Author: Real History Lisa

We should have listened to Nikola Tesla when we had the chance.

At the height of his popularity as the key inventor who pioneered commercial electricity, Tesla cautioned the world of the inefficiencies of burning substances to generate energy, especially coal, the predominate fuel source of the day.

Not only did the burning process waste most the potential energy of coal, Nikola Tesla argued, but it was a nonrenewable resource that we would eventually run out of. The same arguments could easily be made about oil.

“Whatever our resources of primary energy may be in the future,” Tesla wrote in Century Magazine in 1900, “we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material.”
Tesla reminded us that a windmill is one of the most efficient energy devices ever devised, and suspected we’d eventually be able to harness the sun’s rays in an efficient way. He also advocated utilizing the heat “in the earth, the water, or the air.”

He proposed, essentially, geothermal energy plants, one capturing the heat of the earth, the other floating on the ocean, using the temperature differential between the surface water temperature and the deeper water temperatures to drive turbines to generate electricity.

One of Tesla’s designs for a floating geothermal plant was published in the pages of the New York Times, complete with pictures and diagrams, in the 1930s. But by the 1930s, oil was being found all over the world in such quantities and with such relatively little output of energy that no one cared much about producing power in other ways.

It wasn’t until the oil shortage in the 1970s that people started taking a serious look at alternative ways of producing energy on a large scale.

Who was Nikola Tesla?

Today, on the 154th anniversary of Tesla’s birth, you could ask Europeans who Nikola Tesla was and their eyes will light up as they comment on his remarkable inventions. Over 100 years ago, Nikola Tesla proved the energy establishment wrong by creating something the establishment believed was impossible: a motor driven by alternating current.

Ask most Americans, however, who Tesla was, and you’ll often get a blank stare. Recently, Tesla has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in visibility, thanks to David Bowie’s portrayal of a highly fictionalized version of him in the film “The Prestige,” as well as through the Tesla Motors company, which markets an ultra-sexy fully electric sports car.

Why do we know so much about Tesla’s contemporaries, such as Edison or Marconi, but so little of Tesla? Tesla’s story is, after all, the quintessential rags to riches story.

As a child, Tesla, a Serb in Croatia, saw a picture of Niagara Falls that gave birth to a passion he would never lose. He vowed to be the first to harness of the power of Niagara Falls, to turn all that natural motion into a way to generate energy.

As a youth, he imagined a simple waterwheel turned by the falls. But as he studied electrical engineering, he realized more efficient ways of using the power of the river to generate electricity by passing water over turbines.

Tesla’s turbines were unique, in that they had no grooves or ridges. They were smooth, so they wore well and had no edges to wear down or break off.
When Tesla first came to America, ironically, he worked for Thomas Edison.

Tesla tried immediately to sell Edison on the notion of using alternating current to generate electricity, but Edison was opposed, claiming it was both too dangerous, due to the high voltages produced, and too difficult to capture.

Those who had tried found motors running forwards and then backwards, making energy capture impractical at best. Tesla wasn’t ready to argue this point, and let it go, for the moment, even though in his head he already knew the solution, having figured it out some years earlier.

Instead, Tesla said he could at least improve the efficiency of Edison’s motor. Edison had told Tesla, essentially, that there’d be several thousand in it for him if he made the improvement. But when Tesla did, and tried to collect, Edison said Tesla didn’t understand the American sense of humor.

Tesla, his pride wounded, quit, and struck out on his own.

In the mid 1880s, a buzz arose in the electrical community when it was learned that Tesla had developed and patented a working alternating current motor. Tesla was pressed into speaking before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Columbia College to explain and demonstrate his motor.

The lecture brought Tesla instant fame, and, ultimately, a very serious business partner: George Westinghouse. Westinghouse, himself an inventor, believed, unlike Thomas Edison, that the future of electricity depended on alternating current, not direct current, and moved to purchase the rights to Tesla’s patents.

