“In 2001 painstaking postmortems of the Florida count, one by the New York Times and another by a consortium of newspapers, concluded that Mr. Bush would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted throughout the state had been retallied.” Alessandra Stanley, New York Times, May 23, 2008, in a review of the HBO television movie, “Recount”

That is not true.

The New York Times did not do its own recount. It did participate in a consortium. Here’s what the consortium actually said: “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin.” Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2001.

Why did Ms. Stanley make such an important and fundamental error?

It is not a trivial matter. It is a common piece of misinformation. Many, many people believe it. Now a few more do, as a result of Ms. Stanley’s review. It is not a trivial matter. Because that misinformation was created by one of the most bizarre, and still completely unexplained, journalistic events in modern times.

Here’s what happened.

George Bush appeared to have won Florida, and therefore the presidency.

The law in Florida was actually quite simple and direct:

ƒ(4) If the returns for any office reflect that a candidate was defeated or eliminated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast for such office … the board responsible for certifying the results of the vote on such race or measure shall order a recount of the votes cast with respect to such office or measure.

That is one of the simplest and most clearly written bits of legislation I’ve ever seen anywhere. The Florida court thought so too and ordered a recount. Then the United States Supreme Court stepped in and shut the recounts down. Bush was left as the victor and became the president. But, presumably, the whole world wanted to know who actually did get the most votes. It would make a great and important story. But getting the truth was too time-consuming and expensive for any single news organization, so a consortium was formed. It consisted of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Company, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times, the Palm Beach Post and CNN. It took almost a year and cost more than a million dollars. All the news organizations had the same information: Al Gore got more legal, countable votes than George Bush. Here are the headlines:

New York Times: “STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE”

Wall Street Journal: “IN ELECTION REVIEW, BUSH WINS WITHOUT SUPREME COURT HELP”

Los Angeles Times: “BUSH STILL HAD VOTES TO WIN IN A RECOUNT, STUDY FINDS”

Washington Post: “FLORIDA RECOUNTS WOULD HAVE FAVORED BUSH”

CNN.com: “FLORIDA RECOUNT STUDY: BUSH STILL WINS”

St. Petersburg Times: “RECOUNT: BUSH.”

If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn’t get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline, and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph — if you got that far — was the statement quoted above:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin.”

There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcana about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Times dismissed what the consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: “While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.” That would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law, and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.

The rest of the story, another four paragraphs, detailed a variety of other possible recounts, all partial recounts — these counties, but not those counties — that the Gore lawyers or the Bush lawyers asked for at various times. Bush would have won all of those variations; he just didn’t get the most votes in Florida. Not that the all variations mattered much. The Florida court had ordered a statewide hand recount.

The news story spinners hung their hat on a technicality.

Florida law, as affirmed by the courts, says a vote most be counted if there is “a clear indication of the intent of the voter.” When the questions and lawsuits started, they were about undervotes. An undervote is when a voter has tried to vote but for some reason the counting machines fail to accept it. The most common cause, in Florida, which used a punch system, was that the punching device did not make a clear hole in the voting card. The piece of paper that was supposed to be knocked out, a chad, was hanging, or only broken on two corners, or merely dented. While the machines couldn’t discern the “intent of the voter,” the human eye often could. So we had the spectacle, and the jokes, about “hanging chads” as the recounts began. If only the undervotes were counted, by some standards of judging them, then Bush would have won.

But the consortium recount came across something else: overvotes. An overvote is when someone punches in the name of the candidate, and then, just to make sure, writes their name on the ballot. The machines could only read that the ballots had been marked in two places and threw them out.

But a human being, who saw that the place to vote for Gore had been punched and then that Gore’s name had been written in, could easily determine the intent of the voter. So the reporters for the consortium kept track of those too, and found out that Gore actually won.

Had the people inspecting the votes in the actual recount also noticed overvotes, and would they have done something about them? The answer appears to be yes.

Newsweek has uncovered hastily scribbled faxed notes written by Terry Lewis, the plain-speaking, mystery-novel-writing state judge in charge of the Florida recount — just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its order — showing that Lewis was actively considering directing the counties to also count an even larger category of disputed ballots, the so-called “overvotes,” which were rejected by the machines because they purportedly recorded more than one vote for president:

“Judge, if you would, segregate ‘overvotes’ as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter,” Lewis wrote in a note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the Charlotte County Canvassing Board on the afternoon of Dec. 9, 2000. “I will rule on the issue for all counties, Thanks, Terry Lewis.”

