Not a complete surprise given our history of torture and injustice

 

September 23

GUEST: Murtaza Hussain, reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy, and has appeared on CNN, BBC, and MSNBC, talks about The Fort Dix Five, and how young Muslim men were entrapped by the FBI.

Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept

9/11 brought out the very worst of our corrupted and violent criminal justice system. The FBI ever fixated on its own image, set out to entrap poor and uneducated Muslim men so that the organization would look good to the general public. The plots were depressingly similar. There would be one or two FBI infiltrators  who would make friends with these young people, offering them emotional support and a chance to get rich quick. The FBI "plot" would revolve around a few angry young men talking tough about what they would do, all taped by the informants. When the talk was over, it was time for the bribes. $25,000 for loading up a car and driving across state lines. What was loaded? Well, fake weapons that were supposed to be part of an FBI contrived terrorist attack. 

Why not hire actors? Well then you couldn't arrest them and enhance your career as a crime fighter. Chris Christie made a name for himself with the Fort Dix Five Plot. He went on to become one of the very worst governors New Jersey ever had, a completely corrupted prosecutor following Hunter Thompson's road to success: "In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile."

So September 11 brought out the swine, from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the FBI entrapment of Muslim men in this country. And so much of this was based on a deep seated racism towards Muslims, a key ingredient of the American Empire. There are many people sitting in US prisons who are completely innocent. Not a total surprise given our history of torture and injustice at Guantanamo Bay. 

Defunding police is all about removing white privilege

 

September 16

GUEST: Isis Benitez, community activist with End the New Jim Crow, member of the Healthy Black and Latinx Coalition, and former Liberty Partnership scholarship recipient, talks about why local policing must to be changed and how the community's needs can better be served.

6 reasons why it’s time to defund the police

What works and what doesn't. That would seem to be a simple question when applied to almost any community need. But whose community are we talking about? 

Are we are talking about a poor, inner city community with many Black and Latinx residents? Or are we describing the needs of the surrounding white suburbs that are much more affluent and well represented in local government? Which community gets to define what their needs are, and to decide how monies are spent? If one community has too much power, will their needs supersede the needs of the less affluent and influential? 

When it comes to policing, this difference in power has tremendous consequences. The city of Poughkeepsie has very few minority police officers, and an even fewer number who live in the inner city. How does a police force like that take minority views into account? Moreover, white police officers are much more apt to use force when dealing with people of color. Even when policing the city's public schools, white officers arrest more Black kids than they do white students in the suburbs. White officers do more stop and frisk in the inner city than in the surrounding small towns. Perhaps white police officers are following the priorities of the white suburbs even when patrolling Black neighborhoods in Poughkeepsie. 

So defunding the police is about Black communities getting to plan and implement policing that fits their needs. It is not so much "defunding" as changing where the money gets spent. Maybe the schools could use more social workers, rather than armed police officers whose only response is arresting Black students. Maybe the police should be Black themselves, and live in the communities that they serve. 

Why wouldn't everyone who lives in Dutchess County be for this more equitable structure of community policing? Well, because having an all white police force is a form of white privilege. It is more comforting to be stopped by someone your own race who lives in your own white community. Someone you can trust isn't prejudiced towards you. Someone who won't fear you for the color of your skin, and shoot you when things don't go according to their sense of white entitlement.

Defunding police is all about removing white privilege when it comes to law enforcement. It is about treating communities equally. It is about making Black lives matter when it comes to our criminal justice system.

Taking our place with the peaceful nations of the earth

Larreynaga, Nicaragua

September 9

GUEST: Dr. Arnold Matlin. retired pediatrician and long time political activist in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution since the 1980s, talks about the need to defend Sandinista gains from US imperial interventions.

NicaNotes: Hands off Nicaragua!

Dr. Matlin has made Nicaragua an important part of his life. After visiting Nicaragua in the late 1980s during the Contra Wars, he has returned over 30 times to the sister city his group in Rochester, NY had established in El Sauce, Leon. My brother and I have been to El Sauce too, each of us driving a truck full of medical supplies, bicycles, and schoolbooks. My truck eventually made it to the sister city that my town of Rhinebeck, NY had established. We called our group the Mid Hudson/Larreynaga Sister City Project. 

El Sauce, Nicaragua

Noam Chomsky recently did an article for Jacobin Magazine, and I thought his take on Nicaragua was right on. 

"Of course, the world is somewhat different. One difference is the population. To the extent that today’s wars are more humanitarian, that’s thanks to people like you. It’s coming from people on the ground. The country has become more civilized as a result of the activism of the 1960s. And there’s plenty of evidence for that, though it doesn’t get discussed. It’s not the right story. Take the Central American wars. Horrible atrocities. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. There was torture, massacres — everything you can think of.