Tesla had been well on his way to becoming a millionaire when Westinghouse came to him at one point with difficult news. The Westinghouse company was so deep in financial trouble that if Tesla did not relinquish his royalty payments, the Westinghouse company could go under.

Tesla ripped up his contract, saying that Westinghouse believed in him when no one else would, and that the Westinghouse company must survive in order to bring alternating current to the world.

The Falls

As the 1800s were drawing to a close, Niagara Falls was in the forefront of every electrical magnate’s mind. An international group had formed to examine proposals for how best to harness the power of the falls.

Tesla, still clinging to his childhood belief that he would be the first, teamed with Westinghouse to design a plant. Edison, backed financially by J. P. Morgan, proposed a direct current scheme.

The big disadvantage of such a scheme was that direct current didn’t hold up well over transmission. Edison’s plan would have required power stations about a mile apart. Alternating current, on the other hand, could be sent many miles across wires.

You’d think this would have been an easy decision. But as we saw more recently in the VHS-Betamax competition, the best idea doesn’t always win.

Edison launched an all-out campaign to discredit alternating current. He electrocuted first dogs, then horses, and ultimately an elephant on stage in front of audiences to show how dangerous alternating current was.

Edison even pushed for the development of the first electric chair using alternating current to execute humans. Its initial use was, not coincidentally, in Buffalo, just up the river from Niagara Falls.

Westinghouse and Tesla fought back via a different venue: the World’s Fair in Chicago, also known as the Columbian Exposition of 1893. (It was supposed to celebrate the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America in 1892, but the fair ended up opening a year late.)

Edison’s company had merged into General Electric, which fought mightily to get the contract to power the fair. Westinghouse, on the other hand, was in financial difficulty, and could not bid on the fair.

But when a tiny local Chicago firm entered a bid that would cost the fair only a fraction of what General Electric was asking, Westinghouse said he would back the small shop, and together, they won the contract for the Fair.

Edison was upset, and tried to block Westinghouse by denying the Fair permission to use his light bulb, as it was still under patent to him. So Westinghouse went out and invented a different kind of light bulb, one that used two filaments, not one, to light the bulb.

The Fair was known as the “White City” due to a budget shortfall which required all buildings to be coated at the last minute with a white plaster-like material. The fortunate accident made the buildings look like classical Greek temples.

President Grover Cleveland pressed a lever to light the Fair on opening night, and the sight was so beautiful that reporters noted men threw hats in the air and women wept openly at the sight. The White City was the first all-electric city anywhere on the planet.

The Niagara Falls commission members were very impressed, and ultimately chose to go forward with an alternating current plan, due in no small part to its successful use at the Fair.

Wireless Energy

The one thing, however, that Edison and Morgan won was the concession to carry the generated power away from the falls. This angered Tesla on a number of levels, not the least of which was the fact that he had become obsessed with the notion that there should be a way to transfer energy wirelessly.

He’d already sent signals wirelessly, in a demonstration that caused the Supreme Court to later rule that Tesla, not Marconi, was the father of radio. But sending power was different than sending a signal.

Still, Tesla had been struck from childhood by the sight of the sky sending power to the ground in the form of lightning. If nature could do it, could not man, as well?

Tesla was offered the use of unlimited power by a friend if he moved to Colorado Springs. So Tesla left New York and set up a lab not far from Pike’s Peak. There, Tesla reportedly found a way to transmit energy wirelessly across a distance of several yards, from a device inside his lab to a small set of light bulbs outside the lab.

Read the rest of my article over at ConsortiumNews.com.

During his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater famously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” But was he correct?

Last weekend, those words were wrapped around a brick and thrown through the window of the Monroe Democratic Committee headquarters office in Rochester, New York.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York, whose Niagara Falls office also received a brick through a window, reported that someone left a voicemail message that referenced “snipers.” Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, provided a photograph to the Associated Press showing a cracked window in her Tucson office.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan, one of the few anti-abortion voices in the Democratic Party, was called a “baby-killing mother f***er” on his office’s voicemail. The brother of Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Virginia, had a gas line cut after the brother’s address was mistakenly listed on a Tea Party site as belonging to the congressman.