Newsweek, “The Final Word?” by Michael Isikoff, 11/19/01

That leaves us with a big question.

The largest, most prestigious news organizations in the United States — pretty much in the world — discovered a great and exciting story: The wrong guy was president of the United States. Also, that the Supreme Court of the United States had interfered in an election to frustrate the actual will of the voters. (Justice Antonin Scalia wants us to get over it.) Why did they so distort the story with misleading headlines, by burying the lead, by blowing so much fog and confusion around it, that almost everybody who read or heard the story walked away with the false impression that they had deliberately created? Created so successfully that the New York Times TV show reviewer is repeating it as fact seven years later.

There is no hard, on-the-record answer to that. None of the editors or publishers have come forward and said, “This is why we spun the story the way we did, even if it meant pissing away the million dollars we spent to get it.” Nobody has, and nobody can, sue them for gratuitous misinformation and malfeasance, and put them in the witness box under oath to get to the bottom of it. There is only speculation. The story is dated Nov. 12, 2001, just two months after Sept. 11, 2001. We can imagine that they universally felt it was not the time to announce a pretender was on the throne and that the system was rotten, right to the top. But I sure would love to know how they all got on the same page about it. That would make a terrific story. Not as great as the one they threw away, but good enough.

I wrote to the Times and suggested a correction. At this time, none has appeared.
However, the Gray Lady did correct an article that appeared the same day…
about “Sex and the City”…
that got the number of its television seasons wrong.

You have to know when accuracy is important.

i wonder if extremist madrassas have any trouble getting students?

“a mind is a terrible thing to waste”…unless you are Palestinian..in which case..

its only the beginning.

i grew up on the Carol Burnett Show..i miss you already Harvey!!

big FUN from MAD magazines Al Jaffee and the NYT

This week, Senator Barak Obama traveled to Florida and spoke to Jewish and Cuban-American audiences. In those speeches, he embraced the right-wing policy positions of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and the hard-line program of the most reactionary elements of the Cuban exile community.

Senator Obama was for many years considered pro-Palestinian, but a year ago when he spoke sympathetically about the suffering of Palestinian people, he quickly backed off his statements under pressure from the Israeli lobby. His surrender to AIPAC this week is particularly troubling because it comes at a time when more and more Americans - including Jewish Americans - are awakening to the fact that the Israeli lobby is a threat to both America and Israel, because its unwavering support for the expansion of colonial settlements and its resistance to serious peace negotiations serve to block the two-state solution which could otherwise be within reach.

Last year, George Soros wrote in the New York Review of Books that the power of the Israeli lobby should be challenged by the creation of a new Jewish lobby in America, one committed to peace and justice.
Just such a group was recently formed in Washington, D.C., calling itself “J Street.”

Former President Jimmy Carter has warned that the occupation of Palestine is creating an Israeli apartheid.

On May 7, Carter appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” and explained the need to negotiate with Hamas, negotiations that are opposed by the Israeli lobby and by the U.S. administration. He noted that Hamas prevailed in an internationally-supervised Palestinian election that had been sponsored by America and Israel. Carter pointed out that a recent Ha’aretz poll found that 64% of Israelis favor negotiations with Hamas. Yet Senator Obama has now fallen in line with AIPAC, ruling out negotiations with Hamas, and adopting the language of the Bush administration in calling Hamas a “terrorist organization.”

Occupation invites resistance. To demand an end to resistance as the price of discussing the occupation is to invite endless casualties. As Ralph Nader has pointed out, the American media makes much of the primitive rockets fired at Israel by Palestinians, while minimizing the use of heavy weaponry and helicopter gun ships by the Israelis in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Over the last year, Palestinian civilian casualties outnumber Israeli civilian casualties nearly 400 to 1.

In his speech to the Cuban exiles, Senator Obama said he was willing to meet Raul Castro, but declared that members of the exile community would have to have “a seat at the table.” This is the sort of precondition which Obama had previously ruled out, and the likelihood of Castro sitting down with exiles is beyond remote. Obama said that the release of political prisoners would have to be on the agenda, yet the exiles’ notion of who is a political prisoner consists largely of those who not only resisted the regime, but who took money from the American government, and coordinated their efforts with those who supported the overthrow of the regime. (See ” Cuba: U.S. Diplomat is Accused of Delivering Cash to Opposition,” N.Y. Times, 5/24/08.)