But there were things the United States couldn’t do. It couldn’t do what John F. Kennedy could do in South Vietnam twenty years earlier. They tried, but they couldn’t do it. There was simply too much opposition here.

When he came into office, Ronald Reagan tried to duplicate what Kennedy had done twenty years earlier. There was an immediate backlash from the population. They weren’t accepting that anymore.

What happened in Central America was something totally new in the entire history of imperialism. It was the first time ever that people in the aggressor country didn’t just protest but went to live with the victims. I visited churches in Middle America where people knew more about Central America than the academics, because they were working there." AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY

I am a believer in long term activism. It doesn't always bring our troops home. It often doesn't stop the US Military Industrial Complex's from launching new invasions and occupations. Perhaps Chomsky is right when he describes 250 year of US history. Our country has always had an addiction to expansion, from the extermination of its indigenous peoples, to the continuing economic embargo of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. We are the empire, and most of the slaughter and mayhem committed since World War II has "Made in America" stamped on every landmine, smart bomb and drone involved in the bloodshed. But people like Dr. Matlin don't give up. Pete Seeger once told me, "You never know which grain of sand it will be. But one grain will eventually tip the balance." We were standing at a vigil against the invasion of Iraq, which happened anyway. The scale wasn't quite ready to tip. But perhaps one day it will, and our beautiful and multicolored country will learn how to take its place with the peaceful nations of the earth. 

Fascism in the US has been crafted by many elites

September 2

GUEST: Thom Hartmann, top rated progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host, and New York Times bestselling author of over 30 books, talks about his latest work, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich.

The Hidden History of American Healthcare

In an era of Black Lives Matter, we can see the white supremacy basis for denying healthcare. Thom Hartmann spells it out for us in this very informative and readable history of America's shame, the denial of the human right for universal healthcare. 

Read how the early campaign for healthcare denial was based on reducing the number of Black people in our society. As an "inferior race," they couldn't be allowed to multiply. It was Nazi thinking well before the Third Reich was even conceived. And it was supported by Prudential Insurance, seeking another source of vast revenue. 

Read about how FDR and Churchill and met secretly to insure that after World War II, Europe would not succumb to fascism again. The answer that both men agreed upon was a social security plan and universal healthcare. Unless nations were able to make their citizen's lives better, the population would be vulnerable to fascism. Or so their thinking went. England adopted both social security and state supported healthcare when the war ended. But US corporations fanned the flames of white supremacy and universal healthcare never passed. 

In fact, fascism is never mentioned in the healthcare debate in our country. Nor is racism. But remember that our media is owned by the same class of people who have so effectively bought off our politicians. There is no end of elected officials on the take from our insurance and healthcare industry, from Reagan to Joe Lieberman and Obama. Fascism in the US has been crafted by many elites. And the death toll over the last century has been staggering. 

 

When will we ever learn?

 

August 26

GUEST: Dr. Jerry Lembcke, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the College of Holy Cross, researcher on media and myth-making, and co-author of the new book, Dissenting POWs, From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today.

Monthly Review, An Independent Socialist Magazine

How does a country lose wars time and time again, squandering its national treasure and good name for nothing at all? The Vietnam War (called the American War by the country that freed itself) was particularly bloody, with up to 3 million Vietnamese killed. And then there was the loss of US lives, over 58,000 soldiers who came home in body bags. Looking back, the insanity of this campaign leaves any reasonable explanation of it in the dust of history. 

There were those who showed immense bravery and opposed this war from the start. Some were celebrities like Jane Fonda, who traveled to Hanoi to talk to US prisoners of war. She is in Dr. Lembcke's book, as are the captured soldiers who felt the same way she did about the war. In fact, the war was finally ended because the war mongers in power as well as the generals had stopped trusting their own troops. There was an unexpected rebellion from within the ranks, from soldiers who at last refused to be part of the carnage.

I did my part in a small way to frustrate the US war machine from within. It was self preservation first, and some GIs did so much more. But I was a terrible soldier from start to the finish, leaving the military at exactly the same rank as I had entered, that of an E-1. It had taken me several field grade Article 15s to get there. My colonel told me, if we were in Vietnam, he would simply shoot me with his pistol. I told him that if we were in Vietnam, he would be dead already. And he would have been; he was such a bastard. 

So Dr. Lembcke's book is not about me. His goal is to educate the American public about how the Vietnam War was resisted from within, even in the prisoner of war camps in Hanoi. We have had so many catastrophic military adventures since then. When will we ever learn?