Rep. James Clyburn, D-South Carolina, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, received a faxed image of a noose. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that at least 10 Democratic members have been targeted.

Clearly, extremism, even in the defense of a certain perception of liberty, is still extremism, and a vice worthy of serious punishment. That people are resorting to such playground bully tactics only underscores the lack of leadership on the Right.

The Right would do better to take a page from the Left in this regard.

During the 1960s, when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading marches for civil rights, King preached the necessity of modeling the movement’s behavior on the nonviolent actions of Mahatma Gandhi. In his book Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote that nonviolent resistance was not passivity in the face of evil, it was active love in the face of evil.

King explained that “nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.  … The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

King also noted that nonviolence resistance must target the evil itself, not the people “who happen to be doing the evil. It is the evil that that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the person’s victimized by the evil.”

People on the Left would do well to remember that the violent people protesting are indeed not just perpetrators but victims, too – of a media that has not offered them what only a Fox News anchor would deem “fair and balanced” reporting on this issue.

The major media has allowed the demonization of the health care bill and its supporters, to such a degree that some people feel their fundamental liberties are being taken away and thus they are justified in threatening, and in some cases committing violent acts.
Read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/032610a.html.

Robert Greenwald, bless him, is gathering signatures in an effort to persuade the History Channel to act like a History Channel and not like an adjunct of Rush Limbaugh, distorting history to serve an agenda.

Greenwald sees this as a politically motivated effort. I see something more sinister, as I’ll explain in a minute.

This upcoming miniseries is produced by Joel Surnow, producer of “24” and written by one of his writers on 24, a guy who claims to be a liberal but does not appear to have made any political contributions to any liberal candidates.

Watch the clips here, and then sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
Here’s what actual historians – not all of them fans of Kennedy – have to say about the script:

Here’s what an outraged David Talbot, the creator and former Editor-in-Chief of Salon.com, said when he heard his book Brothers was used as a source for the miniseries:

And here’s a clip of Robert Greenwald talking on MSNBC yesterday about his effort:

I’ll ask again – please sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.

I also encourage you to find a copy of the book Jim DiEugenio and I put together. There are a couple of articles in that book by Jim that you can’t find online, including Jim’s seminal essay on “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Because Jim’s essay describes why projects like this our made: if John Kennedy was a horrible person, who cares who killed him? Bottom line, that’s the agenda.

Jim’s article goes into the details of two women most often linked to Kennedy – Judith Campbell “the Government wants me to talk again” Exner and Mary (wife of CIA heavy Cord) Meyer, and shows how flimsy the accusations are that they in any way shaped policy or had any serious influence on Kennedy.

And I can’t help but remember walking by the newsstand one day and seeing another woman claiming to have slept with Kennedy. I burst out laughing, but then felt like crying because I was one of a handful of people in the country who got the joke. The woman was Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a journalist who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald four years before Kennedy was shot, and who wrote a book afterwards titled Marina and Lee that Marina, Oswald’s wife, called a pack of lies. Would it surprise you to learn that Priscilla’s CIA file listed her as a “witting collaborator”?

When I saw that, I began to wonder how many other of Kennedy’s supposed paramours were also CIA assets, perhaps on assignment to smear the man so no one would care enough to look for the CIA’s hand in his death?

So while Greenwald sees this as a political maneuver, I believe this springs less from Joel Surnow’s relationship with Limbaugh and the right and more from his connections to the intelligence agencies in general and the CIA in particular. The strongest evidence in this case points to high-ranking members of the CIA being involved in the plotting and cover-up of the assassination of President Kennedy. (See our book for a plethora of evidence in this regard, presented with solid factual references to actual CIA documents housed at the National Archives.)

