Removing the US knee from Haiti's neck

August 19

GUEST: Robert Roth, activist in the Central America solidarity movement, organizer for various campaigns to free political prisoners in the US, and co-founder of the Haiti Action Committee, talks about colonialism and how our media covers it up.

Haiti Action Committee

Like Jim Crow in the US, racism towards the country of Haiti has gone on for generations. And it has mostly been invisible to the majority of white Americans.

Part of that racism can't be understood unless one looks at the history of Haiti, and its overlord, the US Empire. The perpetual invasion, coups and private interventions are airbrushed out of our ever compliant media. Stories about Haiti are always like stories about our inner city ghettos. Blacks are perpetually described as shiftless, rebellious, and incapable of creating a workable society. 

What isn't referred to is the millions of dollars being taken from Blacks in the form of wage theft, resource robbery, and ethnic cleansing. Many US corporations and their grossly overpaid CEOs thrive on exploiting Blacks, both in the US and in Haiti.

Slavery itself, that most obvious of exploitive institutions, persisted for hundreds of years in the US. Jim Crow and Sundown Towns lasted well over a century. The imperial injustices visited on Haiti's Black population go way back as well. Haiti is really an oppressed colony of the US, and since colonialism ultimately depends on racism to survive, the treatment of this supposed independent nation has been particularly bloody. 

Take a look at the Haiti Action Committee above. Freedom for Haiti means removing the US knee from this island's neck. 

Obama's 11 million dollar mansion for all the homeless people

August 12

GUEST: Dr. Larry Wittner, early civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, author of several books, and Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany, talks about his new article in Counterpunch, "Nationalism on the Decline."

Nationalism on the Decline

We have had Dr. Larry Wittner on Activist Radio before. This time we talk about nationalism and about why it is suddenly in decline after seemingly peaking in the Trump era. Larry points to the failure of authoritarians to solve the major problems of the day from climate collapse to COVID. In essence, he outlines the futility of using race hatred and violence to solve national crises. Eventually people want relief rather than scapegoats. 

What we do need in the US is a conversation about how fascism arises in the first place. Obama can't be ignored, that huckster of hope and change we can believe in. The Democrats have been lying to the public for decades, promising our citizens so much, only to be rob them again and again. Trump's new way of thinking appealed to so many who have finally figured out this two party scam of the American public. 

Obama will have all his billionaire friends at his 6,892-square-foot Martha's Vineyard mansion this weekend. He has served them well, and like the grifter Clintons, he can now wallow in all his unjust rewards.

One of those rewards is fascism, a time when ordinary people decide that they will try anything to get rid of the current cleptocracy. I hope that instead of fascism, we try socialism next time. Perhaps one of the first things that the 99% will do is to offer Obama's 11 million dollar mansion to all the homeless people he helped create. 

A nation that continues year after year...

August 5

GUESTS: Yohana Beyene, organizer for Horn of Africa Pan-Africanists for Liberation and Solidarity, and Tunde Osazua, Coordinator of Black Alliance for Peace's U.S. Out of Africa Network, talk about the sordid history of US involvement in Somalia and Ethiopia. 

Horn of Africa - Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity

It's a powerful combination: US military aggression and the ignorance of the American people. The aggression part has been around since the end of the WW II, when government "leaders" decided to expand US hegemony to include the rest of the world. And that has been the underlying motivation of the CIA, created during the war to destroy fascist armies, but now transitioned to attack any country that strays from the US neoliberal agenda.

This has been especially damaging to emerging democracies in the Third World. In places like Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and many newly formed countries in Africa, Somehow, the US sees itself as above the law when it comes to subverting elected leaders or assassinating critics of the empire.

The CIA has made the transition from fighting the Nazi SS to becoming its United States equivalent. This agency should have been shut down after the war was won and our troops came home. Only our troops never came home from all the countries that our military liberated. And the CIA was vastly expanded so ensure that our bases multiplied and stayed forever. In that way, the US became the Third Reich, determined to last a thousand years, despite the yearnings of tens of millions to be free. 

If the US empire ever falls, we will be left with the baggage of its war crimes: tens of millions killed and dozens of governments overthrown. The US will have spent all its vast treasures on war, with little to show for it besides a burning planet and the hundreds of billionaires who talk of escaping to outer space. 

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Room for all God's miscreants

The new Supreme Court has significantly expanded the rights of religions over the good of all citizens. For this court, the First Amendment "free exercise" clause includes just about anything a religious group chooses to do, no matter how detrimental that might be to the common good. Want to have hundreds at a wedding during a deadly pandemic? Now religious groups have the right to be super spreaders of COVID 19.

That is probably good news for the 40,000 fundamentalist Mormons whose practices of polygamy may now be protected. Other religions groups also have reason to be spiritually joyous. Take the Catholic Church, where the sexual abuse of children has become so commonplace that it is almost part of the religious experience. Thousands of priests have abused children for decades, and their actions have been protected right up to the Vatican. Why couldn't the church now claim that pedophilia is a part of its religious tradition, and as such is protected from criminal prosecution?

Zionists have reasons to celebrate as well. Israel is an important part of the Jewish and Evangelical Christian religions, so wouldn't the apartheid treatment of five million Palestinian now be protected by the Supreme Court? In fact shooting Palestinians, bulldozing their homes and walling them into fetid ghettos has been part of both religions for over a century. Why not celebrate it, along with bigamist Mormons and child molesting Catholics? The new religious freedoms enshrined by the Supreme Court have room for all God's miscreants.