While Obama spoke in favor of allowing Cuban-Americans to more frequently visit their families in Cuba and to send money to them, these reforms are widely popular in the exile community. Most tellingly, Obama failed to oppose the Bush Administration’s ban on ordinary Americans traveling to Cuba on educational tours, tours that until 2004 allowed thousands of Americans to visit Cuba, and to come to their own conclusions about the Cuban Revolution.

Worse yet, the same Senator Obama who only a year ago supported ending the embargo declared that the embargo would continue until Cuba knuckled under to American demands.

In 1959, Cubans overthrew a dictator who was in partnership with the Mafia and who allowed Cuban workers and natural resources to be exploited by giant American corporations. In response to their nationalizing American assets, the Cubans faced nearly fifty years of U.S. sponsored invasion, embargo, sabotage, terrorism, and attempts to assassinate their leaders.

Yet Obama spoke not a word of how the restrictions of political liberty in Cuba are linked to Cuba’s struggle to maintain independence in the face of relentless attempts by a succession of U.S. administrations to use their great power to bring Cuba to heel.

Senator Obama spoke not a word of the accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution, the world-class health system, the high quality education, rural development, cutting edge research on infectious diseases, and the provision of thousands of Cuban doctors to the most disease-ridden, God-forsaken corners of the earth.

Senator Obama essentially gave the same kind of speech on Cuba that we have heard from American Presidents for the last fifty years. Where is the “change” that we have been waiting for, that we have been promised so repeatedly?

We have been down this road before.
In 2004, progressives lined up behind Senator Kerry, and progressive organizations made no demands upon him. The anti-war movement folded its tents.
After this early and unconditional surrender on the part of the American left, Senator Kerry moved sharply to the right.
The Democratic Convention was militaristic in form and corporate in policy.
The candidate who had called himself “anti-war” wound up running against Bush’s war policy from the right, calling for tens of thousands more troops, and criticizing Bush for having pulled back from Falluja simply because of the massive civilian carnage.
Yet for all of this appeasement of the right, Kerry lost the election.
Shortly thereafter, Bush leveled Falluja, and four years later American forces have been bombing major cities in Iraq.

the only ‘change’ Obama seems to represent..IS a change of COLOR.
now who’s playing the race card?

citx…don’t look at ME…i vote for NADER…and who’s counting?

CHANGE=VIOLENCE

the recent elections in Italy marked the return of openly fascist governance in Central Europe..
the new mayor of Rome was ushered into office on a pledge to “expel 20,000 people from the city”..

and in Naples we see the POGROMS begin.

la dolce vita!

“The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel”

pardon?

…and somewhere a woman is about to be murdered for witchcraft. Just this week a crowd of 20 people in India gathered to beat a 75-year-old woman for being a witch. A judicial inquiry found that 150 women had been tortured for witchcraft in three Indian provinces since the first of the year, despite the passage of a new law meant to protect them.

Reports of witchcraft are common in Africa these days. There’s this recent case of an 18-year-old girl who says that she was sent by her grandmother to steal a newborn baby and given magical powers to accomplish the task. (Stories like this are frequently reported as fact in African newspapers.) Panicked reports of kidnapping and murder for body parts are frequent in Tanzania and nearby countries. And readers of a Ghanian tabloid were given this information, presented drily as fact:

“A global meeting of witches, currently underway in Ghana, is targeting thousands of lives through fatal road and other accidents. The assembly is also looking to infect millions of lives with incurable diseases, according to documents available to Daily Guide. In keeping with the witches’ agenda, 1,000,154 people would be killed worldwide through road accidents, rape, murder and armed robbery. For Ghana, the organizers of the annual global congress insist they want to make the meeting a memorable one and are therefore requesting heavy loss of lives on the nation’s roads. According to the document, Ashanti Region has to ‘donate’ 722 lives, Eastern Region, 119; Brong Ahafo, 103; Central, 134; and Greater Accra, 76; through an operation code-named ‘XXC-XVI-Starlight 666′ …

“In the first quarter of our calendar year we are to infect 110,000 people (both married and unmarried) with HIV/AIDS through sex, 4,000 with tuberculosis, 6,000 with high blood pressure, and 2,600 with blindness, while 11,000 pastors and preachers will be destroyed, 220 marriages broken, and 100,000 wombs destroyed.”