But maybe Greenwald is right. Maybe Joel just hates everything Kennedy did and stood for. And maybe his sidekick writer is just gullible enough to fall for all that bogus sex stuff that’s been added to the record. I have a strong suspicion some of his “source” material came from C. David Heymann, whose books are so factually inaccurate I felt the need to expose him in full. See my essay on his fabrications and listen to me talk about him on Black Op Radio.

Either way, the show absolutely is not history. It is fiction. And not even close or loosely adapted fiction, but outrageously wrong, inaccurate, fiction. Do you really think that should be presented by the “History” channel? I don’t.

Please join me in signing that petition. And please stick your neck out a bit and ask your friends to sign up too. No one deserves to have not only their life taken from them, but their legacy as well. That’s a crime against Real History.

So sign the petition already! Thanks for caring. http://stopkennedysmears.com/.

On my lunch hour, I was surprised to find a rally for health care being held a few blocks from where I work. Usually, when I see protests downtown, it’s been hate-filled skinhead types bashing Obama or decrying gay marriage. How refreshing it was to see a bunch of progressives protesting for health care reform.

One woman carried a medical school skeleton with a sign that said, “Dying for health care.” I can’t recall the other signs, but there were several.

The protest was a little noisy, but definitely sane. It did, however, feel claustrophic because it was on one of the smaller corners. There’s a big plaza streetcorner a few blocks away that would have served better. And heck, they should have gone to LA Live! There’s a nice open plaza there, and a lot of people pass through there for lunch.

One thing I’d like to say to my fellow activists. If you’re going to protest in someone else’s neighborhood, dress like they do. I couldn’t help but feel the campaign would have been 20x more effective had all the activists had on suits, skirts, or other professional business attire. As liberal as I am, it felt weird to see these hippie types in my business neck of the woods. It felt a little jarring, and this from someone who couldn’t possibly be MORE sympathetic to the cause.

A couple of years ago, we had a march downtown for peace, and one guy showed up in a business suit. I instantly assumed he was conservative, which was his point. He wasn’t, but he wanted people to assume that. It’s amazing how much our brains assume that we’re not usually aware of!

The action, btw, was to have people call their senators and demand health care via the reconciliation process. There’s a ‘new letter on Harry Reid’s desk’ one of the activists told me. Not sure what they’re referring to and no time to check that out. Just had to share a little good news, even if not so professionally delivered..!

Excerpted from the second part of my article on Haiti at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013110d.html.

The Haitians have a saying in their native créole language: Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li. “Little by little, the bird builds its nest.”

Freed of the powerful grip of the Duvaliers in 1986, and despite a dysfunctional system, little by little, the Haitians undertook the difficult work of rebuilding their nation into a more democratic place from within.

They formed trade unions, created independent radio stations, initiated literacy programs, and built silos to store their grain so they could wait for better prices before selling their crops.

Meanwhile, a quiet, small Haitian man who spoke eight languages and who had declared capitalism a “mortal sin” was espousing a brand of liberation theology too radical for the Catholic Church that had ordained him.

In 1988, the Catholic Church expelled Jean Bertrand Aristide for preaching class warfare in a move that, ironically, made him far more powerful.

Undaunted, Aristide, called affectionately by the diminutive “Titide,” opened a medical clinic, ran a children’s shelter, and continued to speak to the people.

As Haiti headed into its first internationally supervised election, the U.S. was banking on Marc Bazin, now their chosen candidate for president. But the majority of the Haitians saw Bazin as “America’s Man” and refused to support him.

The strongest leftist candidate, however, was considered lackluster, and the other candidates were too little known to win.

On Oct. 16, 1990, just two months before the elections were to be held, Aristide entered the race. He called his movement and its followers the Lavalas, a créole word for torrents of water that rushed down gullies, sweeping away everything in their path. He summed up his platform in three words: “participation, transparency, justice.”

Predictably, the U.S. government, then headed by President George H. W. Bush, was disconcerted. One businessman probably summed up a lot of businessmen’s thoughts when he called Aristide “a cross between Fidel and the Ayatollah.”

