
to apply those principles will be very much on our site and in our
pages over the next months, as this unfolds. And you, our readers, have
a definite role to play in getting into these works, and writing in
with your thinking provoked by them.
Right now, though, some things that CAN and MUST be said about
what the rise of Trump, even now, means for those working for
revolution:
It means, most of all, getting out to people that there is a
REAL and NECESSARY alternative to all of this: revolution. This means,
right now and in the coming months, seizing on the highly charged
atmosphere to get BA out to millions—his way of understanding the
world, the vision of a new society he’s developed (concretized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America),
and the strategy to accomplish this. And this includes, as part of
this, going out to those attracted to Sanders’ message and winning them
to see that what we face cannot be dealt with in the terms Sanders is
proposing—this is, as we said recently, an illusion... a “wisp of
painless progress.”
It means preparing ourselves, the movement for revolution, and
the people to deal with the much more repressive atmosphere already
being unleashed, and the heightened repressive measures and actions
that now loom with the ascendancy of Trump (and which, whatever happens
to Trump, his candidacy is creating public opinion and organization
for). This means very much building a wall of support around BA—based
on people understanding what he is all about and coming to respect and
love him on that basis.
This is extremely important. Without a REAL alternative,
people will remain locked on the same deadly treadmill they now find
themselves on.
It means getting out among the people and showing very vividly
how Trump actually embodies what America stands for and does not in
any fundamental way go against it, and that the solution is not
to return to the illusion of “America’s democratic traditions,” nor to
throw our energies into electing a Democrat as some kind of defense,
but to actually fight to get rid of a system that produces no end of
Trumps, Reagans, and, yes, Clintons, once and for all. It means getting
out both to those opposing Trump and to those who are
currently seduced by him but whose most fundamental interests and
aspirations can only be met by communist revolution and who, through
struggle, can be won to see that. The basis to do this and to succeed
in doing it lies in the contradictions of this social system and what
it gives rise to, in so many different ways—and that Trump is not an
anomaly, or some weird exception, but a concentration of this social
system at a time of crisis.
It means getting revcom.us and Revolution newspaper
way out there into society. In a time like this, when people are
unusually hungry to understand what is going on and what to do about
it, this website and paper must truly be, as BA has called for, “the
guide, the pivot, the crucial tool in drawing forward, orienting,
training, and organizing thousands, and influencing millions—fighting
the power, and transforming the people, for revolution—hastening and
preparing for the time when we can go for the whole thing, with a real
chance to win.” And it means this on a whole other level.
In addition, the movement for revolution must assume much more
powerful form. This means that the Revolution Clubs have to become
much more vital forces in the neighborhoods and campuses, recruiting
people on the basis of their two slogans: Humanity Needs Revolution and
Communism; and Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for
Revolution. This means that centers of revolution—the bookstores—must
become vital sites where BA’s new synthesis of communism engages and
contends with key trends in society and coheres the trend of
revolutionary communism. And finally, the Party itself, the vanguard,
needs to grow and further develop—quantitatively and, yes,
qualitatively, in its scientific rigor and revolutionary orientation.
It means continuing to mobilize people to fight the power, both to tap into the righteous anger and defiance that people do feel toward Trump, reaching out to and joining with those who disrupt his rallies and,
at the same time and even more important, continuing to fight—and to
draw more people into the fight—against police terror and other forms
of the oppression of Black and Brown people... against the oppression
of women and, right now, the vicious attempts to deny tens of millions
of women the right to abortion... against the demonization of
immigrants... the wars... and the plunder of the environment.
In short, these are times of danger... and times of great opportunity. Prepare to rise to the challenge before us.
Even before and certainly after a man deposits his seed in the womb
of a woman, he has no rights over the control of her womb and the fruit
thereof. Male politicians need to stay out of all issues relating to the
body of women. Yes, stick to men's business! You'll be doing great if
you can handle men's issues, which is doubtful--alas, you may need the
help of women on these issues.
"Men don't know their asses from a hole in the ground. They must ask their woman, Baby, where's my asshole!" (from the monologue, One Day in the Life, a docudrama by Marvin X)
"Look,
when I jump my pussy jumps, therefore my pussy belongs to me!" said
Rashidah Mwongozi Sabreen in The Mythology of Pussy and Dick by Marvin
X.