In a direct sign of the kinds of subconscious anxiety that lead to these accusations, there has been a wave of reports regarding penises shrunken by witches. Paging Dr. Freud …

But it’s no joke. A 60-year-old woman in India was beheaded last month by a neighbor who believed she was a witch. Saudi Arabia is planning to execute a woman accused of witchcraft, and so far King Abdullah has resisted calls for clemency. Also in Saudi Arabia, a maid was accused of bewitching her male boss because the boss’s wife noticed he defended her from criticism.

Women aren’t the only victims of witchcraft accusations. In Africa, for example, men are frequently accused of operating “magic planes,” supernatural vehicles that seem to crash with alarming frequency. Children are targets, too. “Planet of Slums,” by Mike Davis, documents the hysteria created by Christian preachers who distribute videos of bewitched children and exorcisms. He writes that “literal, perverse belief in Harry Potter has taken hold in Kinshasa, leading to the mass-hysterical denunciation of child ‘witches’ and their expulsion into the street, even their murder.” But the vast majority of witchcraft accusations are still directed against women.

Different theories are being floated for the increase in this behavior. Nicholas Kristof writes of a study suggesting a link between climate change and witchcraft claims, a link which the New York Times “Freakanomics” blog explores even further.

But there’s still an underlying theme behind all of these trials, murders, and incidents of torture: the superstitious fear of women. Until the ignorance and misogyny that drives these accusations are rooted out, these incidents will continue. And if you think this only a problem among “primitive” people, that it’s nothing but ancient history for “civilized Europeans,” think again. It’s a human problem. Do you know when the last woman was imprisoned for witchcraft in Great Britain?

1944.

Also, the radical feminist who conceived Mother’s Day

St. Paul, MN, May 10, 2008 — The sesquicentennial wagon train winding towards the state capital for tomorrow’s celebration of Minnesota statehood, came to an unexpected standstill this morning entering Fort Snelling when a group of Dakota people gathered in the road to dispel a few of their cherished myths. “This is a place of genocide, our ancestors were force marched here in 1862 and interned in the concentration camp for an entire winter. So many of our people died here, women and children, so much of our history is ignored and suppressed. We are here to tell the truth about this history and challenge the Sesquicentennial celebration,” said Chris Mato Nunpa, Ph.D.. “All we’re asking is to be heard,” said Ben Yahola, amidst protesters holding signs with “We are not invisible,” “1862,” “Site of Dakota Genocide,” and “My grandmother died here.”

The travelers looked on or away as Dakota speakers addressed them and a gathering group of other protestors, onlookers, and, soon, many police officers from the city of Minneapolis. They stood by, some perched atop horses, for about fifteen minutes before the tensions increased.

Two skittish horses were steered by their mounted officers through the protesters, endangering everyone in their path, including several small children. Unsure of what to do, one officer radioed for backup. As reinforcements arrived, one officer said, “I thought we came down to do some thumping.” A sheriff’s SUV tried to force its way through the crowd of protesters to clear a path for the wagon train. Then, two kids and two women laid down in front of the SUV. For twenty minutes while protesters smudged, prayer drums sounded, and speakers addressed their message about the past’s atrocities, officers conferred, debating how best to remove the blockade. Dakota protesters cried the history of the atrocities committed, including land theft, ethnic cleansing, bounties placed on Dakota scalps (up to $200 dollars), the largest mass hanging in US history, the horrors of the concentration camp at Fort Snelling, and the brutalities of the war of 1862.

Then the arrests began.

“You are benefiting from the same colonial practices which justified the genocide of the Dakota people,” Waziyatawin stated as she was pressed against the hood of a patrol car before being led away. “This wagon train is a fantasy of manifest destiny, as some sort of righteous thing.” Next to go were her two minor children, Talon and Autumn Cavender-Wilson. Anita Rae, Chris Mato Nunpa, Jim Anderson and Diane Elliot followed, before the officers ceased making arrests.