Just before the election, Ambassador Andrew Young, at the request (he said) of former President Jimmy Carter, tried to persuade Aristide to sign a letter accepting Bazin as president if Bazin should win, in the hopes of forestalling a violent reaction from Aristide’s followers. William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, noted the Bush White House likely had a hand in this as well.

Hope, Then Tragedy

On Dec. 16, 1990, in the country’s first internationally supervised election, Aristide won with over two-thirds of the vote, proving the Lavalas worthy of their name. The margin also gave him the largest majority of any democratically elected leader in the Western Hemisphere.

But in a sad parallel to some recent U.S. elections, when the time came to vote for the legislature and other offices, turnout was light. An opposition-dominated legislature then thwarted much of the legislation that Aristide proposed.

Still, Aristide upset the status quo. He initiated “programs in literacy, public health, and agrarian reform,” Blum wrote. Aristide also sought to increase the minimum wage; he asked for a freeze on the prices of basic necessities; and he created a public works program to generate jobs.

Aristide also criticized the business class, accusing some of the Haitian elite of corruption. He also sent a youth group from Haiti on a friendly visit to Haiti’s neighbor to the west, Castro’s Cuba.

Aristide, who had survived assassination attempts in the past, created a private force that he could trust. He further antagonized the military by making temporary appointments to key positions rather than permanent ones. He hoped this would encourage good behavior, but instead it rankled those stuck in tenuous situations.

But perhaps Aristide’s greatest affront to the military was to crack down on smuggling and drug-running, which were rampant in Haiti. According to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, Aristide’s actions “were putting a dent in many officers’ life styles.”

Janus-faced America

Any student of real history can guess what happened next. The military overthrew Aristide a short nine months into his five-year presidential term.

And as Blum notes, while there is no direct evidence that the CIA or the United States supported the coup, given the CIA’s role in training and supporting the Haitian military, the coup could hardly have come as a surprise.

Bob Shacochis supports Blum’s suspicions in his book The Immaculate Invasion, where he wrote that President George H.W. Bush “swiftly announced that the coup would not stand, then just as quickly receded into embarrassed silence when informed by his staff that his own crew in Port-au-Prince not only had foreknowledge of the putsch but had allowed it to advance without a word.”

Shacochis decried how America had been essentially “Janus-faced” toward Haiti due to a the split between those in the U.S. willing to support a true democracy, no matter how messy, and those whose knee-jerk reaction was to decry the leftist president, despite the fact that “the Haitians democratically chose Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the only Haitian president who ever attempted to lead his people out of darkness; the only Haitian chief of state who seemed to display an ideology beyond self.”

Read the rest at the link above. It gets worse.

[This excerpt crossposted from http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html ]

America’s Sorry History with Haiti

By Lisa Pease
January 30, 2010

With all the talk of America taking charge of Haiti for a while, it would be prudent for us to take a step back and review the history of our various interventions in Haiti, and the outcomes of those efforts.  

For there is another kind of aid that the people of Haiti need that isn’t being talked about. They need us to understand their real history, their culture and their potential.

They need us to stop patronizing them and interfering with their progress so they can realize the freedom they are still seeking two centuries after officially casting off the shackles of slavery. [For more on that era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Haiti and America’s Historic Debt.”]
If there’s one lesson we’ve had to learn in Haiti over and over, it’s that the solutions to Haiti’s problems can never be imposed from the outside. They must be allowed to grow from within.

And we have to let those solutions flourish, instead of trying to shape them to the liking of our business class, as we have repeatedly attempted to do, with disastrous effect.

The Military Occupation

In 1915, the United States began a nearly 20-year military occupation of Haiti, ostensibly to guarantee the country’s substantial debt repayments to American and other foreign lenders. But historian Hans Schmidt, among others, questioned this motive, as he found that Haiti’s record of repayment had been “exemplary” compared with that of other Latin American countries.

The larger reason for the occupation, according to Schmidt and others, was to keep European financial interests (German and French in particular) from economically colonizing Haiti at a time when America, having recently completed the Panama Canal, was hoping to expand its own sphere of influence in the Caribbean.

And potential investors in Haiti, such as the United Fruit Company (whose name is familiar to anyone who has studied the CIA’s coup in Guatemala), weren’t going to move in unless the U.S. took over the government and brought stability.

To be fair, it’s not like America alone ruined the place. Haiti was a mess when the U.S. forces got there. Of the 11 presidents who had held office in Haiti from 1888 to 1915, only one had apparently died a natural death, and none had served their full term. Seven presidents were killed or overthrown in 1911 alone.

And from 1843 to 1915, Haiti had been through, according to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, “at least 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections” or as one commentator called it, a series of “bloody operettas.”

Years of various colonization attempts had divided Haiti into an economic and cultural caste system that was in part racially based. The whites and lighter-skinned people often held the money and position; the darker the skin, the lower down the economic totem pole one was likely to be.

Efforts to spread modern technology among the peasant population fell flat, and working all day for someone else’s profit wasn’t much of an incentive for people who had few needs and were accustomed to scarcity.

In addition, many Americans who came to Haiti looked down on the native people, often due to racial prejudice. The Americans typically didn’t recognize the value of the natives’ knowledge, and believed that America knew what was best for Haiti.

One notable exception was Major Smedley Butler, who noted that “The Haitian people are divided into two classes; one class wears shoes and the other does not. The class that wears shoes is about one percent. …

“Ninety-nine percent of the people of Haiti are the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people I have ever known. They would not hurt anybody [unless incited by the shoe-wearers; then] they are capable of the most horrible atrocities.”

“Those that wore shoes I took as a joke,” Butler added. “Without a sense of humor, you could not live in Haiti among these people, among the shoe class.”

Ignorance and Arrogance

You’d think that if you wanted to help a people become a prospering democracy that the first thing you’d offer them would be an education. But over 10 years into the U.S. occupation, 95 percent of the Haitian population remained illiterate.

The one educational effort the U.S. put forward was the Service Technique, a training program in agricultural and industrial technology. The problem with that, as Schmidt noted, was that the elite “traditionally held that manual labor was demeaning, while the peasants were enmeshed in subsistence farming and were reluctant to risk an already tenuous existence in outlandish experiments that were fundamental to American technological progress.”

In addition, American arrogance even prevented an exchange of ideas that could have benefited American businesses. For example, the Haitians had developed a much more efficient way of farming cotton than the industrial farming methods employed by the Americans. But Americans pushed their own technology instead.

Not surprisingly, the Americans failed to win many converts.

What little profit Haiti did make, financially, was used to pay off American bankers, sometimes in advance of the payment schedule. Funding education and public projects — the very projects the loans had been provided for — were not the priorities.

Haitian laborers were paid pennies an hour to work 12-hour days. Raising wages was discouraged for fear it might cause capital to seek a more favorable climate.

In 1925 and 1926, in an attempt to make the country more attractive to farming interests such as United Fruit, the Marines took aerial photographs of the land in the hopes of creating a cadastral survey showing actual boundaries of property.

But the photographs were destroyed in a fire, and American officials for the large part refused to pressure the masses into selling their tiny, title-less but generations-held property to American businesses.

When the market crash in 1929 rippled around the world, Haiti’s productive coffee farms lost their markets, and the people returned to subsistence-level farming. Students began striking to protest the American occupation, and soon others joined in a general strike.

An early attempt at “shock and awe” failed as miserably in Haiti as it did in Iraq. The Marines dropped bombs in a harbor where a particularly aggressive group of protesting Haitians had gathered. But instead of cowing them, the demonstration seemed to instigate them further. The Marines had to fire on the group to disperse them.

Ultimately, the depression turned the tide of opinion in Haiti against its American occupiers, increasingly seen as oppressors.

By 1932, tensions had come to a head, and President Hoover began taking steps to end the occupation. President Roosevelt completed the action in 1934.