By use of truncheon, officers pushed the protest aside, finally clearing the way for the wagon train to enter the camp. Imprisoned protestors were then released under charges of disorderly conduct. At least some of the wagon riders began conversing with protestors, agreeing to the need for truth telling. One young man softened his position and even apologized for his participation in the wagon train.

The protestors will also be present tomorrow at the state capital, where the kick-off celebration for the Minnesota Sesquiscentennial will begin.

For additional information, Contact:

Chris Mato Nupa, Ph.D.
Oceti Sakowin Omniciya
Tel: (320) 981-0206
matonunpa@earthlink.net

Jim Anderson
Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community
(763) 753-2833
ander67@netzero.com

Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, Ph.D.
Oceti Sakowin Omniciya
Tel: (320) 564-4241
waziyatawin@gmail.com

Scott DeMuth
Oceti Sakowin Omniciya
srdemuth@stthomas.edu

Diane Elliot
hecetu1@yahoo.com
# # #

On April 30th, reporters flocked to the penthouse suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel where fifteen representatives of the Rockefeller dynasty were holding court. There, the Rockefellers chastised oil giant Exxon-Mobil for failing to invest in “alternative energy” sources, invoking their own moral authority as Exxon-Mobil’s longest standing shareholders.

Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and originator of the family fortune. “Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realized it could replace whale oil,” she argued. “Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.”

But the indignation of today’s generation of Rockefellers—who inherited their own exorbitant wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobil’s parent corporation—is aimed more at ensuring the continued financial health of the family’s trust funds than concern for the future of the world’s population. As Peter O’Neill, great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, commented at the press conference, “I have a world of respect for what the company has done well. In fact, if the next 20 years of the energy business were just going to be about oil and gas, we probably wouldn’t be here today.”

Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers as concerned environmentalists. The New York Times ran the headline, “Can Rockefeller Heirs Turn Exxon Greener?” News outlets quoted freely from the Rockefellers’ press release, which described John D. Rockefeller as “one of the first major philanthropists in the U.S. and the World” and the family’s Rockefeller Foundation’s mission as “promot[ing] the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”

The family fable concocted above warrants a rebuttal. Standard Oil was the world’s first oil monopoly, and Rockefeller’s greed was insatiable. Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply entangled with the U.S.’ current reliance on oil—and automobiles. Moreover, the family’s “philanthropic” pursuits include a peculiar preoccupation with lowering the birth rates of the world’s black and brown populations throughout the twentieth century—highlighting the absurdity of their claim to be promoting the well being of humankind. Mainstream journalists could easily uncover these unsavory aspects of the family history but instead report the Rockefellers’ self-sanitized version, with all its glaring omissions.

* * *

Indeed, the family’s selective memory of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, as a saintly philanthropist stands in sharp contrast to his role as a nineteenth-century robber baron. “God gave me my money,” he said. “Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”

Rockefeller’s conscience apparently did not dictate paying his employees more than a starvation wage. His admirers praise him for making gasoline affordable to average Americans, and he did indeed aim to produce large amounts of “cheap and good” gasoline for mass consumption, successfully lowering the price of gas from 58 cents to 8 cents a gallon. But he achieved this goal through ruthless union busting, hiring his own private militias to crush workers who dared to go on strike to demand higher wages.

The private armies of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Rockefeller was a cutthroat capitalist who built his oil monopoly in the decades after the Civil War using methods more in keeping with the bribery, blackmail and back stabbing of a mafia family than an honest entrepreneur. As he once proclaimed, “I would rather earn 1 percent off a [sic] 100 people’s efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts.” This credo made him the richest man in the world.

As he quietly bought up his smaller oil competitors with these methods, Rockefeller entered into secret—and illegal—agreements with railroad magnates that gave discounts as off-the books rebates to his growing oil monopoly, easily driving smaller refiners out of business. By 1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the oil refining business in the U.S. When the Supreme Court finally forced Rockefeller to formally disband Standard Oil as a monopoly trust in 1911, the damage was done. Indeed, the breakup doubled the value of his stock and gave birth to oil conglomerates Esso and Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), Arco and Amoco (now BP), Pennzoil (now Shell), Chevron and Conoco. Rockefeller spent his remaining decades playing golf.
* * *

John D. Rockefeller’s descendents have happily carried on in the robber baron’s tradition, alongside a public relations machine that routinely airbrushes the family history. These heirs have never needed to work a day in their lives to afford the best of everything money could buy. The Rockefeller name ensures each generation a ten-figure trust fund and a guaranteed spot at an elite university, enabled by the Rockefeller family’s generous donations. The many chapels, libraries, museums and other buildings bearing the Rockefeller name on private campuses across the U.S. bear testament to the family’s self-serving approach to gift giving. Most recently, David M. Rockefeller, Sr., former chairman, president and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, and former chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Group, donated a record $100 million to Harvard University, citing his fond memories as part of the class of ’36.