Evaluating the Effort

What did the United States leave the Haitians with in return for the occupation? The U.S. did bring them some years of relative stability, law and order. The U.S. built some hospitals and rural health clinics as well as some roads and bridges and airstrips.

But for all that, as a contemporary observer noted, “the Haitian people are, today, little better fitted for self-government than they were in 1915.”

U.S. military forces also killed thousands of Haitians in efforts to achieve security.

The aforementioned Major Butler became quite outspoken about the role he’d been forced to play. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912…

“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Did the U.S. learn from this failed attempt at nation building? No. The U.S. just kept intervening, with repeatedly disastrous results.

Cut to 1957. Whatever modernization was achieved from the U.S. occupation was already a distant memory. Bridges and roads had fallen into disrepair. The same drive that in 1934 took two hours to complete by 1957 took nine hours by jeep (in good weather) due to unpaved potholes and the island’s “wrinkled paper” topology.

And that was just one road.

Imagine a country without a telephone system, with failing bridges, ports with crumbling docks, patients lying ill on the floor of dirty hospitals, political institutions in shambles or even nonexistent. Imagine what you’re seeing now, post-earthquake, as the everyday state of things.

… read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html.

The Duvalier part (not included here but posted at that link) is especially interesting re some overlap with people from the Kennedy assassination story. That part has many links – better if you read it there.

Part 2, about our Janus-faced dealings with Aristide, should be up tomorrow, I think.

BooMan asked yesterday what we wanted to hear in Obama’s State of the Union speech. Here’s some of what I’d like to hear.

I wanted to come before you tonight with a different story.

I wanted to tell you that people on the right and left have come together to do what’s best for this country, that people put aside their fears, their dislikes, and reached down and found a common goal in truly helping the least fortunate among us.

I wanted to tell you that right and left worked together to pass landmark health care legislation.

I wanted to tell you that the bankers had seen the evil of their ways, that greed is on the decline, that common decency and goodness was on the rise.

There is so much I wanted to tell you by now that I can’t. Because it wouldn’t be true.

The Republicans have obstructed our efforts from my first month in office. While my door has always been open, and I’ve actively reached out to the Republicans on the hill, they have never once reached back.

Their spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, has stated the goal from the start: They want to see me fail. And I wouldn’t mind that, if it was just me. I’d be willing to take the hit, if it would help the rest of you. But the truth is, if I fail, we all fail. Our country rises or falls together. We do not have the option to have winners and losers in government. Either we are all winning together, or we are all losing separately.

So I have to be honest. The state of the Republic tonight seems tenuous, at best. I don’t know if this experiment in democracy, so conceived, will survive the ravages of those who would destroy this country for private profit.

Too many people are out of work. And while many say I should have focused on jobs from the start, look, no one ever died from losing a job. But people die in this country every minute — every minute — from a lack of health care.

My own mother died in part due to our inability to cure a disease we’ve studied for over 100 years. Think about that. We can kill someone remotely via a drone, but we can’t save a woman from cancer after 100 years. What is wrong with our priorities?

I can’t fix everything. But I can fix some things. And I haven’t been doing enough. I told you we had ended torture. But our definition of torture is still too broad. I’m going to narrow that definition.

I told you I would fight for you. But I appointed the same people who brought us this fiscal crisis in the first place to craft a solution.

I was wrong. I admit it. And I’m pledging to you right here and now, I will do better.

Starting tonight, I have asked Tim Geitner to resign. This is not a symbolic move. I am not just sending a signal, or making a gesture. I firmly believe we have not pursued the best possible course, and that Geitner is too close to the problem to craft an appropriate solution.

I invited Paul Krugman, but he turned me down. [Laughter.] I can’t say I blame him. [More laughter.] But I am asking him to make recommendations. I am listening to many voices. And your voices are going to be more important than the beltway voices, going forward. This I promise to you.

I’m asking Congress to please do the right thing. Pass the health care bill. And let’s be honest. We all know this is not really a health care bill. It’s an insurance reform bill. But until we can change the political discourse in this country, we can’t make more radical changes. And this bill will save lives.

Let me repeat that. It will save lives. We can change it later. But we must put a stake in the ground now, while we still can. This bill will save lives.

Now. Let’s talk about the wars. I told you I’d bring the troops home from Iraq starting in August of this year. I’m not waiting that long. Starting in June, the troops who have been on tour the longest will be home, for good. They will get not only whatever medical care they need. I will personally ensure they receive mental health care as long as they need it.

There is nothing more horrific than having to kill another human being, and to see people kill each other. I want to ensure that those people who put their lives on the line for us every day know what we will honor their commitment to them in return the fullest. We will find them jobs. We will help them return home. We will help them in any and every way they need, because they were willing to give everything for us. We owe them no less.

Afghanistan. I know many of you have doubts about why we are there. But make no mistake, we have a vital interest in securing the border region from actual terrorists. I know you’ve heard that before. But I’ll ask you to trust me on this a little longer. I don’t want to give away what we know. But I promise you, our goal remains not to tame the region, but to train those who live there to control it themselves. It’s a difficult mission, and it’s possible we will not succeed. That’s why I’ve given the military a short timetable. If we can’t fix it in a year and a half, we can’t fix it in five years, or fifty.

I promise you that before my term is up, our troops will be back from the Middle East.

There is so much more I’d like to hear him say. But in the end, this is only a speech. I’m much more interested in what Obama will actually do, going forward. Only then will I know if our ship of state is truly under repair, or sinking.

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he said in an interview. “And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”

“We have been awfully successful,” he added, “and we are not done yet.”

I don’t have time to explain this. But perhaps BooMan will. These guys have a long-term plan and are running it.

We have NO plan, and are running that too.

Who do you think is going to win, under those circumstances?

Just heinous.

Read the whole thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/us/politics/25bopp.html

Now that the Supreme Court has stuck a stake in the heart of the constitution, rendering the quaint little notion of one man, one vote a thing of the past, by allowing corporations to contribute unlimited amounts,

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Actually, a lot.
We need to reinstitute monitoring of companies that support progressive policies.

We need to go out of our way to shop only at those establishments, and eschew, to the greatest extent possible, the rest.

We need to educate each other that while we must still act as if our votes at the ballot machine still count (whether they do or not) we must also realize that henceforth, every dollar we spend is also a vote, and we need to vote far more consciously and wisely.

There used to be websites like BuyBlue and ChooseTheBlue which listed companies that donated to Democrats and progressives. Both of those sites are essentially defunct or taken over now. So we need someone with skills and no-how to recreate that, and we need a lot of contributors.

Maybe a simpler way would be a group Wiki to track companies worth buying from.

We need to leverage boycotts – something the left hasn’t used much since the 1970s. They were actually very effective.

And I’d also like to see us organize some “pro-cotts” – have a day where everyone promised to buy at least one thing from a business if they donate to our cause.

Come on, people. Be creative. We still have this site. I’m ready to go drown my sorrows in a drink in one part of my brain, but I have to shove that aside and let the other part, the “hero” part of my brain, come to the fore. I suggest you let your inner hero out as well.

These are extraordinary times, and call for extraordinarily creative measures. Get busy!!!!

I’m working hard on an article re the sorry history of America’s interventions in Haiti. But I felt compelled to write and share this little summary as well, in limerick form.

Hang on, Haiti

America’s got Haiti’s back
Or so you will read on the rack
But if truth be told
The public’s been rolled
America’s got Haiti back

We occupied them once before
For years til 1934
We left them untethered
While bankers still feathered
Their nests off the backs of the poor

Our record’s been jaded, at best
Their leaders served at our behest
We propped up their beast
And abducted their priest
While businesses paid off the rest

If none of this makes sense to you
You know what you now have to do
Just open your eyes
And your heart to great size
And let history enter through

Please learn from mistakes of the past
And from wisdom the Haitians amassed
If their truths we’d heed
They may yet succeed
And win their true freedom, at last.