By design, the Rockefellers have received no blame for their pivotal role in destroying the vast trolley car system that dominated U.S. cities before the 1940s, thereby increasing city dwellers’ dependency on automobiles and gas-fueled bus lines. Yet the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California joined General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum to form the National City Lines holding company, which bought out and dismantled more than 100 trolley systems in 45 cities (including New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Minneapolis and Los Angeles) between 1936 and 1950.

In 1949, these corporate defendants were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize transportation services. Indeed, the corporations behind National City Lines were each fined just $5,000—while each of their directors paid a mere $1 fine—a small price to pay for the windfall in profits they all enjoyed in the decades that followed. Congress offered up tax dollars to build the enormous highway infrastructure that encouraged automobile travel in the 1950s, while federal investment in mass transit and train systems languished. As Noam Chomsky noted, “By the mid-1960s, one out of six business enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry.”

* * *

No Rockefeller family history would be complete without highlighting their central role in shaping twentieth century population control policy, aimed explicitly at curbing birth rates among the non-Caucasian poor. Beginning in 1910, Rockefeller money flowed into organizations such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, which spearheaded the eugenics movement—the “science” of “improving heredity.” These organizations, also funded by the upstanding Carnegie, Harriman and Kellogg families, sponsored academics claiming that those at the top of the social ladder had proven their racial superiority, while those at the bottom were biologically incapable of success. The eugenics movement encouraged the “superior” races to marry each other and have lots of children, while promoting forced sterilization, racial segregation and deportation of immigrants of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.
The “superior” races so admired by the eugenics movement were “Nordic,” with blond hair and blue eyes, and the movement soon gained an admirer in Adolph Hitler. In 1924’s “Mein Kampf,” Hitler noted, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was already providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund eugenics research in Germany; in 1929 alone, $317,000 of Rockefeller money went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, according to Edwin Black, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. Although the Rockefellers had withdrawn all funding to German research by the onset of the Second World War in 1939, Black argued, “[B]y that time, the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.”

By the 1930s, the wheels for forced sterilization were also in motion inside the U.S. Laws were enacted in 27 states in 1932, calling for compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and physically defective.” In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America, as historian Dorothy E. Roberts described, “planned a ‘Negro Project’ designed to limit reproduction by blacks ‘who still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.’” In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor black teenagers had been sterilized in that state alone.

After World War Two, population control agencies set their sights overseas. In the 1960s, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, heavily funded by the Rockefellers alongside the U.S. government, played a key role in a coercive sterilization programs targeting Third World populations. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico—still a U.S. colony—had been permanently sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent. Rockefeller-funded programs sterilized 40,000 women in Colombia between 1963 and 1965, according to feminist author Bonnie Mass. These are just two examples among many.

The self-righteous claims of the current generation of Rockefellers must be viewed in this context. They have kept silent since the 1989 Exxon-Valdez Alaskan oil spill, even as Exxon-Mobil has refused to pay court-ordered compensation to the nearly 33,000 Alaskans who won a lawsuit against Exxon in 1994 for the company’s “reckless” behavior. Nor have they uttered a word of protest following news that growing numbers of employed workers across the U.S. are lining up at food pantries due to the skyrocketing price of food and gasoline. As Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, told CNN, “People are giving up buying groceries so that they can pay rent and put gas in the car.”

Today’s Rockefellers praise Exxon-Mobil for its current status as the most profitable corporation in U.S. history, having raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits in 2007. They are merely watching out for their own parasitical futures.

what?…SUE me!

what part of NO…..?

or…do three wrongs make a Reverend Wright?

an introduction to John McCain’s spiritual advisor

the great whore thirsts for Jewish blood?

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!